Discretion, p.6
Discretion, page 6
She was this close to cutting their Coco Pops rations.
It’s true that Omar has never gone hungry. God knows how, but Yamina always sets something aside, just in case. Even when he’s working nights and returns home at dawn, her son is guaranteed to find a plate in the fridge covered in umpteen layers of clingfilm. He can guess at the chicken casserole, slow-cooked lamb or vegetable lasagne underneath. He eats in his bedroom, where nothing beats dunking his mother’s homemade flatbread (the world’s best matlou) in saffron-scented sauce at five in the morning.
Meanwhile, lying on her side in the bedroom at the rear of the apartment, Yamina, woken by some instinct, has had her eyes open in the dark for some time.
It’s always the same rigmarole: tracing her son’s journey in her head, guessing when he’ll switch off the app, estimating how long the return trip will take him, trying not to think about the overloaded heavy goods vehicles speeding on the A1, then counting his steps from the Renault Talisman, which he always parks in the same place, under the street lamp in front of Chez Akfadou, the halal butcher run by Kabyles, opposite the gas-powered rotisserie (thirty-four chicken capacity).
Yamina pictures his haggard face. My poor boy, how hard he works, what a plucky kid. When she hears the clink of the key in the lock, her heart finally relaxes, reassured that nothing has happened to her son. Taxi driving is a dangerous profession, especially for a mother with an overactive imagination. Only then can she drift back to sleep, serene and proud.
She has made some progress: she no longer gets up to open the door for him or to warm his food. Abiding by Omar’s request that she stay in bed requires no small effort.
Not that it stops there.
She still cleans his shoes, brews hot thyme infusions at the first sign of a cough, tidies his bedroom and wrestles with the urge to call him on the phone when he has passengers in the car.
Omar’s clothes are always impeccably ironed, and when he puts on his shirt the waft of lavender makes him feel like he’s walking on air. His mother tries to make Omar’s life as soft and gentle as a washing detergent advert.
Sadly, real life doesn’t match the soap suds ads.
In real life you find creases, sweat and grime, and you’d better be ready for them.
COMMUNE OF ARBOUZE
PROVINCE OF MSIRDA FOUAGA
ALGERIA, 1963
Yamina crouches down at the foot of the dead fig tree and stays there a while, feeling wretched.
Her beautiful fig tree won’t come into bud again.
This girl, just shy of fourteen, looks ten or eleven at most: she and her brothers have experienced years of malnourishment. She rests her frail hands on the trunk of her childhood tree.
How will she tell her mother that Sid Ahmed, the grocer, has categorically refused to put their goods on tick? ‘Your father’s slate is too full! You’ll have to pay me first! Go home!’ His harsh rebuke in front of the other customers made Yamina look down at the ground and her cheeks stream with tears. And so, with a heavy heart and a dismayingly empty basket, she turned away, knowing she would have to find the courage to walk all those kilometres back to the house.
It’s exhausting to return home defeated.
Rahma is waiting for her on the threshold, hand on hip.
‘Well? Where’s the shopping?’
Behind her, the other children bawl their hunger.
Yamina’s eyes tell the whole story as she walks in emptyhanded.
It doesn’t occur to Rahma to comfort her daughter, nor does she acknowledge the humiliation inflicted by the grocer. She is furious, shooting Yamina a dark look and ripping the basket out of the hands of her firstborn.
‘It’s your fault! You don’t know how to talk! You’re good for nothing! Always looking at the ground! What are we going to do now? Who will feed your brothers? Eh? And what about your father? What’s he going to say? He’ll kill us!’
Mohamed Madouri has gone from independence hero to dominoes champion, roaming the area in search of makeshift jobs, trying to get by. Or else he loiters at the café, playing cards and smoking bad tobacco. He is obsessive and constantly out of sorts. His temper comes crashing down on Rahma, should she be rash enough to complain.
Yamina hates it when her father turns violent. She detests intervening between her mother and him, taking the blows herself, no longer recognising the look in his eyes, which is normally so gentle. The war has robbed Mohamed Madouri of his kindness as well as his calm.
