Bitter Almonds (17 page)

 

They go together to the office of social services near the rue de Laborde. A social worker confirms to Fadila that she does have rights, in spite of everything, and she advises her, if one day she finds her door locked and her belongings on the landing, to go immediately to the police. At the same time she has her fill out a housing application, but warns her that she could wait years for subsidized housing in Paris. The best thing would be to start looking on the housing market without delay.

By the time they are back outside, night has fallen. They go a few hundred yards down the street together. At the first intersection, Édith stops. “I'll leave you here,” she says, waving in the direction of the Place Saint-Augustin, “I'm going to take the métro over there.”

“No, no taking métro,” says Fadila urgently. “Is night. You has to take taxi. I giving money for taxi.”

Édith thanks her, declines, but wonders if once again she has not made a faux pas.

 

One evening there is a knock on Fadila's door. Two gentlemen she does not know introduce themselves: the owner of the room and his son. She has to leave, says the owner. Next month there will be a new tenant in the apartment, and they will need the room.

Fadila is losing sleep over it. No matter how often Édith tells her they cannot evict her by force, she wants to move out. But she doesn't know where to go. Her children have no room for her. No one will help her. All anyone says, when she tells them about it, is not to budge, wait to be evicted, because the only way to get the social services to house you is to be out on the street.

 

In fact, her son has not sat around doing nothing. He has an idea. He suggests she come to Pantin, not far from his place. The town has a hostel for foreign workers, where mainly North Africans live, and she could get a spot there.

Fadila absolutely refuses to live there. It's a mixed hostel, with two floors for men and one for women. “Is people saying women in the hostel they go seeing the men. Maybe I old, but is old women saying they find women for the men. I no want nothing to do with that.”

Still, she goes to fill out an application. She cannot say no to her son. And besides, you never know, if things get bad at the rue de Laborde, the hostel might be an interim solution.

In fact, she has her own plan. She is “fed up with everything.” She wants to go back to Morocco. This summer her half-brother suggested she come and live with his family in their father's house in the village.

“Would you get along with his wife?”

No problem. She's a young woman, and “very nice.” And the children are “very nice.” When Fadila left at the end of August, they were clinging to her and crying. Something that had never happened to her before, Édith gathers.

There have been violent confrontations in Morocco recently, on the border with the Spanish enclaves. Sub-Saharan Africans have massed there in the thousands and forced their way through the barbed wire fences. Moroccan and Spanish police retaliated. People were injured and killed. A few hundred “lucky ones” managed to slip through. There are pages and pages about it in the press.

Édith is reading an article about the situation. No doubt because she can see she is focused on something, Fadila asks, “Is something going on?”

“Yes, in Morocco. Look. Had you heard?”

A photograph shows a young black man with a ladder placed against a fence. Fadila knows all about it: “I seeing all the time on television is Morocco.” She cannot contain her rage: what are those foreigners doing there? They have to go home. And so on.

Édith ventures, “Home for them, is extreme poverty.”

How could she say such a thing! Fadila sees red.

“Is not poverty! Everyone he is eating, now. Is people they never happy. They not knowing what is poverty.”

She knew what poverty was, when she was a child. “One day is someone he feeling too much hot, next day is dead.” She recalls a cholera epidemic: “Half of people is dead.” That was the way things were. You ate tomatoes and bread and you didn't complain.

“Poverty! If that is poverty, then is poverty everywhere! Here too is poverty, is no work, social security he no have money . . .”

She fusses: “And they having lots the children! They no have to go having so many the children. Is pills, after all!”

 

“You see?” she says. “Four airplanes is full the people they sending home.”

“I saw,” says Édith.

They read, too, that the Moroccan authorities had transported entire busloads of people all the way to the Algerian border, for that is where they had come in, and they abandoned them there in the middle of the desert.

“Is having to go home,” concludes Fadila.

