Bitter Almonds (2 page)

Édith calls the Malesherbes branch of the Crédit Bancaire, her branch, and asks what these withdrawals are all about. They are only too happy to help. It's what they charge now for cash withdrawals made from the teller at the bank. The rules have changed. Every withdrawal, no matter the amount, will be charged e7.50. If you want cash without a fee, you have to get it from an ATM with your credit card, or go to the teller with your checkbook and write out a check to yourself for cash.

Fadila has always withdrawn very small sums from the teller at her bank, in accordance with her needs. She doesn't like having money on her person or keeping it at home. No one at the branch told her that she would have to pay for withdrawals from now on, that even for just fifteen or twenty euros she would have to pay e7.50 every time.

Édith writes a letter to the bank to complain. Gilles takes a look at Fadila's bank statements and notices that there have also been regular withdrawals from an ATM. Édith asks Fadila: “Do you still use a card from time to time to withdraw cash?”

“Is with Nasser,” explains Fadila.

It's a simple matter. She does indeed have a credit card, but she can't remember her secret code. Her son knows the code by heart. So whenever she goes to visit him in Pantin she withdraws some money from the nearest ATM.

“You really ought to know how to read,” blurts Édith. “Would you like me to teach you?”

“Okay,” says Fadila, looking her straight in the eye.

 

On the days which follow, Édith is tormented by doubt. She's afraid she's done something terribly stupid. She has no experience in the matter, or very little.

Ten years ago she taught her eldest boy, Martin, how to read. He was four and a half. He could listen to stories all day long (“Tell me a story . . . ” “Keep going . . . ”) and he had understood that stories could be found in books. “I want to read,” he said, over and over.

Édith went to speak to his teacher at nursery school. “And what if I teach him?” The teacher didn't see anything wrong with the idea. He himself thought that a lot of children could learn to read before starting primary school, before they turned six.

Édith also turned to her friend Jacques, a bachelor, a Sinologist, from whom she frequently sought advice. She had just cut out an article in a weekly magazine where they explained that to teach a child to read all you have to do is make a series of a hundred or so file cards with an elementary word written on each one. Cat, bag, hop. The child plays with the cards, moves them around, you say the words together, repeat them. After a while the child knows how to read.

“That sounds stupid to me,” said Jacques. “You'd do a lot better to tell your son that there are twenty-six letters that you can combine in an unlimited number of ways, that's it.”

It turned out to be good advice. Among her father's things Édith had found
The Cat in the Hat
. She took Martin on her lap and started on page one. “You see, that's a
c,
that's an
a
, and that's a
t.
Together they make
cat.
Now you have
h
together with
a
and
t
, so that makes
hat.
Look,
cat, hat
. The cat in the hat.”

Martin seemed to think it was very easy. School had already smoothed some of his rough edges. He was in the second month of his last year of kindergarten. He'd been introduced to basic reading and writing the year before. Now, since September, they had learned what numbers, letters, and words were. The children's names were posted in bright colors on the classroom walls. Martin recognized his name. At home he tried to decipher the words on the measuring cup: “Sugar,” “Flour,” or on the box of laundry powder: “OMO.”

He didn't seem to think there was any difference between
The Cat in the Hat
and other children's books, and he couldn't understand why his mother didn't want to read more than a page a day with him. But by the end of November, after three weeks had gone by, at the rate of a quarter of an hour a day, he was reading. He didn't need help anymore to get his fill of stories, he got lost in books.

This was a dream memory for Édith: she remembers giving a gentle nudge at the right time, nothing more, putting the textbook down in front of Martin and showing him the twenty-six letters and a few basic diphthongs, that was all, other than that all you had to do was line the letters up to combine them. As far as teaching went, it seemed no harder than showing someone how to string pearls, how to combine the colors and shapes to make a pretty necklace.

All of which confirmed that you don't teach children a thing, you just give them the means to teach themselves. You turn the pages of an early reader, and the children make their own way through it.

And even years later she could recall the bliss, still vivid, of sharing a secret of happiness with an eager little boy, like the fairy in the tale giving the awestruck child the key to the garden of delights.

Édith suspects that with a woman who is over sixty it will be something else altogether. She has read as much—hasn't everyone?—and that is what annoys her, the way most received ideas do. After all, Fadila knows a lot more than a four-year-old boy does, she speaks French, she has common sense and she's motivated.

With Martin, Édith had relied on
The Cat in the Hat.
She couldn't have taught him to read without some sort of teaching aid. Doing one page at a time: that had been the method, the program, and the entire learning process. She will have to find the appropriate textbook for Fadila. The cat and his hat might be fine for a child, but not for a very capable older woman.

Édith has a young cousin who works with asylum seekers, and Édith remembers she used to give literacy classes in the past. A very pretty redhead with green eyes, an English teacher, who rides around Paris on her bike as a matter of principle, come rain or shine. Édith calls to ask her about teaching material.

Sara remembers that they had used photocopied handouts, in a given order; the method was fairly traditional. She didn't keep them, but she knows of some specialized associations, she still has some names and phone numbers in her address book.

The volunteers Édith manages to get hold of don't know of any miracle methods. One of them suggests making up a method on a case-by-case basis, another suggests she use school­books. A third one recommends she try the big educational book­store on the rue du Four.

The illustrious bookstore has nothing for helping analphabets. The sales assistant looks like a pontificating doctor, and informs Édith that there is a difference between analphabet and illiterate: “First you have the people who have never learned to read and write—they're analphabets. Then you have the illiterates, who learned but have forgotten. You said this person is from Morocco? Try L'Harmattan bookstore over on the rue des Écoles. They specialize in Africa. As you can tell, from the name.”

