Bitter Almonds (10 page)

They start with the five vowels. Each time they click on one of the letters, they hear a woman's voice saying the letter. The game consists in having the student point the cursor at a letter, then say the name of the letter out loud and, with a click, check whether or not they have given the right answer.

Édith has chosen the capital letters. She emphasizes once again to Fadila that she knows four out of the five vowels. “The fifth one is
u
, we'll deal with that one later. Let's start with the others.” She shows Fadila how to move the cursor across the screen with her fingertip, how to put it on the chosen letter, and then how to click with a slight pressure of her finger to hear the name of the letter. “Go ahead, you'll see, it's easy.”

Fadila shakes her head. She is glum. She keeps her back pressed against the chair, her hands on her thighs under the table. “Is computer I no doing,” she says.

“Forget it's a computer. Just pretend it's a game. You know how to use a telephone: this is even simpler.”

“I no doing,” says Fadila again. “Is for young people. I'm be too old.”

“Try it! Everyone can do it.”

“I no can seeing on there,” says Fadila, lifting her chin toward the screen. “I no see nothing.”

“How can that be,” says Édith. She points to the letter
A
. “You see the letter, here. You recognize it, no?”

Fadila goes on shaking her head. “I no can seeing.” A stubborn child.

“Don't you want to try? Just once?”

The same sign language. No, no, no.

“Would you rather go on like before, with paper?”

“Yes.”

“Fine,” says Édith. “If you prefer. After all, in the old days before computers we didn't need them to learn how to read.”

She will think about Fadila's refusal later. For the time being the main thing is to stay cheerful.

She closes the laptop, shoves it to one side, and reaches for the sheets and the felt-tips. On one sheet—comprising their entire fortune—are the words they have already seen:

 

FADILA AMRANI

NASSER LARBIT

AÏCHA

RER A

RER B

RER C

 

The time before, when Édith had added
AÏCHA
to the list of words Fadila knew, she had hoped Fadila would notice the dieresis above the I and ask her what these two dots were for. Now while she goes over the words again one by one, she hopes Fadila will say something about the dieresis. But no questions come.

So Édith points to the dieresis: this sign means anybody can recognize
AÏCHA
among the other words, she explains.

But apparently, it doesn't apply to everyone, as the minutes which follow make amply clear. At least not straight off, where Fadila is concerned.

Édith realizes that the problem is precisely that Fadila cannot learn such simple things with her first attempt, and, for lack of an explanation, she now knows that repetition, tedious repetition, will have to be one kind of solution.

 

She goes back to the letter
U
. They mustn't miss the opportunity to learn another letter.

“On the computer you saw that there are four letters you know . . .”

Fadila does not deny it. She does not repeat that she couldn't see anything on the screen.

While she is speaking, Édith writes
A
,
E
,
I
,
O
.

“ . . . and there's one more, a new one, the
U
.”

Some writing practice. Work on the
U
. Simplified writing: just a curve, no vertical serif on the right side. Fadila relaxes.

Édith notices that she still doesn't hold her pen properly.

Suddenly an idea springs to mind: “You know you've got nearly all the letters, now.”

She writes the twenty-six letters of the alphabet on two lines and shows them one by one to Fadila. She doesn't question her. She draws a red circle around each of the letters they have already seen, affirming, “You already know this one very well,” and only then does she ask, “Which one is this?”

Once again she can see there are varying degrees in Fadila's knowledge, and there is a major difference between recognizing and naming. Just because Fatima is familiar with a letter she doesn't necessarily know how to name it.

Still, they come up with fifteen red circles, fifteen letters that Fadila knows, to varying degrees.

“That's a lot, out of twenty-six,” says Édith, jubilant.

She rewrites the twenty-six letters on a sheet of paper, and asks Fadila, once she is at home and relaxed, to pick out the ones that are familiar. “You can make a circle around it, or a square. Squares are easy to make.”

She adds the gesture to her words, four lines. This brings back a memory from Luc's early childhood. The family pediatrician recommended the children undergo a series of tests offered by the Social Security, once they turned two and four.

Luc was four. The psychologist gave him a blank sheet of paper and a pencil: “Can you draw a square for me?” He sat there silent and motionless. Édith assumed he didn't know how. The woman said again, “Draw a square for me.” So Luc, determined, said: “I'd rather draw a sun.” And without waiting for her green light, he drew a huge sun, with S-shaped sunbeams, filling the entire page.

“It doesn't matter,” said the psychologist. It really doesn't, is what Édith would have said.

Two days later she walked by Luc and saw he was drawing, and she asked, “Say, don't you want to draw a square?” And the little boy, as if he were fed up with all this obsession with squares, immediately drew a square, with four very confident pencil strokes.

 

Fadila watches as Édith puts away some of the boys' clothes that are lying around: shoes and trousers into the wardrobe, a parka onto the coatrack, a belt into a drawer. “Is always the mama she picking up everything,” she says, sympathetically.

Édith and Gilles have a friend who has just lost his wife. The children are quite young still. Édith tells Fadila about it. The friend has assured them that everything is fine, he's gotten organized, but Édith wonders, in concrete terms, how he is getting on with their everyday life.

“When is mama dying, life is go all black.” Fadila tells her again about her mother, about her own sorrow when she died. Édith says, dully, “She lived a long life, she was old.”

“Yes,” nods Fadila. “Is sixty.”

Her mother died a gentle death, the kind she would like to have, she says. She was in Casablanca, with her granddaughter Aïcha, who was twenty at the time and had been married for a while already. She was fine. She was to have left a few days earlier to go back to be with Fadila, with whom she was living in Rabat, but Aïcha had insisted she stay on a bit longer until her mother-in-law came back from Mecca “with things for her.”

