(THE FATE OF THE EMIGRANT)

S. V. PROZHOGINA

Doctor of Philological Sciences

Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Morocco Keywords:, Tahar Bendjelloun, novel "Au pays" ("Home"), Arab immigrants in France

It was a dry heat wave in the village. The earth was scorched by the sun. Mercilessly. Not a blade of grass or a green bush can be seen on it. The trees withered. On the way, Mohammed breathed in a lot of dust. People were all staying at home. They covered the wells in the courtyards with lids for fear that the water would evaporate. There was silence. There was nothing to talk about. There was nothing to do. The hearts of men gradually grew stale, too. The children didn't listen to their elders. The girls were locked up: their parents wouldn't let them look at men. There is no argument, no objection. They follow the tradition.

"Life is very simple, that is, terrible" (this is the author's comment)*. Although the TV sets installed in the houses (powered by gas generators, since there is no electricity in the village) allow people to "open a window to the world". But people "looked at this world with a smile" as if it were something exotic. And if they were shown a film where a man takes a woman by the hand, the audience covered their faces with a handkerchief, saying: "These Christians have completely lost their shame!"...

"HOUSE OF HAPPINESS, PEACE AND HARMONY"!

...Time passed" on the native side "slowly, and as if" moving away from the person." Mohammed did not notice how five years had passed: he had begun building his new home-following his plans to "reunite the children with the family" - and did not stop, "as if floating somewhere in the air", cherishing the hope of clinging to his mirage until all his savings ran out.

The contractor lured money out of it, and the builders hired by him tried to implement crazy plans for the construction of a huge and ridiculous structure with a large number of rooms, terraces, with some kind of "common toilet" (numerous seats with holes), with a large kitchen, countless corridors, window openings (empty, unglazed). And all this was built on a vacant lot that Mohammed had purchased near his old home, where, like everywhere else in the village, there was no sewer or running water... And Mohammed imagined that something was being built "grandiose, spacious, airy, like a magic carpet, gently bobbing on the clouds in the sky."

Perhaps, he thought, time had become more favorable to him, and if there was anything he had failed to do for his happiness in France, he would be rewarded in full here in Morocco... The house, he believed, was bound to be " bright and beautiful, full of children, their joyful noise and hubbub.".. He smiled, remembering that he had never been annoyed by children's running around before.

And he also planned to plant trees around the House, grow a lush garden and vegetable garden, rose bushes and collect abundant harvests of fruits, fruits and flowers... And he imagined his beloved adopted son, Nabil, as a gardener... Nabil was now the only person Mohammed could count on for help and support. And he firmly believed that making Nabil the "steward" in his big and new future Home would help him heal from Down's disease... After all, he was already in his sixteenth year...

Maybe the youngest daughter will be able to learn to be a veterinarian and become a respected and revered woman here... Back in France, Mohammed reflected, it was unlikely that she would ever be able to overcome the "bar" that had been set for immigrants. A friend of his once explained to him why this was being done: "You see, our children will never go to their universities... At best, they will be oriented towards the acquisition of workers, technical professions, and various crafts. And they will never become members of parliament, not work in large banks, in research laboratories. Despite all the promises, France easily grants the children of immigrants only one right: to fill out prisons, to be constantly registered with the police, to always go to suspects in all crimes committed in the country... We immigrants are finished people. The French are bringing down their colonial guilt complex on us. So they take it out on our children, and they take it out on them, and they destroy their cars, and everything that gets in their way, and they break windows... Our deplorable fate and the fate of our children are the same... We immigrants will always be pointed at as the source of all the misery here.. But my son, like your children, Mohammed, was born here, and they are one hundred percent French citizens..."

...On the way to his native village (Tangier by boat from Marseille, Casablanca by bus, Agadir by train, and then by hitchhiker), Mohammed saw beggars everywhere on the roads; women with children on their backs (Moroccan women, like many other African women, tie them with towels).,

End: Beginning see: Asia and Africa Today, 2012, No. 5.

* Here and further translated by Prozhogina S. V. by: Tahar Ben Jelloun. Au pays. P., 2009.

walking into the city in the sweltering heat; jobless young men wandering aimlessly; pathetic old men in rags holding up some crumpled, old prescription forms, asking for money from passers-by and passers-by for medicine, and said to himself: "Little by little, but more and more, this country is losing its dignity, gradually losing its former pride in its past... There are too many people who reach out to you, asking for help, and those who mercilessly profit from the poverty of the people... Too much injustice has become, and the further, the more. And the richer people become, the more terrible is corruption, the more terrible is poverty."

And now, seeing how "injustice reigns everywhere", I wanted to hope only for the future: for the House in which, perhaps, he will find happiness...

