Burned alive (14 page)

Laetitia was a child who was truly wanted. I spoke to her every day she was in my womb. To show off my pregnancy, I wore tight, formfitting clothes. I wanted the world to see my ring to show that I was married and to see that I was expecting a child. This was the complete opposite of what I had experienced the first time, but I didn’t realize it then. When I was pregnant with Marouan, I’d had to hide myself, to lie, and to plead to be married so that a child would not be born from my belly and dishonor my family. And now I was alive and free to walk in public with this new child, and I thought I had erased the past with this new happiness. I believed it because I wanted it with all my strength.

Marouan remained hidden in a very small corner of my mind. One day, perhaps, I’d be capable of facing him and telling him everything. But not yet, because I hadn’t finished being reborn.

Laetitia arrived like a flower. There was just time to tell the doctor that I thought I needed to go to the bathroom when he said I couldn’t because the baby was coming. A little flower with black hair and a smooth complexion, she slipped out of me with remarkable ease. Everyone around me said this was exceptional for a first child, that it is rare to give birth so easily. Of course, it was not my first child! I nursed Laetitia until she was seven and a half months, and she was a very easy baby. She ate everything, she slept well, never a health problem.

Two years later, I wanted another child. Boy or girl, it didn’t matter. I wanted it so badly that it didn’t happen. The doctor advised Antonio and me to take a vacation and to stop thinking about it and trying so hard. But I was watchful, and I would cry at each disappointment. Finally, I conceived another little girl and we were both wild with joy at the birth of Nadia.

She was still quite small when Laetitia, stroking my hand, asked me, “What is that, Mama, a boo-boo?”

“Yes, Mama has a boo-boo, but I’ll explain it when you’re older.”

She didn’t mention it again and little by little I would raise my sleeves to let more of myself show. I did this gradually, not wanting her to be shocked or disgusted. She must have been five years old when she touched my arm and asked, “What is that, Mama?”

“Mama was burned.”

“What burned you?”

“It was someone.”

“He was very bad!”

“Yes, he was very bad.”

“Can Papa do to him what he did to you?”

“No, your papa can’t do what that person did to Mama, because it was far away, in the country where I was born, and it happened a long time ago. I’ll explain all that when you are older.”

“But what did he burn you with?”

“You know, in that country, they didn’t have washing machines like we have, so Mama would make a fire to do the laundry.”

“How did you make the fire?”

“You remember when we went with Papa to get wood in the forest and we made a fire to grill the sausages? Mama did the same thing. I had a place for making a fire to heat the water. And while Mama was doing the washing, a man came and he took a very dangerous liquid, which burns everything, it can even burn down a whole house, and he emptied it on Mama’s hair and he lit a match and it caught fire. That’s how Mama was burned.”

“He’s a bad man! I hate him! I’m going to kill him!”

“But you can’t go kill him, Laetitia. Perhaps God has already punished him for what he did to me. But that was a long time ago and I’m happy now because I’m with your papa and with you. And you know I love you.”

“Mama, why did he do that?”

“It’s a very long story and difficult to explain and you’re too young to be able to understand.”

“But I want to know!”

“No, Laetitia. Mama has told you she will explain it to you someday later. What Mama has just said is enough for now.”

That same day, after the evening meal, I was in an armchair and she was standing near me. She stroked my hair and began to raise my sweater. I suspected what she wanted and it made me very uneasy.

“What are you doing, Laetitia?”

“I want to see your back, Mama.”

I let her look.

“Ah, Mama, your skin isn’t soft like mine.”

“Yes, your skin is very soft because it’s your real skin, but Mama’s skin isn’t like that because there is a large scar. That’s why you have to be so careful with matches. They’re only for lighting Papa’s cigarettes. If you touch them you can get burned like Mama. You must promise me that you will be very careful. Fire can kill.”

“Are you afraid of fire, Mama?”

I couldn’t hide that fear. It would well up in me at the least provocation. And matches were the worst. It’s always been that way.

After this, Laetitia began having nightmares and I would hear her thrashing in her bed and crying for help and I saw her clutching her coverlet with all her strength. Once, she even fell out of bed. I hoped that things would calm down, but one day she told me that at night she sometimes would come to my bed to make sure I was just sleeping and not dead. I took her to my doctor because I was worried about her and was upset with myself for telling her too much. But the doctor told me that I had been right to tell her the truth, but that I should pay close attention to her from now on.

And then it was Nadia’s turn, more or less at the same age. But she reacted very differently. She did not have nightmares and she wasn’t afraid for me. But I could tell that all was not well. It was clear that she kept everything to herself. For instance, we would be sitting together and she would sigh. When I’d ask why she was sighing, she would respond, “I don’t know, I just am.”

“The heart that sighs does not have what it wants. What do you want to say to Mama that you feel you can’t say?”

