The Bridges of Constantine (12 page)

You looked at me with adorable mischief and said, ‘I only want to fulfil one of them with you.’ Before I could ask which, you continued, ‘I won’t write anything about you.’

‘Oh, why not?’

‘Because I don’t want to kill you. You make me happy. We write novels to kill the people whose existence has become a burden to us. We write to get rid of them.’

I spent a long time that day discussing your ‘criminal’ view of literature. As we parted I said, ‘Do I finally get to see your first novel, or your first “crime”?’

You laughed and replied, ‘Of course, provided you don’t become a detective or party to the case!’

Perhaps you were foretelling what awaited me; you knew in advance that I wouldn’t be an impartial reader from then on.

The following day you brought me the novel. As you were handing it over, you said, ‘I hope you find something enjoyable in it.’

Playfully, I said, ‘I hope the number of your victims won’t spoil my enjoyment!’

In the same tone, you replied, ‘No, rest assured, I hate mass graves!’

How did I forget that last sentence?

When I recall everything now, I’m convinced that your new story, the one being promoted in the papers and magazines, will be a grave for one character, who might be Ziyad or might be me. Which one of us has the luck to die like that? Only your book can answer that question and all the others haunting me.

But why does everything you write fill me with questions? Why do I feel I’m an element in all your realist fantasies? Even the one you wrote prior to me.

Perhaps because I imagine I have a historic right over you, or because, when you gave me that first book, you didn’t write a dedication to me. You just made a comment I’ll never forget. ‘We only write dedications to strangers. Those we love do not belong on the blank first page, but in the pages of the book,’ you said.

I devoured the book in two nights. I raced from page to page, breathless, as if looking for something other than the words. Something you had written to me in advance, before even meeting me, something that might connect us through a story that wasn’t ours.

I knew that was crazy. But aren’t there so many coincidences in life? Like the picture I painted in September 1957 and that waited a quarter of a century for you without me realising it was yours. That it was you.

That was pure fantasy.

The only things you secreted in that book for me were bitterness, pain and stupid jealousy – whose fire I tasted for the first time. Insane jealousy towards a man on paper, who might have passed through your life or might have been a fictional creature that you used just to fill empty days and blank pages.

Where was the line dividing fantasy and reality? You never once gave me an answer to that question. You simply increased my confusion with ambiguous answers, like, ‘Only what we write matters. The writing alone is literature and will endure. Those we write about are incidental, just people we paused before one day for some reason or another, before continuing on our way with or without them.’

‘But the writer’s relationship with his muse can’t be so simple,’ I said. ‘The writer is nothing without his inspiration. He owes it something.’

You interrupted, ‘Owes what? What Aragon wrote about Elsa’s eyes is more beautiful than eyes that will grow old and dim. What Nizar Qabbani wrote about Bilqis’ plaits is surely more beautiful than her thick hair destined to go grey and fall out. The Mona Lisa’s smile painted by Leonardo attains its value not as a woman’s naive smile but as the sign of the artist’s incredible ability to convey contradictory emotions in a vague smile that combines melancholy and joy. Who is in debt to whom, then?’

Our conversation was taking a different course, perhaps one you desired in an effort to escape the truth. I put the question to you again more directly. ‘Did that man pass through your life, or not?’

You laughed and said, ‘Amazing! Agatha Christie’s novels contain more than sixty murders. The works of other women writers contain even more. Yet not once has a reader raised his voice in judgement or demanded their imprisonment. But if a woman writes a single love story, every finger points in accusation, and forensic investigators find plenty of evidence to prove it’s her story. I think critics really ought to resolve this once and for all. Either they admit that women have more imagination than men, or they put us all on trial!’

I laughed at your surprising but unconvincing reasoning. ‘While we wait for the critics to resolve the matter,’ I said, ‘allow me to repeat the question you haven’t answered. Was that man really part of your life?’

You said, winding me up, ‘What matters is that following the book he died.’

‘I see. Because you can kill the past just like that, with the stroke of a pen?’

You continued to be evasive and said, ‘What past? We might also write to bury our dreams, no?’

I had a feeling deep down that the story was your story. That that man had entered your life, and perhaps your body. Between the lines I could almost smell the scent of his tobacco, almost sense his things strewn on the pages. There was something of him in every paragraph, his tan, the taste of his kiss, his laugh and his breaths. There was also your shameless desire for him.

Perhaps he loved you creatively, or was your description of him creative? Maybe he was a purely feminine invention that your language covered in manliness and dreams and for which it fashioned a beautiful, made-to-measure tomb afterwards. What logic made me read this book as a lover disguised in the uniform of the morality police? I delved between the words, I investigated the chapters in the chance of catching you red-handed in a kiss here or the first few letters of his name there.

My thoughts roaming widely, I remembered you had been in Paris for four years and that you had been living with your uncle since his posting to Paris – only two years earlier. I wondered what you were up to before that, for all the time you were on your own.

That book of yours exhausted me. It was enjoyable and tiring, like you. Subsequently, I admitted to you that my relationship with you changed after I read you and I doubted that I would be able to endure. I wasn’t prepared for words as weapons.

As if it did not at all concern you, you said, ‘You shouldn’t have read me, then!’

Stupidly, I replied, ‘But I like reading you. Besides, I don’t have another way to understand you.’

You answered, ‘Wrong. You won’t understand anything that way. A writer, despite living on the edge of truth, isn’t necessarily a professional in it. That’s the preserve of historians. In fact, he’s a professional dreamer, or a kind of refined liar. A successful novelist is someone who lies with shocking truth, or a liar who speaks truth.’

After a little thought, you added, ‘I think that’s more correct!’

