Aïcha stood up. She made a discreet signal to her husband and went back into the living room. She walked silently among the guests, the champagne in her glass slowly going flat. Mehdi told people: “She’s shy,” and he said it in a tone of disappointment. He must have thought shyness a handicap, a defect that prevented you from living life to the fullest. He imagined that she must be sad, discouraged, frustrated not to be at ease with other people. “You don’t know how to put yourself forward,” he said regretfully, and Aïcha shrugged. Her shyness did not bother her. On the contrary, it seemed to her that this self-effacement, this absence of desire to be seen and heard, had enabled her to develop a sort of gift. A presence with others of which Mehdi knew nothing. First of all, she liked watching people, and even during long receptions when she didn’t say a word she was never bored. She stared at the other guests and noted all the little details that nobody else could see. A scratch, a few centimeters long, at the base of the neck. A scar behind an ear. The young minister’s bitten fingernails. A shaking hand. A callused heel in a shiny stiletto. She took up so little space, demanded so little time to express herself, that people confided in her with a freedom that had long ago ceased to surprise her. That night, sitting at the table opposite the king’s chamberlain, she kept her eyes lowered to her plate as the woman beside her told her about losing a child, years earlier. “It’s something I never talk about. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

  At work this gift of Aïcha’s got her into trouble with the nurses. They were furious because her consultations lasted forever and every working day would go hours over schedule. Lying naked on an examination table, legs spread, her patients would talk about their lives. They would reveal secrets they had never spoken aloud before. They would tell her about their loneliness, their sorrows, their husband’s harshness, their mother’s indifference, their children’s ingratitude. They would talk about their lovers, their money problems, and it was as if they’d forgotten the presence of the doctor in the white coat sitting between their thighs. Sometimes, leaving Aïcha’s office, these women would wonder what had gotten into them and blush at having unburdened themselves like that. Was it because they were nervous, ashamed at having to strip off in front of another woman? Or was it the way the doctor had looked at them that had bewitched them somehow? Mehdi would often express surprise that Aïcha knew so much about people. In the street, when her patients recognized her, they would throw themselves at her, hug her tightly, then say to the husband or children who stood beside them: “This is the doctor I told you about.” Mehdi, on the other hand, was so occupied with his own affairs that he forgot names and faces. Often he would turn to his wife and say: “Who is she again?”

  When she was a child, Aïcha used to play the “Ladies” game with her brother. In the afternoon, when Amine was out in the fields and Mathilde in her clinic, they would open the wardrobes and borrow their mother’s dresses, hats, and high-heeled shoes. Selim would sometimes climb onto his mother’s white dressing table so that he could reach the hat shelf. For the little boy, the excitement of dressing up in his mother’s clothes was intensified by the fear of being caught in the act by his father. He would smear his face with makeup, weigh down his neck and wrists with jewelry, and prance around in high heels, giggling. “That’s not how you’re supposed to do it,” Aïcha would scold him, annoyed that he wasn’t taking the game seriously. For her it wasn’t a fancy-dress party or a source of ridicule, it was about becoming a real woman. The kind of woman who wears woolen coats and gloves, who slips a stack of banknotes into her bra—a gesture that struck her as horrifyingly coarse, but fascinated her. She imitated the mannerisms of neighbors, strangers, her mother, clutching her handbag to her chest, spinning a bunch of keys around her index finger. She held her doll in one arm and told it off for not being good. She pretended to smoke and shouted orders at an imaginary maid.

