Burned alive (13 page)

At the end of the first year after my arrival, I left the hospital to be placed in a shelter. There were more skin grafts, for which I returned to the hospital. It didn’t always go well in my mind, but I survived and I couldn’t ask for anything better. I was learning French as well as I could, expressions, bits of sentences that I repeated like a parrot, without even knowing what they meant.

Jacqueline explained to me later that when she brought me to Europe, it was more important to save my skin than to send me to school. My repeated hospitalizations did not allow me to take regular French courses. I hadn’t even thought about that since in my village there were only two girls who took the bus to go to school in the city, and people made fun of them. Me, too, I ridiculed them, convinced as my sisters were that they would never find a husband if they went to school! Secretly, my greatest shame was not having a husband. I retained the mentality of my village, it was ingrained in me. And I told myself that no man would want anything to do with me. For a woman in my country, living without a man is a punishment for life.

In the shelter that had welcomed me and Marouan, everyone thought I was going to get used to this double punishment of being repulsive to look at and no longer being desired by a man. They also thought I was going to be able to take care of my son and raise him once I was able to work. Only Jacqueline realized that I was totally incapable of doing this, first because it would take me years to become a human being again and to accept myself as I was, and during these years the child was going to grow up the wrong way. Also, despite my twenty years, I was still basically a child myself. I knew nothing about life and responsibilities and certainly nothing about independence.

It was at that time that we left Switzerland. My treatments had been completed so I could now go live elsewhere. Jacqueline found me a foster family somewhere in Europe. This couple became my adoptive parents. I really loved them and called them Papa and Mama, as did Marouan and all the other children. The family took in many children who came from all over the world, and I remember that at one time there were eighteen of us around the table. They were for the most part abandoned children. These amazing people received from Terre des Hommes the money necessary for the temporary shelter of some of the children, and when the children left, it was always painful. I saw some of them throw themselves into the arms of Papa and Mama, they didn’t want to leave. For many of them this house was only a temporary home, intended to give them a chance to be healed or cured. Some stayed with our parents for the time needed for an emergency operation, which it would not have been possible to have in their own country, and then they would return home.

The older ones were expected to take care of the smaller ones, and I helped out as best I could. But one day, Mama told me that I was paying too much attention to Marouan and not enough to the others. This surprised me because I didn’t have the feeling that I was devoting myself to my son. I felt too lost for that. In my few moments of solitude, I would walk along the river pushing Marouan in his pram. I needed to walk, to be outside. I don’t know why I had such a need to walk alone in the country, perhaps the habit of leading the flock at home when I would bring along a little water and something to eat. I did that now as I pushed the pram, walking fast, upright and proud. I walked fast as I had at home, and upright and proud as in Europe.

I did everything possible to do what Mama said, to spend more time caring for the other children. I was the oldest, so it was expected. But as soon as I was closed up in the house, I would be dying to run away, to get out to see other people, to speak, to dance, to meet a man, to see if I could still be a woman. I needed this proof. I was crazy to hope for it, but it was stronger than me. I wanted to try to live.

Marouan

Marouan was five years old when I signed the papers that allowed our foster parents to adopt him. I had made some progress in their language—I still didn’t know how to read or write, but otherwise I was able to function. It was not abandonment. My foster parents were going to raise this little boy in the best way possible. And in becoming their son, he was going to benefit from a real education, and bear a name that would protect him from my past. I was completely incapable of caring for him, of providing him equilibrium or even normal schooling. I feel guilty, many years later, for making this choice. But these years have permitted me to construct a life that, back when Marouan was five, I no longer believed in but all the while had hoped for as if by some instinct. I don’t know how to explain these things very well, at least not without breaking down in tears. For all these years, I have wanted to convince myself that I wasn’t suffering from this separation. But you can’t forget your child, especially this particular child.

I knew that he was happy, and he knew that I existed. At the age of five, how could he not know that he had a mother? We had lived together in his adoptive parents’ house. But I didn’t know how they had explained my departure.

Many of the children in my foster family had a real family and a real country of their own somewhere in the world. Those who had nowhere else to go, like Marouan and me, were adopted. I was legally dead in the West Bank, and Marouan didn’t exist there. He was born here, just as I was, on the twentieth of December, the day we arrived in Switzerland. And his parents were also mine. It was a rather strange situation, and when I left this family home, at the end of almost four years of communal life, I thought of myself almost like Marouan’s big sister. I was twenty-four years old. I couldn’t stay in their charge any longer. I had to work and gain my independence, and finally become an adult.

If I hadn’t decided to leave him there and to have him adopted, I would not have been able to raise him alone. I was a depressed mother, I would have brought my suffering on him, my hatred of my family. I would have had to tell him about things I wanted so much to forget! This way Marouan would be sheltered from my personal war.

I couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep Marouan, it was beyond my strength. I was a refugee, I had no money, I was sick. I would have to live under a false identity the rest of my life because I came from a village where men are cowardly and cruel. And I had everything to learn. The only way I could survive was to throw myself into this new country and its customs. I said to myself:
I am here now, I must integrate myself into this country, I haven’t any choice.
I didn’t want the country to take me in, it was for me to fit in, for me to remake myself. My son spoke the language, he had European parents, papers, a normal future, all the things I’d never had and that still were not mine.

I chose to survive and to let him live. I knew from my own experience that this family would be good for him. When they talked to me about adoption, they suggested other families might take him, but I refused: “No, not another family! Marouan will stay here or nothing. I lived with you, I know how he’ll be raised here, I don’t want him to be placed in another family.” Papa gave me his word. I was twenty-four years old, but my mental age probably was not quite fifteen. Too much suffering kept me stuck in childhood. My son was part of a life that I had to forget in order to build another one. At the time, I couldn’t understand things this clearly. I went from day to day as in a fog, feeling my way along. But I was certain of one thing, that my son had a right to normal parents and to a safe life, and I was not a normal mother. I hated myself, I wept over my burns, this horrible skin, which condemned me for life. At the beginning, in the hospital, I believed that all these wonderful people were going to give me back my skin. When I realized that I would be in this nightmarish skin for the rest of my days, I retreated deep inside myself. I was nothing anymore, I was ugly, I had to conceal myself so as not to upset people by my appearance. In the years that followed, getting back a taste for life little by little, I wanted to forget Marouan. I was certain he was more fortunate than I was. He was going to school, he had parents, brothers, a sister, and he should be happy. But he was always there, hidden away in a corner of my mind.

I would close my eyes, and there he was. I would see myself running in the street and he was there, behind me, in front or next to me, as if I was running away and he was chasing me. I always had this image of the child whom a nurse placed on my knees, the child I couldn’t take in my arms, because of the garden where I ran in flames, and my child burning with me. A child whose father didn’t want him, who knew very well that he was condemning both of us to death. And I had loved this man and hoped for so much from him! I was afraid of not finding another man, because of my scars, my face, my body, and what I was inside myself. Always this idea that I was worth nothing, this fear of displeasing, of seeing people look away.

I began by working on a farm, and then thanks to Papa I was hired by a factory that made precision pieces. The work was clean, and I was paid well. I checked printed circuits, parts of mechanisms. There was another interesting area of the factory but you had to check the pieces on a computer and I didn’t feel able to do that. I turned down training for this position, pretending that I preferred to work standing on the line, rather than sitting down. One day the head of the team called me: “Souad? Come with me, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sit down, next to me, hold this mouse, I’m going to show you how to do it.”

“But I’ve never done this, I’m not going to know how. I prefer the line . . .”

“And if one day there’s no more work on the lines? Then what? Nothing at all? No more work for Souad?”

I didn’t dare refuse. Even if I was afraid. Every time I had to learn something new, my hands would get damp and my legs would tremble. I was in a total panic but I gritted my teeth. Every day, every hour of my life, I had to learn new things. I couldn’t read or write like the others, and I knew next to nothing of the world. But I wanted so much to work that this woman could have told me to put my head in a bucket and stop breathing and I would have done it. So I learned how to use a mouse and to make out a computer screen. And after a few days, it was all right, and they were all very pleased with me.

I never missed a minute of work in three years, my station was always impeccable, I cleaned it before I left every day, and I was always on time, always there before the others. They had trained me in my childhood, with a stick, to intensive work and to obedience, to exactitude and cleanliness. It was second nature, the only thing that stayed with me of my former life. I would say to myself that you never know, suppose someone were to come by unexpectedly, I wouldn’t want them to find the place dirty. I even became a little obsessive about order and cleanliness. An object should be taken from its place and put back, you take a shower every day and change your underwear, you wash your hair twice a week, keep your nails clean. I look for purity everywhere, it’s very important to me, and I can’t explain it.

I especially like selecting my clothes, but I know this is because choice had always been forbidden me. I like the color red, for example, because my mother would say: “Here’s your dress. Put it on.” It was ugly and gray but even if I didn’t like it, I put it on. So I love red, green, blue, yellow, black, maroon, all the colors I could never have. I don’t have much choice about the style of my clothes. Rolled collar, or high neckline, tailored shirt buttoned up, pants. And the hair over the ears. I can’t show anything. Sometimes, I would go sit on the terrace of a café, bundled up in my clothes, winter and summer, and I would watch the people pass by. The women in miniskirts or low necklines, arms and legs exposed to the gaze of men. I watched for a man who might look at me but I never found one, so I would go home.

