So Vast the Prison (23 page)

Then the mother collapsed on the bed in the room they shared and cried. She sobbed. Right before the startled eyes of her youngest daughter she let herself go. Then she pulled herself together, dried her
face, and apologized. After a while, feeling guilty for her weakness, she proposed that they take an excursion this next Sunday: “We’ll even go to Germany if you’d like, and we’ll send your brother a postcard from there!”

The visit ended on a sad note. They decided not to go through Paris and spend the three days they had planned with friends, an emigrant family. They sent everything they had brought for Salim in several packages, including the things his girl cousins had knitted for him. As for the money, the pastries, and food from home that they should have carried him “in our hands,” moaned the mother softly, they sent all of that the day after they received the letter from Salim that was so disappointing.

A year went by in Algiers: the everyday life of war baring its teeth in the countryside, in the mountains set on fire with napalm where the resistants were hanging on in caves, where the peasants were brought down from the mountains and placed in camps under supervision. In the capital fear was a diffuse, gray fog, and it stayed that way for a long time, until later, somewhat later, one exuberant December. (The days of barricades on which, among the children and women who fell beneath the bullets, they flew the new flag, and its red and its green …) Later!

Before all of that the father kept up a regular correspondence with his son’s lawyer, and this time the mother looked as if she were resigned. She only talked about Salim when she was in Caesarea among women, her friends, who knew that she would not, certainly not, give up on making the trip to see her only son. The son who was “safe,” she called it, rather than “imprisoned,” because as months went by, how many young people around her, how many grown men would leave, disappear, be abducted! Even her brother (her half
brother through her father), M’Hamed, her favorite because of his kind heart and his beauty. One day the French army searched the bus he had taken between Caesarea and Hadjout. They pulled him off the bus and took him and two other men, like him in their forties, into the nearby forest! Their bodies were never found; the lawyer assigned to the case had searched for some trace in all the prisons around. After six months there was still nothing! Our mother regularly went to Hadjout to see her sister-in-law and her four little ones—all of the relatives there certainly considered her a widow with orphans already. But the hardest thing was this: You could not weep for M’Hamed openly; he had no right to the ritual, even if his body was departed! “No,” her husband declared, “we have to hope for M’Hamed, we have to keep on searching!”

They came home from Hadjout, or from Caesarea, and there was a letter from Salim waiting for them with news that seemed banal, nothing unusual. He thanked them for the packages; he mentioned, as always, that he shared everything with his comrades.
We pool everything we have
, he wrote—and at least that was something, said the young sister when she came home from lycée and read the message in her turn—the fact that the usual censorship had left them those comments!

The mother no longer said anything—except in her regular conversations with the pharmacist, who sometimes came upstairs at tea time. The mother said nothing for that entire year; she endured patiently until finally the summer of 1960 arrived.

The mother left again in July, for the same treatment center, this time alone—her fourteen-year-old daughter had been sent to a summer camp for adolescent girls in the Pyrenees.

As soon as the traveler checked in at the Trois-Épis, she informed the housekeeping staff that she would leave the following Saturday,
that she would return after the weekend, and that while she was away she would be in Metz. She took the train, then at the station she asked for the bus “to the prison.” She spoke now with no accent; her light chestnut-colored hair and her clothing from the most elegant shop in Algiers made people think not so much that she was a Frenchwoman (at forty, she seemed at least ten years younger, looking chic and a little tense) but rather a bourgeois from northern Italy or a frenchified Spaniard.

She arrived at the gates to the prison. Paying no attention to the posted schedules, she rang the bell and waited, her heart pounding. The caretaker behind his glassed-in station greeted her with surprise: “What about the schedule? What about visiting days?” Despite her ladylike appearance that led one to believe she was a teacher, a lawyer’s or magistrate’s wife, she explained in a voice that was almost a little girl’s (she was working so hard in this language), “I have come a long distance! From farther away than Strasbourg! I traveled yesterday and all this morning. I want to see my son.”

She gave Salim’s name.

“Your papers!” the guardian demanded, loud and gruff.

