The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Before your words could register, my gaze was caught by the bracelet adorning your bare wrist. With its plaited yellow gold and distinctive engraving, it had to be a piece of Constantine jewellery. One of those heavy bands that in the past were always part of a bride’s trousseau and were for ever found on the wrists of women in eastern Algeria. Without completely taking my eyes off the bracelet I took your hand. My memory instantly travelled a whole lifetime back to my mother’s wrist, which was never without such a bracelet.

  I was seized by an ambiguous feeling. How long had it been since I’d seen a bracelet like that? I could not remember. Maybe more than thirty years. With considerable adroitness you withdrew the hand I had been gripping, perhaps unconsciously, as though I were holding on to something you had suddenly brought back.

  I lifted my gaze for the first time, but our eyes only half met. You smiled at me. You were looking at my missing arm, while I contemplated the bracelet on your arm. Both of us carried their memory on the surface.

  That might have been the end of our acquaintance. But you were an enigma made even more mysterious by such details. I took a gamble on discovering you. Fascinated and confused, I examined you. It was as though I already knew you whilst also just making your acquaintance.

  Your beauty wasn’t of the dazzling, frightening or disconcerting kind. You were an ordinary girl with an extraordinary aura and a secret hidden about her face. Perhaps it was your high forehead, the natural arch of your thick eyebrows, the mysterious smile on your lips that were painted a pale red, like a covert invitation to a kiss. Or perhaps it was your wide eyes and their changeable honey colour. I already knew these details. I knew them, but how?

  You spoke in French, interrupting my thoughts. ‘It makes me happy to see such a creative Algerian artist.’ You went on, a touch embarrassed, ‘Actually, I don’t really understand much about painting, and I only go to art exhibitions once in a while. But I can give an opinion about beautiful things, and your paintings are superb. We need something new like this, with a taste of modern Algeria. That’s what I was saying to my cousin when you came up to us.’

  With that, the young woman came forward to shake my hand and introduce herself. Perhaps she thought she would join in the conversation from which she felt excluded – I had, without realising, ignored her from the beginning. Introducing herself, she said, ‘Miss Abdelmoula. Pleased to meet you.’

  The name shook me.

  I looked in amazement at this girl who was shaking my hand with a warmth not lacking in arrogance. I gazed at her as if only just noticing her presence, then went back to considering you. Perhaps I was seeking an explanation for my amazement in the features of both your faces. Abdelmoula. Abdelmoula. My memory went searching for an answer to this coincidence.

  I knew the Abdelmoula family well. There were only two brothers: Si Taher, who had been martyred more than twenty years before, leaving behind a boy and a girl, and Si Sharif, who had married before independence and might have had several sons and daughters by now.

  Which one of you was Si Taher’s daughter? She whose name I was commanded to carry from the front, back to Tunis, and whose father I represented when registering her birth at the town hall? Which one of you was the baby I had kissed, cuddled and spoiled as her father’s stand-in? Which one of you was you?

  Despite some features in common between you, I felt that you were you, not her. Or so I hoped, dreaming prematurely of a certain bond between us. I was astounded by this coincidence and suddenly found the reason why I was already attracted to your face. You were the image of Si Taher, but more alluring. You were a woman.

  Could you possibly be that little girl I had last seen in Tunis in 1962, right after independence, when Si Sharif had called me from Constantine and asked me to sell Si Taher’s house, which was no longer needed? He had bought it a few years previously as a refuge for his small family after the French had exiled him from Algeria in the 1950s, once he had spent a few months in prison for political incitement. So I had gone as usual to check you were all fine and to keep an eye on the arrangements for your return to Algeria. How old were you then? Could you possibly have changed this much, grown up this much in twenty years?

  I gazed at you again, unwilling to admit your age – maybe my own, too, and the man I had become since those bygone days.

  What brought you to this city and this gallery on this day in particular? A day I had awaited, for a reason unrelated to you. A day for which I had made a thousand calculations that had not included you. In which I had expected all surprises except you.

  I was stunned, afraid to meet those eyes of yours that were following my confusion with some astonishment. I decided to turn the question around and continue my conversation with the girl who had just introduced herself. I knew that if I found out who she was, the puzzle would be solved, and I would automatically know who you were. One of you had a name that I had known for twenty-five years. I just needed to learn which one. I asked her, ‘Are you related to Si Sharif Abdelmoula?’

  As if realising I was interested in her, she answered gaily, ‘He’s my father. He couldn’t come today because a delegation just arrived from Algeria yesterday. He’s told us so much about you. We were so curious to meet you that we decided to come to the opening in his place.’

  Despite the spontaneity of what she said, it provided two answers. First, she wasn’t you. Second, it explained why Si Sharif hadn’t come. I had noted his absence and wondered whether it was for personal or political reasons. Or whether he was avoiding being seen with me.

  I knew our paths had diverged years ago when he had entered the corridors of politics. His only goal was to reach the leading ranks. Even so, I couldn’t ignore our being in the same city. He had been part of my childhood and youth, part of my memory. Because of this, and for purely sentimental reasons, he was the only Algerian personality I had invited.

