Part 5 (1/2)

The initiation...

Still she looked at me in the same questioning way.

The female initiation, I said. Into womanhood.

Oh? she said. But looked still as if she didn't understand.

Circ.u.mcision, I whispered.

Pardon? she said, in a normal tone of voice that seemed loud in the quiet room.

I felt as if I had handed her a small and precious pearl and she had promptly bitten into it and declared it a fake.

What exactly is this procedure? she asked, briskly.

I was reminded of a quality in African-American women that I did not like at all. A bluntness. A going to the heart of the matter even if it gave everyone concerned a heart attack. Rarely did black women in America exhibit the graceful subtlety of the African woman. Had slavery given them this? Suddenly a story involving Raye popped into my mind: I saw her clearly as she would have been in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth, the seventeenth, the sixteenth, the fifteenth... Her hands on her hips, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s thrust out. She is very black, as black as I am. ”Listen, cracker,” she is saying, ”did you sell my child or not?” The ”cracker” whines, ”But listen, Louella, it was my child too!” The minute he turns his back, she picks up a huge boulder, exactly like the one that is in my throat, and... But I drag myself back from this scene.

Don't you have my file? I asked, annoyed. I was sure The Old Man sent it before he died. On the other hand, this was a question he'd never asked me. I'd said ”circ.u.mcision” to him and he'd seemed completely satisfied; as if he knew exactly what was implied. Now I wondered: had he understood?

I have your file, said Raye, tapping its bulging gray cover with a silver-painted nail and ignoring my att.i.tude. I am ignorant about this practice, though, and would like to learn about it from you. She paused, glanced into the folder. For instance, something I've always wondered is whether the exact same thing is done to every woman. Or is there variation? Your sister... Dura's c.l.i.toris was excised, but was something else done too, that made it more likely that she would bleed to death?

Her tone was now clinical. It relaxed me. I breathed deeply and sought the necessary and familiar distance from myself. I did not get as far away as usual, however.

Always different, I would think, I said, exhaling breath, because women are all different. Yet always the same, because women's bodies are all the same. But this was not precisely true. In my reading I had discovered there were at least three forms of circ.u.mcision. Some cultures demanded excision of only the c.l.i.toris, others insisted on a thorough sc.r.a.ping away of the entire genital area. A sigh escaped me as I thought of explaining this.

A slight frown came between Raye's large, clear eyes.

I realize it is hard for you to talk about this, she said. Perhaps we shouldn't push.

But I am already pus.h.i.+ng, and the boulder rolls off my tongue, completely crus.h.i.+ng the old familiar faraway voice I'd always used to tell this tale, a voice that had hardly seemed connected to me.

It was only after I came to America, I said, that I even knew what was supposed to be down there.

Down there?

Yes. My own body was a mystery to me, as was the female body, beyond the function of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, to almost everyone I knew. From prison Our Leader said we must keep ourselves clean and pure as we had been since time immemorial-by cutting out unclean parts of our bodies. Everyone knew that if a woman was not circ.u.mcised her unclean parts would grow so long they'd soon touch her thighs; she'd become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection would be in his way.

You believed this?

Everyone believed it, even though no one had ever seen it. No one living in our village anyway. And yet the elders, particularly, acted as if everyone had witnessed this evil, and not nearly a long enough time ago.

But you knew this had not happened to you?

But perhaps it had, I said. Certainly to all my friends who'd been circ.u.mcised, my uncirc.u.mcised v.a.g.i.n.a was thought to be a monstrosity. They laughed at me. Jeered at me for having a tail. I think they meant my l.a.b.i.a majora. After all, none of them had v.a.g.i.n.al lips; none of them had a c.l.i.toris; they had no idea what these things looked like; to them I was bound to look odd. There were a few other girls who had not been circ.u.mcised. The girls who had been would sometimes actually run from us, as if we were demons. Laughing, though. Always laughing.

And yet it is from this time, before circ.u.mcision, that you remember pleasure?

