The letter from France, informing Halima that she’d been awarded a scholarship to study material sciences at one of the country’s most prestigious institutions, set off joyous celebrations, but at no small cost: she hadn’t slept in years.
Even before starting school, Halima had never been much of a sleeper. As a toddler, she’d tossed and turned and balled and kept her parents up all night. As a teenager, she’d tried everything she could think of: chamomile, pennyroyal, lemon verbena, and whatever was recommended at the pharmacy. Nothing had worked. At the university, she’d decided to lean into her insomnia, poring over textbooks all night while her dormmates snored. She’d grown accustomed to having a mind full of fog, and she’d trained herself to switch on a powerful beam and cut swaths through that fog when she had to. She wasn’t the first in the family to receive an education, but she was the first and only one among her siblings. Her parents had invested everything in her.
Halima’s counterpart among her father’s siblings was her Uncle Belhaj. Belhaj and her father had spent their early years in a one-room mud hut in rural Kabylia, along with their three younger brothers and two older sisters, before moving to the outskirts of Algiers, where Halima’s grandfather, an eagle-eyed construction worker, had seen more opportunities. He’d determined that one of his children should go to school, thereby paving the way out of poverty. It should’ve been Halima’s father, for he was the eldest, but Belhaj had exhibited a greater aptitude. He now worked in finance and had three large houses in three different countries. Every month, he sent money, but Halima’s father refused to dip into it except in emergencies, and sometimes on special occasions. He called it “The Charity Fund.”
Whenever Halima’s father looked at Halima, one of his eyes would burn with the pride of an eagle, while the other would smolder with all the resentments of Cain. When Halima came home with bad grades, he would beat her. When she came home with excellent grades, he would beat her to remind her of what would happen if she didn’t keep earning them. Yet he also doted on her. When she earned good grades, once he finished beating her, he would take her to the French bakery down the road and buy her pastries, marvelous treats that no one else in the family ever tasted. “You’re our pride and joy,” he would tell her, watching her plate to make sure that she ate every crumb. “Our one and only. You’ll be our deliverance someday.”
These rituals continued well into Halima’s adulthood. No one thought them odd. When Halima read the letter from France aloud and explained what it meant, her father, beaming from ear to ear, took her into her room and gave her a sound thrashing. Then he stood her at arms’ length, taking stock of her disheveled beauty, before drawing her into a bear hug. “I’m so proud of you,” he whispered in her ear. “You’ve gone beyond anything any of us could imagine. We’re all so proud.”
He was under the impression that because material sciences was a more rigorous discipline than finance—“vulgar mathematics,” as he called it—it would also pay a great deal more. Halima never had an opportunity to disabuse him of this notion.
Belhaj, as it happened, owned a house three and a half blocks from the university where Halima would be studying. He wouldn’t need the place any time soon, he assured her when they spoke on the phone. She was welcome to stay there. He also promised to purchase her plane ticket, adding that if she needed anything at all, he would have it delivered to her door. Though he was on a business trip in Prague, he arranged to fly home for a few days so that he could attend her farewell party.
With money from the Charity Fund, a venue was rented, musicians recruited, and a catering service hired. This level of decadence did no favors to Halima’s stomach, which soon began to make strange noises as she witnessed her relatives and friends and former teachers marveling in unconcealed awe. Her lower back throbbed where her father’s beatings always landed, a persistent tug against her mind. Anxious that someone would mistake her distraction for haughtiness, Halima did her best to keep her head down and not look anyone in the eye, but this was impossible: she was the center of attention. Against her will, she found herself drawn into one conversation after another, blushing and cringing and muttering what she knew to be complete non sequiturs, wishing that she could be anywhere else: going for a walk, or reading a paper, or writing one. The worst part was that she couldn’t even say that she had to get to bed early. No one would’ve believed her.