Fadila's mother had agreed to postpone her departure. The “hadja” came home, told them all about her pilgrimage, and they listened. Everyone had dinner and went to bed. The grandmother had planned to leave the next morning. She got up at dawn and said her prayer. But when she went to get dressed, she couldn't. She went to rouse Aïcha, and Aïcha realized something was wrong. They fussed over her. “Don't worry,” said the grandmother, “I'm dying.” She lay down, said her prayers, very calmly, and died.

Fadila's great regret is that they were not able to reach her in time for her to see her mother again before the burial. In Islam the burial takes place very soon after death. “If is die in the morning, has to burying before evening prayer.” She knows that it is different for Christians, that they let a few days go by. “Is be sure the person is really dead,” she says, evoking a fear that Édith knew, from her reading, had been prevalent in bygone eras, but which seemed to have disappeared in their own.

“What sort of work did you do in Rabat?”

Fadila had been the housekeeper for a French couple with three children. People who ran a café. “Is Jewish, but is very nice,” she says. She raised their children. She spent more than twelve hours a day with this family, and that is why she is grateful to her own mother for having come to keep house for her and take care of the children while they were little.

“Your daughters got married very young,” says Édith.

“No. Aïcha is eighteen, Zora seventeen.”

“That's not exactly old. You said you found it so hard, getting married when you were still a girl—wouldn't you have preferred for them to wait a bit?”

“Girls is have to getting married young,” says Fadila firmly, “otherwise is going around with boys, is no good.”

“You were twenty-five when you were on your own with your children and went to work in Rabat?”

“Twenty.”

“You were twenty and you'd already been married three times?”

“No, is third is after, in Rabat. I'm no luck with husbands.” She changes her tone: “Is ironing to do. Gotta go.”

However willingly she speaks of her mother, she will only talk about her husbands if Édith asks her about them, and then she quickly changes the subject.

Ramadan has begun. Fadila is in a bad mood. She works fewer hours, and leaves earlier. She has to finish cooking before breaking the fast, which is set for seven in the evening these days. And the ritual meal takes a long time to prepare. She really has no time at all for reading and writing.

 

One morning she calls to say she won't be coming this Tuesday. She had an upset stomach all night. “Is lady giving me Ramadan cakes is making someone in Morocco.”

Cakes that keep one awake all night long, from the country where Fadila cannot go without being sick.

 

The following week, her upset stomach is better, so she comes to do the ironing. But she is still in a black mood. Her back aches. Every year it's the same thing, she says. She cannot stand fasting.

Édith asks Fadila whether, given the fact that sick people are exempt from fasting, and that not being able to drink anything makes her sick, she could not exempt herself from fasting, or at least allow herself to drink. Fadila does not grasp this casuistry, is shocked, even: “I no sick, since I working. If you working, you no sick!”

 

It is Fadila who comes, once she has finished ironing, to sit by Édith and say, “We going writing a little today?”

Édith asks her to write her first and last names. She no longer watches while she does it. It has been a long time since she had to guide her hand.

Fadila puts down her felt-tip and sits up straight. She wrote
FADILFADIL
and below that,
MRANI
. Édith is bewildered.

“You wrote
FADILA
twice?”

“Yes,” she replies, cheerfully, as if she were saying, “Why not?”

Édith points out that there is a letter missing from
FADIL
, and a letter missing from
MRANI
. Fadila cannot see which one.

“Both times it's the
A
.”

This seems to amuse Fadila.

Édith writes slowly there before her:
AMRANI
. Just below that, Fadila writes
AMRAI
. Édith points out that there is a letter missing. Fadila cannot see which one.

“The
N
,” says Édith.

Fadila starts over. This time she writes
AMRNI
. Same observation, letter missing. Same fog, she cannot find it.

“That's the one that's missing,” says Édith, pointing with her finger.

“Ah, the
A
,” says Fadila, identifying it at last.

 

They move on to reading. Édith writes
RER B
. Fadila reads
RER C
.
LARBIT
: she recognizes it.
RER C
: she reads
RER A
.
NASSER
: she cannot.

“You know, is very difficult,” she says.

Édith suddenly feels so helpless, that she has to find a trick, a magic formula, a mantra. If only Fadila could grasp that words are made up of syllables, she thinks, with a sort of despair, as if she were squeezing a lucky charm, the overall difficulty would be transformed into tiny little efforts. Syllables are tiny, very simple little words.

She divides
FADILA
into three, circles the
FA
, then the
DI
, then the
LA
. “We're going to try a little exercise with your first name, the word you know best. At the same time as you write
FA
, you will say
fa
, and then
di
when you write
DI
, then
la
when you write
LA
.”

You have your eyes, your ears, and your mouth. You learn from all sides. If you say what you write that's one way of absorbing it. It is bound to work.

But Fadila must think it's ridiculous, she doesn't follow. Or else, thinks Édith, the way we pronounce the word in French must seem light years away from what she knows of her first name. For a moment Édith imagines someone asking her to write her first name in Arabic, using Arabic letters, in other words, with no capital or final
h
. It would be a transcription. A very abstract process: you change the word before putting it down in writing in unfamiliar signs. It's hard, very hard.

But the following Tuesday Fadila writes
AMRANI
perfectly, first try. Édith squeezes her in her arms.

She remembers the first thing Fadila wrote for her, that little scribble of messy, unrecognizable signs: it's absolutely clear that they've made considerable headway in seven months. Considerable headway with nothing at all.

 

And that is the day, the last in the month, when Fadila leaves with her paycheck. As she is preparing to endorse the check on the back with her usual zigzag, Édith suggests she try signing her name instead. You cannot just change your signature like that, retorts Fadila; you have to warn the bank. Maybe she knows this because she told her branch office that one day she would sign her name?