So Vast the Prison (22 page)

“You and I will go to see Lla Rkia. Her visions are often of comfort … Still, she has to agree to it. Now that she has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and is a
hadja
, it is not certain that she will! Maybe for our family.”

After two messages sent via the little girl next door, the woman sent word that she would be expecting both of them at coffee time and that she was doing this “only to give thanks to God and his Prophet!” The sister-in-law had explained that this was the expression she used to let them know in advance that she would not accept any money because of remaining faithful to her vow. Nothing, however, prevented their being armed in advance with some special present, perfume from Paris or a silk scarf … So now they were walking along the low wall separating the old, antique theater and its ruins from the high road; they came to the little house tucked back into a dark corner.

The mother tapped on the carved iron “hand of Fatima.” They went in and crossed a patio that was small but dazzling with an almost purple light that seemed to flow from a heavenly fountain … Blinking still, her veil slipping off her hair, the mother quickly removed her face veil and bent over the venerable woman seated on a deep divan awaiting them. After the kisses and customary compliments the mother stood close to her sister-in-law and waited, her heart in a tumult.

It was the sister-in-law who spoke about Salim, almost calmly, in her soft, almost dreamy voice, as if he were there, as if in a second he would enter this room, bend down because he was too tall, half smile his sidelong smile … The mother, listening, accepted this nearby and not completely unreal presence.

Silence. The servant had just had a
kanoun
full of burning coals brought in without the mother noticing, and then slipped away. The silence stretched on but seemed translucent. In the shadows of the small, cool room, the mother saw the mask of Lla Rkia, her tawny scarf with black fringes. Beneath her half-lowered eyes, beneath her long, thin, arrogant nose, her thin, almost completely erased lips were murmuring in this no longer total silence: The old woman was uttering scattered, disconnected scraps of
sura
. Finally, they could hear the language of the Koran as if it were pouring from the mouth of a woman half dead: this time the mother waited without emotion. The sorceress swiftly threw a powder, or some herbs or a little sac of medicine, into the
kanoun
without having it brought closer to her. All at once whitish, then almost green smoke rose up, and for a moment the acrid smell made the two visitors cough. Inscrutable, the old woman waited, then when the smoke had dissipated and the women were calm, she asked in a haughty voice, “What month was he born, your prince?”

The mother hesitated and then said, “In the month of
Rdjeb
. The twenty-seventh, I believe.”

Once again, the fear in her causing panic (her wind a storm inside her). She hunched over, bent her head over her breast, tried to find the breath left hanging; finally she thought that she herself might say the beginning of a
sura
, the one everyone said, the
fatiha
. She repeated the first lines two or three times and regained her calm. She watched the lips of the soothsayer, whose eyelids were lowered in concentration.

The silence settled in the room. The sister-in-law seemed invisible, or dead. You could not even hear her breath, thought the mother, who was patient now and confident. If Salim knew, she said to herself, he would surely make fun of her! But if he saw her now, full of confidence, he would smile at her indulgently. Imagining this, this sort of tacit affection for her that he had expressed ever since puberty, was a comfort to her.

The old woman coughed. Then she began:

“Do not worry about the youth! The protection of Sid el-Berkani,”—the mother was grateful that she had not forgotten the hallowed ancestor up in the nearby mountains—“is upon him.”

She went on, speaking more softly, as if the vision were written down already and she only said what was there: “Do not worry about him. He will have a destiny … one greater than his father’s!” she finished off pompously.

The sister-in-law gently put her hand on the arm of her companion, who had started unknowingly.

After a sigh, almost a death rattle, the voice of Lla Rkia said loudly in triumphant tones, “I see him … I see him …” She hesitated then: “I see him walking on the road to Verdun!”

This last French word, which she pronounced rolling the
r
, surprised them. The two visitors looked at each other despite the half-light. They both knew old pensioners, veterans of the other war, who were called, even in Arabic,
“the men of Verdun”
—always with a rolled
r
. So what did the other war, the one from which only old men remained, have to do with this one, “our war”? the women wondered. Could it be that old Rkia in turn, despite her magic potions and her recent pilgrimage, was slipping into some disturbing senility?

“I will admit,” said the sister-in-law from under her veil on their return trip, “I thought, ‘She is rambling; she no longer can see the
way she could before!’ But you see, she was firm when she said ‘Selim is in good health.’ Where he is does not matter!”

“She did relieve my anxiety a little,” the mother acknowledged.

They went home, where they found the others; of course it was only with the women, young and old, that they talked about Lla Rkia’s verdict. Some of them embraced our mother warmly and she thought to herself that this was one of the reasons she had come on this second day of
Aïd
—to share in the almost childish buzz of excitement and spontaneity.

That same night she went back to their apartment in the capital with her daughter, who was her youngest child, and her husband.

The following nights she slept peacefully.

Ten days later a letter from the court in Metz, in Lorraine, arrived. The prison administration informed the father that his son, aged less than twenty-one, had been arrested, that he was being indicted for “criminal association” and other equally pompous charges. The mother did not feel that these were as serious as the charges made against Salim when he had been arrested at seventeen in his own country. She remained silent, looked gravely at her husband, and breathed deeply, thinking excitedly,
What is essential is that he is alive. He is safe. All the prisons in the world don’t matter! He’ll get out!
Then finally she asked softly, “Metz, in Lorraine—isn’t that near … Verdun?”

“Verdun?” the father repeated, surprised.

“The seer, the one in our town …”

Stammering then in confusion but at the same time calm again, she explained, or rather admitted, that the last time she and her daughter had visited their town, she had met with Lla Rkia, who had “seen” Salim “on the road to Verdun,” she repeated almost triumphantly.

So the news of the arrest of their son did not really arouse either anxiety or alarm—at least not for the mother.

