Bitter Almonds (16 page)

“Why can't you go to the Champs-Elysées wearing a headscarf?” says Édith, astonished.

Fadila laughs and raises her chin. “She no want 'cause she is chic!”

 

Before leaving Fadila asks, not to read for a while—she doesn't have time—but for some homework. Édith ruffles through the little pile of papers that have served in the past as material for their lessons. “Here,” she says, taking out one of the sheets, “your children's first names.”

For some reason she cannot recall,
NASSER
has been written four times on the sheets, on four successive lines.

Fadila takes the sheet, looks at it and, instead of leaving, she sits down. Édith points to
AÏCHA
: Fadila reads
Nasser
.

“No, look.” Édith points to the first
NASSER
: “Here he is, Nasser.”

Then she slides her finger down to the second
NASSER
, on the line below. Fadila reads
Zora
.

“Are you sure?” says Édith.

Fadila blurts, “Aïcha! Zora! Larbit!”

Édith stops her, asks her to look carefully at the two
NASSER
s written one on top of the other on the first two lines. Fadila realizes they are identical.

Édith shows her the third and fourth
NASSER
underneath. Fadila takes a while to grasp that this is the same word once again, and again.

 

She is beside herself. Her granddaughter Khadija has gone on vacation, just when Fadila was counting on her to take her to the airport the following week.

As for Zora, she has already left, too, by car with her family as planned, but did she say goodbye to her mother?

“Bitch!” says Fadila, spitting out the word. “You say goodbye when you is going away! You no knowing what can happen, maybe is dying. You say goodbye.”

She stabs at a tear. “I no having luck my children. My son I no asking nothing, he has wife is not my daughter, I leave them alone. Girls is not the same. In Morocco is girls they gotta do everything for his mother.”

And Aïcha, whom she never mentions anymore? “Did she get married?” asks Édith. “Did she marry that young man?”

Fadila gives her a fierce look. “I dunno. Aïcha I no seeing.”

And immediately afterwards, in the same tone: “No, she no getting married. But is crazy anyway!”

 

On July 26, when Fadila is due to leave, Édith will be in Geneva. But Gilles will find a way to take Fadila to Charles de Gaulle airport. Departure is scheduled for late afternoon, he'll be able to get off in time.

 

On the appointed day, at the end of the morning, he gets a call from Fadila. She is not taking the plane after all. They never brought her her ticket. The grandson who made the reservation has left Paris. Her daughters are in Morocco. She's out three hundred euros.

She has just made an arrangement with “is one man Aïcha she know” who will give her a lift in his car. She will be leaving in two days' time. And of course she will have to pay for this trip by car.

When Édith next sees Fadila, in early September, she finds her pale with rage. “I so mad,” she says, over and over. She did not particularly want to see any of her family in Morocco, but none of them tried to see her, either, not one of them got in touch with her, and she has not gotten her money back.

It is out of the question for her to call anybody. If anything, they should be calling her, she says repeatedly.

“It's true,” concedes Édith, “you do have the right to an explanation.”

“I no care nothing about explanation.”

She wants to get her three hundred euros back, period. As for Zora and her family, it's all over between them.

She asks Édith to write to Zora for her. “I'll do it,” says Édith, “but you have to dictate the letter.”

Fadila is not at a loss for words. “Your mom she asking you give back three hundred euros,” she dictates. “You is bringing in envelope her house where she living.”

So who did she stay with in Morocco, since she was not with any of her family?

“Well, is my house!” she says.

She did not want to risk running into any of her children, so she didn't go to Casablanca, or Rabat, or Agadir, where they might have met; she left right away for her village “in mountain is not far Essaouira.”

There in “is big house,” which she insists belongs to her, or at least half of it, she made the acquaintance of her brother, the half-brother she had never seen. He is married to a “very nice” woman, they have four “very nice” children. “Is calling me auntie, is wanting me stay there. They is crying and crying when I going.”

She is determined to stay in touch. The family's poverty distresses her. The children are ragged, they have none of the things her grandchildren in France have. She is going to send them clothes and money.

 

On her way out she comes of her own accord to sit next to Édith.

“I forgetting everything,” she says.

“You didn't practice at all?”

“I doing nothing at all!”

You don't forget things like this, Édith assures her. They'll start again. It will come back.

“Has to!” says Fadila, who hasn't forgotten that the class at the
mairie
of the sixteenth arrondissement will be starting on September 25th.

“Off we go, then.”

“Slow-slow.”

They start over, first name, last name, address. Fadila can still write her first name from memory, but not her last name. She copies out her address, more or less without any mistakes.

 

“And how is your daughter-in-law? The baby?” asks Édith, who would like to know if Fadila is seeing her beloved son, at least.

“Is okay,” says Fadila. “Poor woman, she is getting presents but no one they giving her brand names!”

So Fadila, the grandmother, went to Jacadi and bought two pairs of pajamas for her three-month-old granddaughter.

 

As she walks past the sofa Fadila stops: there are always some recent newspapers lying on it, and now she picks one up. She holds it in both hands and stares at it intensely.

“Have you seen something that interests you?”

“What is this?” she asks.

This, on the cover of the television section of
Le Monde
, is a photograph of youths from the
banlieues
throwing stones at shop windows.

“They've made a documentary about the young people in the
banlieues
,” says Édith. “That business in Clichy-sous-Bois, you remember?”

“I has to watch. Is already finish?”

Édith checks.

“No, it's on tonight. See, Tuesday the nineteenth, that's today.”

“Show me,” says Fadila.

She examines the line Édith is pointing to, the date and the day, at the top of the page.

