Aided by Malika — who was just thirteen but a hard worker, silent and energetic — Lla Fatima coped with it all. She decided that she would even call a doctor — yes, the French doctor, why not: she was the first Arab “lady” in the city who dared do so. The physician, a gruff man of fifty who could speak a few words of the local dialect, came to the house, curtly sounded “the hand of Fatima” at the heavy door, crossed the patio, went into the first room, where the son had lain, almost unconscious, for three days. He listened to his chest, wrote out a prescription, then asked to see the daughters who were ill. He spent more time over Chérifa, who smiled at him sadly (it was only at that moment that her mother became aware of how thin the adolescent had become: she never complained, she was sweet and passive in her illness, her narrow eyes looking at you from far away, so far away, and always this smile! …). Bahia, the baby, also seemed to worry the Frenchman. Without consultation he administered some lotions he carried in his heavy satchel; he wrote out a second prescription and said he would come back in two days’ time.
While he was washing his hands and wrists — Malika poured the water for him from a ewer by the edge of the well — he remarked that he was an object of curiosity for the anonymous women watching from the neighboring terraces. He did not even smile: Fatima’s children were on his mind, and Fatima understood this and was grateful for it. So a Frenchman could be her ally. She gave him her sincere blessings in thanks and asked how to “pay him”; he answered briefly in Arabic: “Afterward,” and he left.
This created a small revolution in the city. The old families took note of the fact that Lla Fatima (who was nonetheless descended, both through her father and through her two last husbands, from the men who had formerly resisted the occupying forces) had not thought twice about having her children treated “in France.”
Hassan, moreover, was the first to get well, and it seemed to his mother that the first noose had been untied. Bahia was still lethargic and hardly spoke at all. She hardly ever left the bedside of Chérifa, whom she adored, in whose arms she had loved to fall asleep so often — Chérifa, who did not get well.
Lamentations of women … The little girl crouched at the head of the young dead woman.
The little girl sits dry-eyed before the crowd of women in white all seated in a circle around Chérifa, swallowed up beneath the shroud, only her face still visible, pale, a mask. The little girl who is looking at it does not speak, will not speak, not tomorrow, nor still at the end of the week.
The kinswomen are touched; one of them comes and tries to take hold of Bahia, to make her sit on her knees: “A six-year-old child, in state like that at the head of a dead woman!” “Beware of the evil eye!” warns another, and the third: “Chérifa, may God have mercy on her, was in fact like a mother to her youngest sister! As if she had a premonition, poor girl, that she would never have children, that she would die first!” “Orphaned by her sister, that is the most awful thing!” moaned another, a woman they did not know. She was from the capital, recently married, and her beauty was a little wild, which made her somewhat feared and respected by her sisters-in-law.
“The loss of the sister, awful?” exclaimed an old woman with an inquisitive look. “It is the mother, when one loses a mother, that leaves you with an open wound!”
“I am sure,” continued the stranger (they called her this because she did not speak her dialect with a Caesarean accent), “that losing a sister is the worst!” Then, without getting up, she recited in a louder voice and in learned language:
“O my other self, my shadow, my one so like me,
You are gone, you have deserted me, left me arable,
Your pain, a plowshare, turned me over and seeded me with tears.”
At these last words, rhyming in ancient Arabic, a woman suddenly shrieked. She stood up, tall and thin; she tore her scarf with one hand, and the fingers of her other opened to tear slowly at her left cheek.
The poet crouched there and was silent; Bahia stood up, her mouth gaping and her eyes growing larger at the sight of the bloody face of the weeping woman. Another woman gently tried to draw the little girl to her. The one who screamed just that once now was casually wiping her cheek, then suddenly she had something like a spasm, her torso shaken as if with a sort of laughter. To everyone’s astonishment, she cried out: the strange language that most of these city-women did not understand or that they had forgotten and greeted now as the improvisation went on by making faces that showed their embarrassment mixed with condescension. The Berber language ran rapidly on as if pawing the ground, stamping, as one woman whispered to another, “That is the dead girl’s cousin who has come down from the zaouia; she often improvises like this in their mountain language!”
So the cousin, her cheek dry now, with just the pink traces of scratches showing, beat out:
“Seg gwasmi yebda useggwas
Wer nezhi yiggwas!”
And she cried out the last two lines in a more piercing voice:
“Meqqwer lhebs iy inyan
Ans’ara el ferreg felli!”
And Malika, the dead girl’s sister, who did not weep but remained standing, motionless, near the doorway, then said in her metallic voice,
“Oh bless you, my uncle’s daughter, come so far to share our grief!”
Then, speaking to the women who had apparently not liked hearing this “mountain” speech, she went on, “For those of you who do not understand the language of our ancestors, this is what my uncle’s daughter has said; this is what she sang for my sister, who is not forgotten.”
Malika stepped out into the middle of the crowd of white veils before she continued, to make sure that her mother, Lla Fatima, was not there. But Lla Fatima still lay unconscious as she had since morning, driven almost mad after spending a long time in trances, carried away by despair. Finally Malika translated for the city-women who only cared to understand in the dialect of the city:
“Since the first day of the year
We have not had one single day of celebration!”
… … … … … … … … … … …
“So vast the prison crushing me
Release, where will you come from?”
At these words, little Bahia, who had stood up, went back to the dead girl and sat down by her head all alone, absolutely determined to stay there, since the men who would carry the funerary board had not yet come …
Bahia, motionless. And even when some kinswoman sprinkled her forehead or her hands with eau de cologne, it was like blessing someone not there. Deep inside, Bahia, mute, face dry, repeated to herself the Berber lament of the cousin who tore her face …
“So vast the prison,” “Meqqwer lhebs.” Two or three words, sometimes in Arabic and sometimes in Berber, were singing inside her, slowly, a sort of rough march, jolting, but also calming — which made it possible for her to watch peacefully as Chérifa, with her face suddenly enwrapped in the swallowing shroud, was carried away.
In the days that followed and then the weeks, then the months and seasons, one after the other, Bahia did not speak. Did not smile. Did not sing.
This is how she lived, cool and calm, but how could they know whether she was in pain or indifferent? Until she was seven.