While the Gods Were Sleeping (37 page)

She knew it herself. Behind her whalebone our prosperity precipitated as guilt. She made the aunts prepare food parcels for distribution in the village. I don’t know if she sensed any of the resentment that smouldered not even that far under the surface of gratitude, when she paid her charity visits to the poorer families in the area—the paltriness that cries out for revenge of knocking on the door of a woman who has lost half her family with a jar of jam or a piece of pâté.

“Are you all right, my child?” asked my uncle. “I don’t think the thaw will be here by tomorrow.”

We felt allied in our penance. Sometimes he interrupted his paperwork, went over to one of the shelves against the walls, and showed me the cover of one of the books he collected for the saucy prints they contained. They were generally daring farces from the eighteenth century, with titles like
Plaisirs Secrets
, usually sewn into a single volume with the sequel:
Le Regret inutile
. We could giggle at them like teenagers. “She’ll come round,” he said reassuringly.

I didn’t know that a body could long so violently for another body. My man, my companion, my spiritual brother, his flesh that revealed itself as a synonym in mine. I lay my head again on the soft skin of his belly, the membrane of skin that swells and contracts with his breath between his pelvis and ribcage. I hear the gurgling of his intestines beneath my ear, the hidden processes in the factory of the metabolism, as gruesome as it is ingenious, the beat of his heart, accelerating as he breathes in, slowing with each out breath, pumping his blood through his tissues. Even his brain must pulse to that rhythm under the natural helmet of his skull.

The hair that grew outward in an arc on his forearms and legs fascinates me again as powerfully as when I rested my head on his naked chest for the first time and plucked at those black hairs with my fingers. What hunger, what longing, what lust could rage through my limbs!

I think of my father in the hour of his death, forgive me for digging up yet another dead person from the inside pockets of my memory. I’m thinking of the surge of his breathing,
as he lay on his back under the sheets, the increasingly long silence between his breaths—and my fear, which welled up in each interval, but, together with the fear, strangely enough, the amazement at the precision, not to say tact, with which the organism that was my father was recalling the life from his farthest arteries and cells, was drawing the warmth out of his feet towards itself, and seemed to be concentrating everything in his head, and just before he died smoothed the last folds out there too. I saw life sliding out of him, his cheeks sunk, it was almost a kind of relief.

My husband, on the other hand, lay on the bed with amused surprise, as if he would never have expected that nothingness could be so friendly, while when we had sex he was always a lover who gave himself over in deep contemplation to
le petit mort
. There are men who climax with a blissful grin, as if an opium bubble is popping in their head, and there are those, like my husband, who in those few seconds of ecstasy seem to dream up a whole treatise, a concise theology of ejaculation. Only when I saw the wrinkles appearing in his forehead and his midriff tensing did the spasms start in me, shimmering as far as the roots of my hair and my nipples. They sent starling swarms of gooseflesh through my pores.

Naturally I never talked about such things to my uncle up in his study. He was no longer alive when my husband died, and he was more the type who liked corny puns. But I did tell him about the sense of loss, the confusion of suddenly having a body that could no longer define itself, and did see him more than once give a melancholy nod. When he read my letters, the letters my mother told me to write, he sometimes said: “You’re threatening
to become a mystic, my dear niece. Albeit the excommunicated type. But that doesn’t matter, they’re the best.”

After that one time I never returned. I went to the village and waited in the café next to the
mairie
until my daughter, who had actually caught the sun, returned from the coast to pick me up. I still don’t know if I trembled with rapture when I left the property under the shade of a hedge that had grown into a substantial row of trees, I savoured the dry smell of the bricks for the last time, and the dull, ochre-coloured sand under my feet, and on the bluestone slabs heard the lizards shooting off as shyly as a name or a date you can’t remember—or was I on the contrary shivering with the deepest fear a person can feel: that of their own futility, when the scrolls close and the hymns fall silent and above the candlesticks and flames go out, till we hang blind in time like a glass window behind which no sun any longer glows?

What more is there to say? The house later finished up in the gravel mills of that factory-owner from Calais, ground into sand, and the trees on the farm may already have been cut up for firewood.

I hear Rachida coming upstairs. I recognize the jingling of the cutlery on the tray now she is climbing the stairs. Listen, first she will try to turn the door handle with one hand, without letting go of the tray, but she seldom manages it. She will whisper a few curses and put the tray on the cupboard next to the door.

Of course she will have taken endless trouble as usual. The egg perfectly soft-boiled, the top cut off and the yolk sprinkled with fresh pepper. She will have toasted the bread in the oven, poured the lukewarm milk into a jug—the smell hits my nose. She will also have put a flower in a vase, a marigold or orchid that she cadged from the flower stall on her way here this morning. “He goes for my smile,” she always says. “The wider my smile, the dearer the flower he pinches off the stem.” If now, while she opens the door and disappears back into the hall to get the tray off the cupboard, she hums the ‘Snap, Crackle and Pop’ jingle, I fear that she’s having a frivolous spell today. Listen.

“Look at everything I’ve made for you, Mrs Helena,” she says triumphantly. “And what a lovely rose from the garden. It must make your mouth water when you see this. And you remember what I promised you just now?”