  Now she was a lady, a real one. Her handbag was not filled with sweets, and the keys she carried were used to open a real car, to lock the door of a real house. But what she wanted more than anything was to know how to be a good wife to her husband, to know how to “keep house” and receive guests. She was hardly ever there, she couldn’t cook, and they mostly survived on sandwiches and pizzas. Her mother, by contrast, was the queen of her castle. In March every year Mathilde would embark upon what she called her “big spring clean.” All the drawers were lined with fabric. For years she had provided three meals a day to her indifferent children and continually asked them: “What would make you happy?” She knew recipes by heart, and when Aïcha asked her about how much butter or cumin to use, Mathilde would reply: “I don’t know—that kind of thing is a question of feel.” Mathilde could sit in silence with other women and recite condolences in Arabic. She could hug poor, sick people without feeling disgusted by their filthiness or their symptoms. Not once had Aïcha thought of her mother as submissive. On the contrary, Mathilde seemed to her a sort of fairy to whose will human beings, animals, and inanimate objects were all obedient. And now that she was a lady herself, she kept thinking enviously about her indefatigable mother who ran around the house, a duster draped over her shoulder, humming Alsatian songs.

  One day Aïcha suggested to Mehdi that they organize a dinner party for some of his colleagues from the ministry. “I know it’s important for you. You need to nurture those relationships.” Mehdi hesitated. He was preoccupied with a speech he had to write and deliver in front of the Council of Ministers and His Majesty. A speech in classical Arabic that was giving him cold sweats. At the colonial school he had never learned to write in his own language and now, at almost thirty, he was secretly studying the alphabet and verb conjugation. His friend Ahmed had advised him to transcribe his speech phonetically, and now he spent all his evenings practicing his pronunciation. “You wouldn’t have to do anything,” Aïcha reassured him. “I’ll take care of it all.”

  While she examined her patients she thought about the menu she would serve to their guests. Once, she wrote “salmon mousse” on a prescription instead of a particular brand of pills. And when the patient, perplexed, asked her what it meant, she became bogged down in absurd explanations: “You should eat more salmon,” Aïcha stammered. “It’s good for your hormones.” She considered preparing some Moroccan specialties but she was afraid of making a fool of herself in front of these men, most of them Fassis, whose mothers were all excellent cooks and who had passed on their own mothers’ impressively sophisticated recipes to their children. Then she remembered the success she had encountered during her first summer at Monette’s beach hut by serving Alsatian charcuterie. In fact, Mehdi’s colleagues often called her the Alsatian. They told her about their university years in Paris and the little brasserie in the Latin Quarter where they could drink pints of beer and eat saucisses-frites for only a few centimes. I know! Aïcha thought. I’ll make them sauerkraut.

  Aïcha went to the Porcelet Gourmand, the best charcuterie in town, which was run by a tall, severe Frenchwoman with skin as rough as a gherkin. Her assistant was a young, balding Moroccan man who had trouble pronouncing the words “ham” and “saveloy.” Aïcha queued for fifteen minutes behind Frenchwomen, visiting lecturers, and chauffeurs for rich people. She stared at the young man’s hands as he sliced lard and saucisson with astonishing dexterity. “Next.”

  All afternoon she slaved away in her kitchen. The potatoes were overcooked. The cabbage, despite the wine and the spices, was somewhat bland. But the charcuterie looked excellent and she could already imagine her guests dipping their frankfurters into the mustard, going into ecstasies over the pork knuckle that melted in the mouth. She waited for a long time, sitting at the kitchen table, vainly swatting away gnats from the plate of fresh fruit. Twice she called the ministry and Mehdi’s secretary explained, in a sympathetic voice, that the meeting still hadn’t ended. When she finally heard the car entering the garage she smoothed down her skirt, straightened her hair, and furtively lifted the lid from the cooking pot. Everything was ready. Aïcha, whose teachers had always praised her for her calmness and composure, was a hive of anxiety. She was afraid of making a faux pas, saying the wrong thing.

