“Yes . . . Well, my mother’s from here,” Aïcha replied.

  “From Strasbourg?”

  “No, from another town.”

  “Which one?”

  The girl’s face blushed darkly then, and she stammered: “I . . . I don’t remember.”

  Madame Muller was given no cause to complain about this tenant whom she privately dubbed “the African.” It had to be admitted that the girl was studious and hardworking. During the four years she spent in Strasbourg, Aïcha never once brought anyone back to her room and she very rarely went out at night. Her life consisted of attending lectures at the medical school during the days and poring over her books at the kitchen table in the evenings. She only ever went out for a walk when she was so exhausted by her studies that she needed some fresh air or she had to buy food from the supermarket. In those moments she had the feeling that she was invisible, and she was always surprised when someone spoke a word to her or even looked at her. She couldn’t get over the idea that people could actually see her. In Strasbourg she had to learn everything from scratch: how to live in a city, how to live alone, how to cook and clean. Some nights she had so much work that she didn’t sleep at all. Gradually the color of her skin changed, becoming dull and earthy. Bluish rings appeared under her big, dark eyes.

  She worked harder than she had ever worked in her life, to the point of exhaustion, sometimes even to the point of madness. She lost all notion of time. She got so little sleep and drank so much coffee that her hands shook and she felt constantly nauseated. She passed her exams at the first attempt and wrote to her parents to tell them she would not be coming home that summer. She had found a job running the office in a clinic. As careful as an old lady, she was already saving her money.

  * * *

  In their third year the students were taken to a vast, windowed hall in which a dozen corpses were laid out on high, black tables. On the sides of these tables there were iron wings to support the dead body’s outstretched arms. Deep trenches ran along the tables’ edges to trap fluids and other waste products. When they saw all this, the students gave little cries of disgust or hilarity. Some of them made tasteless jokes, others said they couldn’t do it, that they were going to faint. The lecturer, an old Alsatian man with gray eyes, was used to these juvenile reactions. He ordered the class to be silent. Then he organized them into groups, each of which would dissect a different body part.

  Aïcha felt no fear or revulsion. The corpses, preserved in formaldehyde, did not have too bad a smell, and she knew it would be several weeks before it became unbearable. Throughout her youth she had been fascinated by anatomy, and even now, if she closed her eyes, she could visualize the plates that Dr. Palosi had given her when she was young. She had seen the innards of animals thousands of times at the farm. A cow dead in a field, its belly exploded in the hot sun. She still remembered that stench, an odor so strong and repugnant that the farmworkers had stuffed mint leaves into their nostrils before they burned the animal.

  Aïcha walked over to the corpse she had been assigned. Its skin had turned a grayish color and its facial features were deformed, as if a sculptor had tried to mold a face in a block of clay but had given up before he could finish. It was above this cold, naked body with blackened genitals that she first met David. Unlike the other students, he wasn’t laughing. His expression was serious, almost reverent, as he examined the corpse’s left shoulder, which he had been told to dissect. He did not immediately pick up his scalpel, but joined his hands beneath the table. He appeared to enter inside himself. He looked at the guinea pig in front of him as if it were not a stranger but his father, his brother, perhaps even himself. When he glanced up, he noticed that Aïcha was waiting for him. She had joined his prayer and she seemed to understand that, before slicing open this man’s flesh, before stripping away his nerves, he needed to offer his apologies. In that moment David felt no fascination for the complexity of human anatomy or for the magnitude of medical knowledge accumulated by mankind over centuries. On the contrary, he was filled with a heavy, melancholic feeling of powerlessness. This corpse had once lived, it had had a name, it had been loved. Where his classmates saw a body, David saw the incarnation of a mystery.

  He picked up his scalpel and began. Across the table, Aïcha’s movements were assured and precise, and when the lecturer approached her he made a sort of grunt that David interpreted as an expression of admiration. David asked her if she had done this before. And Aïcha, whose shyness usually prevented her from speaking, told him, with her eyes fixed on the corpse’s empty blood vessels, about her memories of Eid al-Adha at the farm, how she had sunk her fingers into the aortas and carotid arteries of sheep.

  David became her friend. Aïcha thought he was sweet, with his curly hair, his thick eyebrows, and his plump cheeks that made him look like a sixteen-year-old boy. David was part of Strasbourg’s Jewish community and his father taught in the theology department. Later he explained to Aïcha that he belonged to an ancient lineage of Alsatian scholars. The two of them would meet in the evenings to study at the library and sit next to each other in the lecture hall. During the winter of 1968 he often took her to have dinner at a kosher restaurant run by a woman with such an enormous bottom that she could barely walk between the tables. She treated the students who came to her restaurant like her own children, insisting they finish their plates to give them strength for all their studies. She thought Aïcha too skinny and after every meal she would hand her an aluminum box full of leftovers. A bowl of baeckeoffe, vol-au-vents with mushrooms, gefilte fish with rice. Aïcha loved that restaurant, the noisiness of it and the cigarette smoke behind which the customers’ faces disappeared. And she loved watching David, who ate with an extraordinary appetite. There was never the slightest ambiguity in their friendship, never a single awkward moment. Aïcha was convinced of her own ugliness in any case, and she could never believe that a boy might be interested in her. She also knew that her friend was deeply attached to his family and to his religion, which he practiced with a devotion she found quite moving. She often asked him to tell her about Judaism, its rites and its prayers. About the place that God occupied in his life. She confided in him too, telling him about her love for the Virgin Mary and the comfort she had found, long ago, in the freezing chapel of her boarding school.

