3

SHE WAS DARK LIKE MY mother, and was twenty-seven years old.

There wasn’t anything particularly striking about her looks. She possessed the kind of beauty that imposes itself gradually, like the beauty of trees or the sunset or the beauty of millions of women . . . a beauty that doesn’t dazzle you or turn your head. You could easily miss it as you pass by.

Perhaps the most prominent thing about her was the calm that radiated from her, like the tranquilizing scent of perfume. Everything about her was calm: the expression in her eyes, her smile, her hair, her modest clothes, her walk, her low voice, and her relaxed, sedate way of talking.

This calmness pushed you to respect her, feel at ease with her, and trust her.

Despite that, when my father introduced me to her for the first time, I couldn’t match her calmness. I couldn’t get control of my smile. It almost fell from my lips. I couldn’t get control of my hand as I reached out to greet her. It trembled in her hand. I searched for something to say, but only came up with nervous sounds, like radio static when you can’t tune in to a station.

My father stood between us, between his wife and his daughter. He was nervous too, and contented himself with a simpleminded, meaningless smile.

She was the first to talk.

“Welcome, Nadia,” she said, giving me a tender, good-natured look. “You’re much more beautiful than your picture.”

“Merci, Auntie,” I stammered.

My father smiled when he heard the word “Auntie,” as if he’d found a way out of his discomfort.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, still trying to hide his uneasiness. “I have an errand to run. I won’t be gone for more than half an hour.”

And he left us alone.

We sat in the salon. Safi—the pet name for Safiya, my new stepmother—began doing her very best to engage me in a long chat. But I was reserved, as if something in my head were urging me not to talk with her.

I was thinking about my new life with her and about my new position vis-à-vis my father, the servants, and the house.

Which one of us was the mistress of the house?

She was, of course.

And me—what was my position, what was my share?

I couldn’t define my new status in the house. I would begrudgingly have to relinquish one of the rights I’d earned. I knew I had to give it up, whether I wanted to or not.

When I got annoyed at this thought, I looked at her talking and asked myself: Couldn’t my father have found someone more beautiful?

Would I have preferred it if my father had picked a wife more beautiful than this one?

Maybe. If he’d picked a beautiful, wanton, pampered, and fickle wife—and I knew those kinds of women were chasing after him—I could have found a hundred reasons to hate her and plot against her. But this calm, respectful, modest wife . . . how could I hate her? In other words, please forgive me if I plot against her or cast on her the evil spirit that lives inside me.

From the first moment, I felt that this woman was stronger than me—stronger than me in her nature and in her desire to make my father and me happy, her concern for our home showing her desire to stay in it forever.

We sat together for a while. We talked about many things—about school, the servants, the family.

She told me about herself.

And she asked about me.

My father was gone for a while, so I asked permission to go off to my room to change my clothes.

“I let myself go in your room while you were at school,” she said, getting up with me. “Let me congratulate you on your taste! Everything in your room is beautiful and lovely, just like you.”

I felt like she was exaggerating. My room wasn’t that beautiful. The entire house wasn’t beautiful before she arrived. It was crammed with expensive antiquated furniture lined up along the sides of the rooms, just as my mother had left it before she and my father got divorced fourteen years ago. Neither my father nor I had tried to move the furniture around or add anything new.

My room was the only one that had new furniture.

And I didn’t have anything to do with it. Once I got older, my father called Pontremoli, the furniture sellers, and had them design the whole room for me. Pontremoli picked the “modern style” and organized it all. Even the drapes, the color of the walls, and the pictures. I wasn’t involved at all.

It was expensive, but it wasn’t beautiful . . . rather, its beauty was manufactured, not an expression of my personality or taste.

Auntie Safi hadn’t tried to change anything in my room, but she’d turned the house completely on its head without adding anything new. She’d moved pieces of furniture from one place to another, rugs from one room to another, and reorganized the flowerpots and all the beautiful porcelain so that the house looked as if it had been refurnished, as if everything in it were bought just for her, on the occasion of her marriage.

She was indeed the mistress of the house.

I couldn’t deny that.

Auntie Safi left me at the door of my room.

I locked myself inside and threw myself on my bed, crying.

I couldn’t explain the reason for my crying, but I had never cried with such intensity. My tears had never gushed out like that before. I felt I would wear myself out through my tears, as if I’d lost my father forever.

I locked myself in my room for a long time. I began to feel like this room was all I had left in this big house.

When it was time for dinner, my father came and knocked on my door. I wiped my tears and fixed my hair and clothes before opening the door for him.