  The guests—all of them men—took their seats in the living room. Aïcha began moving back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. She opened a bottle of champagne. “There’s whiskey too, if you prefer.” She passed around a plate of little gougères, insisting that everyone take second helpings until a look from Mehdi informed her that it was time to back off. “Dinner is served,” she announced, and the men headed toward the dining room. Aïcha put the dish of sauerkraut in the middle of the table and ceremoniously removed the lid from the pot. She stuck a fork in a sausage and brandished it in the air. “Sauerkraut from Alsace. A typical dish from my homeland.” Later, she wondered if it had been that little phrase that had shocked people, even more than the fact that she was serving them a pot full of pig meat. “A dish from my homeland,” she had said, and it was as if she had forgotten where she was, who she was, who her husband was. She had grown up in Morocco, just as all her guests had. Her name was Aïcha, she was the daughter of a local farmer, and yet she had said “a dish from my homeland” while waving a sausage in their faces. One of the guests brought his napkin to his mouth as if he wanted to wipe away a blemish. Then he raised his hand and said softly, apologetically: “That’s very kind, but not for me. I’ve had sauerkraut before and it’s very nice. But I’ve just come back from Mecca, so . . .” Still holding the fork with the pinkish frankfurter hanging from its tines, Aïcha turned her gaze on another guest. “Would you like to taste it?”

  “I’ll take some cabbage. You cooked them separately, right?”

  The meal seemed to last forever. They chewed the marinated cabbage in silence and Aïcha found herself glaring at the pot with its lid firmly in place. She was afraid of how Mehdi would react once his guests had left. She imagined him in a rage, and his image became blurred with memories of Amine, whose yelling had terrorized her as a child. She wished she could beg for forgiveness, admit she’d been stupid, that she’d acted unthinkingly. But Mehdi didn’t yell. He closed the door behind the last guest and joined his wife in the kitchen. He did not offer to help her wash up. He just lifted the lid from the pot, took out a sausage, and bit into it.

  When Aïcha told Mathilde about her misadventure, her mother advised her to hire a maid. Everyone had a maid, it really wasn’t a big deal, but Aïcha—who paid a woman to come and clean her house twice a week—had never wanted to hire anyone on a full-time basis. She hated the idea of another person living in her home, someone who would watch her living, being happy, getting drunk, someone who would spy on her, perhaps, her husband and herself, when they had sex. All her life Aïcha had heard women talking about their maids. It was an inexhaustible subject of conversation, a breeding ground for sordid or comical anecdotes. “You’ll never guess what my maid did!” a woman would say over tea. Then another desperate housewife would ask: “Would you happen to know of a good maid? I’ve just fired mine.”

  Aïcha began her quest. She asked friends, colleagues, the nurses at the hospital. She even asked her neighbor, who employed two maids, a chauffeur, and a caretaker. And for weeks she would listen to these women who, like an ancient chorus, warned her of the dangers to which she was exposing herself by allowing a servant to enter her home. Maids are thieves, maids are horny little minxes. You’re bringing a virgin into your house, after all; it’s hardly surprising if she ends up becoming hysterical, violent, jealous. Maids are sexually frustrated, so they make advances to the man of the house, and you can hardly blame the husband if the girls end up pregnant and jobless, can you?

  The local watchman went even further. Aïcha was a young, naive woman. She mustn’t be too soft with them. “Maids are liars and deceivers,” he told her. “If they don’t look you in the eye, it’s not out of respect or fear, believe me. They’re ungrateful, never content, even when you spoil them, and even after years or decades living under your roof they will betray you and let you down.” Aïcha talked to her friends about the issue. They were lawyers, doctors, university lecturers, who understood her consternation and who, like her, did not have the time to stir the tajine sauce, change the baby’s diaper, iron the husband’s shirts, chop olives and coriander. To do all that, they told her, you had to train a maid. According to Ronit it was better to hire a young girl. “The old ones think they know it all when the truth is they’re just as ignorant as all the others.” She would have to teach the maid to do everything: set a table, stop acting like a savage, get used to the morality of civilized people. Make a bed, follow the rules of hygiene, know when her apron has become so dirty she needs to change it. Maids wore specially designed blue or pink uniforms that could be bought from shops in the city center or even at the main market. Aïcha went into one of these shops and also bought some woolen blankets—“maids adore blankets.” Maids did not eat at the same table as their employers and were only allowed to eat certain brands of yogurt. They ate leftovers in the kitchen. All they cared about was bread and sauce anyway, so what did it matter if their employers had eaten all the meat? The problem, her hairdresser remarked, was that maids couldn’t read, and that complicated everything. You couldn’t ask them to follow a recipe, you couldn’t leave a note on the kitchen table with instructions for the day. They were creatures of instinct. You had to show them everything, and then all of them—from the most gifted to the stupidest—were capable of reproducing the correct actions. Women would also sometimes say things like: “I tell you, that maid isn’t stupid, it’s a shame” or “What a waste—a girl like that could have made something of herself.” But nobody liked intelligent maids. They were the least trustworthy, the most recalcitrant of all.