When I was little I used to stroke myself, which was taboo. And then, when I was older, and before we married, Adam and I used to make love in the fields. Which was also taboo. Doing it in the fields, I mean. And because we practiced c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s.

Did you experience o.r.g.a.s.m?

Always.

And yet you willingly gave this up in order to... Raye was frowning in disbelief.

I completed the sentence for her: To be accepted as a real woman by the Olinka people; to stop the jeering. Otherwise I was a thing. Worse, because of my friends.h.i.+p with Adam's family and my special relations.h.i.+p to him, I was never trusted, considered a potential traitor, even. Besides, Our Leader, our Jesus Christ, said we must keep all our old ways and that no Olinka man-in this he echoed the great liberator Kenyatta-would even think of marrying a woman who was not circ.u.mcised.

But Adam was not Olinkan, said Raye, puzzled.

I sighed. The boulder was gone, but speech itself suddenly felt quite hopeless. I never thought of marrying Adam, I said, firmly, and watched the surprise in her eyes. I married him because he was loyal, gentle and familiar. Because he came for me. And because I found I could not fight with the wound tradition had given me. I could hardly walk.

But who...? Raye began, even more perplexed.

At last I found a cool smile forming on my tense face. I smiled at the young innocent, ignorant girl I'd been. The boulder now not only had rolled off my tongue but was rolling quite rapidly away from me toward the door. Like every Olinka maiden, I said, I was in love with the perfect lover who already had three wives. The perfect lover and father and brother who had been so cruelly taken from us, but whose laughing eyes we saw in the photograph he'd left us, and whose sweetly tempting voice we heard on ca.s.sette in the night. Poor Adam! He couldn't hold a candle to Our Leader, the real-to us-Jesus Christ.

ADAM.

THE OLINKANS SPOKE of ”Our Leader” with exactly the fervor we wished them to speak of ”Our Lord.” There were always tales of his exploits drifting through the village, his ”miracles” of ambush and derring-do against the whites. He seemed like Christ to the villagers except for one thing: his acceptance of violence as a means to the end of African oppression. He was called ”Our Leader” because the white regime made it a crime to say his name aloud. There were men walking about in every Olinka village whose backs bore the scars of their forgetfulness or defiance of this edict. And when these men spoke of ”Our Leader,” an especially harsh protectiveness and anger blazed in their eyes. In fact, it became increasingly frightening to try to talk to them about Christ at all. Our Christ. Our white, pacifist leader safely dead.

PART EIGHT.

LISETTE.

WHEN PIERRE TURNED SEVENTEEN and had completed his studies at the lycee, nothing could prevent him from going to America to be nearer his father. He is thoughtful, curly-haired, golden. In France, people a.s.sume he is Algerian. I sent him to Harvard. Why not? As I tell my friends, since Pierre is my only expense, I can afford to be lavish with him. But it is more than that. Because he has grown up virtually without a father, I feel compelled to compensate.

When Evelyn learned of my pregnancy with little Pierre, as Adam and I and my parents used to call him, she flew into a rage that subsided into a years-long deterioration and rancorous depression. She tried to kill herself. She spoke of murdering their son. I felt badly for Adam. He had not intended to have a child with me. It was I who wanted a baby. I who did not want, except occasionally, a man. Perhaps I was simply swept along by the winds of change that were blowing over women's lives in France, thanks to women like my suffragist grandmother and writers like Simone de Beauvoir, whose book The Second s.e.x put the world I knew into a perspective I could more easily comprehend, if not control. Prior to reading her book I felt doomed to incomprehension regarding the universal subjugation of women. Doomed to ignorance, in spite of having listened, from babyhood, to the flaming speeches of Grandmother Beatrice, as she labored for the rights of French women. Doomed, even, to a kind of insanity that I believe the pampered oppressed always feel, and for which there seems to be no remedy except enlightenment regarding their plight, followed by active exercise of the insights of their awareness.

