Laughing, I asked you, ‘Did you visit him?’
‘Of course,’ you said. ‘And I visited with every one of the women individually afterwards. I also visited Sayida Menoubia, whose name I would have got had my mother not spared me that disaster. She decided to call me Hayat until my father, who had the final say, came back.’
My heart stopped at that name. Memory raced backwards. My tongue tripped as it tried to utter it after exactly a quarter of a century. ‘Would you be happy if I called you Hayat?’
My question surprised you, and in astonishment you said, ‘Why? Don’t you like my real name? Isn’t it nicer?’
‘It is nicer,’ I said. ‘I was amazed at the time how your father thought of it. When I heard it for the first time there was nothing in his life to inspire such a beautiful name. Still, I’d like to call you Hayat, because I’m probably the only person apart from your mother who knows that name now. I want it to be like a password between us, a reminder of our remarkable relationship. That you’re also somehow my child.’
You laughed and said, ‘You know, you’ve never left the days of the Revolution. You feel a need to give me a codename, even before you love me. It’s as if you were signing me up for a secret mission. I wonder what it is?’
I laughed in turn at the startling accuracy of your observation. Maybe you had begun to know me that well. ‘Listen, my budding revolutionary,’ I said. ‘There has to be more than one test before we entrust someone with a guerrilla operation. I shall begin with your initial training to assess your level of readiness!’
At that moment, I felt the time was finally right to tell you the story of my last day at the Front. The day Si Taher spoke your name to me for the first time as he was saying goodbye and entrusted me to register you, if I made it to Tunis alive.
That night, feverish and with a bleeding arm, I crossed the Algerian–Tunisian border. In my delirium I kept repeating your name. In the midst of exhaustion and loss of blood, it became the name of Si Taher’s final mission for me. I wanted to fulfil his last request of me, pursue his fleeting dream and grant you an official, legal name unconnected with superstitions and saints.
I remember the first time I knocked on the door of your house on Toufiq Street in Tunis. I remember all the details of that visit as though my memory had read in advance what fate had written and kept a space for it. That autumnal September day, I waited in front of your green iron door for what seemed like hours until Amma Zahra opened it.
I still remember her double-take, as though she had been expecting someone else, not me. She stood bewildered before me, taking in my sad grey overcoat and my pale, thin face. She lingered over my one arm holding a box of sweets and the empty sleeve of my coat which, for the first time, was tucked into a pocket out of shame.
Before I said a word, her eyes flooded with tears. She started crying without thinking to invite me in. I leant down to kiss her, with the accumulated longing of the years I had not seen her, with the longing imparted by her son, with longing for my own mother, to whose loss I was still not reconciled after two-and-a-half years.
‘How are you, Amma Zahra?’
Her sobbing rose as she hugged me and asked in turn, ‘How are you, my son?’
Was she crying with joy to see me, or with sadness at my state, at my amputated arm, which she was seeing for the first time? Was she crying because she expected to see her son, but saw me? Or just because someone had knocked at the door and brought joy and a little news to a house that a man had not entered for months?
‘You’re safe. Come in, my son, come in.’ She spoke as she finally made it through the door and wiped her tears. Before I spoke she repeated, ‘Come in. Come in,’ in a loud voice like a signal to your mother, who came running when she heard the words. I only saw the back of her robe as she walked in front of me and then disappeared behind a door quickly closed.
I loved that house with its trellised vines climbing the walls of the small garden and hanging over it so that the rich red grapes dangled in the middle of the courtyard. The jasmine tree that spread and peered from the outside wall, like an inquisitive woman fed up with the confines of her house who goes to see what’s happening outside and seduces passers-by to pick her flowers or gather those fallen to the ground. The reassuring smell of food and a vague warmth that made a person reluctant to leave.
Amma Zahra went before me into a room overlooking the courtyard, repeating all the while, ‘Sit down, my son. Sit down.’ She took the box of sweets and put it on the round copper tray on a wooden table.
As soon as I sat down on the woollen cushion on the floor, you appeared in the corner of the room, as tiny as a doll. You crawled quickly over to the white box and tried to pull it to the ground to open. Before I could intervene, Amma Zahra took the box away and put it in another spot, saying, ‘Thank you, my dear. You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble, Khaled, my son. Seeing your face is enough for us.’
Then she told you off as you headed towards the domed wooden rack on top of the stove, where your tiny white clothes were hanging to dry. You gestured towards me, your small hands held out, asking for my help. Right then, as I stretched out my single arm in an effort to lift you, I felt the horror of what had happened to me. With my one uncertain hand I was unable to pick you up, put you in my lap and dandle you without you slipping away.
Wasn’t it amazing that my first meeting with you should also be my first test and my first difficulty? That I should be defeated by you in the hardest test I had faced since becoming a one-armed man – no more than ten days before?
Amma Zahra came back with a tray of coffee and a plate of tammina. ‘Tell me Khaled, my son, I beg you, how’s Taher?’ She said this before she sat down. There was a taste of tears in her question. The question whose answer was feared stuck in her throat. I reassured her, telling her I was under his command and that he was at the border. His health was good, but he couldn’t visit for the time being due to the situation and his many responsibilities.
