So Vast the Prison (31 page)

Ambiguity, my problems make me look the other way … I see, in what the crew did, the usual altruism of the beginnings of a shoot (as if we were mindful of placing ourselves under favorable auspices), but also the technicians’ indirect way of somehow thanking me. They learned of the crisis through my conversation and they were vaguely beginning to forgive my rhythm of work, whose apparent improvisation astonished them.

Ambiguity, I said … That would be the real story: darkness in the
humble lodging; myself, entering at night to take away the little girl with her dirty feet and her hands red with henna, the mother overburdened but saying nothing, the next day an ordinary conversation … Then, behind the hedge and because they are affected by this story, the nineteen members of the technical crew (seventeen of them men) would create their own scenario to deal with this long, hard wait for the insurance.

Suddenly this bothers me: Why is it that all these intentions, obviously born of collective generosity, do not result in social aid?

Whereas we, nineteen other people and myself, are coming with a camera, that is, a gaze, that is, “the” Gaze. Whereas what must be caught is the first wrinkle, the whispering at the moment when, like the Ogress in legends, I come to take away the little girl, the beauty with innocent eyes. Whereas the camera must catch the gaze of the widow when, in the morning, she tells about the accident, the husband who no longer provides protection, the boy-child who can only be a temporary defense. The camera has to record the silence of my pupils: when one has nothing to say in the face of misfortune, it is hard not to turn a blind eye oneself when confronted with the other who is blinded by misfortune.

Yet the camera takes nothing. The nineteen people, who should know that they are nineteen facets of the spying eye, feel rather that they are endowed with a kind heart. Like everybody, they have a clear conscience when the widow offers them this “couscous of the sun” with her blessings.

I do not feel my conscience is clear.

Aichoucha, during the next two months, became a smiling dream friend. I frequently caught myself gazing at her, dividing her time as she did between coming to see us work and then dashing off immediately after one of her animals that had strayed. She came and went
but stuck to her job of keeping the sheep, observing us afterward without real curiosity but rather with fond indulgence.

She seemed, however, to flit lightly about over us, protectively. Sometimes I wanted her to think of me as one of the sheep; I wanted to feel that it was her responsibility as the shepherdess to look after me when my enthusiasm would go drifting off toward so many different rivers … Aichoucha, the illiterate shepherdess, eight years old, scandalous in today’s Algeria—and this was only seventy kilometers from Algiers. In actual fact Aichoucha is the real outsider in these regions where I think I see the future dawning imperceptibly …

THERE IS ONE NIGHT
during the World War—I do not know what year it was—that I want to tell about. Not to begin my memories of earliest childhood, no, this was a night that caused some imperceptible shift in me at the age of three. As if, because of belonging irrevocably to the family community in a colonized country, one consequently split in two, there would be some sort of alarm set off in the consciousness of this entirely Arab little girl. It was only decades later that I would become aware of its subterranean swell.

Let us locate the facts first: I remember this World War as just beginning. Bombing of North Africa by the German air force. Any textbook about this period would give me the precise date, of course—what month in 1940 or 1941, perhaps even later … But I shall rely only on this child’s memory. The scene I want to describe—revive, pass beneath the spotlights, dimmed or blinding, of my sudden new curiosity—this scene takes place in the parents’ room, in this
modest apartment in the building where the teachers lived in a village in the Sahel of Algiers.

My bed was also in this bedroom—a deep, narrow bed of wrought iron, which I would later use for the bedroom of the heroine of my film. That is where I slept, at least until my brother was born, the second one, the one who is not dead, younger than I by three years and three months. After that I went back to my paternal grandmother’s bed to be lulled to sleep every evening in her arms, to have my feet warmed in her hands. I know that having been wrapped for several years this way in maternal warmth was like a second birth for me.

The strange night, or rather the almost uncanny way I woke up during this night that I am trying to resurrect, comes therefore before that second period.

There was war, and bombing; I have to have been less than three years and three months old. This gentle, humble grandmother whispering affectionately in the night shadows becomes for me a sort of motionless statue (a female version of one of the lares), standing guard outside of this first memory with its dragging undertow.

There were many bombings earlier during the tumultuous nights of this period: probably ten nights or so over about three months … In the center of the village, between the easy-to-spot church and the bandstand in the public square, not far from the teachers’ apartments—where we were the only “native” family alongside five or six households of French teachers—some bomb shelters had been dug. I can see us all heading for these shelters, a line of about twenty people, in the dark of night barely pierced by the glow of a few candles.

These few expeditions left a cheerful impression on me. Not only was it fun when we had to race to this place close by (because they
had dug the trenches in a nearby park) but it was especially so when we were all seated more or less in a circle, finally safe, awaiting the return to calm outside. There was a scattering of other children there; we must have been all wound up because of the completely incongruous protocol that we saw perniciously take hold among the adults. What did we expect other than that the danger would pass? Our village was at the foot of the mountains of the Algiers Tell, the main target of enemy planes for I do not know what strategic installation. My father and two or three other teachers used to remind us of this during the attacks, probably to reassure the ladies. When we left the trenches, it was highly unlikely that we would find our houses destroyed, the village devastated, or that any of the people not, like us, in shelters would be dead …

This line of reasoning, spun out to fill the time as we waited, remains for me a sort of sound sculpture … However, the relations among the adults in this shelter shifts subtly, uneasily in my memory. So I am not absolutely sure whether my mother (then about twenty-one or twenty-two), who at the time wore the veil in the style of city-women, was there dressed in European or Moorish fashion. I have no memory of this detail; writing now, all I would have to do is ask her—she would repair or correct that forgetfulness … I am not doing so because I am trying to discover how it was that I sensed a change, some disorientation in this minisociety.