Somehow the old youthful energy had returned, and he was completely lost in counting bags of cement, rubble, and plaster, forgetting about time... Neighbors and relatives helped him with advice, although they looked with surprise at the strange structure that gradually appeared on the vacant lot, not at all like their small huts, and as they went home, they asked themselves if their countryman had lost his mind...

He kept telling them only one thing: "I want a big house, the biggest in this village, as big and spacious as my heart itself. It is necessary that this house should be visible from afar, so that people can say: Mohammed lives there with his children... Yes, yes, all my children will come here and settle down here in these big rooms. There's plenty of room for everyone... And my children and grandchildren. And it will be a House of Happiness, Peace, Harmony!"

He knew sometimes that he was exaggerating, but the construction had taken him so completely by surprise that he had long ago become dissimilar to himself. And the house kept growing, losing all conceivable proportions, all logic. The main thing was to "gather everyone under one roof," although the housing that was being built was more like "a huge pot with something inedible cooking under the lid." The walls were still unpainted, the window openings were unglazed, and the shutters were still loose... Dark holes yawned.

Several years passed, but the house remained uninhabited. The children never showed up, and the wife who lived in the old family house nearby, visiting her almost insane husband, was still trying to " turn him off the wrong path.".. She had long ago realized that her children no longer belonged to them, that they had been swept away by the "whirlwind of life in France", that they were living their own lives and had no regrets or remorse... They are also attached in their own way to the country where they were born and raised. And how can we blame them for this?"

And my father, after forty years of working in France, did not want to change. It was as if it had been sealed: it had not experienced any influences. Nothing from the " French "left a trace in his soul, in his heart." Nothing could shake him, erase his essence from him. And there were, he was sure, millions of people like him in France... They arrived there, these emigrants, as if "in armor", and did not want any "mixing", lived their own lives, kept their own customs. We have always felt like "strangers" here, foreigners. And they protected themselves with their traditions. As if they had moved their native village, their world, here, and were afraid of catching the "French infection"... They protected themselves in this way from the surrounding reality. They didn't ask too many questions. They believed that Islam was their fortress. Their essence.

"I am," mused Mohammed, " first of all a Muslim, then a Moroccan, and I was like that before I became an immigrant. Why change? Islam is my refuge. Religion calms me down... There is a different faith here. We're not cut out for it. And the French also live their own lives, and we - our own. And they can't live like we do. Our mutual contract is simple: we work, they pay us. But I have grown children on their land. And it would be necessary for them to return to their native home. And he is in my country, in my homeland... It's so simple: this House is our star, our main wealth, our most precious thing. And every stone that is laid in its foundation is a drop of my blood; every wall of it is a part of my life... And we will all live here the same life that my father and my grandfather lived, I just follow the road that they laid out, and they knew better how to live the next generations after them... Here you will find everything you need to be happy... The main thing is our land, and this is better than money... And the proof that I came back without being different... France has helped me earn money, make some savings, but it is good for the French. We don't have a place there... And I want to get our children out of there, and they should continue the lives of their ancestors... The drought will soon end here, the land will bear fruit, and there is no point in our children living away from us."..

OBSESSION HOUSE-MAUSOLEUM HOUSE

The idea became an obsession, and he kept repeating the same thing over and over, pausing only to look up at the sky and see if there were any clouds...

But it didn't rain. The construction of the House was no longer going on, but Mohammed kept hoping that the water would be brought to it, and the electricity, and the children would probably come next summer, at least for the holidays... So with the last of his money, he bought an old armchair that had belonged to some other French colonist, set it up in front of the strange structure, sat down in it, although the springs were no longer good and it was uncomfortable to sit in it, and looked out at the road and the horizon beyond, hoping to see approaching cars. Here are the cars...

Mohammed sat stubbornly in his chair and waited. He couldn't get up, didn't wash, was covered in mud, and smelled bad. And the old chair suddenly seemed to grow overgrown with grass, sinking deeper and deeper into the ground, as if it wanted to bury itself and its occupant in it...

Mohammed thought he saw a black shape, a shadow swirling around him.

and an unfinished House. There was a terrible chill in the air... There was a strange gnashing of teeth; the black shape kept disappearing and coming back again... Mohammed washed his face with the last of the water in the jug that his wife brought him, and whispered a prayer, trying to remove this vision of Death from the House and from himself...

