“Do you speak her language?”
“I don’t know,” says Lalla.
Lalla says a few words in Chleuh, and the young woman looks at her for a minute and then answers.
“Tell her that her papers aren’t in order, the authorization for the baby is missing.”
Lalla tries to translate the sentence. She thinks the young woman hasn’t understood, then all of a sudden she collapses and begins to weep. The policeman says a few more words, and the interpreter from the International Red Cross lifts the young woman to her feet as well as he can and guides her over to the back of the room, where there are two or three imitation leather armchairs.
Lalla is sad because she realizes that the young woman will have to take the boat back in the opposite direction with her sick baby. But she is too weary herself to think about it much, and she goes back to lean up against the wall next to her suitcase. At the other end of the room, high up on the wall, there is a clock with numbers inscribed on rotating flaps. Each minute, a flap turns with a sharp click. The people in the room aren’t talking anymore. They’re waiting, sitting on the floor, or standing against the wall, eyes fixed, faces tense, as if with each click, the door in the back is going to open and let them go.
Finally, after such a long time that no one is hoping for anything anymore, the men from the International Red Cross walk across the large room. They open the door in the back and start calling out the names of the children again. The muttering of voices resumes, the people crowd up near the exit. Lalla, carrying her cardboard suitcase, cranes out her neck to see over the heads of the others; she is so impatient for her name to be called that her legs begin to tremble. When the man from the Red Cross says her name, he sort of barks it out, and Lalla doesn’t understand. Then he repeats himself, shouting, “Hawa! Hawa ben Hawa!”
Lalla runs, her suitcase banging around at the end of her arm, and makes her way through the crowd. She stops in front of the door while the man checks her tag, then she leaps out, as if someone had shoved her from behind. There is so much light outside, after all those hours spent in the large gray room, that Lalla staggers, overcome with dizziness. She moves forward through the rows of women and men without seeing them, walks aimlessly straight ahead, until she feels someone taking her by the arm, hugging her, kissing her. Aamma pulls her over toward the exit from the wharves, toward the city.
Aamma lives alone in an apartment in the old town, near the port, on the top floor of a dilapidated house. There’s just a living room with a sofa, a dark bedroom with a folding bed, and a kitchen. The windows of the apartment open onto an inner courtyard, but you can see the sky pretty well above the tile roofs. In the morning, up until noon, there’s even a little sunshine that comes in through the two windows of the room with the sofa. Aamma tells Lalla that she was very lucky to have found the apartment, and also to have found work as a cook at the hospital cafeteria. When she arrived in Marseille, several months ago, she was first housed in a furnished apartment in the outskirts, where there were five women to each room, and the police came by every morning, and there were fights in the street. Two men even had a knife fight, and Aamma had to flee, leaving one of her suitcases behind, because she was afraid of being picked up by the police and deported.
Aamma seems quite happy to see Lalla, after all this time. She doesn’t ask her any questions about what happened when Lalla ran away into the desert with the Hartani and was later taken to the hospital in the city, because she was dying of thirst and fever. The Hartani had continued his journey southward alone, toward the caravans, because that was what he was always meant to do. Aamma has aged a lot in a few months’ time. She has a thin weary face, a gray complexion, and her eyes are ringed with dark circles. In the evening, when she gets home from work, she nibbles on cookies and drinks mint tea while she talks about her journey by car across Spain with other men and women who were going to look for work. They drove along the roads for days, passing through villages, over mountains, rivers. And one day, the driver of the car showed them a city with a lot of identical brick houses, with black roofs. He said, this is it, here we are. Aamma got out of the car along with the others, and, since the entire trip had been paid in advance, they took their belongings and started walking through the streets of the town. But when Aamma showed the envelope with the name and address of Naman’s brother, people started laughing and told her she wasn’t in Marseille, but Paris. So then she had to take the train and travel all night again before she got here.
When Lalla hears that story, it gives her a good laugh, because she can imagine the passengers of the car walking around in the streets of Paris thinking they were in Marseille.
This city is really big. Lalla never thought there could be so many people living in the same place. Ever since she got here, she has been spending her days walking around town, from north to south, and from east to west. She doesn’t know the names of the streets; she doesn’t know where she’s going. At times she walks along the wharves, looking at the silhouettes of the freighters; other times she walks up the main avenues, toward the center of town, or else she follows the labyrinth of narrow streets in the old town, climbs the stairways, going from square to square, from church to church, until she reaches the large esplanade from where you can see the fortified castle overlooking the sea. Or still other times, she’ll go sit on the benches in the parks and watch the pigeons walking round on the dusty paths. There are so many streets, so many houses, stores, windows, cars; it makes your head spin, and the noise and the smell of gasoline fumes are inebriating and give you a headache. Lalla doesn’t speak to anyone. Sometimes she sits on the steps of the churches, well hidden in her brown woolen coat, and watches the passersby. There are men who look at her, then stop on a street corner and pretend to be smoking a cigarette while they keep an eye on her. But Lalla knows how to disappear very quickly, she learned that from the Hartani; she goes across two or three streets, through a store, weaves around the stopped cars, and no one can follow her.
Aamma would like for her to work at the hospital with her, but Lalla is too young; you have to be eighteen. And also, it’s hard to find work.
A few days after she arrived, she went to see Old Naman’s brother, whose name is Asaph, but everyone calls him Joseph. He has a grocery store in Rue des Chapeliers, not far from the police station. He seemed happy to see Lalla, and he hugged her and talked about his brother, but Lalla was wary of him right away. He doesn’t look anything like Naman. He’s small, almost bald, with repulsive, bulging gray-green eyes, and a smile that augurs nothing good. When he learned that Lalla was looking for work, his eyes lit up, and he got nervous. He told Lalla that he just happened to need a young girl to help with the grocery store, putting things away, cleaning, and maybe even being in charge of the cash register. But as he was talking about all that, he was constantly staring at Lalla’s abdomen and breasts with his repulsive watery eyes, so she told him she would come back tomorrow, and left immediately. Since she didn’t go back, he came to Aamma’s place one evening. But Lalla went out as soon as she saw him, and took a long walk through the narrow streets of the old town, making herself as invisible as a shadow, until she was sure the grocer had gone back to his place.
This city is a strange land, with all of these people, because they don’t really pay any attention to you if you don’t show yourself. Lalla learned how to slip silently along the walls, up the stairways. She knows all the places where you can see without being seen, hiding places behind trees, in big parking lots filled with cars, in doorways, in vacant lots. Even in the middle of very straight avenues, where there is a constant flow of cars and people going up, going down, Lalla knows she can become invisible. In the beginning, she still bore the marks of the burning desert sun, and her long, black curly hair was full of sparkling sunshine. So people would look at her in surprise, as if she were from another planet. But now months have gone by, and Lalla has been transformed. She cut her hair short; it is dull, almost gray. In the shadows of the narrow streets, in the damp chill of Aamma’s apartment, Lalla’s skin has grown dull too; it’s become pale and gray. And then there’s the brown coat Aamma found in a Jewish thrift store, near the cathedral. It reaches almost down to her ankles, the sleeves are too long and the shoulders sag, and the best thing is that it’s made out of a sort of wool carpeting, worn and shiny with age, the color of city walls, of old paper; when Lalla puts on her coat, she really feels as if she becomes invisible.