monosyllables.
He points to the faint outline of a wall on top of a dune and replies equally monosyllabically:
‘Sidi Bou Djema!’
But when I get up there, it is just a wall enclosing a small garden where a lone man and his dog grow chickpeas and onions.
The man is very friendly and he speaks beautiful French. He knows exactly where the tomb is and is pleased to take me there.
It is his garden. He laid it out himself. He dug the well himself, eleven metres deep. He fired the clay bricks for the wall himself. It would have been ready by now if it hadn’t rained the other day. His semi-fired bricks have run out into the ground – look at this! Now he has to start all over again. He is used to that. He was a guest-worker in France for eight years and has worked in Marseilles and Lyons. He has even been to Paris. Now he has come back, has a wife and six children, five of them boys, and he is looking forward to a secure old age when he no longer needs to do any work, other than potter around in his garden.
As he is telling me this, we have got as far as the burial ground of Sidi Bou Djema. It lies with dunes and mountains behind it and a view over the
oued
where it happened.
A few spindly stems of grass grow in the sand after the rain. But all the same, it is a very desolate place. The desolation seems to be concentrated on the absurd buckled aluminium saucepan hanging at the back of a tombstone. On the front it says in European letters:
ISABELLE EBERHARDT
54
The act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all. A selfish happiness perhaps, but it is happiness – for him who knows how to appreciate it. To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world …
That is what Isabelle Eberhardt writes in a piece sometimes called ‘The Road’, sometimes ‘Notes in Pencil’.
Departure is a tradition in her family. Her surname comes from her German maternal grandmother, Fräulein Eberhardt, who left her country to live with a Russian Jew.
Her mother marries an old Russian general, but then leaves him to go to Geneva with the children’s young tutor – a handsome, intellectual Armenian, Tolstoy’s apprentice, Bakunin’s friend. He has been a priest, is married and now leaves his wife and children to live with his beloved in exile.
He teaches Isabelle six languages: French, Russian, German, Latin, Greek and Arabic. But he never admits to her face that he is her father.
She grows up among exiled anarchists in a chaotic milieu in which catastrophe is the natural state.
When she is eight, her brother Nicholas joins the Foreign Legion.
When she is nine, her sister Olga runs away and marries against the will of her family.
When she is seventeen, her favourite brother Augustin joins the Foreign Legion.
When she is twenty, she goes with her mother to Algeria. They both convert to Islam. The mother dies and is buried in Annaba.
When she is twenty-one, her brother Vladimir commits suicide.
When she is twenty-two, she gives her father, who is dying of cancer, an overdose of a pain-killing drug which, intentionally or not, ends his life.
She is alone in the world. At the turn of the century in 1900 she writes in her diary that the only form of bliss, however bitter, destiny will ever grant her is to be a nomad in the great deserts of life.
55
In secret, my sister Isabelle winds wet cotton bandages round her chest. She wears these bandages under her clothes andwith not the slightest sign betrays what is going on. Only I know about it and I cannot stop her. She winds the wet bandages tightly, tightly round her chest. When they dry and shrink, they slowly crush her chest and suffocate her heart. No one can save her.
56
‘From where have I got this morbid craving for barren ground and desert wastes?’ Isabelle Eberhardt asks.
In her teens, she was charmed by the melancholy escapism of Loti’s first novel
Aziyadé
, and
He points to the faint outline of a wall on top of a dune and replies equally monosyllabically:
‘Sidi Bou Djema!’
But when I get up there, it is just a wall enclosing a small garden where a lone man and his dog grow chickpeas and onions.
The man is very friendly and he speaks beautiful French. He knows exactly where the tomb is and is pleased to take me there.
It is his garden. He laid it out himself. He dug the well himself, eleven metres deep. He fired the clay bricks for the wall himself. It would have been ready by now if it hadn’t rained the other day. His semi-fired bricks have run out into the ground – look at this! Now he has to start all over again. He is used to that. He was a guest-worker in France for eight years and has worked in Marseilles and Lyons. He has even been to Paris. Now he has come back, has a wife and six children, five of them boys, and he is looking forward to a secure old age when he no longer needs to do any work, other than potter around in his garden.
As he is telling me this, we have got as far as the burial ground of Sidi Bou Djema. It lies with dunes and mountains behind it and a view over the
oued
where it happened.
A few spindly stems of grass grow in the sand after the rain. But all the same, it is a very desolate place. The desolation seems to be concentrated on the absurd buckled aluminium saucepan hanging at the back of a tombstone. On the front it says in European letters:
ISABELLE EBERHARDT
54
The act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all. A selfish happiness perhaps, but it is happiness – for him who knows how to appreciate it. To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world …
That is what Isabelle Eberhardt writes in a piece sometimes called ‘The Road’, sometimes ‘Notes in Pencil’.
Departure is a tradition in her family. Her surname comes from her German maternal grandmother, Fräulein Eberhardt, who left her country to live with a Russian Jew.
Her mother marries an old Russian general, but then leaves him to go to Geneva with the children’s young tutor – a handsome, intellectual Armenian, Tolstoy’s apprentice, Bakunin’s friend. He has been a priest, is married and now leaves his wife and children to live with his beloved in exile.
He teaches Isabelle six languages: French, Russian, German, Latin, Greek and Arabic. But he never admits to her face that he is her father.
She grows up among exiled anarchists in a chaotic milieu in which catastrophe is the natural state.
When she is eight, her brother Nicholas joins the Foreign Legion.
When she is nine, her sister Olga runs away and marries against the will of her family.
When she is seventeen, her favourite brother Augustin joins the Foreign Legion.
When she is twenty, she goes with her mother to Algeria. They both convert to Islam. The mother dies and is buried in Annaba.
When she is twenty-one, her brother Vladimir commits suicide.
When she is twenty-two, she gives her father, who is dying of cancer, an overdose of a pain-killing drug which, intentionally or not, ends his life.
She is alone in the world. At the turn of the century in 1900 she writes in her diary that the only form of bliss, however bitter, destiny will ever grant her is to be a nomad in the great deserts of life.
55
In secret, my sister Isabelle winds wet cotton bandages round her chest. She wears these bandages under her clothes andwith not the slightest sign betrays what is going on. Only I know about it and I cannot stop her. She winds the wet bandages tightly, tightly round her chest. When they dry and shrink, they slowly crush her chest and suffocate her heart. No one can save her.
56
‘From where have I got this morbid craving for barren ground and desert wastes?’ Isabelle Eberhardt asks.
In her teens, she was charmed by the melancholy escapism of Loti’s first novel
Aziyadé
, and
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