Selma was whispering, and, to Selim, it seemed as though she was completely indifferent to his presence, that she was talking to herself, not to him. Abruptly she appeared to notice him there. She stubbed out her cigarette, gestured for another one, and went on: “Ask your sister. Ask her if she remembers the night of the revolver. It must still be there, inside that terra-cotta vase in the corridor. Take a look if you don’t believe me. The revolver he wanted to kill us with—your mother, your sister, and me. He says I was lazy, that I didn’t work in school. But the truth is that even if I’d been a perfect student, as perfect as little Miss Aïcha, he still wouldn’t have let me leave. He’d never have paid for me to go to college. So what’s the point, huh? When I was your age I wanted to be a flight attendant. ‘A flight attendant?’ he said. ‘I’d rather you just became a prostitute.’ I always loved airplanes. And I fell in love with a pilot. He took me to the airfield and explained how it all worked, all the machines and stuff, and he told me how it felt to fly. I wanted to travel, to get away from this place, become somebody. And I thought I had my whole life ahead of me.” Selma sniffed. Big fat tears were rolling down her cheeks now. “When I got pregnant with Sabah, I begged your mother to help me. Saint Mathilde. She told me that Dragan had agreed to do it, that she would arrange everything. No one would know and I’d be able to get on with my life. You know what I’m talking about, right? You’re big enough to know all that. Every day I would ask her when she was going to take me to the abortion clinic and she’d say: ‘Soon, very soon.’ And then she got scared. Or she wanted revenge. Or she was jealous. Anyway, she never took me. Your father brought the adoul to the house and they forced me to marry Mourad. And I had the kid over there, in that moldy old storehouse. Sometimes I think it would have been better if he’d used his revolver. He should have just killed me.”

  During her first days at home, Aïcha did nothing but sleep. Mathilde worried about her. She thought her daughter might be ill. “It’s like she’s been bitten by a tsetse fly,” she told Amine. Whenever she sat down, Aïcha was overwhelmed by exhaustion. She slept in the living room, in the middle of the morning, or on a garden chair. In the afternoons she would close her bedroom shutters and sleep until evening, and she would have no difficulty falling asleep again at night. It was as if, during all those years in Strasbourg, she had never had a moment’s rest, like the victim of a witch’s curse in some fairy tale. Now the spell had been broken and she abandoned herself to sleep. Or perhaps this endless sleep was the curse. Aïcha didn’t know what to think anymore.

  It took her a week to emerge from this lethargy, and then she was able to enjoy the burgeoning summer and the beauty of nature. In the mornings she would watch her brother swim; she could sit there for hours, her feet in the water, admiring the sleekness of his body and the regular rhythm with which he swam lengths. Selim didn’t talk to her very much. He had to take his baccalauréat at the end of June and he was in a sullen mood. Aïcha offered to help him study but he coldly rejected her, saying that studying wasn’t the problem and anyway he was big enough to manage on his own. In the evenings she would put on an old pair of sneakers and walk through the fields, her pockets filled with stones to scare away stray dogs. She picked barely ripe oranges from the trees, knowing even before she sniffed them, even before she raised a segment to her lips, exactly how they would taste. She lay in the grass and stared up at the sky, at that blueness that had often come to her in dreams during her Alsatian exile. The sky here was naked, open, as if a divine hand had stripped away everything that might cover it, obscure it, diminish its brightness. Birds flew, sometimes alone, sometimes in flocks, and the branches of palm trees and olive trees swayed in the wind, awakening within her a desire for storms.

  Several times she invited Monette to spend the day with her. Her friend still lived in Meknes, where she worked as a classroom assistant. She envied Aïcha for having been able to leave this provincial town, meet new friends, learn a profession. Monette lived with her mother at a house in the hills. Her mother was so fat that she hardly ever left the house and she whined constantly about her varicose veins and the diabetes that was slowly killing her. The day of their reunion, Monette threw her arms around Aïcha. She kissed her and began to giggle so happily that Aïcha, too, burst out laughing. Aïcha had barely thought about Monette during the four years she had spent in Strasbourg; the image of her friend had been a vague, distant presence in the back of her mind, like something remembered from a dream. Now Monette was standing there, before her, her face lit up with a radiant smile, and Aïcha realized how much she had missed her.

