attempt, but, hampered by his condition, would fall down again, and the kicking would resume.
The prosecutor general’s office never made any investigation.
I read Siham’s testimony as if I were back in the 1970s, following in her footsteps. Having heard her once I had wanted to hear more from her. There were only three years’ difference in age between us. What? I said, ‘So it’s possible.’ If I hurried, I thought, maybe in three years I could be like her. A flood-tide of feelings; images, scenes, sounds, questions, all rise to the surface. A lump in the throat wells up, then goes away: pride, self-assurance. I know what it means to be innocent; the thought brings a smile to my lips. I’m no longer the girl I once was, but a mother trying to protect her little girl from a devouring world. ‘It did devour her,’ I murmur. What’s done is done. ‘It devoured her,’ I say again, ‘many times.’ A shudder overtakes me. My eye catches the words, ‘the aforementioned’, and I laugh. The phrase is conspicuously repeated in the procès-verbal, and in the reports of the secret service, as it is in the charges brought against Siham: a comment in a wall-journal, the composition of an article or communiqué, participation in a conference or a sit-in or a demonstration.
In imagination and in principle it seems that the references of the secret service and the public prosecutor to those quite ordinary student activities as suspicious behaviour – necessitating secret reports and denouncers and witnesses for the prosecution; the knock on the door at dawn, the police on duty all night; prisons with budgets, administrations, officers and guards; vast blue lorries transporting people from here to there and from there to here; prosecuting attorneys opening investigations and closing them, applying themselves minutely to their signatures, followed by the date (day-month-year), after long hours of interrogation – this is what is laughable. But I laugh only at the words, ‘the aforementioned.’ No sooner does my eye fall upon the words than I start laughing – laughter I am at pains to keep in check, but I quickly discover, as it escapes from me and rises to a raucous crescendo that I’m incapable of restraining it.
Siham is not the only ‘aforementioned’. All of them are referred to as ‘the aforementioned’ – my close friends, all of whose height and girth I know well; I know the lineaments of their faces in joy, anger, despair; I know the nuances of each one’s voice and intonation; I know their gait; I know whom they loved, went about with, married; I know when it all came down on their heads, with or without their children looking on. Likewise I know a thousand details of their lives, of episodes both meaningful (the great, the earthshaking) and meaningless, or seemingly so.
I go back to the files, and all those facts slip out from their hiding places in the memory, to reclaim their body, their presence, their role in the creation of what I find written in the dossiers. And every time the same question surfaces: Does death constitute a barrier or does it, on the contrary, draw aside a curtain? For example, I read the words of my comrade who committed suicide by throwing herself, in a highly dramatic scene, from a twelfth-storey balcony. I read about the suicide after the fact and I wonder: am I seeing it more clearly, or less? Does reading across the line between life and death, across more than thirty years, with all that happened in the course of those years, form a thick lens, like prescription glasses, that improves vision, or blinders that shield the eyes from the sun’s glare? Or is the whole premise inadequate? Should we consider each case on its own merits?
Be that as it may, the fact remains that the files are much like a mirror, in which I stare at my own face, which is not mine alone, but is rather the face that belongs to us all together, as a collective of young men and women who took part
The prosecutor general’s office never made any investigation.
I read Siham’s testimony as if I were back in the 1970s, following in her footsteps. Having heard her once I had wanted to hear more from her. There were only three years’ difference in age between us. What? I said, ‘So it’s possible.’ If I hurried, I thought, maybe in three years I could be like her. A flood-tide of feelings; images, scenes, sounds, questions, all rise to the surface. A lump in the throat wells up, then goes away: pride, self-assurance. I know what it means to be innocent; the thought brings a smile to my lips. I’m no longer the girl I once was, but a mother trying to protect her little girl from a devouring world. ‘It did devour her,’ I murmur. What’s done is done. ‘It devoured her,’ I say again, ‘many times.’ A shudder overtakes me. My eye catches the words, ‘the aforementioned’, and I laugh. The phrase is conspicuously repeated in the procès-verbal, and in the reports of the secret service, as it is in the charges brought against Siham: a comment in a wall-journal, the composition of an article or communiqué, participation in a conference or a sit-in or a demonstration.
In imagination and in principle it seems that the references of the secret service and the public prosecutor to those quite ordinary student activities as suspicious behaviour – necessitating secret reports and denouncers and witnesses for the prosecution; the knock on the door at dawn, the police on duty all night; prisons with budgets, administrations, officers and guards; vast blue lorries transporting people from here to there and from there to here; prosecuting attorneys opening investigations and closing them, applying themselves minutely to their signatures, followed by the date (day-month-year), after long hours of interrogation – this is what is laughable. But I laugh only at the words, ‘the aforementioned.’ No sooner does my eye fall upon the words than I start laughing – laughter I am at pains to keep in check, but I quickly discover, as it escapes from me and rises to a raucous crescendo that I’m incapable of restraining it.
Siham is not the only ‘aforementioned’. All of them are referred to as ‘the aforementioned’ – my close friends, all of whose height and girth I know well; I know the lineaments of their faces in joy, anger, despair; I know the nuances of each one’s voice and intonation; I know their gait; I know whom they loved, went about with, married; I know when it all came down on their heads, with or without their children looking on. Likewise I know a thousand details of their lives, of episodes both meaningful (the great, the earthshaking) and meaningless, or seemingly so.
I go back to the files, and all those facts slip out from their hiding places in the memory, to reclaim their body, their presence, their role in the creation of what I find written in the dossiers. And every time the same question surfaces: Does death constitute a barrier or does it, on the contrary, draw aside a curtain? For example, I read the words of my comrade who committed suicide by throwing herself, in a highly dramatic scene, from a twelfth-storey balcony. I read about the suicide after the fact and I wonder: am I seeing it more clearly, or less? Does reading across the line between life and death, across more than thirty years, with all that happened in the course of those years, form a thick lens, like prescription glasses, that improves vision, or blinders that shield the eyes from the sun’s glare? Or is the whole premise inadequate? Should we consider each case on its own merits?
Be that as it may, the fact remains that the files are much like a mirror, in which I stare at my own face, which is not mine alone, but is rather the face that belongs to us all together, as a collective of young men and women who took part
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