She surprised me when she said, “Your ears are so little! Do you have little ears because you didn’t eat enough?”

“No, honey. Mama has little ears because she was burned.”

I explained to Nadia the same way because I wanted both of my girls to hear the same thing, the same words. So I used the same language, the same truth with Nadia. It affected her deeply. Nadia didn’t say like her sister that she wanted to kill the person who had done this; she asked to touch my ears. I was wearing earrings, which I often do to hide what remains of my ears.

“You can touch them but please don’t pull on the earring because that hurts.”

She touched my ears very gently and then she went into her room and closed the door.

I think that the most difficult thing for the girls had to be school. They were getting bigger and Antonio couldn’t always go to pick them up so I did this. I imagined the other children’s questions:
Why is your mama like that? What’s the matter with her? Why does she always wear a sweater in summer? Why doesn’t she have any ears?

The next phase of explanations was harder. I simplified it, without mentioning Marouan. I told them that I had met a man, and we loved each other, but my parents would not allow it. They had decided that I had to be burned and die because this was the custom of my country when a girl disobeyed her parents. But the special lady, Jacqueline, who was known to both Nadia and Laetitia, had brought me to Europe to be healed.

Laetitia was always the more vengeful one, while Nadia was quiet. It was when Laetitia was about twelve that she told me she wanted to go to my village and kill them all. Almost the same words as her father used when I told him my story and about Marouan’s birth. “I hope they all die for what they did to you.”

My own nightmares returned suddenly. I’d be in bed asleep and Mama would come with a shining knife in her hand. She brandishes it over my head as she says: “I’m going to kill you with this knife!” And the knife shines like a light and my mother is very real, she is standing over me. I would wake up in terror, perspiring, just at the moment when the knife shone the brightest. The most unbearable part was to see my mother. More than death, more than the fire, her face haunts me. She wants to kill me, just as she had killed several of her babies. She is capable of anything, and this is my mother, the woman who gave birth to me!

I was so afraid of resembling her that I decided to have one more operation, but with an aesthetic purpose this time. This one was going to deliver me from a physical resemblance to my mother I could no longer bear to see when I looked in the mirror—a little bump between the eyebrows at the top of the nose—the same as hers. I don’t have it anymore, and I think I am more attractive now. But after the surgery, the nightmare continued to haunt me; the surgeon couldn’t do anything about that. I should have consulted a psychiatrist, but that idea didn’t occur to me then.

One day I went to see a faith healer and explained my case to her. She gave me a tiny knife and told me to put it under my pillow, with the blade closed, and I wouldn’t have any more nightmares. I did what she said and the nightmare about the shiny knife did not come back to terrorize me while I slept. Unfortunately, I keep thinking about my mother.

All That Is Missing

I wish so much that I had learned how to write. I can read but only if the letters are printed. I can’t read a handwritten letter because I learned by reading the newspaper. When I get stuck on a word, which is often, I ask my daughters.

Edmond Kaiser and Jacqueline had tried to give me some tips in the beginning. I always wanted to learn how to be like the others. Around the age of twenty-four, when I first started to work, I had the opportunity to take a course for three months, which made me very happy. It was difficult because I was paying much more for the course than I was earning. Antonio offered to help me but I wanted to do this with my own money. I stopped after three months but it had really helped me. They taught me to hold a pencil, just as you would teach a child in nursery school, and to write my name. I didn’t know how to make an
a
or an
s
so I had to learn the alphabet, letter by letter, at the same time as I was learning to speak the language.

At the end of these three months, I could make out a few words in the newspaper.

I began by reading the horoscopes because someone had told me that I was Gemini, and every day I would slowly make out my future. What I got out of it wasn’t always understandable. I needed briefer texts and short sentences in the beginning. Reading an entire article would have to wait for later. One example of short texts was the death notices. Nobody pored over them as carefully as I did! “The X family regrets to inform of the death of Madame X. May she rest in peace.” I also read the short marriage announcements and ads for car sales but I soon gave up on those because abbreviated words were too hard for me. I wanted to subscribe to a popular daily paper but Antonio thought it silly. So every day, before I went to work, I would go into town and start the day by having a coffee and reading the paper. I loved that time of my day. For me it was the best way to learn. And little by little, when people around me talked about some event, I could show that I knew about it, too, because I had read about it in the paper. Now I was beginning to be able to take part in the conversations.

I now know a little of European geography, the big capitals and some smaller cities. In Italy I’ve seen Rome, Venice, and Portofino and I visited Barcelona, Spain, with my adoptive parents during a summer vacation, but I stayed only five days. I remember it as very hot and I felt I was depriving Papa and Mama of the beach, obliging them to stay inside with me, so I went back and they stayed on. It is hard for me to imagine myself wearing a bathing suit in public. I would have to be alone on the beach as I am when I am undressed in my bathroom.

