Bitter Almonds (11 page)

Édith has left herself a reminder at the end of the table, a piece of cardboard on which she has written in big fat letters:
LAUNDRY
. She mustn't forget to take out a load she started a while ago and hang it up to dry.

Fadila picks up the piece of cardboard: “What's this?” she asks.

“Laundry,” says Édith. And she shows Fadila that she already knows the
L
, the
A
, the
U
, the
N
, the
D
, and the
R
. “The only one that's new is the
Y
. It's not too difficult.”

“Have to learning this word, too,” says Fadila, and Édith adds
LAUNDRY
to their treasure.

The doorbell rings. It is Aïcha who has come to visit her mother.

“I won't offer you any coffee because of Ramadan,” says Édith.

“It's as if you had,” answers Aïcha.

They go and sit in the kitchen. Before long the tone of their voices becomes animated. Aïcha comes over to Édith at her work desk and asks her for a sheet of paper.

“I'm showing her that letters are easy,” she says.

“It's easy when you know how to write,” says Édith. “You've known for a long time, you went to school.”

“Yes, I finished high school. I didn't pass my final exams, but at least I sat them. I started school at five.”

Two days later Édith runs into Aïcha again at the post office.
“I wanted to ask you something, actually,” she says. “Could you work with your mother a bit on her reading and writing? She's not spending enough time on it. She should do a bit every day.”

“She'll never agree.” Aïcha is adamant. “With me? Acting as teacher? No use even suggesting it to her.”

They walk a short ways down the street together.

“She's not an easy person,” says Aïcha. “We're getting along at the moment, but there have been other times . . . Poor woman, it's no wonder, with the life she's had.”

Édith grabs the line she's been thrown.

“She was married three times, and not one of the marriages worked out?”

“Married, married . . . The second time, she was sold.”

It was her father who arranged it. Fadila had just left her first husband, the year she turned fifteen. She went back to her parents. Her father had no intention of supporting her. He had heard that in Casablanca there was a rich man looking for a second wife. The man had been married for a long time and had no children, so he'd struck a bargain with his wife: he'd take a second wife, and once she had given him a son and a daughter—a son for him, a daughter for his wife—he would repudiate her.

“My mother had no choice,” says Aïcha. “But what her father didn't know at the time he was concluding his business was that she was pregnant with a second child. She hadn't told anyone about it because she was afraid it might prevent her from getting a divorce.”

She complied with her father's demands, and went to Casablanca, to the house of the childless couple. “She couldn't understand a thing. She didn't speak Arabic, all she knew was Berber.”

They found out she was expecting. It didn't really matter, but it did complicate things somewhat. The child was born three months after Fadila arrived in the home of the rich man, so no one would believe that he was the father.

“The child was Zora,” says Aïcha. “My sister and I are true sisters. Same father, same mother.”

As for the issue of paternity, it was easy to fix. They waited six months before declaring the birth. And of course Zora was declared as being the daughter of the man in whose house she was born.

The woman in want of a child now had her daughter, but they still needed a son. They did not wait long, Fadila fell pregnant again and a boy was born.

“A successful purchase,” says Édith. “The couple must have been pleased.”

“Yes and no,” winces Aïcha. “The man, yes, the woman, no.”

The wife reminded her husband of the terms of their agreement: You've had your son, I've got my daughter, we agreed, now you send Fadila away.

“But the thing was, the husband didn't want to send her away,” laughs Aïcha. “My mother was a very beautiful woman, she was seventeen, he found her rather to his liking. He told his wife he had changed his mind.”

“And then?”

“And then the first wife poisoned my mother. Just like in some story from a harem. It was a close call.”

Fadila's mother had done everything she could to oppose the contract her husband had made. She had a brother in Casablanca so she stayed with him as often as possible, in order to be in touch with her daughter. You cannot stop a mother from visiting her child.

“So she was the one who brought you up, your grandmother?”

“In addition to everything else, yes. She had me with her day and night. When she moved in with her brother in Casablanca, she took me there, too.”

One Sunday, the rich man's wife told Fadila that she and her husband were going out for the day. “You stay here, your lunch is ready,” she said to Fadila. When they left they locked the door.

Just by chance, that same afternoon Fadila's mother came to visit her daughter. She found the door locked. She knocked.

“You know what it's like back there,” says Aïcha, “the houses so close together, everyone knows everyone else's business.” The neighbors came out: “They've gone out.” “And my daughter, too?” “No, your daughter stayed behind.”

Through the door Fadila's mother could hear someone moaning. She sensed something was wrong.

She set off at a run to fetch her brother, and they came back together. The brother broke down the door. They found Fadila in a very bad way and took her to the hospital.

“My mother never set foot in that house again,” says Aïcha. “At least the poisoning enabled her to get away from those people. A man who kept her there to sleep with her and nothing else; a woman who hated her. Her own children in the same house and she didn't even have the right to treat them as her own . . .”

Fadila didn't stop there, she sued the couple for fraudulent declaration of birth and attempted murder.

“The lawsuit took forever, it took the judges eight years to hand down their decision,” says Aïcha. “The couple won. They had bought everyone—all the neighbors who could testify, the lawyers, the judges.”

In the meantime Fadila had to find work. That was when she went to stay in Rabat with her mother and Aïcha, and went into service for “the very nice Jews.”

“I thought she had raised three children in Rabat?” says Édith.

“The couple kept Zora and Khaled. My mother had two more children after them.”

Édith keeps her surprise to herself. Fadila has never breathed a word about Khaled. It would be an understatement to say she talks about Nasser, calling him her son, she never calls him anything but
my son
. Moreover, she has always insisted she has three children; now Aïcha is talking about five.

