Tunis, January 6, 1984
“And now that social peace has returned thanks to the efforts of the Tunisian people . . . and after these disturbances, we shall go back to where we began . . . just as before, with no increases in prices for bread, semolina, or macaroni . . .”
There we were, all seated in the living room, eyes riveted to the television set. The black-and-white images flickered across the screen as if in slow motion. We were at the mercy of the weather, which affected reception. If the weather was fine, the picture was clear and bright, and images marched uninterrupted across the screen. But if the east wind began to blow, our antenna would begin to pivot, swinging this way and that. All the cardinal points — east, west, north, and south — seemed to merge into one. It wasn’t long before the picture blurred, zigzagged, and finally disappeared, white on one side of the screen, and total black on the other. The sound came in fits and starts: “Today . . . done well . . . We . . . thanks . . .” I was seated straight up on my chair, fingers crossed on my thighs, ears straining to catch every word. I wasn’t in the habit of listening to political speeches, but this time, it was different. My father sat to my left, looking depressed as he watched without saying a word. I could see the swollen veins of his hands. And Mother hovered vigilantly, ready to respond to each new word with a tirade of abuse.
“Flea-bitten old fox! Why are you even still alive?” she shot back at the sound of President Bourguiba’s words.
As for Bourguiba, he couldn’t have cared less about my mother and her lowly housewife’s insults. He was the one on television; he was invincible, invested by a divine mission, or so he thought. The venerable father was speaking to his children. We were all his children. That’s what they kept telling us: the Father of the Nation would speak to his children to tell them the good news. He was speaking of the bread riots and had just cancelled the recent price hikes with a snap of his fingers. “Back to where we began,” were the words he used. For some people, perhaps, but not for me.
Back to where we began for the price of bread and couscous, well, so much the better for the people. So much the better for Mr. Everyman and Mrs. Everywoman, for my father, my mother, their friends, those poor civil servants who could now fill their shopping bags with baguettes and couscous to feed their families, all the better for the workers on the rich men’s construction sites, who could eat bread and drink Coca-Cola that burned their esophagus and caused them to belch noisily. All the better for the rich, who could save a few dinars and squeeze more out of their housemaids, their gardeners, and their drivers. All the better for these fine people. But not for me. This “disturbance” of theirs wasn’t going to happen without breakage. This disturbance had opened my eyes to a reality that I’d been refusing to see for years.
This “disturbance” wasn’t going to be painless. It wasn’t about the poor against the rich or about bread instead of a piece of meat. No, this “disturbance” had hit me in the gut. Awakened something in me. It lifted the veil from my life, from my parents and my friends. I really didn’t want to go back to where we began. Was I an egoist, a spoiled brat? I couldn’t tell. But at that moment I took a decision: to keep the bread riots going every day of my life.
“Poor guy, that Bourguiba, he’s not getting good advice,” Father exclaimed finally.
“Poor? You call that man ‘poor’?” Mother shot back. “He’s stuck fast to power like a postage stamp on an envelope. All he has to do is resign! Let the wind take him away!”
Papa stopped talking. He could never win against Mother. She sighed, then continued: “Bourguiba or someone else, there’s no difference. At least the price of bread is going back down.”
As far as Mother was concerned, that was what counted. That evening — I was sure of it — thousands of people reacted just as she did. Money, that was what mattered. How much did you make, how much was left over, how much you could accumulate? Dignity, equality, justice — all that was for the intellectuals, the philosophers, and the crazies. The little guys only wanted to eat, to live; that was all there was to it.
Najwa was sniffling again. She wiped her nose on her cuff.
“Don’t do that!” Mother cried out with a grimace of disgust. “Use your hanky!”
“I can’t find it,” whined Najwa. “I think I lost it.”
“Well, borrow one of Nadia’s. Next time, watch what you’re doing. Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know. You think all your mother can do is buy, buy . . .”
Najwa bounded off to my room, as light-footed as a Saharan gazelle. She didn’t understand a word of what Mother had told her. She was happy enough to spend another evening at our house.
Father sunk deeper into his armchair, like a ship sinking in deep water. Mother got to her feet and went off after Najwa. The story of the lost hanky was only just beginning.
There I was, sitting close to my father. I wanted to talk to him, to turn a new page with him, learn from him and really feel his presence. Not just see his ghost.
“Papa, what do you think of all this? The demands of the young people who are in the streets, do you agree with them?”
How diminished, how fragile he appeared. He looked me in the eye. I could feel his distress, his humiliation. Bizarre; I’d never felt it before. The “disturbance” Bourguiba was talking about had given me a new way of seeing.
“What do you want me to say? I think we’re entering a new phase. Our country will never be the same again. I feel it, but I can’t explain it.” He hesitated, as though he already regretted the daring words coming out of his mouth. “Concentrate on your studies, that’s what matters most. You’ve got an exam to write at the end of the school year. Don’t let those things distract you.”
Father had quickly slammed the brakes. Too bad he hadn’t followed up on his first impulse. In the beginning he’d spoken to me as a friend, as he would to an adult, but suddenly he flip-flopped, back to his traditional role, to his passivity, to his world. A world that little Nadia, as a child, might have been a part of, but not the young woman I’d become, the young adult searching for herself.
I went back to my room. My attempt had failed. My parents seemed more and more remote. Far from my way of thinking, far from my ideas, far from the questions I was asking myself, and far from my aspirations. A wall was going up. In fact, it had been under construction for years, but only over the last few days had I come to realize that it existed. I didn’t know whether to demolish it and let the stones fall, one after the other, or instead, to add stones to the wall each day.