Édith doesn't take it any further. She just says the same thing that all the experts on emigration have predicted: these young sub-Saharan Africans will be back. They will try again.

“No,” interrupts Fadila. “Is finish. Is no possible no more.”

 

Édith is having trouble concentrating on her work, it's taking her forever. Her father is not well. He cannot stay on his own. She's worked it out with her sisters, she'll spend forty-eight hours every week in Lyon, from Friday morning through Saturday night. And Gilles has just found out that his company will be making cutbacks among the staff. It's not the first time. He might be on the list this time.

“Are you all right?” asks Fadila when she comes in.

Édith has always said, “Fine,” but this time she can't help herself: “I'm tired.”

Fadila literally laughs in her face, her fist on her hip: “If you saying you tired, what I gonna say, huh? With everything is happening right now?”

 

At least she has patched things up with her daughter Aïcha. She had a dream, she says. A man was speaking to her on behalf of her mother, her mother who died long ago and whom she loved so dearly. “She is fed up,” said the man in the dream. He repeated this several times and Fadila understood that he was talking about her feud with Aïcha. Through him, her mother was telling Fadila that it was time for her to make up with Aïcha.

So sure enough, three days later, last Sunday, Aïcha came to visit, with one of her daughters.

 

Once, only once, did Édith venture to say, “Maybe it would be a good idea to go back to the class at the
mairie
of the sixteenth arrondissement.”

Fadila brushes her suggestion aside: “You think I being in the mood for that?” It's no, once and for all. Even under better circumstances, she would not go back there. “Is woman she making class is crazy.”

“Well then you could at least ask to be reimbursed.”

“I no caring about the money,” says Fadila.

Édith, however, puts in a request for her. At the center, Édith's contact is conciliatory. She doesn't insist on trying to get Fadila to come back. They will send a check to Madame Amrani.

Édith tells Fadila what she has done. Then adds (she feels obliged to at least try): “We can go back to working the two of us.”

She is instantly sorry she said anything. It would have been smarter to wait, and let the interested party say whether she wanted to start up again or not.

But Fadila is already saying, curtly, “I giving twenty-five euros my neighbor, she is teaching me.”

 

“And do you have any news of Zora?” asks Édith.

Fadila explodes: “No. I no seeing her anymore, is long time. Is not my daughter. I don't know is name of her children.”

Zora has not been in touch since June. “After all,” says Fadila, “I being her mother. She maybe just call say hello, how are you? Why she wearing headscarf if she has no heart?”

In all honesty, she knows very well why her daughter doesn't call. “She no want speak to me because I telling her is husband he no have respect, she should no putting up with it. She no like. I say, You kissing his feet, nobody they doing that here, why you doing that? Here is land of freedom! I telling Zora I no want to see him until day I die. He say he earning millions and all day long she going make cleaning people's house. And at night she ironing and cooking for him. She making dinner and she say, What time you want to eat, Mohammed? I telling her, you no say that. She always do that. Already in Morocco she let him walk all over. In Morocco, is maybe, but here, no! In France you no do that.”

Édith has not forgotten that at the age of sixteen or seventeen Zora discovered she had two fathers and two mothers—and under what circumstances. “Who chose this husband for her?” she asks.

“Is choosing all alone. I say nothing. Woman has no husband she no can say nothing.

“If Mohammed he earning millions, if he so rich, why his wife not stay home?” she continues. “And he say to Nasser, too: I gonna buy SUV, and is children all have they own car. Why he say that to Nasser? Nasser he no earning very much, he no have car, is no matter, he stay in his place. Why is Mohammed he say, I earning millions? You know what I telling Nasser? I say, is everybody buying SUV, even dog is having SUV!”

In other words: to humiliate Zora, his wife, is one thing. But to humiliate her son Nasser, that's unforgivable.

The landlord came and knocked at her door one evening. Fadila told him she would soon be going back to Morocco.

“Before you leave,” says Édith worriedly, “you have to ask about your retirement.”

