A Palace in the Old Village (4 page)

One day Jamila had been pulled aside by security agents at Orly Airport: in her purse, wrapped in tinfoil and duct tape, was a small unidentified object that the agents suspected was drugs or an ingredient for a bomb. They had active imaginations. Jamila had opened the wad to reveal a strip of brown fabric on which Allam had scribbled in Arabic a protective talisman that had
unfortunately
proved powerless to deflect the attention of the security staff. During the flight, his daughter had reflected on how ridiculous it was for a modern young woman like her, born in Yvelines, to be carrying in her purse—along with (among other things) a mobile phone, a bottle of perfume, some lipstick, and a PDA—a scrap of dirty material for her mental and physical safety! But a little later, when the plane encountered some frightening turbulence, Jamila couldn’t help halfway blaming the storm on the fact that the talisman had been opened and incorrectly closed. I was sure born in France, she
concluded
, but my genes come from the old country!

What could Mohammed do? His entire village practised this kind of magic. His wife occasionally burned herbs with a suffocating smell and asked him to stand in the smoke for seven minutes. Because he avoided conflict, he did as she asked instead of arguing; he had no choice if he wanted peace in his home. He walked around and around the little brazier so the nauseating herbal odours could affect the course of his life. His wife was a good woman, though; illiterate perhaps but intelligent,
courageous
, and thrifty. She never became angry, patiently put up with her children’s behaviour, and served her
husband
without grumbling, of course: protest was useless. She’d seen what had happened to Lubna, a young village woman who married too young and was taken to France by her husband. Lubna had tried to rebel, refusing to cook and clean the house, but her husband had boxed her ears so hard that she’d been deaf for a good hour. When she went to the police, the husband denied
everything
, then sent her back to the village as a repudiated wife. He’d written ahead to ask her father to take away her passport and throw it in the fire.

Mohammed preferred the Book. He liked things to be simple and obvious. He was fond of the olive oil and pure honey his elderly uncle brought him. Although Mohammed was diabetic, his uncle had persuaded him that pure honey was completely compatible with
diabetes
: You can eat as much of this as you want; honey is wonderful for the health. What you should avoid is white sugar, city sugar. Honey can only do you good! Allah talks about it in the Koran: there will be exquisite
honey in paradise, rivers of honey—it can’t be bad for you. So Mohammed ate some every morning before going to the plant. His diabetes was getting worse,
drying
his mouth, but he would not give up his honey. Hot bread soaked in olive oil then dipped in a bowl of honey—that was his treat, his pleasure.

Mohammed took medications, and his wife had given him a talisman tightly sewn up in a scrap of grey cloth, probably the same kind his daughter carried. It will
protect
you against illness, the evil eye, and even against the heat in the plant! He pretended to believe her; he didn’t want to give up his morning feast. As for the Book, enveloped in a swatch of the paternal shroud, every day he slipped it inside a plastic bag bearing the logo of a local supermarket. Whenever he opened the book and brought it to his lips, he was no longer alone. No need for the services of al-Hajj, the sorcerer of the Porte de la Chapelle neighbourhood in Paris; no, he refused to go see him, and although Mohammed carried the man’s talismans around with him, that was because he didn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings.

Avoiding arguments with his wife or colleagues was a priority, and he found disputes over material things
particularly
pointless. He minded his business, quietly, inoffensively. When there was a strike, he went along with everyone else, never took the lead, followed
Marcel’s
orders, waited for the whole thing to blow over. It’s not my problem, he said. The French are used to going on strike, so I do as they do, and sometimes I don’t even know why we’ve stopped work, so Marcel explains it to me, and while I’m listening I think about something
else, like my childhood back home, and I smile, because if I’d stayed home no French fellow would ever have taken the trouble to tell me the reasons for a strike, political or whatever, and no European would have asked for my opinion! It’s really your decision, Marcel tells me. You can vote against the strike, that’s your right; we’ve got a democracy here.

The first time Mohammed had heard that word was in a café in Marrakech, one day while he was waiting for the bus to Tangier. Someone on the radio was shouting, “Demokratia al hakikya!” Democracy and truth. Later, on the bus, a man sat down next to him and began explaining what it was all about: You see, we who live out in the country, when we go to the city we feel like we don’t belong, but with
demokratia
we’ll get better
treatment
—that’s what a guy said on the radio the other day, that we’ll all be equal and our children will go to public school for free, like hospitals and medicines will be too, but to get that you have to go vote, even if you can’t read, so you just put your fingerprints in a notebook, then you vote, that’s
demokratia
, and then we’ll get water,
electricity
in the village, plus we’ll have roads and even
streetlights
because you see, we want to be like Europeans and that’ll take time and lots of effort, but we’ll get there, so anyway, right now I need to smoke this cigarette. Got a light?

