36
Her grimaces, her exhaustion, her still hands unnerve us. My sister looks at me, Keltum looks at my sister, and I watch my mother’s breathing.
The sky is blue. It’s cold. Keltum has muted the TV. A procession of images. A pretty woman, over made-up, is talking, tanks roll across the screen, a burial, the pretty presenter is back, then images of young men running and throwing stones.
I tell myself: ‘The day is blue, and so is the season. The silence is blue. And death is stalking the house. Maybe blue ushers in grey, the bitter hue of winter.’
My sister cries silently. Tears run down her face but she doesn’t wipe them away. She looks lost. She’s no longer here. She’s thinking about her husband, how loving he was, his unbearable absence. Her husband was goodness itself, someone you could rely on. Killed outright. My sister wishes she could have died with him. That’s what love is. She’s never spoken the word. They loved each other without ever needing to say it, they were simply there for one another.
My brother’s the peacemaker. How does he manage it? He believes everything’s negotiable. My mother didn’t like making decisions: she let time do its work. My father was never afraid of saying what he thought of people, even if it caused ructions.
We’re all gathered round her, all thinking the same thing. Her eyes are half-closed, her breathing’s laboured. The smell of cooking reaches her room. The windows are kept closed, for fear she’ll catch cold. My brother slides a tape into a radio-cassette player. An Egyptian intones the Qur’an. A discussion begins on the different ways of reciting it. The Moroccan style’s apparently the least popular, the Egyptians are the champions. I feel uneasy. One of my brothers murmurs the verses the Egyptian’s reciting. My sister’s pleased: it reminds her of her visits to Mecca. Mother is in a deep sleep. Keltum’s in a foul mood, as if our being there annoys her. I feel useless. My brother tells me he feels the same. We are helpless. If we stopped her medication, she’d go during the night. Go, and not come back. Fly off, give her hand to the angel watching over her, let herself be quietly, weightlessly borne away, regaining, perhaps, the grace and beauty of the old days. My mother’s sixteen, playing hopscotch in the courtyard of the big house. Her father sees her and pulls her up short: ‘You’re not a child any more, you’re a woman now!’ Her mother adds: ‘You’re jumping about as if you were a little girl, but you’re pregnant! I’m going to tell your husband. He won’t like it.’ My mother lets down her long black hair and covers her face with it. Perhaps she’s ashamed. She stops skipping and joins her mother in the kitchen, humming to herself. She smiles and pretends to dance.
Her face has gradually lost its wrinkles, her skin’s become smooth and sallow: her time is over. We know it’s passed, it’s taken off, leaving no trace. Within a few days, she’s shed the years that weighed her body down. For a long time now, she’s been walking towards the end. She used to say: ‘Death is a right, a right we can neither be rid of nor change. Death is a fact, it’s above us, within us, from birth. So what is dying? This right is practised on us and we accept it in silence.’ She has accepted it serenely, without ever being angry, with no protest. What’s the point of arguing, of talking about it, of wanting more than anything to be stronger than the inevitable?
Her face is a girl’s, appeased by a dream, by a promise, by a soft, generous spring. Her face has given itself to death, an act of the ultimate private truth. Who would lie at this moment? Alive, she was incapable of lying. As the end approached, she was even more beautiful, because lying never came into it.
Her death was slow and free of anger. Her body slowly deserted her. When she still had the strength to speak, she wanted to be washed, and have her hair combed, twice a day; mindful of her appearance to the end. Anguish now left her in peace. She no longer fretted. She knew we were all there with her, all together, devastated. We talked to her and her lips moved, but no sound came from her mouth.
Now her face was ready to be given to the earth. She was fond of that expression. She’d say: ‘He who’s given his face to the earth is no longer to be pitied. It’s those left behind who are to be pitied, the ones who will have to live without him.’
She once said to me: ‘You know, Rabi’a died in childbirth. It’s like a voice that’s been interrupted by something external. When it’s sudden, that’s what it’s like, a telephone call cut off — you call, and you call, and then you can’t believe there’s no one on the other end of the line.’
She wasn’t afraid of her own death, but she couldn’t bear the rituals surrounding other people’s. It was a childlike fear, an unsoothed nightmare. A cry in the night, the smell of perfume and Arabian incense. A stiff, icy hand pulling her towards a precipice. Death is nothing. But everything that lurks around it is unbearable.
Soon I’ll arrive at the house. I’ll go down Impasse Ali Bey. I’ll push open the gate, and then the door. I’ll look for her face from afar, and won’t see it. I’ll go into her room, where she’s at rest now, until morning. She didn’t spend the night in the fridge. She died at home. I’ll lean over and kiss her face, as I did four years ago, before I left. I’ll cry, there’ll be a flood of tears and I’ll find it hard to stop them. I don’t know if they help. It’s other people’s tears that make mine flow, it’s catching. I’ve never been ashamed to cry. I’ll cry to empty my heart and my mind. And then the real tears, the ones I fear, are the tears that will wake me later, months and years after this 4 February 2002.
There’ll be stubborn, haunting, cruel dreams. I’ll see her young and beautiful again. I’ll see her, pregnant with me, in the heat of the Fez summer. I’ll see her at Sidi Harazem, when I’m still a baby sucking at her breast. I’ll see her in the Ifrane spring, at my aunt’s house. She’ll be glowing, happy and carefree. I’m expecting these dreams and I’ll be sad when I wake up, because Mother won’t be there. I’ll be the unconsoled child, the one bored by school, who prefers the intimate world of women and afternoon parties at the house. I’ll seek refuge in the basement, among the earthenware jars of provisions, and I’ll jump out and give her a fright. I’ll emerge, jubilant at having managed to scare her. I’ll see her in the crowd and she won’t recognise me. I’ll wake with a start and cry out for help. I’ll go out on the terrace of our first house in Tangier and stand beside her, gazing at the sea. I’ll talk to her but she won’t hear me. I’ll tell her I miss her and she’ll let the wind tangle her hair and cover her eyes. She won’t try to resist the wind. She’ll turn around and set off on a journey, with the wind.
Perhaps tonight her mother, her father, her brothers and her husbands will welcome her, saying: ‘What’s happened to your wrinkles? Where’s your white hair gone? You come to us with all your teeth. You’re beautiful, short as you are … You called out for us so often that we’ve come to welcome you. For years, you called out for Moulay Ali, Yemma, Lalla, Sidi Hassan — you called out for us all the time. So here we are, all of us. The journey wasn’t so bad — the journey, or the crossing. You’ve arrived in the middle of winter. At last we’re going to sleep, to sleep for a long time, for all eternity. Come, come to us, sit down, have a rest. You’ll see, here time goes in circles, sometimes it makes our heads spin. You don’t like that. When you were little, you fell off a merry-go-round at the Jnane Sbil Garden in the public park. You saw stars, you were giddy for a few minutes. Here, there’s no merry-go-round. But you’ll see, you can feel time on the wind it whips up as it passes. We don’t worry about time or the wind. Nothing can touch us any more. As long as people remember us, we are here. Anyway, it’s the wind that tells us, lets us know about the things we’ve left behind.’