The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Had I forgotten Bilal Hussein?

  Here was Kidya prison.

  I contemplated it as one contemplates the walls of a prison that one is entering for the first time, like entering a nightmare unprepared.

  Many years passed before I entered a different prison. That time, however, the executioners were Algerians. That prison had no known address for Mother’s ghost to locate and visit me, as she had done here before, when she cried and pleaded with every guard.

  Here was Kidya prison, which held more than one revolutionary from more than one revolution and so many painful and other extraordinary stories. In 1955, exactly ten years after the events of 8 May 1945, the prison came to the fore with a new batch of exceptional prisoners for whom France had prepared an exceptional punishment. In cell number eight, death row, thirty leaders of the Revolution awaited the certainty of execution. They included Mustafa Ben Boulaïd, Taher el-Zubeiri, Mohamed Lafia, Brahim Tayeb, the comrade of Didouche Mourad, Baji Mukhtar and others.

  All the preparations were in place for their death. Even the barber to the criminal inmates told the martyr Commander Mustafa Ben Boulaïd in the morning that they had washed the guillotine the previous night, and that he had dreamed they had been ‘executed’. The word held a double meaning for Mustafa Ben Boulaïd, who had long been planning an escape from Kidya. Days before he had started digging a tunnel with his comrades, which had reached an enclosed courtyard inside the prison. They resumed digging with the aim of breaking out.

  On 10 November 1955, after the sunset prayer, between seven and eight o’clock to be precise, Mustafa Ben Boulaïd and ten of his comrades escaped. They pulled off the most spectacular escape from a cell that no one else left that day unless it was for the guillotine.

  Afterwards, Commander Mustafa Ben Boulaïd and some of those who escaped with him fell as martyrs in other battles no less heroic than their escape. Algerian history books have given a prominent place to their deaths, and major streets and facilities are named after them. Those who remained behind in the cell were unable to escape execution. Today only two of the eleven prisoners who escaped from Kidya are still alive. Twenty-eight of the men brought together by cell number eight have died.

  The whole time I stood in front of the prison’s high walls, my memory was scattered, darting between faces, names and executioners. I longed to open the gates of other prisons that, in the absence of a single writer willing to repay the debt of those who had been through them, were still guarding their secrets.

  Once I was envious of the comrade with whom I shared a cell for a few weeks.

  Then, Yacine and I were the youngest political detainees. He was only sixteen years old and might have been a few months younger than me. Although I was released due to my age, they refused to let Yacine go, and he remained in Kidya prison for fourteen months. He dreamed of freedom and of an unattainable woman ten years his senior called Nedjma.

  I went back to school after six months in prison, but a few years later Yacine wrote his masterpiece, Nedjma. The idea of that tragic novel was born in the long night there, in pangs of bitterness and disappointment and in great nationalist dreams.

  Yacine was always amazing, full of rejection and the urge to provoke and confront. His belligerence spread from one prisoner to another. We would listen to him, unaware at the time that we were before Algeria’s Lorca and witnessing the birth of a poet who would one day become the greatest talent produced by this country.

  A few years passed before I met Kateb Yacine in his other forced exile in Tunis. With joy and no little astonishment I discovered that he had not changed. He still talked with the same intensity and aggression, declaring war on all those whose hint of submission to France, or any other country, he sniffed out. He was allergic to polished betrayal and some people’s instinctive willingness to comply.

  That day he was giving a lecture in a large auditorium in Tunis. He suddenly launched an attack on Arab politicians, the Tunisian authorities in particular. No one could shut him up that day. He carried on speaking and swearing even after the microphone and the lights were turned off and the audience was forced to leave.

  That day, in a police interview, I paid the price for being in the front row and for my shouts of ‘Long live Yacine!’ Nobody paid attention to the faces of those applauding, but someone with an interest spotted my one arm raised aloft in support and admiration.

  I learned then the other side of having one arm: you were destined to reject and oppose because in no circumstances could you clap!

  I embraced him afterwards and said, ‘Yacine, if I have a son I’ll call him Yacine.’ I felt a surge of energy and pleasure, as though telling him the most beautiful thing that could be said to a friend or writer. Yacine laughed as he patted my shoulder nervously, as was his habit when an admission embarrassed him. He said in French, ‘You haven’t changed either. You’re still crazy!’ We laughed and parted for yet more years.

  Perhaps I wanted to be faithful to our common memories, or just wanted to compensate for my complex regarding Nedjma, the novel I’d never write, but which I felt in some way was also my story. A story with my dreams and disappointments, with the face of Mother on the verge of despair, running between the prison and the saints, offering sacrifices to Sidi Mohamed of the Crow and bribes to the Jewish prison guard who was our neighbour. She even brought me a food parcel from time to time, which she had made specially. Mother, whom I barely recognised when I left prison six months later. My father’s indifference to her and me, busy as he was with his business and his mistresses, made her only ask God for my return to her. It was as if I was the only thing that could justify her existence and the only witness to the motherhood and femininity that had been stolen from her.

