The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  ‘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.

  In reality, I had become convinced that there was no hope. The train was going in the opposite direction, and at a speed we could do nothing about. Nothing, except await the disastrous crash in dismay.

  I packed the suitcases of my heart and also went, without realising, in a different direction, away from the homeland.

  I furnished my exile with forgetting. I made myself a new homeland out of exile. Maybe an eternal one that I would have to get used to living in.

  I started to reconcile with things. I formed sensible relationships with the Seine, Pont Mirabeau and all the landmarks visible from that window, which I had treated as enemies for no reason.

  I chose more than one transient lover. I furnished my bed with insane pleasures, with women whom I amazed more and more as I used them to kill you more and more, until not a trace of you remained.

  This body has forgotten its longing for you. It has forgotten its passion and folly, how it went on strike against every pleasure except fantasies of you.

  I set out to strip women of their primary symbolism. Those who say ‘woman is exile’ or ‘woman is homeland’ are liars. Women have no domain beyond the body. Memory is not the path that leads to them. Today, I can state categorically that there is only one path.

  I have discovered something I must tell you now. Desire is all in the mind, the exercise of the imagination, that’s all. It’s an illusion we create at a moment of madness. We become slaves to one person whom we judge in total awe for a mysterious reason outside of logic.

  Desire born like that from the unknown may lead us back to another memory, to the scent of another perfume, a word, a face. To a crazed desire born some place outside the body, from memory or perhaps the unconscious, from mysterious things that you infiltrated one day to become the most awesome, the most desirable and all women in one.

  Do you understand why I automatically killed you when I killed Constantine inside me?

  I wasn’t surprised, then, to see your corpse laid out on my bed.

  In the end the two of you were only one woman.

  You will say, ‘Why did you write this book for me, then?’ And I will reply that I’m just borrowing your rituals for killing and that I decided to bury you in a book, that’s all.

  There are corpses we must not preserve in our hearts. Love after death also has a foul smell, especially when it takes on the aspect of a crime.

  Note that I didn’t use your name once in this book. I decided to leave you nameless. Some names don’t deserve to be mentioned.

  Let’s assume you’re a woman called Hayat, who perhaps has another name. Is your name really that important?

  Only the names of martyrs cannot be forged. It’s their right that we remember them by their full names. It’s also the right of this homeland to reveal who betrayed it and built their glory on its ruins and their wealth out of its misery, as long as nobody holds them to account.

  I know it will be rumoured that this book is yours. Let me confirm for you, madam, this rumour.

  Critics who practise criticism in compensation for other things will say that this book isn’t a novel, but the ravings of a man who knows nothing of the norms of literature.

  I confirm to them in advance my ignorance and my contempt for their norms. The only norm I have is pain. My only ambition is to amaze you and make you cry when you’ve finished reading this book.

  There are things I haven’t said to you yet.

  Read this book and burn the other books in your cupboard by half-writers, half-men, half-lovers.

  Literature is only born from wounds. Let all those who loved you rationally, without bleeding, without losing we
ight or their balance, go to hell.

  Leaf through me with some shyness, as you would leaf through an album of yellowed pictures of you as a child. As you would look through a dictionary of old words at risk of extinction and death. As you would read a clandestine pamphlet you found in your letterbox one day.

  Open your heart and read.

  Once I wanted to talk to you about Si Taher, Ziyad and others, about all you were ignorant of. But Hassan died. There’s no time left to talk about martyrs. We’re all martyrs in waiting.

  I’m sad that I haven’t given you a gazelle. ‘Gazelles are only gazelles while they live,’ wrote Malek Haddad. I have nothing left to give you today.

  You took from me all those I loved one after another, one way or another. My heart has turned into a mass grave where all those I loved are sprawled. It’s as though Mother’s grave had expanded to hold them all.

  All I am now is the gravestone for Si Taher, Ziyad and Hassan, the gravestone of memory.

  I knew a lot about the foolishness of fate, about its oppression and stubbornness when it insists on pursuing someone. But could I have imagined that something like that would happen?

  I thought I had paid enough to this fool destiny. That after this life and the years that followed the tragedy of Ziyad and the tragedy of your marriage, the time had come for me to finally find rest.

  How could fate come back and take my brother from me? My brother, whose death had no logic. He wasn’t in any Front, or on the battlefield to be shot dead like Si Taher or Ziyad.

  That day in October 1988, news of his death struck over a telephone line full of static and Atiqa’s voice choked with tears.

  She kept sobbing and saying my name as I asked her in torment, ‘What’s happened?’

  I was aware of the events that had shaken the country. The French media competed to pass on in-depth details and images with a gloating prurience. I knew that the events of the second day were still restricted to the capital. How, then, could I have expected what happened?

  Atiqa’s voice kept repeating in broken fashion, ‘They’ve killed him, Khaled. They’ve killed him.’

  My voice repeated in shock, ‘How? How have they killed him?’

  How did Hassan die? Did the question matter? His death was as foolish as his life, as naive as his dreams.

  I read all the newspapers to understand how my brother had died, between one dream and another, one fantasy and another.

  What had taken him to Algiers when he only rarely went to the capital?

  He had gone at the weekend looking for his own end.

  He’d had enough of Constantine. Her many bridges had led him nowhere.

