I met Annie for the first time in 1995, in Algiers. A friend of my sister’s, she came from Paris and stayed with me for one night. During the evening, as we were getting to know each other, just the two of us, Annie’s story unfurled and flowered in the twilight. Back then, Algiers was still a peaceful capital, although animated by the excitement of new parties forming and recently created newspapers: ‘a new political life’, so people believed.
Annie needed to confide in someone. The next day she was leaving for the east of the country. She told me, simply, in muted tones, of her emotion at being able, at last, to meet Fatima, the little girl she hardly knew. ‘Her’ little girl.
It was an everyday story, doubtless commonplace when two countries meet. A man and a woman fall in love, and part. One of them, often the man but sometimes the woman, forcibly takes the child away, back to ‘their’ country, without consulting the other.
The other is helpless, and so begins a tussle against the worst of windmills – time. Time, which makes the child grow so fast, too fast, far from the sight of the dispossessed parent.
Two countries, France and Algeria, linked for so long by history in a conflict – in a union? – torn by passion, desire, violence. During the twenty or thirty years that followed the painful separation of the two national destinies, a few individuals recreated the union in the private sphere imagining that they were living out their own stories when, actually, an obscure debt was unfolding.
Some Algerian-French or French-Maghrebi marriages turn out to be well-favoured. But Annie, who had met my sister in Paris, where they had both been taking a course in Berber, was not so fortunate. She talked late into that Algiers night about the circumstances of her marriage, ten years earlier.
Newly arrived in Paris, she was a young provincial girl who had left her native Anjou. Her ‘beloved’, Idir, was a builder’s mate, an immigrant of four or five years who lived in a hostel for single foreigners: he worked hard, saved his money to send back to Kabylia and had never approached a European woman.
Annie was the first he dared speak to – by chance, in a record shop where she was listening to a Berber lament that was popular at the time; before buying the record, she had asked what it was about. The assistant called over Idir, a neighbour who was hanging around in the shop – it was a Saturday. Annie listened as he unfolded the words of the lament, smiled at him with her huge, innocent eyes, paid for the record and said goodbye. And returned the following Saturday. Idir was the first man to whom she gave herself. ‘He was so handsome and so kind!’ she recalled.
Very quickly, she married him, despite her father’s misgivings when she introduced her betrothed to her parents in their village.
‘An Arab? Do you trust him?’
‘Father, he speaks Kabyle, not Arabic!’
‘It’s the same thing,’ grumbled her father, who did not, however, stand in their way.
They were happy for two years, despite Idir’s furious jealousy over trifles. Annie generally gave in. She performed her secretarial duties, kept herself to herself, and went home to him. She became as isolated as she had been on her arrival in Paris.
Then she gave birth to a daughter, Fatima. During the following months their relationship was stormy, though with periods of tenderness and harmony. But Idir would fly into a rage for no reason.
‘Probably,’ admitted Annie, ‘he was working too hard. But what annoyed him most was the fact that I continued to go to work, and handed my daughter over to a nanny every morning.’
‘We had six months of continuous rowing,’ she went on. ‘And then one day I asked for a divorce. Initially, we had to separate.’
Annie paused, choked.
With the break-up, the divorce process was set in motion. Annie would raise Fatima, who was six or seven months old: naturally, she agreed to leave her with Idir on Sundays; later, he would have her during the holidays. She had no intention of keeping the girl from her father any more than was reasonable; it was just that Fatima was so little! They would see. That, at least, Annie was sure of: Idir was naturally gentle, and although he had proved to be too difficult as a husband, would certainly remain an affectionate father. Annie did not anticipate that their quarrel would worsen, and she was angry with herself for years afterwards for being so naive at the time.
Because for Idir, the divorce felt like a chasm. He was separated from his wife, of course: he still loved her and said so. But how could he bear being cut off from his daughter? She would grow up, and he would see her only on Sundays? He suddenly discovered, like a swelling abscess, that this was France, a land where fathers could not be all-powerful.
He made up his mind. After spending a couple of Sundays in dejected silence at his father-in-law’s house in the village outside Anjou, he returned a fortnight later in a taxi. He asked the taxi to wait further up the road, on a bend.
He went inside. Annie smiled at him and they exchanged a few words. Annie was changing the baby’s nappy. She scooped up Fatima and held her out to him, her bare bottom white with talc.