S
AID WITH THE LOVELY EYES
was my mother’s father’s father, Mrs Helena. My mother says that he had opal eyes, thin Said with the opal-blue eyes and the mother-of-pearl teeth. In the street or in the market the girls never first made eyes at him and closed their eyes, because everyone wanted him to look at them and swim in his irises. One of those girls drowned in his eyes and became my mother’s father’s mother—I’m using lots of words, Mrs Helena, because you’re eating slowly and my story is very short, but now you must have a bite, and a drop of milk, thank you. Said, Said al-Amrani, never saw his son. He became a soldier and one day had to sail on a ship to Marseilles. People said a war has broken out on the other side of the sea, the Lord of All Things be praised, that’s one war less for us. That’s what my mother told me when I was little, that’s why I use little words to tell the story of Said with the lovely eyes, I’ve never heard it any other way, because Said has been dead for a very long time, and everything that is dead must be silent—careful, there’s a bit of yolk on your chin. Said had to go to Marseilles on the boat because he was a soldier, a soldier, my mother always said, in the Régiment de Marche de Chasseurs Indigènes à Cheval. When I was little she did a dance with her fingertips in my hair when she said Régiment de Marche de Chasseurs Indigènes à Cheval, she repeated it at least ten times an evening. I laid my head in her lap when she took me to bed, and she rocked me to sleep with her stories and the magic wands of her fingers in my hair. Thin Said with
the lovely eyes became a soldier because his own father was dead and his bride and his mother, and also his little brother and sisters were hungry. Said wasn’t a thief, my mother always said, because anyone who steals to fill an empty stomach is not stealing. Without the empty stomachs of our family, Said would never have become a soldier in the Régiment de Marche de Chasseurs Indigènes à Cheval and he would never have seen Marseilles. In Marseilles there are no high mountains, there is no gleaming fringe of ice on the threshold after the night in Marseilles and the women have gold teeth, Said wrote home, to his family, because we could write, we come from a good family, Mrs Helena. Everyone learnt to read and write in our family, but reading and writing doesn’t fill the stomach—you mustn’t leave the crusts, I’m very, very strict this evening. If you don’t eat them I shall soak them in milk and feed them to you. Said had to go to the north, to the far north, where there were no mountains at all, but where there was ice, all day and night ice that doesn’t melt, like with us in the mountains. In the north men creep about fighting in the earth, Said wrote home. My blanket is dirty, it is grey with ice and earth, and all our horses are dead. You think you’ve almost finished, but I’ve caught you out because in the pocket of my apron I’ve got two biscuits, soft chocolate biscuits. One day no more letters came. The mother of the father of my mother’s father waited and Said’s bride waited, with her fat tummy in which my mother’s father was swimming about. They waited a long time, a very long time, but no more letters came, only a message that Said with the lovely eyes was dead.
Le soldat Saïd al-Amrani est tué lors d’une attaque à pied au Front Nord.
That’s what it says in that letter, I have it at home. The mother of the father of my mother’s father and
Said’s bride wanted to know where Said’s body was, but there was no body any more, Mrs Helena, I looked it up, he is just a name on a list, that’s all. My mother said the earth looked into Said’s opal eyes, where are his opal eyes now? First you must drink some more milk, those biscuits are for later. When my father came here long ago, with my mother and my brother, who was already born and is also called Said, my father said: if I find his bones I shall bring them to the surface. I shall wash them and wrap them in a shroud. My father was underground too when I was small. Not to fight, but to work. Digging coal for the stove in winter. If I find Said in the ground I’ll bring him home, he always said to my mother, who in turn always told me, I’ll have them pray Janaza for him and bury him in a worthy grave. But he never found Said with the lovely eyes, only flowers, deep in the earth, coal flowers black as the night, those are my mother’s words. Do you know what the Janaza is? Every evening my father taught me to recite Al-Fatiha by heart—that was his way of telling me stories. I can still do it, with my eyes closed: Bismill
ā
hi r-ra
ḥ
m
ā
ni r-ra
ḥ
ī
m… Al-
ḥ
amdu lill
ā
hi rabbi l-‘
ā
lam
ī
n… Ar-ra
ḥ
m
ā
ni r-ra
ḥī
m… M
ā
liki yawmi d-d
ī
n… Iyy
ā
ka na‘budu wa iyy
ā
ka nasta‘
ī
n… Ihdin
ā
ṣ
-
ṣ
ir
ā
t al-mustaq
ī
m…
Ṣ
ir
ā
ṭ
a al-la
ḏī
na an‘amta ‘alayhim
ġ
ayril ma
ġ
d
ū
bi ‘alayhim wal
ā
ḍ
-
ḍā
ll
ī
n… I said to my father that I didn’t understand the words, but he said: later, when you start Arabic, you will understand the words, but you must repeat Al-Fatiha often enough, much more often than now, because only then will the holy words detach themselves from what you think and start to float, like a roof over your head, and if you do it well, if your lack of understanding is good enough, then between the roof of the words and the roof of your head the whole world looks
you in the eyes—and that’s true, Mrs Helena, and that’s why the verse is called “The Mother of the Book”. You are that too. When I come here and my mother asks me who I am going to care for, I say I’m going to the mother of the book, and then she immediately knows it’s you. You’re making a lot of crumbs now. Come on, I’ll wipe your mouth. Eat everything up in your own time. I’ll wait. Afterwards you must sleep. You’ve eaten. I have told you the story of Said with the lovely eyes, the short story of his short life. And as my mother used to say when I was small: that’s all there is to tell. The animals are asleep and the night owl keeps watch. You must sleep now, she used to say, Rachida my almond blossom must sleep. I’ll take the tray with me. I’ll leave the curtain next to your bed open, then tonight you can look at the stars and the lighted windows, but if you close your eyes, Mrs Helena, then, as my mother always said, you’ll soon be fast asleep.

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