In the Country of Others Read online

  She was so concentrated on her daughter that she didn’t notice people mocking her. She didn’t notice the eyes staring down at her big, faded leather shoes. The mothers whispering behind their gloved hands. Some of them appalled, others laughing. Then, suddenly aware they were still at the gates of the Notre-Dame School, they remembered that they were supposed to be compassionate because God was watching.

  Amine grabbed his daughter by the waist. He was furious. “I’ve had enough of this nonsense! Let go of that door now! Behave properly! This is shameful!” The girl’s skirt was hitched up to her waist, exposing her underwear. The school caretaker watched anxiously. He didn’t dare intervene. Brahim was an old Moroccan man with a round, friendly face. He wore a white crocheted hat over his bald head. His navy blue jacket was too big for him but neatly ironed. These parents seemed unable to calm down their little girl, who was acting as if possessed. The opening ceremony would be ruined and the Mother Superior would be angry when she heard about this farce being played out in front of her venerable institution. She would demand an explanation. She would blame him for it.

  The old caretaker approached the car and, as gently as possible, attempted to detach the girl’s fingers from the metal door. He spoke in Arabic to Amine: “I’ll grab her and you drive away, okay?” Amine nodded, then gestured with his chin for Mathilde to return to the passenger seat. He didn’t thank the old man. As soon as Aïcha let go of the door, her father set off. The car sped into the distance and Aïcha didn’t even know if her mother had given her a second glance. So there it was: they’d abandoned her.

  She found herself on the pavement. Her blue dress was crumpled and she’d lost a button. Her eyes were red and the man who was holding her hand was not her father. “I can’t go inside with you,” he said. “I have to stay here, at the gates. That’s my job.” He put his hand on the child’s back and pushed her through the doorway. Aïcha nodded obediently. She was ashamed. She always wanted to be as discreet as a dragonfly, but here she was now, the center of attention. She walked through the courtyard to where the nuns were waiting, lined up outside the classroom in their long black robes.

  In the classroom the other girls were already sitting behind desks. They grinned as they stared at her. Aïcha was so frightened that she wanted to sleep. Her head was filled with a humming sound. If she closed her eyes she felt sure she would instantly fall into the deepest sleep. A nun gripped her shoulder. Holding a sheet of paper, she asked Aïcha what her name was. Aïcha looked up, confused. The nun was young and the little girl liked her pale, pretty face. The nun repeated her question and crouched down next to Aïcha so their faces were on the same level. At last Aïcha whispered: “My name is Mchicha.”

  The nun frowned. She nudged up the glasses that had slid down her nose and examined the list of pupils again. “Mademoiselle Belhaj. Mademoiselle Aïcha Belhaj, born 16 November 1947.”

  The child turned and looked behind her, as if she didn’t understand who the nun was talking to. She didn’t know who these people were and a sob caught in her chest. Her chin started to quiver. She dug her fingernails into the flesh of her arms. What was happening to her? What had she done to deserve this? When would Mama come back? The nun found it hard to believe, but in the end she had to admit it: this child didn’t know her own name.

  “Mademoiselle Belhaj, sit over there, near the window.”

  For as long as she could remember, Mchicha was the only name she’d ever been called. It was the name that her mother yelled from the front steps when she wanted her daughter to come in for dinner. It was the name that flew between the trees, that climbed up the hill in the mouths of the peasants who searched for her and finally found her, curled up and fast asleep inside a tree trunk. “Mchicha,” she always heard, and what other name could she have, since that was the one blown about on the wind, the one that made the Berber women laugh as they hugged her as if she were their very own child. That name was the one her mother hummed to her at night as she made up nursery rhymes. It was the last sound she heard before falling asleep, and ever since birth it had echoed in her dreams. “Mchicha”—little kitten. Old Ito, who’d been there on the day she was born, had mentioned to Mathilde that her baby’s cries were like little meows, and the name had stuck. Ito had taught Mathilde to tie the baby to her back with a large cloth. “That way, she can sleep while you work.” Mathilde had thought this very funny. She’d spent her days like that, her baby’s mouth gummed to the back of her neck, her heart filled with tenderness.