I didn’t tell her that the battles were intensifying every day, that the enemy had decided to surround the mountains and burn the forests so that their planes could observe our movements. That they had arrested Mostafa Ben Boulaïd together with a group of commanders and fighters, thirty of whom had been sentenced to death. That I had come for treatment with a group of wounded and crippled men, two of whom had died before they arrived.
My appearance told her more than a woman of her age could bear, so I changed the course of the conversation. I gave her the money Si Taher had sent with me, and asked her, as he had requested, to buy you a present. I promised that I would come back soon to register you in the name he had chosen for you. Amma Zahra repeated it with difficulty, somewhat surprised, but without passing comment. For her, what Si Taher said had a sacred quality.
As if you had suddenly noticed that the conversation concerned you, with childish spontaneity you took hold of my trouser leg and pulled. Helping you on to my lap, I couldn’t stop myself hugging you with my one arm. I drew you to me, as if embracing the dream for which I had lost my other arm. It was as though I were afraid it might escape along with the dreams of the man who was yet to throw his arms around you in joy.
Caught between tears, joy and pain, I kissed you for Si Taher and for comrades who hadn’t seen their children since joining the FLN. And for others who died dreaming of a simple moment like this when they would hug not rifles, but their children who had been born and grown up out of sight.
I forgot that day to kiss you for me, to cry before you for me, for the man you would make me a quarter-century later. Alongside your name I forgot to register my name in advance, to request in advance your memory and years to come, to reserve your life. I should have stopped the toll of the years racing with me towards twenty-seven as you entered your seventh month. I forgot to keep you in my lap for ever, playing and toying, saying things neither you nor I understood.
I told the story with deliberate brevity and kept the inciden
tal details to myself. You didn’t interrupt once and only seemed to pause at the date, 15 September 1957, when I officially registered your actual name. Even though nobody had told you the story before, you didn’t ask a single explanatory question and didn’t utter a word of comment. Perhaps no one had found it worth telling.
Stunned, you listened in alarming silence. A haze of stubbornness obscured your gaze, and you, who in the same place had laughed so much, wept in front of me for the first time. Did we realise at the time that we laughed to evade the painful truth, to evade something we were looking for and putting off at the same time?
I looked at you through the fog of your tears. Right then I longed to enfold you with my one arm like I’d never held a woman, or a dream. But I stayed where I was, and you stayed where you were, facing each other. Two stubborn mountains with a secret bridge of compassion and longing between them, and many rainless clouds.
The word ‘bridge’ caught my mind, and I recalled the painting – as if I had remembered the most important chapter in a story. I was telling it to you, but perhaps, also to myself so that I could believe how strange it was. I stood up and said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you something.’ You followed me without question. I stopped in front of the painting. Bewildered, you waited for me to speak. ‘You know, that first day when I saw you standing in front of this picture, a shiver went through me. I sensed that there was a definite, if unknown, link between you and the picture. That’s why I came and said hello to you – perhaps to learn whether my intuition was wrong or right.’
You said in surprise, ‘And was your intuition correct?’
‘Haven’t you noticed the date on the picture?’
Looking for it at the bottom, you said, ‘No.’
‘It’s close to your official birthday. You’re only two weeks older than this painting. Your twin, if you like!’
‘Wow, that’s incredible!’ you said.
You looked at the picture as if searching for yourself and said, ‘Isn’t that the mountain suspension bridge?’
I answered, ‘It’s more than a bridge. It’s Constantine, which is the other kinship you have with this picture. The day you entered this exhibition hall, you brought Constantine with you. She came in your figure, in the way you walk, in your accent and in the bracelet you were wearing.’
You thought a while, then said, ‘Ah, you mean the miqyas. I sometimes wear it on special occasions, but it’s heavy and hurts my wrist.’
‘Memory is always heavy,’ I said. ‘Mother wore one for many years and never complained about the weight. She died with it on her wrist. It’s just a question of getting used to it!’ I wasn’t telling you off, there was sadness in my voice. But what I was saying meant nothing to you. You were from a generation that finds everything too heavy. That’s why traditional Arab clothes have been cut down to one or two contemporary pieces. Old bracelets and jewellery have been reduced to baubles taken on and off in an instant. History and memory have been reduced to a couple of pages in textbooks, and Arabic poetry to one or two names.
I didn’t blame you. We belong to countries that don memory only on special occasions; between one news broadcast and another. As soon as the lights go out and the cameras leave, they take it off again, like a woman removing her finery.
As if apologising for an unintentional mistake, you said, ‘If you want me to, I’ll wear that bracelet for you. Would that make you happy?’
What you said surprised me. The situation was a bit sad, despite its spontaneity. Perhaps it was sadly funny: I was offering you my paternal feelings while you were offering your maternal ones. A girl who might have been my daughter was, without realising, turning into my mother!
I could have answered you then with one word that encapsulated all the contradictions of that scene and all the intense – and shy – feelings I had for you. But I said something else. ‘That would make me happy, but I’d also be happy if you wear it for your own sake.
