So Vast the Prison (41 page)

Sidi came into his inheritance but never changed the austere life he led in the little village near Caesarea where I used to spend part of summer vacation. His sons had been students, his daughters had married: he had raised his family by his own labor and without ever counting on the miserly uncle.

My earliest memory of the country, farthest back in early childhood, is connected to Sidi. There he sits in the
barouche
in which I was taken with my girl cousins very early in the chilly halfdawn to one of the farms that would be the private world of our games and escapades. I can still hear, close beside me, the rhythmic monosyllables of his voice guiding the mare and talking to her. I am grateful to him for this vivid, undying sense of simply moving along, as if sailing above the road, in the fog, the cold, and boundless nature: “my Lord”!

Thirty, forty years after this sharp memory (the mare and the road before us, the voice of the reassuring coachman close beside me), now he is about to die …

The last time I saw this uncle he had just had the entire house whitewashed again: the façade, the numerous rooms, the two vast courtyards and the dovecote, even if the latter was empty now. My father, who was with me, remarked, “Sid Ahmed, your house certainly is beautiful!”

“Just clean, O Tahar. Clean and neat! This way, when it is my time, everything will be ready when people come.”

We were silent. My father must have protested. And, filled with emotion, I stared at him. Since the death of his eldest son at fifty of cancer, Sidi, who was seventy-five, suddenly looked ten years older. He rose early. Took care of the animals. Made an appearance in the village. Returned home for his prayers. Came and went stoically.

“When it is my time,” he had said. I did not see him again. One month later the men of the village went into the house that was so clean. They came to wash him, read the litanies, carry him away.

I learned about his last moments from his wife, my aunt, who had been more like our grandmother for twenty years, for all the boys and all the girls.

“He woke up at five in the morning as he did every day. I heard him vaguely in my dawn slumber. I faintly heard his prayer, his faint voice.”

Suddenly she was silent for a moment, let a few tears fall from her nearly blind eyes, then with the same voice went on: “He stood near my head. ‘Get up,’ he told me, ‘O Khadidja!’ I sat halfway up, attentive. ‘The time is come,’ he told me. ‘I feel it!’

“And right there, almost next to my bed, he went back to his prayer mat. He kneeled down again. I heard the beginnings of a verse … then … nothing more! I got up; I groped around. I found him crouched down; I touched him; I called him. ‘God is great! God …’ I said. He was dead.”

Her voice shook, just one spasm.

“Your Sidi, your Lord is dead! In his dawn prayer!”

Why is it that I am determined to report Sidi’s final breath? Why recount this very simple death? To open these our present days to the others, to the “dead who pull the earth to them like a blanket.”

To recall that my uncle Sidi died like so many others, men and women of this period of silence, patience, and simply carrying on.
They watched the first oppression, the one in the first half of the century; then they saw the coming of oppression by their own people, their “brothers.” They underwent the first with the distance guaranteed by their faith. They contemplated the second with disdain and deep withdrawal—harsh silence and poorly concealed surprise. The world of the
roumis
had not surprised them; it was too completely strange to them, in its iniquity as well as in its foreignness. Occasionally, almost as a miraculous exception, they would acknowledge some kinship, sometimes just one person, a man or a woman, whose value they tacitly appreciated, and they would then grumble among themselves: “This Christian, he’s essentially a Muslim and doesn’t know it!”

Now, with age coming on, in the midst of all these changes and the stridency of the public displays that followed independence, they were often isolated within their own family circles. Suddenly they witnessed different forms of dissension and new hatreds whose nature they did not understand … It was no longer the foreigners who had set themselves up there as masters, and now were gone, who proved to be foreign to them! The strangers were their own descendants, people they knew shared their blood and, they had thought, also their aspirations—these people were the foreigners, in huge numbers, a hybrid species; still, among them they could also find, though rarely, some innocent man, some innocent woman.

