Albert Memmi

In moving to this new street that we called the Passage, Mother saw an old dream of hers come true. She was now living again with all her family... All day long, whether for a pinch of pepper or a sprig of parsley, to find out what time it might be or even for no good reason at all, the whole staircase re-echoed with their various names. Actually, they derived comfort and pleasure from constantly finding each other at home, and the other tenants felt like trespassers in this hive of solidarity. After dinner every evening there was a gathering of the clan in Uncle Aroun’s flat, where a detailed post-mortem of the day’s events would take place, while everyone gossiped and munched squash seeds. Thus, each of us remained completely visible to all the others, and the whole family, by pooling its problems and its hopes, acquired a collective soul.

We lived at the bottom of the Impasse Tarfoune, in a little room where I was born one year after my sister Kalla. With the Barouch family we shared the ground floor of a shapeless old building, a sort of two-room apartment. The kitchen, half of it roofed over and the rest an open courtyard, was a long vertical passage toward the light. But before reaching this square of pure blue sky, it received, from a multitude of windows, all the smoke, the smells, and the gossip of our neighbors. At night, each locked himself up in his room; but in the morning, life was always communal, running along the tunnel of a kitchen, mingling the waters from the kitchen sinks, the smells of coffee, and the voices still muffled with sleep.

Once I had overcome my rage against Vichy, the numerus clausus, and the Fascist Legion, I began to doubt the treason of France. To accept it would indeed have been unbearable. All my ambitions, my studies, and my life were founded on this choice. How much would I have to uproot in myself now? What would be left of me? It was in this dreadful moment that I finally caught a glimpse of my ruin. If I rejected what I was becoming would I be able to return to what I had been?

Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge.

Sleep, when one has no worries, tastes like honey.