I’d found refuge in my classes, and of course there was Neila. But it wasn’t the same thing. I needed my parents. Needed to talk to them about life, about politics, about my fears, the things I wanted to do. But that was asking for the impossible. We were saturated in banality, right down to the bone. It dripped from our hair, oozed from the pores of our skin and from our day-to-day routine. “Eat, sleep, and study” was my parents’ unspoken advice. I’d understood it as a little girl and never called it into question. But that day, at last, I’d managed to sweep some of the dust away. I was daring to think differently — not to memorize the notes I took in class, but to ask questions, to understand, to figure out what was really going on. To find out why Mounir had gone off with the zoufris. Was he one of them after all? Who invented those categories, anyway? Society? My parents? The government? All of us?
Those were the thoughts weighing down my mind. I shook my head from left to right, nodded vigorously up and down. I wanted to disperse the thick clouds that were gathering and blurring my vision.
I heard Mother exclaim to Najwa: “Look in your little bag. Maybe you’ll find it there. Your mother shouldn’t have to buy you another one, life is too expensive these days.”
Najwa was sniveling harder than ever and piped up in a desperate voice: “It’s not there, Auntie Fatma. I can’t find it. I’m afraid my hanky fell out of my pocket the other day at school when we were playing ‘elastic.’”
Mother let out a cry that was more like the roar of the lion I’d heard at the Belvedere Zoo when I was a little girl, and it terrified me.
“Why are you always playing ‘elastic’? When are you going to grow up and mind your manners like a big girl?”
Mother burst out of the room without so much as a glance in my direction. Najwa was holding back tears and then, as soon as she saw me, she rushed over and threw her tiny arms around my waist.
In a trembling voice she asked, “Nadia, didn’t you play ‘elastic’ when you were my age?”
I smiled at her and wiped the tears from the corner of her eyes. She sat down on the edge of my bed. Her nose was dripping. Mother was going to scold her. She was waiting for my answer, her damp little hand was stroking mine.
“I just loved ‘elastic.’ But I was no good at it. We played every day in the playground, at recess. One of the girls was the champ. I could jump as high as my waist, but no higher. But that girl, she could jump as high as her head and sometimes even higher — we called it ‘the sky.’ We stretched our arms up, and still she could jump through the elastic band. She was really super, nobody could beat her!”
Najwa’s face relaxed, her eyes were gleaming like two candles in the dark. Mother’s reproaches seemed far away. Suddenly she leaned over toward me, for fear someone might hear her, and whispered sweetly in my ear:
“Me too, I just love playing ‘elastic,’ and you know what, I’m letting you in on a secret: I can jump as high as my chest.”
I laughed a nervous laugh. Poor Najwa, I had no idea how she would ever find her way. Her father was dead. Her mother was raising the children single-handed. The country was going to the dogs. I saw myself in the playground of my elementary school. It was winter. My fingers were red and swollen with the chilblains that tormented me all winter long. A rubber band about ten feet long went around my legs, and I stood there, straight. Neila, a few yards away, was standing just as straight, the other end of the rubber band around her legs. Looking one another in the eye, we made faces and burst out laughing. The hems of our second-hand checkered skirts peeped out from under our dark blue tunics. Neila had two long braids and spindly legs that looked like crutches. The tiny hairs on her skin stood up in the cold, and her red socks came up to her ankles. My hair was done up in a ponytail that swung back and forth in the wind as if shooing invisible flies. Every now and then I’d rub my swollen fingers.
The whole playground was filled with little groups like ours. The younger girls preferred skipping rope. It was like a competition. You’d see girls leaping into the air, then landing on their two feet or — sometimes — on the ground. The games lasted until the school bell rang out and we dashed off in all directions to get in line and march back into our classrooms. With a quick twist of the wrist we slipped the elastic from around our legs, rolled it up into a ball, and hid it in our school tunics. Every day the same scene would be repeated. Sometimes, but not often, we would stroll around the playground, arm in arm, or arms thrown over each other’s shoulders. We told stories we’d overheard told at home by an loquacious aunt or a sweet old grandmother, or furtively read in books left on bookshelves by careless adults or carefully hidden under pillows. We would stroll aimlessly around the schoolyard, our worn-out shoes kicking up pieces of gravel that would skip off to one side and roll along the ground.
Quietly Najwa came over and lay down beside me. She was staring at the painting hanging from the wall of the bedroom. It was a cheap, poor copy of Renoir’s Jeunes filles au piano. I’d gotten it as a birthday present several years before.
“I really like that picture, Nadia,” Najwa whispered without looking at me. “It’s like you and me. Maybe one day I could play the piano like the little girl in the painting.”
“Play the piano or play ‘elastic,’” I said, teasing her and tickling her feet. “You’ve got to make up your mind.”
Najwa curled up in a ball, holding her feet to protect them from my harmless torments. Her face was gleaming. In spite of her laughter, she managed to say: “Both! The piano and ‘elastic.’”
Suddenly Father’s voice rang out, tearing us away from our innocent games: “There will be school tomorrow, they just announced it on the radio. Hurry up, off to sleep.”
Our faces dropped. Najwa went to put on her pajamas. Me, I had to review my notes. I hadn’t done a bit of homework for two days.
I dreaded going back to normal already.