The Bridges of Constantine (38 page)

His only dreams were to obtain a passport for the Hajj, and a fridge.

He finally achieved half his dreams. The nation had given him a fridge where he was calmly awaiting me to bid him a final farewell.

If he had known you, perhaps he wouldn’t have died this idiotic death.

If he had read you closely, he wouldn’t have looked at his killers with such amazement, wouldn’t have dreamed of a job in the capital, a car and a nicer house.

He would have spat in his killers’ faces in advance, cursed them like he had never cursed another, refused to shake their hands at that wedding, would have said, ‘You pimps and thieves and killers, you won’t steal our blood too. Stuff your pockets as you like. Furnish your houses as you like and fill your bank accounts with any currency you like. We will keep blood and memory. We will make you answer to them, we will haunt you with them and rebuild this homeland with them.’

Ah, Zorba. Ziyad died and now Hassan has also died of betrayal.

Ah, my friend, if only you knew that neither of them deserved to die.

Hassan was as pure as quicksilver and good to the point of naivety. He was even afraid to dream. Once he started, they killed him.

Ziyad was a bit like you, Zorba. If only you had seen him laugh or heard him talking, rebelling, cursing, crying, getting drunk. If you had known them, you would have danced in grief for them tonight like you’ve never danced before.

But it didn’t matter. I knew that you wouldn’t turn up tonight either. Perhaps because you had died, like in the novel, after cursing the priest who came to administer the last rites. Or perhaps because you had never existed at all, but were just a mythical hero for a time when people were seeking a new Greek mythology to teach them madness and defiance and the absurdity of life.

Did it matter that you were absent tonight when everyone was absent?

I didn’t blame you, my friend. You weren’t responsible for all the stupid mistakes that could be made because of a novel.

Just answer me this. You killed Turks, and they killed many of your comrades. Was there any difference between killers?

Si
Taher died at the hands of the French, Ziyad died at the hands of the Israelis, and now Hassan has died at the hands of Algerians.

Were there degrees of martyrdom? What if the homeland were both killer and martyr?

So many Arab cities had a place in history because of massacres, the graves of which still remained secret.

The inhabitants of so many Arab cities were martyred before they even became citizens.

Where should we file them? Under victims of history or under martyrs?

What to call death when it is by means of the Arab dagger?

As soon as Catherine saw me that morning, she cried out, ‘You look as though you were drunk last night!’ Then she added, with some wit and a clear hint, ‘What did you get up to last night, naughty boy, to be in such a state?’

I said, ‘Nothing. Maybe I didn’t sleep well.’

Casting a curious, woman’s eye around the living room in search of clues as to the kind of person I spent the evening with, she said, ‘Did you have friends round last night?’

I smiled at her question and felt like saying yes. When sadness verges on madness it can turn sarcastic on its own.

She continued, ‘Did they spend the night here?’

I said, ‘No. They left.’ After a brief silence, I went on, ‘My friends always leave!’

Perhaps I wasn’t convincing or I just increased her curiosity. She resumed looking for something in the disorder and the two open suitcases.

Women are like that. They see no further than their bodies. So Catherine was unable to discover the traces of Ziyad, Hassan and Zorba in the house.

In truth, Catherine always lived on the fringes of my sadness, so she had convinced herself in a few words that I was awaking from a night of passion.

She asked me, as if all of a sudden she could find no justification for her presence with me at that moment, ‘Why did you ask me to come round straight away?’

‘For many reasons,’ I said. Suddenly I added, ‘Catherine, do you like bridges?’

In a tone not devoid of astonishment, she said, ‘Don’t tell me you brought me round this morning to ask that question!’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’d like you to answer it.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never asked myself such a question before. I’ve always lived in cities without bridges, except for Paris, perhaps.’

‘It doesn’t matter. In the end, I’d prefer you not to like them. It’s enough that you like my painting.’

She replied, ‘Of course I love what you paint. I’ve always thought you were an exceptional painter.’

‘That’s settled then. All these paintings are yours.’

She shouted, ‘Are you crazy? How can you give me all these pictures? They’re of your city. You might miss it one day.’

‘There’s no need for nostalgia after today. I’m going back. I’m giving them to you because I know you value art and that they won’t get lost with you.’

Catherine’s voice acquired a new mysterious note of sadness and joy, ‘I’ll look after them all. No man’s ever given me anything like that.’

I gave her body, hidden as usual under light, baggy clothing, a final glance, and said, ‘And no woman before you has given me a more delicious exile.’

She said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll regret it and miss one of them one day. Know that you’ll always find them with me.’

‘That might happen,’ I said. ‘We always regret something.’

She interrupted me, as though suddenly discovering the seriousness of the situation. ‘
Mais ce n’est pas possible
. We can’t part like this.’

‘Oh, Catherine, let’s part hungry. For various reasons, history has condemned us never to be completely satisfied with one another, not to completely love one another. Now you have more than one copy of me. Hang my memory on your wall, even if it’s an antidote to memory. You were also party to it!’

Catherine was unable to understand the reason for all the symbolism.

Why this mysterious talk that I had not conditioned her to?

Perhaps she did understand, but her body refused to. Her body was always off topic. Her body was a French employee, always protesting, always asking for more. Overdoing freedom of expression and the right to strike.

But where would I find the words to explain my sadness to her?

Where would I find the silence that would speak to her without my saying that Hassan was waiting for me in the morgue in another city, and his six children had no one but me?

