So Vast the Prison (29 page)

While he was washing his hands and wrists—Malika poured the water for him from a ewer by the edge of the well—he remarked that he was an object of curiosity for the anonymous women watching from the neighboring terraces. He did not even smile: Fatima’s children were on his mind, and Fatima understood this and was grateful for it. So a Frenchman could be her ally. She gave him her sincere blessings in thanks and asked how to “pay him”; he answered briefly in Arabic: “Afterward,” and he left.

This created a small revolution in the city. The old families took note of the fact that Lla Fatima (who was nonetheless descended, both through her father and through her two last husbands, from the men who had formerly resisted the occupying forces) had not thought twice about having her children treated “in France.”

Hassan, moreover, was the first to get well, and it seemed to his mother that the first noose had been untied. Bahia was still lethargic and hardly spoke at all. She hardly ever left the bedside of Chérifa, whom she adored, in whose arms she had loved to fall asleep so often—Chérifa, who did not get well.

Lamentations of women … The little girl crouched at the head of the young dead woman.

The little girl sits dry-eyed before the crowd of women in white all seated in a circle around Chérifa, swallowed up beneath the shroud, only her face still visible, pale, a mask. The little girl who is looking at it does not speak, will not speak, not tomorrow, nor still at the end of the week.

The kinswomen are touched; one of them comes and tries to take hold of Bahia, to make her sit on her knees: “A six-year-old child, in state like that at the head of a dead woman!” “Beware of the evil eye!” warns another, and the third: “Chérifa, may God have mercy on her, was in fact like a mother to her youngest sister! As if she had a premonition, poor girl, that she would never have children, that she would die first!” “Orphaned by her sister, that is the most awful thing!” moaned another, a woman they did not know. She was from the capital, recently married, and her beauty was a little wild, which made her somewhat feared and respected by her sisters-in-law.

“The loss of the sister, awful?” exclaimed an old woman with an inquisitive look. “It is the mother, when one loses a mother, that leaves you with an open wound!”

“I am sure,” continued the stranger (they called her this because she did not speak her dialect with a Caesarean accent), “that losing a sister is the worst!” Then, without getting up, she recited in a louder voice and in learned language:

At these last words, rhyming in ancient Arabic, a woman suddenly shrieked. She stood up, tall and thin; she tore her scarf with one hand, and the fingers of her other opened to tear slowly at her left cheek.

The poet crouched there and was silent; Bahia stood up, her mouth gaping and her eyes growing larger at the sight of the bloody face of the weeping woman. Another woman gently tried to draw the little girl to her. The one who screamed just that once now was casually wiping her cheek, then suddenly she had something like a
spasm, her torso shaken as if with a sort of laughter. To everyone’s astonishment, she cried out: the strange language that most of these city-women did not understand or that they had forgotten and greeted now as the improvisation went on by making faces that showed their embarrassment mixed with condescension. The Berber language ran rapidly on as if pawing the ground, stamping, as one woman whispered to another, “That is the dead girl’s cousin who has come down from the
zaouia
; she often improvises like this in their mountain language!”

So the cousin, her cheek dry now, with just the pink traces of scratches showing, beat out:

And she cried out the last two lines in a more piercing voice:

And Malika, the dead girl’s sister, who did not weep but remained standing, motionless, near the doorway, then said in her metallic voice,

“Oh bless you, my uncle’s daughter, come so far to share our grief!”

Then, speaking to the women who had apparently not liked hearing this “mountain” speech, she went on, “For those of you who do not understand the language of our ancestors, this is what my uncle’s daughter has said; this is what she sang for my sister, who is not forgotten.”

Malika stepped out into the middle of the crowd of white veils before she continued, to make sure that her mother, Lla Fatima, was not there. But Lla Fatima still lay unconscious as she had since
morning, driven almost mad after spending a long time in trances, carried away by despair. Finally Malika translated for the city-women who only cared to understand in the dialect of the city:

At these words, little Bahia, who had stood up, went back to the dead girl and sat down by her head all alone, absolutely determined to stay there, since the men who would carry the funerary board had not yet come …

Bahia, motionless. And even when some kinswoman sprinkled her forehead or her hands with eau de cologne, it was like blessing someone not there. Deep inside, Bahia, mute, face dry, repeated to herself the Berber lament of the cousin who tore her face …

“So vast the prison,”
“Meqqwer lhebs.”
Two or three words, sometimes in Arabic and sometimes in Berber, were singing inside her, slowly, a sort of rough march, jolting, but also calming—which made it possible for her to watch peacefully as Chérifa, with her face suddenly enwrapped in the swallowing shroud, was carried away.

In the days that followed and then the weeks, then the months and seasons, one after the other, Bahia did not speak. Did not smile. Did not sing.

This is how she lived, cool and calm, but how could they know whether she was in pain or indifferent? Until she was seven.

On the anniversary of Chérifa’s death, or shortly afterward, Lla Fatima agreed to put her youngest child in the hands of a local sorceress. She was told the sorceress knew how to free someone possessed,
kidnapped by a beloved now among the dead who held on to this person “despite the will of God.”

It was difficult, but she let her little girl go with an old neighbor, the woman who gave her the advice. “It will be near the beach, in an isolated inlet where the woman lives as a recluse … You will see, with the will and protection of the saints of your lineage, Ahmed or Abdallah and the two Berkanis, father and son, she will succeed!”

Bahia returned that evening silent. The next morning, the last Friday before the month of fasting, just after her mother and big sister completed their prayer, Bahia spoke softly, as if things had always been the way they were now, without sadness: just a few words about the cool breeze and the brightness of the light.

Lla Fatima gave alms every morning for the next week.