  Aïcha sat down in the chair the teacher had indicated, next to the window, behind beautiful Blanche Colligny. The other pupils were all watching her and Aïcha felt threatened by this sudden attention. Blanche stuck out her tongue at her, then laughed and elbowed the girl beside her. She imitated the way Aïcha kept scratching because of the cheap wool that her mother had used to knit her knickers. Aïcha turned to the window and buried her face in the bend of her elbow. Sister Marie-Solange walked over to her.

  “What’s the matter, mademoiselle? Are you crying?”

  “No, I’m not crying. I’m taking a nap.”

  Wherever she went, Aïcha carried around a heavy burden of shame. She was ashamed of her clothes, which her mother sewed for her. Ashamed of the grayish blouses that Mathilde would sometimes brighten up with a little added detail—flowers on the sleeves, blue edging around the collar—but which never looked new. None of the clothes ever seemed truly hers; they all looked secondhand. She was ashamed of her hair too. In fact her hair was what bothered her the most: that shapeless, frizzy mass, impossible to style, which—almost as soon as Aïcha arrived at the school—would escape from the clips that Mathilde used to pin it in place. Mathilde didn’t know what to do with her daughter’s hair; she’d never had to deal with anything like it before. The individual hairs were so fine that clips broke them and irons burned them, but the mass itself was so dense that it could not be combed. She asked Mouilala for advice, but her mother-in-law just shrugged. No woman in her family had ever before been cursed with such kinky, unruly hair. Aïcha had her father’s hair. But Amine always kept his hair cut short, like a soldier. And because he went to the hammam so often, and sprayed his hair with hot water, the bulbs had atrophied and his hair had stopped growing.

  Aïcha was cruelly taunted because of her hair. In the middle of the courtyard she stood out like a sore thumb, with her slender figure, elfish face, and enormous hair—an explosion of coarse blond strands that shone like a golden crown in the sun. How many times did she dream that she had hair like Blanche’s? In front of the mirror in her mother’s bedroom she would hide her hair with her hands and try to imagine what she would look like with Blanche’s long, silky tresses. Or with Sylvie’s brown curls. Or Nicole’s neat locks. Her uncle Omar teased her. He told her she would struggle to find a husband because she looked like a scarecrow. And it was true, thought Aïcha: her hair was like a clump of hay. She felt ridiculous in her secondhand clothes, with her impossible hair.

  The weeks passed, all of them identical. Every morning Aïcha would wake at dawn and kneel in the dark at the foot of her bed, praying to God not to let her be late for school. But there was always something. Black smoke pouring from the oven. An argument with her father. Shouting in the corridor. Her mother finally arriving and stopping to adjust her hair, her scarf, then wiping away a tear with the back of her hand. Mathilde wanted to look dignified, but sometimes she would just turn around and start screaming that she had to get out of this place, that she’d made the worst mistake of her life, that she was a stranger here. She yelled that if her father knew the truth, he would beat up her bully of a husband. But her father didn’t know the truth. Her father lived far away. So Mathilde surrendered to her fate, and took out her frustrations on little Aïcha, who was waiting patiently outside the door, biting her lip so she wouldn’t yell at her mother: “Please hurry up! Just for once, I’d like to get there on time!”

  Aïc
ha cursed her father’s van. He’d bought it from the American army for a reasonable sum. Amine had tried to scratch the painted flag off the hood but he’d been afraid of damaging the metal, so a few flaking stars and part of a red stripe were still visible on the bodywork. The van was not only ugly, it was also unreliable. When it overheated, gray smoke would pour from the hood and they would have to stop and wait for the engine to cool down. In winter it wouldn’t start. “It has to warm up,” Mathilde would always say. Aïcha blamed that vehicle for all her troubles and she even cursed America, a country that everyone else seemed to revere. Those Americans are just a bunch of thieves and incompetent fools, she thought. Thanks to that old banger, she was constantly mocked by her schoolmates—“Your parents should buy you a donkey instead: you’d get to school faster!”—and told off by the Mother Superior.