There is no work. The land is parched. The countrymen have lost everything. Some are unable to recover their land because they no longer bear a family name – the colonial administration even cheated them of that. No trace of them is left.
The return to their country has come as a shock. Freedom has cost them dear.
LAV’STORY
14 RUE LETORT, PARIS (75018)
FRANCE, 2019
Imane enjoys hanging out at the laundrette on the corner of her street. It’s practically empty most of the time and she can daydream in peace, with only damp laundry for company.
She appreciates its name: Lav’Story. Although the sixty-something Chinese proprietor, a man whose eyebrows are fixed in a permanent frown, appears in no mood for a love story. No, he looks unhappy and preoccupied, his eyes crammed with worries, his mouth muttering as he cleans the portholes of the tumble dryers. A black cloud hovers above that tiny head of his supported by his fevered neck.
Imane finds it hard to imagine a man like him enjoying romantic films.
She and her big sister Malika must have replayed the video of Love Story a hundred times as teenagers. She kept it secret, but Imane was madly in love with the hero, Oliver Barrett, the rich, white Harvard undergrad ice hockey player. She knew she would never come across anyone like him in Aubervilliers.
Oliver Barrett wasn’t the kind of man Yamina and Brahim had in mind to sit on the hard Moroccan-style sofa – or sedari – in their living room.
Oliver Barett wasn’t the kind of man they had in mind for Imane, period.
Whenever she meets a boy, Imane carries out a little experiment: she pictures him sitting on one of the sofa benches in her mother’s living room. She calls this ‘the sedari test’ and the results are striking, with, at present, a failure rate of 99.9 per cent. No boy belongs there.
What on earth would an Oliver Barrett do on the Taleb family sedari? What of interest could he possibly have to say to Yamina? How could he even hope to impress Brahim?
The sedari test is ruthless.
COMMUNE OF ARBOUZE
PROVINCE OF MSIRDA FOUAGA
ALGERIA, 1964
It proves to be Yamina’s single act of disobedience. Until this point, the shy and biddable daughter has never caused her parents any worries. Having been a child of war and exile, she now endures poverty, hunger and unprovoked hidings.
At fifteen, she is used to swallowing the bitter aftertaste of revolution without complaining.
Yamina has barely recovered from the cholera outbreak among the village families a few weeks earlier. She looks like a forlorn skeleton. All you notice are the vast honeycoloured eyes that still light up her furrowed face.
On this day, the woman they call the old mother is doing the rounds of the villages in the commune, to tattoo the young girls. Rahma has worn a tattoo on her brow and chin since she was thirteen, and it’s time for her daughter to be marked in turn. This tribal legacy has been passed down through the female line for centuries, from generation to generation, and symbolises membership of the tribe. In the Berber tradition, tattooing also marks a rite of passage, from childhood to adulthood.
But wasn’t Yamina born directly into adulthood? Didn’t the war deprive her of being a child? Has she not already been marked?
Her mother has asked her to prepare the bread for the tattoo woman. Resigned to her fate, Yamina drags her skinny frame out to the yard, readying herself for what lies ahead. She pictures the old mother nicking her skin by drawing a motif, probably the same as Rahma’s: a line between the eyebrows with tiny diagonal markings on either side, representing the palm leaf, which embodies the mother protectress.
She mustn’t move, of course, or cry out, or even whimper. She must be strong. Same as always.
Yamina will feel the warm blood running over her eyebrows before it trickles down her perfect nose. She imagines the tattooist rubbing her charcoal-coated fingers into the gashes, and already she can sense her face flaring up.
According to the women’s tales, you are changed afterwards, you belong to your people’s history, and, above all, you are protected. They say the custom has a magical purpose: when the blood has run, the bad luck is over.
In her heart, Yamina doesn’t believe in this nonsense.
If it were so, then why hadn’t all these tattooed faces, all these patterns, all these motifs on the women’s scratched countenances prevented their bad luck?