Twelve years later Bahia is nineteen. She was eighteen when she had me.

At nineteen, just thirteen months after my birth (because she nursed me only for the first month; she had no more milk after that; she had grown thinner and felt ill. Her lethargy and sadness faded when this blessed pregnancy arrives a few weeks later to renew her energy and make her bloom), she finally has her son. Her first.

So beautiful. A big baby who made her suffer giving birth. But how happy she was afterward hearing the women’s compliments when they came to visit: “White, fat, and so blond, so blond …”

“He has blue eyes, you are lucky, he will be a real lord! A bridegroom! …

“He has his father’s eyes, his lineage is paternal!”

“The women are mountain Berbers,” another whispered, all sweetness.

But Lla Fatima, my mother’s mother, retorted calmly, “It’s true! On our side the men have black eyes and long lashes! They are all
dark and handsome at home.” She sighed, thinking nostalgically of her son whom France kept in the Sahara as a soldier, so far away!

The endless talk of the visitors creates a warm babble of sound close by. It is Bahia’s third day after the birth; she will leave her bed before the seventh day for the celebration—what a stroke of luck that after all she delivered her son in the city, and in her mother’s beautiful house, she will enjoy the ritual cermony. A great many women will come as guests; an orchestra of women musicians will provide the music. Lla Fatima attends to it all, as she did when this her youngest child was married (the most beautiful wedding in the city, the one that all the women will talk about for a long time. The bride, after having arrayed herself in the traditional caftan, then was so proudly the first in the city to wear the white gown of European brides: according to the wishes of the bridegroom, the brother’s friend, just out of teachers’ training …).

Consequently Bahia does not worry. As the seventh day unfolds her serenity and contentment will grow in this soothing, new sweetness.

When she bore her daughter a year earlier, it was quite the opposite: Everything had been done hastily and far away, at the first teaching post assigned to the husband, in the mountains north of Bou Saada. As if she had had her first child in exile! On that last day of classes, the baby coming a week too early, whereas they had both expected to leave the next day (in the corners half-open suitcases needed only to be closed). Summer vacation was beginning, her mother had prepared her room for her in the city, the bed, the sheets and the provisions for the celebration with all the women arriving to visit … Now the birth was going to take place in the middle of the mountains! They were going to have to get through it with the midwife, an extremely old peasant woman; she was experienced of course, with a jolly, soothing face, but still, she did not even speak Arabic, except the words to invoke God and to call for patience, just
a few expressions from the Koran sprinkled over her chatter. It sounded like some foreign idiom to the woman giving birth as she tried to surmount her pain.

The old woman had wanted to get a rope ready to hang from the ceiling so that the woman in labor could hang on it and help herself by pulling with her arms raised over her head … Bahia refused: She knew that was a peasant custom. No. In the city all they did was tilt the bed … The boiling water was ready, and while the future mother suffered, she recited verses from the Koran … As a last resort they might call the French doctor. Lla Fatima would be determined: he would come, even at midnight, he knew the family … And Bahia, waiting to give birth for the first time, would have been tranquilized. Instead, now, faced with this old peasant woman who came running from the nearby
douar
, my mother had to suffer, first in silence and then with harsh rattling breaths that became more and more rhythmic—until finally I burst into the light of day.

The old woman set to work with a great laugh. She cut the cord. Turned me quickly upside down. Waited for my first cry. Then she spouted a long sentence that my mother in her weakness heard but did not understand.

Lla Fatima arrived in haste four or five days later (taking the bus to Bou Saada, then as far as the road was passable in a car, after that she asked for a mare, a mule, anything at all, and there before the surprised peasants she proudly straddled her mount). She was impatient to see her youngest daughter safe and sound, even though she had been abandoned to the customs of the past. When my grandmother found herself there with the midwife (whom she brought a remnant of cloth from the city for her
séroual
, perfumes from Mecca, and a string of beads that were blessed as well), the two women plunged immediately deep into a conversation that lasted the entire evening.

Even though she was able to get up after the third day and take a
few steps before lying down again, my mother was lying there on her bed and heard them laughing. She thought,
How long it has been since I heard my mother laugh, she is such a stern woman! They seem to get along well!

Finally the midwife left, spreading a great flood of blessings. Lla Fatima said to her daughter, “Do you know how she greeted the arrival of your first child, when the baby uttered its first cry?”

“I heard her give some long speech,” said my mother, “but I didn’t understand any of it.”

“Luckily her version of Berber and mine, the one I spoke as a child, are rather close: we talked together like two cousins!”

She began laughing all over again, long, soft laughter, almost inaudible, but it shook her entire torso. Bahia, still surprised, watched her until finally she took a breath, and went back to what she was saying. “The midwife greeted the child, when your pains finally came to an end: ‘Hail to thee, daughter of the mountain. You were born in haste, you emerge thirsty for the light of day: you will be a traveler, a nomad whose journey started at this mountain to go far, and then farther still!’ ”

The young mother, Bahia, said nothing.

“So much talk for a girl!” She sighed.

“You will have a boy the next time!” retorted the grandmother.

The second delivery took place as Bahia had hoped. She did not necessarily expect such radiant beauty in a newborn.

The blue eyes, of course, that was ancestry on his father’s side—whereas her daughter had hazel eyes; she had noticed this but not mentioned it to anyone. They were the honey color of Chérifa’s eyes, the sister she had lost as a child, for whom she had never wept.

When she was just slightly more than nineteen, Bahia savored the joy of entering the realm of the mothers. For a month, as if to make
up for the fact that the firstborn, the daughter born a “mountain girl,” had not been entitled to the usual honors, women poured into Lla Fatima’s house to pay their visits.