So Vast the Prison (39 page)

She was silent. She did not laugh anymore. She sighed.

“Next time,” she muttered, her voice hard, “I hope to have a good miscarriage, or else to stay there and never come back to Him!”

In fact she had a miscarriage the next year. Three days later they carried her off, dead. Thirty years old and with five children already, all of them still very young.

She was buried in her village near the
oued
. Her face is the one
surfacing within me; I hear again her inexhaustible laughter in the low-rent building where I find the mother-in-law who tells me what happened. I was not there in the city when the pallbearers took her away under a shroud, her face toward the sky. Her voice went ahead of her to the oasis, I am sure.

Should one tell, O mother (why do I suddenly speak as if I were the one, the dead child, the child never mourned, the child buried without my knowing how to find any trace of it again?) yes, do you have to be reminded, O mother, that you were worried about me from the time I was twelve until I was fourteen, waiting for my blood, my menstrual blood?

In vain. I had a bloodless adolescence, a bloodless coming of age, the way one would describe a death as bloodless. Later, well after my marriage, the gynecologist explained that one legacy of this land was that very young girls contracted the tuberculosis bacillus without anyone knowing, and they would only find out later, sometimes too late, that genital tuberculosis made them sterile wives. I gladly accepted the verdict: I would therefore be miraculously sterile, available to be a bosom friend to children, all heart, and never any blood!

So my coming of age made my life easier, allowing me to think of myself as androgynous for a rather long time. A gift. One that I expressed in the ignorance and haziness of a mind steeped in mystical reading (a jumble of Claudel and Jalal-ud-din Rumi) that day I turned fourteen, when proudly, too proudly, I wrote out my life project in black and white,
Until I am thirty!

So, intoxicated with space and motion, I dreamed my life; I danced my little life of an odalisque who has left the frame for good,
at least until I turned fourteen … And ever since? Between shadow and sunlight, between my vulnerable freedom and the fetters imposed on the women of “my home,” I zigzag along the frontier of a bitter, voracious land. I try my hand at living, that is at looking, one eye turned wide open to the sky and sometimes toward others, the other eye turned inward where it rediscovers, farther and father back, the funeral processions of yesterday, and the day before yesterday …

Any number of interviews, meetings back to back, dozens of forms to fill out, questionnaires explained by the social worker, read by the woman in charge of children’s services, put in order by the family counselor, all ladies with sweet expressions, but who move quickly, speak like inquisitors, are courteous and attentive, and are probably prolific mothers outside these offices. For the past three months Isma has been severely testing the high walls of her patience. After she and her husband had the same impulse at the same time and decided to adopt a child, they had found the bureaucracy trying. Now that is over with! This is the morning they will choose.

They are going together to the nursery where all the babies are, some, they have been told, only a few days old, and some already as old as six months.

Choosing a baby the way you choose a doll, a knickknack, a refrigerator, a dog in a kennel, a cat; no, not a cat, people give you cats—a ball of fur in the palm of your hand—or sometimes the cat comes in by itself through the garden gate, stops on the sill, rubs itself for a second against the doorframe, studies the half-light inside the home, and suddenly it lives there.

Perhaps the same is true for a toddler who gets lost in the street, who dawdles in a playing field, who seems distraught at the entrance to a market: The child lays its eyes upon you and will not withdraw them. The decision opens up inside you like a water flower on some inner lake: It is your turn to approach, look, keep the child … Ah, such a choice (who chose whom?) would be lived as some obscure abduction in full daylight.

Isma has dreams like this as she prepares for the encounter at the nursery. Adopting a child is moving toward a moment of slow seduction, or of falling in love. She moves into this imaginary space: prowling, visiting a friendly house, leaving it. Where would it be? In what place open to every wind would she find herself face-to-face with this child?

