The Bridges of Constantine (23 page)

I can say today that my resentment at you also rose and fell like your faith. But that day I said, with a lover’s naivety, ‘Are you a believer?’

‘Of course,’ you exclaimed. ‘I practise all the rites and commandments of Islam.’

‘Do you fast?’

‘Of course I fast. It’s my way of defying this city, of reaching out to the homeland and memory.’

I don’t know why I didn’t expect you to be like that. There was something about the way you looked that suggested you were liberated from vestigial things. When I expressed my surprise you said, ‘How can you call religion a vestige? It’s a conviction, and like all our convictions, something that only concerns us individually.

‘Never trust in outward appearance in such matters. Faith, like love, is a secret emotion that we experience on our own in a permanent retreat into the self. It is our secret confidence and shield. Our secret escape to the depths to recharge our batteries when we need to. Those who seem overly religious are mostly those who’ve emptied themselves inside and make an outward display of their faith, for reasons unrelated to God.’

Such beautiful words from you that day. They came and turned the folds of memory inside out and awoke the sound of Constantine’s minarets at dawn within me. Your words came bearing prayers, the chanting of the Qur’an, the voices of the monitors at the old religious schools of Constantine. I went back in the same childhood confusion to the mat where I had sat and repeated verses with other boys. We didn’t yet understand them, but still copied them on to our slates and memorised them, fearful of the rod, the long cane lying ready to bloody our feet at the first slip.

Your words came and reconciled me with God. Me, who hadn’t fasted for years. They reconciled me with the homeland and incited me against this city that, every day, stole a small space of faith and memory from me.

That day you were the woman who awoke my angels and my demons at the same time. Then you watched after turning me into a battleground where good and evil struggle ruthlessly.

That year, victory went to the angels.

I decided to fast, maybe as a result of what you said, but also to escape you through God. Didn’t you say, ‘Worship is our secret shield?’ So I decided to deflect your arrows with faith. I tried to forget you, your dumping me, your very presence in the same city.

I spent days between dread and awe, religiously comatose. By conditioning my body to hunger I tried to condition myself to being deprived of you. I wanted to restore control over the senses that you had infiltrated and that only took orders from you. I wanted to restore to my former self the prestige, sanctity and principles I had before you. All the values you declared war on.

I admit I had some success in that. But you, I completely failed to forget. I fell into another trap of your love: I was living to your schedule. I fasted and sat down to break my fast with you. I ate the night meal and refrained from food with you. I had the same Ramadan dishes with none other than you. Without realising, I became one with you in everything.

In the end you were like the homeland. All things led to you, then. Love for you, like love for the homeland, remained present in faith and thought even when it stopped and went silent.

Was worship also a form of reaching out?

June was a month that provided plenty of reasons for pessimism.

In addition to June 1967 there were other painful recollections linked to that month. The most recent was June 1971, part of which I had spent in prison under investigation and as punishment along with others who had not learned to hold their tongues. The first painful memory went back to Kidya prison in Constantine, which I had entered with hundreds of others following the demonstrations of May 1945. Our military trial finished at the beginning of June.

Which June was the most unjust and which experience the most painful? I started to avoid posing those questions the day my answers led me to pack my bags and leave Algeria.

Algeria, the homeland that had become a prison with no official name, whose cells had no fixed location and whose inmates faced no clear charges. I was led in at dawn, blindfolded and flanked by two unknown figures taking me to an unknown destination. An honour not even bestowed on our biggest criminals.

As a youth full of enthusiasm and energy, and with soaring dreams, had I anticipated that, astonishingly, a quarter of a century later a fellow Algerian would remove my clothing, and even my watch and possessions, and fling me into a cell (solitary this time)? A cell I entered this time in the name of the Revolution. The Revolution that had already removed my arm!

More than one reason and memory made me take flight from the month that had chewed up so much of my happiness over the years.

Perhaps I harassed fate more that year, and it answered my pessimism with all the shocking tragedies that befell me in one month. Or perhaps it was just in the nature of disasters to come all at once: good things come led by a hair but leave in chains.

That was the absurdity of life. A coincidence as slender as a strand of hair was enough to bring unexpected happiness, love and good fortune. But once the strand was cut, all the chains attached to it broke even though they were thought too strong to break like a hair.

I hadn’t noticed beforehand that meeting you that day, after a quarter of a century of forgetting, was a slender coincidence bringing with it all the happiness in the world. When it left, it severed the chain of dreams and pulled the carpet of security from under me.

Years after that summer of 1982 that strand of hair has come back today to knock down the last pillar in my house, bringing the roof down on top of me. Even though I believed back then that there was nothing left in my life to collapse, and that I had paid enough for fate to forget me at times.

At the time I did not know rule number one of the law of life. ‘Man’s destiny is but the end of a chain of folly,’ Malek Haddad wrote.

Summer 1982, which combined personal and national failures, had a bitter taste of deadly despair.

I was living between two news items: your continuing silence and Arab catastrophes. This time, however, fate struck from another direction. Israel launched a surprise attack on Beirut that summer and for several weeks took up residence in an Arab capital. This was visible to more than one ruler and more than one million Arabs and took me several rungs down the ladder of despair.

I remember a minor incident struck me at the time and overshadowed other news. To protest the Israeli incursion in the south, Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi committed suicide by shooting himself. The south was his alone and he refused to share its air with Israel. The death of this man, whom I had not heard of before, had a uniquely bitter pain. When a poet’s only means of protest was his death, and his only writing paper his body, then we have also been shot.

