So Vast the Prison (32 page)

In the beginning I sleep alone in the room; through the door left ajar I hear the sounds of voices: My father has to correct his students’ papers, it is my mother who is talking quietly with my paternal grandmother. The apartment is rather cramped.

I slowly fall asleep, reassured by snatches of adult voices. Across from me the window looks out on the village square and its bandstand. The windowpanes are covered with newspaper; this is wartime. Lying there, I stare at this newspaper. Was it during this period that I began to be fascinated by the same photograph, a French military man with a mustache, rather elegant, who stared at me at length in the triangle of light carved by the open door? A certain General Weygand, but I only knew that later.

So I slowly went to sleep under the general’s gaze. When I would wake up just before dawn, I would look first for my parents’ bed: Probably my mother, already up, was just leaving the room … On Sundays, it seems to me, I would ask if I could jump into that great big bed, to be there next to my father, or between them, in the hollow of their complicity … Laughter and chatter: the outbursts of these lazy mornings have faded irreparably (no, they came back to me vividly thirty years later, when my own little girl seeks out the same spot, on those lazy mornings, between father and mother!).

I still remember an unexpected awakening from this part of my childhood.

Wartime it was and in this village the siren often pierced our evenings or nights. When it howled, it seemed to me that I heard its endless spiral bore into my flesh: the alarm emanated from the town
hall across from the teachers’ apartments. Consequently the first thing I would do was run to the bedroom window, and from it try to focus on the façade of the town hall. But it was already night. Everything had to be closed to make sure that not even the thinnest line of light would show. My mother and my grandmother went from one window to the next, one room to the next … I sometimes preferred to sink deep into my bed almost voluptuously, feeling I was the only one sheltered (the alarm, the airplanes—all that was up on the mountain and we could not even see the spectacle), but at the same time savoring the anxiety that was so exhilarating, so deliciously exhilarating.

It was only later that we began to leave the building and go in frightened groups to the hastily constructed trenches in the surrounding parks …

For the time being I am still in these first dark nights of mine: I am not budging from my bed; I am watched by the General Weygand of windowpane and newspaper—asleep like so many times before. But one morning I woke up just before dawn; everything around me, everything inside me reeled slowly.

Probably during the night there had been some vague turmoil of which I was barely aware, but it had not awakened me. Probably my sleep this time was not clear and limpid but rather jerky and uneven, in fits and starts. In the distance voices, torn but still dangerously blanketing me; suddenly a white light over my head, over my closed eyes, then abruptly turned off; a few whispers in the dark, maybe other people. Or had I rather dreamed some new voice, the soft tones of a foreign woman and—(but it was only long afterward that I would not piece together what I heard that was not part of my usual sleep) a “French” sound. It was as if the parents’ bedroom had shifted
horizontally, was half open to the village square, and there, where I still slept in my baby’s bed, where I still kept my eyes shut on purpose, I and my relatives standing around me were exposed to the four winds in front of everybody, in front of “the others.” And so France was for me simply the outside.

Finally I opened my eyes; nothing in the room had moved. However, right away, in the half dawn it seemed to me that there was no denying, because of the strange night sounds but also because of a certain stillness around the beds, it was obvious: I was waking up somewhere else, in a room that seemed the same but was totally different.

Bright daylight, gleaming gray-blue transparent lights, lit the imposing mahogany armoire whose tall mirrors had beveled edges, the one that stood there, on show and impenetrable, across from us. Tick-tock. Regularly, from the clock on the other side of the room.

Where was I? I did not move. My heart was pounding. Where were my parents hiding? I did not sit up. I did not look beside me. And still there was this absurd impression of being both there and somewhere else: the sound, the sound of breathing was different; a different silence inhabited the big bed. Then I greedily studied that hollow in the bed to discover whose imperceptible breathing was covered by the sheets … My father, my mother, where were they? In the blur of the night I heard their voices in the turmoil, or in my dream. My heart was pounding wildly.

