It did not take long for me to determine that they were not sleeping nearby; the window grew bright. A woman’s hand, not my mother’s, a fat, white hand emerged from the sheets, lit the lamp, a different voice, not my mother’s, murmured.
Murmured what? Some question. I must not have understood. But I recognized the French language: I was definitely waking up in the home of foreigners!
I open my eyes, in the lamplight and the gray light of dawn. I look. In the parents’ bed our next-door neighbor — a teacher who is widowed or divorced, I do not know which — is sleeping. And what is more, beside her is her son — stretched out in “our” bed. “Ours,” I thought as if this were the final, irreparable breaking and entering in the night — occupied by the teacher’s son, a boy who was ten or twelve, Maurice. It is only just now his name comes to me intact.
So there they lay in my parents’ place, “them,” the French mother and her son, our neighbors … That night there had been sirens and German bombing in the nearby hills. In this terror the neighbor who was alone had panicked: she had come and knocked on our door. To reassure her, my parents had invited her in and had, quite naturally, given her their room. They made do themselves with a mattress on the floor in the dining room: just everyday Arab hospitality … he was, poor thing, a woman alone.
There, right next to me, as I lay motionless in my bed, a new couple were stretched out: the mother and her son … The boy was sleeping: I only saw his silky light brown hair. The teacher was sitting up in bed. She was wearing a nightgown, her ample bosom, her blond hair loose on her round shoulders, and on her chubby face a smile that was almost a little girl’s, sweet and half surprised, was turned to me. She looked at me, as if asking to be forgiven, then glanced tenderly at her still-sleeping son.
“Maurice,” she began, then she turned back to me, because, probably, I was staring at her fixedly, as if demanding some explanation for this intrusion.
I did not get out of bed. I no longer stared at the neighbor. I felt this boy there right next to me, a boy who in those days must have seemed to me a sort of hero, one close but faraway. For me this was the height of disruption—“he” was in my house, in the most secret part of “my house,” of “our house,” and he kept right on sleeping as if nothing had happened!
That night when the tumult was unable to wake me up completely, that night became one of transmutation. The mother and her boy, the “French,” were of course neighbors on the same floor but also the closest representatives of “the other world” for me; “they,” this couple sprung from the dark and stretched out there in the open for me to see, had taken my parents’ place!
Substitution: I must have spent long minutes thinking it was irrevocable, that my parents had vanished into the wings of the scenery, that this pair of recumbent forms, mother and son, were taking their place. Was I not going to become different all of a sudden? In the slow shifts of this astonishing night was I not going to remain like this: simultaneously in the bedroom of my parents (perhaps they had even chosen different roles themselves, in some other people’s house, in some other French apartment?) and discovering I was in the opposite camp?
No, I would not move from my bed, my only haven. I stayed, open-eyed, frozen. So many years later I am relocating the ineradicable minutes of this awakening, trying to relive inside myself: what did I feel, what made me worry?
The fear that one might have expected from a little three-year-old girl who imagines for an instant that she has lost her parents — this is not a fear I recognize … The excitement of an unknown world, a new mother (the neighbor did of course seem older, more of a “matron” than my mother, who was then scarcely more than twenty), no, that is not familiar either. The nearness of this twelve-year-old boy, however, this boy with whom I would sometimes play in the afternoon in the park and who seemed to me a young man, this unexpected familiarity provided an ambiguity and keen pleasure that I can deal with more readily.
So there I stayed: neither frightened nor particularly excited by the adventure. I relive the awakening. For a few seconds I imagine I am a little Arab girl (myself, my bed, with my silent, gentle grandmother close by) and yet suddenly all decked out with French parents: this widowed (or divorced) lady with her hair down who is casually waking up next to me.
I do not smile. I make no move to get up. Finally my mother appears at the door. The neighbor rises and sincerely begs to be forgiven for her night fears.
I closed my eyes. I did not want to see anybody. I felt I was at the border, but which one? One moment I was going to have a French mother, a “brother” and not “a brother”; her son stretched out close by, in this great big bed into which I liked to leap and curl up between my father and my mother. I closed my eyes. I am sure I must have dreamed that I was going to jump into this big bed again, back in my old Sunday ways, squeeze up next to the “lady,” between her and her son, next to Maurice, between mother and son, who were my parents, speaking French, breathing French … That is the moment I experienced at the age of three.
That was perhaps a year or more before I began school. This waking up, the only one from my early childhood, is still unexpectedly the most vivid. (It is oblique, its mobility establishing its fragile equilibrium.)
What were my games like then? In the courtyard of the apartment building, my voice sings the usual counting rhymes tirelessly, while with the other little girls I throw the ball against a high wall painted white. Then we play hopscotch or on the swings … I don’t wander off into the village; my father set limits on where I can go: the courtyard and the garden in front, never the street.
I think of myself as being happy in the garden to this house, with a sort of inexpressible excitement in my heart … A few trees, lemon trees, and a medlar tree in the midst of weeds; a corner where someone must have grown salad greens … We reach it through a rickety gate whose squeaking made us laugh.
It is only in this garden that I see myself playing with Maurice, the twelve-year-old boy who woke up one morning in my bedroom, next to me.
“Playing” with this boy: the voices of our dialogue have vanished. Of the scenes that come back, there is only one of these two child’s bodies clinging to the tallest lemon tree — Maurice, full of energy, manages to perch on the highest branch. He waves to me to come. His wave suggests that I climb up to where he is.
I stay clinging to the bottom branch. Strangely I refuse; I stay where I am. I am afraid of the contact. As if reaching the same branch, squatting there beside him, seemed to me in some vague way utterly sinful. My heart pounds. I am full of guilt, prickles of anxiety: In just a second my father, I am sure, is going to appear, stand there before the garden gate whose squeak I can already hear. My mother, at the kitchen window, must have watched me from the heights of her lookout post: she would watch powerless the scene in which my father would catch us at something, needless to say, I was doing wrong. I stay on my branch, immobilized. Maurice invites me up again; I can still see his mocking face. Not suspecting anything, not imagining that my fierce refusal could be anything other than a mere lack of physical daring, he insists; then I see him jump all at once into the grass on the ground, sing to himself, climb back up to the highest branch … He was probably sorry that I was not joining in this athletic competition!