Bards in the markets of the last century already disguised their despair and pronounced, “Everything is so upside down that scandal becomes normal!” They maintained therefore their reserve, their austere
morality, and prickly distance. And like Sidi, who interrupted his prayers to announce that his time had come, they are dead. A purified, bloodless death. No blood, no murder. They left all that behind.

They are the men I want to write about—not the victims, not the murdered ones! Because behind each of the latter there are ten murderers, and I see, oh yes, I can make out the cascades of blood behind the one man, the one woman, assassinated today.

I cannot.

I do not want to.

I want to run away.

I want to erase myself. Erase my writing. Blindfold my eyes, gag my mouth. Or else, let the blood of the others and of our people swallow me up naked! Dilute me. Root me to the spot, a crimson statue, one of the statues of Caesarea that later, much later, will be smashed to pieces and fall into ruin …

Shall I call the narrator Isma once again? “Isma”: “the name.” In the mixing confluences of this evocation, out of superstition or fearing pagan omens, I would so much like to extract her from her earlier exaltation, after the emotions that shook her, the belated gust that blew as she approached her forties, to the shores of the lake of serenity! The serenity that is called
sakina
in Arabic: not the sudden transparency of being that, they say, shortly precedes the coming of death, no! but the serenity of passages that seem never to need to end. As they stream by,
sakina
—serenity—fills your heart and soul, reinforces you with liquidity, nourishes you with surfeit, while around you everything tips and capsizes and changes. And you have decided to go forward, eyes cast downward, to follow the path mysteriously traced out on the ground for you.

The
sakina
of a person who knows how to keep sight of the road, of a blind man who sees best at night …

But everything else, living and dying, the masculine (that is, the nationalist pride) and feminine (the lucidity that makes one strong or drives one crazy) natures of what I believe to be the soul of this land, the rest is draped in sheets of dust, in French words masking the unformed voice—the gurgles, the disowned Berber, and barbarous sounds, modulated melodies made Arab, and laments—yes, the multiform voice of my genealogy. How hard it is for me to free myself from it!

June 1993: I have planned a few days of peace in Copenhagen walking in the footsteps of Kierkegaard’s ghost, or at least that of the Kierkegaard I dreamed of in my youth … Then, a painful piece of news reaches me, pierces like a knife: This very day in Algiers another of my friends has suddenly been murdered—not by bullets this time, not with his chest ripped open by a knife, no, this friend, the most upright, discrete, pious, is “sacrificed” according to a bizarre ritual—slowly drained of his blood while, next to his bed, three murderers surround him as closely as possible.

And right beside them in the room his young daughter hears her father’s death rattle; a physician, she finds the strength to grab her doctor’s bag; she throws herself upon the still-warm open body, the body of her father, alive but drained. Her agonizing cry occupies this house for ever now, this June dawn in 1993.

And I occupy my hotel room, I the traveler, the one spared. I cannot, I do not want to mourn my blood-soaked friends and family there; for this friend at least, what I am attempting to do is bring his
last breath back to life. Approaching, for just a fraction of a second if need be, the extent of his martyrdom: in the hollow of reddened shadow …

With that the image of Jugurtha revived within me, for the days that followed and the days that followed them. And not as he is so often summoned up, by all those fine nationalist emotions!

He comes to me the way a clear vision of my young brother on the road to Verdun came over a great distance to the clairvoyant woman in the Roman theater in Caesarea. I, however, am only capable of raising familiar ghosts and inviting them to a selfish, egotistical celebration. Sometimes better able to experience my loves when I think they are erased, I feel they have only deserted me to unburden me, and I am now lighter because I am moving, running. It is not the friend gored in June 1993 that I summon (O M’Hamed, with the sweet name my tribe is so fond of, the same as that of my maternal uncle, assassinated just before 1962, whose kind-hearted nature is still proverbial among us). No, it is not the dead people who are close to me that I call up before me. Probably, alas, because their blood has not dried!