It did not take long for me to determine that they were not sleeping nearby; the window grew bright. A woman’s hand, not my mother’s, a fat, white hand emerged from the sheets, lit the lamp, a different voice, not my mother’s, murmured.

Murmured what? Some question. I must not have understood. But I recognized the French language: I was definitely waking up in the home of foreigners!

I open my eyes, in the lamplight and the gray light of dawn. I look. In the parents’ bed our next-door neighbor—a teacher who is widowed or divorced, I do not know which—is sleeping. And what is more, beside her is her son—stretched out in “our” bed. “Ours,” I thought as if this were the final, irreparable breaking and entering in the night—occupied by the teacher’s son, a boy who was ten or twelve, Maurice. It is only just now his name comes to me intact.

So there they lay in my parents’ place, “them,” the French mother and her son, our neighbors … That night there had been sirens and German bombing in the nearby hills. In this terror the neighbor who was alone had panicked: she had come and knocked on our door. To reassure her, my parents had invited her in and had, quite naturally, given her their room. They made do themselves with a mattress on the floor in the dining room: just everyday Arab hospitality … he was, poor thing, a woman alone.

There, right next to me, as I lay motionless in my bed, a new couple were stretched out: the mother and her son … The boy was sleeping: I only saw his silky light brown hair. The teacher was sitting up in bed. She was wearing a nightgown, her ample bosom, her blond hair loose on her round shoulders, and on her chubby face a smile that was almost a little girl’s, sweet and half surprised, was turned to me. She looked at me, as if asking to be forgiven, then glanced tenderly at her still-sleeping son.

“Maurice,” she began, then she turned back to me, because, probably, I was staring at her fixedly, as if demanding some explanation for this intrusion.

I did not get out of bed. I no longer stared at the neighbor. I felt this boy there right next to me, a boy who in those days must have seemed to me a sort of hero, one close but faraway. For me this was the height of disruption—“he” was in my house, in the most secret
part of “my house,” of “our house,” and he kept right on sleeping as if nothing had happened!

That night when the tumult was unable to wake me up completely, that night became one of transmutation. The mother and her boy, the “French,” were of course neighbors on the same floor but also the closest representatives of “the other world” for me; “they,” this couple sprung from the dark and stretched out there in the open for me to see, had taken my parents’ place!

Substitution: I must have spent long minutes thinking it was irrevocable, that my parents had vanished into the wings of the scenery, that this pair of recumbent forms, mother and son, were taking their place. Was I not going to become different all of a sudden? In the slow shifts of this astonishing night was I not going to remain like this: simultaneously in the bedroom of my parents (perhaps they had even chosen different roles themselves, in some other people’s house, in some other French apartment?) and discovering I was in the opposite camp?

No, I would not move from my bed, my only haven. I stayed, open-eyed, frozen. So many years later I am relocating the ineradicable minutes of this awakening, trying to relive inside myself: what did I feel, what made me worry?

The fear that one might have expected from a little three-year-old girl who imagines for an instant that she has lost her parents—this is not a fear I recognize … The excitement of an unknown world, a new mother (the neighbor did of course seem older, more of a “matron” than my mother, who was then scarcely more than twenty), no, that is not familiar either. The nearness of this twelve-year-old boy, however, this boy with whom I would sometimes play in the afternoon in the park and who seemed to me a young man, this unexpected familiarity provided an ambiguity and keen pleasure that I can deal with more readily.

So there I stayed: neither frightened nor particularly excited by the adventure. I relive the awakening. For a few seconds I imagine I am a little Arab girl (myself, my bed, with my silent, gentle grandmother close by) and yet suddenly all decked out with French parents: this widowed (or divorced) lady with her hair down who is casually waking up next to me.

I do not smile. I make no move to get up. Finally my mother appears at the door. The neighbor rises and sincerely begs to be forgiven for her night fears.

I closed my eyes. I did not want to see anybody. I felt I was at the border, but which one? One moment I was going to have a French mother, a “brother” and not “a brother”; her son stretched out close by, in this great big bed into which I liked to leap and curl up between my father and my mother. I closed my eyes. I am sure I must have dreamed that I was going to jump into this big bed again, back in my old Sunday ways, squeeze up next to the “lady,” between her and her son, next to Maurice, between mother and son, who were my parents, speaking French, breathing French … That is the moment I experienced at the age of three.

