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 speak 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 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 when they went out after midnight. 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 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.

‘I 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!”

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 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 she did and were 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 place they’d go. I want to smell out their dreams and their fears too, and I career through these over-crowded 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 oft he 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 out 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 for- ward, leaping across the sidewalk curbs, ascending flights of staircases? Or instead I’d 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 blessé, 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, starting off 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 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, although 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 also 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 specialist who takes care of him! I will take him away if the specialist 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 specialist 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 with them at the clinic!”


We were told that it occurred one hour after that. At one in the afternoon or a little bit later.

My father was in his room, conscious. The specialist’s examination had eased his mind. Standing in front of the window, Maman smiled. She was talking to Madame Darmon, who was sitting on the other side of the room. She had just reassured her that she had told us and that we, the sister and the little girl, would be coming very soon. We would all be reunited in one or two hours.

My father participated in the conversation, though he was very pale and apprehensive about the upcoming operation.
At which point they came in. A group of doctors. New ones? Strangers, in any case, They, the three, were all wearing white shirts.

One remained standing next to the door. The second questioned the patient in a rough voice: “Are you the designated . . . ?”

My mother interrupted, “I’m his wife! What do you want?”

Maman didn’t have the opportunity to continue.

The third, the one in the front, pulled out a gun from beneath his shirt. While the others blocked the exit, he sedately emptied his gun on the patient. The second, holding a revolver, aimed for Maman’s standing form, which then crumpled.

Her eyes wide, Madame Darmon cried and stood up. The first hesitated, went to shoot her, but his bullet chamber was empty. He took a step back.

“Don’t move, lady!”

The fake doctors, the murderers, all backed out of the room.

Commotion and silence outside in the corridor as the armed men started to run.

The scene took place in slow motion, just before Maman’s body was gunned down . . .

Then, poor Madame Darmon said, “Your maman wasn’t dead, no! They put her on a stretcher and immediately took her to the biggest hospital. With Abbas it was simpler, alas; the sheets of his bed were his shroud.”

Madame Darmon continued, with tears in her eyes, “Poor Habiba! Less than one hour later, because of her damaged liver, she breathed her lasts I was with her in the ambulance!”

The scene in slow motion. And mute.

It’s strange, dear Olivia. As I inscribe this for someone who is totally removed from this, the sounds come back, the dialogues, the uproar, and sometimes the sobs, the same as the infinite, inaudible lament of the survivors.


My maternal aunt passed away the day before yesterday, Olivia, a Thursday night. She was buried yesterday and had the fortune of being carried to the nearby mosque just before the public prayer at one in the afternoon. All of the people that she knew in her neighborhood prostrated themselves during the service, thinking of her. And so she has died a natural death in the company of her own.

Tomorrow will be the third day of mourning. I will stand at her grave amid her friends and her friends’ children. Two days later I will leave the city, Olivia,

The day they bury Khalti (I pronounce this name, tears welling up in my voice), I’m told that, not far from our neighborhood, two or three teenagers fired at an elderly university professor at point-blank range from an old car that then took off for the Petit Lac neighborhood; they fired at the professor when he was leaving his house, with one of his grandchildren at his side. A great master who formed other great masters in sociology, in both Arabic and in French.

He knew that he was in danger and was making preparations to go. He had accepted an offer from a French university to come and teach as an assistant professor.

The master was taking his time because it was going to cost him (he hadn’t budged from his city since the 1960s). He was only waiting for his French visa.

The murderers shot him just before he was going to get it. The professor—gunned down! I heard about it at the cemetery I heard about the wave of sorrow that washed over the world of students and young colleagues.

The body of the assassinated master was taken to the hospital, then to the morgue.


The rest, I know the rest. Let me hear nothing more about what’s going on now in this city, Hide the hate from me—the insanity the victims!

In the hospital’s corridor, I see a child, a little girl or a boy, who learns that the master—his father or grandfather—has died. The child screams: “Assassins! You’ve killed him!”

Let me hear nothing more. Mma—Khalti—passed on peacefully. Just one street over, death bared its fangs, its mouth open.

And the child in the corridor screams. Doesn’t stop. I’m leaving tomorrow or the day after. Already, I can no longer hear the cries, nor the songs. My memory has been stopped up, dulled.
I’m leaving because I want to see nothing more, Olivia. I want to say nothing more—just write. Write Oran in a trough, in a mute tongue, finally reduced to silence.

Write Oran, my dead language.

—Paris, August 1996

Copyright © 1997 by Assia Djebar. English translation © 2006 by Seven Stories Press. Reprinted by permission of Seven Stories. All rights reserved.