  That winter David introduced her to his old school friends whom he still saw from time to time and who were now studying philosophy, theater, or economics. Aïcha was surprised by the warmth of these young Alsatians, by all the questions they asked her and the admiration in their eyes when she told them about her childhood at the farm. Sometimes she was slightly embarrassed by the way they treated her, and she had the impression that she was lying to them, leading them astray. For them, she represented a sort of ideal. She was a woman from the Third World, a farmer’s daughter, a native with frizzy hair and olive skin who had succeeded in overcoming her disadvantages. Their discussions often revolved around politics. They asked her whom she had voted for. She said: “I have never voted. Nor have my parents.” They questioned her about the condition of women and wanted to know if Simone de Beauvoir was famous in Morocco. Aïcha replied that she had never heard of her.

  They forgave her for not understanding their theories and for staring wide-eyed when they talked about historical materialism. Aïcha was shy and uncultured. Once, she admitted that she had never taken part in a protest march and that in her parents’ home no one read newspapers. She felt ill at ease during their discussions about class conflict, anti-imperialism, the Vietnam War, and she prayed they wouldn’t ask her what she thought. The girls made fun of her because she blushed at the slightest provocation and bit the insides of her cheeks when they talked about sex or contraception. For these students, Aïcha was beyond mere theory: she was the revolution incarnate. She was living proof that women could escape their oppression through education and achieve emancipation. One day David’s friends dragged her to a café near the cathedral. Joseph, who was wearing khaki canvas pants and an American-style military shirt, asked her what she thought about Algeria’s independence and the Moroccan workers who came to work in factories in the north of France. Everyone fell silent, waiting for her answer. Aïcha felt scared. She thought she was going to be accused of something, that they had conspired against her and were going to reveal their hand in this noisy café where they had forced her to order a beer. She stammered that she knew nothing about it. In a high-pitched voice she added that she had nothing to do with Moroccans like that. She looked at her watch and made her excuses. She had to go study.

  At the medical school she was known as the brightest student in her year and, ever her father’s daughter, she worried about the jealousies this might arouse. Her classmates made fun of her rabbit-in-the-headlights appearance, the way she always walked so quickly through the corridors of the university, books under her arms, her hair sticking up. They said she was uptight, timid, overly deferential to authority in the form of her lecturers. During classes she concentrated so hard that she seemed to forget the presence of others. She chewed her pen and spat little bits of plastic into her hand. Her lips were often ink-stained. But what annoyed her classmates most was the habit she had of pulling out hairs from her forehead one by one. She did it without realizing and at the end of each class her desk would be covered in hair.

  Medicine was the only thing that interested Aïcha. She couldn’t have cared less about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the fate of de Gaulle, or the situation of Black people in America. No, what fascinated her, what thrilled her more than anything, was the incredible, complex functioning of life. The fact that, when we eat, each piece of food is assimilated, each element going exactly where it is supposed to go. What astonished her was the tenacity and intelligence of a disease when it entered a healthy body, intent on destruction. The only newspaper articles she read were about science, and she eagerly followed news of the first heart transplant in South Africa. Her memory was phenomenal and whenever David worked with her he kept saying: “I can’t keep up, you’re too fast for me!” She impressed him with her capacity for concentration and the ease with which she absorbed the lessons of clinical cases. One day, as they were leaving the library, he asked her where her passion for medicine came from. Aïcha put her hands in her jacket pockets and, after a moment’s reflection, replied: “Unlike your friends, I don’t believe we can change the world. But if we can heal the sick, at least that’s something.”

  Aïcha was baffled by the events of May ’68. That spring she prepared for her exams with her usual focus, and spent whole days and nights at the hospital where she was on call as often as she was asked. Of course she noticed that something was happening: a change, an agitation. People would hand her pamphlets and she would take them with a shy smile before dumping them in the trash can outside her apartment building. It felt as if an enormous party was being readied all around her, an orgiastic celebration in which she could play no part. David and his friends took her to the literature department, where thousands of students were sitting on the lawns. A boy yelled at them through a megaphone to rise up. She was amazed that they felt so free to say whatever they wanted. Her father had always warned her to be careful with her words. She looked at the girls around her, in short skirts and thigh-high socks, their breasts wobbling under their blouses. One of David’s female friends told her how groups of young people were traveling on a bus to Kathmandu to lose themselves in clouds of opium smoke. But Aïcha would never be one of them. The megaphone was passed from hand to hand and Aïcha started to feel bored. She didn’t dare tell David that she thought his friends were hysterical, sometimes even ridiculous. All these big words, all these concepts, struck her as meaningless. Where had they found this fervor? Where did this wide-eyed idealism come from? And, most mysterious of all, why weren’t they afraid? Just then, she thought of an Arabic expression that her father often used: “When God wishes to punish an ant, he gives it wings.” Aïcha was an ant, hardworking and obedient. And she had no intention of flying anywhere.

