The school year was drawing to a close when M. Bernard summoned Jacques, Pierre, Fleury, a kind of prodigy who did equally well in all subjects—“he has a polytechnic brain,” the teacher said—and Santiago, a handsome boy who was less gifted but succeeded by virtue of diligence: “Now,” said M. Bernard when the classroom was empty. “You’re my best students. I’ve decided to nominate you for secondary-school scholarships. If you pass the examination, you’ll have scholarships and you can continue your studies at the lycée through the baccalaureate. Elementary school is the best of schools. But it leads to nothing. The lycée opens all doors. And I would rather see poor boys like you go through those doors. But for that, I need your parents’ authorization. Off with you!”
They left in amazement and did not even discuss it before they parted. Jacques found his grandmother at home alone picking over lentils on the oilcloth cover of the dining-room table. He hesitated, then decided to wait for his mother to arrive. She came home visibly tired, put on an apron, and came to help the grandmother sort the lentils. Jacques offered to help, and they gave him the thick white porcelain bowl where it was easier to separate the pebbles from the good lentils. Staring into his plate, he announced his news.
“What’s this all about?” said the grandmother. “At what age do you do this baccalaureate?”
“In six years.”
His grandmother pushed her plate away. “Did you hear that?” she asked Catherine Cormery.
She had not heard. Jacques slowly repeated the news. “Ah!” she said. “It’s because you’re intelligent.”
“Intelligent or not, we were going to apprentice him next year. You know perfectly well we have no money. He’ll bring home his pay.”
“That’s true,” said Catherine.
Outside, the day and the heat were beginning to fade. At that time of day, with the factories all working, the neighborhood was empty and silent. Jacques gazed out at the street. He did not know what he wanted, only that he wanted to obey M. Bernard. But, at nine, he could not disobey his grandmother, nor would he know how to. Still, she was obviously hesitating. “What would you do afterwards?”
“I don’t know. Maybe be a teacher, like M. Bernard.”
“Yes—in six years!” She was sorting the lentils more slowly. “Ah!” she said. “No, after all, we’re too poor. You tell M. Bernard we can’t do it.”
The next day the three others told Jacques their families had agreed. “How about you?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and the thought that he was even poorer than his friends left him sick at heart.
The four of them stayed after school. Pierre, Fleury, and Santiago gave their answers. “And you, moustique?”
“I don’t know.”
M. Bernard gazed at him. “All right,” he said to the others. “But you’ll have to work with me afternoons after school. I’ll arrange it, you can go.” When they had left, M. Bernard sat himself in his armchair and drew Jacques close. “Well?”
“My grandmother says we’re too poor and that I have to go to work next year.”
“And your mother?”
“It’s my grandmother who decides.”
“I know,” said M. Bernard. He thought a moment, then put his arm around Jacques. “Listen: you can’t blame her. Life is hard for her. The two of them alone, they’ve brought you up, your brother and you, and made you the good boys you are. So she’s bound to be afraid. You’ll need a little money besides the scholarship, and in any case you won’t bring home any money for six years. Can you understand her?” Jacques nodded without looking at his teacher. “Good. But maybe we can explain it to her. Get your satchel, I’m coming with you!”
“To our place?” said Jacques.
“Yes, it will be a pleasure to see your mother again.”
Minutes later M. Bernard was knocking on their door in front of a bewildered Jacques. The grandmother came to the door, wiping her hands on her apron; the strings were tied too tightly, making her old woman’s paunch protrude. When she saw the teacher, she made a gesture as if to comb her hair. “So it’s the grandmom,” said M. Bernard, “hard at work as usual? Ah! You’re a worthy woman.” The grandmother invited him into the room that you had to cross to get to the dining room, seated him near the table, brought out glasses and a bottle of anisette. “Don’t put yourself out, I came to have a little talk with you.” He began by asking about her children, then her life on the farm, her husband; he talked about his own children.
At that moment Catherine Cormery came in, panicked, called M. Bernard “Monsieur le Maître,” went to her room to comb her hair and put on a clean apron, and returned to perch on the edge of a chair a little away from the table. “You,” M. Bernard said to Jacques, “go out on the street and see if I’m there. You understand,” he said to the grandmother, “I’m going to speak well of him and he’s liable to think it’s the truth.” Jacques left, dashed down the stairs, and stationed himself by the door to the building. He was still there an hour later, and the street was already coming to life, the sky through the ficus trees was turning green, when M. Bernard emerged from the stairs at his back. He scratched Jacques’s head. “Well!” he said. “It’s all settled. Your grandmother’s a good woman. As for your mother … Ah!” he said. “Don’t you ever forget her.”
“Monsieur,” the grandmother suddenly said. She was coming out of the hall. She was holding her apron in her hand and wiping her eyes. “I forgot … you told me you would give Jacques extra lessons.”
“Of course,” said M. Bernard. “And it won’t be any picnic for him, believe me.”
“But we won’t be able to pay you.”
M. Bernard studied her carefully. He was holding Jacques by his shoulders. “Don’t worry about that,” he said, shaking Jacques. “He’s already paid me.”
Then he was gone, and the grandmother took Jacques by the hand to go back to the apartment, and for the first time she squeezed his hand, very hard, with a kind of hopeless love. “My child,” she said. “My dear child.”
For a month M. Bernard kept the four children after school every day and made them work for two hours. Jacques would go home both tired and exhilarated, and then have to start on his homework. His grandmother would look at him with mingled pride and sadness.
“He got a good head,” Ernest said with conviction, tapping his own head with his fist.
“Yes,” the grandmother would say. “But what’s to become of us?” One evening she gave a start: “What about his First Communion?” Actually religion had no part in their lives.10 No one went to Mass, no one invoked or taught the Ten Commandments, nor did anyone refer to the rewards and punishments of the hereafter. When someone’s death was reported in the grandmother’s presence, “Well,” she would say, “he’ll fart no more.” If it was someone for whom she was deemed to have at least some liking, “Poor man,” she would say, “he was still young,” even if the deceased had long since been old enough to die. It was not a matter of ignorance on her part. For she had seen many die around her. Two of her children, her husband, her son-in-law, and all her nephews in the war.
But that was just it: she was as familiar with death as she was with work or poverty, she did not think about it but in some sense lived it, and besides, the needs of the moment were even more urgent for her than they were for Algerians as a whole, who by their daily cares and their common lot were denied the funerary piety that flourishes in civilizations at their height.i Death for them was an ordeal to be faced, as they had faced those that preceded it, which they never spoke of, where they tried to show the courage that for them was a man’s principal virtue; but meanwhile one tried to forget it or push it aside. (Hence the comic air that all interments would assume. Cousin Maurice?)
If to that general inclination is added the harsh work and struggle of daily life, not to mention, in the case of Jacques’s family, the awful wear and tear of poverty, it becomes hard to find a place for religion. For