‘Wait a second! I’ll go and get some clean nappies and tell Father you’re here!’
Her father would probably insist that Idir eat with them.
She rushed upstairs to the bathroom. The front door, near the kitchen and next to the little living room, was wide open.
On the stairs, Annie spoke to her father and came back down with the nappies. The door was still open, the living room was empty. She ventured out on to the front steps. The taxi was disappearing into the distance.
She called two or three times: ‘Idir!’
Only after an hour did she finally ring her lawyer at home. She asked, still stunned, ‘What should I do?’ She continued to believe that Idir had taken his daughter for a walk, on impulse, ‘just to spend some time alone with her’.
‘With a bare bottom?’ replied her father, adding: ‘You’d do better to phone the police and tell them about the taxi!’
She wasted another hour, agitatedly wandering from room to room, before facing the facts: Idir had kidnapped Fatima.
For ever? No, she did not think so.
She did not sleep that night. In the morning, her lawyer decided to circulate Idir’s description to the border police.
But by then Idir – who had decided to abandon everything: his job, his hostel, his plans – had already boarded the plane for Algiers. His little girl would stay with him for ever, he said to himself. He felt reassured, resolute.
Nine years passed, nearly ten. It was as if Annie was paralysed. She did not join those support groups for French mothers separated, like her, from their children. Except for attending to the divorce, which went through almost automatically, she did nothing except sign the lawyer’s application for Idir to be arrested if he were to come back unexpectedly. Idir never came back. It did not take long for Annie to realize that her husband had turned his back on his entire life in France.
Of course she had the address of the village in Kabylia. But all her letters remained unanswered.
Annie’s emotional life was on ice: all she could do was work, and gain promotion at the office. Then, two years later, a letter arrived at the Anjou village. It was addressed to Annie’s father – the two men had got along fairly well. But the envelope contained so little: a photograph of Fatima, a little girl of almost three, tall, thin and dark-haired, posing among her boy and girl cousins. She was standing, while the others were sitting all around her, like a Princess’s entourage. On the back of the picture was written, in a laborious hand, the words: ‘Fatima is well. Is happy.’
Idir did not sign his name. But he got into the habit of sending, every year on Fatima’s birthday, another photograph, though sometimes these turned out to be blurred or of poor quality. Each time there was a fresh snippet of news – ‘Fatima is going to school’ – and still no signature. The packages were always addressed to the grandfather in Anjou. ‘As if Fatima’s picture could only travel between these two men!’ sighed Annie.
In the years that followed, she noticed without commenting that her daughter was now standing in the midst of younger children, three, then four: her brothers and sisters, of course.
Finally she decided to take advantage of a new Franco-Algerian legal protocol and obtained permission to visit.
What was it that finally made her shake off the helpless paralysis which had afflicted her for so long? My sister, her friend throughout these years, explained it to me over the telephone:
‘You see,’ she said, ‘when Annie told me she was learning Berber so that one day she’d be able to talk to her daughter, it struck me. You know we always talk about relearning the lost “mother tongue” – and for me that’s what Berber is. I want to speak it like my grandmother, because my mother rejected it! But Annie, you see, wants to discover “her daughter’s tongue”.’
She wanted, in other words, to learn a language which was not a question of her roots, but of her future. I could see how this would have made everything inside her spring back into action.
When Annie returned to Algiers a few days later, she told me what had happened. She had arrived in Constantine, and from there she took a coach to a little neighbouring town, and went to the office of the lawyer who was expecting her. She slept at the town’s only hotel, where a room had been booked for her.
In the morning, at the attorney’s office, Idir’s brother arrived, a young man with an open expression and a polite manner. He told her, in impeccable French, that her ex-husband refused to see her, as she had come ‘through official channels’.
He left, and returned one hour later. This time he was accompanied by a girl. She looked older than ten. The two men went out, leaving Annie and Fatima in a sort of visitor’s room.
There was silence between them. Annie’s eyes were wide, her face remained impassive, and her hands extended in a tentative gesture, not even a caress. Fatima stared at her, the little girl’s face long and delicate, her features as if drawn with a brush, and that fiery gaze slowly taking in the stranger.