  I hadn’t seen him for a few years, but news of him had always reached me since his appointment, two years previously, as an attaché at the Algerian embassy. Like all postings abroad, this required serious connections and a power base. Si Sharif could forge a path to such posts – and more important ones – by means of his past alone and by his name, which Si Taher had immortalised with his own martyrdom. Yet it seemed that the past alone was not enough to guarantee the present. To make progress, he had to adjust constantly to the way the wind was blowing.

  All of this occurred to me as I tried to absorb the emotional shocks that had rocked me in the last few moments. It had started with my wanting to say hello to a pretty girl who was visiting my exhibition, nothing more. Then, suddenly, I was saying hello to my memory.

  I returned to my initial surprise at you: to all the details that caught my eye and the particular picture that you were standing in front of for so long. It was more than coincidence, more than fate, more than destiny.

  Was it really you? In a gallery looking at my paintings. Studying some and pausing before others, turning to the catalogue in your hand to find out the names of the pictures that most caught your attention.

  Might it be you lighting up each painting that you passed? The spotlights directed at the paintings seemed to point at you, as though you were the genuine work of art.

  Yes, you. You paused before a small painting that no one else had stopped at. You scrutinised it, moved closer and scanned the list for its name. At that instant a dark shiver ran through me, the curiosity of the mad artist piqued.

  Who were you, standing in front of my favourite painting? Confused, I watched you studying it as you talked to your friend out of earshot. What made you stop before it? It wasn’t the most beautiful painting in the show. It was just my first painting, my first effort. Yet, despite its simplicity, I had insisted this time that it be included in the exhibition – my most important to date – because I considered it my little miracle. I had painted it twenty-five years ago, less than a month after my left arm had been amputated.

  It wasn’t an attempt
at creativity or designed to go down in history. I was just trying to live, to escape despair. I had painted it like an art student taking an exam in which the assignment is to paint the scene closest to who you are. That was what the Yugoslavian doctor had told me to do. He had come to Tunis with other doctors from the socialist states to treat wounded Algerians and had taken charge of amputating my arm. Afterwards, he had kept an eye on how I was doing, physically and mentally.

  He had noted my continuing depression and, each time I saw him, he had asked if I had any new interests. I wasn’t ill enough to stay in hospital, but neither was I whole enough to begin my new life. I was living in Tunis, a local and a foreigner at the same time, both at liberty and confined, happy and miserable. A man rejected equally by death and by life. A tangled skein of wool. How could the doctor find the end of the yarn and unravel all my complexes?

  On one occasion he asked me, as he was inquiring about my education, whether I liked writing or painting. I seized hold of his question as if grabbing at a straw that might save me from drowning. I realised immediately the prescription he had in mind for me.

  He said, ‘I’ve carried out the operation that you’ve had dozens of times on those who’ve lost limbs in war. The operation is the same each time, but its psychological impact differs from person to person, depending on their age, job, social status and, especially, on their level of culture. Only an intellectual reconsiders himself every day. He reconsiders his relationship with things and with the world whenever anything in his life changes.

  ‘I’ve come to realise this over the course of my experience. Yours isn’t the first case I’ve come across, and I think that losing your arm has upset your relationship with what’s around you. You have to build a new relationship with the world through writing or painting.

  ‘You must choose which you prefer and then sit and write down everything that’s on your mind, without inhibition. The kind of writing isn’t important, nor its literary quality. What matters is simply writing as a means to get it all out and rebuild yourself internally.

  ‘If you prefer painting, then paint. Painting can also reconcile you to things and to a world you see differently. You’ve changed now that you see and feel it with only one hand.’

  My reflex answer would have been that I loved writing. It was certainly closest to me, seeing as I had done nothing all my life except read, which naturally leads to writing. I could have replied that my teachers had always predicted a glowing literary future for me – in French. Maybe that was why I answered without thinking or, as I discovered later, with the response that was already deep inside me, ‘I prefer painting.’

  My terse answer did not convince him, and he asked me if I’d painted before. ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘So, start by painting the thing that is closest to you. Paint the thing you love most.’

  With the wryness of a doctor tactfully admitting they can do no more, his parting words were, ‘Paint, then perhaps you won’t need me again!’

  I hurried back to my room, wanting to be alone between its white walls that were an extension of the whiteness of the Al-Habib Thamir hospital, which at the time was the place I knew best in Tunis. Unusually for me, I started staring at the walls and thought of all the paintings I could hang on them: portraits of those I loved, all the alleyways I loved, everything I had left behind.

  My sleep was troubled that night. Perhaps I didn’t sleep at all. The doctor’s voice, in his broken French, kept waking me up as he said, ‘Paint!’ I saw him in his white coat, as he shook my hand in farewell and said, ‘Paint!’ A mysterious shudder passed through me and in my half-sleep I remembered the first revelation of the Qur’an, when the angel Gabriel, peace be upon him, came down to Muhammad for the first time and said, ‘Recite!’ The prophet, trembling in dread, asked, ‘What should I recite?’ Gabriel responded, ‘Recite in the name of your Lord the Creator,’ and went on to complete the first sura. When this was over, the prophet went to his wife, his body trembling in terror at what he had heard. As soon as he saw her he shouted, ‘Wrap me up, wrap me up!’

