The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PART ONE - ALGERIA: BETWEEN DESIRE AND DEATH

  Oran, Dead Language

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Non-return Returns

  MOTHER AND DAUGHTER—1

  MOTHER AND DAUGHTER—2

  MOTHER AND DAUGHTER—3

  Burning

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  The Attack

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  The Woman in Pieces

  PART TWO - BETWEEN FRANCE AND ALGERIA

  Annie and Fatima

  Félicie’s Body

  I. ARMAND/KARIM

  II. OURDIA/LOUISE

  III. PALAVER

  IV. KARIM/ARMAND

  V. THE LAUGH OF THE SHROUDED WOMAN

  Afterword: The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry

  Nota Bene

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Copyright Page

  Soon, I will know of no place in which I can find a refuge for my dreams.

  Gérard de Nerval (letter to Th. Gautier—1843)

  When you come back to Oran, you are running; when you leave it, you are fleeing.

  Algerian proverb

  PART ONE

  ALGERIA: BETWEEN DESIRE AND DEATH

  Oran, Dead Language

  I learned to read, to write, to scream, to vomit in Algeria.

  —Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman

  For Yamina

  I

  Olivia, I’m not coming to spend my vacation with you in Sardinia, like last summer. I’m going back, Olivia . . . “Where?” you ask. I’ll write to you about it; I don’t have the courage to tell you. As the June heat spells begin, I wander . . . wander the streets of Paris. And I’ve decided: I’m going back. “Where?” you ask again, widening your large eyes. This summer, Olivia, there won’t be any dips in your village creeks for me, no evenings in the old square with the friends who come from so far and with the neighbors . . . I’m going back, Olivia. I’ll tell you tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Or I’ll write to you.

  Am I really going back home this time? To my mother’s, anyway—well, my mother’s sister’s. She’s very weak, she’s getting old. Two years have already gone by since I waited for her at Orly, the same season as now. She stayed in Paris for just a day, barely longer. Then I went with her to Savoie for her treatments. In the morning, I would attend to her at the hot springs. The rest of the day we would walk by the lake, slowly . . . She would talk to me; she talked only of home.

  When, refreshed at last, she hastened to leave the country as quickly as possible, I said my good-byes. Relieved, I met up with you in your village in Sardinia.

  This time, Olivia, I wrote to you, “This vacation, don’t wait for me! We’ll see each other again in September.”

  But you postpone your departure by a day and come rushing to my house.

  “These attacks, since springtime? They’re happening in your city, too—and you said it would be ‘untouched.’ And you’re going?” you insist anxiously.

  “Death comes in circles, Olivia! She comes back as a crazed dancer . . . The latest news this week: a raï musician was gunned down! You see, they’re shooting even the nightingales! What to do? Above all, what to make of it?”

  And I, who normally speaks very rarely of my city, remember: “I know the people from that part of the world. There will be three days of mourning for a death or an assassination. They’ll spend them in tears, or in silence, or in prayer. But they need at least seven days for festivals! That’s Oran for you. As for the rest of the country, I don’t know . . .”

  And so I ended up giving voice loudly to that bitterness, revealing it, so as to be more certain of it myself. “In Oran, three days of tears and silence for an assassination, for two assassinations! Then life goes on.”

  In Oran, you forget. Forget and forget more. A city that has been washed, a memory bleached. For ten years after its independence—ten years—the heart of the city was left deserted, except for a few offices, the headquarters of two or three state organizations.

  Of course, a wave of Kabyle merchants and bourgeois Tlemcenians eventually flowed back. Competition set in between the two groups, and in two or three months they made up for the lost time. The void was then populated, overpopulated, glutted!

  Before, all throughout the sixties, Oran had preserved its ravaged heart. Its facades tattooed with nostalgia, grimed over with melancholy; shops with fallen metallic curtains; buildings from the beginning of the century with elegant balconies, but entire floors closed and dark; long and narrow roads stripped of children’s cries, of the calls of mothers of raucous families. No beggar—not even a blind one—would venture there from El Hamri!

  Of course, people would go to some of the cafés at the intersections. Two or three repainted hotels, with hopes of being chic, opened again. They belonged to notables from the capital who had invested there, for later . . . for when Oran would finally wake up “joyous,” as in the past. Her nightlife was only temporarily dimmed . . . Dockers, workers, and even the crooks who would reappear in the Marine quarter, then depart again quickly for Spain or Marseille—all of them would cautiously haunt the places that were once so popular, as if they feared the echoes of those absent, who weren’t truly absent . . .

  Long after 1962, everyday life downtown remained frozen, ghostlike.

  Yes, everyone forgets in my city. After three days, maybe three months, let’s say. Even my aunt, who brought me up after “it” happened, started to hum every morning a year later, sometimes one or two songs from the playground. Oh, the songs of yesterday.

  Forgetfulness immerses these places. As soon as I was able, I left my city, where memory effaces itself or merely dissolves into the furies of the soul.

  In those years, whenever the second of February was approaching, I would hiccup. Even at fourteen, I would tremble and hiccup. The rest of the month, I would pass the days mutely.

