Burned alive Read Free Page B

in order to talk about her, so I’ll call her Hanan, but may she forgive me because it surely isn’t her name. I know she took care of the two little half sisters my father brought home after he abandoned his second wife, Aicha. I have seen this woman and I did not have ill feelings toward her. It was considered acceptable for my father to have taken her. He always wanted to have sons, but it didn’t work out with Aicha, either. She gave him only two more girls, still more girls! So he dropped her and brought the two new little sisters home. That was considered the normal thing to do. Everything the men wanted to do was considered normal in this village, including my father’s striking us with the cane, and all the rest. I couldn’t imagine any other kind of life. Besides, I didn’t really imagine anything at all. There were no precise thoughts in my head. In our childhood, we knew no play or toys, no games, only obedience and submission.
    In any case, these two little girls live with us now and Hanan stays at home to take care of them, of that I’m sure. But their names, too, are unhappily forgotten. I just refer to them as “the little sisters.” In my first memories of them, they are about five or six years old and they don’t work yet. They are in Hanan’s care and she very rarely leaves the house, except when it is necessary for picking vegetables in season.
    In our family, the children are about a year apart. My mother was married at fourteen, my father much older than her. She has had many children, fourteen in all, she says. Only five are still living. For a long time I didn’t realize what giving birth to fourteen children meant. One day my mother’s father was talking about it while I served the tea. I can still hear his words in my ears: “It’s good that you married young, you were able to have fourteen children . . . and a son, it’s very good.”
    Even if I didn’t go to school, I knew how to count the sheep. So I could count on my hands that there were only five of us, Noura, Kainat, me Souad, Assad, and Hanan, not fourteen. Where were the others? My mother never said that they had died but it was acknowledged in her usual comment: “I have fourteen children, seven of them are living.” She included the half sisters with us five, since we never said “half sisters,” always “sisters.” It would seem that there were then seven others missing. But really nine were missing, if the half sisters weren’t counted. Either way, many of the children she had borne were not still alive.
    But one day I learned why there were only seven of us in the house. I can’t say how old I was, but I wasn’t yet at puberty, so I was less than ten years old. Noura the oldest is with me. I have forgotten many things, but not what I saw with my own eyes, terrorized, but not really aware that it was a crime.
    I see my mother lying on the floor on a sheepskin. She is giving birth, and my aunt Salima is with her sitting on a cushion. There are cries from my mother and then from the baby, and very quickly my mother takes the sheepskin and she smothers the baby. She is on her knees. I see the baby move under the blanket and then it’s over. I don’t remember what happened after that, I just know that the baby isn’t there anymore. That’s all, and a terrible fear grips me.
    So it was a girl that my mother suffocated at her birth. I saw her do it this first time, then a second time. I’m not sure I was present for the third one, but I knew about it. And I hear my sister Noura say to my mother: “If I have girls, I’ll do what you have done.”
    This is how my mother got rid of the seven girls that she had after Hanan, the last survivor. This was accepted as normal. I accepted it, too, but I was also terrified. These little girls my mother was killing were a little of me. I started to hide and cry every time my father would kill a sheep or a chicken, because I was trembling for my life. The death of an animal,