Here in the Panier neighborhood, everyone knows everyone, more or less. It’s not the same in the rest of the city, where there are those streams of men and women flowing along the avenues, creating that great din of shoes and motors. Here in the Panier, the streets are short; they twist and open into other streets, alleyways, stairways, and it’s more like a big apartment with halls and rooms that fit together. Yet except for the big dog, Dib or Hib, and a few children whose names she doesn’t know, most people don’t even seem to see her. Lalla slips along without making a sound, going from one street to another, she follows the path of the sun and the light.
Maybe the people here are afraid? Afraid of what? It’s hard to say; it’s as if they feel they are being watched, and they have to be careful about everything they do and say. But no one is really watching them. So maybe it comes from the fact that they speak so many diVerent languages? There are the people from North Africa, the Magrhebis, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Mauritanians, and then people from Africa, the Senegalese, the Malians, the Dahomeyans, and also the Jews, who come from all over, but never really speak the language of their country; there are the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Italians, and also the odd people, who don’t resemble the others, the Yugoslavians, the Turks, the Armenians, the Lithuanians; Lalla doesn’t know what those names mean, but that’s what everyone here calls them, and Aamma is quite familiar with all of those names. Most of all, there are the gypsies, like the ones who live in the house next door, so many of them you never know whether you’ve already seen them, or if they’ve just arrived; they don’t like Arabs, or Spaniards, or Yugoslavians; they don’t like anyone, because they’re not used to living in a place like the Panier, so they’re always ready to get into a fight, even the little boys, even the women, who, according to what Aamma says, carry razor blades in their mouths. Sometimes, at night, you’re awakened by the sound of a battle in the alleyways. Lalla goes down the stairs to the street and, in the pale light of the streetlamp, sees a man crawling on the ground holding a knife stuck in his chest. The next day, there is a long gooey streak on the ground that the flies come buzzing around.
Sometimes people from the police come too; they stop their big black cars at the bottom of the stairways and go into the houses, especially those where the Arabs and the gypsies live. There are policemen with uniforms and caps, but those aren’t the ones who are the most dangerous; it’s the others, the ones who are dressed like everyone else, gray suits and turtleneck sweaters. They knock on the doors very hard, because you have to open up right away, and they go into the apartments without saying anything, to see who’s living there. At Aamma’s, the policeman goes and sits on the vinyl sofa that Lalla uses as a bed, and she thinks he’s going to make it sag and that tonight when she goes to bed the mark where the fat man sat down will still be there.
“Name? First name? Tribal name? Resident card? Work permit? Name of employer? Social security number? Lease, rent receipt?”
He doesn’t even look at the papers Aamma gives him one after the other. He’s sitting on the sofa, smoking a Gauloise, looking bored. He does look at Lalla though, who is standing at attention in front of the door to Aamma’s room. He says to Aamma, “Is she your daughter?”
“No, she’s my niece,” Aamma says.
He takes all of the papers and examines them.
“Where are her parents?”
“They’re dead.”
“Ah,” says the policeman. He looks at the papers as if he were thinking something over.
“Does she work?”
“No, not yet, sir,” says Aamma; she says “sir” when she’s afraid.
“But she’s going to work here?”
“Yes, sir, if she finds work. It’s not easy for a young girl to find work.”
“She’s seventeen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You must be careful, there are a lot of dangers here for a young seventeen-year-old girl.”
Aamma doesn’t say anything. The policeman thinks she hasn’t understood and insists. He talks slowly, carefully articulating each word, and his eyes are shining as if he were more interested now.
“Be careful your daughter doesn’t end up in Rue du Poids de la Farine, eh? There are lots of them over there, girls just like her, you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” says Aamma. She doesn’t dare repeat that Lalla isn’t her daughter.
But the policeman feels Lalla’s cold eyes on him, and it makes him feel uneasy. He says nothing more for several seconds, and the silence becomes unbearable. So then, in an outburst, the fat man starts over again with a furious voice, eyes squinted in anger.
“‘Yes, I know, yes,’ that’s what you say, and then one day your daughter will be on the sidewalk, a whore at ten francs a pass, so then you’d better not come crying to me and say you didn’t know, because I warned you.”
He’s almost screaming, the veins in his temples are bulging. Aamma stands still, paralyzed, but Lalla isn’t afraid of the fat man. She looks at him coldly, walks up to him and simply says,
“Go away.”
The policeman looks at her stunned, as if she’d insulted him. He’s going to open his mouth, he’s going to get up, maybe he’s going to slap Lalla. But the young girl’s stare is hard as steel, hard to hold. So the policeman suddenly stands up and is out of the apartment in an instant, rushing down the stairs. Lalla hears the door to the street slam shut. He’s gone.
Aamma is crying now, holding her head between her hands, sitting on the sofa. Lalla goes over to her, puts her arms around her shoulders, kisses her cheek to comfort her.
“Maybe I should leave here,” Lalla says softly, as one would speak to a child. “It might be best if I left.”
“No, no,” says Aamma, and cries even harder.
At night, when everything around her is asleep, when there’s nothing but the sound of the wind on the zinc valleys of the roofs, and the water dripping somewhere into a gutter, Lalla lies on the sofa, eyes open in the half-light. She thinks about the house back there in the Project, so far away, when the cold night wind came. She thinks that she would like to push open the door and be outside right away, like before, engulfed in the deep night with thousands of stars. She would feel the hard, icy earth under her bare feet. She would hear the cracking sounds of the cold, the cries of the nighthawks, the owl hooting and the wild dogs barking. She thinks she would walk like that, alone in the night, until she reached the rocky hills, with the song of crickets all around her, or else out along the path in the dunes, guided by the breath of the ocean.
She searches the darkness as hard as she can, as if her eyes could open up the sky again, make the invisible shapes appear again, the outline of the sheet metal and tarpaper roofs, the walls of planks and cardboard, the crest of the hills, and all of the people, Naman, the girls at the fountain, the Soussi, Aamma’s sons, and most of all, him — the Hartani, just as he’d been, motionless in the desert heat, standing on one leg, his body and face covered, without a word, without a sign of anger or fatigue, motionless before her as if he were awaiting death, while the men from the Red Cross came to get her and take her away. She also wants to see the one she used to call al-Ser, the Secret, the one whose gaze came from afar and enveloped her, penetrated her like sunlight.