Sirocco Read online

  At dinnertime, Pépé tipped his chin at the green box sitting next to my plate. “Where did you get this?”

  I pointed to the wall separating the kitchen from the other room. “Là, Pépé.”

  “Who gave you permission to take it?”

  I shrugged. “Nobody.”

  “Then put it back where it belongs.”

  Tonton Gilles frowned. “Allons, Papa, let her have it. This box has been in my mother’s sewing machine for ever.” He winked at me. “You’ll take good care of it, oui?”

  I opened my eyes wide to show my good faith and nodded so hard, I thought my head would roll off my shoulders.

  Pépé stared at me for a while then gave a dry smile. “D’accord,” he said, stretching his neck to the side. “But don’t lose anything.”

  I shook my head with a vigor I dearly hoped showed my good will.

  Later, after Pépé had gone to bed, I asked, “Tonton, pourquoi was Pépé en colère?”

  “He was upset because no one has touched my mother’s things since she died.”

  “If she was your mother, that means she was Pépé’s wife?”

  “Oui. That makes her your grandmother.”

  “So, she was my Mémé Honninger?”

  “She was.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Oh, a very, very long time ago. Your Ma was eleven years old, your Tonton Pierro was nine, and I was six.”

  “And what was her name?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like you are Tonton, but your name is Gilles. What was her name?”

  “Aimée.”

  “Oh. That’s my middle name!” I felt as if Tonton had given me a rare present.

  After that, I held onto my tin box the way a puppy holds onto its rag doll and sleeps with it.

  I’d sit on the front steps and take out the buttons. Arrange them by size and color in one line or several, a circle, semi-circle or any other pattern. I liked some buttons more than others. I especially liked the ones that glittered with jet-black or diamond-like stones—but, as I was not used to having things of my own, I cherished them all.

  Then, later that summer, Malika came along.

  Malika

  Malika was the young Arab girl who cared for me during the day. She was tall and very thin. A red kerchief, tied at the nape of her neck and sewn with beads and pieces of mirror, partially hid her blond hair. A narrow blue rag, wrapped around the length of her single braid, ran down her back like the tail of a giant mouse.

  She wore beads of vivid red and blue around her ankles, shimmering yellow and purple around her wrists. Heavy silver earrings stretched the holes in her earlobes, and the thin colored babouches on her hennaed feet gave her the look of the fragile princess in my picture book of One Thousand and One Nights.

  In the morning, when Malika knocked at the door, I’d give Pépé and Tonton a hurried kiss before running out to look into Malika’s face—a blend of shiny day and starry night.

  Her smile was radiant as the desert sun, her right eye blue as a spring sky and her left, white and glossy as a full summer moon.

  “Malika, why is your eye white?”

  “I was born like this.”

  “Can it see?”

  “No, but the other can see for both.”

  “I like it a lot.”

  A small cloth bag hung from her neck, smelling like a blend of menthol and mothballs. She called it, “Kafur.”

  “Pépé, what is kafur?”

  “It means ‘camphor.’ From the camphor tree.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It fights infection and helps with breathing problems. It also keeps insects away.”

  One morning, Malika arrived with a little pouch she had sewn at home and filled with camphor crystals. She pinned it to my dress.

  “What is that for, Malika?”

  “This will clean the air you breathe.”

  She showed me how to string garlic cloves into a necklace and hang it around my neck.

  “To fight the Evil Eye,” she said.

  Along with her kafur, Malika wore a flawless piece of glass, in the shape of half an oversized pigeon egg. I called it, “L’Oeil de Malika.”

  “Malika’s Eye” reflected the world around us, bending it in curves, and when I touched it, the tips of my fingers grew much bigger than the rest of my hand.

  She showed me how to make dolls out of flat pieces of wood swathed in rags with pencil dots for eyes and a mouth. I learned to play jacks with small stones from the yard.

  We collected the pits of apricots and let them dry in the sun. Then Malika lined them up in little mounds—three pits at the bottom and one on top—against a step riser, and we threw pits at the mounds to topple them.