  He had been told, ‘You’ll have strings in the capital. They’ll give you a shortcut there that the bridges here never will.’

  Hassan believed it and went to the capital to meet so-and-so through another so-and-so.

  He was destined finally to solve his problems this time, after several years of connections and interventions, and finally leave the teaching profession by moving to the capital to take up a job in the media.

  But it was fate that decided his case this time.

  Between so-and-so and so-and-so, Hassan died, a mistake by a stray bullet on the path of his dreams.

  Dreaming isn’t for all, my dear brother. You shouldn’t have dreamed.

  Is it true, as Malek Haddad said, that ‘misery knows how to choose its ingredients’? Is that why it chose me, and all these shocking disasters for me alone?

  Me, who only dreamed of giving you a gazelle.

  How could I have done that when you gave me so much destruction, so much ruin?

  An old conversation we had comes to mind.

  A conversation that went back six years to the time when you saw a similarity between me and Zorba, the man you loved most, as you put it. You had dreamed of emulating his novel or loving a man like him.

  Perhaps because you couldn’t write a novel like that, you were content to turn me into a copy of him. You made me learn, like him, to get over the things that I loved by consuming them to the point of nausea.

  You made me love beautiful destruction and learn to dance in agony like a freshly slaughtered chicken.

  Here were the beautiful ruins, which you had once told me about with a zeal that didn’t arouse my suspicions. You had said, ‘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.’

  My lady, if only you knew!

  How grand my dreams; how horrific the destruction that the television stations raced to air!

  Such horrific destruction. How sad my brother’s dead body on the pavement, hit by a random bullet.

  How sad his body, as it waited in the morgue refrigerator for me to identify and then accompany to Constantine.

  Once again Constantine. The tyrannical mother lying in wait for her children, sworn to bring us back to her, even as corpses. She has defeated us, brought us both back to her. At the very moment we believed we had got over her and cut the tie of kinship.

  Hassan would not leave her for the capital. I would not run away from her again.

  We would go back to her together. One of us in a coffin, the other, the remains of a man.

  You have given your judgement, rock, mother of rock.

  Open your tombs and wait for me. I’m coming to you with my brother. Give him a small space next to your holy saints, your martyrs and your beys. Hassan was all of that in his own way.

  He was a gazelle.

  While waiting, come, madam, and see all this beautiful destruction!

  Soon, Zorba will appear to take hold of my shoulder for us to start dancing.

  Come here. You mustn’t miss this scene. You’ll see how prophets dance when truly bankrupt.

  Come here. I’ll dance today like I never have before, like I longed to dance at your wedding but didn’t. I’ll leap as though my feet have grown wings and my missing arm has grown back again.

  Come here. May my father forgive me for never joining him at the Aissawi rites. At sessions where he would sway and dance madly and plunge that skewer right through his body in the ecstasy of pain that transcends pleasure.

  Grief has many rituals and pain has no particular homeland. May the prophets and the holy saints forgive me. May they all forgive me. I don’t know exactly what prophets do when they grieve, what they do in the age of apostasy. Do they cry or pray?

  I decided to dance. Dance also reached out, was also a form of worship.

  Look, Almighty, with one arm I dance for You. How difficult it is to dance with one arm, my Lord. How horrific it is to dance with one arm, my Lord.

  But You will forgive me, You who took away my other arm.

  You will forgive me, You who took all of them away.

  You will forgive me, because You will take me, too!

  Was the believer really afflicted? Or was that saying created just to teach us patience. To market us delight in a certificate of piety instead of our afflictions?

  So be it.

  Thank you, Almighty, You who alone are praised even in affliction. You who only bestow Your affliction on Your faithful and righteous worshippers.

  I confess I never expected such a certificate of good behaviour.

  I emptied of you, my lady, and filled with a Greek melody.

  Zorba’s music came over me as an invitation to utter madness.

  It came from a cassette I was used to hearing with strange pleasure. Coming in the midst of ruin and corpses, now the melody assumed its true, original aspect.

  The music hit, and I leapt up from my seat and shouted, like in the novel, ‘Come on, Zorba, teach me to dance.’

  This was the beautiful destruction that you had made me desire. I didn’t think it would be so horrific, so painful.

  Theodorakis’ music stole towards me.
It penetrated me note by note, wound by wound.

  Slowly. Then fast, like a storm of tears.

  Shyly. Then bold, like a moment of hope.

  Sadly. Then ecstatic, like the musings of a poet over a drink.

  Hesitant. Then certain, like the march of soldiers.

  I surrendered to it and danced like a madman in a vast room furnished with paintings and bridges.

  I stopped in the middle of the room, as if on the towering cliffs, to dance in the midst of ruin while the five bridges of Constantine shattered in front of me and rolled like rocks towards the valleys.

  Yes, Zorba! The woman I loved and who loved you got married. I wanted to make her a copy of me, but she made me a copy of you.

  Ziyad died, that friend who bought this tape, perhaps because he, too, loved you for her sake, or perhaps because he anticipated a day like this for me, and prepared for me, in his way, all the details of my sadness to come. Perhaps it was her gift to him, which I’ve inherited among all the grief.

  Hassan has died, my brother who cared little for the Greeks or their gods.

  He had but one God and a few old albums.

  He died and only loved Fergani, Umm Kalthoum and the voice of Abdel Baset Abdel Samad.

  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.’