Bitter Almonds Read Free Page B

you’ve finished.”
    Fadila turns on her heels without replying. Once she has finished the ironing she comes into the kitchen for a coffee. She sits on a stool, her feet flat on the floor in front of her. Édith is washing the lettuce. “Shall we have a look at the book?” she asks.
    â€œNext week,” says Fadila.
    Â 
    The following week, Édith tries again: “Perhaps it would be better to start right away, as soon as you get here. You’re often in a hurry when you leave.”
    â€œWe gonna see,” murmurs Fadila, tying her headscarf behind her neck.
    Ã‰dith begins to wonder if they will ever start. Fadila must be afraid, but she doesn’t realize that Édith is as afraid as she is.
    After two hours have gone by, when Édith sees her coming back in, she asks again, “Shall we get going?”
    â€œWe get going,” answers Fadila, with a big smile that Édith is seeing for the first time.
    They sit side by side at the table in the dining room. Édith pushes her papers to one side. She’s been thinking about this first session for ten days now. She bought a big pad of lined paper. The textbook recommends starting off with letters written at least three times larger than usual. Édith has prepared a sheet inspired by page one in the book, where she has written the name
fadila
in cursive letters—no capitals for the moment—and the five vowels. She has decided it would be good to see that very special word
fadila
as a whole right away: it’s obvious what it means, and they can use it as a matrix for the first letters she learns. A concession to the whole language method. Édith was careful to write it in big letters. On the special lined paper, the
a
and the
o
fill an entire space between two lines, the
d
and the
l
take up three, and the
f
takes up six.
    On the paper she sets down in front of Fadila she points to the word
fadila,
at the top in the middle of a line, and pronounces it. Then she points to the five vowels ten lines further down. She names them one after the other as she points to them:
a, e, i, o, u.
    â€œIs like zero,” says Fadila, her forefinger on the
o.
    â€œExactly. It’s written the same way, you’re right. But this is an
o.
You find it in the word olive, or orange—and you know the sound, o. These letters, these five here, have a loud sound:
a
,
o
,
u
. They’re called vowels. There are other letters that you don’t hear as well,
f
,
s
, or
m
, they’re called consonants, we’ll look at them later.
    â€œListen carefully: Fa-di-la,” says Édith, pointing to the word on the paper. “Can you hear? Fa (she stresses the
a
), di, la (again stressing the
a
).”
    â€œThis is the letter
a
,” she says, pointing to the
a.
“Look, in
fadila
you have the letter
a
twice, and if you listen carefully, you can hear it twice, too, Fa-di-la.”
    She has a red felt-tip at the ready, in addition to the black pen she used to write the five vowels and the name
fadila
on the sheet of paper. She underlines the
a
in Fadila’s name, twice, in red. “Here you have the letter
a,
twice: here, and here.” Then she writes in red, below the name and just below each
a,
a new separate
a
.
    â€œDo you remember the name of this letter?”
    Silence.
    â€œIt’s
a
.”
    â€œ
A
,” echoes Fadila.
    â€œYour turn to write it.”
    On a second sheet of paper Édith writes the letter
a
on its own, in big letters. She deconstructs the gesture: “You start with a circle, like for an
o
. Then you draw a line down the side, like this. See?”
    She writes
a
several times on a line, slowly.
    â€œYour turn,” she says, putting down the felt-tip. “Go ahead.”
    Fadila picks up the pen with all five fingers of her right hand. She holds it vertically, perpendicular to the white sheet.
    â€œGo ahead,” says Édith, encouraging her. “Make