  As soon as I was able, I wanted to go—and by boat. From our terrace, I had so often sighted steamers coming majestically into port; when they would set off several days later freighted—at least in the early days—with wine, I would station myself up there, catching the last glimpses of their wake while in the grips of a violent urge to leave.

  I finally embarked for France at eighteen, after getting my baccalauréat . My mother—well, my maternal aunt—believed that it was for my studies. I’m going away forever, I had decided. As a negation of people, of places, of things.

  My mother and my father, buried down below, behind a hill. Standing on the deck, I looked out for the cemetery. I imagined the two tombs where they were laid to rest side by side, both on the same night. I hadn’t been there.

  I come back to you thirty-three years later (an entire lifetime). Will I finally go to your graves?

  In 1962, I was ten years old. You were both interred on February 5 at three o’clock in the morning. They hadn’t wanted to send us your bodies.

  At nightfall, my mother’s sister asked me gently, “I’ll wake you up, and you’ll come with us?” She didn’t cry; she was completely stiff. But there was a glimmering of black tears, not on her cheeks, nor in her dry eyes, but in her voice, when she pronounced the mere words.

  I shook my head and I stayed curled up on my mattress next to the window. I pretended I was going to go to sleep, so that my aunt and two cousins wouldn’t wake me up when they went out after midnigh
t. The three women, wrapped up in their white haiks, and with a seventeen-year-old nephew acting as their guide, proceeded to the Cemetery d’El Alia.

  I didn’t sleep. I listened to all four of them go out. I remained curled up between the sheets until dawn. My head on my knees.

  When she returned, my aunt took me up in her arms. Undressed me. Put me in my nightshirt. Thinking that I couldn’t hear her, she sighed, “In the name of God! . . . In the name of God!”

  Then, with her somewhat cold hands—I remember—she spent a long time caressing all of my body, as if she were kneading me: the shoulders, and then over the haunches to the knees. “In the name of God!” she repeated, then, “God the benevolent! God the merciful!”

  I let her. I wanted to be dead. Asleep or dead, like my mother. “Maman!” I called her by the French “Maman”—she who was assassinated by the French.

  From the next day on, my aunt began to do her prayers. Regularly and discreetly, five times a day. Sometimes, just before dawn, she would kneel in my room, near my mattress. I would wait for her voice to whisper, as it had the night she had come back from the cemetery: “God the benevolent! God the merciful!”

  Such a sweet voice, my mother’s—well, my mother’s sister’s.

  II

  Much later, when I was no longer ten years old, but twelve or fourteen, I can’t remember—she found the courage to tell me about the night at the cemetery.

  “We came in through the upper gate. The night was clear, the moon three-quarters full. A wan light was spilling out everywhere from the sky, but it was damp. Other women like us were arriving in small groups; they were whispering or sometimes crying. They were looking for the graves.

  “What struck me first were four or five young men with bare arms who were digging all over the place, making a hole in the side of the hill. It was strange, all these men digging as if it were the middle of the day! And there, next to them, there was a candle with a wavering light. They were working hastily, mostly by the diffuse light of the nearly full moon. What I heard next froze my heart.

  “A woman I didn’t know, a bent old woman with a hard face and blackened eyes, said rather loudly, ‘They’re preparing the graves, but they don’t know for how many! There will be so many to bury tonight, as there were last night and the one before! Hear this, O my sisters’—and her hoarse voice broke—‘these graves that they are digging, as numerous as they are, will not be enough! They’ll all be used, you’ll see!’

  “I was told that the army had just arrived, in the trucks borrowed from the morgue, from each of the two main hospitals. ‘There have to be graves ready for everybody! For all of the dead from today or from yesterday! ’”

  And so years later my aunt described this moonlit night. The relatives, veiled in white, were crouching next to the open graves . . . Behind them worked the silent gravediggers, pickaxes in hand, already exhausted.

  My aunt continued, “We stayed sitting in a corner—we, the living, waiting for the dead. It seemed like years!

  “Behind us, some women brought forward an old taleb; he started to sing verses from the Koran. His nasal voice spread all around; it seemed tireless.

  “Suddenly, an opulent woman wearing tunics cried out, ‘O my sisters, tell this taleb to stop! The soldiers are about to arrive, and the sacred word of God will make them angry! I know them. They can’t stand it, the wretches! Tell him to be quiet or to chant in his heart. The benediction will be just as valuable to our victims! The soldiers or the furious mad-men and hotheads with them are likely to take offense with this holy man! . . . Or with us, the unfortunate ones!’

  “Her declamation had been loud. An orator, this matron. The taleb immediately grew quiet.

  “‘He, too, he knows fear!’ I thought. ‘Even though he’s armed with the word of God, he fears for his life!’

  “And that night, so luminous, felt stifling.”

  “The soldiers arrived shortly after. They lowered the cadavers, which were all wrapped up, ten at a time.

  “My nephew Ali, whose neighbor works at the morgue, had informed us discreetly. He went up to them and said the name of your poor parents.