Somewhat disconcerted by the Arab name because he recognized it as belonging to one of the “agitators,” he could not understand: This lady seemed so well-mannered!
Her, the mother? This almost-blond young woman who looks …

He watched her in silence, beginning to feel spiteful. She waited, forcing her face to reveal little of the agitation the wait was causing her:
A fiancée
, the suspicious man thought vaguely.
She doesn’t look like a mother, not one from over there!

He ended up by telephoning to explain that there was a young lady there who claimed to have been traveling since the day before … She said she was “ ‘the mother of Salim,’ the young ringleader.” These prison inmates had spent the last year in a struggle for their status as
“political prisoners,” which they ended up getting. They had even begun to set up courses in Arabic. “They’re pretentious on top of it all!” muttered the man awaiting his instructions, his eye on the visitor. The answer was not long in coming.

“Go through there,” he said to the mother. “They want to see you first. I don’t know if you will get to see your son! But you can go in …”

Then, confronted by the silhouette of the visitor passing through the second doorway, he suddenly felt vicious and angry.

They took away all of the mother’s packages. “What do you think, that we’d let you bring in delicacies like this, what you call your regional cakes, dates!” But there were more than sixty of them there, including the ten old ones from the most important crackdown in Lorraine (among them Salim, “the student”), and the collective atmosphere was permeated with tension. From here on in, everyone had to be on his guard. Until when? Who knows … It was that Salim who was responsible for the literacy courses. Of course, of course!

Up to that point, as she went down the half-lit corridors, she could hear the two guards in front of her talking to each other. She knew it was about her. She could not be sure of their tone: warning or grudging, perhaps to prepare her for the final refusal! She listened with an empty heart. One single apprehension filled her:
to see him, just to see him, God help me and don’t abandon me! Not like last year!
And her two guides went on with their chronicle, but their voices were lower: a hum, maybe not so hostile, preceding her.

One last door opened and suddenly there was light, brilliant and intense; it was the warden’s office. The other men vanished, but it was as if some recrimination on the part of everyone, guards, attendants, the janitor, awaited her on the other side.

A man stood there in front of her and examined her. She remained standing, empty-handed, her leather bag hanging from her shoulder.
They will give me back my packages when I leave
, she thought, not knowing what to do with her hands, and she still did not look at the stranger, just at his office and at this light that she was finally getting used to.

“Have a seat, madame,” said the very polite voice.

She sat immediately in the leather armchair facing the large desk. She waited, her hands resting on her knees.
My son … Will he let me …?
she agonized, as she now had the warden himself seated facing her.

The warden spoke … She did not hear everything. She tried to understand from his features, his delivery, his tone: Was he going to let her see Salim? Would they agree to it? She peered as if through a fog at the face of this man and she thought of all of them, the crowd of others, other men, an army … Faced with all of them (suddenly, through the open window a sound rose, outbursts of voices, giving brief commands …), she must try to remain dignified, to speak French correctly when she answered, so that they would see that she was perhaps a mother like mothers in “their country,” that …

The warden repeats a question: “Did you come a long way? From Strasbourg?”

She nodded in the affirmative. Not waiting, he went on, not really hostile, she thought, beginning to hope.

“He is young, the youngest one here … He is intelligent and has character, too.”

Silence. Suddenly she thinks she is in a classroom; this man observing her discreetly through his eyeglasses could be one of her husband’s colleagues, the head not of a prison but of a school.

She knows what the conclusion will be just before he says it: “You
shall see him! But here, in my office, just this once. Briefly. You have gone to a lot of trouble!”

It is true that she has come a great distance. A sudden weakness comes over her. She turns her head and would like to go to the open window, but dares not move. She breathes to overcome the faintness she begins to feel. Sounds at the door. Three silhouettes: The two guards stand there motionless, with “him” between them. Salim. Long and thin. Thinner than usual. And that strange beret like a plate on top of his head.

He looks at her. Without a word. Turns his head toward the warden. Says nothing. Waits, then hesitates and takes a step in her direction.