You might think the opposite was the case. You might say it was because of their superstitions that they attracted bad luck.
The scorching heat makes her head spin and this time, instead of fetching the semolina from the cloth sack as planned, instead of kneading the dough, instead of lighting the wood in the clay oven, Yamina, in a flash of madness, leaves the mechta by the back door and takes flight.
She shrugs off her apron, raises up the hem of her dress and runs full pelt down the slopes, without once looking back. She won’t accept the tattoo, she refuses to be marked for life, she has made up her mind, this tradition will stop at her.
Yamina wishes to keep her face intact, just as God made it.
For the first time in her life, she is deliberately disobeying orders. She understands that spurning this custom will cost her dearly, but she still she runs.
Flat out, rushing over rocky craters, covering perhaps ten kilometres towards the south before she is pulled up short by her body: skin and bone, devoid of strength, no longer her ally.
Yamina’s legs are trembling, she can barely stand up. So she crouches, breathless, and weeps, there, on the dry ground, releasing a long sob that has been held prisoner in her throat for months, perhaps for years.
She knows her mother’s fury will come crashing down on her head, and her father, returning from the stables where he cleans the horses’ hooves all day long for a few coins, will punish her for this affront, for the shame she will have brought upon their household and the whole family, in choosing to run away.
She is afraid.
Yamina wipes away her spittle using the back of her gandoura and scrabbles to her feet. ‘We’ve been through worse than this,’ she mutters, using the word with which she urges herself to carry on: ‘Nodhi!’
She catches her breath and begins to walk slowly, gazing at the sun nearing its zenith.
The old mother has probably gone on her way by now. Yamina braces herself for her punishment, which she will need to brave with her head held high. She recalls her heroine, Djamila Bouhired. How she laughed in the face of the military tribunal of the French colonial regime when her death sentence was announced. Rebellious laughter in the face of injustice.
If only Yamina had sprung from the womb of this woman; if Djamila had been her mother, then she wouldn’t have had to flee. Djamila cherished freedom too highly; she would never have inflicted this on her daughter, never have forced her to get her forehead tattooed.
Yamina’s forehead belongs to her alone, it represents her personal liberation front, her struggle, the first one.
And she will win, even if it means receiving a thrashing and wetting herself under her father’s blows.
Yamina’s forehead will be free: her personal liberation front will remain intact until the grave.
CHEMIN DES VIGNES, COMMUNE OF BOBIGNY
DEPARTMENT OF SEINE-SAINT-DENIS (93300)
FRANCE, 2019
It’s been a long night.
Omar has neckache and can’t check the wing mirrors without wincing.
This evening, he picked up a passenger at Montparnasse station and dropped her off at Romainville. He wished the trip could have lasted until dawn. You could even say they got to know one another a little, since they didn’t just chat about the weather, or the traffic, or the Gilets Jaunes protests. No, it was more than that.
Omar hopes she hasn’t noticed his bald patch, because he didn’t have time to shave his head. Unfortunately, when his hair starts growing back, it does so anarchically, tracing a pattern as uneven as the creeks around l’île du Frioul in Marseille. Omar spent his holidays there last year, with the Barcelona FC beach towel he bought back in the bled in 2012, at Tlemcen. The vendor was also called Omar, as he recalls, a friendly guy, skinny, shamelessly exhibiting a thatch of chest curls through his open shirt.
The passenger introduced herself spontaneously, which was handy, because Omar was intimidated, and felt it would have been overstepping the mark to ask for her name…
Nadia, that’s what she’s called. Her eyes, with their heavy lids, are so black you can barely see the contour of her pupils. She has perfect eyebrows, rounded cheeks and nothing that escapes her lips is surplus, not a word out of place. Omar feels a warm tingling in his chest every time she laughs. This has never happened before. He’s never found a girl so special.
Despite her outgoing nature, it’s unusual for Nadia to engage taxi drivers in conversation. They tend to be interested in the sound of their own voices, relying on ready-made expressions pinched from Radio Monte Carlo talk shows.