  Monette looked like an adult, thought Aïcha. She was exactly what Mathilde would have liked Aïcha to be. She wore a loose-fitting, knee-length dress and square-toed, low-heeled shoes. She wore her hair like Brigitte Bardot, in a high bun pierced with pins that forced her to stand very straight. Monette was no longer the insolent, clumsy girl she had been before, whose only ambition had been to humiliate and ridicule adults. She behaved like a woman of the world. She paid Mathilde compliments about the fabric of her sofas or those little glass ornaments in the shapes of animals that Aïcha’s mother had decided to collect.

  Mathilde enjoyed her presence. When the two girls sunbathed by the side of the pool she would bring them lemonade, making Aïcha feel like a tourist at a luxury hotel. Her mother treated her so respectfully that it was embarrassing. She refused to let Aïcha help clear the table, saying: “Stay where you are, you must be tired.” Aïcha no longer felt at home. This house where she had grown up was strange to her now, and she sensed a sort of hostility in these walls, these paintings, this new furniture. She missed her independence and even the silence of her attic room in Strasbourg. Here, she had the impression she was becoming a child again, and the regression irritated her.

  In the mornings Mathilde came into her bedroom. She drew the curtains and kissed her daughter as she used to when Aïcha had to get ready for school. Her mother encouraged her to eat, to get some fresh air; she warned her about the winter sunlight that caused migraines and the chergui that made your lungs wheeze. Aïcha wanted to tell her that these were just old wives’ tales, that there was no scientific evidence for such claims. But she stayed silent. At the end of June, while Monette was busy monitoring the school exams, Aïcha offered to help her mother at the clinic, where a long queue of patients formed every morning. Mathilde agreed without enthusiasm. When Aïcha had been a child, her mother had called her “my nurse” and had let her disinfect and bandage wounds. Now she asked her to cut out blister packs of pills, but it was always Mathilde who gave the medicine to the peasants, like a priest handing over the sacred Host. She listened to their secrets and, with gentle authority, overrode their prudishness, persuading them to unbutton their blouse or pull down their underwear. She had come to believe in her science, her pseudo-science, the way a preacher might believe his own sermons.

  When she had first come to Morocco, in 1946, Mathilde had prided herself on being the only woman in the family to have received a real education. She boasted about reading books, speaking several languages, playing the piano. At first she had been proud of Aïcha’s brilliance at school, the nuns’ compliments on her intelligence. Then she had begun to anxiously await the day when her daughter knew more than she did. Because then she would be confounded. Aïcha would understand that her mother was an impostor who didn’t really know anything. As soon as Aïcha started secondary school, Mathilde realized that she was incapable of helping her with her homework. The numbers swam before her eyes, losing all meaning. The history, geography, and—worst of all—philosophy questions were utterly incomprehensible to her, and she wondered how children so young could possibly absorb so much knowledge. She dreaded Aïcha’s questions and the way her daughter looked at her. Sitting at her desk, hands resting on a book, she would gaze up with dark eyes at her dumbstruck mother.

  Mathilde felt certain that she had been part of the reason Aïcha had chosen to pursue medicine as a career. She had given her the taste for healing, had let her read the medical magazines lent to her by Dragan even though they were not really suitable for a girl that age. But Aïcha had overtaken her now. She was the possessor of an immense, irrefutable reservoir of knowledge. This shy, skinny girl, barely twenty-one, looked down on her own mother from humiliating heights. How pathetic Aïcha must think this little clinic of hers! Her gaze was probably scanning the walls in search of a diploma from some foreign university—like the one in Dragan’s office—that granted her mother the power to make decisions about other people’s lives.