  The day before her return to the farm, Aïcha went to a hairdresser’s in the center of Strasbourg. In the four years she had lived there, she must have passed the window of this elegant salon thousands of times on her way to the medical school. She had often looked in at the women sitting in those white leather chairs, their hair covered with strips of aluminum or big blue curlers. She would imagine herself as one of them, her head under a dryer, her manicured hands holding a women’s magazine. But something always held her back, prevented her from entering. She would feel guilt at her vanity, wasting money on something so trivial, wasting precious time that could have been spent studying. But the exams had been canceled now and she had saved enough money to pay for a flight back to Meknes and get herself a new haircut. She pictured her mother’s reaction when she saw her little Aïcha with beautiful long smooth hair, like Françoise Hardy. And she opened the door.

  Aïcha waited in front of the unattended reception desk. Employees rushed past her wearing grave, anxious expressions, as if they were not merely cutting hair but saving lives in an operating theater. Sometimes they would cast her a sideways glance, a look that seemed to say “What does she expect?,” and Aïcha almost turned around and left. Nobody offered to take her coat, and, standing in that overheated entrance, she began to sweat. Finally the salon’s boss—a tall, blond, voluptuous Alsatian woman—came over to serve her. She was wearing a tweed dress that showed off her curves and, around her plump wrists, some gold bracelets that clinked together when she moved her blemish-covered arms.

  “How can I help you, mademoiselle?”

  Aïcha said nothing. She stared at the pearlescent lipstick stains on the hairdresser’s incisors. Then she noticed a swelling in the woman’s thyroid, similar to that of certain species of bird. You should get that looked at, she thought.

  “Mademoiselle?” the woman prompted her, annoyed.

  Aïcha could only murmur: “I’m here for my hair . . . Um, to straighten it? Like Françoise Hardy.”

  The hairdresser raised her eyebrows and leaned her cheek on her hands, distressed by what she saw. With a clatter of bracelets, her expression betraying something close to repulsion, she reached out to touch Aïcha’s hair.

  “We don’t usually do this kind of hair.”

  She rubbed a lock of hair between her fingers and it made the sound of dry leaves being crumbled to dust.

  “Follow me,” she said, and led Aïcha toward the back of the salon. It smelled of ammonia and nail polish. A woman with long gray hair was telling off one of the employees: “I want more hairspray!” Her silver helmet was already frozen in place, like an old wig in a shop window. She could have walked through a tornado without disturbing a single hair on her head, but “I want more!” she repeated, and the young hairdresser obeyed.

  The boss abandoned Aïcha near the shampoo chairs. The walls were covered with large mirrors and every time Aïcha turned around she saw her reflection without really recognizing herself. She could not admit that they belonged to her, those enormous bulging eyes and the receding gums that were exposed whenever she smiled. She could not believe that she was beautiful, and she refused herself all the little adornments common to girls her age. No makeup, no jewelry, no elaborate chignon. No, when the idea suddenly came to her that she ought to do something—to “make an effort,” as her mother always said—her actions were purely impulsive. One day, in a fury, she had tried to straighten her hair with an iron; she had leaned her face against the table in her attic room and pressed the hot iron to her frizzy hair. Smoke had filled the room, along with the bitter smell of grilled meat. The tips of her hair had been blackened and she had burned her temple. Another time, after reading a magazine, she had shaved off both her eyebrows and tried to redraw them in black pencil, but she could never manage to make them symmetrical. Now, in front of the mirror, under the stark fluorescent lighting, she noticed that one of her eyebrows was thicker than the other and that the black line had run down slightly onto her eyelid.

  As she waited, her memory supplied her with all the nicknames her old classmates had invented for her. Poodlehead. Black sheep. Damp squib. Barbary lion. They called her darkie, bad-hair girl, and worse names too. She waited a long time. Hairdressers shoved past her, carrying pots of dye in their rubber-gloved hands. Aïcha’s presence bothered them. She was in the way, and she imagined that everyone could smell the acidic odor of her sweat. She was sure that beneath their hair dryers the other customers were whispering about her, mocking her shapeless hair. At last a teenage girl with round cheeks and bored eyes told her to sit down in front of a white enamel sink. Aïcha thought: What wouldn’t I do to have hair like hers? Smooth, soft hair that she could run her fingers through.

  The hairdresser brutally stabbed a comb into Aïcha’s hair. She spoke Alsatian and laughed with her colleagues and the other customers. She yanked so hard that Aïcha yelped.

  “Well, what d’you expect, eh? It’s not easy untangling this mess.” Exasperated, she barked: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, pass me the straightening cream!”

  The hairdresser covered her nose with her elbow and dipped the other hand in a large red pot. She applied this cream to Aïcha’s scalp. After a few minutes her head started to itch so badly that she had to slide her hands under her bottom to stop herself from scratching her scalp. Tears ran down her cheeks and she looked around helplessly. When the boss saw her, she exclaimed: “Oh, don’t be such a wimp! You have to suffer if you want to be beautiful.”