Fadila knows. Her daughter-in-law has expressed her concern about it, too.

She goes to see a social worker, who does some rapid calculations and warns her: her retirement pay will be very limited, it is in her interest to go on working as long as possible.

 

Every month Fadila sends a bundle of clothing to her brother in the village, for his four children. The clothing doesn't cost her anything, people give it to her. “In France is people have plenty, is crazy.” But the shipping, through a private carrier, is very costly.

 

There is a smell of onions in the apartment. Édith is making a potato dish for supper. Fadila, who has only just walked in, lifts the lid: “Is no tomatoes?”

“Tomatoes? No, it's a dish of potatoes and onions, that's all.”

In Morocco, Fadila explains, they have tomatoes with everything: lentils, zucchini, turnips, meat and fish, everything. Always onions, always tomatoes.

This reminds Édith of an article she read recently. In Baghdad, the civil servants who were once devoted to Saddam and now proclaim their willingness to serve the elected government are called “tomato-civil servants”—because they go with everything.

“And have you noticed that tomatoes nowadays have no taste at all, they're worthless,” says Édith.

Fadila agrees on that score, the tomatoes you find in Paris in December are useless. She can see why Édith doesn't buy any. “But we has to,” she says.

 

She leaves early. She has to go to Pantin to see her son so that he can help her cash the checks that came last week, at the end of November. Lately the bank has refused to let her bring her checks to the teller the way she always has: now she has to fill out a form first. They very kindly handed her a pile of these forms, twenty or more.

“What louts, they could have filled them out for you,” says Édith, irritated. “They know very well that you can't do it on your own. If you like, we can do the paperwork together, you and I. It would be a way of working on your numbers and letters.”

Fadila declines her offer: “I doing with Nasser.”

“It's not a very good idea to carry the checks around with you on the bus.” It is not just to trick her that Édith points out the risk: “They could get stolen.”

“No,” says Fadila peremptorily.

She shows Édith how she puts her handbag inside her big shopping bag, as if this were a form of protection, and she says, “If a person no eat other people's money they no stealing from him neither.”

For the pleasure of hearing her repeat what sounds almost like a proverb, Édith asks her again what she said. She explains: “I never taking nobody's money. Is nobody they no do bad, is God protecting them.”

 

As for Zora, according to the same logic, she predicts: “I don' care. She gonna suffer the same from his daughters. What you doing your parents, is your children doing to you.”

Édith finds it hard to understand why she is so angry with this daughter whose married life, as Fadila knows only too well, is hell on earth. Yet that is just how things are. Fadila feels humiliated by the fact that her daughter seems to accept her fate. Every week she brings it up. “Has to stop her husband drinking. In the evening he putting car in the garage is going to café right away, is coming home ten-eleven clock, is drunk. She has to make scandal, she say I no sleeping with you no more. I sorry to speak like that. She hiding her hair with her headscarf but under is hair all white. She no using dye. She has to fix hisself up a little! She say is okay but she no happy. Is like a slave. She doesn' do nothing! Her husband he no do nothing in the house. Nowadays is everyone he working in the house. Is director he working in the house. Nasser he coming home he putting pajamas on the kids, after he start setting the table. Is Mohammed he no do nothing!”

It all ties in. Fadila finds fault with her daughter not only for not listening to her, but also for lacking in dignity, for not looking after herself, and for putting up uncomplainingly with a husband who's a macho brute.

Her anger also stems from the fact that Zora lives with a man who constantly offends his mother-in-law by humiliating her son. “Is bragging, Mohammed! He always saying all the time is every one his children they having house, every one is having car. If you see how he bragging with me!”

“Have you seen him again? Do you see them, Zora and him?”

“No, I no seeing but is Nasser he tell me. His wife too is tell me. Is Mohammed he no stop bothering Nasser, Come on, we going out tonight . . . But Nasser's wife she no want.”