How would I explain to her my cold feet and the chill creeping up on me as the hours advanced and her hands started to open the buttons of my shirt without warning, out of habit?

‘Catherine. I don’t feel like making love. I’m sorry.’

‘What do you want, then?’

‘I want you to laugh like usual.’

‘Why laugh?’

‘Because you’re incapable of sadness.’

‘And you?’

‘I will wait till you’ve gone to be sad. My sadness is only deferred, as usual.’

‘Why are you telling me this today?’

‘Because I’m tired and because I’m leaving in a few hours.’

‘But you can’t leave. They’ve cancelled all travel to Algeria.’

‘I’ll go and wait at the airport for the first plane. I have to travel today or tomorrow. Someone is waiting for me.’

I could have said to her, ‘My brother is dead. My only brother, Catherine,’ and broken down crying. I needed to cry in front of someone that day.

But I couldn’t do it with her. It might have been an old complex. Sadness was a personal matter that sometimes became national.

So I kept my wound to myself and decided to keep talking like normal. I might tell her another day, but not today. Silence today was greater.

I suddenly felt I had mistreated the butterflies.

I said, ‘Catherine, we had a beautiful thing, didn’t we? A bit complicated maybe, but beautiful all the same. You were the woman who was always about to become my beloved. Perhaps separation will bring about what all the years of being together couldn’t.’

‘Will you love me when we split up?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll definitely miss you loads. That’s the logic of things. I had more than one habit with you, and someday I’ll have to change my habits.’

‘Will you come back?’

‘Not for a long time. I have to learn the other side of forgetting now. Exile is also a mother, and it’s not easy for us to cross the bridge that separates us from her.’

‘Khaled, why do you surround yourself with all these bridges?’

‘I don’t surround myself with them. I carry them inside me. There are people like that, born on a suspension bridge who come into the world between two tracks, two paths, two continents, born in the currents of crosswinds. They grow up trying to reconcile the contradictions inside. Perhaps I was one of those. Let me tell you a secret. I’ve discovered that I don’t like bridges. I hate them in the way I hate all things with two sides, two faces, two possibilities, two opposites. That’s why I’m leaving you all the paintings.

‘I wanted to burn them. It was a tempting idea, but I don’t have the courage of Tariq ibn Ziyad. Perhaps because a sailor burning his ship in battle is easier than an artist burning his paintings in a moment of madness.

‘Even so, I want to burn them to cut off any path back for my heart.

‘I don’t want to spend my life walking the bridge both ways.

‘I want to chose a final place for my heart.

‘I want to return to that city perched on a rock, as if re-conquering her, just like Tariq ibn Ziyad conquered Gibraltar and gave it his name.

‘Since leaving her, I’ve lost my bearings. I’ve severed my link with history and geography. I’ve stood for years before a question mark, outside lines of latitude and longitude.

‘Where is the sea, and where is the enemy? Which is in front and which behind?

‘Over the sea there is only the homeland. Before me is only the raft of exile. Only I stand between them.

‘Who shall I declare war upon when there are only the regional borders of memory around me?’

I looked at Catherine. She understood nothing.

Our relationship had always been the victim of misunderstanding and short-sightedness. We split up as we had met more than one century before, without really knowing each other. Without completely loving each other but always with the same mysterious attraction.

You said, ‘What happened to us was love. Literature was all that did not happen.’

Yes, but.

Between what happened and what didn’t happen, other things occurred, unrelated to love or literature.

The outcome in both cases was for us to produce nothing but words. Only the nation created events and wrote us as it willed, as long as we remained its ink.

I had left the country at a time when there was no air. Now I was going back at a time of curfew.

As I, alone this time, confronted the airport of this city draped in mourning, I remembered something Hassan said years earlier, which had made me pause for no obvious reason. He had said, ‘The natives of this city only come to visit for weddings and funerals.’

The discovery stunned me. I had become a legitimate son of this city that had summoned me by force twice. Once to attend your wedding and once to bury my brother. What was the difference between the two?

My brother had actually died while I had been dead since your wedding.

Our dreams killed us.

Him because he was infected with vast, empty dreams.

Me because I abandoned my fantasy and went into permanent mourning for my dreams.

An edgy customs officer, about the same age as independence and not put off by either my sadness or my one arm, shouted in my face. He had the tone of someone convinced that we only went abroad to get rich and always smuggled something back with us. ‘What do you have to declare?’ he asked.

My body raised memory before him, but he didn’t read me.

It can happen that a nation becomes illiterate.

At the same moment, others were entering through the VIP channel with elegant diplomatic bags.

His hands rifled through Ziyad’s modest suitcase and fell upon a bundle of papers. A proud tear in my eye almost answered him, ‘I declare memory, my lad.’

But I kept quiet and gathered up the draft of this book scattered in the suitcase. Chapter headings, the headings for dreams.

A Note on the Author

Algerian novelist and poet Ahlem Mosteghanemi is the bestselling female author in the Arab world. She has more than 2.6 million followers on Facebook and was ranked in the top ten most influential women in the Middle East by Forbes in 2006. The Arabic original of this title (
Dhakirat al-Jasad
) was awarded the 1998 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (founded in honour of the Nobel laureate). It is the first in a trilogy of bestselling novels and has since been translated into several languages and adapted into a television series. Ahlem lives in Beirut.