I have seen a little of the world. I know that it is a round ball but I’ve never been taught to understand it. For example, I know that the United States is America, but I don’t know where this America is on the round ball. I don’t even know how to situate the West Bank, my former land, on a map. When I look in my daughters’ geography books, I don’t know where to begin to grasp the location of all the countries. Part of the problem is that I don’t have an understanding of distances. If someone tells me, for example, that we’ll meet five hundred meters from my house, I can’t picture the distance in my head. I get my bearings visually on a street by finding a store or some other place that I know. So I don’t have much success in picturing the world. I do watch the international weather report on television and try to remember where places like Madrid, Paris, London, Beirut, and Tel Aviv are. I remember working near Tel Aviv with my father when I was still small, maybe about ten years old. We had been taken there to pick cauliflowers for a neighbor who had helped us harvest our wheat. There was a fence that protected us from the Jews because we were practically on their land. I thought you’d only have to cross over this fence to become Jewish, and that made me very afraid.

I have realized in adulthood that the memories that remain of my childhood are all linked to fear. For instance, I had been taught not to go near the Jews, because they were
halouf,
pigs. We were not even supposed to look at them so it was very bad for us to be there so close to them. We were taught that because they eat differently and live differently, they were not as good as us. We and they were like night and day, like wool and silk. That’s what I was taught, that Jews are the wool and we Muslims are the silk. I don’t even know why that was put in my head, but that was the only way of thinking. When you saw Jews in the street, and you almost never saw them anywhere else, fights would break out with stones and pieces of wood thrown. You were absolutely forbidden to go up to them or speak to them because if you did, you would become a Jew, too! But the Jewish people never did me any harm and I must realize once and for all that this is complete nonsense. There is a very nice Jewish butcher shop in my current neighborhood and the meat there is better than I get elsewhere. But I don’t dare go in alone to buy it myself because of this lingering fear. So I go to the Tunisian butcher just because he is Tunisian and not Jewish. Why, I don’t know. I often tell myself:
Souad, you’re going to go there and buy this fine meat, it’s meat like any other.
I know I’ll be able to do it one day but I’m still afraid. I heard too much at home that any contact with Jews was forbidden, that we had to ignore them as if they didn’t exist on the same earth with us. It was more than hatred: They were the Muslims’ worst enemy.

I was born Muslim, and while I am still Muslim and I believe in God, I retain a few of the customs of my village. I don’t like war, I detest violence. If someone reproaches me for being critical of the Muslim religion by speaking badly of the men of my country—and this has happened—instead of arguing, I try to force the other person to listen to me by discussing the issue calmly. I want to help them understand what they haven’t understood before. My mother frequently quarreled in anger with the neighbors. She would throw stones at them, or she would pull their hair. In our country, the women always go after the hair. I would hide behind the door, in the bread oven, or in the stable with the sheep because it was very upsetting and I didn’t want to see it.

I would like to learn about everything I don’t know, and come to a greater understanding of the differences in the world. It is my hope that my children will profit from the opportunities they have here. My own misfortune is actually responsible for their chances. It is destiny that has preserved them from the violence of my country, from the throwing of stones and the evil actions of men. I want them to have no part of all the wrong ideas that were put into my head and that I have so much difficulty getting rid of. I realize that if I had been told I had blue eyes and I had never seen myself in a mirror, all my life I would have believed I had blue eyes. The mirror represents culture, education, the knowledge of oneself and others. If I look at myself in a mirror, for example, I say to myself:
How small you are!
Without a mirror I wouldn’t know this unless I walked next to a tall person.

I begin to realize that I know nothing about the Jews, or about their history, and that if I continue like this I, too, will convey the idea to my children that the Jew is a
halouf.
I will have passed on to them ignorance, instead of knowledge and the ability to learn to think for themselves.

Out of the blue one day, Antonio told Laetitia that he didn’t want her ever to marry an Arab.

“Why, Papa? An Arab is like you, like any other person, like everybody.”

I said to my husband: “It may be an Arab, a Jew, a Spaniard, an Italian. The most important thing is that they choose the person they love and that they are happy, because I haven’t been.”

I love Antonio but I don’t know why he loves me and I have never had the courage to ask him, to say to him:
Look at me, where I come from and how I look. With all these scars, how is it that you want me when there are plenty of other women?