The following morning, more exhausted than ever, Halima kissed her parents and siblings goodbye and dragged herself and her suitcases through the airport and onto the plane. She was so threadbare that the novelty of leaving the earth behind barely registered except in her stomach, which briefly forgot which way was up. With a pounding head and aching eyes, she leaned back in her seat and wallowed in a shallow doze, through which she could still hear the roar of the engines and every word spoken by the flight crew.
The airport into which the plane disgorged her and her fellow travelers some hours later reminded her less of the terminal she’d passed through that morning, more of the venue where her farewell party had been held. While bodies bustled to and fro, all purses and elbows, Halima stood like a stone in a patch of white river, gazing around at the glittering terminal, stunned that anyone could rush about in a place like this with their heads down, staring only at their phones.
Eventually, she collected herself enough to call a Bolt. Uncle Belhaj had taught her how to do this. He’d also subscribed her to a travel plan so that she could keep using her phone until she got a new SIM card.
She spent the Bolt ride gazing out the window, wide-eyed, watching France go by. There were specific differences, of course—more naked arms and legs than she was used to, and endless heads of hair as blond as straw—but somehow, these weren’t enough to account for the all-encompassing sense of wonder that tossed her on its raucous swells. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was about the whole of this place that exceeded the sum of its parts, but France was more than just Algeria with booty shorts and platinum hairdos. France was France.
Uncle Belhaj’s house was exactly as he’d described it: a narrow, three-story structure on a cobblestone street between two other houses, each ornately fronted with columns, balconies, gables, and dormer windows. Beneath the front porch was a carpark, its mouth yawning darkly. Uncle Belhaj had left one of his cars there and said she was welcome to use it, though, as she’d reminded him, blushing, she had never learned to drive.
“That’s all right,” he’d told her. “Everything in good time.”
Uncle Belhaj wasn’t married. Nor did he have any children. Sometimes, lying awake at night, Halima found herself wondering why he didn’t just go ahead and adopt her. Of course, her loyalties lay first and foremost with her father, who’d worked tirelessly all his life, delivering bottle gas to shops before sunrise, and after him with her mother, who slaved away all day, cooking and cleaning. She couldn’t abandon the people who’d given her life and health and a good education any more than she could part with one of her own limbs. Still, this fantasy lurked in her mind. If she ever did manage to drift off to sleep, she half-expected it to form the backbone of a dream.
“You’ve had a long day, Kid,” Uncle Belhaj told her when she called to report her safe arrival and ask directions to the nearest market. “Don’t worry about dinner. Leave that to me.”
A little while later, groceries were delivered: an assortment of fresh fruits and vegetables, staple grains, fine cuts of meat, cheeses, and frozen foods. While putting away the shelf-stable items, Halima explored the kitchen, taking stock of the gadgets and cookware. It was when she had an immersion blender in her hands, trying to guess how it worked, that the thought hit her, a knife through the lungs: in just a few years, she would have to go home. Time was rushing past her like those travelers in the airport, heads down, indifferent to awe.
That night, despite the crust that limned her eyelids and the fierce ache in her bones, Halima never went to bed. Instead, she wandered from room to room, taking books from the bookshelves and reading a few lines aloud before putting them back, opening the backs of the clocks to observe how they worked, taking her uncle’s photos off the walls and searching their cardboard backs for hidden messages. She couldn’t bear to waste a second of this life, this freedom.
Eventually, she brewed a pot of strong, black coffee, chopped onions, peppers, cheese, and sausages, and scrambled three eggs in a pan. She ate slowly, savoring every morsel, until the birds broke into song. A headache linked her temples, arcing over her prefrontal cortex like a rainbow, but she fixed her attention on the sunrise streaming through the kitchen window, resolutely ignoring the pain.
Soon, she was caught in a whirlwind. She explored all the shops within walking distance of her uncle’s home. She got off the bus at the wrong stop and spent hours wandering the city, asking for directions. She discovered that her French, though fluent, was not quite the right sort of French and therefore might as well not be French at all. She learned to communicate using larger-than-life gestures rather than words.