It was hard enough to have been forced to leave Algeria, our house and gardens and servants and friends.h.i.+ps (with the servants) there. But the French were killing the Algerians, body and soul, and the Algerians grew sick of being treated worse than dogs. They fought back. There seemed to be a rising tide of blood across the land, and even clergymen like my father were not exempt. We left in tears, for we considered ourselves Algerians. French Algerians, of course. Members of the ruling cla.s.s and race, bien sur. The elite. And yet I, especially, felt native to the land, because I was. I was born there. Hot sun even now is the kind I prefer. I am never so happy as when enveloped by a scorching Parisian summer, when most true Parisians make sure to be someplace else. Someplace cooler. The ocean or the mountains.

There were places-restaurants, nightclubs, schools, neighborhoods-the Algerian natives could not go. The old colonial story. And yet the people were so beautiful, hospitable as Africans are always, especially our servants and playmates. The children taught me games, and they and their parents taught me Arabic.

There was no way I could understand what was happening, when they arrived for work with their eyes veiled, even hostile, and their faces swollen from grief. Some loved one would have been picked up by the French security forces in the night, grilled, imprisoned, tortured, killed.

Loving my nurse, my playmates and the servants, I naturally hated France. And then suddenly to have to ”return” there, as the newspapers said of us. I protested to my parents that France was a place I'd never been; how, therefore, could I ”return”? My parents, like most settler parents, had no answer. They were far from happy about the turn of events themselves. They'd left France in the first place because French society had no place for them; all prominent spots, my father joked, having been occupied; and though in Algeria my father suffered as a Christian minister surrounded by a world of Moslems, he felt he'd discovered and enlarged a niche for himself that was rewarding. He had more power in Algeria, and a more conspicuous place in society, than he ever could have had in France.

I liked to watch my father with pet.i.t Pierre, his namesake. They were physically much alike, short, thin-bodied and serious, rather slow and low-key among the coffee-crazed, perpetually cranky Parisians. I know that when my father looked at Pierre he saw the innocent, that is to say, apolitical, Algerian boys of his congregation whom he'd left behind to an uncertain fate, caught as they were between the French security forces, to whom all Arabs looked alike, and the Maquis, the NLA and the more militant Moslem fanatics, to whom Christian Arabs looked not at all like themselves: which is to say, like true Arabs. The young boys who had appeared deeply moved by the nonviolence preached by the Jesus Christ of my father's church. The Jesus they inevitably identified as a rebel Algerian, for not only did the Jesus Christ of the Christian religion look like an Algerian, but for a long time there was a tradition of Arab martyrdom in Algeria, of which they were well aware, as young ”Arab terrorist” after young ”Arab terrorist,” sometimes boys no older than themselves, went up, barehanded or with stones and rusty swords, against the machine guns and hand grenades of the French.

Pet.i.t Pierre, appearing years later, after my parents had resettled completely into French life, and I had settled for the first time, became both our remembrance of our Algerian experience, which in Paris seemed suddenly never to have existed, and our solace. This became true even for my mother, who cared, to a much greater extent than either my father or I, what other people thought. She did not have her own mother's firm belief in her right to enjoy life as she pleased and in such company as she alone chose, but she had loved Algeria and the warmth of the people had impressed itself upon her. Her bourgeois French racism-”All Arabs steal; the women are no better than they should be; the children are born with a criminal streak; etc., etc., etc.”-had been severely shaken by the suffering of her servants and friends.

She adored Pierre. When he left for America I thought her heart would break. She who saw him as the light of her waning existence, and the light of her memory of an earlier phase, in which he had had no part, but rather was like a belated sun in the evening of her life, illuminating some new truth she now knew, pointing backward with its rays. She who, since he could walk, had strolled hand in hand with him in every Paris square. Protectively wary at first of the covert glances of strangers; then boldly in solidarity with pet.i.t Pierre; then lost, happily, in the grandmotherly joy of his golden hand in hers.

EVELYN.