MOHAMMED HANDED
all bureaucratic paperwork to his youngest daughter, who spent hours filling out forms for the welfare and health insurance agencies, the bank, and the tax authorities. Although
Mohammed
had learned the alphabet back in Koranic school and could write his name in Arabic, his signature was a drawing of a tree—an olive tree, he said, the very one (and the only one) that grew in his village. He drew two vertical lines topped with a circle full of crosshatching: an original signature, unlike the traditional
X
used by his friends.

I can’t write, but I like to draw. The children don’t know this; they’d make fun of me, so I draw in secret. Don’t need school for that. In fact, I have a notebook full of drawings, which I’ll leave to my children or, rather, to my grandchildren. I draw trees and houses. That’s all. Trees with fruits of every colour, big trees, middle-size ones, squat ones, trees thin as sticks, others that are bushy; I draw groves of them and even a forest, and I can walk in the forest, lose my way, stop and sit down with my back against an immense tree trunk, and though I don’t know the name of this tree, it offers cool shade to rest in, gives me fresh air, and it does me good, this tree that exists only in the forest I draw, for I know
it doesn’t exist anywhere else. I draw trees and forests because we don’t have any back home, up country where it’s all dust and stones, dryness everywhere, and among the large or small stones there are scorpions that sting children while they sleep so that they die asphyxiated, sometimes, when people forget to raise the beds high enough, as with my four-year-old niece who was killed by a scorpion one night: in the morning she was
swollen
, her eyes shut, she had stopped breathing. If only we’d had water, some small streams, the scorpion wouldn’t have stung my little niece.

I draw playgrounds, slides, mazes in an English
garden
like the one I saw one day on the TV: the whole movie took place among these crisply trimmed rows of trees, where all the grass was as smooth as carpet—I can’t remember anymore what the characters said. They wore old-fashioned clothes. It was pretty, orderly, strange. I draw the automobile plant seen from a
distance
, all splashed with phosphorescent colours, looking like an amusement park with lights that never stop
twinkling
; I also draw houses with roof terraces free of all satellite dishes and television antennas, terraces draped with rugs and fabrics of shimmering hues. I don’t appear to like colour, and my children have often reproached me for always wearing grey, but really I adore natural colours, the tints of spring, and I don’t need to wear them on my back because they’re in my head, where they make music when my mind is tired but they stay inside me, that’s why people say I’m sad, but being sad is being frustrated: nothing happens the way I’d hoped, so since I can’t do a thing about it, I keep my face closed up
tight and watch the world run around as if it were in a frenzy or had some incurable fever, and I’ve been sad ever since I came to France, a country that has nothing to do with my sorrow but hasn’t managed to make me smile, to give me reasons to be happy, that’s simply how it is, I can’t help it and I’m not the only one—look at the men when they leave the plant, they’re all sad, especially ours, the guys from the Maghreb, leaning slightly
forward
while they walk as if weighed down, although
perhaps
I’m imagining things and they aren’t sad but spending their time having fun, while me, I just can’t. So yes, I love colours and I keep that to myself. I can’t make my children understand it, but I don’t even try, don’t feel like talking, explaining myself.

That’s why I’ve never talked much with them. I thought it would be easier for us to talk in France, but even around the dinner table I feel as if they’re
elsewhere
, already gone and merely showing up. Nothing happens. They chat among themselves about their friends, their plans. I don’t understand, and a few polite words are all we exchange. But I’m not the only one in this fix. Did my father talk to me? It’s true, he didn’t say a lot to me, but I knew what had to be done. No need for big speeches. He taught me the fundamentals of our religion: My son, Islam is simple: you alone are
responsible
for yourself before God, so if you are good you will find goodness in the afterlife, and if you are bad you’ll find that instead. There’s no mystery: everything depends on how you treat people, especially the weak, the poor, so Islam, that means you pray, you address the Creator and don’t do evil around you, don’t lie, don’t
steal, don’t betray your wife or your country, don’t kill—but do I really need to remind you of this? My mother said nothing, rarely spoke. The day I told her I should get married, she replied, I’ve thought about that and found you the wife we need. She emphasised the “we.” As expected, I married my cousin—a distant cousin—and everything was fine. No trouble, never a harsh word, everything quiet; she has never opposed me, and I have never troubled her. My mother knew what I needed; I’ll be eternally grateful to her. Parents should always be trusted, for they know better than their children what’s best for them. That’s not always true, I know: times change, but I don’t. With my children, I couldn’t manage it. I don’t understand—I’m lost and don’t know what to do. I allowed things to happen and said nothing. That wasn’t a good solution. Children need to hear their
parents
, and there I think I made a mess of it. But that’s another story, between LaFrance and me.