She got a new SIM card. She got lost on the metro, then found. She memorized her way to the campus and back. She filled out paperwork. She signed up for classes. She met her academic advisor, a heavyset man with gray skin and the pursed lips and huge, bulging eyes of a fish. She met everyone who worked in the International Students’ Office. She attended orientation sessions. She was bombarded with names and numbers, rules and regulations.
Every night, instead of sleeping, she wandered through her uncle’s rooms, sometimes with a book held in front of her, sometimes lost in her thoughts. She left all her clothes on the bed, if only to feel that she was getting some use out of it. The state of consciousness that she achieved, by the end of the week, was one of reality commingled with dream. She floated about the city like an old balloon, bobbing from moment to moment and person to person, never quite certain what anything had to do with anything else, but taking it on faith that it was all connected.
On Friday, she was told of an upcoming party for incoming graduate students. Despite her exhaustion, she resolved to attend. The next night, however, when she arrived at the venue, it turned out to be a nightclub. The lights were low, the music was deafening, and there was no meeting, no greeting. She didn’t find the scene all that appealing, but it occurred to her that if she danced and drank enough, she might finally force her body past its limits. Spurred by this hope, she ordered cocktail after cocktail and leapt about on the dancefloor like a marionette operated by an epileptic until her legs nearly gave out and she had to totter to the women’s restroom, where she vomited everything she’d eaten.
She retched again upon reaching her uncle’s house, this time into the kitchen sink. Behind her, the front door hung open, admitting a warm breeze. When she attempted to retrace her steps, the floor sloshed out from under her, nearly braining her on a vitrine. Eventually, she managed to shut and lock the door, whereupon she let her body melt onto the stairs. She ascended sea-slug-style, one oozing step at a time. At long last, she reached the bedroom, where she threw herself onto her clothes.
Yet sleep still refused to come. Her mind spun like a dinghy on a storm-tossed swell, but her consciousness shone through it all like a beam from a lighthouse, unquenchable. It occurred to her then, for the first time, that her mind and body might just be determined to destroy themselves. With this thought, she became afraid.
When she couldn’t bear to drift there anymore, she got up, staggered to the bathroom, and took a long shower, then fixed herself breakfast and went out to search for a pharmacy.
It took her a long time because it was Sunday, but eventually she found one. “Please,” she begged the pharmacist, unable to think of a larger-than-life gesture that would sum up her situation. “I don’t sleep. I need whatever you’ve got. The strongest.”
Instead of pretending that her French wasn’t French, the pharmacist took pity on her. He disappeared into the back room and returned moments later with a bottle of pills. The price wasn’t bad. She went home and left the bottle sitting conspicuously on the counter, where she could ignore it. She was determined to wait until nightfall so that her body wouldn’t have the final say.
Sprawled on the sofa, she reviewed her syllabi, feeling as if she were reading a language whose alphabet she’d studied, but whose syntax and semantics she had never learned. “Don’t panic,” she told herself, whispering even though she was alone in the house. Somehow, she would get through her first day of class. And then the next. And then the next.
Now and then, she glanced at the bottle of pills. Her heart skittered in her chest like a small lizard over hot stones. Her future cantilevered, sheer and impending.
At last, taking her cue from the setting sun, she unscrewed the bottle and shook two pills into her hand. “This is going to work,” she told herself, even though nothing had ever worked before. She washed them down with a glass of water, brushed her teeth, and changed into a nightgown, then cleared a space among her clothes, many of which now smelled of sweat and bile, and got into bed. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, her fingers steepled.
Before long, she felt the heaviness and numbness spreading. Hoping against hope that this sensation wouldn’t desert her, she turned over onto her side. The last thing she remembered seeing were the green numbers on the alarm clock beside her uncle’s bed: 00:00.
* * *
The first thing she saw in the morning were the green numbers on the alarm clock beside her uncle’s bed: 10:00. The significance of these four digits took its time sinking in. First came the revelation that she’d slept for ten hours. Something had worked. The pills had done their job.
Then she remembered her eight o’clock class.
