Bitter Almonds (6 page)

 

She doesn't bring back the paper but she has been working hard, she says.

Édith has her write
FADILA
“in her head” (they are creating a shared language). Fadila writes
ADILHA
.

Again the initial
F
is missing. Which means Fadila must not identify it as the letter that carries the sound f. She doesn't set it apart. Does this mean she'd be ill advised to start with the phonics method?

On the other hand, given the fact she has written
ADILHA
, does this mean that the whole language method suits her better? She has the right number of letters, even if the
F
is missing and the
H
shouldn't be there—this mysterious
H
.

 

Every day on television there are reports about sub-Saharan clandestine emigrants, young black men who volunteer to pass through Morocco in their effort to reach the Canary Islands by sea. They pay smugglers and set sail on leaky tubs, at night, risking their lives. The number of shipwrecks has increased because the network is doing well: there have been more and more attempts. Reporters tell stories of distraught survivors, and candidates for departure await their turn, hidden just behind the shore. Planned itineraries have been reconstructed. Those who stayed behind are interrogated: the families, the mothers in the villages they abandoned.

Fadila has neither compassion nor even indulgence for these people who are prepared to risk everything. “People say is poverty, but is not poverty. In the village there is bread. That guy drown, he do better had stayed in the village. But people they no want just eating, they want big car, big house, all that.” When she was a child, she says, no one in her village had a car, or a television, or a telephone. People had food on the table, nothing more, but they didn't think about crossing the sea.

Early one afternoon Édith comes home to find Fadila outside her door on the sidewalk, extremely irritated. She was meant to meet her daughter at two o'clock and the door was locked, Aïcha was not at home. Édith suggests they call her on her cell phone, assuming Fadila has a cell phone; she does indeed but—the usual problem—Fadila does not know how to find Aïcha's number in her little notebook.

“Aïcha not keeping her word,” she grumbles.

Édith points out that Aïcha is not the only one who doesn't respect the time. They have already discussed it; it is the only cause of friction between them and, after all, if Fadila finds it difficult to put up with people who fail to show up, perhaps she might be prepared to see that other people find it irritating, too.

Édith fully expects Fadila to put her in her place, but she doesn't: “Is true,” says Fadila, “is problem with Moroccans, they no keep their word.”

She adds that perhaps Aïcha's daughter called her, as she is about to have her baby. But since she is already there, she'll come up and do the ironing, she says to Édith, without asking her whether it's a suitable time or not.

Édith is afraid that Fadila will be too annoyed now to want to work on her reading. Nevertheless, she suggests that they start with that, and Fadila accepts.

 

They go over the numbers, it's a good day for telephone numbers: Fadila's, Édith's. Fadila can identify her own number without hesitation.

“How do you recognize it?” asks Édith.

Fadila can't explain. She doesn't point to any given number that she can recognize in particular. “I just knowing, is all.”

But she does not know her number so well that she can write it on her own.

Experts are unanimous in affirming that writing is reading. Writing the digits helps to learn them. Fadila is stumbling over the
2
and the
9
, which look very similar the way she draws them. Édith repeats that it is vital always to draw the numbers the same way. Fadila looks at her skeptically, as if to say, that really does complicate things unnecessarily.

 

Fadila arrives late, and Édith is on her way out. They make an appointment for six o'clock, to read for a moment. Édith gets back just in time, in a rush, but in the entrance to the building she runs into Fadila on her way out. Her son's in-laws are in Pantin, they've come to see their daughter, she has to go and say hello to them, she's in a hurry. They'll do their reading “s'm'other time.”

 

“Well, has she had her baby?”

No, says Fadila, but they've kept her granddaughter at the clinic. It's better that way, there won't be any problems. “Clinic is expensive but is better. Me, when my daughter is born I no speaking for one month.”

Édith cannot see what that has to do with it. Fadila explains that she screamed so much during the three days it took her to give birth that she lost her voice for an entire month. It was her first birth, she was fifteen years old. No, she didn't have a midwife, only women who'd already had children, but they wouldn't have been able to do anything if there'd been a complication. “They hang this thing, up there, so I holding,” she says, raising her arms and squeezing her hands as if around a rope. “After three days I no feeling nothing.” She holds out the palms of her hands to Édith.

Édith recalls that Fadila was an only child, and she loved her mother very much.

“Was it your mother who married you off so young?”

“No, is my father!” exclaims Fadila.

She was married at the age of fourteen to a man she did not know, a young fellow, a good-for-nothing. There was something blocking him, she says, pointing to her upper back. When the time came to harvest the wheat or work the fields, her own father had to go and do it.

“You lived near your parents?”

“No, is far, very far.”

“Was he kind, your husband?”

She makes a face: “No, he no kind. I running all the time.”

Édith asks her to repeat what she has said. She used to run away, every evening. She would hide in the countryside. She would rather spend the night out of doors.

Then they took her back to her husband. And she would run away again.

“Were you happy to have a baby?”

She raises her eyes to the ceiling: “Happy?” It is her turn not to understand. “I no happy, I knowing nothing about babies.”

Her mother took the child in. It was Aïcha.

A few months later Fadila ran away for good. She hitchhiked, she says. She went back to her parents. Her father was furious but her husband behaved decently, he said that if Fadila did not want to live with him anymore, he would not force her.

He let her have the baby because it was a girl. She gives a little laugh. If it had been a boy, of course he would have kept it.

 

“You're a Berber, aren't you?” asks Édith. She is cross with herself for not having thought of it sooner. And yet she knows very well that the majority of the population in Morocco are Berbers.

Fadila's face lights up.

“You know what is Berber?”

“What do you think! With your children do you speak Arabic or Berber?”