Fatima spoke first. In, surprise, surprise, a French definitely learned at school, borrowed:
‘What’s your name?’
‘Annie.’
‘Annie,’ repeated Fatima. She then told Annie her own name, pronouncing it not exactly as it had lived for so long in the visitor’s heart: the i was not a French i, but something between an é and an i. Annie would learn that pronunciation later, and get it right.
Fatima continued, hesitantly, or rather sceptically:
‘My father (she said those two words proudly and Annie was pleased), my father doesn’t know that I know. I’ve been told.’
‘What have you been told?’ murmured Annie with a tremor in her voice. She thought how she had prepared, in the crude little hotel, a long sentence of love in Berber for her daughter. How could she say it, get it out, confess? The little girl wanted to reply, her curiosity seemed to be aroused, but she was holding back:
‘What have you been told?’ Annie’s hands reached out to Fatima’s shoulder. The girl did not flinch. She did not recoil.
‘The children at school – the boys say I’ve got a French mother.’ Suddenly, in a clear, incisive tone: ‘Are you the French woman?’
The child did not move: her features were motionless, the brown of her forehead almost bistre, her eyes slightly dark around the edges; she wore a vague expression, feigned indifference or coldness – and Annie, numb, felt herself go weak inside. She said nothing. She contemplated her daughter. Her little girl; no longer so little.
‘Dare I hug her?’ she wondered, ‘Me, the French woman!’ She stretched out her hand, her fingers, wanting to brush Fatima’s cheek. Who did not move. She simply stared fixedly.
Suddenly, Annie said, she took the plunge and spoke at length. A very, very, long sentence, just for Fatima, her daughter, the little girl who had grown up alone and who held herself upright, with that impassive older-woman look wielded like a sword before her. Annie poured out everything in one sentence, her love, her pain, the fact that she only had one little girl, that she would never have any other children …
She probably lost herself in these over-passionate words. Fatima must have suffered it as an avalanche, a torrent, a hail of little stones. There were no caresses, no; or not yet. Annie stopped her story, and then said to me, in a different voice:
‘It’s true, it was suddenly as if I had another voice, as if another person was inside me, a stranger who was somehow still me, or a dead woman from the past brought to life again through me. And this other voice inside me – the voice of a lost little girl – recited the Berber sentence I had learned the previous evening. Written at the hotel, in the Roman alphabet and then in Tifinagh: my little sentence of love!’
Annie got her breath back, then admitted:
‘Fatima stared at me, she smiled slowly, almost mysteriously, like . . . ’ She cast around for the right words: ‘like an Italian painting of a Madonna.’
I held my tongue. I was getting ready to take her to the airport. She was going back to France.
Annie went on, immersed in the memory:
‘It was wonderful! But it was also . . . Oh Isma . . . ’ she said to me, ‘it was so hard! I haven’t told you yet: Fatima, who to my surprise spoke French and Arabic, and Berber of course, Fatima at the age of nine and a half wears a black chador which comes down to her shoulders. I wanted her to show me her hair, I wanted her to take off that scarf. Oh, not straight away: but I plucked up the courage to ask her when I sensed that it would soon be time for us to part. It’s silly, but I so wanted to see her hair. Silky or curly, black or auburn, it didn’t matter! Just to see it. And yet she refused my request, and it was a deliberate refusal that truly came from her.’
I could see Annie going over it in her mind, her face drawn from fatigue or pain. ‘During our conversation,’ she said, ‘one thing shocked me above all. Fatima had spoken to me about the fast that was ending and how she had just fasted – at such a young age! She said she had got used to the idea of having a French mother, but not a mother who did not observe the Muslim fast. I tried to explain about the many different religions, and even that people can be “outside religion”. She gave me the same cold look that she had given me at first. That is why, I know, she didn’t want to take off her chador for me.’
We left for the airport. In the car, Annie began counting the months until summer. She grew more confident, blossomed: she would come, next summer, and spend a whole month near Annaba. The two of them would get to know each other better; they would love each other: Annie and Fatima.
And, as she kissed me, Annie gave me a letter to post: ‘My Berber sentence in the two alphabets that I should have given to her. Do you think, Isma, that her father will come between us?’
I did not have the time to reassure her. Another minute and she would have missed the plane.
I waved goodbye, her letter in my hand like a pennant.