Three or four years after the end of this long war, in every city in the country, and sometimes in the towns on the plains, homes have been set up where dozens of orphans live; boys of ten, sometimes older. The summer before, Isma visited the children’s houses in her region, one after the other. Once she forgot herself for an entire afternoon, playing with twins who were six or seven. It hurt her to leave them, and she made herself not go back to see them again. They had a paternal uncle, a peasant from one of the frontier regions, who was going to take them … The husband then came to a second decision: they would take in a child who was less than a year old, one of “the ones truly abandoned,” he said. Isma did not object and no longer went into the villages. The autumn rains flooded the city; the wind and its icy squalls preceded the winter that would be sunny, but chilly, violet. Isma was silent for days at a time.

The government’s positive response arrives: They are going to have a child.

The time to visit approaches. Isma leaves the house. She has dressed herself as if for an ordinary day. An hour later she meets her husband in front of a nursery in a nice neighborhood. A bright two-story building between gardens. They smile at each other uncertainly.

She makes the decision: “Let’s go in!”

He takes her elbow, his fingers gripping the wool of the young woman’s jacket.

A hostess greets them. Courteous reception; a few gentle phrases of small talk, a soft breeze of words murmured to swathe the beginnings of anxiety. The woman in charge of the nursery is introduced: she explains to them how the formalities will unfold, that was her word,
formalities
.

They stop for a moment in an icy corridor with a view of flowering groves. Outside, the sweetness of spring suffuses the horizon striped with rose and mauve.

The woman in charge points to a closed door. Her sharp voice pierces the silence that seems to have slipped in from outside:

“This is the room where our children sleep! Walk between the rows and look at them. There is a number on every bed. If you see one baby in particular …” Her voice is left hanging.

Isma keeps her head turned toward the door. “So go on!” the first lady says. “It’s always up to the woman to get things going. Your husband will do what you do.”

The husband lets go of Isma’s elbow; he had still been holding it tightly.

“Here we go,” she whispers.

And what if it’s just a game?
she thinks, beset by timidity as she pushes open the door.

A deep, bright room, where the first thing awaiting them is the hospital smell. An undefined smell, not medicine but rather the
stench of enforced waiting. And the silence. A few pediatric nurses in white smocks, all of them astonishingly young. These women tread imperceptibly from one bed to the next; they hardly seem to be working. Even the rustling folds of their smocks, when occasionally they brush against each other, cannot be heard. There are also the little canvas beds; they are deep and hide their contents. Tightly clasped in these two rows lies something like an evanescent secret …

When Isma reaches the center line, however, she notices a murmur, then plaintive sounds, a bit farther a sort of gurgling, the beginnings of some monotonous chant, the consultations of the deaf or the blind in this vast place, haunted despite the brilliant daylight. The visitor, motionless, considers there before her the great distance to be crossed to the canvas beds that are occupied but closed in upon themselves.

To choose
, she says to herself,
you have first to look at them, you know! Them!

Thirty, forty children, from one week to a few months old, are in this room. Later she will be told that this is a common number of abandoned children to be gathered in one administrative district over a period of several weeks.

For the moment, standing there motionless, Isma’s vision is clouded. The sounds, the crying, the purring, like mini-orchestras distributed among these beds as if they were many orchestra pits. She steps forward. No longer is she aware of anything except the room that seems to her both full of people and, at the same time, transparent—a lake of absence so far from the city. Forgetting her husband behind her, she walks cautiously.

Suddenly she is stopped by the arm of one of the nurses, who recognizes her and greets her with a smile. She says a few words; at first
Isma does not understand, then finally she realizes that this is a neighbor from her building. The woman boisterously reminds Isma of meeting once and even of a conversation at the butcher’s where they both shop. She is a round woman with a puffy face; her red hair is pulled back and her eyes are moist. Soft sweetness spreads from her whole being, a sort of healthy freshness. She bends down beside a bed and takes a child in her arms, perhaps even the one who was purring like a kitten. She holds him out to Isma.

“This is my favorite!” she adds unequivocally.

