Bitter Almonds (18 page)

 

In the end Fadila has decided to move into the hostel in Pantin. It is a week before Christmas. The landlord had said end of the year. He has come knocking on her door several times. Fadila doesn't open anymore, but he shouts through the door that he knows she's there, and then she can't sleep a wink. She'd rather move out.

Not long ago they confirmed a place for her at the hostel: she immediately found a way around her own reservations and said she would take it. She'll be able to move in a few weeks from now, the time it takes for them to give the walls a fresh coat of paint.

She didn't find anything on the market. True, she did not go about it the way Édith would have. For Fadila, house-hunting means asking her family whether anyone has heard of anything to rent. If I were alone in Rabat, thinks Édith, I would do the same.

 

Fadila has no plans for Christmas. Her children are not on the best of terms these days, so they haven't arranged anything. “Is always one is mad with the others. They live close, is Christmas and they no see each other, you think is normal? They no seeing each other, is holiday for end of Ramadan, they no see each other is Christmas day. Yesterday I crying and crying.”

Édith takes her hand: “You will go and spend Christmas day with your son, won't you?”

Fadila doesn't really reply: “My son his sister she not even go seeing baby. He not even calling.”

Does she mean Aïcha or Zora? She adds: “When is problems with family is really really bad. Because is people outside you can close the door, but with family you no can close the door.”

 

Édith makes out the check for the month of December. She also fills out the form to send in to the domestic help taxation administration. When Fadila picks up the check, she looks at it and says, “What is check is nothing written there?”

Édith has forgotten to fill in the line where one is meant to spell out the amount.

“Is thanks to you I seeing,” says Fadila. “Before I taking to bank I no seeing.”

And, of her own accord: “We is having to start again after I moving.”

When Édith immediately suggests she write her name on the back of the check, Fadila smiles as if she was expecting this. She writes
FADILA
without difficulty. As for
AMRANI
, she's forgotten how.

 

She's been with Aïcha to visit her future studio at the hostel in Pantin. It's all right. It's really not far from Nasser's place.

Zora's husband has been beating her. She has a black eye, bruises all over her body, and a constant headache. Fadila relates this to Édith with a heavy heart; she heard it from her son. But it's not enough to make her go and see her daughter. She has told her a hundred times to leave the man and press charges.

“I say: I been crying before you, and I get outta there!” She's fed up that no one listens to her. She shrugs: “Zora she no going police, she no going doctor, nothing. Is thirty years she no do noth­ing. In Morocco she having like that ten stitch in her head, she no do nothing. What they say, here in France? Love is blind, huh?”

Scornfully, her voice heavy with reproof, she says, “Look at that! Zora she
loving
his husband! She say she wanna die before him. Some people is loving so much . . .”

She thinks it is shameful that her daughter just puts up with the beatings and doesn't react. She feels shame in her place. Twice—she raises two fingers close together—she left a man because he was beating her.

“Was it the best solution?” asks Édith, who thought Fadila had said her first husband wasn't so bad after all, and that she had a soft spot for the third one.

“‘Course! I no loving him. I no loving no one, never! I never felt no love for any man!”

She says it forcefully, with satisfaction, the way you might say, I'm not stupid! Let other people get on with such idiotic nonsense.

*

L'Abbé Pierre has died. The news talks of little else, and everyone is upset. “I crying,” says Fadila. “That is beautiful life. God he bless him. I think, once a person is nice, God no let him down.”

 

Fadila comes in and finds Édith in the kitchen, standing at the counter eating bread and cheese. It is nearly three o'clock.

“Excuse me, this is my lunch,” says Édith. “I'm not exactly running on time.”

“You no sitting?” scolds Fadila. “You gotta stop for eating. For vacation and for eating you gotta take time. Otherwise is work, and work is never end.”

 

That idiot Zora still hasn't called her mother. “He knowing what I gonna say, is why.”

“She must be scared to death, every night with that brute. Are there children in the house at least?”

Fadila sits up, furious.

“What she afraid of? You no has to be afraid nothing! You no afraid people, is afraid God, is all! If God he no decide is people they kill you, then people no kill you.”

“But you can be afraid of being beaten, don't you think?”

Fadila stands like a boxer, her fists raised: “If I was her, I the one do the beating.”

Then, inversely, she rounds her back: “Zora is like this! If always she gonna be like this, is everyone they step on her. Her brother he say other day she come his house she eating all her plate then falling asleep. All he do is eating and sleeping.”

Fadila shakes her head, dismayed: “I never seen love like that.”

 

That weekend she moved. Her son borrowed a van to transport all the furniture and heavy objects. Her daughter Aïcha went with her by taxi, after filling the trunk with her clothing and odds and ends, in bags.

At rue de Laborde they said a proper goodbye among neighbors. They promised to meet again.

Fadila is in good spirits. She has a real studio, with a window overlooking a garden and, for the first time (in her life, Édith supposes), she has her own bathroom. On every floor in the hostel there is a large common kitchen at the disposal of the residents, and everyone has their own food locker with a key.

“You'll make new friends there,” says Édith.

“No.” Fadila is categorical. “I no see nobody. Is Arabs, I know, is nothing but problems.”

“Even the women?”

“Arab women, you no know them, is blah-blah-blah, she do this, she say that, is nothing but trouble. I no want to see. Anyway I no have time, I leave, I work, I going home, I take shower, making prayer, and sleep.”

She seems to be limping slightly.

“You're limping,” says Édith. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“Is leg hurting. I try too hard. I going up the stairs, down the stairs, climb on stool, climb off stool.”

“Try to get some rest, now.”

“Rest? I no have time. No, is leg I don't bother with it, is all. I'm no twenty years old, right? Just I have courage, is all.”

