Free So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar Page A

metropolis the only thing I kept with me as I set out on my walk was its hum, the faint echo of its roar. I walked and I became the spectator of a day in 1198, probably a spring day, on the outskirts of Béjaia … Sidi Abou Madyan, almost eighty, prepares to leave his city; thousands of the faithful are there, trying in vain to keep him from going. Will they ever see him again? He is so sick. He resigns himself to going to Marrakech, where the Almohade sultan with the fearsome reputation has summoned him.
    Surrounded by the sultan’s guards who are waiting for the old man to tear himself away from his disciples, he is ready to go; he seems serene. Suddenly he makes a prediction: “Obeying the sultan,” he begins, “I obey God, glory be to Him! But I shall not reach the sultan; I shall die along the way, in front of Tlemcen!”
    “Then mysteriously, they say, he whispered (was this meant for the ruler of Marrakech? like a statement of the obvious) ‘He, moreover, will follow me shortly!’ ”
    I had only been to Tlemcen once. Striding along with the flow of honking automobiles and crowded buses, I kept my face turnedtoward the espaliered slopes. Small houses from the beginning of the century were interspersed with apartment buildings that were too high and full of people, and here and there a vaguely Byzantine chapel or an ancient mosque stood next to a vacant lot full of garbage but also full of bunches of children tormenting a cat or playing soccer. I skimmed lightly through the shocks of the present. I kept on going, living far back in the past, this time there for the arrival of the saint in the area surrounding Tlemcen. At the entrance of a modest town, Abou Madyan faints, people come running from all over: “The great Abou Madyan is going to die! … He is dying! May the salvation of God …” Decades later, centuries later, the faithful will flock to this place of pilgrimage, and do so still! I feel tired, I look for a public square, a bench, and end up sitting down for five minutes in a men’s cafe, just enough time to have some mint tea. I am sad that I have to suspend my daydream because I am no longer walking, because my feet are dragging. Then, suddenly, my torment returns, like an abscess only half anesthetized, erupting now again.
    I set off once more. The sun dims; I have to get up there and reach home before nightfall. In vain I look for a taxi.
    And along the way I lost the accompanying shadow of the saint of Béjaia, dead at the entrance to Tlemcen and shortly followed, as he predicted, by the sultan who died at the height of his powers … I am no longer protected by my ghosts; they are replaced by my own sense of loss, which crops up again, harsh, pointed, sharpened, this severing I have borne for weeks. It is simultaneously a hardening that bolsters me and the latent danger of falling; how can I just find “him,” even at a distance? Even in secret? No, I won’t go where he works. I could find a hundred pretexts. No, I won’t take any of them! Luck is what I need, and I don’t have it. And he, how can he live like this, how has he gotten used to not seeing me anymore, how … Already Iam inventing an imaginary argument, a lovers’ quarrel, suddenly paying no attention to the fact that nothing has happened, that the attraction has remained implied, scarcely begun, that my cool façade finally seemed to have taken flawless control of me. My eyes search the crowd; I begin to watch all the cars—usually just boxes to me. I am only looking for one color—a particular dirty blue and a chassis rather rarely seen here. Even though I cannot recall any of the makes of cars, I would recognize his immediately, I’m sure of it.
    Twice, in a trivial conversation this summer, my Beloved, or his friend, had mentioned the make of the car I was looking for now, whose name at least I was trying to remember; this car that had driven me home two or three nights—if it went by I would recognize