“Where have you been, Nadia?” he asked happily, looking ten years younger. “We’re all waiting for you for dinner.”

“I was just so tired,” I said, trying to smile. “I slept for a little.”

My father looked me in the eye, trying to figure out what I was really thinking.

“Okay, let’s get going,” he said, trying to dispel the doubts swirling in his head. “We’re throwing a party for you!”

I put on new clothes. I braided my hair into a single braid rather than the usual two hanging down on my chest. I wanted to look older, like my father’s wife.

I joined them in the parlor. My father was sitting with a glass of whiskey in front of him. His wife was sitting next to him wearing a black dress of shiny faille. It was a modest dress that covered her arms and neck, but it was chic and refined, like part of a bridal gown. She was drinking a glass of strawberry juice. My uncle Aziz—I mentioned before that he lived upstairs—was sitting opposite her, laughing as always, but drinking more than usual.

Auntie Safi met me with delight as if I were her daughter. My father smiled, proud of me and my beauty. Uncle Aziz hugged me and kissed my cheeks.

“That’s it!” he said, laughing. “Now that Daddy’s gotten married, you have to too!”

“If you’d like to marry me,” I said, trying to laugh, “I’m ready to get married right now!”

“I’m sure your father wouldn’t like that,” he said, chuckling.

“Could he find someone better than you, Uncle?” I asked. I looked at my father. “Ever since I was young, I wanted to marry Daddy!” I said, unable to clear the bitterness from my voice.

“I don’t think there’s a man in the world who deserves Nadia,” my father’s wife said in a happy and innocent voice.

“Even Daddy?” I asked, challenging her.

“Is there a man in the world like your father?” she asked cleverly.

As soon as I sat down next to my uncle, Abdou the butler came over to bring me a glass of strawberry juice.

Who taught Abdou to bring me a drink I hadn’t asked for?

Abdou had worked in the house for five years, but he’d never thought about bringing me something I hadn’t asked for. He’d only bring coffee for guests, or whiskey if they were my father’s close friends.

And what was the story with this strawberry juice?

I knew there were always bottles of Coke or soda water in the fridge, but there was never strawberry juice or anything like it.

What had happened?

She was the mistress of the house!

She was the one who put strawberry juice into the refrigerator. She was the one who taught Abdou to present it before dinner.

This was a new world that she built for me and my father to live in—a world I couldn’t have offered him when I was mistress of the house.

We moved to the dinner table.

She sat at the head of the table with my father on her right, my uncle on her left, and me at the opposite end.

The butler brought out the plates. He went to her first, and then came to me.

This was the natural order that had to prevail in the house. She was first and I was second, but I was struck by it. I’d gotten used to being the first and only. I’d gotten used to sitting at the head of the table.

We talked as we ate dinner.

I spoke the least, and I was the last one they directed conversation to.

My uncle spoke to her, giving me only passing comments.

My father was talking more than he usually did. He wasn’t as serious and reserved as usual. Instead, he bantered with my uncle, exchanging little jokes with him and looking at his wife between mouthfuls as if thanking her for this blessing.

She was clever at steering the rudder of conversation. She was directing it, trying to get everyone to participate, even me.

“I learned from your father that you like moussaka,” she told me. “I told the cook to make it just for you.”

I really did like moussaka, but on this day, I wasn’t interested in eating moussaka or anything else.

After that, I would get accustomed to her making everything I liked. She was doing it to try to please me. But it was a mistake. These flatteries annoyed me and made me feel like I was a guest in my own house. I tried hard to break free from them. I hid from her what I liked and what I didn’t. I sometimes purposely ate things I didn’t like just to confuse her. But she kept trying to please me, trying to convince me that I was the most important person in the house.

If she hadn’t tried so hard to please me, would I have forgiven her?

I don’t think so. I figured out afterward that what annoyed me about her wasn’t her trying to please me, but that she closed all the doors through which I could vent my hatred and loathing for her, from which I could let out the evil in my heart.

We finished dinner.

We went back to the parlor.

My uncle stayed for a little as he drank coffee. He then excused himself and left.

Auntie Safi sat next to my father sewing a piece of needlepoint as I began playing some records.

They were whispering to each other as if they were exchanging sweet nothings. Their whispering sometimes got so loud that I could hear it as I sat next to the turntable. Sometimes it went quiet so that I only heard a light flutter, as if their lips were the wings of angels hovering in the air.

All of a sudden, I noticed they had stopped whispering. Their silence went on for a while. I turned toward them and saw him give her a look. He was infatuated, as if he were kissing every part of her with his eyes. She looked down intently at the piece of cloth she was sewing, her cheeks blushing. They were looking at me in silence, then exchanging looks with each other as if there were a conversation happening between their eyes that my presence was ruining.