For a time his reason returned to him, and before he was completely settled in his chair, he managed to climb to the roof of his House and there, looking up at the sky, addressing his God and his Prophet, began to mutter in Berber or Arabic: "Oh, wretch! You've spent all your money on this construction project of yours, and now you'll only eat hedgehog meat and drink sheep's milk mixed with sand. Then you'll choke to death and no one will come to your rescue... You must have built all this on land that doesn't belong to humans, trespassing on the secret owners of this place and causing them harm... And this structure of yours, this House of yours, will remain forever empty, and not a single soul will settle in it, and you yourself will be left to die in the wasteland before entering it... And when the Night of Destiny comes, the last night of the holy festival of sacrifice to Allah, you will leave this place forever, leaving it to its secret masters , those spirits of it who dwell in the depths of the wells, in the heights of the heavens, who burn with fire all that they look at, knowing no shame, knowing no fear, because they are stronger than the Devil himself, and they have always lived here, from time immemorial, for thousands of years, and they can not stand naive people who think that by praying to Allah, they will cast out these spirits... Oh, wretch! Everything you've done is all for nothing. All in vain! And you yourself will become dust that the wind will carry away, leaving no trace of you on this earth..."

And filled with ancient beliefs, Mohammed now conjured people: "O you who live in a foreign land! When you left your land, you covered it with stones! You are lost people , and your children are lost to you! They have torn you away as you once did your land! And its secret guardians, the spirits of this land, have made it so that your descendants will consider themselves the sons of another land, a foreign one! Oh, the ungrateful ones! And from now on they will have no roots anywhere, and they will never find true faith! They have burned their roots, and they will turn to dust, become ashes, like burnt grass... Oh, people! Go rather to the graves of your ancestors, put your ear to the ground, and listen to what they say. They are the sages and the righteous. And they will tell you that everything I have planned and built is all a mistake. And it's huge. And no one can live in its immensity... And may this place of the secret lords, whom I have disturbed, become a place of universal repentance for us; and may all those who are lost like me, all who live beyond the borders of this land, who have forgotten where they come from and where they are going, come here..."

Mohammed had come down from the roof, deciding not to spend the night in the open air, but in his old house, where the Koran lay on a nightstand next to an iron cot. He found that the pages of the old book had crumbled. He picked them up, but saw that they were completely white, without a single word. Then he carefully wrapped the Book in a shroud-like cloth and fell asleep curled up on the prayer mat.

Someone Unseen has taken the last refuge and his tired soul, erasing all signs of his Faith from the pages of holy scripture... Has Allah also forsaken him? But he still managed to make his last sacrifice to him with the last pennies on the holiday that came (shortly before his death). After slaughtering a ram in front of the House, he gave the meat to all the neighbors who came to him the next morning, without waiting for the most expensive guests - his children, whom he hoped to see at least on the Holy Night for Muslims-the Night of fate, which once revealed a Divine Revelation to the Prophet...

"No, no one will ever come to me in this wilderness, will not leave their Christian wives and husbands, will not want to marry a local shepherd, and one of my sons completely forgot his name-Rashid - and began to call himself Richard..."

...People will take it home, butchering the carcass of the sacrificial animal, which has become stale by morning, wondering at the generosity of Mohammed and marveling at the strange structure, the walls of which have already begun to give noticeable cracks...

Then his other life began, or rather, his death, in an old chair that grew into the ground. Although Mohammed could no longer see the black shape wandering around the House... He kept his gaze fixed on the road, still hoping to see the children hurrying over to say goodbye. He waited for the night, somehow thinking that their meeting would take place when the heat of the day subsided and the scorching sun sank below the horizon. But only a local shepherd who had wandered in with his sheep visited him, and leaning on his shoulder, felt the full depth of his sadness and longing. And after weeping over him, I told him that "I had never seen such beauty as this House," and indeed I had never seen anything else but this dry, sun-baked, cracked earth. The shepherd boy reminded Mohammed of his youth.

...His wife still managed to wash his body, which was gradually sinking into the ground with the chair, wrapped it in a white shroud, and anointed it. Mohammed had been silent for a long time. I didn't react to anything. Slowly, together with the chair, he went deep into the earth, " like a tree that took root... Like an anchor that wanted to stay here forever... Like an old boat that has crashed forever on a deserted seashore..."

And then, finally, everything was mixed with the ground. Scraps of old leather that covered the chair, and the almost decomposed old, useless body of Mohammed, like household junk.

Suddenly a hill grew up, covered with greenery, and people in white clothes came to pray at this grave. They said that the deceased was a man who had been "robbed of everything" by a foreign country. And also that in that country their values are worthless, and no one there needs either their language or their traditions... It only sows madness among the likes of Mohammed, who tried to preserve his roots... And they decided that the House he had built would become his Mausoleum. Although his grave is not inside, but inside.

outside. This is how the tomb of a new saint on this earth, the Marabout Mohammed, was built. And it will become a hill from his native land, which itself grew up in front of the entrance to the failed House of Happiness, a place of pilgrimage for people...

...Someone suggested that they dig up his body, which had gone underground by itself; it turned out to be incorruptible, fragrant, and the shroud remained pristine white... The portal of the House was painted with lime and an inscription was made on it: "In the name of God, the All-merciful and All-powerful. A righteous man has rested. And his suffering ended. We all belong to the Lord. And we're all going back to it."..

