He stopped; he had never revealed his worries at such length, but his wife’s brother was also his best friend; with him he was moved to speak up and thus confess his fears, especially relating to his son, things he usually did not even reveal to himself, or to his wife …
The mother stood bolt upright and left the room, left the two men alone; she went into the little bathroom, washed her face with great splashes of cold water, looked at her features — those of a woman who had just turned forty. Her face in the mirror became stiff, with a sort of gasp her cheeks tightened: she would not cry, she had decided. Comfort her husband before herself! As for her unspeakable anguish, she usually chased it away by talking endlessly with a few old women. The cleaning woman would come every Monday to do the laundry, and there were one or two other women in the market who sold herbs or eggs — in short, she would talk about it with anybody who told her she was lucky that her son was far away (of course he was her only son, “the apple of her eye,” “the promise of her future,” and so on) in France or somewhere else, but not here, left to the risks of retaliation, searches, interrogation, or … After listening to the whispers of the vendors or the washerwoman’s murmurs every Monday, the mother would breathe deeply and feel almost lucky. She would think that someday, returning to the city of her childhood, she would do what her old mother had done before her. She would go to the sanctuary near the sea, take tallow and wax candles, hard-boiled eggs and brioches for the poor, and give thanks to the dead saint. She would beg for blessings — you had to pay for them of course — from the heirs of this saint, and she would do this without breathing a word of it to her husband, who would be annoyed at her rituals!
Leaving the bathroom, she calmed herself, momentarily persuading herself that she would have the luck in this endless war to remain a mother. After all she had only one son, which was rather rare here, God would be kind to her …
Over three months with no news, the banality of days, the banality of fate!
She took the occasion of the end of Ramadan — also the fact that their daughter, their youngest, who was thirteen, had a holiday from school — to ask if she could go and spend the whole day in their city, in Caesarea.
They had barely arrived, but after dinner she and her sister-in-law excused themselves to visit an aunt who was very ill. They did, in fact, pay her a quick visit, then on their return (as they had planned from the start) they trotted along in their silk veils, each wearing the little stiff veil of embroidered organza across the bridge of her nose, leaving only two large eyes visible. Half anonymously, they thus visited the woman who was a seer and who, ever since her recent pilgrimage to Mecca, no longer sold magic potions or read the cards but lived on alms and her savings, which became more and more depleted by her devotions: Lla Rkia. All the matrons of the city knew her name.
As soon as the mother arrived that morning, she had confided in her sister-in-law, “If this silence from Salim continues, I won’t be able to exist without showing anything, I won’t be able to put on a strong face for my husband and my little daughter, for …” and her voice fell.
“You and I will go to see Lla Rkia. Her visions are often of comfort … Still, she has to agree to it. Now that she has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and is a hadja, it is not certain that she will! Maybe for our family.”
After two messages sent via the little girl next door, the woman sent word that she would be expecting both of them at coffee time and that she was doing this “only to give thanks to God and his Prophet!” The sister-in-law had explained that this was the expression she used to let them know in advance that she would not accept any money because of remaining faithful to her vow. Nothing, however, prevented their being armed in advance with some special present, perfume from Paris or a silk scarf … So now they were walking along the low wall separating the old, antique theater and its ruins from the high road; they came to the little house tucked back into a dark corner.
The mother tapped on the carved iron “hand of Fatima.” They went in and crossed a patio that was small but dazzling with an almost purple light that seemed to flow from a heavenly fountain … Blinking still, her veil slipping off her hair, the mother quickly removed her face veil and bent over the venerable woman seated on a deep divan awaiting them. After the kisses and customary compliments the mother stood close to her sister-in-law and waited, her heart in a tumult.
It was the sister-in-law who spoke about Salim, almost calmly, in her soft, almost dreamy voice, as if he were there, as if in a second he would enter this room, bend down because he was too tall, half smile his sidelong smile … The mother, listening, accepted this nearby and not completely unreal presence.
Silence. The servant had just had a kanoun full of burning coals brought in without the mother noticing, and then slipped away. The silence stretched on but seemed translucent. In the shadows of the small, cool room, the mother saw the mask of Lla Rkia, her tawny scarf with black fringes. Beneath her half-lowered eyes, beneath her long, thin, arrogant nose, her thin, almost completely erased lips were murmuring in this no longer total silence: The old woman was uttering scattered, disconnected scraps of sura. Finally, they could hear the language of the Koran as if it were pouring from the mouth of a woman half dead: this time the mother waited without emotion. The sorceress swiftly threw a powder, or some herbs or a little sac of medicine, into the kanoun without having it brought closer to her. All at once whitish, then almost green smoke rose up, and for a moment the acrid smell made the two visitors cough. Inscrutable, the old woman waited, then when the smoke had dissipated and the women were calm, she asked in a haughty voice, “What month was he born, your prince?”
The mother hesitated and then said, “In the month of Rdjeb. The twenty-seventh, I believe.”
Once again, the fear in her causing panic (her wind a storm inside her). She hunched over, bent her head over her breast, tried to find the breath left hanging; finally she thought that she herself might say the beginning of a sura, the one everyone said, the fatiha. She repeated the first lines two or three times and regained her calm. She watched the lips of the soothsayer, whose eyelids were lowered in concentration.
The silence settled in the room. The sister-in-law seemed invisible, or dead. You could not even hear her breath, thought the mother, who was patient now and confident. If Salim knew, she said to herself, he would surely make fun of her! But if he saw her now, full of confidence, he would smile at her indulgently. Imagining this, this sort of tacit affection for her that he had expressed ever since puberty, was a comfort to her.
The old woman coughed. Then she began:
“Do not worry about the youth! The protection of Sid el-Berkani,”—the mother was grateful that she had not forgotten the hallowed ancestor up in the nearby mountains—“is upon him.”
She went on, speaking more softly, as if the vision were written down already and she only said what was there: “Do not worry about him. He will have a destiny … one greater than his father’s!” she finished off pompously.
The sister-in-law gently put her hand on the arm of her companion, who had started unknowingly.
After a sigh, almost a death rattle, the voice of Lla Rkia said loudly in triumphant tones, “I see him … I see him …” She hesitated then: “I see him walking on the road to Verdun!”