The Bridges of Constantine (25 page)

My heart started to overflow with a strange emotion, nothing to do with jealousy. We can’t be jealous of the dead. Still, in cases like this we can’t change the taste of bitterness.

My eyes were arrested by the colour red. Should I have stopped their tears when they read:

Not much is left of life.

You standing at the crossing of opposites.

I know

you will be my final sin.

I ask you

till when will I be your first sin.

You have space for more than one beginning

and all endings are short.

Now I am ending in you.

Who will give a life fit for multiple endings!

Some of the words made me stop in my tracks.

The red ink suddenly turned the colour of blood, a blush of crimson sweeping over the page in the colour of ‘your first sin’.

I quickly shut the diary, as if afraid that if I kept looking I might catch you in an unforeseen position.

Something that Ziyad had said long, long before came back. ‘I have a great deal of respect for Adam,’ he had said, ‘because when he decided to taste the apple, a bite wasn’t enough. He ate the whole thing. Perhaps he knew that there are no half-sins and half-pleasures. That’s why there isn’t a third place between heaven and hell. To avoid any miscalculation, we have to enter one of them on merit!’

At the time I admired Ziyad’s philosophy of life. What was it that hurt me that day about the ideas we shared? Perhaps because he stole his apple from my secret garden or because he took a bite in front of me with the appetite of someone who, having made up his mind, had relaxed.

Trees can also only

make love standing up.

Palm tree of my desire, stand up!

I alone mourned the forests

they burned down

to force the trees to kneel.

Trees die standing.

Come and stand with me.

In you, I want to send my manhood

off to its final resting place.

I suddenly began to feel that opening the diary had been a stupid move, and started to regret it. My personal interpretations of every word had exhausted me. Despite everything, I didn’t want to hate Ziyad, and couldn’t. Death had given him immunity from my hatred and jealousy. I was insignificant compared to him and his death.

I had nothing to condemn him with except words open to interpretation. Why should I insist on the worst and stalk him with all these suspicions? I knew he was a poet who specialised in the violation of language, in revenge at a world not created to his specification, perhaps even created at his expense. Could I shoot him for words?

He had been born standing and shared the fate of trees. Should I blame him for the way he died – and the way he loved?

Now I remember that when I met him he had stood upright. I remember that day he came to my office for the first time, and I made some remarks about his poetry collection and asked him to cut some poems. I remember his silence, and his gaze lingering on my amputated arm. Then he said what went on to change the course of my life: ‘Sir, my poems do not undergo amputation. Give me back my book. I’ll publish it in Beirut.’

Why had I accepted his insult that day without responding? Why hadn’t I slapped him with my other, unamputated hand and flung his manuscript at him? Was it because I respected his tree-like courage and individuality at a time when pens bent like wheat to any rustle of breeze?

I met Ziyad standing tall, and standing tall he left; a manuscript in front of me like the first time, but this time without comment. Since the beginning we had shared the complicity of the forest, and now its silence.

All of a sudden the traces of a previous profession stirred within me. I started turning the pages of the diary, counting and examining them with a publisher’s eye. A sudden enthusiasm obscured my other feelings, and a crazy idea took hold. I would publish these writings in a poetry collection that I might call
Trees
or
Drafts from a Man who Loved You
, or some other title I might stumble across. What mattered was that Ziyad’s last thoughts be published, that I grant them another life, without summer. Poets would always take their revenge on fate, which pursues them as summer pursues butterflies. They are transformed into poetry, and who can kill words?

Ziyad’s diary rescued me from despair without my realising.

It gave me plans for days without plans. I spent hours copying out poems, hunting for another title or trying to arrange the chaos of these scattered thoughts and stanzas into a form suitable for publication.

I felt a mix of pleasure and bitterness. The pleasure of aligning with the butterflies and giving life to words that I alone had the right to bury alive in the diary or grant eternity in a book. The bitterness of delving into the papers of a dead poet, of exploring the blood in his veins, the beat of his heart, his sadness and his ecstasy, of entering his secret locked world without permission or licence from him, of selecting, adding and erasing on his behalf.

Did I really have such authority? Who could claim, for some reason, to have been given such a task? But would anyone dare to condemn the words of others to death and decide to appropriate them for himself?

Deep inside I knew that if the death of a poet or writer had an extra hint of sadness that distinguished it from the deaths of others, it might have been because when they died, they, like all creative people, left chapter headings, the headings for dreams and unfinished drafts on their desks. That was why their deaths shamed us as much as it grieved us. Ordinary people carried their dreams, worries and feelings on the surface. They put them on every day with their smiles and depression, their laughter and stories, and their secrets died with them.

To begin with, I was ashamed of Ziyad’s secret, before it induced me to confess that his writings had created within me an irresistible desire to write. A desire that increased when I felt his words did not reach my depths and fell short of my pain. Perhaps this was because he had been ignorant of the other half of the story, the part only I knew.

When was the idea of this book born? Perhaps during the period I spent besieged by Ziyad’s poetic testament, that unexpected reunion with literature and manuscripts, lost to me since I had lost my job in Algeria years before. Or was it during my other unexpected reunion, with a city? Belatedly, fate itself made that appointment.

Could I possibly find myself face to face with Constantine without advance warning, without floods of longing, madness and disappointment bursting inside me? The words swept me along to where I am!