  Amine had managed to fit a small seat in the back, with the help of one of his laborers. Aïcha would sit there surrounded by tools and by crates of fruit and vegetables that her mother was taking to the market in Meknes. One morning, still half asleep, the child felt something move against her tiny calf. She screamed and Mathilde almost swerved off the road. “I felt something,” Aïcha said. Mathilde didn’t want to stop, in case the van wouldn’t start again afterward, so she just grumbled, “You’re imagining things again,” as Aïcha put her hands under her soaking armpits. When the van came to a halt outside the school gates and Aïcha jumped on to the pavement, the dozens of little girls crowded around the entrance began to scream. They gripped their mothers’ legs and some started running toward the courtyard. One of them fainted, or pretended to. Mathilde and Aïcha looked at each other, completely baffled, and then they noticed Brahim, who was pointing at something and laughing. “Look what you’ve brought with you,” he said. A long grass snake had escaped from the back of the van and was lazily following Aïcha, like a faithful dog being taken for a walk.

  When the wintry weather began in November, they also had dark mornings to contend with. Mathilde would hold her daughter’s hand and lead her into the driveway, between the frozen almond trees, and Aïcha would shiver. In the black dawn they could hear nothing but their own breathing. No animal sounds, no human voices broke the silence. They’d get into the damp van and Mathilde would turn the key in the ignition, but the engine would just cough. “Don’t worry, it just needs to warm up.” The poor vehicle, numb with cold, would hack and hawk like a consumptive. Sometimes Aïcha would have a meltdown. She’d cry, kick the wheels, curse the farm, her parents, the school. She’d get a slap. Mathilde would get out of the van and push it down the driveway to the gates at the end of the garden. In the middle of her forehead, a vein would throb. Her purplish face would frighten Aïcha. At last the engine would start, but they’d still have to climb a steep hill. The old van would whine and growl ever louder, and often it stalled.

  One day, despite her exhaustion and the humiliating prospect of having to ring the school’s doorbell again because they were even later than normal, Mathilde started to laugh. It was a December morning, cold but sunny. The sky was so clear that they could see the Atlas Mountains like a watercolor floating above the horizon. In a stentorian voice, Mathilde shouted: “Dear passengers, please fasten your seatbelts. We’re about to take off!” Aïcha laughed and leaned back in her seat. Mathilde made loud noises with her mouth and Aïcha held on to the door, ready for the van to roar into the air. Mathilde turned the key, pressed down on the accelerator, and the engine purred before wheezing asthmatically. Mathilde gave up. “We’re very sorry, dear passengers, but it would seem that the engines aren’t powerful enough and the wings are in need of repairs. We will not be able to take off today, so we’ll just have to continue on the ground. But have faith in your pilot: in a few days, I promise, we will fly!” Aïcha knew a van couldn’t fly and yet for years she was unable to approach that steep incline without her heart pounding, without thinking: This is the day! Despite the improbability of such an event, she couldn’t help hoping that, just this once, the van would soar up into the clouds, carrying them to new places where they could laugh like hyenas, where they would see their remote little hill from another angle altogether.

  Aïcha hated that house. She’d inherited her mother’s sensitivity, and Amine concluded that women were all the same, fearful and impressionable. Aïcha was afraid of everything. Of the owl in the avocado tree, whose presence, according to the laborers, foretold death. Of jackals, whose howling stopped her from falling asleep, and of the stray dogs with their jutting ribs and infected teats. Her father had warned her: “If you go out walking, take some stones with you.” She doubted she’d be able to defend herself, to scare off those fierce animals. All the same, she filled her pockets with rocks and they clicked together as she advanced.

  Most of all, Aïcha was afraid of the dark. Of the deep, dense, infinite dark that surrounded her parents’ farm. In the evenings, when she’d been picked up from school, her mother’s car would drive along the country roads, the lights of the city would fade behind them, and they would enter an opaque, dangerous world. The car moved through darkness like someone entering a cave or sinking into quicksand. On moonless nights, they couldn’t even see the thick silhouettes of the cypresses or the haystacks. The blackness swallowed up everything. Aïcha held her breath. She muttered Our Fathers, Hail Marys. She thought about Jesus, who had been through such terrible sufferings, and she repeated to herself: I could never do that.

