The Bridges of Constantine (36 page)

That was your first defeat with me. So, everything was over. I had finally met you, but had the meeting been worth the wait and the pain?

My dreams of it had been so beautiful. Yet, that day, incredibly, it fell flat. So full of waiting for you had it been, that in your presence it proved hollow, painful.

Was the half-glance we exchanged worth all that pain, longing and madness?

You wanted to say something to me and words failed. Looks failed.

Your eyes had forgotten how to talk to me. I no longer knew how to decipher your hieroglyphs.

Had we reverted to being strangers that day without realising?

We had separated.

Two final kisses on your cheeks, a glance or two, lots of pretence and a secret, voiceless pain.

We all exchanged polite words of congratulation and a final thank you.

We swapped addresses after your husband insisted on giving me his phone number at home and in the office in case I should need anything.

We went our separate ways, each with their own illusions and mind made up.

When I arrived back at the house, I stared a long time at the card that I had handled all the way in shock and with a funny taste of bitterness. It was as if you had moved from my heart to my pocket under a new name and telephone number.

Without much hesitation or deep thought I decided to rip it up right away while I still had strength to do so and while I still had the resolve to end everything there in Constantine, as you had once wanted and as I had come to want that day.

What did you want that evening when you called out of the blue and pulled me out of the blur of my contradictory thoughts and feelings?

When Hassan passed me the telephone saying, ‘It’s a woman who wants to talk to you,’ you were the last thing I expected.

‘Haven’t you left yet?’ I asked.

You said, ‘We’re leaving in an hour. I wanted to thank you for the painting. It made me unexpectedly happy.’

‘I didn’t give you anything,’ I said. ‘I returned a painting ready for you for twenty-five years. It’s the gift of our fates that crossed one day. I have a different present for you that I expect you will like. I’ll give it to you some day in the future.’

As though you were afraid someone might hear you or steal that present, you spoke in a low voice. ‘What will you give me?’

I said, ‘It’s a surprise. Let’s assume I’ll give you a gazelle.’

Surprised you said, ‘It’s the title of a book!’

‘I know,’ I replied, ‘because I will give you a book. When we love a girl we give her our name. When we love a woman we give her a child. When we love a writer we give her a book. I shall write a novel for you.’

I sensed joy and confusion in your voice, amazement and vague sadness. Then you suddenly said in a voice full of desire that I wasn’t used to from you. ‘Khaled, I love you. Do you know that?’

Your voice suddenly cut off and fused with my silence and sadness. We remained speechless for a few moments before you added with a touch of hope, ‘Khaled, say something. Why don’t you answer?’

In bitter irony I said to you, ‘The pavement of flowers no longer responds.’

‘Do you mean you no longer love me?’

In an absent voice I answered, ‘I don’t mean anything in particular. It’s the title of another book by the same novelist!’ What I said after that I don’t remember. Most likely that was the last thing I said to you before hanging up. We separated for several years.

‘Don’t keep knocking at the door. I’m not here any more,’ Malek Haddad wrote.

Don’t try and come back to me via the back doors and holes in memory, the folds in dreams, the windows blown open by storms.

Don’t even try.

I abandoned my memory the day I made a shocking discovery: it was not
my
memory, but one I shared with you. Each of us had a copy of it even before we met.

My lady, don’t keep knocking at the door. I no longer have a door.

Walls dropped on me the day I dropped you. The ceiling fell in on me as I tried to smuggle out my possessions that were scattered in your wake. Don’t circle like that around what was my house. Don’t look for a window to climb through like a thief. You’ve stolen all I have and there’s nothing left worth venturing.

Don’t keep knocking so painfully at the door.

Your phone call rings in the caves of memory, empty without you, and the echo resounds painfully and fearfully.

Don’t you know that after you I live in this valley like the stones live at the bottom of Wadi Rummal?

So, easy now, my lady. Easy now as you cross Constantine’s bridges. Any slip of the foot will send me down in a landslide of rocks, and any inadvertence on your part will send you down to be crushed with me.

Woman disguised in my mother’s clothing and perfume and her fear for me, I am as tired as the bridges of Constantine. I am suspended like them between two rocks and two paths.

Why all this pain? And why are you the most lying of mothers and why am I the most idiotic of lovers?

Don’t knock on Constantine’s doors one after another. I don’t live in this city. She lives in me.

Don’t seek me on her bridges. They never once supported me. On my own I supported them.

Don’t look for me in her songs, and come rushing to me with old-new news, and a song for sadness now sung in joy:

The Arabs said, they said:

   We didn’t give Saleh money.

The Arabs said, look:

   We made Saleh Bey of Beys.

I know by heart what the Arabs said, and what today they dare not say.

I know that Saleh was your first mourning garb, even before you were born. He was the last bey of Constantine, and I was his last testament: ‘Ah, Hamouda, ah, my child, take care of the home for me.’

Which house, Saleh? Which house do you mean?

I visited the Asr market and saw Saleh’s house, empty of memory. Even its stones and iron windows had been stolen. They had destroyed its passages and ruined its inscriptions. Yet it still stood, a yellowing skeleton where drunks and tramps pissed on its walls.

What nation is this where they piss on its memory, Saleh?

What homeland is this?

Here is a city that donned mourning for a man whose name it had forgotten. Here you are, a little girl whose kinship with these bridges remained unknown.

