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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people,
or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2012 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
First publication 2013 by Europa Editions
Translation by Alison Anderson
Original Title: Les amandes amères
Translation copyright © 2013 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in
any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609451110
Laurence Cossé
BITTER ALMONDS
Translated from the French
by Alison Anderson
1
There’s a ring at the door. Édith is at work on the dining room table. I won’t
get it, she thinks, the hell with it. Who could it be? It’s almost dark. But she
gets up, and goes to open.
It’s Aïcha, the concierge from number 31, all smiles and in the company of
an older woman. Édith wasn’t expecting this. She often sees Aïcha, in the
street, in the shops; she’s a neighborhood feature, they call her Radio Aïcha.
But she’s never seen her in her building. Aïcha, moreover, apologizes, with
little movements of her head and hands; she’ll be quick. She’s ringing at every
door in the street.
“Maybe you know my mother?” she says, not waiting for an answer. “She’s
looking for work.”
The woman standing next to her is impassive. She holds herself very
straight, her mouth pursed, a black headscarf knotted tightly beneath her chin,
her hands crossed over her belly. Impassive and tense, notes Édith, who
wonders for a moment whether she speaks French. She was working at a dry
cleaner’s in Passy, explains Aïcha. Six months ago the cleaner went out of
business; no one took over from him, and his two employees were let go.
“My mother has been looking everywhere,” says Aïcha, “she hasn’t found
anything. She’ll be penniless soon, they’ve signed her up for part-time . . . well,
never mind the details. She can iron to perfection, and she can sew, so I got an
idea. If fifteen or twenty families in the neighborhood take her on for two or
three hours a week, she’ll be in the clear. She could keep her room.”
Gilles is delighted with the idea. For ten years he’s been giving a lot of time
and a bit of money to SNC, Solidarités nouvelles face au chômage, an association
that provides assistance to jobless people until they find work again. One of the
ways they go about it is to finance short-term contracts with the dues and
donations of their members.
“Basically Aïcha’s idea is the SNC all over,” says Gilles enthusiastically, “real
neighborhood solidarity.”
So he’s all for it. It’s true that in this household he’s the one who does the
bulk of the ironing. Édith is useless at ironing. She can’t stand it. Gilles doesn’t
mind, he’s happy enough to do his own shirts, but the boys’ jeans, or the
tablecloths and pillowcases, that’s a real bore.
Done deal, then. Not right away, and not just in this street alone. But the
upshot is that within three months Fadila is working twenty to twenty-five
hours a week. That’s all she wants. “I’m not young,” she says. You need time
for yourself, after all. She lives in Saint-Augustin but she buys her bread on the
avenue de Clichy, the flat bread she likes and which keeps well; she goes to the
baths Boulogne, they’re very clean, “not like out in the suburbs.”
She comes on Tuesdays between four and seven. Or five and seven, if she’s
been held up, or twenty to four and six if her son’s coming over for supper and
she has to cook. Or Wednesday if she’s been really busy on Tuesday and could
only have come for an hour.
It annoys Édith. Gilles doesn’t care, he never gets home before eight in the
evening. But Édith works at home, already it’s hard enough with the children,
she needs to know when she will be alone.
“I no see problem,” retorts Fadila. What difference does it make whether she
comes Tuesday or Wednesday? She has the keys. She knows what she has to do,
she can manage her schedule on her own.
Already on the second Tuesday she looked Édith right in the eye and said, “I
never been to school.” She was wearing her wooden face. Édith took several
weeks to understand that obviously this meant she could neither read nor
write French, but that she had not learned to read or write Arabic either.
Before long she is bringing letters, often still sealed. Bills, summons,
advertisements, she can’t tell them apart, any form of mail frightens her. She
has to get someone else to read it to her. “I’m stupid,” she says. She doesn’t
know how to sign her name: she just scribbles a little zigzag.
She has no trouble speaking on the telephone, but she never calls. At first,
Édith gets annoyed. “It’s all right if you change the time, or even the day, but
give us a call. Call ahead.” Until the day she understood why Fadila wouldn’t do
anything of the sort. Dialing the number is the problem. Fadila keeps an old
notebook in her bag, with telephone numbers marked in different handwriting
and colors. “You put notebook telephone number,” she asked, the day she
informed Édith she had never been to school. She can read numbers—“a little
bit”: she shrugs one shoulder, she has to be able to read the prices in the shops,
after all.
But reading the phone numbers in her notebook, that’s another matter
altogether. She cannot tell them apart.