  Inside the house, the lighting was feeble and Aïcha lived in permanent dread of a power cut. Often she had to grope her way along the corridor like a blind person, hands patting the walls, cheeks wet with tears, calling out, “Mama! Where are you?” Mathilde, too, dreamed of brightness and she nagged her husband about it. How could Aïcha do her homework if she ruined her eyes trying to read in this gloom? How could Selim run and play when he was shivering with fear? Amine had gotten hold of a generator that could recharge batteries, but he also used it at the other end of the farm to pump drinking water to the animals and irrigate the fields. In its absence the batteries soon died and the lightbulbs flickered and dimmed. When that happened Mathilde would light candles and pretend to find the light they gave beautiful and romantic. She told Aïcha stories about dukes and marquesses, about masked balls in magnificent palaces. She laughed but the truth was that she was thinking about the war, about the blackouts when she had cursed her people, the sacrifices she’d made, the way her first seventeen years of life had flown past in a blur. The house was heated by coal and consequently Aïcha’s clothes were impregnated with the smell of soot, which made her retch and amused her classmates. “Aïcha stinks of smoked meat!” shouted the other girls in the courtyard. “Aïcha lives like the Shilhas in their country shacks!”

  In the house’s west wing, Amine had his office. He called it “my laboratory” and on its walls he’d pinned up pictures whose titles Aïcha knew by heart. “On the culture of citrus fruit,” “How to prune vines,” “The application of botany to tropical agriculture.” These black-and-white images meant nothing to her and she thought of her father as a sort of wizard, capable of influencing the laws of nature, of speaking to plants and animals. One day, when she was yelling because she was afraid of the dark, Amine put her on his shoulders and carried her into the garden. It was so dark she couldn’t even make out the end of her father’s shoe. A cold wind lifted up her nightshirt. Amine took an object from his pocket and handed it to her. “It’s a flashlight. Shake it at the sky and point the light at birds’ eyes. If you can, they’ll be so frightened that they’ll be paralyzed and you’ll be able to pick them up in your hands.”

  Another time he asked his daughter to go with him into the little ornamental garden that he’d created for Mathilde. There was a young lilac there, a rhododendron bush, and a jacaranda that had never flowered. Beneath the living room window grew a tree whose misshapen branches sagged under the weight of oranges. Amine showed Aïcha the lemon tree branch he was holding
and, pointing with his permanently soil-stained index finger, he indicated the two large white buds that had formed on it. With a knife, he dug a deep notch in the trunk of the orange tree. “Now watch carefully.” Amine delicately inserted the end of the lemon tree branch, which had been carved into a bud shield. “I’m going to ask one of the men to stick it in place with putty and string. But what I want you to do is think of a name for this strange new tree.”

  Sister Marie-Solange loved Aïcha. She was fascinated by this child for whom she secretly nursed great ambitions. The girl had a mystic soul, and while the Mother Superior suspected her of being slightly hysterical, Sister Marie-Solange believed that Aïcha had been called by God. Every morning before class the girls went to the chapel, which was located at the end of a narrow gravel path. Aïcha was often late, but as soon as she came through the school gates her entire attention was focused on the house of God. She gave herself to it with a determination and a seriousness unusual in one so young. A few feet before the door she would sometimes kneel and then move forward in that position, arms crossed, face impassive as the gravel dug into her flesh. Whenever she saw this the Mother Superior would roughly lift the girl to her feet. “I do not approve of such self-indulgence, mademoiselle. God knows when someone’s heart is sincere.” Aïcha loved God and she said this to Sister Marie-Solange. She loved Jesus, who welcomed her, naked, in the freezing mornings. She’d been told that suffering brought you closer to God and she believed it.

  One morning, as Mass was ending, Aïcha fainted. She couldn’t speak the last words of the prayer. She shivered in the ice-cold chapel, her bony shoulders covered by an old shawl. Nothing—not the singing, nor the smell of incense, nor Sister Marie-Solange’s powerful voice—could warm her. Her face turned pale, she closed her eyes, and she collapsed on to the stone floor. Sister Marie-Solange had to pick her up and carry her. The other girls were annoyed by this. Aïcha, they said, was a sanctimonious little goody-two-shoes who would probably end up a religious fanatic.