Oh, you little liar! Your lies were the sweetest and most painful. I decided that day not to delve into your memory any more. You wouldn’t confess anything. Perhaps because you were a woman who specialised in evasion, or was there nothing to confess?

You just wanted to make me imagine that you were no longer the child I knew. In fact, you were empty and your lies filled the emptiness. What else would explain your attachment to me? Why did you pursue my memory with questions and why did you induce me to speak about everything? Why such greed for knowledge, such a desire to share my memory and everything I loved and hated? Was memory your complex?

My exhibition had to come to an end for us to realise that we had only known each other for two weeks, not the months it felt like. How did we spill our memories in a matter of days? How in the few hours we spent together did we learn to be sad and happy and dream all at once?

How did we become versions of each other? How could we leave this place that had become part of our memory? For a few days inside a large silent hall hung with art we were transported beyond time and space into a quarter-century’s worth of suffering and madness.

We were a painting among other paintings. A mutable polychrome painting started by chance and finished by the hand of fate. I relished my new situation as I turned from the artist into one of his paintings on display.

I had never felt this sad taking an exhibition down before. I packed the paintings one by one in their cases. The hall would be left empty for another painter who would come with his pictures, with his sadness and joy, with other stories unlike mine.

I felt I was packing up my days with you.

My hand suddenly stopped as it was about to take down the picture I had left till last. I contemplated it again and felt it lacked something. On its surface there was only a bridge crossing from one side to the other, suspended from above by cables at both ends like a swing of sadness. Beneath this iron swing was a rocky gorge of great depth that expressed its blunt contradiction with the pure mood of an annoyingly calm and blue sky. Before that moment, I had not felt that this painting needed new details to break the contradiction and cover the nakedness of the two colours that were unique to it.

In truth,
Nostalgia
wasn’t a painting. It was an
aide-memoire
, the draft of dreams that had been overtaken by fifteen years of nostalgia and bewilderment, not just a quarter-century of time.

I carried it under my arm, as if marking it out from the others. Suddenly I was in a hurry. After all these years, I wanted to sit in front of it with a brush and a new palette and imbue it with life and energy. I would finally move the stones of the suspension bridge, one by one. But right then my mind was distracted by an overpowering obsession. How could we meet again from now on? And where?

Your break from university ended more or less at the same time as the exhibition. We were now confined by the practicalities of when and where. Our secret might be stolen out in the open by people we didn’t know but who knew us. What madness my destiny with you! Why did my disability give only me away? Why all this caution? And why you, in particular? But the mere possibility of meeting
Si
Sharif some day when I was with you made me give up the idea and realise the awkwardness of the situation and how my embarrassment would betray me.

We agreed that you’d call me on the phone and that we’d come up with a new plan. That was the only solution. I couldn’t visit you in the university quarter – your cousin was studying at the same university. Could we have found a more complicated set of circumstances?

I spent the longest weekend waiting for you to call on Monday morning.

On Sunday the phone rang. I rushed over, betting it was you. Perhaps you had managed to steal a few brief minutes to talk to me. Catherine was on the line. I hid my disappointment and listened to her chattering away about her everyday preoccupations and her planned trip to London. Then she asked me about the exhibition and, skipping from one subject to another, said, ‘I read a good article about your exhibition in a weekly magazine. No doubt you’ve seen it. It’s by Roger Naqqash, who seems to know you, or he knows your paintings very well.’

I didn’t have any desire to talk and said curtly, ‘Yes, he’s an old friend.’ I politely got rid of her. I had no desire to meet that day. Perhaps my need to paint was stronger than my other physical needs. Perhaps I was just too full of you.

With heavy steps I went back to my studio. I had started preparing a palette to add some touches to the picture. Yet I was bewildered and, in front of it, I reverted to the beginner I had been twenty-five years before. Did its new kinship with you add this tinge of confusion? Or was I confused because I was standing before the past, no less? To retouch memory, not the painting.

I felt I was about to do something stupid. I knew, despite my illogical desire, that one should never toy with the past, that any attempt to beautify it would only end in disfigurement. I knew that, but the painting suddenly annoyed me. Everything about it was simplistic to the point of naivety. So why not continue painting it, then? Why not just treat it aesthetically?

Didn’t Chagall spend fifteen years painting one of his pictures? He would go back to it again and again in between works to add some new feature or face after he decided to include all he had loved since childhood. Wasn’t it also my right to go back to this painting and mark the steps of those crossing? At the side, I might scatter some houses hanging above the rocks. Beneath the bridge I might leave some trace of the river – at times scanty, at times glistening and foaming – that divided the city. Was it no longer necessary to mark the traces of my original memory, those I had been unable to include before, when I was only a beginner?

I thought about Roger Naqqash, a friend from childhood and in exile. I recalled his infatuation with Constantine, his attachment to her memory, even though he had never returned since leaving in 1959 with his family and the bulk of the Jewish community who wanted to build a secure future in another country.

Every time I visited him at home, he insisted that I listen to a tape by the Jewish singer Simone Tamar. With her marvellous voice and rendition, she would sing the
maalouf
or
muwashshah
of Constantine. She was pictured on the box wearing the luxurious Constantine robe she had been given on her first visit back.

One day Roger told me that Simone’s husband had killed her in a jealous rage after accusing her of being in love with an Arab man. I asked him if the accusation was true. He said, ‘I don’t know.’ Then he added somewhat bitterly, ‘I know she loved Constantine.’ Roger also loved Constantine. His secret dream was to go back, even if only once. Or for someone to bring him even a single fig from the tree that shaded the window of his room and had been in the garden of his house for generations.