Of my mother as a little girl? She never spoke of this day from her early childhood when she entered the first house in Caesarea. Does she even remember it? She probably does not want to, why recall the sharpness of the separation? The country house they had left behind whose many low rooms were painted in purplish-blue whitewash every spring, that had two yards and a row of fig trees and, in the middle, two very majestic zen oaks. There were children scattered everywhere. A separation from laughter and the vast horizon … Without transition there they were living in town, in a high building with imposing walls; at the bottom one huge, bleak bedroom into which they all squeezed. The mother is endlesly conferring. To begin with, she is given some advice by an old cleric connected with the family. Soon afterward she sells all her jewels to buy an old house a little higher up and not far from the walls, still in the Arab quarter. Consequently Lla Fatima will be almost Amna’s neighbor, in the neighborhood of her former home where Soliman lived. His daughters, moreover, who are older now, some of them already grandmothers, come to visit her and congratulate her on her move: She is the model of feminine decisiveness and intelligence. They call her aunt or amti, that is, “paternal aunt.” Out of respect.
Lla Fatima, finally in her own home, surrounded by her son — who attends the French school — and her three daughters, begins her new life. She is not yet forty.
Little Bahia, a little more than two, almost three now, explores the new place: four deep rooms, the patio with just one tree, an orange tree (with the bitter oranges so much sought after for preserves) spreading its low, dense foliage. Way in the back is the edge of a well and right next to it a staircase leading to a broad, low terrace from which there is a view of the mountainous slopes of the southern part of the city.
Bahia squats all alone in the back near the edge of the well. When they call her, she runs away; she climbs the staircase and makes a place for herself on the terrace with her cat, in a hidden corner where she has put down a mat. She stretches out, contemplates the mountain: she can hear noise from the nearby houses, smell the coffee roasting or the paprika cooking, hear the scattered voices of the gossips shouting, laughing. One voice of an unknown woman, in the evening, just before the prayer at sunset, sings, naked and alone, always singing the same lament …
Lying there on her back, Bahia fills her eyes with the blue of the sky and dreams: She would like to be far from the city. (Below, in the reception hall, the endless stream of ladies still comes to congratulate Lla Fatima.) She imagines herself at her father’s house at the zaouia of the Beni Menacers.
Bahia’s father is the man Lla Fatima has left. One afternoon a week he comes. One hour after the Friday public prayer he knocks at the front door. The meal awaits him; he comes in. Afterward he shuts himself up with his wife in her room.
When Hassan, Lla Fatima’s son, returns from school to discover that “the other man,” the one not his father, is trying to bring Lla Fatima back to her senses (or submission?), he climbs up to the terrace, where he finds little Bahia. To calm his displeasure, he says mockingly, “You, why don’t you go with your father? That’s your father, isn’t it?”
“That’s my father!” answers the child.
“Go do it! When he comes out, go and tell him to take you!”
Bahia would like that. She would like to take her father’s hand when he crosses the patio, she would like him to call her joyfully in his clear, musical voice, she would like to stay with him … She bursts out crying; she weeps in silence, but how could she defy the big brother?
A fifteen-year-old girl appears; her long hair is light brown and her somewhat wide-set eyes are the color of honey. Catching them in this childish conversation, she scolds Hassan roundly: “Why are you jealous of her? And what will she do without us?”
Bahia takes refuge in the skirts of her favorite sister, Chérifa. She cries even harder, this time for the pleasure of being comforted, of wallowing in Chérifa’s sweetness, her warm voice, her almost motherly caresses.
The brother shrugs his shoulders, implying that he knows what is going on.
“You think I don’t know! Mma brought us all down here so she can hang on to her wealth. Her wealth comes from my father. And that man there,” he says, waving angrily toward the couple’s room, “was the one profiting from it up to now!”
“You’re not even ten years old and you’re already looking after grown people’s business!” Chérifa says sarcastically, finished now with consoling the little girl.
“What kind of authority will my brother have over me and my sisters and my mother when my Lord Brother”—she says it in Arabic, “Sidi Khouya”—“is a grown man!” Chérifa, jaunty and teasing, bursts into laughter.
Even now, three-quarters of a century later, I, Isma, the narrator, the descendant through the youngest daughter, do not know if Lla Fatima (“mamané”) loved her two successive husbands afterward, or one rather than the other, or one more than the other … Surely I am the only one who wonders about dead people this way!
“The two mountain husbands,” I call them for short. The mountain is the Dahra — etymologically the mountain of the “back” or “that turns its back” on the city of Caesar. Despite the way it looks, in these ravines at the beginning of this century called by some “the colonial night,” right in with these rocks and eroded slopes, at the bottom of half-dried-up wadis, some rebellious individuals hung on and kept alive and resisted. They felt they were still “aristocrats”; even though all that remained of their property was dust, still there was a dark deposit springing inside them, the memory of former battles (against the Turks in the old days, against the French yesterday).
Was it for this oxygen that Fatima, widowed at seventeen, furrowed with pride and sensing the acrid taste of freedom, left the city and went back up into the mountains? She raised her little girl, Khadidja, alone for several years and only returned to Caesarea once a year for the great feast of Abraham, to show her first child to the crowd of half brothers and half sisters. Was it for this air?
When Khadidja is six, Fatima, taking the advice of her father the mokkadem, agrees to marry an honorable suitor from the region: Si Larbi, one of the descendants of another saint, twenty or so miles from here, on the slope that faces Miliana. This saint’s religious reputation is greater than Saint Ahmed or Abdallah’s.
Si Larbi is not young, but he is still not an old man. He is “in the prime of life,” or at least that is how Ferhani describes him to Fatima through his wife Amna, “the Golden Woman.” In the spring Amna goes up to the zaouia for a few days. She sees Fatima, at twenty-four, acting as mistress of the house for the entire little community: servants, dependent families, tenants … Fatima, first one up at four in the morning, taking care of the animals in the darkness first then awakening the little shepherds and farm girls. Not stopping there, smiling, sturdy and radiant, taking hardly any rest when it is time for the siesta and then receiving the usual women come to visit; they will bring her the detailed chronicle that makes its way through the valleys, from the hills and tiny hamlets. On the other hand, she will listen somewhat absentmindedly to the news Amna brings from the city: the scattering of Soliman’s family, the weddings, the funerals, the newly wealthy …