Until the day when I saw from the window of my room a car, and a man inside I couldn’t see except for the hands and knees. I fell in love. He was the only man in the world. I saw only him, because of this car, and his two hands on the steering wheel. I didn’t fall in love with him because he was handsome, nice, tender, because he didn’t hit me or because I was safe with him. I fell in love because he drove a car. Just seeing his car parking in front of the apartment building made my heart beat fast. To be there, simply to see him get into and out of this car when he would leave for work, or return . . . I wept over him! I was afraid in the morning that he wouldn’t come back at night.

I didn’t realize that it was the same thing as the first time. It took someone to draw it to my attention later for me to realize it. A car and a man who leaves and comes back in it under my window, a man I was in love with before I had even spoken to him, a man I spied on with the anguish of fearing the car might not come back. It was simple. At the time, I hadn’t examined these feelings. Sometimes I tried to work through my memories, to know the why of things in my life, but I dropped it very quickly, it was too complicated for me.

Antonio had a red car. I stayed at my window until it disappeared from view, and I would close the window. I met him, I spoke to him. I knew he had a girlfriend, someone I also knew. And then I waited. At first, we became friends. Two and a half or three years went by before the friendship turned into something else. I was in love, but I wasn’t sure what he thought of me and I didn’t dare ask him. I did everything possible to make him love me, to keep him. I wanted to give him everything, to serve him, to spoil him, feed him, do everything to make him keep me! I couldn’t see any other way. How could I seduce him? With my beautiful eyes? My shapely legs? My lovely bosom? How?

We first lived together, without getting married, and it took me some time to be comfortable with him. For example, I couldn’t have a light on when I was getting undressed, just candles. In the morning, I closed myself up in the bathroom as fast as possible, and I would only appear covered in a robe from head to foot. And that went on for a long time. Even now it bothers me to be undressed in the light because I know my scars are unattractive.

Our first apartment was a studio in the city. We both worked and made a good living. I waited for him to ask me to marry him but he didn’t talk about it. I dreamed about a ring and a ceremony, and all the while I did for Antonio what my mother did for my father, what all the women of my village did for their husbands. I would get up at five o’clock in the morning just for him, to wash his feet and hair and to lay out his clean and well-pressed clothes. Then I watched him leave for work with a departing wave of his hand, a kiss through the window. In the evening, I would wait for him with the meal ready, sometimes until twelve thirty at night or one o’clock in the morning, just to be able to eat with him. Even when I was very hungry, I waited for him as I had seen women do at home. The difference was that I had chosen this man and I loved him. No one had forced him on me. I’m sure it was rather surprising to him, a Western man, who was not used to this type of devotion. In the beginning he would say to me: “This is super! Thank you, it gives me extra time, and I don’t have to worry about anything.” He was happy. When he came home in the evening, he would sit in his armchair and I would remove his shoes and his socks and give him his slippers. I put myself entirely at his service to keep him at home. I was so afraid every day that he would meet another woman. Then when he did return in the evening and eat the meal I had prepared for him, I was relieved and happy until the next day.

But Antonio didn’t want to get married and he didn’t want children. I was the one who wanted both of these things. He wasn’t ready and I respected that. We lived almost seven years this way. Antonio knew that I had had a child, and that he had been adopted. I had to tell him the essential details of my life to explain my scars, but once I told him, we never spoke about it again. Antonio thought I had chosen the best solution for the child. My son, Marouan, belonged to another family, and I had nothing to say about his life. Although they sent me news about him fairly regularly, I was afraid to go to see him. In fact, I went only three times during all these years, and as quietly as possible. I finally got used to the added burden of guilt. I forced myself so diligently to forget and I almost succeeded. However, I did want a child. But first we would have to marry, that was a must. I had to remake my life in this order: a husband, and then a family.

I was almost thirty years old the day of this much-anticipated marriage. Antonio was ready to go ahead with it because his situation had improved and we could move from a studio into a larger apartment. And he wanted a child, too. It was my first marriage, my first dress, my first beautiful shoes. A long leather skirt and leather blouse, a leather jacket, and high-heeled shoes! Everything was white leather! Leather is so supple, and it is expensive. I loved the sensation of it on my skin. When I would walk through stores, I could never pass a leather garment without touching it, patting it, judging its softness. I had never understood why, but now I know. It is as though I were changing my skin for something soft and smooth. It is a sort of defense, a way of presenting a lovely skin, not my own. Like the smile I usually forced myself to wear as a way of trying to appear pleasant to others.

This marriage was the joy of my life. The only thing close to joy I had known until then was my first rendezvous with Marouan’s father. But I no longer thought about that. It was now forgotten, buried in a mind not my own. Then, when I became pregnant, I was in paradise.