  Yes, in the end we were a generation with one story combining the madness of mothers who loved too much, the betrayal of fathers who were too cruel, make-believe love stories and emotional frustrations. Some of us turned them into world literary masterpieces, others were turned into mental patients.

  Writing this book is perhaps only an attempt to escape being branded a lunatic and be deemed a writer.

  Ah, Yacine, how the world has changed since that meeting and that farewell.

  You ended your novel by having the hero say, ‘Goodbye then, my comrades. What an unbelievable youth we lived!’

  You didn’t expect then that our later lives would be far stranger than our youthful years.

  Tomorrow would be your wedding, then.

  It was useless trying to forget it by walking the streets of Constantine. Each alleyway and memory led on to another.

  Didn’t you say you were mine as long as we remained in this city? So, where were you now? In which alleyway in a city whose streets and lanes were as entangled as your heart? They reminded me of your constant absence and presence and were bewilderingly like you.

  You were not mine. I knew they were readying you that minute for your coming night of love. They were grooming your body for a man other than me. I picked at my wound to forget what was happening there.

  Your day had been full, like the day of a bride; my day had been as empty as a retired civil servant’s.

  We had each gone our separate ways a long time ago. Our schedules clashed. One was for happiness and one for sadness. How could I forget that?

  All the paths led back to you, even the one I took for the sake of forgetting and where you accosted me. There in all the old schools and kuttabs, all the minarets, all the brothels, all the prisons and all the cafés. There, too, in all the bath houses where the women would emerge ready to make love, and in all the shop windows displaying jewellery and wedding dresses. I even took a taxi to the cemetery and hunted for Mother’s grave. I sought help from the attendant’s ledgers to find the numbers of the passageways leading there, but I still only reached you.

  Why did my feet carry me to Mother on the eve of your wedding? Did I simply go to visit her, or to bury beside her another woman whom I imagined was my mother?
/>
  Her marble grave was plain like her, cold like her fate and layered in dust like my heart. I stood immobile next to it, and the tears I had hidden from her over the chill years of disappointment set solid.

  This had been my mother. Now, a thin piece of ground and a marble headstone concealed all the treasures I ever owned: her ample maternal bosom, her smell, her hennaed strands of hair, her figure, her laughter, her sadness, her constant injunction, ‘Take care, Khaled, my son.’

  I compensated for Mother with myriad other women and never grew up. I compensated for her bosom with a thousand more beautiful, but was never satisfied. I compensated for her love with more than one affair, but was never cured. She had a fragrance that could not be equalled. She was a painting that could not be copied or forged.

  Why at a moment of madness did I imagine you were an authentic copy of her? Why did I demand from you things you did not understand and a role you were not up to?

  The marble slab next to me was more merciful than you. If I cried now, it would burst into tears too. If I rested my head on its cold stone, enough warmth would rise from below to console me. If I called to it, ‘Mother!’ the dust would answer in pain, ‘What’s wrong, my darling?’

  I was afraid that even the dust of Mother’s grave suffered, since her life had been nothing more than a succession of tradgedies. I was afraid for her even after she died from pain, and tried to hide my severed arm whenever I visited.

  What if the dead had eyes? What if the grave didn’t mean repose? What a lot I would have to tell her to explain all that had happened to me.

  I didn’t cry then, as I stood before her after all that lifetime. We always cry later. I just ran my hand over the marble, as though trying to wipe away the dust of the years and apologise for all the neglect. Then I raised my one hand in prayer and recited the Fatiha over the grave. At the time the scene struck me as surreal. My one hand open as I recited the Fatiha seemed to be asking for mercy rather than giving it.

  I sighed, hid my hand in my jacket pocket and headed out of the city of dust and marble.

  In their anticipation and ceaseless preparations for the wedding and their excitement at meeting all the important people who would attend, Hassan and his wife at times seemed like children talking about the circus coming to town. A town neither the circus nor clowns had ever visited before. Because of that, I took pity and forgave them.

  Constantine, in the end, was a city where nothing happened except weddings. I left them happily awaiting their circus, and kept my disappointment to myself.

  Everything about that day was exceptional. I knew the programme in advance from the talk of the night before. Hassan would go and get ready in the morning, then pray the noon prayer at the mosque. After that he would come by with Nasser for us all to go together to the wedding. Atiqa would probably have taken the children and gone in the morning to accompany the bride to the hairdresser. Then she would stay behind with other women to serve the guests and set the tables.

  I felt like staying in bed that morning and not leaving it before noon, perhaps because of the previous night’s exertions or in preparation for a late night and other exertions awaiting me that day. Or perhaps just because I no longer had any idea where to go, after having spent a week getting lost in a city that had ambushed my memory in every street. Streets where you lay hidden around every corner.

  After a little thought, I found that bed was the only place I could escape you, or at least meet you in pleasure rather than pain. Even so, would I really be bold enough to make you present today, at the very time I knew you were making yourself beautiful for another man? Would I be bold enough to make you present that morning? Would my body truly forgive you, on a whim, for all past and future disappointments? That was madness upon madness!

  But in the end wasn’t that what you wanted when you said, ‘I’ll be yours that night’?