The most awkward thing is that she can’t really get around other than by
bus. From the bus she can see where she is, she can recognize the place so she
knows where to get off. She can only take the métro if it’s direct, and if
someone goes with her several times first to show her which direction to go
and which platform to wait on, and how to count the number of stations.
“After is okay,” she says. So she can go to see her other daughter, Zora, in
Aubervilliers, for example. But she is incapable of changing trains. And no, she
doesn’t like asking strangers for help.
To get to the fifteenth arrondissement where Gilles and Édith live, she takes
the number 80 bus from Saint-Augustin. More than once she has arrived late,
and in a foul temper. “They having demonstration, I been waiting the bus
forty-five minutes.” Or the number 80 had to make a detour, so she panicked
and got out at Les Invalides and went the rest of the way on foot. She walked
for half an hour. Why did she get out at Les Invalides and not somewhere
closer? Because she knows Les Invalides, she recognizes the place. From there
she can find her way. Monuments are beacons for her. With the streets she gets
all mixed up.
Her French is comprehensible but full of mistakes, particularly with the
verbs, and she tends to drop auxiliaries altogether (“I no understand,” “I no
come”); other approximations can be charming (she says “He kiss you” for
“She congratulates you”—she frequently confuses he and she), and from time
to time she’ll come out with a perfectly idiomatic expression, such as “I
overdid it” or “I cannot say no to that old lady.”
She is not really sure how old she is. On her documents it says she was born
in 1945, but she knows for a fact it can’t be true. When she moved to France,
they asked her for her date of birth, and she said she didn’t know. The
immigration officer looked at her for a moment then said, “I’ll put 1945, is that
all right?” Fadila still thinks it’s funny. To get younger like that, all at once: it’s
not an offer you turn down.
If her mother were still alive, she would be able to dig up the year of her
birth. She would go about it in the way that was usual in Morocco back in the
days before they had registrars who kept records: she would say, “the year the
almond trees froze,” “the fourth year of the great drought,” or “the year of the
earthquake.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to learn how to read?” Édith asks.
“Yes, one time I starting!” says Fadila. A few years earlier she had signed up
for a class, in a parish not far from her home; she’s forgotten the name of the
church. “I no continue.”
The instructor had called her several times, insisting she continue the class.
“She say I nearly there.” The others in the class had all learned to read. Fadila
shrugs.
Had she given up because it was too difficult? She couldn’t manage? On the
contrary. “The lady she say I am the best to recognize the letters.” As she
speaks she points with her chin and her hand, as if at a blackboard.
But the class was held in the evening, and it wasn’t exactly next door. Fadila
found it hard to go back out after dinner.
She rarely smiles. When she comes in she says hello, and looks Édith straight
in the eye without smiling. If something is bothering her, she keeps quiet and
puts on her stony expression. Édith can hear her banging the ironing board,
the chair, the door.
She knows she has to sign a check the minute she gets it. Before stuffing it
into her bag she turns it over and on the back carefully traces that sort of Z
that passes for her signature.
Sometimes it’s frightening, the way she looks at you. You can see an inner
violence surfacing, about to explode, every instant filled with a bitterness she
keeps in check as best she can when she’s in the presence of people who are
not close to her.
She is so hard, so much of the time, that you find you have to be on your
guard with her, always ready to step back.
As far as her living quarters are concerned, she can’t complain. Her seventh-
floor room is small, but it’s “in good neighborhood,” rue de Laborde. “Calm.”
“There are only rich people.” Her floor is well-kept and her neighbors are
quiet: “A Cambodian gentleman” who’s been there for over twenty years, a
“very nice” Tunisian couple, a student whose grandparents live on the sixth
floor.
Fadila rents her room for e120 a month from a lady who lives in the building,
and she knows that’s not expensive. The only problem is that the lady doesn’t
want to give her a receipt for the rent. She wants to be paid cash. And at the
office of social services at the mairie, where Fadila, on more than one occasion,
has been offered a housing subsidy, they explained that to obtain it she will
absolutely have to produce the receipts for her rent.
When she goes out she wears a black headscarf, tied beneath her chin, to
hide her hair. Her clothes are long, skirt and coat down to her ankles. But no
one notices her, no one thinks, when they see her: there goes a veiled woman.
For work she gets changed. She removes her black headscarf and puts on a
white one, which she ties behind her neck instead. She wears a white overall
made of very thick cloth; on the front, printed in indelible blue ink, are the
words AP-HP Hôpital Cochin. “Are you a nurse?” asks little Paul. She laughs,
ruffles his hair: “No, I buying this overall at the flea market in Saint-Ouen.”
