The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry Read online

  Thus, you—the daughter, or the granddaughter, or the niece . . . in any case the dearest one, the precocious one in the household—you protest, “You wear this ring! This jewel is too beautiful for me! I couldn’t!”

  But really, you don’t refuse, you cannot refuse. You accept. You wipe away a few tears.

  My aunt—really, my adoptive mother—had just recounted that terrible night when she extended the plaques with the “66” and “67” with the spotted brownish stains to me. That night when I, a little ten-year-old girl, hadn’t wanted to go with them, and had remained cowering on my mattress until dawn.

  She handed the plaques to me in silence. An offering? A restitution. I touched the blood that had dried on the two numbers that had been chosen for them at the morgue.

  I took these plaques with me when I left the city at the age of eighteen. I keep them on me these days, for my return.

  III

  My childhood lasted for ten years, ending when my parents died. I spent no more than two of these years with them. Very early on, Habiba, my mother, involved my father in her trade union activities. In the middle of what would later be called “the events,” of what must have been around 1957, she was expelled to France and he put on trial. My father was barred from teaching, which he had been doing at the time and which he really loved. Finally, he was detained in a camp in the south. In the eyes of the authorities, both of them, evidently, were dangerous “agitators.”

  I was entrusted to my aunt’s care. While I was starting school in a Muslim neighborhood, Maman was trying to survive in the Parisian world. With the help of her French friends, she found work as a secretary. My father was released one year later, and then expelled from the country himself, he went to join her.

  Until about 1960, they lived far from us. My father had a harder time finding a job, but was eventually hired as a traveling salesman; not long after, he fell ill. They were giving up hope that I would be able to come live with them. (At the time, whenever I was out on the terrace of my aunt’s old house and saw a plane passing in the sky, I would murmur hopefully, “That one! Next time, that one will take me back to Maman!” or else, “It’s Maman who’s returning! She’ll land in Es Senia! Before nighttime, you’ll see, she’ll be knocking on the door, along with my father. Yes, you can count on it, it’s Maman’s plane!”)

  Suddenly, thanks to a reduction in my father’s sentence, they decided to come back. Some years later, Olivia, when I myself came to live in Paris, where they had taken refuge—I, who was spared their anguish, who became a student, then a teacher—I was often tormented by the question, “Why did they want to return? They wouldn’t have been killed had they stayed in Paris! I would still have them! Why?”

  Maman had been apprehensive about coming back. She had observed that, at the end of 1960, the tensions were getting worse. The extremists—those of the French army, then the hundreds who became OAS leaders—were at the forefront of the scene . . .

  “We’ll always be watched, because of our union activities,” Maman worried. My aunt told me what she had said . . .

  Back in France, my father hadn’t gotten any better. “He couldn’t get used to it—sick, and being so far from all of us!” commented my aunt. “He’d even say again and again, ‘If I don’t get better, Habiba, I’d rather die in our country!’ Yes, that’s what he had said and so your mother resigned herself to coming back . . .” My aunt sighed. “For the first six months, they lived in relative peace. They were staying in a European neighborhood. Their neighbors were good people! Madame Darmon, a social worker, had become a kind of sister to your mother; I think she even agreed with her ideas!”

  “And I!” I exclaimed. “I was living with them at last!” Then, out of respect for my aunt, I tempered my enthusiasm.

  My aunt added, “Remember, they were bombed, at least twice!”

  The second time I was in the apartment with Maman. Fortunately, the bomb wasn’t very big. It exploded on the front steps and blew out the door completely, destroying the furniture in the entryway . In the smoke, Maman had thrown herself on me and dragged me quickly to the back of the house. I stayed in the bathroom, waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

  “They changed apartments,” my aunt continued. “They rented one on the border between the New City and the Arab Quarter, near the shoreline road.”

  “Yes,” I remembered, my eyes distant. “Father stayed in bed almost all the time!”

