The Last Life (45 page)

"Your grandfather was—well, an old-fashioned father. He'd had to do without one, himself, from a young age, and he felt it was important to be firm, important that a son obey. But adolescent boys, they don't want to, do they? So it was almost a relief when Alexandre went away. Evenings were so much calmer. No roaring and stomping, no slamming doors. It was better for Marie. And he wasn't far away, in that last time. I saw a lot of him. He came by after school. And he seemed calmer, too. He and his grandmother shared a special bond.

"But that was later, and it's by the by. I wanted to tell you about my time. I was no less distressed than Alexandre, you understand, at Jacques's news; but I couldn't turn heel and run away. I had responsibilities, to my husband, to my daughter. Family. I don't know how to explain what that time was like. In '57, we had endured—it was awful—war, on our doorstep. Outright war. The cafés, the airport, the casino—bombs, everywhere; children, teenagers, mutilated and killed ... and the stories from the countryside were even worse. Families—women, infants—slain in their beds, dismembered. Grotesque. The city was swarming with paratroops, the casbah was sealed off with barbed wire. Everyone lived in fear—not so much for ourselves, even, but for our children. And we didn't know where this terror had come from, how it had escalated. Each new governor they sent from France gave us hope, for a little while; and in time we had won the battle in the city. The paratroops did nasty work, I don't deny it, but they had no choice, and they did it well. They flushed out the terrorists, squashed their cells, made the city habitable again. People now talk about torture, but it was on all sides. It was war.

"And let me be clear on this: the Muslims, most of them, felt as we did. I'm sure of it. We all just wanted our lives back, wanted life to be as it had been before, in that beautiful city. Wanted to be able to go about our affairs in peace, under the trees and in the squares, to go to mass or the market or the cinema—the wonderful old Majestic, say—without listening for gunfire and passing truckloads of soldiers, without looking askance at every brown face, wondering if this young woman, or that scruffy boy, hid explosives in their bags ... And for a while, that seemed possible. It seemed, after the Battle was won, that we could resume where we had left off. After the madness in May '58. Which is when Jacques first came here. It seemed possible.

"From the terrace of our apartment, you could glimpse the water—we were on the hill, and could see over other buildings. And at dawn, before anyone else was awake, I would stand there and watch the sea change with the light, a vast mirror, and listen to the city starting, like a motor, the hum of traffic, and the
boulangerie
below opening its shutters, and I'd spy on the greengrocer's boy as he set out the stands on the sidewalks, all the beautiful colors, the artichokes and pomegranates, the apricots, the lettuce, in pyramids against the grey pavement, and the sky bleeding and then blueing ... sometimes I'd see ships, or boats in the harbor, making their way, and I'd chart their wakes, like ripples in silk, and it was the world I'd always known, and I loved it. To you, what is Algiers? Nothing—an unknown, a regret, a dream. But to me, it was life. That moment, in the morning, was the purest happiness for me. I thanked God for it, every day. And then I'd waken your grandfather, and the children, and the day would begin, and I'd know that the rituals—of breakfast, of school, of the house, of our friends; in short, of our lives—kept us safe. And in '57 and early '58, we'd thought we might lose that forever; and we hadn't. We had triumphed. There was order, more or less, and I can't tell you the relief I felt. It was physical, as if my lungs and nerves and arteries were opening again after some hideous hibernation.

"And into this came your grandfather with his plans and his contracts, and he said that we had to go. He had no faith in de Gaulle. When the general made his promise at Mostaganem, in June of '58, and I said to Jacques, 'It's not too late, we can still stay—sell that land back, and we'll stay'—he shook his head and claimed it was a lie. I didn't want to believe him. I tried to persuade him otherwise. Mane tried, too. It enraged me, his stubborn refusal to see that the city was still standing, that we were still living in it. I wasn't a child; I wasn't hopelessly naive; and I knew what I wanted. I wanted to stay. Over a year later, when the apartment was up for sale and the movers ordered, I threatened to stay, with the children, to let him go off alone. It was a dreadful thing to do. We didn't speak for a week. It was worse than the fights with Alexandre, because it was I who was betraying him. Can you imagine? In retrospect, I'm stunned at my behavior. And I prayed. I prayed morning and night for God's guidance, for some sign...