 

She is enjoying the luminosity and tranquillity of her new accommodation. The room is sunny. There is no noise at night. “Is quiet, is clean. On my floor is only three people, is two old women they retired, and me. I no see nobody, is better that way.”

 

The presidential election campaign is in full swing. The confrontation between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy is on everyone's minds.

“He is a man. Is better man is president,” decides Fadila.

That is just what a woman who has been crushed by machismo since birth would say, thinks Édith. But how many “born and bred” French people also share her opinion?

Her expression is glum, her lips are pursed.
“Is something wrong?”
That would be an understatement. She moved over two weeks ago now, and Fadila cannot understand why her son has not come to see her even once: he lives a hundred yards away from the hostel. The day before yesterday, Sunday evening, after she had waited all weekend for at least a phone call, she couldn't stand it any longer. She called him.

Her son told her straight up that he didn't like the fact she'd moved to Pantin because his wife didn't like it.

“It's typical,” says Édith. “She's afraid you'll be over at their place all the time.”

Of course, wails Fadila. But it's this very hypothesis that makes her so angry. She's never tried to impose at her son's house, she's never found fault with her daughter-in-law about anything, she's never criticized in any way, even implicitly. “I never saying I need this, I need that, the way other old women is doing, I never asking for money.”

“I thought your daughter-in-law liked you?”

Fadila doesn't think so: “She no say nothing but she never looking in the eye. After she go talking my son.”

She sits with her hands between her knees. There are days when the work can just wait a while. It wasn't her idea, after all, to move into this hostel in Pantin. She didn't even know it existed. She wasn't the one who went to find out whether she could get in and how to apply.

After her son first mentioned it, she went over to his place to discuss it, on purpose, in her daughter-in-law's presence. The young woman did not seem to be particularly reticent. Later, just after she found out she'd been given a spot at the hostel, she had lunch with them; it was two days later, a Sunday, she remembers. She spoke openly of how pleased she was, turning to her little two-year-old granddaughter and saying, right in front of her daughter-in-law: “I say I taking the little girls to the park on Wednesdays with sandwiches.” Now she seems to recall that her daughter-in-law fell silent at that point. “She thinking I going her place before I going to the park. Is not true! I take the little girls and I go, I don't see her!”

Édith reasons with her. It will work out. In a little while, once Fadila has shown them she knows how to be discreet, and that she will never show up at their door uninvited, her daughter-in-law will be reassured. She'll come around.

Fadila shakes her head wordlessly.

“You'll see,” insists Édith, “your son will be in touch very soon. He's a good son, you've always said as much. He's kind.”

“He's kind but is changing.”

She wipes her eye.

“Is daughter-in-law never like mother-in-law.”

“It's because they're rivals. They love the same man. And in general the husbands show that they prefer their wife.”

Fadila nods her head. She knows this as well as Édith.

“Yesterday I crying,” she says. “All my life I crying.”

 

She is getting ready to leave, her long coat buttoned up to her neck and her black headscarf pulled tight around her head, when the door opens. It is Gilles, home earlier than usual. He has a big bouquet of flowers in his hand, little roses of a ravishing color, which he bought for no particular reason as he was walking by the florist's, something he does from time to time.

“Here,” he says to Fadila. He pulls the bouquet apart and holds out half of it to her.

She stands there with her arms tight against her body.

“Nobody is never giving me flowers, not me.”

“Well, all the more reason, then,” says Gilles.

As she watches her, Édith wonders whether Fadila is not about to succumb to her emotion. Perhaps that is what Fadila herself is afraid of, as she tucks the flowers between her elbow and her side and says simply, “Thank you, then. Goodbye.”

 

Little Paul has constant chalazions and his eyelids are swollen. Fadila knows what it is.

“Has to use orange flower water, is making germs go away.”

“Have you seen all the medication he has?”

“Is medication no doing no good. Is orange flower water is good for everything. You putting on cotton when he go to bed, you washing his eyes. Even for the heart is very good.”

 

She is in better spirits. Her son and daughter-in-law came to see her on Sunday, with her granddaughters. They all went for a walk, the weather was fine.

Fadila herself volunteers this information, while she's having a little coffee break in the kitchen.

 

Yesterday she went to the police
préfecture
to renew her residence permit. She waited in line for hours. And once it was her turn, since she had just moved, things got complicated. She didn't leave with a new permit. They are supposed to send it to her.

“There's no problem, then?” asks Édith. “You'll get your permit?”

“Me, I never had no problems with permit,” says Fadila confidently. “I been careful. I no have the courage do stupid things.”

She pulls up a chair next to Édith and sits down heavily. “Has to begin again,” she says.
“With pleasure,” says Édith approvingly, trying to make her tone as light as if they had never interrupted their lessons.

But she remembers how Fadila had asked to go “slow-slow” after an earlier interruption, and that even then they were starting over.

“Would you like to work on the numbers for a while?”

That is fine with Fadila, particularly as she has a new telephone number. She's making do without a landline: Aïcha has given her a cell phone.

“That's very kind of her,” remarks Édith.

“No, is no kind, she having another, is give me old one. Is no kind, Aïcha.”

“She helped you move.”

“Yes, and after she no phoning, never! Is one month, maybe more. She be selfish-center.”

SELFISH
, writes Édith at the top of a blank sheet, pronouncing the word at the same time. And below it:
06
.

“You know all the cell phone numbers begin with
06.
Which is lucky for you, because those are two numbers you write easily.”

She has the impression she is pulling on an extremely fragile string. But Fadila copies the two numbers perfectly.

They go back over the eight other ones. “By the way,” says Édith, “you will have to give me your new address. We'll learn to write it, too.”