  “His diabetes had gotten worse, the poor man. He didn’t complain. He would wait for your mother. She was so energetic. From his bed, he would follow her with his eyes. He would smile at her! What a man!” my aunt exclaimed all of a sudden, her expression anguished. “Poor Abbas!” she sobbed.

  I cut off my aunt’s string of memories. Now, ever since I returned, she has been remembering, mostly in a state of resigned melancholy. At eighty-three years of age, she is growing weaker, and I fear for the state of her heart.

  You’ll read this in Sardinia, Olivia. In all those years that we were colleagues at the lycée, then friends, there was one time I managed to talk to you about it. “I can’t see myself living anywhere other than Paris. Here, at least there are three or four French people from the past, all rather old, that I see often: friends of my mother who fought like her and with her the two years she was here.”

  I know that my parents had stayed on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. (I’ve kept the letters I received from them as a child, even if I never open them.) And then I was wandering aimlessly one day when I ended up on this street. My heart was beating. I walked hurriedly, as if ghosts were coming to meet me! I found myself in front of the Saint-Antoine hospital. Suddenly, I felt weak; my legs were shaking. I sat down at a brasserie next door. From there, I spied on the people coming and going through the widely opened doors; a springtime sun lit the scene. I was fascinated.

  For the illusion was working: soon I’d see the silhouette of my mother (she was thirty-five or thirty-six then). She had come to this hospital so many times with my father, who was already ailing. In a second—certainly, yes—I’d see them, the couple, so young. Uneasy perhaps, but alive!

  I’m telling you about this now, Olivia, from Oran. As in Paris, here I’m looking, searching for traces of them, for their shadows. Even more than I did in Paris, I comb through the places they’d go. I want to smell out their dreams and their fears too, and I career through these overcrowded streets, these noisy public squares that are deserted of the crowds of pieds-noirs that they would have brushed past, where some of their colleagues and friends had been. Where certainly the three assassins from February the second were!

  Alas, I find almost nothing of my parents in Oran. This city is opaque, Olivia. Oran has become a frozen memory to me, a dead language.

  Unless I am at my mother’s—my mother’s sister’s—bedside.

  IV

  I always called my aunt Mma, “my mother,” in Oranian Arabic.

  An incident comes back to me: I was still very little. Maman was living in France, unable to return to us, and I would survey every single plane in the sky that could bring me to her. There was a cousin—actually, an aunt by marriage—malicious, as some women here, too severely cloistered by brothers or husbands, know how to be. Every time this visitor came to stay with us, she would ask me, not without an undercurrent of insincerity (she always did it in front of the household’s matron), “So, which one is the real mother for you: ‘Mma’” indicating my aunt, who suddenly looked uneasy, “or ‘Maman,’ as you say,” pointing toward the distant horizon, in the direction of my heart’s beloved, my absent fairy.

  She would torment me, little girl that I was. I wouldn’t respond. My forehead expressionless, I would keep myself behind a wall. I would be almost in tears because my aunt would be waiting, growing alarmed, I could tell, and in spite of herself, cornering me into a lie.

  “Both of them are my mother!”

  Imperiously, the inquisitor would persist, “The real mother, she�
�s the one you like better!”

  “Both of them!” I would cry, throwing myself into some dark corner, a prison cell.

  The following night would be fraught with nightmares. And my mother’s sister would get up to calm me, to give me something to drink, to rock me, at times, like a baby.

  In the old days . . .

  This persecution, of course, broke off briskly, but this unexpected respite sent me to an even greater suffering. To a desert.

  Dear Olivia, one day I will have to teach you Arabic, or at least my dialect, which is much like speaking the Moroccan of Fez or Tétouan. In return, you’ll teach me Sardinian, since I can read Italian and sing it, even if I don’t speak it yet.

  You see, in Arabic the maternal aunt is called khalti, and this khâ, pronounced as a gentle hiss at the back of the palate, is in radical opposition to ‘amti, the paternal aunt, which, like the first consonant, has an ‘ayn that is emitted roughly from the very back of the palate.