"And when the sign came, I regretted asking for it. It was in the late autumn of '59, when that fat peasant Ortiz set his
ultras
marching through town like the fascists that they were, in their khaki uniforms, with their Celtic crosses. I was on the way home from lunch with a friend, and was stopped by their
défilé,
a veritable militia of men with murder in their hearts, and that great fat Spaniard at the helm. I knew, when I saw them, that there would be no peaceful end to it all, when the men on our side had become terrorists like the others, when they had sunk as low. And later, I heard him, that Ortiz. I felt it in my bones when he said it was 'the suitcase or the coffin'—that slogan the FLN had been spitting at us for ages, by then—and I knew that Jacques was right. I couldn't know what was to follow, but I knew it was true. The suitcase or the coffin: is that a choice? But it was true, and it was all we had.

"Up till that moment, I had hoped; things had been better. But then I knew that my will was foolish and insignificant; and I told Jacques that we would go. Together. As a family should. It took another year and more, but we went. And from then on, it was bad to worse. From then on, it was the end. It came more quickly than we might have expected, when it came; and God knows what Alexandre and my mother lived through and witnessed in the time after we left. But he didn't want to come with us. If it hadn't been so bad with his father, I would have persuaded him. As a mother, I feel now that I should have. I could have protected him, even a little. From his father, perhaps, as much as anything. But he was already far from me, from us. Because of the row, because of their wills.

"For me, when I remember home, I can still stand on our terrace in my mind's eye, and feel myself a part of the day beginning, and know that it was bliss, while it was; but that was lost to my boy, because he thought he knew what he wanted, and we let him stay until it was all rubble, until the very death of it.

"I'll tell you, the truth is, I'm lucky: I don't live nostalgically. Every morning, I wake up and look out my window at the Mediterranean sea, vast and creeping, and I smell the pines and the heat on the breeze, rising up the clifftop, and I'm in Algiers again. I live, still, in my heart, in Algeria. And that was burned out of Alex, razed in him forever. And now, still, I ask myself, who knows how it might have been different, if he had been spared that death, if we had travelled together?"

Her story finished, my grandmother perched awkwardly on her chair, looking neither at my mother nor at me, but at Etienne, from whose slightly parted lips a tendril of saliva was slowly stretching. He sneezed.

"You couldn't have known," my mother said, at last. "You couldn't have forced him, even if you had known. He wanted to stay."

"The suitcase or the coffin," repeated my grandmother. "For Alexandre, it was both."

"That was a long time ago. That has nothing, necessarily, to do with his—passing."

"It marked him."

"Maybe so. But so did many other events, later events, and probably earlier ones, too. We can't keep asking why."

My grandmother turned. "Of course not. But I'm telling you because I know, in my heart, that it was a mistake. And you're about to make another."

"The situations aren't comparable."

"You think not, but in some ways ... It's a matter of moorings."

"I agree absolutely," said my mother. "That Sagesse needs precisely that; and right now, I think boarding school may be the best place to find them."

"You're a fool, my dear," my grandmother chided. But her voice hung with resignation and regret.

"If I hate it, then I'll come home. Won't I, Maman?"

"Nothing stands still, Sagesse. You should know that by now," said my grandmother.

"And there's no turning back," I finished for her. "But I have to go. I have to. Maybe I'm like Grand-père, not like Papa. Maybe I see the right way forward."

"If there is such a thing."

"The only way forward. Maybe that's what I see."