In a panic, she leapt up, snatched her toothbrush from the bathroom, and began to rush about the room, frothy-mouthed, pawing through her clothes in search of something elegant and clean enough to wear. Then she began to sneeze.
Her sneezes always came in odd-numbered clusters. She’d been known to unleash as many as seven consecutive sneezes in one bout, but never six or eight. This time, she broke all records: fifteen sneezes wracked her body, each one sending mists of toothpaste foam across the mattress, the curtains, the bedside table, and the dresser drawers. On its way out of her nose, the fifteenth sneeze took the last of her strength with it. Weak-kneed, she sank onto the bed and sat staring at the alarm clock in dull and helpless horror. It was covered in dust. She’d spent a week in her uncle’s house without once noticing that he’d forgotten to have it cleaned.
Fighting off another bout of sternutation, Halima pulled a dress over her head, seized her backpack and purse, and hurried down the stairs. The weather was cool, the sky densely clotted with milk-colored clouds, but the jog soon warmed her blood so that by the time she reached the edge of campus, she was no longer shivering. Her backpack jostled against her as she sprinted through the quad, aggravating her eternal bruise.
When she arrived and peered through the little window set into the door, she found the classroom full. Instead of the old man whose picture she’d seen on the university website, however, the lecturer was a young, trimly dressed woman.
Halima dug in her purse, expecting an email announcing a last-minute change of location, but when she found her phone, its screen was dark and unresponsive. It had died.
She was still attempting to rearrange the fragments of her shattered day into a sensible backup plan when the students began filtering out of the classroom. Slipping inside, she addressed the young woman: “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother, but I thought my eight o’clock was here. Only you’re not my professor.”
“Organic chemistry?” said the woman, arching a stenciled brow.
“Nanolithography.”
“You’ve got the wrong room, then.” The woman gathered up her things and, without sparing so much as a glance at Halima, went clopping off down the hall.
The thought of explaining herself to the administrators whom she’d met the week before made Halima itchy all over, yet she was not relieved, arriving at the International Students’ Office, to find that no one whom she knew was in. The secretary, a plump, middle-aged woman, asked for her name. Watching her type it into the computer, Halima found herself wondering why she was wearing glasses in the first place if she was just going to peer over the tops of the frames to get a better look at the screen.
“Hmm,” she said after waiting for the system to load. “I’m not getting anything. Is there another way to spell your name?”
Halima offered several variations, each of which the secretary dutifully transcribed, to no avail, even after refreshing the system.
“Let me talk to my boss,” she said after the fourth try. “This is unusual.”
She disappeared into the director’s office, returning a few minutes later with a handsome, dark, aquiline man. He was not the director, whom Halima had met the week before. He asked her to spell her name, then commandeered the secretary’s keyboard and typed while standing, his shoulders hunched forward, the secretary squeezing plumply into the corner so as to be out of his way.
“Which department?” he asked. “Material sciences?”
“Exactly.”
“Well. Here you are.” He straightened, raising his eyes to Halima’s: not blue, like so many of these people’s eyes, but sharp and dark, like hers. “It seems that you left.”
“What?”
“Dropped out, actually. Before completing your first semester. That’s what it says.”
“But I haven’t dropped out,” said Halima. “I haven’t even started yet.”
“This is your second enrollment, then?”
“What?”
“This is the second time you’ve been enrolled at this university,” said the man, his pitch no longer curling upward at the end. “Your first enrollment was—” he peered at the screen, double-checking, “—ten years ago. No?”
“No,” said Halima. “No. That’s an error. I was just here on Friday. I’ve been here for a week. In France, I mean. I’m from Algiers. You can ask your colleagues. I was here, in this office. Look.” She unslung her backpack and brandished her syllabi. “These are my classes. I just need to know where they are. I’m on a scholarship. I can’t afford…it’s just that I overslept. I never oversleep. I have the worst insomnia. I just thought I would try a new sleeping pill.”
The man’s eyes scanned the syllabus, tacking, then locking. “Look. You see?” He held it out to her as if it were a flower, which she was expected to accept with gratitude. “This is an old syllabus. This professor may not even teach here anymore.”