  “An officer took out a sheet of white paper. Looked through the names. Indicated two numbers . . .

  “I felt paralyzed. Sitting directly on the ground just in front of a grave awaiting its anonymous deposit. ‘The moment has come!’ I told myself. ‘How can I get up?’

  “Your two cousins pulled me up. Ali repeated the two numbers. (‘Habiba and you, Abbas, here you are as numbers! They have made numbers of you! O gentle Prophet, you are the witness!’) Then he led me, as well as he could, slowly through the groups, the sound of weeping bursting out here and there.

  “I, my petite, I moved forward heavily, first one step, then another. And a thought began to consume me, like fire.

  “‘Why? But why aren’t I the one being buried tonight? It would be more just, O my Lord! I, who am ten years older than Habiba, my young sister! Why don’t I die? I’m fifty years old and have remained childless.’

  “‘Tante, there they are!’ murmured my nephew.

  “Two men, each carrying a dead body wrapped in shrouds or simple blankets, were heading for two graves in a corner. I approached these open graves. I sank down onto the platform in front of them. I think I cried, ‘Wait! God is great!’

  “I wept. I was lifted up again.

  “The two men, the carriers, stood still patiently, with their burdens supported by their outstretched arms. I leaned over. Your cousins were holding me by the shoulders. With two hands, I finally lifted the cloth of the first shroud.

  “It was she! My sister, her moon face, in its grace and its charm. Orphaned as a child, the daughter of my dear mother. Habiba! Her eyes are closed, but I know—oh yes!—that she’s looking at me.

  “‘Habiba!’ I leaned over. I kissed her on the forehead, on each of her cheeks. Cold, like marble. I talked to her.

  “Your cousins were still holding me by the shoulders. From behind us, the taleb began to softly say the fatiha, which spread like a balm across my heart.

  “I suddenly saw a metal plaque hanging by a string around my sister’s neck. It had a number on it. Without thinking, I extended my hand and tore it off. ‘Her’ number. I kept it for you. I was thinking of you, my petite!

  “Then Ali held me up with his strong arms. The cousins, the two cousins? They were, I think, collapsed on the edge. They were crying in little plaintive bursts. I don’t know, I never asked them if they themselves had seen Habiba’s face.

  “Ali slowly led me toward the other shroud. I had to see him, too, your father. The second bearer waited, arms extended beneath the weight.

  “Your father—my younger sister’s prince! The man she’d loved ever since her twentieth birthday. Abbas!

  “With the sheet lifted, I could see that his features were swollen. He had been in the hospital getting ready for his operation when the killers got him. I recognized him, of course. His forehead and his skull still had their bandages. They were dirty, I think.

  “My hand reached for his plaque. And I did it again, to bring what remained of him. For Habiba, ‘66,’ and ‘67’ for Abbas! As I drew away the second plaque, I saw that it was spotted with blood.

  “Behind us, the taleb began his litany again. He recited the “Yacine” sura, so tender, reserved for the dead.

  “Then, they set our two loved ones deep into the earth, which from then on would serve as their mantle! Two graves side by side. I prayed, and the cousins wept. I heard the trucks start up in the background. I don’t know how long we remained standing there like that.

  “The workers had come up next to me; their pickaxes were scattering the damp soil on top of . . .

  “‘Go! I want to go!’ I said, making Ali jump.

  “We moved away. Other groups of women, some silent, some murmuring, were dispersing. The light wasn’t the same anymore; the moon was behind a veil.

  “Ali gave some money
to the taleb, who was moving toward some women who had just arrived. As we were leaving, I saw that the men with pickaxes were working continuously, without rest.

  “‘For tomorrow night!’ one of them said, resignedly.

  “‘May God spare the Muslims!’ I replied.

  And, as usual, my aunt concluded, “God is benevolent! God is merciful!”

  When she related this mournful night to me so many years later, she decided to give me the two plaques (“66” and “67”), which she had torn from the necks of the two who had been assassinated. With their dried blood.

  I can tell you that this was the most precious gift that my aunt ever gave to me.

  You know, there is always a moment among us women (not only for the mother or the grandmother, but also for the older sisters or aunts, those who remained in the paternal household, or for the adoptive mother or the foster sister, sometimes, or the father’s first wife, who never had children, who held on by raising the second wife’s children), there is a moment when, in this tribe of women, the one who is closest to you crouches down before your knees for a private moment, and not knowing how to express her tenderness for you, her attachment to you (she struggles with her sense of propriety), she wants to dispossess herself of something for you, usually a precious ring or a pair of antique gold bracelets. Sometimes she holds nothing in her hands but a silk scarf with florid, faded colors and heavy fringe, which you will wear as a shawl . . . Oh yes, Olivia, during this moment of giving the relative or the friend indicates to you that you are the one closest to her, that she is now prepared to unburden herself, to pray regularly, to go down any glimpsed corridor, any narrow road! . . .

  “So you don’t forget me!” says the giver—or, more spontaneously, “Because you are young, because you are beautiful! You have your life ahead of you, and may God illuminate your days ahead, may He favor your destiny!”