Shortly afterward the two of them left for the village to visit their old nurse. She herself had a son in prison in the south, “in the Sahara” she said. They could tell from her silences that her two youngest sons (though without sighing she said rather proudly that she had not heard anything from them) had very probably “gone up” into the nearby mountain, in short, joined the Resistance.

The nurse who was nearly sixty was ill: a weak heart and chronic diabetes at the same time. In bed, in the half darkness of her cool shack, she was informed of Salim’s arrest in Lorraine and that they had to stop worrying about him from now on (prisons in France were less harsh than the ones here), or rather muster their patience until things finally worked themselves out! She listened to the news from her bed of pain; in the old days she used to say she loved Salim as much as two of her sons put together!

“I’m getting old,” she finally murmured. “Prison. Provided he doesn’t stay there for years. Provided I can see him standing before me someday …” She stopped, musing, then finished her sentence, “and free! Oh yes, Lord and gentle Prophet, free, the son of my heart!”

The mother listened, showed no emotion, asked about life in the village. She delivered the medicine they had brought, took care of making another list, and then located her husband so that they could return to the capital.

Late that evening in the kitchen she silently decided, for herself (she then would talk to her almost adolescent daughter about it before laying the groundwork for getting the husband’s permission), yes, she made a firm and irrevocable decision. If her son had to remain in jail for years, well then, she would go there “even alone if
necessary!” because her husband, who had just left teaching, would be less free than before over summer vacation. The next evening, finishing up the dishes, and this time with the young girl there, she repeated, “I will go alone, unveiled—now I know that I will—alone into every one of the prisons they put him into!”

“You’ll take me with you!” the daughter interrupted, hardly surprised at her mother’s resolution.

And so, for the mother, the news of Salim’s imprisonment meant that she could anticipate the beginning of an adventure …

She slept peacefully when they returned from the village. After market the next day she talked about it with her only friend, the woman who ran the pharmacy. She bought some aspirin and began tentatively to study the different models of sunglasses. (It would be summer when she went, and it felt easier to think of herself suddenly off the boat, taking the train, without her veil now but with her face blocked at least by dark glasses.) The Frenchwoman left the last customers with her assistant and showed the mother into the back of the shop. The news of the son’s arrest was reported, explained. “So,” said the mother, “I’m right not to be too worried?” and she watched the expression on the pharmacist’s face. Then, without waiting, she came out with her prepared sentence: “My son is a political prisoner!” She repeated the last words, trying them out, and watched for any little reaction in the woman she was talking to, who, of course, remained friendly; to be a “political prisoner” was noble, not shameful. Would the Europeans who were less well disposed have the same reaction as her friend?

She would have liked to talk about her projects, just to be encouraged. Would her husband, if he could not get away and go to France for a holiday, let her travel alone, in short, in his stead? But she did
not talk about it anymore this time. On her next visit in three or four days there would be fewer customers. Then she would mention it. She would explain that she felt strong. She would seek some comforting reassurance.

That evening, in the kitchen when she and her daughter finished putting everything away, she whispered to her a little impishly, with a knowing smile, “Find us a map for the city of Metz. Because I’ve had an idea. We’ll go to Alsace for ‘rest and relaxation’! That’s not far away, is it? Your father will let us, I’m sure!”

She went to sleep imagining the high façade of the prison in Metz: not gray, not black, a tall building, of course, but with a gracious air, a bit like a deluxe hotel where her son was staying, where she would cheerfully go …

When mid-July arrived in 1959, the father, emotional over letting them go on such a long trip alone, accompanied the mother and his daughter to the boat. During the crossing in their second-class cabin the mother watched over her daughter, the daughter watched over her mother—she was elegant and seemed so young.
The
pieds-noirs
passengers, especially
, thought the adolescent,
would never guess that this lady in a flowered summer suit just a few weeks earlier, in Caesarea, had been just as elegant but in a different way. Reigning in the first rank of guests seated like gods around the musicians as they celebrated the seventh day after the birth of her youngest nephew, she was an Andalusian Moorish woman! In which place are we playing a role? Is it there among the family or here on this boat among these passengers who think we are tourists like themselves?
And the mother, who stayed in the cabin, absolutely convinced that she was going to be seasick despite the sea’s being clear and so calm, the mother advised her young daughter, who wanted to go up on deck, “Be careful! Don’t talk to strangers, but if it becomes unavoidable then don’t mention the real
reason for our trip, that is, your brother! Not that you should be ashamed, to the contrary! We are proud of it! But you never know. We are two women alone, and among ‘them’ they might take us for what they call
fellaghas!
Remember, we are going for our health to a treatment center in the Vosges, and besides, it’s really the truth!” She delivered her advice in Arabic, then lay down. It had been bound to happen: Unable to sleep, nauseated, she would not doze off until they took the train from Marseilles the next day. Her daughter acquiesced and went up on deck, where she stayed alone for hours, filling her eyes full of the night that made the waves sparkle.

Two days later, silent, united, and so weary, they arrived at the clinic at Trois-Épis. They expected to spend three weeks there. The first week they expected the letter from Metz. It came.

Salim had written them (in his splotchy handwriting, stamped over here and there by the prison censor) advising them not to come see him. He was well; he said so two or three times. But he explained that the present conditions of detention were very harsh, that his “brothers” (that was his word, just before something deleted by the censor), “forty of them” he said after the crossed-out word, which his young sister finally read or guessed at, “are organizing!”

“Yes, I’m sure that what he wrote is that they are organizing, and those men, the administration, crossed out the word!”

“Which means?” the mother asked, and her daughter tentatively explained that probably the prisoners were going on strike, they must be demanding political rights or even just a better quality of life.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to see us, it’s because this is a bad time! It’s just the way it is—even in prison they are still part of the struggle!”