All the time my heart went out to Ziyad. He used to say, ‘Poets are butterflies who die in summer.’ At the time he was mad about the Japanese novelist Mishima, who also killed himself – in another way and protesting at another failure. Perhaps he was inspired to say it by one of Mishima’s titles,
Death in Summer
, or it was an old idea he still upheld by reciting a list of the names of poets who had chosen that season to die.

I would listen to him then and try to confront his pessimistic view of the summer with humour, fearful that the condition would spread to me. I would joke to him, ‘But I can also give you a list of dozens of poets who didn’t die in the summer!’ He would laugh and reply, ‘Of course, there are those who die between summers.’ I could only respond, ‘Poets! Stubborn fools.’

Ziyad came to mind and I suddenly wondered where he might be. In which city, at which front line, in which street when all the streets were surrounded and all the cities were graveyards prepared for death?

Since he had left, I had only received one brief letter, where he thanked me for my hospitality. That was eight months ago. What had become of him since then?

I hadn’t been anxious about him until now. He had always lived in the midst of battles, ambushes and random bombardment. He was a man whom death feared or respected, whom death did not want to take cheaply. Even so, a vague feeling aroused my fears. I took it as a bad omen when I recalled his words on summer, and the suicide of that poet.

What if poets imitate each other in death too? What if they are not just butterflies, but like the giant baleen whales who prefer to die together at the same seasons on the same beaches?

Hemingway also committed suicide in the summer of 1961. He left behind the draft of his last novel,
The Dangerous Summer.
What was the link between the summer and all these novelists and poets who had not met? I shouldn’t have thought too deeply about this, as though I were baiting or challenging fate that summer to give me the blow I haven’t recovered from yet, even years later.

Ziyad died.

By chance, his obituary, a small square of newspaper, struck the eye and then the heart. Time stopped. The news formed a lump in my throat. I didn’t shout or cry. I was paralysed by shock, stung by the tragedy.

How had it happened? Why didn’t I expect his death when his last looks towards me held more than one farewell?

His suitcase was still in the wardrobe in his room. It would give me a start several times a day when I was looking for something. He went back without possessions. Did he know that he didn’t need much to keep him going on his final journey or, as my jealousy made me imagine, was he contemplating coming back to settle down and live close to you?

I hadn’t asked him the day he left. There had been silence between us for a few days. I avoided sitting with him, as if afraid he would confess to a thing I feared or a decision I expected. He left carrying a small bag and revealed nothing. He just apologised, ‘You don’t mind if I leave this suitcase with you? You know what it’s like at airports these days, and I don’t want to lug my things from one airport to another yet again.’ He went on with something like sarcasm, ‘Especially as nothing awaits me at the final destination!’ His intuition hadn’t been wrong. There was only the fatal bullet to come.

I still remember he once said, ‘In every homeland we have a grave. We die at the hands of all in the name of all revolutions and all books.’ His convictions didn’t kill him this time. Just his identity.

That evening I got drunk toasting his laugh, toasting his distinctive tone unlike any other voice, toasting his proud, unequalled sadness, toasting his beautiful death, his final departure.

I wept for him that evening, obdurate painful tears that we secretly steal from our manhood. I wondered which man in him I cried for most, and what I was crying for.

He had died just as he wanted, as a poet, in summer and in battle. Even in death he defeated me.

At the time I remembered the wonderful words of Jean Cocteau. He made a film of his death in advance, where he turns to Picasso and his few friends standing in mourning and says to them with the painful irony of which he was a master, ‘Don’t cry so. Just pretend to cry. Poets do not die, they just pretend to die!’

Perhaps Ziyad just pretended to die and did it out of stubbornness to convince me that poets really die in summer and come back to life at every season.

And you? Did you know? Had you heard news of his death? Or would it reach you some other time in the middle of another story with other actors?

What would you do that day? Would you cry for him or would you sit and construct a mausoleum of words and bury him between the covers of a book, in haste, as was your custom for all those you loved and decided one day to kill?

He hated eulogies as much as he hated smart suits and ties, so in what language would you lament him? Ziyad defeated you just as he defeated me. He made you see the difference between death as a game and death itself. Not all heroes can die on paper. Some choose their own death and we cannot kill them just by writing a novel.

He told lies, like a hero ready for a novel. He would obstinately claim that Palestine alone was his mother. Sometimes, but only after a few drinks, he would admit that his mother had no grave of her own but lay in a mass grave from an earlier massacre, Tel al-Zaatar. They had taken souvenir pictures and raised victory signs, stood on corpses in their boots. Her corpse could have been among them.

Only at that moment did it seem he was crying. Why tears, Ziyad? You had a corpse in every battle, an unmarked grave at every massacre. Now your death continued the same logic. Nothing awaited you except the train of death. Some rode the train of Tel al-Zaatar, some took the train of Beirut 1982 or of Sabra and Shatila. Here or there, in a camp or in the ruins of a house, or even in some Arab country, some were still waiting for their final journey.

Between one train and the next comes a train.

Between one death and the next comes death.

Happy are those who took the first train, my friend. They are so happy and we so miserable at every news broadcast. After them the ‘travel agencies’ multiplied along with the ‘mass departures’. It became an Arab phenomenon, with each regime specialising in its own way. After them the homeland became a mere railway station. Inside each one of us was a railway line waiting for a train that we were sad to take and sad to see leave without us.