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.
But is it possible for them to come all the way over here, to the other side of the sea, to the other side of everything?
Can they find their way amongst all of those paths, find the gate amongst all of those gates? The darkness is still opaque; the emptiness in the room is immense, so immense that it is swirling around and hollowing out a funnel in front of Lalla’s body, and the dizzy mouth clamps against her and sucks her toward it. She clings to the sofa with all of her might, resists, her body tensed to the breaking point. She would like to shout out, scream, in order to break the silence, throw off the weight of the night. But her tight throat will not let out a single sound, and merely breathing in requires a painful effort, makes a hissing sound like steam. For long minutes, hours maybe, she struggles, her whole body caught up in that spasm. Finally, all of a sudden, as the first light of dawn appears in the courtyard of the building, Lalla feels the whirlwind loosening, leaving her. Her limp shapeless body falls back onto the sofa. She thinks of the child she is carrying, and for the first time feels anxious about having hurt someone who is dependent upon her. She lays her two hands on each side of her belly, until the warmth goes very deep. She cries for a long time, without making a sound, with calm little sobs, like breathing.
THEY’RE PRISONERS of the Panier. Maybe they don’t really realize it. Maybe they think they’ll be able to leave one day, go somewhere else, go back to their villages in the mountains and in the muddy valleys, find the people they left behind, the parents, the children, the friends. But it’s impossible. The narrow streets lined with old decrepit walls, the dark apartments, the cold dank rooms where the gray air weighs down on your chest, the stifling workshops where the girls work in front of their machines making pants and dresses, the hospital rooms, the construction sites, the roads with the deafening detonations of jackhammers, everything is keeping them here, grasping them, holding them prisoner, and they’ll never get free.
Now Lalla has found work. She is a cleaning woman at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, in the first part of the old town, to the north, not far from the main avenue where she met Radicz for the first time. She leaves early every day, before the shops open. She wraps herself up tightly in her brown coat because of the cold, and goes all the way across the old town; she walks through dark narrow streets, up stairways with dirty water trickling down one step at a time. There aren’t many people out, just a few dogs with their hair bristling, looking for something to eat in the piles of garbage. Lalla keeps a piece of old bread in her pocket because they don’t feed her at the hotel; sometimes she shares it with the old black dog, the one they call Dib or Hib. As soon as she arrives, the owner of the hotel gives her a bucket of water and a long-handled scrub brush for her to wash the stairs with, even though they are so dirty that Lalla thinks it’s a waste of time. The owner is a fairly young man, but with a yellow face and swollen eyes as if he didn’t get enough sleep. The Hotel Sainte-Blanche is a run-down, four-story house, with a funeral parlor on the ground floor. The first time Lalla went there, it frightened her and she almost left immediately; it was so dirty, cold, and smelly. But she’s used to it now. It’s like Aamma’s apartment, or like the Panier neighborhood, it’s just a matter of getting used to it. You just have to close your mouth and breathe slowly, in short breaths, to keep that odor from getting inside your body, that odor of poverty, of sickness, and of death that pervades the stairways, the halls, and all the nooks and crannies where the spiders and cockroaches live.
The owner of the hotel is a Greek, or a Turk, Lalla isn’t quite sure. When he’s given her the bucket and the scrub brush, he returns to his room on the first floor, the one with the glass door so he can watch who goes in and out from his bed. The people who live in the hotel are all menial workers, poor, men only. They’re North Africans who work on the construction sites, black men from the Antilles, Spaniards too, who have no family, no home, and who are living there until they find something better. But they get used to it and stay, and often go back to their