  I felt like having you that morning. As though I wanted to steal everything from you before I lost you for good. After that day you would never be mine. The stupid painful game, which was never a hobby prior to you, would come to an end.

  My encounter with you that morning was painful. Full of ferocity and dark bitterness. Full of resentment and crazed longing.

  If only you had been mine. Ah, if only you had been mine that morning. In that large bed, empty and cold without you. In that spacious house haunted by memories of a severed childhood and the suppressed longings of a youth that had quickly passed.

  If you were mine, I would have you like I’d never had a woman here. In a moment of madness, I would squeeze you with my one hand. I would turn you into pieces, into raw materials, into the remnants of a woman, a paste fit to mould into a woman, into anything other than you, anything less arrogant and wilful, less tyrannical and oppressive.

  I, who had never raised my hand to a woman’s face, might have hit you that day till it hurt and then made love to you till it hurt. Then I would have sat next to your body begging its forgiveness. I would kiss every part of you, effacing with my lips the redness of your hennaed limbs and tattooing you with savage kisses. Perhaps when you awoke you would find me tattooed on your body, in that blue colour only ever found on the skin!

  Where did all that madness come from? Did I want to be alone with you and have you before him? Or did I know, by intuition or prior decision, that in spending the last shudders of my desire with you, I would cast you out of this bed for ever?

  My problem with you wasn’t simply desire. If it had been, I would have resolved it that day one way or another. There were plenty of women that a man could easily have. There were plenty of half-open doors waiting for a man to push. There were female neighbours who crossed my path in those shared Arab houses, and whose secret desire for love I well knew. Over time I had learned how to read the looks of coy women, with their excessive decorum and polite words. But I would ignore the looks and their wordless invitation to stray.

  Today, I no longer know whether I behaved like that on principle or out of stupidity and a sense of nausea. In truth, I felt pity for them. I despised their husbands who had no justification for strutting like peacocks. Except that they had a plump hen at home, whom probably no one would touch in disgust. Or another, tastier one, domesticated according to tradition, whose master wouldn’t expect that her short wings still flapped instinctively.

  The idiocy of cocks! If all the women were chaste and all the men guarded their honour, who were they all fooling around with, then? Didn’t all the men boast of their conquests when they got together? Didn’t each of them make a fool of the others while not realising they were making a fool out of themselves? I really hated the atmosphere of hypocrisy and inherited corruption.

  If my gaze should catch a woman’s, I would recall something you once said. It was when I expressed my astonishment at the contents of your first novel and started interrogating you for a suspicious memory. You said, ‘Don’t look too hard. There’s nothing between the lines. A woman writer is beyond suspicion because she is open by nature. Writing cleanses all that has stuck to us since birth. Look for dirt somewhere other than literature!’

  Inherited corruption was everywhere around me, in the eyes of most of the women, who craved a man – any man. It was in the nerves of men who were taut with accumulated desire and ready to snap in the face of the first woman.

  But I had to resist my animal desire that day, and not let that city draw me to the depths. There were principles I couldn’t renounce, like having an affair with a married woman. Perhaps that explained my recent sadness. For I knew that that day another reason had been added to all the others that made our relationship impossible. You would never be mine after that day.

  My right hand didn’t shame me that day. I felt a sense of relief as I discovered that, despite all that had happened, I still respected my body. What mattered in these situations was not to lose respect for the body and give it up to the first tramp. What could we inhabit afterwards if we were to humiliate it and it refused t
o forget?

  I suddenly threw off the covers and went over to the window. I opened it as if to let your ghost out for ever and let light enter the room.

  In a city haunted by magicians and jinn, perhaps you were a jinn who would creep in to bed with me in the dark and tell me tall tales, promising me a host of magical solutions to my tragedies. Then you would disappear with the first rays of the sun, leaving me to my obsessions and doubts.

  Did your ghost really leave my bed, my room and my memory that day? Did it escape out of the window? I don’t know.

  All I know is that Constantine came in through the same window that I rarely opened. The call to prayer from many minarets all at once startled me. I was rooted to the spot as people rushed in every direction. The Sidi Rachid bridge also seemed absorbed in its constant motion, like a woman getting ready for some event, caught up in its daily worries and weekend enthusiasm.

  That morning in particular, the bridge seemed too busy for my sadness, which I felt amounted to betrayal and ingratitude. In my turn, I decided not to flatter it and closed the window in its face.

  All of a sudden, I was struck by an overwhelming desire to paint, a raging hunger for colour that almost matched the violence and intensity of my earlier sexual desire.

  I no longer needed a woman. My body had been healed and the ache had moved to my fingertips. Ultimately, the bed wasn’t my pleasure ground or the arena for the rituals of my madness. Only the white space stretched between wooden runners would allow me to empty myself out. I wanted to pour my curse on to it, spit out the bitterness of a lifetime of disappointments.

  I emptied out a memory that had developed a penchant for black since I aligned myself with a city that had foolishly been wrapping herself in blackness for centuries and that, in contradiction, had been hiding her face under a white triangular scarf of seduction.