  One morning Aïcha turned up at the clinic in her baggy jeans and old sneakers. She gave her mother advice about the patients. “He needs to see a dentist. That’s why he has a fever. There’s nothing we can do to help him.” She made fun of the remedies her mother prescribed. Warm, salted water to heal a sprain. Ginger decoctions for sore throats. A spoonful of cumin to stop diarrhea and vomiting. Watched by her daughter, Mathilde didn’t dare offer a diagnosis. She lost all her confidence, second-guessed her every move, kept looking to her own child for approval. Aïcha reacted with cold reticence to the hugs and kisses that the patients gave her. “Look how she’s grown! Tabarakallah! May God watch over her,” they told Mathilde. Their admiration for Aïcha was of the same blissful, unquestioning nature that the illiterate always feel for the educated. Aïcha hid in the toilet. And as she was washing her hands she saw her mother open a drawer, take some cash out, and hand it to one of the peasant women. “May God bless you,” Mathilde whispered. “And may He protect your children.”

  One evening in early August, while they were drinking aperitifs by the pool, a farmworker came to ask to see the boss and his wife. He told Tamo it was an emergency and the maid, tortured by curiosity and furious with the man for not telling her what the problem was, went to tell her masters. Mathilde and Amine went to see the farmworker, but he appeared hesitant. First he asked about their family—“How is your son? And your daughter? And your sister?”—then he began mumbling apologies: he didn’t want to disturb them, he knew it was late, he was sorry. Amine, annoyed by all this deferential small talk, cut him short: “Get to the point.” The man swallowed before explaining that a girl had arrived in the douar two days earlier. “A lost girl, if you want my opinion.” Nobody knew where she had come from but she was heavily pregnant and she refused to give her name or the name of her village. The farmworker shed his shyness at this point and continued his story in Berber: “We don’t want any trouble. I said we should send her away, that she would only bring us problems. Everyone knows about girls like that. But she cries, she begs, so the women take pity on her. They say we must be merciful and that if we take care of her she will end up telling us who the father is and how she came to be here. Only now, the girl is in my house and tonight she started screaming and shouting. She is twisted up with pain. We brought the midwife over but she says the baby does not want to come out. That it is a child of shame and it will kill its mother. I am telling you, boss, I would rather have a bastard under my roof than a dead kid. That’s why I thought you could come, and Madame Mathilde too. We can’t leave her like that. To let her die under my roof.”

  Mathilde took his hand. “You did the right thing. We’ll take the car and I’ll come with you.” She walked over to the large wooden cupboard where she kept the clinic’s medical supplies and began tossing them into a bag: a bottle of Betadine, compresses, a large pair of scissors. Amine, who had stood with his arms crossed and head lowered while the laborer was talking, interrupted these preparations: “No, Aïcha will go. She’s the doctor. And I will accompany her. I will not let my daughter go alone into the douar after nightfall.” He went to the terrace and, as he used to back in his days as an army officer, yelled: “Aïcha, get dressed and come here! Hurry up!”

  When they got in the car, Mathilde gave her daughter the small bag filled with medicine. She watched the car move away as the sky turned the color of ink. They drove to the douar and throughout the journey Aïcha kept repeating that she had never done this before, that she was not, technically speaking, a doctor yet, and that it was crazy to saddle her with such a responsibility. Her legs shook and she felt like she was going to throw up. The landscape began to flicker, she couldn’t hear anything anymore; her head was empty of knowledge, filled only with a thick fog. “Would you rather let your mother do it?” Amine asked her, and Aïcha shrugged.

  In the headlights’ glare the first houses appeared. A crowd had gathered in front of one of them. Women in djellabas, wearing brightly colored headscarves, were slapping their own faces and wailing. Some of the men were squatting while others paced around, hands behind their backs or smoking cigarettes. The children, taking advantage of the adults’ distraction, were throwing rocks at a pack of dogs, all of them so scrawny that they looked like ghosts. The villagers surrounded Amine and Aïcha. They blessed them, kissed their shoulders and hands. Their skin smelled of cumin and charcoal. A woman escorted Aïcha into a dark room with a dirt floor. In a corner an oil lamp emitted a feeble light, casting monstrous shadows on the wall. A young woman, lying on a blanket, moaned quietly. Aïcha went back to the doorway, where Amine was standing, and told him: “I need more light. How can I help her if I can’t see anything?” Amine went to fetch two flashlights that he always kept in the trunk of his car. Aïcha paced about in small circles, wringing her hands, and for a moment she thought about running away, escaping through the dark fields. But Amine turned on the flashlights and pointed their beams at his daughter’s face. “What else do you need?” She said they should boil some water and that she had to wash her hands. Amine designated two women and warned them: “Do everything the doctor tells you, understood?” One of the peasant women took care of the water while the other grabbed the flashlights and aimed them at the pregnant woman. It was then that Aïcha discovered she was no more than sixteen or seventeen. Her face was pale, her skin slippery with perspiration, her mouth distorted by pain. She had slanted eyes and flattened features, as if she came not from anywhere nearby but from the Mongolian steppe. Aïcha crouched down beside her and caressed her temples, her sweat-drenched hair. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “Everything will be all right.” Delicately she lifted up the girl’s blouse, exposing her naked belly. She palpated it, glaring at her assistant now and again to make the woman hold the flashlight steady. Then she knelt between the girl’s legs and spread them. Concentrating as hard as she could, she tried to remember the lectures about childbirth she had attended. In a firm voice she called for silence. The conversations from outside, snippets of which she could hear, were bothering her. She also lost her temper with the two women helping her, whose lamentations sounded like the buzzing of insects. They kept droning “Ya Latif, oh my God!” and sniffling.