  We looked for special stones and leaves for my green box and observed lizards, scarabs, and cicadas.

  Malika combed my hair and adorned it with flowers. She hugged and kissed me, always with that shiny smile on her pretty face.

  But then, one day, she simply stopped coming.

  Each morning after that, I leaned over the second-floor landing and stared down the road.

  I asked, “Malika doesn’t like me anymore, Pépé?”

  He said, “Yes, she likes you.”

  “Alors, why doesn’t she come to see me?”

  “When I hired her, her parents did not tell me she was poitrinaire.”

  “Oh.” I vaguely knew that tuberculosis was bad, but had no idea what it meant.

  “So, you don’t like her, Pépé?”

  “Yes, I like her. She took good care of you, but she is sick and could infect—make you sick—too. I told her parents she could not come back.”

  Despite his words, every morning I sat at the top of the stairs, waiting. Until, one day, she came slowly up the road.

  “Malika!”

  From afar, she put a finger to her lips to keep me silent.

  I ran down and met her at the wrought-iron gate with the letterbox. She slipped her lean arm between the railings and opened her hand. Nestled in the center of her hennaed palm lay L’Oeil de Malika. She took hold of my hand and placed the warm glass into it. Without a word, she stroked my cheek, flashed her glorious smile, and walked out of my life.

  After that, I took to peering into a mirror, holding Malika’s Eye in front of my eye and pretending to be her.

  And, at the end of the summer, when my parents and two sisters moved into Pépé’s house, I hid my box with Malika’s Eye under a stack of linen at the bottom of the china cabinet, hoping it would be safe.

  Chapter Three

  During the next eight years, life consisted of dreary things like school, catechism, and Sunday church, counterbalanced by the pleasures of Christmas, Easter and summer holidays—that is, until the dreadful events of La Toussaint Rouge threw a stone into the quiet pond of our lives.

  After the All Saints Day Massacre, the Fellagha—one of the meanings in Arabic was highwaymen—cut off roads, gunned down vehicles, slaughtered passengers on the spot, or abducted them to inflict slower, more painful deaths. These attacks effectively curtailed road travel, forcing people to organize caravans of civilian cars and trucks interspersed with army vehicles carrying armed soldiers. In this carefree fashion, business took place in relative security across the country and families escaped to Philippeville or Bône on one-day trips to the seaside for a few hours of relief from the broil of summer.

  For these excursions, families met before dawn on the fringe of town. An air of carnival prevailed as people hailed each other through lowered car windows. MPs organized the line of civilian cars. They dropped into place between military vehicles like Scrabble tiles in their board slots until ready to set off into daybreak. The ignition keys turned, and the engines coughed in sequence up the line. Then, to the cheer of impatient children, the column advanced slowly, like an earthworm stretching from head to tail in a caustic fog of exhaust fumes.

  By sunrise, we were winding down
a road towered on the right by the sheer cliff of the plateau where Constantine sat like the Queen of Sheeba. Far below on our left, La Vallée du Hamma spread wide and lush toward the distant spurs of La Petite Kabylie’s mountains.

  On its way down to the valley, La Route de la Corniche snaked through a series of short tunnels blasted through the rocky hillside. The road wove in and out of these tunnels, causing the panorama below to vanish and pop up like countdown numbers at the end of a cinema newsreel.

  On the Road

  August, 1956

  At the age of twelve, I was still thrilled by the unfurling panorama. Filled with awe. This is how it must feel to be a hawk—to fly so close to the cliff that your wing grazes the rock and so high that your gaze stretches forever. A tilt of the tail and you soar with the winds, lose yourself in the blinding sky, or free fall to the valley, where a boundless tapestry of vegetable gardens and orchards shoots up to greet you: “As-Salaam Alei-Kum to the garden of Eden.” To which you respond with a triumphant shriek, “That peace be with you also.”

  For hours, we climbed then descended then climbed again through passes across this mountainous, sun-baked land. Blowing in through lowered windows, dry air charged with dust culled from the roadside, and fumes from the military truck ahead burned my eyes and turned my tongue into sandpaper.

