Read Online Bitter Almonds by Laurence Cossé, Alison Anderson - Free Book Online Page B

son. It is this son whom Fadila calls her brother. He is twenty-five years younger and Fadila has never seen him. She knows he has a wife and children and that he lives in the family home. She supposes he lives the way people have always lived there, from the land.
    Fadila’s mother was first to die, a long time ago, then her father, whom neither she nor her mother ever saw again, and finally her father’s second wife.
    For Édith, Fadila’s story had left off when she was fifteen, living with her parents in the village, at the moment of Aïcha’s birth. She did not know that Fadila had gone on to live and work, on her own with her children, in Rabat.
    â€œYou were married twice?”
    â€œThree times.” Fadila lifts three fingers of her right hand. “All three husbands is bad husbands,” she adds. “Enough, I got to do ironing. You listening, I talking all the time, I has ironing, after all!”
    Â 
    â€œDon’t forget that next Wednesday evening, the 7th, is the day to enroll at the association.”
    â€œYes, of course, I remembering.”
    â€œIf you like, I can go to the meeting with you.”
    â€œIs nice of you. Okay.”
    Ã‰dith would like to find out which type of writing they use with their beginners, and to tell the instructor that Fadila is more at ease with capital letters than with cursive handwriting. She’s afraid the class might use cursive.
    â€œIt would be good if we did some work beforehand.”
    â€œHave to!” says Fadila. “If I enrolling next week . . .”
    She goes to fetch her bag from where she left it in the hallway.
    â€œIs no gonna be easy,” she continues. But she does not seem to be particularly worried, her tone is the same as when she finishes a sentence referring to the future with “inshallah.”
    She takes a piece of paper from her shopping bag. On it she has written
FADILA AMRANI
twenty or more times, flawlessly, in a column.
    Ã‰dith wasn’t expecting this. “You’ve been working hard!”
    â€œIs okay, I know my name,” Fadila says forcefully. “Let’s doing something else.”
    This is the first time she has asserted that something has been learned and it is time to move on.
    She is sitting at her usual place at the dining room table. She’s not in a hurry today. Édith sits down in turn, places a few pieces of paper between them and asks her to write her first name from memory. Fadila does it without making any mistakes, first time round.
    â€œPerfect. Now your last name, Amrani.”
    Fadila’s hand hovers in the air.
    â€œBegin with
AM
,” says Édith, “
A
, then
M
.”
    Fadila writes
M
.
    â€œThat’s a good
M
, but to write
AM
, remember, you need one other letter, too . . .”
    â€œYes,” says Fadila, “the letter there and there.”
    Fadila points with her fingertip to the two
A
’s in Fadila. She writes an
A
, not before the
M
but after.
    Next to this
MA
, Édith writes
AM
, explains that
MA
is pronounced
ma
and is not the same thing as
AM
, which is pronounced
am
.
    She writes
AMRANI
and asks Fadila to copy her name. Fadila writes
MRANI
. “There’s a letter missing,” Édith says. Fadila cannot see which one is missing.
    Enough difficulty for now. Édith says again, “Your name begins with
A
, you know the
A
,” and at the same time she adds it to
MRANI
, where it belongs, at the beginning.
    Fadila has trouble doing the same. She doesn’t know how to reconstruct a word. Édith cannot figure out why.
    â€œIn any event”—she is speaking to herself as much as to Fadila—“you’ve got your first name, you know how to write it now.”
    She writes first and last name on a sheet of paper and asks Fadila to copy them out at home, first from the model, then on another sheet of paper on her own.
    Fadila takes the papers and gets up, telling Édith