Tense now, Isma avoids looking at the child she is offered. She feels ashamed, pressured. The baby begins to wail, its spasmodic cries more and more high-pitched. The nurse turns around and, just as abruptly, returns him to his cradle. There is an unexpected languor in the way she curves from the waist to do this, like a dancer rehearsing. Isma smiles slightly, turns away.

She starts to walk again. She finds she is in the middle of the long room. She has not yet come up against any child’s face, not one expectant face. She finds she is relieved; is she trying to avoid saying no, being somehow strangely guilty?

There is no longer anyone in front of Isma, only the white beds, hollowed out, two rows of pink splotches under sheets one can barely see. The nurses seem to have vanished. Isma does not even turn around to make sure her husband is still following her.

Silence again. The invisible presences, curled up, urgent, down inside each bed. She has decided to walk on: as if almost done with an exam she is intent on passing. Suppose they, the motionless, wordless beings, suppose they are the ones who, in some imperious and capricious aphasia, will decide?

Yes, she is sure of it: The magical and necessary choice is going to be imposed from these beds, from all these many hollows watching
her intently. They are asleep, or they are awake, those presences, but certainly they are waiting. They are waiting for her.

Isma is almost at the end of the corridor. Facing her is a French door with a long curtain of blue-gray organza quivering in front of it, its long folds poured in an oblique wave moving downward. She stops; not knowing why, she turns her head: the last bed.

“She” rests there: Isma sees only her big black eyes, almost round, how they look out with the gaze of a peaceful woman. At the same time the gaze is full, so full that the deep bed is full, Isma thinks, and threatens to overflow. A flooding gaze. And yet its black water is clear, solemn, as if it were going to submerge the surrounding space. The little girl—“a three-month–old baby who always smiles,” says a nurse who has returned to stand behind Isma—the little girl contemplates the morning visitor.

Fifteen years later I describe the moment for her: “You were waiting for me! All I saw was your eyes! You were the only one I saw! When we left that room, your father, like me, could only talk about you. The next few days, while we waited for me to bring you home to us for good, we met up with your eyes everywhere! There was an advertisement for powdered milk at the time, with a baby on the poster. The same eyes!”

The girl bursts out laughing.

Born for the second time in this room flooded with sunlight through which, a short time before, an unknown couple had walked, the woman first, the man walking behind her.

“My mother first, my father …,” the young girl repeats.

All the years would go by like a lazy summer siesta, but how long it took to overcome the ordeal of crossing that room to choose, that
span of time. Walking alongside the peril and keeping a sharp eye out not to be thirsty for it!

Succumbing, from that point on, to the lurking anxiety silently beginning, I keep for myself the burden of this mystery.

On the sunny doorstep a young girl—my daughter—is preparing to go out.

My daughter is twenty and lives in Algiers. Enrolled at the university, she is waiting to get a room in the student residence halls.

The first days of October 1988. Suddenly she finds herself alone in a friend’s deserted apartment. In the city the young people, the children, are demonstrating, marching, destroying things. The police sound the retreat. The army is in the city. Tanks at night. Insurrection. Blood in the streets …

My daughter, alone …
I take the first plane at dawn the next day; when I arrive, the driver of the last available taxi at the airport consents to take me.

Finding my daughter; we stay in this apartment on the heights, hemmed in but together; every night we sit unmoving to watch the city through the large bay windows—Algiers deserted and under curfew.

Two or three weeks later the young girl goes back to her studies. Three years go by. Shortly before the heavily charged October anniversary, she calls me on the phone: “They have just offered me a teaching appointment in …”

She tells me the name of the city: her father’s city, the one in which women secretly refer to every husband, real or potential, as “the enemy.” How will my daughter be able to fall in love someday in the midst of “enemies”?

I give a start. “Refuse,” I advise her. “And take the next plane. Please. Come home!”

When she arrives, she decides to go on with her studies in the provinces, in Rouen. I tell her with a smile that at present there is only one place I am familiar with there—the prison. “So we will discover the Seine and the cathedral and Corneille’s house, and …”