His finger was squarely planted on the year. It was the right year, not old: the same as it had been the day before. Clearly, though, he expected her to understand.
In the hall outside the International Students’ Office, she tried again to check her phone. She peered at her own fingers, curled around the edges of the lifeless screen. Her nails were bitten to the quick. She felt her hair and found that it was shoulder-length and slightly greasy, just as it had been. In the stories, those who fell asleep for years always woke up with long hair and long fingernails.
She headed for the edge of campus. There, she hailed a cab. “Please,” she said to the driver, “I need to go to the Algerian Consulate.”
If she’d been asleep for ten years, then surely someone would’ve come to check on her. The authorities. Uncle Belhaj.
When she asked the driver what day it was, he pretended that he hadn’t heard, but she kept asking, repeating herself, raising her voice each time, until finally he snapped, “Monday, of course.”
“And the year?”
He said the year.
Everybody on duty at the Algerian Consulate that morning understood without being told that the young woman who stumbled through the metal detectors on the unsteady legs of a foal, handed over a passport and visa long since expired, and claimed to have slept for ten years was speaking metaphorically. By “fell asleep,” she meant that she’d forgotten who she was and where she came from, slipping into her life in France as if into a dream. By “woken up” she meant that memories of family and home had recently begun to stir. Interpreting her words in this way, the officers spoke to her gently, but firmly. They explained that while they understood the difficulty of her situation, she really had no choice. Her place was there, not here.
“It’s impossible,” she murmured, her nails between her teeth, her eyes a-shimmer. “My father…how can I explain?”
The officer assigned to her case, taking pity on her, agreed to contact her uncle instead of her father. But when he called the number she provided, it was disconnected.
Halima waited, slumped and hiccupping disconsolately in a metal chair, while the officer booked a flight and printed documents and boarding passes. Soon, everything was arranged. She was put into a car with two other officers, who were given her uncle’s address and told to take her there to collect her things before going on to the airport, where it was their job to make sure that she got on the right plane.
This time, she saw what she hadn’t that morning, distracted by haste: the whole house was covered in dust. She noticed the tracks in the dust that she’d in the morning, down the stairs and through the parlor. Double helix dust motes danced and wafted in the air. Fine fuzz limned the inverse U-bend of the kitchen faucet, and the tarnished handles of the drawers, and the lid of the pill bottle, which still sat innocently on the kitchen counter.
Staring fixedly at the bottle, Halima began to sneeze.
By the time she took her seat on the departing flight that evening, a great emptiness had opened within her. Her mind echoed like a vast and vacant coliseum, through which a few thoughts raced in aimless circles. Once every few minutes, all these thoughts would hit the floor in perfect unison, where they would lie prone for a while, playing dead, only to leap up once more and continue on their frenzied marathon. She’d slept so little in her life, and operated with such a rudimentary understanding of what it meant to dream, that she found herself wondering whether she might not have entered a nightmare, one from which she couldn’t wake.
At customs, she aroused neither suspicion nor fanfare. One minute, she was presenting her papers, wincing in anticipating of the bureaucratic gnashing she felt certain she would set in motion. The next, she was standing alone in the terminal, surrounded by her four bulky suitcases. There was, of course, no one to greet her.
What ten years meant didn’t really hit Halima until she found herself standing on her doorstep, face to face with two grizzled specters, their leathery flesh full of creases into which the sediments of ages had settled. Their eyes guttered like candleflames deep in their wax pools. Their backs were bent like gnarled limbs. Her father’s hair was in retreat, her mother’s thinning, streaked with gray.
“It’s me,” was all Halima could think to say.
They stood like that for a while: one outside, two within, a threshold between them. Then Halima’s father made a noise deep in his throat, a sort of, “Harumph.” He turned, hobbled back across the sitting room, and sank into his chair.
Halima’s mother stood aside to let her in, but made no move to help her as she wrestled her suitcases over the threshold.