...Mohammed's grave was not cared for, it was green itself. Believers sometimes brought their simple gifts here (the Moroccans usually have eggs and bread), put them on the doorstep of the House. No flies or wasps touched the food or circled the offerings. Also, no cats or dogs crept up on them. And over this place always reigned some unknown heavenly fragrance. And there was always new grass growing on the grave hill. Someone planted a tree brought from afar. Under the shade of its rapidly growing branches, you could find coolness and peace...

THE WRITER AND HIS HERO

So the writer finished his new story about the difficult fate of people who once left their homeland, but wanted to return to it. In a long-familiar manner, mixing the real and the fantastic (a fan of Borges and Marquez, Bendjellun has been fond of "magical realism"since ^the late 60s of the XX century), the writer once again showed how emigration can destroy and even kill a person, cutting off his "roots", depriving him of the opportunity to fully live "his own life". But even dreaming of finding a new life, even striving to radically change something in your destiny and become a "new person" [the novel "Leave!" - ("Partir!")], even becoming one, i.e. a person who has somehow integrated into another world, into its society [the novel "Sweet hard labor " ("Les raisins de la galere". P., 1997)], the emigrant (and the specifics of the emigrant mentality, as opposed to the immigrant one, are obvious) will feel like a special "settler" on a foreign land. Even if it stays on it for a long time. And one way or another it will feel its own specialness ².

An "exemplary" North African, who lived and worked in France for almost half a century, the hero of T. Bendjellun's novel " Au Pays "could not find his integrity here, because the memory of" cut off roots " tormented him, and he persistently sought them. All his life, which passed like a dream between the real space of a foreign land and the ideal idea of "the shores of the distant Motherland...", This work, in fact, became the expression of the quintessence of this longing, nostalgic dream of a person who did not want to change himself, despite the dictates of the surrounding world. The tragedy of a family breakup, a premonition of which he tried to hide from himself, had been brewing for a long time. But when it was accomplished (as a result of a long and almost natural generational disintegration), it appeared to him as a silhouette of the "black death", as the collapse of all hopes and even faith. And the man who sought to reunite, to bring together his native land and his children, scattered in a foreign land, died.

But it is impossible not to notice that the motif of the House that Mohammed creates in the name of "universal happiness", as well as the motif of the green grass that sprouted on his grave (finally, the native roots came to life!) akin to the motif of the Tree that became the abode of another Benjellunova Mohammed (from the novel "Moha-madman, Moha-wise"), who, like his native tree (in the branches of which this seer lives), ate the juices of his native land, was able to tell ("broadcast"!) people only the truth. Let it be bitter, but after all, it is also saving... So the House that Mohammed, who had returned to his native land, was trying to build on his native land also became, in its own way, an image of a certain Truth, albeit illusory, albeit hopelessly out of date, but so necessary for man, living in the human soul, which longed for such an impossible, but so bright, so warm, so radiant Harmony: the unification of all in one joy, reuniting in peace and peace, and therefore restoring the broken connection between the past, present and future...

Suddenly finding himself in a completely different, unusual time of life, suddenly stopped (retirement almost meant non-existence for him), Mohammed tried to gather his remaining strength to realize this long-cherished dream. But the writer turned out to be merciless to his new hero, showing the absurdity, the impracticability of his plans: whether he himself had long felt the weight of the darkness of hopelessness of all human hopes for a better life "on the native side" (T. Bendjellun's novel "This blinding absence of light" - "Cette aveuglante absence de la lumiere". P., 2001) and while continuing to live in France, or knowing for sure (after all, he, Tahar Bendjelloun, is not only a writer, winner of the Goncourt Prize, but also a professional sociopsychologist) that the process of complete disintegration is inevitable and the new generation of "ethnic North Africans" will finally forget about what "testaments of ancestors" are and what they mean "native roots"... They let them go to another land. But will it reward them with the fragrance of young shoots and new sprouts?.. Or will the "bitter smoke of the Fatherland" sometimes fill their eyes with tears?

One way or another, but, like the grave of Mohammed, the novelist's novel now lives its own life, and the reader is sorry for the House that the hero of the novel never built, sorry for his beautiful illusion of universal happiness... One consolation is that the Person, in spite of everything, has returned to Himself. And this is the main thing.

¹ See: Benjellun Tahar: Harruda; The deepest loneliness; Moha-madman, Moha-wise; Prayer for the absent, Holy Night, etc. About them in the works of Prozhogina S. V.: For the shores of the distant Motherland... (Moscow, 1992), Immigrant stories (Moscow, 2001), and many others.

² Even in the vast body of immigrant literature, this feeling not only manifests itself, but also becomes the dominant consciousness of "ethnic Arabs" (or Berbers), revealing various reasons (mainly social and political) that give rise to this kind of psychological reaction of North Africans living in France.

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