“Arabic. Is they is wanting. But is understanding Berber.”

 

They work on capital letters,
F
,
D
, and
A
. Fadila makes a curved
A
that leans to the right. She bursts out laughing: “Is like banana!” Édith has never seen Fadila laugh so much as at moments like this during the lesson, which to Édith seem so very laborious.

 

There are days when Fadila is tired, or in a hurry, and so she has not had the time to go over what they studied during the previous lesson. She isn't in the mood to read or write.

Other days it is Édith who isn't at home when Fadila comes by. So there is no lesson.

 

Then things happen unexpectedly. “A lady she coming my house, I making dinner. After she stay is sleeping. He speaking, speaking. Is making me too tired. Is pissing me off, that woman!”

 

“So by now the baby must be born, no?”

“Yes, is little girl, Betty.”

“They called her Betty?”

“No! Is name Camélia.”

Édith thought she had heard Betty, in fact Fadila said pretty.

“Is Christian name, Camélia?” asks Fadila.

Not a Christian name, no, but quite common, now. Édith explains the fashion of naming girls after flowers or fruit.

Camélia rings a bell with Fadila. “You knowing, one princess she dying . . . Camélia is old woman!”

Édith doesn't get it. A princess . . . “Diana?” she asks.

“Yes!”

It dawns on her: Camilla. The old woman.

“No,” says Édith, “Camélia is not the same as Camilla. They're two different names.”

She repeats the names, accentuating the differences.

“And is little animal, walking like this . . . Is little green . . .” With her fingertips Fadila imitates a little scampering creature.

Once again it takes Édith a few seconds to grasp what she means. “A chameleon! No, that's not the same word, either.”

Camélia, Camilla, chameleon: to an ear used to Arabic dialects and the rarity of vowels, it must sound almost identical. Even the name Fadila can be written differently in French: sometimes it's Fadela, sometimes Fedla.

Summer has come, splendid. It is suddenly very hot.
“What lovely weather!” says Édith when she sees Fadila coming in.

“Is horrible,” grumbles Fadila, tensely. “I no liking sun.”

She vanishes for a moment, then comes back: “Monsieur he not here?”

“No, why?”

“I taking off skirt.”

She is in her panties underneath her AP-HP overall, buttoned down to the hem; panties that go down below the knee and which in France are called
corsaire
,
or breeches.

“Sun is horrible,” she says again.

“But it must be cooler here than in Morocco,” says Édith tentatively. “The women there must suffocate in their long robes.”

Fadila assures her that they don't, that you suffer less from the heat in Morocco than in Paris, “even with dress is this long and veil, too. I never getting hot there.”

“But when you were young, you didn't wear a veil,” says Édith who, like everyone, has read that the veil has become more prevalent only recently with Islamic fundamentalism.

“Yes,” says Fadila, “like this.”

She hides her face with a corner of her white headscarf, leaving only her eyes visible. “But I not getting hot.”

“I thought that girls weren't veiled in Morocco back then.”

“No, I always wearing veil. Is now is finish. Because of inter­net and all that. I no like it. People they say everyone do what they wanting. I no agree.”

 

She opens wide all the windows in the apartment. Édith doesn't like the idea, since it is warmer outside than in. She prefers the Provençal method which is to have all the windows resting on the catch and the blinds lowered. “At least in the room where I'm working,” she pleads.

“You doing what you want in your house,” says Fadila, furious, turning on her heels.

She leaves earlier than usual. Édith doesn't mention reading. It would only give Fadila an opportunity to tell her to get lost, and their lessons along with it.

 

As she comes out of the kitchen where she went for a drink of water, she stops next to Édith and points to the books open on the table, the little computer, the draft copies, and asks, “What is work you doing?”

Édith explains that she is a translator. She translates from English—novels, to be exact. No sooner has she said the word than she is sorry: Fadila is bound to know the difference between the Koran and all the other books, but probably not between novels and other genres.

While she's at it, she tells her she also works as an interpreter. “That's why there are days when I'm not at home.”

 

The following week when Fadila walks by the table, she says to Édith that books are finished. There are too many of them. Before, it used to be good business, you could earn money with books. Not anymore. “Before is not so many people they writing books, now is many.”

It was a lady who told her this. “A lady I working her place.”

As she speaks she rolls her sleeves up above her elbows and for the first time Édith sees the very deep scar she has on the inside of her right arm, at least eight inches long.

She was locked in, she broke a window pane to get out, and cut her forearm, she says, with no further explanation, then abruptly raises her chin.

 

Édith runs into Aïcha in the street, a festive fiftysomething, a grandmother in jeans. She congratulates her on the birth of her granddaughter. “A girl is better than nothing,” concedes Aïcha graciously.

They are standing in line together at the boulangerie. Édith brings up what Fadila told her about her marriage.

“She was fourteen . . .”

“It was rape,” says Aïcha, not beating around the bush. “She used to do the laundry at night, did she tell you that? She was so afraid to go to bed with her husband that she began to do the laundry, when really it was time to go to bed. He called to her from the bedroom, shouting all through the house. She would say, I'm coming, but first I have to hang up the washing. She went up on the terrace and was as slow about it as she could be, hoping he'd fall asleep in the meantime.”

She shrugs: “I don't know why she goes around saying she doesn't know how old she is. She had me when she was fifteen. I'm fifty, she can just count on her fingers.”

 

Even at the end of the afternoon it is hot. They drink some orange juice in the kitchen then move into the dining room and sit down to work. Édith says, “Can you write your name for me in your head?” and Fadila complies, without any mistakes.

Édith is exultant and claps her hands.

“Is no important,” says Fadila.