She has stood up. Sentences jumble together, rushing around inside her, in her throat. Strangling her. She cannot breathe. Sentences in Arabic.

“I will leave the two of you for fifteen minutes, or a bit longer!” says the warden in a loud voice, then, gesturing pompously but awkwardly, he speaks to Salim: “Embrace your mother!” He starts to add something but thinks better of it. He stands up, makes a sign to the guards. All three leave.

Finally, all at once, the sentences held back inside her, the Arabic words, tender, loving words, come out, burst out. Mixed with choked-back sobs and giggles.

Salim in her arms. He does not give himself over completely, he holds onto himself—and he is surprised (later, in his cell, he will think about it again) at her girlish exuberance. Which is what he had thought at first in the harsh light of the director’s office:
So young, my mother, they must have thought that themselves! And even doubted!
Later he would say to himself,
When she dresses that way, like a Parisian
,
with gestures that are almost awkward because of her clothes, those short sleeves, the schoolgirl’s collar, all those colors, lilac, rose, fuchsia, she turns into a young girl!

She has calmed down, his mother. And now she is sitting, her serenity regained despite where they are. Maybe because, once alone with him, she had been able to let herself go in words that were Arabic. Which gradually restored her armor and decorum … Her appearance, her tone of voice, right down to the gestures of the traditional North African city-woman (
her household gestures
, Salim thought gently), they all returned despite the way the French clothes looked, making her brittle, making her beautiful of course, but also exposing her …

She asked him questions: about his meals, how much time he spent in the courtyard, when the doctor visited. (“Since you haven’t grown any more, if you look taller, it is because you have gotten thinner!”) Does he sleep alone in … she says “your room”? He gives a sidelong smile.

“No,” he answers. “There are three of us.”

She asks what region the others are from. Kabylia? “Not from home!” she says.

He corrects her: “The whole country is ‘home’!”

“Of course,” she says, but she would feel less worried if her son, who is so young, were with men who were, if not from his town, at least from the surrounding area, some neighboring town … He is slightly annoyed, slightly ironic. She sees it, apologizes, stops talking, then considers the strange headgear, the beret that is too flat, too round, and flat as a plate.

“Can’t you take it off?”

She laughs: she thinks he looks, not exactly like a bandit or a hoodlum but, really, in the end—a prisoner. She says “prisoner” again
in Arabic, then, with a sigh, “Prison!”

She reaches her arm out, hesitates, then, determined, she takes off this headgear, this … She runs her fingers through his short, curly hair.

Salim blinks. He sits down to face her but only when she focuses on his prisoner’s beret. He tells her, in a low voice, in Arabic, “They have left the door open!”

His voice sounds wary. If the director comes in behind him, he shouldn’t find the two of them confiding and talking like this in Arabic. He quickly asks for news of his father and his sisters.

She, in turn, starts talking again, but in French; he notices her careful enunciation, how much progress she has made.
She speaks correct French now and almost without an accent!
He could tell her this; he knows it would please her, this young mother who has come from so far away. He feels touched, but he says nothing. He smiles with his eyes. He listens to her.

She has launched in; she does not stop.

“Back at the Trois-Épis, I told the man in charge, you know, that I would just take one afternoon a week to go to Strasbourg! Now I have to go see my son in Metz. I need two days! This time and one other!” Then she says in a lower voice, as if it were a secret, some funny, harmless incident, “I added, naturally, ‘My son is a prisoner!’ ” Then she went on, louder and almost gaily, “A political prisoner!”

The warden stood there at the door. Salim stood up at once. His hand quickly replaced the beret on his curly hair.

The mother, who abruptly cut short what she was saying, looked up at her son. He looked now like a stranger again, like a young man wrapped, she felt, in a lack of respectability, some peasantlike and willful clumsiness. This boy, she thought to herself later, who was so stylish and elegant in adolescence—maybe it is the “politics,” or to make himself older, he is trying to look like a “real Arab,” like one of
his cousins just barely out of the mountain
zaouia!