So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar Page A

that slightly surprised look, as if I were his younger sister, always behind, still paralyzed by taboos
. Yet it was a tender look, and I got his message:
I’m waiting for you! You’ll take the time you need. I’m waiting!
    But then I did not take the time. No.
    His love for this Frenchwoman, five years earlier.
    “I was settling down in this country again, after studying in England. My father paid for that, one advantage of being an only son!” he said, half apologizing. “I still wasn’t doing much; I was twenty-five, without a girlfriend or even a fiancée in reserve for me among the cousins of the tribe … I remember my hunger for traveling the country: December spent in the Mzab, the next months in the Sahara, summer preferably on the beaches in the west … And again, the oases, the ones in the east: escaping the new society,” and he laughed. “There,” he said, nodding his head toward his house behindus, “there is where I found them again, the people I was running away from. I couldn’t do anything else! Ah,” he went on, “those wonderful years of living single, as a nomad.”
    He stopped. Then he described their meeting. A woman a few years older than him. With a ten-year-old child, and a husband.
    “A major,” he sneered, then, more lenient, he smiled. “Of course, when she met him, he was a mathematics or physics student taking courses in her own provincial city, in Alsace, I think.”
    I mused over the many couples I knew. The romanticism of yesterday’s nationalist war was not over yet. It still created an aura around love affairs between Algerian men and French women. But it was not long before the former “fighter” was “promoted,” becoming a director of some ministry, or a diplomat, or in this case a high-ranking military officer.
    “She was bored at home. We fell in love … And after that it was nothing but catastrophe, one long summer of catastrophe! First happiness: she left her husband and son. We hid ourselves away in a mountain village in the Aurès. We lived in a summer cottage loaned by a friend …” He paused, steeling himself. “We should have escaped to Europe, right from the beginning! But she was afraid of permanently losing custody of her child.”
    She was afraid
, I thought.
Imagine living happiness this way, streaked with fear!
    He went on: “The major used all his connections to find us: the chief of police, a director of the interior, who knows? … But however he did it, they showed up one morning very early, with the police. They handcuffed me like a criminal to take me away. And then this husband, so certain of his rights, slapped her right there in front of me! And my hands were in shackles!”
    He broke off his story. Was that when the Belgian ladies passedus on the beach and I told him about them? To let the present dissipate the miasmas of the past nightmare.
    He went on, not describing the crisis, but rather the days that followed. “Almost a year!” he said. And the young woman ended up being expelled, stripped of her rights “for loose behavior.”
    Now, I thought to myself, the major is remarried to some young native-born woman “from a good family,” of course.
    “As for me,” he went on, “I spent three days in jail.”
    He suddenly guffawed. “You should have heard my mother when she arrived with a lawyer from the family; her passionate diatribe against what she said was tyranny. In addition, she said, the crime of bride theft is not provided for in the Constitution!
    He asked me how you say “bride thief” in Arabic. I told him and merrily recounted the fantasies that we children used to find so exciting when we attended weddings. They would shut the bride away, concealing her from everyone’s gaze. Even on the threshold of the bedroom an old woman stood guard to see that she was not left alone for a single second until her husband entered; until he tremulously lifted the silk veil covering her precious face. Because “the