My blood boiled.

I felt that I was a burdensome uninvited guest, that I was a stranger in my own house.

For the first time, I felt like my father didn’t want me next to him, like he wanted to get rid of me.

I felt as if something in my chest were crying and tearing itself apart, that a cold tremor was creeping through my veins, that my body was shriveling around my bones. I wanted to revolt, to destroy something, to pounce on my father and shake his shoulders, to wake him up to my existence, to make him remember me, to make him remember that I was everything in his life.

I pressed down on my nerves mercilessly. I decided to leave.

“Bonsoir,” I said, feeling a weight on my tongue like a piece of clay. “I’m going to bed.”

“Don’t forget to lock the balcony door,” my father said calmly and unenthusiastically, as if tossing me out.

“You’re going to sleep already?” Auntie Safi asked, pretending to insist that I stay.

“I’m tired, Auntie,” I said, unable to smile.

I leaned over my father, kissing him as usual. As if his love for me woke up when his lips touched my cheeks, he pulled me to his chest with great tenderness and gave me a bigger kiss than I was used to, a kiss with more affection and love.

I reached out to my father’s wife and she pulled me to her and hugged me to her chest too.

“Good night, my dear,” she said, pressing her cheek against mine.

There was a ring of sincerity, friendship, and love in her voice—as I remember it now—but my ears had become blocked from hearing anything except for my heart, as it pounded between my ribs like the church bell in a small village ringing out loudly to announce the attack of devils.

I went into my room and locked the door.

I didn’t usually lock the door, but that night I locked it automatically, without meaning to, as if someone were calling out inside me, trying to protect me from an intruder coming in while I was sleeping, grabbing me from bed, and tossing me into the fire of hatred and loathing, the fire of feeling irrelevant.

I took off my clothes with nervous hands as if tearing them from my body. Throwing myself on the bed, I stared at the ceiling.

I didn’t cry.

I didn’t sleep.

My eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling. Images from my life passed through my mind, mixing with the noise filling my chest and burning in the fire that spread in my veins.

My room was next to my father’s. The two rooms opened onto a single balcony overlooking the garden. I’d often see him from the balcony, and he’d come see me the same way. Often we both stood out there, he in his pajamas and I in my nightgown, talking for a while.

I heard my father and his wife walk to their room.

I heard my father let out a light-hearted laugh.

I heard her laugh mingle with his like a lump of sugar melting in a cup of hot tea.

I heard them shut the door behind them.

And then I didn’t hear anything.

My imagination suddenly shuddered at the thought of what could be happening between them, between a man and his wife in the bedroom.

The imagination of a sixteen-year-old girl who hadn’t known a man before and had only heard passing words from adolescent classmates about what happens in the bedroom.

My imagination started picturing incredible things.

I smiled, as if watching an exciting and entertaining movie, and then was disgusted, letting out cries of pain, when my adolescent mind came up with violent, harsh images.

I was revolted and filled with jealousy when a third kind of image jumped to my mind—a gentle image of kindness and love. My father, who gave his life to me, loved and was being tender with another woman.

My imagination persecuted me. It wasn’t only dripping those images into my head, it was also dripping its poison into my body. I felt as if drops of cold water were falling on me in monotonous successive rhythms, like droplets of condensation slipping down a pane of glass or water dripping from a faucet that needed fixing.

It was the most intense physical feeling I had experienced in my life.

My imagination wore me out.

I was so exhausted and felt tortured.

I tried to kick my imagination out of my head and my body, but I was gripped by something like a state of anxiety. I hit the pillow with my hands. I lifted up the covers with my feet and turned on my side violently, as if I were writhing on coals.

I got up in bare feet to close the veranda door. But as soon as I got close to the door, I stopped.

I heard whispering coming from the neighboring room, a whispering that was more like moaning.

Words that I could almost make out, until they popped in the air like soap bubbles.

Distinct sentences torn apart with no meaning except what my imagination gave them.

Moans, agony, intoxication, rebuke as if delight, repulsion as if supplication.

My ears opened up. All of me became the ears of an adolescent girl. I took another step toward the balcony, like a thief, as all my confused emotions formed a gang to hijack my ears.

I stood there for a long time with my eyes wide open like an owl in the dark, my breath trembling as I tried to subdue it so it didn’t drown out the sounds from the next room.

I heard everything.

Then I didn’t hear anything.

Everything went silent.

I closed the balcony door and went to my bed in my bare feet like a sleepwalker.

But I couldn’t sleep.