Take off your shawl after today. Lift the veil from your face and don’t keep knocking at the door.

Saleh is no longer here and neither am I.

So we had split up.

Those who say that love never dies are wrong.

Those who write love stories with happy endings, to fool us into thinking that Majnoun, the crazed lover of Laila was an emotional exception, know nothing of the rules of the heart.

They didn’t write love, they only wrote literature.

Passion can only be born in the middle of minefields, in danger zones. For that reason the triumph of desire doesn’t always mean a sedate and happy ending. It dies as it is born, in beautiful destruction.

So we had split up.

Farewell, my beautiful destruction. Farewell, volcanic rose, jasmine sprouting from the fire.

O, daughter of earthquakes and cracks in the ground, your destruction was the most beautiful, madam. Your destruction was the most horrific.

You killed an entire homeland within me. You slipped into the recesses of my memory and blew it all up with a single match.

Who taught you to play with fragments of memory? Answer!

Where have you come from this time, yet again, with all these burning waves of fire. From where have you brought all the devastation that has come since that day?

So we had split up.

You didn’t lie to me, or really tell the truth. You weren’t a lover, or a cheat really. You weren’t my daughter, or really my mother.

You were just like this homeland, the thing and its opposite.

Do you remember that distant, early time when you loved me and searched me for a copy of your father?

You once said, ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for you. I’ve waited so much, like we wait for the holy saints, or the prophets. Don’t be a false prophet, Khaled. I need you!’

At the time I noticed that you didn’t say, ‘I love you.’ You just said, ‘I need you.’

We don’t necessarily love the prophets. We just need them, at all times.

I replied, ‘I haven’t chosen to be a prophet.’

You said as a joke, ‘Prophets don’t choose their mission, they just carry it out!’

‘They don’t choose their followers, either,’ I replied. ‘So if you should discover that I’m a false prophet, perhaps that’s because I was sent to especially faithless followers!’

You laughed and, with the stubbornness of a woman tempted by the challenge, said, ‘You’re looking for a way out of your probable failure with me, aren’t you? I won’t give you such an excuse. Give me your Ten Commandments and I will obey.’

I stared at you that day. You were too beautiful to obey the commandments of a prophet, too weak to bear the weight of heavenly teachings. But you had an inner light I had not seen in a woman before. A seed of purity I didn’t want to disregard.

Isn’t the role of prophets to find the seed of goodness within?

I said, ‘Put the Ten Commandments to one side and listen to me. I have only an eleventh commandment for you.’

You laughed and said, with some truth, ‘Let us have it, you bankrupt prophet. I swear I shall follow you!’

At the time I felt like taking advantage of your promise and saying, ‘Just be mine.’ But those weren’t the words of a prophet. Without realising, I had started to play the role you had chosen for me. I searched my mind for something a prophet new to his vocation might say. I came up with, ‘Carry your name with greater pride. Not with arrogance, necessarily, but with a profound awareness that you are more than a woman. You are an entire nation. Do you know that? Symbols have no right to fall to pieces. These are mean times and if we don’t stick to our values we’ll find ourselves numbered among the rubbish and waste. Stick to your principles and flatter only your conscience, for in the end it’s your only companion.’

You said, ‘Is that your commandment to me? That’s it?’

‘Don’t treat it lightly. It’s not as easy as you imagine to fulfil. You’ll discover that for yourself some day.’

You should never have mocked the commandment of that bankrupt prophet that day and treated it so lightly.

A half dozen years have passed since that trip, that encounter and that farewell.

During those years I have tried to close my wounds and forget. I tried upon my return to put some order into my heart, restore things to their former place without upheaval or complaint, without smashing a vase, without moving a painting or rearranging the old set of values that had been gathering dust inside me for a long time.

I tried to turn time back, without resentment or forgiveness either.

No, we don’t so easily forgive those who with transient happiness make us realise how miserable we were beforehand. Even less do we forgive those who kill our dreams in front of us without any sense that it is a crime.

So I haven’t forgiven you, or them.

I have just tried to deal with you and with the homeland with less love. I chose indifference as the sole emotion for both of you.

Your news would reach me by chance as I listened to someone talking about your husband, his continuing ascent, his secret deals and public business that was all the rave at gatherings.

News of the homeland would also reach me, at times in the newspaper, at times at other gatherings, and when Hassan came to visit me, for the last time, to buy the car I had promised him.

Every time, I treated all I heard with the same indifference that could only have arisen from ultimate despair.

I began to be attached only to Hassan, as if I had suddenly discovered he existed. He was the only thing that mattered to me once I realised that he was all I had left in the world, and once I discovered the miserable life he led, which I had known absolutely nothing about before my visit to Constantine.

I took to calling him on the phone regularly. I would ask how he was doing and about the children, about the house, which he was intending to fix up and which I promised to pay for.

His spirits would fall and rise from one call to the next. One time he would speak about some project and the calls he had made to be transferred to the capital. Then he would suddenly lose all his enthusiasm.

I knew this when he asked me during his final call, ‘When are you coming, Khaled?’

At the time, I felt he was like a sinking ship sending out an SOS to me.

Even so, I just humoured him and kept promising that I would visit the following summer. But deep down I knew I was lying. I had burned the bridges with the homeland until further notice.