Halima’s reappearance, as it happened, coincided with the ten-year anniversary of her uncle’s death. Word of the car crash had reached her parents in Algiers the same day that Halima was supposed to start classes. Naturally, this had made the radio silence from her all the more disturbing. At first, they’d feared that something awful had befallen her as well, but as time had gone on with no further word from either the French or Algerian governments, Halima’s father had begun to suspect that rather than perishing, his daughter had chosen to disappear. With his brother suddenly gone, the resentments that had smoldered in his heart for years had required a new object. In Halima, they’d found one.
One year after his eldest daughter’s disappearance, he’d suffered a stroke. The doctors had warned that worse was on the way unless he was able to lower his blood pressure somehow. Obligingly, he’d slowed down in the only way he’d known: by collapsing into depression. With that, all the light had gone out of their lives.
It seemed to Halima, perched on the divan across from her mother and father, that time had flattened and grayed the two of them into a single concrete slab, a wall on which a bored and careless mason had scratched an inchoate impression of human faces. “Please,” she whispered, cotton-mouthed, imploring. “Please, you have to understand, I wouldn’t do this. You know me. Please.”
These words clattered off their countenances, small and useless stones. Whether she would’ve done such a thing or not made no difference. She had done such a thing.
By the time the clock struck midnight, Halima wanted nothing more than for her father to leap up from his chair and beat her as he’d always done. Instead, he cleared his throat as if about to speak, then sighed, rose with great difficulty, and made his way out of the sitting room without another word. Her mother followed. Halima was alone.
Nothing would be salvaged, she soon came to understand. The physical infrastructure of her life was all still there—her childhood home, the streets in which she’d played, the open spaces of her childhood—but the essence had vanished like a moth in a flame. Her family despised her, her teachers had forgotten her, and her friends had gone their separate ways. Some had gotten scholarships or landed jobs abroad. Others had found work domestically, teaching, doing research, or serving the government. A third group, the largest by far, had filtered out of the university and down into the socioeconomic substratum of Algiers, taking positions as shopkeepers, taxi drivers, house cleaners, and street vendors. Halima, then, was either a defector, or something infinitely worse: a squanderer of coveted opportunities; a reveler in desecration.
Though she feared what would happen if she boarded the wrong bus or hailed the wrong taxicab and found a former classmate at the wheel, she couldn’t simply spend her days at home. The wordless rancor radiating from her parents, and from her siblings whenever they visited, was more than she could bear. For lack of anything better to do, she took to wandering the streets of Algiers, knocking on the doors of various establishments, asking for work. Everywhere she went, she registered as a disturbance, a bad smell wafting in the air. In ten years, new street slang had emerged. Her efforts to incorporate these idioms into her own vocabulary, crudely informed by whichever conversations she’d last overheard, only elicited cocked heads and consternation. She couldn’t seem to avoid mixing the jargon of twelve-year-olds with the argot of gangsters. She always knew when inappropriate words had left her mouth, for the air in the room would change, taking on an acrid smell, a crackling charge, and she would cringe with shame.
The only language over which she still retained some semblance of command was that of material sciences, but there was little use for angstroms and fullerenes in the shops and restaurants of Algiers. Deep down, she knew that if she ever set foot in a lab, she would discover that even this language had left her behind, but because those doors were permanently closed to her, she was able to maintain the illusion that she still grasped a slice of the world.
One day, on a whim, she went to a cyber-cafe and printed out her CV. She knew that a ten-year gap for which she could muster no convincing explanation would instantly ruin her chances with employers, but carrying these papers around still made her feel as if she had something to offer. Usually, the CV remained tucked away in her purse, but she would sometimes take it out and read it, remembering the classes she’d taken, so fresh and recent in her mind, until the ink was blotted by her tears.
She ate little and was painfully conscious, at every meal, that her need for sustenance imposed an additional financial burden on her parents. They said nothing to discourage her from eating, and her mother always set a place for her or left food at her door, but every mouthful hurt her teeth, as if she were biting through gold. She grew thin.