Chapter Five

I still remember that
incredible Saturday when the telephone rang at evening-news time.
Si
Sharif was on the line. His warmth and excitement delighted me to begin with, breaking the monotony of my nightly silence and loneliness.

His voice itself signified a celebration: it was my only link with you after all avenues had been blocked. I took it as a good sign, always bearing the possibility of a chance meeting with you. But this time it brought more than that.

First,
Si
Sharif apologised for not being in touch since our last evening together. He had been very busy dealing with the non-stop flow of official visitors to Paris. He then added, ‘All that time, though, I haven’t forgotten you. I hung your painting in the living room and now I share the house with you. You know that your gesture has left a big impression on me and made people envy me. I keep having to explain that we’ve been friends since childhood.’

I was listening to him, but my heart foolishly raced ahead to you. Knowing that the conversation originated in the house where you were was sufficient to unleash all the emotions and folly of a new lover. His voice brought me back to reality when he asked, ‘Do you know why I’m calling you tonight? I’ve decided to take you with me to Constantine. You gave me a painting of Constantine, and I shall give you a trip to her.’

I exclaimed, ‘Constantine! Why Constantine?’

As if breaking good news, he said, ‘To attend the wedding of my brother
Si
Taher’s daughter.’ After a little thought he added, ‘Perhaps you remember her. She was at the opening of your exhibition with my daughter Nadia.’

I suddenly felt that my voice had separated from my body and was unable to utter a single word. Could words strike like lightning? At a word, could the body lose its ability to grip the telephone? At such moments I would suddenly remember that I had only one arm. I dragged a chair over with my foot and sat down.

Perhaps
Si
Sharif noticed my silence and that something had happened. He cut short my shock by saying, ‘My brother, what are you worried about? Only a few days ago your name came up at a meeting with a few friends in the security service. They assured me that there were no instructions concerning you and that you could visit Algeria whenever you wanted. Things have changed a lot since you came here. You must go back to Algeria, even if only for a flying visit. I’ll be responsible for making sure you come back. You’ll travel with me and at my expense. What have you got to be so worried about?’

Looking for a way out of my anxiety, I answered, ‘To be honest, I’m not mentally up to such a trip yet. I’d prefer it to be in other circumstances.’

‘You’ll never find better conditions than these for going back,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that if I don’t take you in hand this time, it’ll be years before you go back. Are you going to spend your life painting Constantine? Plus won’t you be happy to attend the wedding of
Si
Taher’s daughter? She’s your daughter, too. You knew her as a child and you have to attend her wedding to give your blessings. Do it for her father’s sake. You have to stand by me that day in
Si
Taher’s place.’

Si
Sharif knew that
Si
Taher was my weak point. He went and played on the loyalty I still owed to our shared past and memory. The situation was quite surreal, quite absurd. I was straddling the divide between reason and madness, between laughter and tears.

‘You knew her as a child.’ – No, my friend! I also knew her as a woman, that’s the problem. ‘She’s your daughter, too.’ – No, she wasn’t my daughter, she only might have been, but she might have been my lover, too. She might have been my wife. She might have been mine.

I asked him, ‘Whose will she be?’

‘I’ve given her to
Si
— —,’ he said. ‘You were at the party with him last time. I don’t know what you think of him. But I think he’s a good man despite what they say about him.’

His last sentence contained an answer in advance to the response he anticipated.

None less than
Si
— —, then! ‘A good man’. Was being good really his distinguishing feature? In that case, I knew more than one good man who could have become her husband. But
Si
— — was more than that. He was the man of secret deals and front companies. A man of hard currency and hard missions. He was the junta’s man, the man of the future. After that, did it matter if he was good or not?

More than one lump in my throat stopped me from really expressing my opinion about him, and from asking
Si
Sharif one question only: whether he thought a man without morals was capable of being good. Or maybe I shut up because I was no longer making any great distinction between him and his ‘in-law’. I asked myself a different question: Could a person related by marriage to a corrupt man really be clean?

I suddenly lost the desire to talk. The successive shocks within one conversation had made me mute. I summed it all up in one sentence, open to interpretation. ‘All things are blessed.’

Si
Sharif gave the traditional response. ‘God bless you.’ Then he added in delight, as if he had passed an exam, ‘So, we’ll be seeing you. We’re counting on you. We’ll be travelling in about ten days’ time and the wedding’s on the fifteenth of July. Call me on the phone to fix the details.’

The conversation ended and a new phase of my life began. My other life began that day when it was made official that you would leave it. But had you truly left? I felt I was the only player at the board. All the squares were the same colour, and all the pieces had merged into one piece that I was holding – in one hand. Was I the sole winner or loser, and how could I tell? The board, along with room for hope and anticipation, had shrunk. Fate, the player we all stood in for from the beginning, was setting the rules.

Sometimes I did resent fate, but I often submitted without resistance. I took a strange pleasure in always wanting to know just how foolish fate could be. I was curious as to how unfair life could be. After all, life was a whore that only gave herself to those of suspect behaviour who got rich quick and took her in a hurry.

At the time, comparing myself with others’ inadequacy was a rare pleasure. My personal defeats were proof of other triumphs that were not available to all. Perhaps in a moment of derangement like that I accepted the idea of attending your wedding. I would witness my own funeral and the depths to which some people would stoop without the slightest shame. Alternatively, perhaps like all creative people, I was a supreme masochist. Given the absence of absolute bliss, I would insist on living in absolute sadness. To get over you, I would take self-abuse to the point of branding my own heart.