“Is numbers is okay. What I don' know, is Tuesday, Monday, Thursday . . .”

“The days? Well, we can learn them,” says Édith.

While Fadila watches she writes
MARDI 19
on a sheet of paper.

“Is look like
LARBIT
,” says Fadila.

“Well done, that's right. But there are some differences, look.”

Édith writes
LARBIT
just above
MARDI
so that the two
A
's are on top of each other, and the two
R
's as well.

“You see,” she says, “in
MARDI
and in
LARBIT
”—she stresses the
ar
orally, and circles the two
AR
's with a pencil—there are two letters that are exactly the same. Not the others . . .”

She writes
MAR
across from
MARDI
, and beneath it she writes
LAR
across from
LARBIT
.

“What is saying, there?” asks Fadila, pointing to
MAR
.

Fadila can decipher neither
MAR
nor
LAR
.

She still cannot read syllables on their own. She can sometimes make out the elements that are shared by two words, but if the words are deconstructed she can no longer recognize the very same elements.

 

In a few days, on Monday the 25th, classes will begin at the
mairie
of the sixteenth arrondissement. Fadila will go on her own, she knows where it is.

“Does that work for you, six thirty?” asks Édith. “It's not too early? Will you have finished work?”

Fadila doesn't foresee any problems.

“I figure out.”

In fact, something else is troubling Édith. She remembers how she had started off teaching cursive handwriting to Fadila, and that it had turned out to be very difficult for her, so they had gone on to block capitals, which were easier for her. And Édith is afraid that at the literacy class they will start off using cursive.

“Do you remember that there are two ways of writing?” she asks Fadila.

She shows her in the textbook words in cursive and others in capital letters, and reminds Fadila that she is acquainted with the two sorts of writing.

 

“How did your first class go?”

Fadila says calmly, “Is going fine.”

They are a big group but the classroom is huge, there were at least twenty tables in there. A “very nice” lady divided up the students. “I sitting at table with Moroccans.” In this sub-group there is a woman who is most definitely older than Fadila and who has also never been to school.

She has brought with her, to show Édith, the workbook that was handed out to all the students, to show Édith. On page 2, neatly written, every letter on its line, are the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, in cursive handwriting.

Fadila doesn't point it out. Édith also thinks it's better not to say anything at this stage.

The nice lady has asked them to copy out these twenty-six letters for the following class. Not for one moment does Fadila entertain the idea of doing it on her own. She has made an appointment with her Tunisian neighbor on the landing, who has agreed to help her between classes. They will be meeting this evening.

This is the first time she has mentioned any such outside help to Édith.

“Is your neighbor with you at the class?”

Not at all, says Fadila. The neighbor has been reading and writing since she was a child. She's in her forties. They get along, the two of them, and help each other out from time to time. They celebrated the beginning of Ramadan together a few days ago.

Édith wonders if this could be a way for Fadila to try another learning method, and to change her tutor at the same time as she changes her method, for Édith herself to put an end once and for all to the disappointing effort of the last year and a half.

The following week everything is all messed up. “Is finish, I no going back,” says Fadila. “I walk out the class!”
She is so furious she can hardly speak. Édith takes a while to piece together what happened.

At the second class, their teacher was no longer the nice lady from the first time, but a young woman, “is very nervous,” and Fadila knew why: she was a heavy smoker, and because they were not allowed to smoke in the classroom she was sucking on one lozenge after the other.

The break came right at the beginning of the class. It didn't take long.

To copy out her letters, Fadila asked for her neighbor's help as agreed. She shows her workbook to Édith: the first ten letters look like models, each one neatly on its line. It is obvious that the following lines were not written by the same hand: Fadila had taken over and, visibly, was writing on her own. The result is a pattern of irregular graffiti that is hard to recognize as letters of the alphabet.

The lady teacher walked behind the students to check their workbooks. When she saw Fadila's, she got angry: “You didn't do this,” she said, pointing to the first ten lines.

Fadila laughed: “'Course not! I no know how to writing, I not writing that.”

Once she had completed her tour, the teacher, still very nervous, went up to the blackboard. In very large letters, with chalk, she wrote the day of the week, the date and the month, and asked everyone to copy it at the top of page 3 in their workbook.

This time it was Fadila who lost her temper: “I not knowing how to write, how you want me is writing that?”

“You copy it!” insisted the teacher.

So Fadila stood up, gathered up her things, said goodbye and left the room.

 

Édith calls the person in charge at the center, the woman she had spoken to several times on the phone the previous year. An intelligent woman, who agrees that it was a false start, and she would like Fadila to come back. In the course of the conversation she corrects Édith: one should no longer say illiterate, but unschooled, and she insists the students have not been grouped by nationality; they are divided up according to their level.

 

Fadila won't hear of going back. “I no wasting time with is business,” she says, more than once.

It is the third week of Ramadan, she is exhausted. She has new things to worry about. She has just found out that she has to vacate her room before the end of the year. The woman who had been renting her the room without ever giving her a receipt is moving out.

“Is she selling it?” asks Édith.

“'Course not, is no hers, the apartment!”

It all adds up. This tenant was subletting the maid's room of her apartment. Illegally. Fadila came across a housing certificate that the woman had finally agreed to give her, in the event she might need it for administrative purposes: on the certificate it states that she is being housed for free, anyway that is what her daughter-in-law read to her. Therefore she has no basis on which to stay there. She is obliged to leave.

“Hold on a minute,” says Édith, who would be surprised if they could throw out into the street a woman in her situation who had in fact been renting her room for years.