  “Maman, j’ai soif,” Mireille whined.

  Zizou and I snickered. Nobody was getting a drink of water, which might trigger the need to go pipi. Once a convoy started, it did not stop. Not for pipi stops. Not even when someone suffered from motion sickness—they had to vomit out the car windows, leaving an array of breakfasts on their car doors for everyone to see.

  I was thirsty too and queasy, but it would be a while before we arrived at Philippeville.

  For something to do, I stuck my head out the window and looked up. I could never have my fill of the fathomless cobalt blue above or forget the burnt sienna of the rugged Atlas slopes and their maquis of thorny acacia shrubs, rosemary, lavender, and white, pink, and purple oleanders. A spray of dirt and stones darting down the slope drew my attention to an escarpment, where I saw a glint of sun on metal at the edge of the rock. My insides clinched.

  I yelled, “Attention, Papa, fellagha!” Just then, a staccato of machine guns fired at the outcrop from the military trucks, drowning out my scream.

  “Down!” Papa shouted. My siblings and I crashed pell-mell over our seat, and the car picked up speed as the convoy moved to clear the area. I closed my eyes tight, trying to shut off the outside world. In spite of the heat and the press of bodies, a thin layer of ice sheathed my skin. I tasted bile.

  Five-year-old Riri clung to my neck. I opened my eyes. His were blue pools of fear. I turned to my side and held him snugly against me. “Listen,” I whispered. The clack, clack, clack of helicopter propellers grew louder as it reached the heights above us. I sat up and pointed at the dust storm raised by the low-flying aircrafts. “See? They’re going after the fellagha. It’s over.” I raised my voice over the rotors’ racket. “It’s over. Right, Papa?”

  “Looks like it, but stay down.”

  I sat up and hung out the window, waving at what looked like toy soldiers in the helicopter’s open side. “Sit down,” Papa bellowed.

  Keyed up, I looked up and down-wind of the convoy and cheered. “Nobody was hit, Pa.”

  “Sit down, Nanna,” Maman, Zizou, and Mireille chorused.

  Nerves still quivering, I dropped back on my seat and drew Riri into my lap. Beyond the car, the rocky slopes had yielded to citrus orchards. Oranges, grapefruits, and lemons peeked through waxy leaves dulled with dust blown in with the last Sirocco wind. The air thickened with the cloying scent of oil as we approached an olive grove. Zizou made a face. “What’s that smell?”

  Riri and Mireille sniffed the air.

  “It’s the smell of raw olive oil,” Maman said.

  The family anointed itself with the scent of oil as if to purge the lingering taint of our earlier fear. I too embraced the cleansing distraction, pointing at the gnarled trees bearing egg-shaped fruit cloaked in silver leaves. “See the olives in the trees?” I asked Riri. He nodded. “They pick them and squish them until the oil comes out; then they put the oil in bottles and we cook and make salads with it,” I explained.

  Meanwhile, Zizou and Mireille wrinkled their noses as we passed tiny villages, small farms, and single-family gourbis. The scent of oil blended with the sharp smell of manure, goats’ milk, and parched dirt. The earthy mélange thrilled me, giving me renewed strength.

  Children’s songs spilled again out of car windows as if the failed ambush never happened. Riri’s head lolled in the hollow of my shoulder as he fell asleep.

  A few kilometers later, the convoy passed an Arab family. They walked by the roadside, led by a donkey carrying a set of panniers across its back and his master astride its rump. The man’s burnoose screened his face while his white, cropped cotton pants exposed lean, sun-baked calves that bounced in tempo with the donkey’s gait.

  Following single file, a teenage boy kicked an old tin can ahead of him. In his wake, a younger girl carried a baby strapped to her back, and an even younger one walked backward, pulling at the rope of a reluctant goat. Closing the procession like an inverted black exclamation mark, a chador-clad woman cradled a toddler in her arms while balancing a large cloth bundle atop her head.