  I wonder what separates the affection of one aunt on the maternal side from another’s on the father’s side? I never had a true ‘amti. Because my father’s family—people of a certain social position from a nearby city—were offended that their son, a teacher who could have made his way up the social ladder in a colonized Algeria, had been taken in by a girl of common stock. A woman who, in addition to taking secretarial courses, was discovering the struggle of the classes and the people’s support of anticolonialism.

  From the few visits I made as a child to one of my father’s sisters, all I remember is the look, loaded with suspicion or regret, that she cast at me, the daughter “of the other”!

  And so I wanted to tell you, dear Olivia, that there was only the maternal aunt in my situation—with the soft hissing at the back of the palate. It is she who is the closest to the mother, who, in my mother’s absence, takes her place . . . this lost mother. The other, the father’s sister, sometimes displays her love, but it’s with ostentation and because of family pride.

  “Lost mother,” yes. I lost my mother when I was ten years old. And if my khalti is in danger of also passing on in a few months (I will stay in Oran a long time, if necessary), then yes, this time I will really have lost my mother.

  Thank you, Olivia, for in writing to you day after day, in spite of the great distress, I am preparing myself for this end. For this redoubled loss.

  Olivia, if my mother dies, this time I will be with her up to her last breath, I will go to the edge of her open grave, even if I cannot pray. The third day of mourning, I’ll be back in the company of all the women, my head covered, accepting the benedictions and distributing the alms. But when I leave the following day, an orphan, I will take refuge on your island.

  “She won’t have to be hospitalized,” the doctor—a cousin who has monitored my adoptive mother’s health for years—tells me the next day.

  I accompany her back to our Moorish family home, to the vestibule, or skifa, whose floor is tiled with yellow and blue faïence. I don’t have the courage to reply when she says, “Me, I’ll never go into this city’s hospital, not for any reason!”

  I see them again, those corridors where so many come and go, entire families of poor people looking fearful, waiting, and the nurses in uniform, usually indifferent Europeans, bustling about.

  It was February the second. We, Mma and I, had been informed.

  Mma had hiccupped, “Your father is dead, my petite! Let’s go, come with me to the hospital. Your mother has only been wounded. May God protect her for us!”

  Had we both run? Walked in great strides? Jostled through the crowds? Crossed the New City, or as they call it in French, “la ville nègre”? Maybe we had hailed a cab. I remember nothing, except what my fixed eyes absorbed of the images that filed past slowly or in fast forward: the furniture on the wrought-iron balconies which flew past my eyes at a diagonal; the brasserie terraces and their well-dressed crowds; for a second I even saw the people in front of Le Continental, a trendy café.

  Had I crossed downtown hand-in-hand with Khalti? Had I rushed forward, leaping across the sidewalk curbs, ascending flights of staircases? Unless, on the contrary, I had huddled in a cab on top of matronly knees, viewing the moving images outside, a mirage from another world.

  What dazed state were we in when we showed up at the big hospital? I’ll never know.

  At the big French hospital!

  At the door, Mma shows her papers, explains in Arabic, “My sister. To see my wounded sister!”

  After her, I repeat in French, “Sa sœur . . . elle veut voir sa sœur blessée!”

  And the nurse, the head nurse, retorts haughtily, “Since you know how to speak French, la petite, couldn’t you also add ‘madame’? They taught you that in school, didn’t they?”

  I stare at the head nurse. I announce, “Sa sœur . . . elle veut voir sa sœur blessée, madame!”

  The appellation “madame,” in addition to Maman being wounded, runs through my whole body. Now I’m walking down a long corridor. They let us come inside. “Madame.” The word still vibrates within me, becoming the start of a lament.

  We advance, Khalti and I. Khalti is veiled in her woolen haik. I’m holding on to her, clinging to her by her veil. The corridor—so wide, so clear, with tall windows on the right overlooking the park, a park with palm trees, a real Eden—this corridor seems interminable.

  At the end—a table, an inspection. A new “madame” who is sitting, also dressed in white.