These parents were seated side by side in couples in a circle. Most of them looked up at the ceiling when there was a pounding dull rumble or the wail of some distant siren.

Snuggled up next to my father, I watched the scene as if it were some sort of suspended theater, noting the presence of my grandmother (she was certainly wrapped entirely in her veils), silent as usual, and my mother, who was so young. Her cautious voice comes
through to me clearly. She is speaking to one of the French wives, making conversation, and it is as if I were hearing, for the first time, French words—hesitant, careful, uttered somewhat haphazardly one after the other—as if, in this general swell of fear, what the others felt was in no way comparable to what my mother must have experienced when, through the force of circumstances, she conversed in a language that was not yet familiar and did so to maintain her “social rank.”

On the nearby mountain German planes were bombing a point strategic to the French army, and my mother took advantage of this to take her first steps in the “others’ ” language. Maybe the way her voice trembled, the slightly labored tone to her words, would go unnoticed when one French lady—one of the ones who usually stayed home—or some other—a teacher this time—gasped
oh
s and
ah
s every time there was a whistle outside, or a bursting shell’s repercussions echoed all the way to where we were …

There was all this ruckus; and in the midst of it, like an invisible ripple in the heart of the subterranean silence, there was my mother’s emotion. She had dared break in, slipping into the talk of the others—the neighbors, other mothers—but also the language of the school world, her husband’s usual realm.

I saw that: not the disproportionate levels of exhilaration, but this gap and the rosy color my mother’s timidity brought to her cheek before we returned to the surface and confirmed that in fact the village had survived, the houses were intact, the everyday world was safe and sound …

A few hours later, curled up in my little bed, I hear in the living room next to me the voice of my hesitant mother: She is asking my father whether or not, in the few sentences she spoke out loud with Mme. Carbonel, she made any very bad mistakes … I hear her questions
again, the slight quaver in her voice: bits and pieces of conjugal dialogue—they have left the door ajar and think I am asleep. Their voices mingle in the shushing tones of the Arab dialect peculiar to our city that was once resettled by Andalusians … In that language my mother recovers her ceremonial habits, I would almost say her haughtiness, her elegance. That she might have displayed some sort of awkwardness just because she ventured into “their” language seemed to me then almost too much to bear. My heart was pounding. Looking back, I felt afraid: Could my mother, a woman so purely bred, of such distinction, have seemed otherwise to the other women?

Asking her questions now, and once again possessed of the warmth both of her own home and of her idiom, she regained her confidence—as if she had, indeed, been afraid, but needlessly. And now she seemed to give in more to an urge to flirt with her young husband.

Of course I remember none of what the father answered; maybe I did not really hear it. I only recall my brief feeling of helplessness about my mother’s words. Was there a danger that they (“them,” all the others who were earlier in the shelter, lit solely by a makeshift, overhead light) had an entirely different image of her than I did, who saw her wreathed in all her graces (her subtlety, her slight arrogance, her ease)?

Them: the foreigners, and not just the adults—men, women, and children equally—our neighbors in the building at the time; the more they brushed against us as we came and went every day, the more they seemed to me creatures from some other shore, floating in an ether that was not ours … Foreigners, whose language I was beginning to stutter, hardly less awkwardly than my idealized mother, complete foreigners for the resolutely silent grandmother (who, for six months every year, in almost total silence and out of love for the
son, put up with living with the “others,” whom she found unpleasant). They seemed foreign to me: But am I sure I really thought they were entirely?

It should be recalled that the foreigner, during this period of collective servitude, did not merely seem different. No, if not always seen as “the enemy,” he was still at all times the
roumi
. (The native Jews were excluded from this category in our eyes, especially when the women, the old people, had kept “our” language, which was of course theirs as well, that they spoke in a “broken” accent that was their own.) But in very rare exceptions the foreigner was perceived as, was received as, the “nonfriend,” an impossible familiar with whom one associated only by force of circumstances. A dense though invisible silence, a blank neutrality like a criminal sentence, surrounded him, separated us. I was obviously too young to analyze or understand this impossible passage, but the fact remains that these teachers, their wives, their children, whom we mostly thought of as “the French from France,” seemed like unreal beings—they very rarely entered our home; we did not cross their thresholds; we made do with polite greetings in the stairway or the courtyard. When my father alluded to his day’s work to my mother, or reported some dialogue with a colleague, this person would appear on the scene as if he were a walk-on from some other place. And yet that night …

I have great difficulty approaching this first memory, this night when I was three, in my parents’ bedroom. Is it a knot that I am only now going to disentangle? Is it a welt, a crack, a definitive break that I immediately tried to erase on that night when these “French from France” did not seem to me (how strange this is) completely foreign?

Nights of early childhood. The ocher-colored bed of wrought iron is set just behind the door: it seems deep to me, so deep that I
sink into it and I still have a vague memory of waking up in the morning and sometimes wanting to stand up—only my head showed above the bed.