Bitter Almonds by Laurence Cossé, Alison Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

o’clock, to read for a moment. Édith gets back just in time, in a rush, but in the entrance to the building she runs into Fadila on her way out. Her son’s in-laws are in Pantin, they’ve come to see their daughter, she has to go and say hello to them, she’s in a hurry. They’ll do their reading “s’m’other time.”
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    â€œWell, has she had her baby?”
    No, says Fadila, but they’ve kept her granddaughter at the clinic. It’s better that way, there won’t be any problems. “Clinic is expensive but is better. Me, when my daughter is born I no speaking for one month.”
    Ã‰dith cannot see what that has to do with it. Fadila explains that she screamed so much during the three days it took her to give birth that she lost her voice for an entire month. It was her first birth, she was fifteen years old. No, she didn’t have a midwife, only women who’d already had children, but they wouldn’t have been able to do anything if there’d been a complication. “They hang this thing, up there, so I holding,” she says, raising her arms and squeezing her hands as if around a rope. “After three days I no feeling nothing.” She holds out the palms of her hands to Édith.
    Ã‰dith recalls that Fadila was an only child, and she loved her mother very much.
    â€œWas it your mother who married you off so young?”
    â€œNo, is my father!” exclaims Fadila.
    She was married at the age of fourteen to a man she did not know, a young fellow, a good-for-nothing. There was something blocking him, she says, pointing to her upper back. When the time came to harvest the wheat or work the fields, her own father had to go and do it.
    â€œYou lived near your parents?”
    â€œNo, is far, very far.”
    â€œWas he kind, your husband?”
    She makes a face: “No, he no kind. I running all the time.”
    Ã‰dith asks her to repeat what she has said. She used to run away, every evening. She would hide in the countryside. She would rather spend the night out of doors.
    Then they took her back to her husband. And she would run away again.
    â€œWere you happy to have a baby?”
    She raises her eyes to the ceiling: “Happy?” It is her turn not to understand. “I no happy, I knowing nothing about babies.”
    Her mother took the child in. It was Aïcha.
    A few months later Fadila ran away for good. She hitchhiked, she says. She went back to her parents. Her father was furious but her husband behaved decently, he said that if Fadila did not want to live with him anymore, he would not force her.
    He let her have the baby because it was a girl. She gives a little laugh. If it had been a boy, of course he would have kept it.
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    â€œYou’re a Berber, aren’t you?” asks Édith. She is cross with herself for not having thought of it sooner. And yet she knows very well that the majority of the population in Morocco are Berbers.
    Fadila’s face lights up.
    â€œYou know what is Berber?”
    â€œWhat do you think! With your children do you speak Arabic or Berber?”
    â€œArabic. Is they is wanting. But is understanding Berber.”
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    They work on capital letters,
F
,
D
, and
A
. Fadila makes a curved
A
that leans to the right. She bursts out laughing: “Is like banana!” Édith has never seen Fadila laugh so much as at moments like this during the lesson, which to Édith seem so very laborious.
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    There are days when Fadila is tired, or in a hurry, and so she has not had the time to go over what they studied during the previous lesson. She isn’t in the mood to read or write.
    Other days it is Édith who isn’t at home when Fadila comes by. So there is no lesson.
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    Then things happen unexpectedly. “A lady she coming my house, I making dinner. After she stay is sleeping. He speaking, speaking. Is making me too tired. Is pissing me off, that