She has a soft spot for Paul. She’s noticed that of the three boys he’s the only
one who is at all practical. One day the iron wasn’t working, the steam
wouldn’t come out. Neither Fadila nor even Édith had a clue what was wrong.
Paul had a look at the iron and in three seconds he’d unblocked the thing.
A few weeks later, the ironing board has gone all wobbly. Two screws have
gone missing. “Where’s Paul?” grumbles Fadila. Édith glances at her watch:
“He’ll be home in a quarter of an hour.” Fadila relaxes. Paul will know how to
repair the ironing board. “He’s smart boy.”
Gilles and Édith’s bedroom has saffron walls, a dark pink carpet (a lovely
pink, intense without being garish), and windows with heavy curtains with a
dominant orange note. “Is beautiful colors,” Fadila says to Édith.
“Congratulations! Is colors like Morocco, very pretty.”
2
One Tuesday—it is the beginning of March, Fadila has been coming for four
months now—she takes a pile of identical papers, all in a mess, from her
handbag. They are her bank statements. Her daughter-in-law, who was a
secretary in Morocco before she got married, noticed that on the statements
there were a dozen or so withdrawals for the amount of e7.50 over the last
three months. Fadila doesn’t know what they could be.
Édith calls the Malesherbes branch of the Crédit Bancaire, her branch, and
asks what these withdrawals are all about. They are only too happy to help. It’s
what they charge now for cash withdrawals made from the teller at the bank.
The rules have changed. Every withdrawal, no matter the amount, will be
charged e7.50. If you want cash without a fee, you have to get it from an ATM
with your credit card, or go to the teller with your checkbook and write out a
check to yourself for cash.
Fadila has always withdrawn very small sums from the teller at her bank, in
accordance with her needs. She doesn’t like having money on her person or
keeping it at home. No one at the branch told her that she would have to pay
for withdrawals from now on, that even for just fifteen or twenty euros she
would have to pay e7.50 every time.
Édith writes a letter to the bank to complain. Gilles takes a look at Fadila’s
bank statements and notices that there have also been regular withdrawals
from an ATM. Édith asks Fadila: “Do you still use a card from time to time to
withdraw cash?”
“Is with Nasser,” explains Fadila.
It’s a simple matter. She does indeed have a credit card, but she can’t
remember her secret code. Her son knows the code by heart. So whenever she
goes to visit him in Pantin she withdraws some money from the nearest ATM.
“You really ought to know how to read,” blurts Édith. “Would you like me to
teach you?”
“Okay,” says Fadila, looking her straight in the eye.
On the days which follow, Édith is tormented by doubt. She’s afraid she’s
done something terribly stupid. She has no experience in the matter, or very
little.
Ten years ago she taught her eldest boy, Martin, how to read. He was four
and a half. He could listen to stories all day long (“Tell me a story . . . ” “Keep
going . . . ”) and he had understood that stories could be found in books. “I
want to read,” he said, over and over.
Édith went to speak to his teacher at nursery school. “And what if I teach
him?” The teacher didn’t see anything wrong with the idea. He himself
thought that a lot of children could learn to read before starting primary
school, before they turned six.
Édith also turned to her friend Jacques, a bachelor, a Sinologist, from whom
she frequently sought advice. She had just cut out an article in a weekly
magazine where they explained that to teach a child to read all you have to do
is make a series of a hundred or so file cards with an elementary word written
on each one. Cat, bag, hop. The child plays with the cards, moves them around,
you say the words together, repeat them. After a while the child knows how to
read.
“That sounds stupid to me,” said Jacques. “You’d do a lot better to tell your
son that there are twenty-six letters that you can combine in an unlimited
number of ways, that’s it.”
It turned out to be good advice. Among her father’s things Édith had found
The Cat in the Hat. She took Martin on her lap and started on page one. “You see,
that’s a c, that’s an a, and that’s a t. Together they make cat. Now you have h
together with a and t, so that makes hat. Look, cat, hat. The cat in the hat.”
Martin seemed to think it was very easy. School had already smoothed some
of his rough edges. He was in the second month of his last year of
kindergarten. He’d been introduced to basic reading and writing the year
before. Now, since September, they had learned what numbers, letters, and
words were. The children’s names were posted in bright colors on the
classroom walls. Martin recognized his name. At home he tried to decipher the
words on the measuring cup: “Sugar,” “Flour,” or on the box of laundry
powder: “OMO.”
He didn’t seem to think there was any difference between The Cat in the Hat
and other children’s books, and he couldn’t understand why his mother didn’t
want to read more than a page a day with him. But by the end of November,
after three weeks had gone by, at the rate of a quarter of an hour a day, he was