The bitterest irony was that she no longer suffered from insomnia. She would go to bed late, exhausted from long days spent trudging about the city, and would plunge immediately into the soundest sleep she’d ever known. Sometimes, she even dreamed. More often than not, her dreams were pleasant, with no connection to her present circumstances. She would wake feeling rested—but then thoughts of her real life would come flooding in, and that ill-gotten sense of tranquility would scatter like spores on the wind. Within a few minutes of waking, she would find herself exhausted once more, her nervous system wrecked by shame.
Because she neither felt that she deserved relief nor wanted any more of that ruinous dormancy, she refused to stay in bed all day. Yet this left her constantly casting about for ways to fill her days. Socializing was out of the question. Employment was out of the question. Only one option remained: to volunteer.
Encouraged by her uncle, who’d bankrolled half the charitable organizations in the city, Halima used to spend her summer holidays volunteering, chaperoning children on field trips, helping with their homework, and packing lunches for families even poorer than her own. “This is half the battle right here,” Uncle Belhaj had told her. “This might even get you into Harvard. Foreigners love when you volunteer.”
The organizations with which he’d connected her had all had ambitious missions, ranging from feeding the hungry to teaching the blind how to see. If he’d still been alive, he would’ve made a few phone calls, and one of those NGOs would’ve hired Halima in no time, perhaps for an executive position where she could spend her days in a sunlit corner office, working out which sorts of synthetic materials could be used to fashion new parents for orphans. As it was, she was left with no choice but to go knocking door to door, begging one secretary after another to let her work for free.
The nonprofit sector would be her salvation, or so Halima expected, the last refuge where someone like her could fit in—but, to her shock, she met with rebuff even here.
“Maybe I’m not making myself clear,” she said to the fifth secretary in a row who shook her head ruefully and tried to send her on her way. “I want to spend time with the children. To entertain them. I’m not asking for compensation. Look.” Gesturing emphatically, as she’d learned to do in France, she shook her CV in the woman’s face. “I did it before. Right here, with you guys.”
But the secretary just went on shaking her head. “We don’t need volunteers.”
“What do you need, then?”
“Cash donations,” said the secretary. “Can you make a cash donation today?”
“I…no.”
“That’s the way to make the world a better place, you know,” said the secretary. “If you really want to help the children, you’ll make a cash donation.”
“Is it because of the gap on my CV?” Halima demanded. “Is that the reason? I promise, I won’t show my CV to the children. I’ll encourage them to work hard, and study hard, and never give up. I’ll set a good example. I won’t share anything about my life. I won’t tell them anything. I won’t corrupt them.”
“Please,” said the secretary, “I’ve already asked you to leave. Do come back when you’re ready to make a donation. Or you can do it through our website.”
“This isn’t right,” said Halima. “I just want to help.”
“I don’t really want to call the police,” said the secretary, “but if you don’t leave, I’ll have no choice.”
Halima left the lobby and stood on the curb in a daze, trying to get her bearings. She must’ve walked this neighborhood a thousand times, but now she couldn’t remember what this street was called, which other streets it opened onto, or even which part of Algiers she was in. She felt more disoriented than she had on her first day in France, even.
Three young men pushed past her, laughing at something that one had just said. Behind them came a married couple, the husband unshaven, the wife in a tightly bound headscarf, trailed by a pouting little stick of a child. Car horns sounded. Traffic clattered on the avenue. These were the sounds of Halima’s Algiers. The smells were familiar, the same ones she’d grown up smelling. But this was not the place where she’d been born and raised, and studied hard, and fought to make a future for herself. This was the future, as heavy as cast-iron, shaped not by her will, or her mind, or her hands, but by a foreign mold. This was not Halima’s country. Halima didn’t have a country anymore.
About the Authors
Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, North Africa, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in The North American Review, Fourth Genre, Fine Lines, Good River Review, Chautauqua, and elsewhere around the globe, and their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, a full-service author support platform. They hold an MA and an MFA, respectively, from the University of Arkansas.