  Khalti presses my hand, as if to say, “Speak in French so that they’ll let us get to my sister faster!”

  In a scholarly tone, I begin, “Madame . . .”

  The woman waits, her gaze cold. I stammer, I explain, and I’m already afraid, because of this cold gaze.

  “Your mother, you want to see your mother? What’s the name?”

  I say the name. The last name and the first name. I repeat them in a voice that is wearing down.

  The woman stares at me. Looks through a list. Lifts her head, then exclaims with a start, “Your mother? But your mother is dead, for goodness sake!”

  “Dead, your mother is dead.” I open my mouth. I look at the woman, her list, and the windows to the right overlooking the park and its palm trees.

  I let go of the rough fabric of Khalti’s veil. Only then do I scream. I run and I scream, “Assassins! You killed her! Assassins, you are all assassins!”

  I screamed. I still scream in the corridor of the hospital in Oran.

  Some years later in Paris, a scene in slow motion would haunt my nights, my siestas, haunt me when I woke up to the gray winter. For days and days it would come back to me, then it disappeared all of a sudden, only to reappear one season later.

  I know the scene in slow motion by heart. I don’t know who told it to me, if it was in Arabic or in French. Perhaps I read it one day, sometime later, in a newspaper. A printed report of testimonies about “the OAS in Oran,” about the murders in Oran, about . . . One day, opening a book with large type and photographs, I even saw an image of my parents right in the middle of a page: young and handsome, in the street, a street in Oran. They were smiling. They looked happy. Perhaps they had just been married. Or else it was a little later, presumably after my birth.

  I stared at this photo on the book’s page. A book of memories from the war. “Our” war, they would say. As if it were necessary to put a possessive on such a tenacious word!

  I stared at the photo without advancing my fingers to touch it. My heart had drained. I forced myself to read the caption: “A young, militant martyred couple.” Followed by their names.

  I shut the book, put it back. I haven’t opened it again. A friend gave it to my aunt, thinking that it would make her happy. I saw her face slowly distort. She turned away from me and back into the kitchen.

  It was in Paris some years later that I was haunted by the scene of their death in the hospital room. So well that I see it, I relive it. I believe that I am an invisible bystander, omnipresent, altho
ugh it was Maman’s closest friend at the time, Madame Darmon, who witnessed the tragedy and later recounted it to the police, to the family, and who knows who else? In July 1962, at the moment of the terrible exodus of the “little Whites,” she too left, Madame Darmon . . . And it’s Khalti who’d promised to take care of the dead at the Jewish cemetery, who keeps up the graves for the friend that had to go away—the graves of the husband, the father, and the mother.

  In Madame Darmon’s place, I’m the one who sheds light on the scene again. The one who writes it, so that I may annihilate it, once and for all.

  V

  The night before the tragedy, my father had a serious hemorrhage. They were in their new apartment. Panicked, Maman went knocking on the neighbor’s door—a lefty teacher who, like Maman, had been the target of a bomb attack.

  “Come with me in the car to the clinic where the professor has already cared for him! I’m begging you!”

  “Don’t try it, madame! These thugs who make the laws now have always had you on their list! It’s a terrible risk!”

  “I’m begging you! I’m afraid that my husband won’t make it through the night! Tomorrow morning, he’ll be able to see the professor who takes care of him! I will take him away if the professor says it’s all right!”

  The neighbor tried to argue that she was “throwing herself into the wolf ’s mouth.” Maman saw her husband in even greater danger that night.

  The neighbor went with her in the car. My father was hospitalized. Maman spent the night by his side. “To be here when he wakes up and to help when the professor visits!” she insisted.

  Madame Darmon, her friend, came in the morning to tell us. I had already been resettled to my adoptive mother’s home. On the front step (she had crossed the old Arab city for us, even though the neighborhoods were turning into ghettos), Madame Darmon tried to allay our fears. “When you come this afternoon you’ll find me at the clinic with them!”