That was perhaps a year or more before I began school. This waking up, the only one from my early childhood, is still unexpectedly the most vivid. (It is oblique, its mobility establishing its fragile equilibrium.)

What were my games like then? In the courtyard of the apartment building, my voice sings the usual counting rhymes tirelessly, while with the other little girls I throw the ball against a high wall painted white. Then we play hopscotch or on the swings … I don’t wander off into the village; my father set limits on where I can go: the courtyard and the garden in front, never the street.

I think of myself as being happy in the garden to this house, with
a sort of inexpressible excitement in my heart … A few trees, lemon trees, and a medlar tree in the midst of weeds; a corner where someone must have grown salad greens … We reach it through a rickety gate whose squeaking made us laugh.

It is only in this garden that I see myself playing with Maurice, the twelve-year-old boy who woke up one morning in my bedroom, next to me.

“Playing” with this boy: the voices of our dialogue have vanished. Of the scenes that come back, there is only one of these two child’s bodies clinging to the tallest lemon tree—Maurice, full of energy, manages to perch on the highest branch. He waves to me to come. His wave suggests that I climb up to where he is.

I stay clinging to the bottom branch. Strangely I refuse; I stay where I am. I am afraid of the contact. As if reaching the same branch, squatting there beside him, seemed to me in some vague way utterly sinful. My heart pounds. I am full of guilt, prickles of anxiety: In just a second my father, I am sure, is going to appear, stand there before the garden gate whose squeak I can already hear. My mother, at the kitchen window, must have watched me from the heights of her lookout post: she would watch powerless the scene in which my father would catch us at something, needless to say, I was doing wrong. I stay on my branch, immobilized. Maurice invites me up again; I can still see his mocking face. Not suspecting anything, not imagining that my fierce refusal could be anything other than a mere lack of physical daring, he insists; then I see him jump all at once into the grass on the ground, sing to himself, climb back up to the highest branch … He was probably sorry that I was not joining in this athletic competition!

The strangest thing is not so much that I refused, that my reluctance was as burdensome as if I had already come of age. The most
incomprehensible thing about my memory is that I remember this scene of the tree stripped of words, with nothing at all uttered by myself. It is accompanied by no sound: no laughter, no exclamation, not the slightest word exchanged … So I did not yet speak French; so this boy seemed handsome to me—his energy, his smiling face, his beautiful straight brown hair that fell across his forehead, his air of an only son whose every last personal detail is wrapped in maternal solicitude.

In this aura in which Maurice moved, he was very near me and yet almost unreal because he was behind a frontier. He belonged “to the world of the others,” and there is no doubt that this frozen state of voices is what gives the picture of the boy its clarity, its immutable presence.

So I did not yet speak French. And the look I sent up toward the top of the tree, at the face of the boy with brown hair and mocking smile, was the gaze of a silent, formless desire, utterly powerless because it had no language, not even the crudest, into which to flow.

Maurice was neither close to me nor a stranger: he was first of all the one my eyes, through the branches of the tree, were filled with while my voice drained away, its laughter, its shouts, its words suddenly gone dry.

In that silence of childhood, the image of childish temptation, the first garden, the first forbidden thing—takes shape. Intense but paralyzing dawns.

This scene comes, I think, almost immediately after I awoke that night in a room that had suddenly become “French.”

I was not yet attending school. All these memories are set earlier than my fourth year, before the autumn in which my father decides to take me to nursery school.

The girls’ school and the boys’ school were separated only by wire fencing down the middle of the large central courtyard. Just about 330 feet separated the apartment building in which we lived from the elementary school. I crossed them, at least for the first two years, hand in hand with my father, who was the only Arab teacher of French, and also the only one proudly wearing a dark red Turkish fez of felt perfectly straight above his sparkling eyes.