  Aïcha slid her hand into the girl’s vagina. The cervix was soft, dilated. She had been having contractions for hours, but they did not seem to be working and they were exhausting her. The birth had to be accelerated. It was the only way to relieve her pain. Aïcha rummaged in the bag that Mathilde had given her, but she couldn’t find anything useful in there. She looked around. “I need something small and pointed. Do you understand what I mean?” Struggling to express herself in Arabic, Aïcha grew annoyed. She went out of the house and called her father: “Tell them to find me something small and pointed enough that I can insert it into that girl’s body. I have to break her waters.” In the darkness, Aïcha did not see the proud smile stretch across her father’s face. The villagers moved into action. They searched through what little they possessed. At last a woman came over, triumphantly holding a fork. Aïcha took it. She dipped the fork in the boiling water, sprayed Betadine over it, and, slowly, with assured, precise gestures, inserted the object into the girl’s vagina. A silence fell. A heavy, devout silence. Then the patient gave a cry of surprise and relief. Transparent liquid, mixed with a few clots of blood, flowed between her thighs. “You’ll start to feel better now,” Aïcha told her. She moved her face closer to the girl’s and kissed it, watched by the outraged Berber women. The patient’s dry lips parted and she muttered: “Help me.” Aïcha smiled. “Yes, of course I’m going to help you.” But the girl repeated: “Help me. Help me never to have any more children.”

  In the morning she gave birth to a stillborn boy.

  Returning to the farm at dawn, Aïcha took a hot shower and then collapsed onto the bed. She slept through the morning and part of the afternoon. She dreamed she was swimming in a pool whose clear blue water transformed into amniotic fluid; she was struggling, drowning in the lukewarm liquid. Mathilde woke her from her nightmare. She shook her shoulder and said: “Monette is here. She wants to go to the movies with you.”

  Aïcha dragged herself out of bed. She had no desire to go out or talk to anyone, but she got dressed anyway. She tried to fix her hair, then gave up. She arrived in the living room waxy-faced and puffy-eyed. “I’ve heard about your exploits!” her friend said excitedly, and Aïcha gave an embarrassed smile. Mathilde asked Monette for the latest gossip from Meknes. “This girl knows everything!” Monette told tales of sex and divorce to which Aïcha paid no attention. She slowly drank her coffee, reliving the night’s events minute by minute. She saw again the girl’s face and the ashen, lifeless body of the child she had brought into the world. In the douar, she thought, the men must have dug a hole at dawn to bury the baby’s corpse. A tiny little hole, so narrow and shallow. The child’s death suited everyone: it erased the sin, the dishonor; it was a blessing. I have to go back, Aïcha told herself. I have to examine the patient, make sure she’s not bleeding, that she has regained her strength. But she felt certain that her presence was unwanted and that all the inhabitants of the douar would act as if nothing had happened. As if that night had never existed. Perhaps the girl had already been kicked out, despite her exhaustion, despite the big, flabby belly she would have to hold up with one hand as she walked. No, Aïcha did not feel like going to the movies. But nor did she feel like staying where she was and enduring her parents’ questions, her brother’s silent resentment.