I never dreamed about LaFrance. True, I heard about people who left to find work in LaFrance, but that’s all. When they came back they never talked about LaFrance, just the cold, the difficult language, the people who never smiled at you. They brought back money, though, and things we didn’t necessarily need. I remember my uncle who brought home an electric oven and an iron. He’d forgotten that we don’t have electricity and use
candles
and kerosene lamps, and butane gas bottles to run the TV. They used the oven for a pantry. It was so funny! My aunt took precious care of it, wrapped it in an embroidered shawl, and no one else could touch it. The iron was useful for flattening dough to make perfectly
thin crêpes. A nephew brought back some underwear, silk bras, but his mother had never worn them and hung them on a nail, saving them for his future fiancée, except that no young woman wanted him because he stuttered, and children made fun of him. When he was angry his stuttering upset him even more, and everyone just laughed louder. He said that in France no one mocked him and the next time he’d go spend his vacation with some peasants in Brittany! He never came back to the village—we lost touch with him.

When I was little my dream was to learn the Koran inside out, to understand it completely, maybe even explain it to others. I recited whole suras yet could not completely grasp their meaning. Nobody in the village could interpret this flood of images. The recitation would excite me so much that I would stutter a little like my cousin, swallowing words so that some vanished down my throat; others left only fragments because they were too long to hold on to. I had other dreams but never dared speak of them. I didn’t want to be rich; I just wanted enough money to give presents. Whenever I gazed at the horizon, at that dry mass of red and grey rock, my dreams were too intimidated to show their faces; I feared they might become stuck in that barren landscape, so hard and hopeless. Everything was
exaggerated
in that place: cold and heat, light and storms, the stars that swarmed in infinite numbers on some nights, and the clouds that blanketed the sky without shedding the tiniest drop of rain. So the dreams stayed sleeping in a cave I never dared to explore. I was scared of what I
might find. Dreams, they’re like memories: I don’t know where they go or where they hide. One of my children once asked me, Where does the light hole up during the day? I thought, That’s the sort of question I’d never have asked my father. It was my son who told me the answer: The earth turns, the light stays put, and us, we move with the earth. That was the time when my children asked me questions even if I didn’t answer. Now they barely look at me.

Neither Brahim (may God keep his soul in his mercy!) nor Lahcen nor Hamdouch nor Larej nor even Ahmed (who wanted to be called Tony) nor lots of others—none of us asked for citizenship, which we left to the young people, because us, we’ll never be one hundred per cent Frenchified. Let’s be honest, that’s not our thing. We’re Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans—we’re not going to pretend, just to get some documents, and it’s not good when guys who can’t even speak correctly call themselves French, putting on that TV-announcer accent.

All my children are French, on paper, which at first I had a hard time accepting. I had to sign documents; I hesitated, and we talked about it, my pals and I, but couldn’t agree among ourselves. Rabi’i even hit his two daughters with a belt after they filled out the citizenship forms, and they raised a huge stink: the police and press got involved and the girls weren’t minors anymore, so poor Rabi’i almost went to prison for assault, but to him their becoming French meant he was publicly admitting that his children didn’t belong to him anymore, that
LaFrance had taken them under her wing and he had no more say in the matter. All fired up, a reporter stormed the projects with a camera, to hear what he had to say for himself, and ambushed the poor man in a café, where he didn’t know
what
to say or how to escape her trap: she bombarded him with questions without giving him time to think, accusing him of every evil plaguing immigrant society, and he was so miserable after this ordeal that he left for Algeria with the youngest of his children, enrolled him in an Algerian high school, and thought, At least they won’t get this one.

But things didn’t work out the way he’d planned. The kid ran away, back to Yvelines, where he fell in with a gang of young guys with beards, who were French but wanted to defend the honour of Islam on Christian soil. Even though they knew squat about the Koran, they observed rituals they didn’t much understand. The boy was troubled by his predicament: between this band of bearded youths trying to brainwash him and his family with their violent arguments, he no longer knew where he belonged. One day he couldn’t take it anymore and shouted, I don’t believe in God! The “brothers” started praying to drive Satan away from him, while he just sneered, provoking them with taunts: In the name of your god, they’re cutting the throats of little girls in Algeria! Then he bolted and took up with a bunch of petty thieves and drug dealers led by his cousin, known as One Eye. When the cousin died in a car accident, the boy took over for him and grew rich. He kept changing his name and address until he was forced to flee and wound up in Australia, where people say he opened a
restaurant called the Couscous King. That’s the last we heard of him. His father was so shaken by despair that he stopped speaking and shut himself up in a long silence to wait for his deliverance in death.