‘You have to be aware that you’ll understand nothing of the past you’re seeking, nor the memory of a father you didn’t know, if you fail to internalise Constantine and her customs. We don’t uncover our memories by looking at a postcard, or a beautiful painting like this one, but when we wear them and live them.
‘That bracelet, for example. I instantly had an emotional relationship with it. Without my knowing it, it symbolised motherhood for me. A fact I only discovered the day I saw you wearing it. If you hadn’t, all the feelings it aroused would still be lying dormant in the labyrinth of forgetting. Do you get it now? Sometimes memory needs waking up.’
What a fool I was. Without realising, I was waking up a genie that had been sleeping for years. In febrile madness I was turning you from a young woman into a city. You listened with the wonder of a pupil, accepting my words as if in a hypnotic trance.
That day, I discovered my power to tame you and control your burning fire.
I decided that I would turn you into a city, towering, proud, authentic, deep, unassailable by dwarfs or pirates.
I sentenced you to be Constantine.
I sentenced myself to madness.
We spent more time together that day. We parted reeling psychologically, drained by the extreme emotions resulting from four hours of non-stop talking. Accompanied at times by stubborn tears or disturbing silence, we had said a lot.
Perhaps seeing you cry for the first time had made me happy. I despised people who didn’t cry. I felt they were either tyrants or hypocrites, and in either case didn’t deserve respect.
You were the woman I wanted to laugh and cry with. That was the most wonderful thing I discovered that day.
I remembered that our first date started with unplanned laughter. That day, I remembered the saying, ‘The quickest way to win a woman is to make her laugh.’ I’ve won her without trying, I thought. Now I’ve realised the stupidity of that saying. It encourages quick victory and behaviour where it doesn’t matter if the woman you made laugh to begin with cries afterwards.
I didn’t win you after a fit of laughter, but when you cried in front of me as you listened to your story that was also mine. At the moment you looked at that painting, clearly affected. Perhaps you were about to kiss me on the cheek or hug me in a moment of sudden tenderness. But you didn’t. We parted as usual with a handshake, as though fearful that a peck on the cheek might ignite the dormant volcano.
We understood each other in complicit silence. Your presence awoke my masculinity. Your perfume drove me wild and lured me towards madness. Your eyes, even when dripping sadness, disarmed me. Your voice. Ah, your voice that I loved so much. Where did you get it? What was your language? What your music?
You were my constant wonder and my certain defeat. Could you have possibly been my girl, when logically you could only be a daughter to me?
I resisted you with imaginary barriers I put between us every time, like hurdles on a racetrack. But you were a stallion bred for the challenge and to win the bet. You jumped all of them at one go with a single glance.
Your gaze would linger on me, pausing here and there, before halting at my eyes or the open neck of my shirt.
Once as you looked especially hard, you said, ‘There’s something of Zorba about you – his stature, his tan, his trimmed, unruly hair. Perhaps you’re more handsome than him, though.’
‘You could add,’ I replied, ‘his age, his craziness, his extremes, and that my heart feels something like his loneliness, his sadness, and his victories that always end in defeat.’
Surprised, you said, ‘You know all that about him! Do you like him?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘You know, he’s the man who’s had the most influence on me.’
Your admission shocked me. I thought that either you didn’t know many men or didn’t read many books. Before I could reply, you went on passionately, ‘I like his madness and his unexpected behaviour. His strange relationship with that woman. His philosophy of love and marriage, of war and religion. Even more, I li
ke the way he links his feelings with their opposite. I remember the story of the cherries – he used to love them and decided that to be cured of his craving he would eat loads of them, enough to make him sick. Afterwards he treated them like an ordinary fruit. That was his way to put an end to things that he felt were enslaving him.’
I said, ‘I don’t remember that story.’
‘Do you remember,’ you asked, ‘his dance in the midst of what he called “beautiful destruction”? It’s amazing that someone’s disappointment and tragedy can make him dance. He stood out in his defeats as well. Not all defeats are available to all. You have to have extraordinary dreams, joys and ambitions for those feelings to become their opposite in that way.’
I listened in wonder and pleasure. Instead of the ‘beautiful destruction’ that you were ardently describing rousing fears of any sado-masochistic tendencies you might have, I was taken in by the beauty of your idea. Without much thought, I said, ‘True. What you’re saying is beautiful. I didn’t know you loved Zorba so much!’
Laughing, you said, ‘I’ll make a confession. The story really disturbed me. When I read it, I felt an estatic sadness. I wanted to love a man like that, or write a novel like that, but that was impossible. So that story will haunt me until I can overcome it in one way or another.’
I said sarcastically, ‘I’d be happy, then, if you find some similarity between me and him. You might fulfil both wishes at the same time.’
You looked at me with adorable mischief and said, ‘I only want to fulfil one of them with you.’ Before I could ask which, you continued, ‘I won’t write anything about you.’
‘Oh, why not?’
‘Because I don’t want to kill you. You make me happy. We write novels to kill the people whose existence has become a burden to us. We write to get rid of them.’
The Bridges of Constantine Page 8