I see—yes, thanks to Dougga, thanks to the plundered stele that can only be read again by going to its kidnappers in London—I see—thanks to this commemoration of that yesterday (the yesterday, that is, of 138
B.C.E
.)—I see a young man of seventeen who stands a few steps back to watch the ceremony. The notables, one after another, read or recite their speeches: one in Punic, the other in Libyan (no doubt the most unpolished and the proudest), and the third—because already this would be diplomatic—in Latin.

Before them and their retinues, Micipsa listens, silent and solemn; he is absorbed in the evocation of his father, the great Masinissa, whose “imperishable” (as each of the speeches reiterates) memory is being honored exactly ten years after his death.

The young man, alone, aged seventeen, is the one I see: Jugurtha in the sun, on the edge of the first row of zen oaks. I see him, a thoughtful spectator who is discreetly stepping back to go away … What road will he take? The one to Cirta of course, but then the one to Caesarea, my city, to go from there to Spain, where he will accept the invitation of Scipio, the generalissimo. Fighting at Numantia in the Roman army, the first in the world at the time, showing them how a Barbarian, a Berber, can combine bravery and intelligence with—what to call it?—a fierce personal reticence, silent, implacable. Already neither lend oneself nor give oneself, only ally oneself for the moment … and watch!

So I see this young man turning his back on the stele and its double writing. But then, immediately after, I see him twenty years later; what does he become once the dense fabric of his calculations, his strategy, also his ambition, sometimes his rages as a leader in fierce battles, has all played itself out? In the end, will it be treachery that was foreseen but not discovered, not escaped, and where will he collapse? Or will he fall from great heights, really the one murdered long after everyone else?

I see him again, this time “on the road to Rome,” handed over in chains. “Rome, a city for sale!” he used to proclaim. He is conquered and taught a lesson. He is Africa’s first Lumumba.

Does he remember his insult, appreciate the irony, when he goes into the “city for sale,” where he is going to die slowly an extremely long and drawn-out death? A hard, dry death: of hunger in a dungeon in Rome.

Did I say I see him? No, I hear him above all. Because he is ironic. His guts cramped and emaciated, he voices an entirely unwarranted fervor: “So vast the prison,” he murmurs in his next to last breath, while the memory of the Berber lament rocks him to his death and carries him away—“release”!

I hear him, of course, because the language is there. It cannot be erased:
“Meqqwer lhebs!” Meqqwer, meqqwer
—but then the word that means the scope, the vastness, of the murderousness reaches me and has its effect. Despite the distance in time, it strikes me.

“Lhebs?”
says Jugurtha. No, it is not vast. Gradually, day after day, like the ogre from the mountains up around Cirta who is tricked and caught in stories, all his days run out in this hole.
“Tasraft!”
he murmurs, because he in turn has been caught in a trap.
“Tasraft,”
the trap that is, the dungeon, this hole in the heart of Rome where he will really die, where, worn to a shadow, he dies.

Unchanging, it is the word that crosses twenty-one centuries in the twinkling of an eye to bring to me Jugurtha’s last life breath, right here.

Nothing will be written by or about him. The women will talk of course; a century later, the legend, impalpable, will be evoked but never set down. Nothing in the hand of the hero himself will reach us, not even in Libyan script. But, in fact, Sallust, then Caesar, will write—in Latin—of course, about this unforgettable man who was defeated. “They,” in the alphabet belonging to them, think to perpetuate Roman victory, but they are the ones who will firmly set down Jugurtha’s glory.

He died in a hole, in Rome. Narrow the prison, nowhere release! Thus his death by silence crumbled and spread across the land of sun from Dougga to Cirta, then on through Caesarea as far as Volubilis. In spite of that, or because of that, his shadow grows longer.

Oh, I see (or hear, I do not know which), I see those who have been longest dead—including my younger brother, though my only memory of him comes through the shaky voice of my father describing the sorrow of the orphan mother. I see these people who died long ago not because I claim any legacy from Lla Rkia, the sorceress
(there is no brazier down around my skirts, nor will I ever go on a pilgrimage, no), but simply because in my country, these past two or three seasons, all the dead are returning indiscriminately.