What’s attractive about this guy is he doesn’t realise it.
Nadia instantly finds his shyness touching, as she does his habit of lowering his head and scrunching his eyes when he smiles. She is moved by his voice, not to mention his forearms and hands, which is all she can see from the back seat.
He’s ten times better IRL than in his photo, she reckons, glancing at his driver profile. He’s no fool, he looks cultured and intelligent.
‘So how come you’re a taxi driver?’ Nadia asks Omar – whose name she’s read on the app – sensing his rightful place isn’t behind the steering wheel.
‘I’m just doing this short term.’
He puts on his hazard lights when they reach rue Gabriel Husson, where the thoroughfare narrows due to the roadworks. The cranes rise up like limbless monsters over Romainville. Omar helps Nadia get her suitcase out of the boot, wishing her a pleasant evening and all the best. He hesitates briefly, conscious of his heart pounding in his chest, and then with no idea how he plucks up the courage. It’s a rare event, given that Omar isn’t courageous by nature.
‘Maybe I’m out of line,’ he says, looking into Nadia’s dark eyes, ‘but I’d like us to stay in touch.’
She smiles. ‘Fine,’ she says, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
She gives him her Facebook name and they part.
Omar’s going to have to get his arse into gear and create a Facebook profile. He hasn’t needed one before this evening.
He thinks about Nadia before he drifts off to sleep and the following morning, too, on waking. Before long, he’s wondering whether she was just being polite: why would a girl like her be interested in a boy like him? Omar’s old complexes rise to the surface, like a corpse chucked into the water by an assassin in a rush. She probably didn’t dare say no, they’d spent a nice moment together and she didn’t want to embarrass him afterwards. She’s a well brought up girl.
Pity, Maman would’ve liked her, he can’t help reflecting, much as it bugs him to be thinking this way so early on.
And Omar is on the nose, Nadia is just the kind of girl to win Yamina’s approval, despite the fact that she isn’t blonde, her skin isn’t very white and she doesn’t have blue eyes.
As a romantically inclined boy hampered by an excess of shyness, Omar has always struggled to find his way in the world.
His speciality is to be the best friend. The confidant who can be counted on, and who becomes desexualised in the process.
It’s always been like this, at least since the lycée where he would fall in love with a girl, too fast, often for no obvious reason. All it took was for her to be nice to him, to smile or look him in the eye and that was it, bam. Omar Taleb had a stunning talent for falling in love.
He maintained the friendship in the hope that it would head in a new direction, over time, but the new direction turned out to be full-on fiasco.
The girl ended up seeking his advice about how she should approach another boy, who was frequently more attractive, more butch or more mysterious. Long story short, he was bound to possess some attribute Omar lacked.
The girl invariably fell for a jerk who was into her body, which hadn’t even fully matured, and which he, the jerk, could as easily trade for another body. The kind of guy who didn’t care about her, or her feelings. No, it was all about the body, end of, the same body Omar hardly dared glance at, because by the age of seventeen he possessed an overdeveloped sense of prudishness, and, nice boy that he was, Omar listened to the girl and encouraged her, without revealing his own feelings. He didn’t want to hurt her, so he didn’t tell her which way it was heading, even though it was clear it was going to the wall. Oh yes, he knew this story’s ending off by heart. And he was never wrong. Once the boy had cheated on her, given her a rough ride and jilted her, the girl was back to cry on Omar’s reassuring chest as a friend and, nice boy that he was, he consoled her without trying to take advantage of the situation. He knew the right words. It has always been his job to mend broken hearts, so much so he’s forgotten about his own, heart that is. When the girl says: ‘You’re so kind, Omar, you’re a true friend,’ Omar makes do.
He’s out of sync.
An Arab who doesn’t conform to the world’s expectations of him: as in, becoming a dominant, physical, butch, conquering, testosterone-fuelled man who is also untrustworthy, and even, where possible, dangerous.