“In Rabat she met a man she liked, and she got pregnant again,” continues Aïcha.

“I'm glad to hear she finally met a man she was in love with,” says Édith tenderly, while working out that Fadila must not have been much older than twenty.

“Another bastard. She loved him all right, but he was married.”

“Did he take her as his second wife, too, then?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Did he marry her?”

“Only a religious marriage. I remember, he used to come and spend the night at our place two or three times a week.”

Nasser was born soon after. By then Fadila's father's patience was at its limit, and he demanded that Fadila's mother return to the marital home. His wife refused and stayed in Rabat with her daughter. Her husband got a divorce and remarried.

“Basically Nasser was the first of her children she was able to bring up herself,” comments Édith.

“He was the only one.”

For Fadila was pregnant again, and when the man she loved found out, he left her. “I told you, a bastard.” The fifth child was born, a third son, but he died very young.

“I know that Zora married young, that she has several children, that she lives in Aubervilliers,” says Édith. “And Khaled, what became of him? Does he live in Morocco?”

Aïcha tells her that he and Zora had everything they needed. Édith understands this to mean, Unlike me. “They were educated at the French Mission. Khaled has a technical degree.”

“Were their adoptive parents good to them?”

“Of course they were. They spoiled them.”

Until Khaled, at fifteen, came upon the family booklet and discovered there were two names on the line that said
Mother
, both for him and his sister. He asked about it. They lied to him. He would not give up, and he found out that his mother was not the woman who had brought him up.

“It drove him crazy. He began to go off the rails. He made life impossible for his adoptive mother.”

He began to live on the edge; he drank, ended up in prison. Aïcha falls silent for a moment.

As for Zora, she continues, not only did she find out that she was not the daughter of the woman she had always believed was her mother, but also that the man she thought was her father was not her father either. She got married very quickly.

“You can see why my mother loves her son so much,” says Aïcha. “He's the only one of her children who grew up in her home.”

Édith notices that Aïcha says
her son
. Not my brother, or even my half-brother.

“I get the impression that your grandmother was quite a person.”

“My grandmother?” Aïcha beams. “She was a fabulous woman. She died in my house, you know.”

“I know. Your mother loved her so much.”

“And as for my grandmother: how she loved her daughter! My mother hasn't been very lucky in life, but at least she's had that. She was everything to her mother.”

The literacy center at the
mairie
of the sixteenth arrondissement has not called back. Édith decides to look into it. They confirm that Madame Amrani is indeed on a waiting list, but nothing has opened up, they tell her. The friendly lady had been so sure, however, back in September. “People who enroll frequently give up quite soon”: Édith remembers what she said, word for word.

She pictures a red dot next to the name Amrani on the waiting list. Perhaps they're not in any hurry, in this center either, to make room for an illiterate Moroccan woman who's already old.

 

One day instead of
FADILA
she writes
FANILA
. Where did this
N
come from, a letter she doesn't like and hardly knows, instead of the
D
which she knows and writes very well?

Another time she writes
FADI
very slowly then stops: “I forgetting.”

“Take your time. It will come back.”

She adds an
M
then shakes her head. “I no doing good. I'm so tired.”

“On days when you're tired, you don't work as well, that's normal.”

Édith wouldn't like her to give up just when she's failed, so she places before her a sheet where she had already written her first name on an earlier occasion, and asks her to copy it. Fadila writes a tiny crooked
FADILA
, a sickly scrawl. “I forgetting. You know, I'm old.”

“No you're not. You've been doing really great,” says Édith.

She needs to hear these words herself, too.

“You just have to write a little bit every day. It's the same thing for everyone, you know, if you don't keep something going, you forget it.”

 

The following Tuesday, while Fadila is writing her name, Édith gets up and goes to open a letter, so that she won't be watching Fadila. She has sometimes gotten the impression that it makes things easier for Fadila if she isn't being watched.

Fadila hesitates, writes, stops. Édith comes to have a look. She has written
AMRIA
. The beginning of
AMRANI
, plus two letters from the end of
FADILA
: confusion, forgetfulness. How is Édith to understand such a fragile capacity for memorization? Could she have lost, in the space of two weeks, something she used to manage straight off the bat?

Édith is dismayed. She tries not to show it.

“This here is your name,
AMRANI
. The beginning is right, but the end, not quite. Can you put your first name in front?”

Fadila writes
ADIL
, the heart of the word, minus the beginning and the end. Édith says nothing and adds an
F
at the beginning and an
A
at the end.

Fadila points to the
A
: “I forgetting that one again.”

“It's strange, don't you think? A letter you know so well. Do you remember what it is called?”

“
A
.”

“Exactly,” says Édith.

She opens the textbook to the page where the entire alphabet is printed. “You see, it's the first letter.” She points to the
A
's she finds, here and there: “At the end of
FADILA
, at the beginning of
AMRANI
, at the beginning and the end of
AÏCHA
—do you see them?”

“Is everywhere,” says Fadila, not really answering.

*

She rarely comes on days just to work on her reading. She blames fatigue, insomnia, worries.

 

Mid-November, the cold weather has started. Her ankle hurts. An old fracture, the pain comes back again every winter. Like something sharp piercing her leg, she says.

 

Gilles has persuaded Édith to change her email program, to give up Orange and switch to Thunderbird. The names of the files and the functions are different, the icons are different, the maneuvers are different. Édith can tell that Thunderbird is indeed an improvement in terms of flexibility, capacity, and the possibilities available. But she had other things to do that evening, and what Gilles is showing her has upset her rhythm. She doesn't understand what he is saying. He is clicking and typing ten times too fast for her. He wants her to remember everything straight off, but she's someone who always needs to put things into words in order to memorize them. She moans, and he scolds, “Stop being childish.”