 

The two encyclopedias Édith and Gilles have at home do not make any distinction between illiterate and analphabet. Édith decides to try L'Harmattan anyway: do they have any books for teaching an adult how to read? “It's not like she ever learned and then forgot.” The saleswoman, who is black, and also very sure of herself, just laughs. “Absolutely. You have your basic illiterate French people, who have forgotten, and then you have immigrants, who are analphabets.” She leads Édith over to a shelf where at least forty textbooks are crammed together.

Initially Édith is afraid she'll never be able to choose. She can still see Jacques with his eyes raised heavenward—the phonics method is far superior to the whole language method. But all the textbooks on sale at L'Harmattan are variations on the whole language method, with one exception. And that is the book Édith chooses.

Reading, a First Step toward Insertion: A Reading Method for Adult Beginners.
The author is a professor. She herself had analphabet students from abroad and, according to the back cover, as she could not find a textbook she thought was suitable for the situation, she wrote her own.

Édith leafs through it slowly. Three quarters of the book are written in “joined-up handwriting,” as the children say. The bulk of the learning process will be based on this type of writing. After that comes printing, then capital letters.

The method is very simple. You begin with the five vowels and the consonant
m
; from page one you can already write
ma, me, mo, mimi, mama.

From pages two to six you learn how to use the
l (le lit, la mule, ali a lu).
From pages seven to ten you add the
t
, from eleven to fifteen the
r.
By then you have several dozen words. Then the first diphthongs, then the silent letters. By page sixteen you can read
la petite mule a mal à la patte.

Consonants come along one after the other, not in alphabetical order; then there are subtleties like
ph
and
gn;
then words that are more and more complicated, up to
expéditeur, destinataire, numéro d'immatriculation.

It seems like a good method. At the register, though, Édith is assailed by doubts. She asks the young saleswoman: “Why have nearly all the manuals opted for the whole language method?” The bookseller is cautious. It is a war that has been fought for fifty years. There are champions of both methods. She is conciliatory: “You know, the human brain combines both methods. You can begin with an analytical approach, but as soon as you know the words you recognize them globally. Or, on the contrary, you can familiarize yourself with them by grasping the whole word, but then before long you'll be trying to deconstruct them.”

That evening Édith reads the textbook attentively. She mustn't get this wrong. If Fadila fails a second time round, she'll give up altogether.

With Martin it didn't even take a month. Édith knows that it won't go that quickly this time.

She spends several hours on the internet. First of all she discovers that there are still many proponents of the phonics method. On the specialized websites nearly everyone seems to prefer it. Édith thought she was being old-fashioned, but in fact it is the whole language method that seems to be outmoded.

She refreshes her memory. The expression is “cursive handwrit­ing,” not “joined-up.” Of course. What you write is a grapheme, what you hear is a phoneme. A morpheme is the root shared by several words in the same family. You're not supposed to say illiterate, false beginner is the preferred phrase, or complete beginner. But such reservations no longer apply when you're referring to illiteracy as a phenomenon, or the rate of illiteracy. Established pedagogues are encouraging: you don't have to be a professor to teach someone to read. It is complicated, Édith reads, and it can take a long time, but sometimes it goes very fast, too.

That Tuesday, when Fadila comes in, Édith hands her the textbook.
“Good,” says Fadila. “We beginning next week.”

“Why not today? We can start right away, or in a while, when you've finished.”

Fadila turns on her heels without replying. Once she has finished the ironing she comes into the kitchen for a coffee. She sits on a stool, her feet flat on the floor in front of her. Édith is washing the lettuce. “Shall we have a look at the book?” she asks.

“Next week,” says Fadila.

 

The following week, Édith tries again: “Perhaps it would be better to start right away, as soon as you get here. You're often in a hurry when you leave.”

“We gonna see,” murmurs Fadila, tying her headscarf behind her neck.

Édith begins to wonder if they will ever start. Fadila must be afraid, but she doesn't realize that Édith is as afraid as she is.

After two hours have gone by, when Édith sees her coming back in, she asks again, “Shall we get going?”

“We get going,” answers Fadila, with a big smile that Édith is seeing for the first time.

They sit side by side at the table in the dining room. Édith pushes her papers to one side. She's been thinking about this first session for ten days now. She bought a big pad of lined paper. The textbook recommends starting off with letters written at least three times larger than usual. Édith has prepared a sheet inspired by page one in the book, where she has written the name
fadila
in cursive letters—no capitals for the moment—and the five vowels. She has decided it would be good to see that very special word
fadila
as a whole right away: it's obvious what it means, and they can use it as a matrix for the first letters she learns. A concession to the whole language method. Édith was careful to write it in big letters. On the special lined paper, the
a
and the
o
fill an entire space between two lines, the
d
and the
l
take up three, and the
f
takes up six.

On the paper she sets down in front of Fadila she points to the word
fadila,
at the top in the middle of a line, and pronounces it. Then she points to the five vowels ten lines further down. She names them one after the other as she points to them:
a, e, i, o, u.

“Is like zero,” says Fadila, her forefinger on the
o.

“Exactly. It's written the same way, you're right. But this is an
o.
You find it in the word olive, or orange—and you know the sound, o. These letters, these five here, have a loud sound:
a
,
o
,
u
. They're called vowels. There are other letters that you don't hear as well,
f
,
s
, or
m
, they're called consonants, we'll look at them later.

“Listen carefully: Fa-di-la,” says Édith, pointing to the word on the paper. “Can you hear? Fa (she stresses the
a
), di, la (again stressing the
a
).”