It is strange all the same. When I’m talking to him on the telephone, I always ask the same question: “Where are you, sweetheart?” And when he tells me that he’s at home, I am so relieved! I always have this fear of abandonment inside me, a fear that he doesn’t love me anymore, that I’ll be waiting alone in anguish, as I once waited for Marouan’s father. I have dreamed several times that Antonio was with someone else. It was one more nightmare. This began two days after Nadia’s birth. Antonio is with another woman. They are walking arm in arm and I am saying to my daughter Laetitia: “Quick, go get Papa!” I don’t dare go myself. My daughter is pulling on her father’s coat and pleading, “No, Papa! Don’t go with her! Come back!” She has to bring him back to me, and she is tugging at her father as hard as she can. There is no ending to this nightmare so I never know whether Antonio comes back. The last time, I woke up about three thirty in the morning and Antonio wasn’t in bed. I got up to look for him and saw that he wasn’t in his armchair and the television wasn’t on. I rushed to the window to see if his car was there before realizing there was a light in his study and that he was working on his business accounts.

I want so much to be at peace, to have no more nightmares! But these emotions are always present: anguish, uncertainty, jealousy, permanent uneasiness about life. Something in me is broken but people often don’t realize it because I always smile politely out of respect for others and to hide my anxieties. But when I see an attractive woman pass by, with beautiful hair, beautiful legs, and lovely skin, and when summer comes, a time for the swimming pool and light clothes . . .

My closet is full of clothes that button up to the neck. While I have bought other things to give myself pleasure, like low-cut dresses, or sleeveless blouses, I can only wear them under a jacket, which has to be buttoned to the neck. It is the same every summer. I am angry knowing that the pool opens May 6 and closes September 6. It drives me crazy and I want it to rain or turn chilly. I’m thinking only of myself, but despite myself. When it’s too warm, I only go out early in the morning or late in the evening. I watch the weather reports and hear myself saying: “Well, good, it won’t be nice tomorrow.” And the children tell me that it’s mean of me because they want to go to the pool.

If the temperature goes up to thirty degrees Celsius, I shut myself up in my room, lock the door, and cry. When I have the courage to go out wearing my two layers of clothes—that is, the one underneath that I’d like to be seen in, and the one on top that hides me—I’m afraid of the people I pass, wondering if they know about me and whether they wonder why I’m dressed for cold weather in the middle of summer. I love the autumn, the winter, and the spring. I’m lucky to be living in a country where there is strong sunlight only three or four months of the year. I was born in a year-round sunny climate but I could no longer live in one. I have all but forgotten that country and the long hours when the golden sun would scorch the earth, and how it turned a pale yellow in the gray sky before setting for the night. I don’t want that kind of sun.

Sometimes when I look outside at the swimming pool, I hate it. It was built for the tenants’ pleasure, of course, but for me it is anything but that. It was the pool that set off one dreadful depression. I was forty years old and it was the very beginning of the summer, a June that started off unusually warm. I had just come in from shopping, and I was looking out my window at some women who looked practically nude in their skimpy bathing suits. One of my neighbors, a very pretty girl, was just coming back from the pool in a bikini, a sarong over her shoulders, her bare-chested boyfriend at her side. I was alone in the apartment, obsessed by the idea that I couldn’t do what they were doing. It seemed so unfair because it was so hot. So I went to my closet and spread out I don’t know how many clothes on the bed before finding something reasonable, but I still didn’t feel right. Short sleeves underneath, another shirt on top of that. It’s too hot. Put on a lighter shirt that’s too see-through but closed at the throat, I can’t do it. A miniskirt, I can’t do that because my legs were used for the skin grafts. Open neck, short sleeves, I can’t do it because of the scars. Everything I laid out on the bed was
can’t do it.
By then I was perspiring heavily and everything stuck to my skin.

I lay down on the bed and began to sob. I couldn’t stand being closed up in this heat anymore while everyone else was outside with their skin exposed to the air. I could cry as much as I wanted because I was alone. The girls were still in school, which was across from the house. Eventually I looked at myself in the bedroom mirror and thought:
Look at yourself! Why are you alive? You can’t go to the beach with your family. Even if you go, you’ll keep them from staying in the water, they’ll have to come home because of you. The girls are in school but when they come home they’ll want to go to the pool. Happily for them they can, but not you! You can’t even go to the swimming pool restaurant to have a coffee or drink a lemonade because you’re afraid of being looked at. You’re covered up from head to foot as though it were winter. People would think you’re crazy! You’re good for nothing! You’re alive, but unable to live. You’re just an object locked up in the house.

Too many thoughts were colliding in my head. I went into the bathroom and took the bottle of sleeping pills that I had bought at the pharmacy, without a prescription, because I had trouble sleeping. I emptied the bottle and counted the pills. There were nineteen left and I swallowed them all. After a few minutes I felt very strange and everything was spinning. I opened the window, and I was crying as I looked out at Nadia and Laetitia’s school, directly across from our building. I opened the apartment door, and I heard myself talking as if I were at the bottom of a well. My intention was to go up to the sixth floor to jump from the terrace. I was moving as if walking and talking in my sleep.