The remaining months before my departure were dedicated to preparation, and to my family. My bedroom floor was piled, in July, with all my winter clothes, with boots and jackets and woollens that my mother and I crammed into a steamer trunk to be sent ahead by ship. I packed my teddy bear, and a pile of photographs; and when my mother inquired whether I would like to take anything from the house—anything at all—with which to decorate my room, I asked for the watercolor of the Bay of Algiers. She did not hesitate; she seemed glad to be rid of it. It was wound in a ream of bubble wrap and hidden among my pullovers in the heart of the trunk, to hang on an institutional wall in a cinder block dormitory in rural New Hampshire where, had I but known it, I would sit and stare at its sunlit crests and hear—but as clearly as if I were within its frame—the soughing of the Mediterranean against the shore; and I would find conjured in my mind's eye, in the still night hours when my wispy-haired roommate lay sleeping motionless as a bolster in the bed opposite, my own imaginary city, half Algiers, half home, with alleys and promenades and beaches at once familiar and a revelation, and as real as any place I had ever been.

In some ways, preparing to leave felt like preparing to die, not least because the break with the known was absolute, the new beginning unimaginable. I emptied drawers, discarded papers, just as down the hall my mother emptied my father's drawers and pored over his files. She sent his suits to charity, gave his shoes to Fadéla for her husband, along with a little-used felt hat and some unworn shirts. I took the grey angora sweater of the time of the trial, in tissue, to Aline and Ariane as a gift. I sat on the floor and reread old diaries while purporting to clean out my desk.

I wrote to Thibaud, with whom my correspondence had dwindled almost to nothing over the year. He was awaiting the results of his
bac.
I told him I was leaving France for New Hampshire: he replied at once. Somewhat less mystified than the twins, he was nonetheless taken aback: the routes to his future, the hurdles, were so clearly defined and reassuring, and those of the United States so apparently arbitrary and irrelevant. He had heard about my father, and wrote about that, too, in a strange, formal, elliptical way, about memories and the spirit surviving and God's will and courage—mine, naturally.

He seemed to see my departure as a flight from my father's ghost—which it was, to be sure, in part—but what amazed me in those busy months was the degree to which the earth had closed up over my father, the way his traces flitted in the air (I kept thinking that I heard his voice, downstairs at night, among the notes of his music) but did not tarry, as though he were always on his way home, nearly with us, and yet not solidly absent.

My mother, in her widow's grief (if such it was), took refuge in organization: of my father's estate and accounts; of her own clandestine money; of my brother's medical supervision; of my life to come. She kept moving, always: the expression used, of such women, is that "she came into her own." She grew firm with her mother-in-law for the first time. From the day after the funeral until the day I left for Boston, I did not see her cry.

In emulation of her fortitude, I attempted to put my old life in order. I rang Marie-José and asked if I could visit her; which seemed, to my surprise, not to surprise her in the slightest. After a subdued lunch with my grandparents—my grandfather, present but distracted, drummed his fingers on the table intermittently throughout and spoke little, while my grandmother volunteered halfhearted anecdotes about Titine and her housekeeper, about Madame Darty, about the church charity drive, and lapsed again and again into silence, during which only mastication and Zohra's distant kitchen movements were audible—I tiptoed down the stairs to Marie-José's apartment and rang the flickering bell.

There is little to tell of our stiff hour in her old pink room, familiar but somehow smaller, like something from a childhood dream. When I arrived, she hugged me tight in silent expression of sympathy over my father, but I felt as cold as if sawdust rather than blood floated in my veins; and when she tried to pin my eyes with her own tear-shined orbs, I merely looked away, like a guilty cat, and padded down the hall to our old sanctuary.

"I hear you're going to America," she volunteered, settling her long, brown frame against her white-painted bed, and wriggling her bare toes. "Lucky you! How wonderful to escape!"

"I suppose," I said. "I just wanted to thank you for calling, and to say good-bye."

"I've felt so terrible, you know," she fluttered. "About everything that happened."

"Sure. Well, never mind."

She offered a drink, a snack; I declined. She had evidently envisaged an emotional reunion, and did not know how to respond to my disaffection.

"School will be weird without you," she observed.

"I doubt it."

"I'm so scared about this last year. I don't know if I can pass the
bac
the first time."

"You've got months to study."

"That's what my mom says, she says studying makes the time pass just like anything else—only it's more productive."

"M-hmm."

"You've been working hard, haven't you? Hanging out with those twins, the grinds. Bet they're good for copying homework off, eh?"