I was talking to Faouzi, one of my Tunisian housemates about my recent trip to the United States. Faouzi usually goes to work in the morning as a renovator but was taking the day off (like most people living in France, he does this quite often). I had just come back at my St Denis house that morning, after two weeks in the United States. As our conversation carried on, I noticed a coolness in his demeanor.
“Has anything happened?” I asked
“Well Claudine has left.”
“you mean she’s gone out?” I surmised, assuming that I had just misunderstood him.
“No she’s gone.”
Claudine was our token “crazy” housemate. She never said a word to any of us, and when she did it was usually to tell us that something was the wrong. She would come down screaming because someone had taken some of her milk without her permission (usually her accusations were directed at me). According to Faouzi two day earlier, she had left in the middle of the night without paying any of her rent to the landlord. I was surprised though by his quiet solemn demeanor. Shouldn’t he have been ecstatic? I certainly was.
“Did anyone know she was leaving?” I said, chomping ravenously into a piece of toast that I had just made for myself.
“No” said my unusually curt flat mate. I tried a more open ended a question.
“Have you done anything interesting in the last two weeks,” I asked as I sipped my tea.
“Nothing much,” he said. Finally, he told me that he needed to go. Alarmed by this terse conversation, I decided to take a look around the house. Everything seemed to be about the same. The right hand bathroom was still undergoing repairs to fix the leak. A leak, which ironically went right into Claudine’s former bedroom and onto her bed. I can still vividly remember her frantically knocking on the bathroom door to get me to turn the water off.
“No I haven’t taken your milk!” I said.
When I came to the door of my room, I saw nothing out of place save for a pair of slippers that were propped outside.
“Has someone moved into my room?” I thought, but when I entered, I saw that everything was where I left it. I started to flip my 2008 Bates Calendar from August to September. It was then that I saw it: I read September 2, Ramadan Begins at Sundown.
Today was September 4th.: the critical day. Anyone who has ever fasted for any period of time knows that the 3rd day is always the hardest. It is then that the body undergoes the metabolic changes that allow one to carry on without the excessive emptiness, pain and fatigue. What I had thought was coldness in my flat mate’s responses was the result of extreme deprivation of food and sleep. The sting must have been exacerbated by the fact that I had eaten my breakfast right under his nose. Of my three flat mates, two would be honoring the Muslim holy month. They would follow the same routine: wake up at 5:00 spend the next twenty minutes eating yogurt, toast and orange juice. Than they would spend the next hour and a half either sleeping or they would stay awake complete some chores before going to work. During the work day, they would do their best to avoid being in the presence of people eating. Akram, my other roommate, (whose slippers they were) admitted that during his lunch hour, he would take his velib and bike to the Eiffel Tower and back.
Over the next month dinner was, as you can imagine, a big deal. Usually it would start with a humus-like Libanese purée made from aubergines followed by salad, then either couscous with halal beef, or a hearty meatball soup with various types of beans, chickpeas, and tomatoes. Then desert, ultrasweet Tunesian sweets, or my favorite, dates with butter. I was in the best of both worlds. I could eat what I wanted during the day and they didn’t mind when I smooched off whatever they had prepared. Still, I felt ill at ease: If dinner was about coming together, my solidarity with them was fake because I had not suffered 15 hours without food or water. So one night, ironically the night after I was accepted into the Institute of European Studies and had polished off most of a bottle of wine to celebrate, I went to my two friends and I said, “Tomorrow I fast with you.”


To Be continued