Page 10 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

9

A World That Has No Need of Women

Rabat, 1932

“I’m going out to see Hachem,” Edouard says to me over breakfast. “You’ll need to come and translate. Find out if they’re really planning another protest or if his wife is just imagining things.”

Hachem is Ghislaine’s husband. Their son Aderfi is dead. He died last year from kala-azar, a disease caused by sand fly bites and poverty. Ghislaine has three more sons now and no time to either mourn or imagine anything.

I want to tell Edouard that I’m done with the go-betweening, done with listening to him derogate Ghislaine and use her for information all at the same time. The last time I saw her, more than six months ago, I told her we should stop, because now her sister, who lives in Rabat, and a couple of her cousins, all equally eager to save their sons from another war, are involved, too. But Ghislaine stared at me with disgust and said, “The only people colonial pity is good for are the French. It makes you believe you’re moral. It gets me nothing.”

She stalked off and I was left with my despicable pity, a sense that my education meant nothing at all and that Ghislaine understood more about politics than I did.

So I nod at Edouard, dress for a day on camelback, then give my son an extra-long hug goodbye.

Most days, I play with Christian from the time he wakes and throws his chubby arms around me until I tuck him into bed at night with a story to sweeten his dreams. He’s insatiably curious and loves to investigate everything, which drives Edouard mad and makes me smile. I go out only when I collect notes from Ghislaine’s sister and cousins, always meeting them at the souk around midday because Moroccan women aren’t permitted out at night. It means I’m able to see Marguerite and occasionally the duke, too, the two of them having become my partners in stealth, taking me out to lunch—somewhere where there’s no danger of running into Edouard—or to explore the abandoned medersas, their loveliness still evident in the ruined skeletons of columns or the broken frame of a mother-of-pearl mirror. They’ve even snuck me into the duke’s airplane a couple of times.

Today’s journey is more sedate. We reach the nomad camp in time for dinner, where I sit between Edouard and Hachem translating.

“Tell your husband he’s getting fat,” Hachem says. “His pretty wife will lose interest in him.” He grins at Edouard, making it clear his words are only amusing to himself.

I’m used to this. The power play. Edouard wants something only Hachem or someone like him can give. And Hachem wants something too, from Edouard and the other tribal leaders. They each give as little as they can. I don’t know if either of them truly has their country’s best interests at heart, or if their lives are devoted to the frisson of gaining the upper hand.

This is why wars happen.

I can’t believe I ever lay in a bed and laughed about go-betweening.

When we return home, Edouard’s in a benevolent mood. He has information that cost him fewer francs than he’d expected, having no idea that his thrift means that this year or next, Ghislaine’s other sons might die from kala-azar disease, too.

The thought pounds in my head beside images of the children at the camp with the round bellies and thin legs of the malnourished. My own son’s skin is plump, his cheeks rosy. We can afford food and medicines because Edouard is good at a job that exists only because of the conqueror’s need to spy on the conquered.

The next morning at breakfast, I take the biggest risk I’ve contemplated since I had Christian.

“I’d like to assist at the women’s clinic,” I say, trying to sound careless, as if it doesn’t matter if Edouard refuses. “I’d overhear things that could be useful for you.”

I have no intention of telling him anything but hope the falsehood will be persuasive and soon forgotten.

He agrees.

Two days later, I’m holding a woman’s legs while she gives birth to a baby boy.

Soon the clinic becomes the second miracle, besides Christian, that my days orbit around. I take the women food I’ve stolen from my kitchen, show them how to treat their wounds so they don’t get infected. I try to tell them—women who believe only in the powers of dead saints and monstrous jinni, in God and not science—what to eat so they have the strength to withstand their ninth or tenth pregnancies. I wipe away their tears when they cry after giving birth to a girl.

“Ten girls,” one of the women says to me after a Herculean labor that’s left me covered in blood and at least three hours late for dinner. “I don’t want her.”

She refuses to look at this tiny, squalling child who did nothing other than be born a woman in a world that has no need of women—other than to produce more men.

When I walk home that night, I’m weeping, and I don’t even know which injustice I’m mourning.

“Enough clinic work,” Edouard says when I walk in the door, having missed dinner and Christian’s bedtime, looking nothing like the blond and deliriously stupid eighteen-year-old girl he married.

Just as the city of Rabat is locked up each night, the space I’m locked into is becoming smaller and smaller—and so much harder to break free of.