  Selma worried: “Where will she sleep?” Some employers made their maids sleep on the kitchen floor but Mehdi didn’t like that idea. He said it wasn’t seemly. “These days, in all the most fashionable houses, the maids have a building for themselves at the bottom of the garden, or a basement,” Aïcha’s aunt explained.

  The chief nurse assured Aïcha she could find her a young Black girl, a Touarga, raised among the slaves in the palace, who was a divine cook. The local watchman suggested his cousin but she had back problems and couldn’t lift anything. And then, one day, Fatima entered her life.

  Fatima arrived one Monday morning, dressed in a dark djellaba, her feet shod in worn old slippers. Her hair was tied in a bun and covered with a headscarf. Aïcha ushered her inside. She felt ill at ease. What was she supposed to say? Should she invite the young woman to sit down? Offer her something to drink? She decided to show her around the house, without meeting Fatima’s eye. The girl remained silent, content simply to nod. Two living rooms. There were two living rooms in this house. Two living rooms, each bigger than the biggest shack in the shanty town. She stared at the floor. It would take time to clean all those tiles. And it must be slippery, a floor like that. She kept sticking her hand under her headscarf and scratching at her scalp with long, dirty fingernails. Aïcha asked her questions. Did she know how to cook? Fatima shrugged and Aïcha said: “I’ll teach you. We don’t eat at home very often anyway.” Fatima’s room was next to the laundry room, beneath the kitchen. As she showed the maid her new quarters, Aïcha hesitated. The room was big, the bed brand new, but the air there was stifling because of the boiler and the noisy old fridge. “You need to air it,” she said. “You won’t forget, will you?” She put a white uniform on Fatima’s bed, with a pocket on the right breast, and a pretty blue apron wrapped in plastic packaging. “This is your uniform. Whenever it gets dirty, take it off and put on a clean one. There are two others in the wardrobe.”

  Later she told Mehdi how uncomfortable she had felt during that first afternoon with Fatima. He was barely even listening. He did not want to get involved. But she had no reason to feel guilty. They were giving the girl a job and they would do everything they could to make sure she was fine. Then, one evening, Aïcha started scratching her head. She thought the itching must have been caused by the product she was using to straighten her hair. But one day at work, as she was scratching hard behind her ear, she felt something burst under her nail. On the tip of her index finger she saw a huge head louse and a small drop of blood. On her way back from the hospital she stopped at a pharmacy. When she got home she went down to Fatima’s room and made the girl sit on a chair. Aïcha put on rubber gloves, draped a towel over the maid’s shoulders, and asked her to untie her headscarf. Fatima refused, reacted ridiculously in fact, crying like a lamb about to be slaughtered. “Why are you being such a baby about this?” Aïcha demanded. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to use the same stuff on my hair, you know. I’ve got lice, thanks to you.” In the end Fatima calmed down. She untied the scarf, and for the first time Aïcha saw the maid’s hair. It was auburn, dirty and tied up in a turban. Grimacing, Aïcha took out the dozens of pins that were holding it in place. The maid’s hair fell down her back, all the way to the base of her spine. “How long has it been since you washed your hair?” Aïcha asked in what Mehdi called her “doctor’s voice”—a clear, curt, authoritative voice; a voice without malice, a voice that did not judge; a voice that healed. Fatima was incapable of responding. She kept sniveling, as if her employer had stripped her naked and mocked her. Aïcha poured out the entire contents of the bottle onto the maid’s head. “If I’d known you had this much hair I’d have bought more.” After that, she wrapped Fatima’s hair in a white sheet, as Mathilde used to do when they were children. “And now we wait.”