Tunis, April, 1984
They expelled me from the lycée. The decision was final. I would never attend a single class there again. All because of my rudeness and the way I’d so terribly insulted a member of the teaching staff. The news hit me like a thunderclap directly above my head. Monsieur Kamel had reported the way I’d insulted Sonia. Immediately after that, my case had come before the school’s disciplinary board. “The board of farce and injustice” is what it really was. I could not defend myself. Overnight, people turned their backs on me as if I had a contagious disease. I was the girl everybody was pointing at because of the terrible false accusations I’d made against my instructor. Those were things that could not be spoken aloud as I had done, but that people whispered in the hallways, and behind the backs of the instructors and the monitors.
Still, everybody knew very well that Sonia was using her charms to wrap Monsieur Kamel around her finger and improve her grades. Everybody knew that he liked her infantile and dangerous games. But nobody would say a word. All the students wanted to do was to succeed, to go on to university. Everybody understood what you had to do in this country. Everybody but me. I wanted to play the heroine. I wanted to struggle against injustice. I wanted to avenge Mounir. And I’d failed. All the members of the board sided with Monsieur Kamel and against the pariah I’d become: a frivolous, spoiled brat. The parents’ representative on the board, who was also a member of the Destourian Party cell in our district, stated that I was a “microbe” and that I had “endangered the other students” and for that reason alone, I needed to be “eradicated.” My father told me the whole story. He had gone to the board meeting and done his best to defend me, the poor man. All for naught. He praised my good grades, my faultless academic record. It had been a youthful error, he said. I’d spoken up without knowing what I was saying; the board should pardon my bad behaviour and give me another chance.
But Father’s words had simply evaporated without a trace. The decision had already been made; all that remained were the formalities. Nadia Mabrouk was an easy target. Father: civil servant with no political affiliation (doubtful case). Mother: housewife (even more doubtful). I was up against two powerful enemies: Monsieur Kamel, professor of Arabic for twenty years, and head of a family, married, a citizen beyond reproach. The second obstacle was even more formidable: Sonia Cherif. Father: Director of the Tunis police and member of the Central Committee of the Destourian Party. Mother: homemaker, French national permanently domiciled in Tunis following her marriage to a Tunisian. The game was over before it started. I should never have ventured into the enemy camp. It was too late. I’d lost. Now I would serve time in the prison of my family.
When she heard the news, Mother almost had a heart attack. She nearly died. She who’d always believed that when I won my baccalaureate, it would boost our status in the neighbourhood. She had already begun planning the little party she would throw to celebrate my graduation. Everyone knew I was a good student, and that I would succeed without any problems. But the couscous revolt had transformed me, had made me a new person. No one had seen the change coming. Suddenly I was the school dunce. Expelled. A zoufri in a skirt! The shame of the neighbourhood.
Father kept silent. But Mother, between bouts of lamentation, cries of rage and pain from her heart-attack symptoms, kept on repeating: “But what got into you? Are you crazy or what? Why did you curse out that girl Sonia? Why didn’t you just mind your own business, eh? You go to school to study, and you come straight home. That’s all. Just like everybody else! Why aren’t you like everybody else? Why?”
“Because it’s the truth. I told the truth! Everybody knows it’s the truth, but nobody dares to say it.”
Mother let out a curse. She got up from the armchair she’d slumped into a couple of minutes before. She would have liked to grab me by the hair. Hit me. She’d never struck me before, but on that day, it was different. I’d destroyed her dreams. Now it was time for her to put my rebellion to an end.
Father, who seemed to be in another world, suddenly reached out and caught her arm.
“Nadia is eighteen. She’s a grown-up young woman, you can’t hit her.”
“So that’s it? There’s your education for you! You’ve always spoiled her and now look at her! Kicked out of the lycée just a few months before she graduates. Now what will become of her? Secretary? Cleaning lady? Even for those miserable jobs you need a baccalaureate these days.”
Mother was exaggerating and I knew it. My Auntie Rafika’s cleaning lady only finished primary school. She could read, and write letters to her cousin in the village. I knew because I helped her write those letters. She wrote them in Darija, the Arabic dialect that everybody spoke, and not the classical Arabic we studied at school, but it was better than nothing. She could read the local news in the newspapers that ran rape and robbery stories. She would tell me all about them each time we visited my aunt, and she was busy hanging the laundry on the veranda, singing the same old ballad of the two lovers meeting at night by the well.
But I didn’t want to become a cleaning lady or a secretary. I knew I could continue with my studies. In fact, I was determined to.
As if Father had read my thoughts, he said to Mother: “Tomorrow, I’m going to visit a private school called La Réussite. I know the headmistress’s husband. He’s an old friend. We grew up on the same street, played ball together in the back alleys. I’ll ask him if his wife will accept Nadia into her school. It’s a long shot. The school year ends in two months. I don’t know if she’ll be accepted. But I’ll try —”
“So now you’re going to pay to get Nadia into a private school?” Mother interrupted. “After all, she brought it on herself. She makes the mistakes and we pay for them, is that it?”
I wept for joy. Father would save me. I didn’t want to hear Mother’s harsh words any more. And in any case, she was never satisfied. But I would show them that I could succeed, that my expulsion was the worst injustice in the world, and that my revolt had a positive outcome: to humiliate Sonia, the daughter of the Tunis police director. The person who had ordered Mounir’s arrest.
I thought back to Neila. What would become of her without me? We would be separated. She was the one who didn’t want to keep up her studies, after all. How would she manage two separations at the same time: from Mounir and now from me?