  With a tap of his stick and kick of his heels, the man pointed his mount out of the convoy’s path. His family stopped and half-turned to watch us stream by. My eyes briefly met those of the girl, who was about my age, carrying the baby.

  How does she feel about us as we spew road dust and engine smoke into her face? Does she wish she were sitting in this car? Is she content with her life or is she resigned to her Maktoob—her destiny?

  The cars following us quickly hid her from sight. I sighed, grateful to be cradling my little brother in comfort rather than trodding barefoot in the heat, a baby strapped to my back.

  As we lumbered on, the parched landscape gave way to fields of maturing wheat. They rippled in the mountain breeze like the nap of golden cloths under a stroking hand, and among the swaying ears, poppies trembled like drops of blood on pricked fingers.

  “Look here. Look there!” I pointed, savoring each detail of the passing scene: the shriek of a hawk gliding over the maquis, the bleating of a goat tethered to a prickly fig. My heightened senses could even spot the ever-present rasp of cicadas, muted within the convoy mayhem of whining engines, straining gears, and laughter and songs streaming out of car windows.

  Then, drained by such stimulation, I sat back and observed the occasional military watchtower perched over the buttes. I was grateful the French army tracked our convoy’s progress from high above the road and, like friendly Djiins leaping out of smokeless fires, materialized to assist our convoy in time of need.

  The failed ambush alarm fading with each turn of the wheels, I once again focused on the looming humiliation that awaited me once we’d reach Jeanne D’Arc beach, when I put on my bathing suit.

  The Bathing Suit

  On the occasion of my twelfth birthday, two months earlier, Ma decided that it was time to replace my bottom-only swimsuit with one that covered my torso. Way ahead of her, I had been ogling the glorious two-piece suit sold aux Magasins du Globe in town. The bottom was a conservative up-to-the-waist number. The top looked like a bra with skinny straps. Nothing like the itsy-bitsy-yellow-bikinis girls wore in the American movies, but it was a two-piece, and the colors—olive green with orange splashes—made my heart thrum in my throat.

  Maman was all for buying it but had reservations. “Let’s ask your father first,” she offered.

  “NO!” he said.

  “But, Papa, that’s the kind the other girls wear at the beach.”

  “I will not have my daughter look like a slut.”

  And that was that.

  The next morning, Maman buried her head inside the old steamer trunk
in the attic then straightened up and shook out what appeared to be a dark blue wool sweater. Shoving it into my hands, she said, “Here it is, ma fille.”

  I held the sweater at eye level. Smells like mothballs. Doesn’t have sleeves. “What is it?”

  “My swimming suit when I was about your age. My mother knitted it for me. It is yours now.”

  A swimsuit made of wool? Dark wool? For the beach? In the North African heat? I’ll die of shame. “Ma, it’s full of holes!”

  She grabbed the suit and examined it. “Moth holes. Not so many that they can’t be repaired.”

  Yeah, enough of the suit left to make it usable. Just my luck.

  She patted my cheek. “Your aunt Yvette showed you how to darn. You can do it.”

  Of course, we had no dark blue wool or even cotton that approached that color. Crestfallen, I used a black sewing thread that formed little puckers where the hole used to be and changed the elastics on the leg openings. Then I sulked.

  It wasn’t fair. Why did I have to wear this …. this …. thing. I had no nénés to cover up, only two miserable little bumps that stared at me from the mirror like long-dead bird’s eyes. Even younger girls’ were bigger than mine. At the school gym, they paraded their pretty pink, blue, or white lace bras. Moi, I’d prefer satin—pink—no ribbons.

  Too small to hold a bra, my nénés pushed up against my tops in two little peaks I knew everybody stared at—so embarrassing. So humiliating. “Why wasn’t I born a boy?” I moaned, not for the first time.

  I stretched the suit against the light to catch missed holes and, with a sigh of resignation, pulled it on to have a look at myself in Pépé’s armoire mirror. The itchy wool covered my body up to the neck—front and back—my long legs and arms protruding. All skin and bones.