  That night I shivered with feverish chills, due perhaps to nerves and my anxiety after the meeting with the doctor, which I knew would be the last. There was also the thin blanket – which was all I had to cover me in the depths of the freezing winter, and which my mean landlord would not supplement.

  I could have screamed when I remembered my childhood bed and the woollen blanket I always had against the Constantine cold. I almost screamed in my night of exile, ‘Wrap me up, Constantine, wrap me up.’ But I said nothing. Not to Constantine, not to the mean-minded landlord. I kept my fever and chills to myself. It was hard for a man just back from the Front to admit, even to himself, that he was cold.

  I waited till early morning to buy, with the little money I had left, the supplies needed to paint two or three pictures. Crazily, I stood and painted Constantine’s suspension bridge.

  Was that bridge really the thing I loved most, for me to stand there and paint it of my own accord, as though about to cross it as usual? Perhaps it was just the easiest thing to paint. I don’t know. I do know that I painted it again and again afterwards, as if every time remained the first time and it was the thing I loved most.

  Twenty-five years: that was the age of the painting I had called, without much thought, Nostalgia. A painting by a twenty-seven-year-old in all his loneliness, grief and desolation.

  There I was, lonely again, with my other grief and desolation. Just an extra quarter of a century full of personal disappointments and defeats and the odd triumph. By then I was one of Algeria’s major artists, perhaps the biggest of all – so said the Western critics whose testimonials I included in large type on the invitation to the opening.

  There I was, a minor prophet who was struck with inspiration one autumn in a mean room on Bab Sweiqa Street in Tunis. There I was, a typical prophet in exile. And why not, when a prophet is never honoured in his homeland? There I was, an artistic phenomenon. And why not, when the disabled can become a phenomenon, an artistic giant? As I was.

  Where was that doctor who recommended that I paint and whose prophecy that I would no longer need him came true? He was the only person missing from the vast space where no Arab before me had ever held an exhibition. Where was Dr Kapucki to see what I’d done with my one hand? (I never asked him what he did with the other!)

  There was Nostalgia, my first painting. Beside the inscription, ‘Tunis ’57’, at the bottom of the picture, was my first signature. Just as I signed beneath your name and date of birth when I registered you at the town hall in that autumn of 1957.

  Between the painting and you, which one was my child? Which my beloved? Questions that didn’t occur to me that day when I saw you standing before the painting for the first time. A painting the same age as you. Officially, you were a few days older and it was actually a few months younger. A painting that marked my beginning twice: once, when I picked up a brush and first started to paint; the other, the day you stood before it and I began my adventure with fate.

  In a diary full of insignificant dates and addresses, I circled that date in April 1981 as though I wished to single it out. There had been nothing throughout the previous years worthy of mention. My days, like the pages of my diary, were all rough drafts. Usually I would write something simply so as not to leave the page blank. White sheets of paper always frightened me.

  Eight diaries for eight years, with nothing remarkable in them. Together they formed a single page of exile whose years, by a process of false accounting, I tried to condense into eight diaries. That was all. They were still stacked in my cupboard, one on top of the other. They hadn’t been kept according to any calendar, but counted off the years of my voluntary emigration.

  I ringed that date as if locking you within, as if fixing you and your memory in my spotlight for ever. It was in anticipation that this date would be a turning point in memory, my rebirth at your hands. At the time I was well aware that being rebor
n through you, like reaching you, would be no easy matter. The fact that your phone number and address weren’t on that page was proof enough. Ultimately, only the date was recorded. Was it reasonable to ask for your phone number at our first meeting or, rather, our first chance encounter? What possible justification or pretext did I have for that? Any reason would have seemed contrived – a man asking a pretty girl for her phone number.

  I felt a need to sit with you, to talk to you, to listen to you. There was a chance I would encounter that other version of my memory. But how to convince you of that? How to explain in a few minutes that I – a man you were meeting for the first time – knew a great deal about you? You were even talking to me in a formal French, as if to a stranger. I had no choice but to respond in the same formal way.

  The words got caught on my tongue that day, as though I were speaking to you in an unfamiliar language, a language that didn’t know us. How could I, after more than twenty years, have shaken your hand and asked in neutral French, ‘Mais comment allez-vous, mademoiselle?’ You responded with the same coolness, ‘Bien, je vous remercie.’

  My memory was on the verge of tears; this was the memory that knew you as a crawling baby girl. My one arm was almost shaking in an effort to resist the unruly desire to embrace you and ask in the Constantine accent that I so missed, ‘Washik? How are you?’

  Ah, how are you, my little one who grew up out of sight? How are you, strange visitor who no longer knows me? Baby girl, wearing my memory and my mother’s bracelet on her wrist.

  I gathered in you all those I loved. I contemplated you: your smile and the colour of your eyes brought back the features of Si Taher. How beautiful that the martyrs lived again in your face. How beautiful that my mother lived again in the bracelet around your wrist. Your appearance brought the homeland back to life. How beautiful that you should be you!

  ‘When people encounter something extremely beautiful, they want to cry,’ Malek Haddad wrote.