Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  He was a retired soldier who was used to taking orders and carrying them out. As such, he wasn’t really qualified to play the role of Fate, and he wouldn’t understand why I might want to imitate some man who had asked a strange taxi driver to take us wherever he wanted and give Fate a chance to drive the car for us.

  After taking me down half the streets in the city thinking that I’d wanted to look at the shopfronts, he asked suddenly, ‘Where shall we go now?’

  Hoping to get him to choose a place, I said, ‘I don’t know, Uncle Ahmad. I’m a little nervous. So if there’s somewhere you like yourself, maybe you could take me there.’

  Surprised by my request, he replied, ‘I love everything in Constantine. It’s my home town.’

  Determined to corner him one way or another, I said, ‘What’s your favourite place in Constantine?’

  After a brief silence, he replied, ‘I love its bridges. No place has bridges like Constantine’s.’

  His answer came as something of a disappointment. But, determined to play by the rules of the game, I said, ‘Well, then, take me to whichever bridge you like the most.’

  The car took off again, speeding along from one bridge of illusion to another, suspended between the sky and the valleys into whose depths my slim hope of finding that man had plunged.

  He’d said he didn’t like bridges. Or maybe he’d said he didn’t like them any more. So why had I come looking for him on a bridge, of all places? Was it an exaggerated attempt on my part to be fair to Fate so that I could prove to it that my intentions were honourable and that I trusted it completely?

  Or was it because I believed that in spite of his dislike for bridges – or even because of it – I might actually find him there, since we sometimes frequent places we don’t like any more simply to justify our dislike for them? If so, this kind of behaviour would suit him to a tee!

  Actually, I didn’t believe he really disliked bridges. In spite of what he’d said, I felt he was just like that artist I’d once known, who’d been madly obsessed with them.

  He’d loved me as much as he’d loved bridges, and whenever he did a painting of one, he would insist that I was just like it.

  The fact is, I didn’t love them, nor was I like them. Rather, I loved him, and I was like his poet friend. That was all. On second thoughts, maybe it was the other way around. Maybe I was like that artist and loved his friend or, maybe I was like myself, and loved them both!

  Be that as it may, we parted. There was an excess of love in our story. There was also a kind of counter-fate at work. The poet died a Constantinian death, and the girl married in traditional Constantinian fashion.

  As for the artist, he disappeared. It was as though he’d decided to die in absentia. He could have come back on any pretext he chose, since he was a man in whose face no door ever closed. But he stayed away.

  He left the way he’d come, without a fuss, and left me a painting that hung on the reception-room wall. It depicted a hanging bridge – hanging, like our story – suspended from steel ropes.

  Before seeing that painting I hadn’t liked iron bridges, the towering types that are like questions that dangle out of answers’ reach. Now, too, when I was faced with this real bridge quite unlike the oil colours I’d grown accustomed to, I was gripped by a vague, inexplicable aversion to it.

  I asked the driver to stop, hoping to find some explanation for this feeling. It also occurred to me that I might just find that man among the scores of people going back and forth across the bridge. Sometimes it happens that life gives you the thing you most love in the very place you most hate. In fact, life has often amazed me with its unexpected logic.

  I got out of the car and went over to the bridge’s iron railing. Never before had I got such a breathtaking view of Constantine from the top of a bridge. It was a chasm filled with frightening rocky valleys, deep as deep could be, and with the approach of sunset, it looked all the eerier and more desolate.

  As people around me scurried in all directions as though they were afraid of bridges, or as though they were afraid of Constantine at night, I thought of some lines from Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’:

  Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

  Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face.

  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

  Suddenly I felt dizzy the way I always do when I’m on a bridge. My legs could hardly hold me up as I stood there, terrified, at a height of seven hundred metres trying to reclaim a man who had left, and waiting for a man who would never come.

  I was happy to see the driver get out of the car and come and stand beside me. This way I wasn’t as likely to arouse the curiosity of passersby, who would find it strange to see a government car parked along a roadside and an eccentric woman getting out to look at a bridge!

  I felt the urge to strike up a conversation with the driver, who lit a cigarette and stood looking at the bridge as though he, too, were discovering it for the first time.

  As if to justify this madness of mine, I started to chatter. I said, ‘You know, Uncle Ahmad, this is the first time we’ve ever come here. Whenever I stand on a bridge, I get dizzy. Bridges scare me.’

  In fatherly fashion he replied, ‘Don’t be afraid, child. Believers aren’t afraid of anything but God.’

  As if to reproach him for having chosen such a place, I went on, ‘I can’t imagine why you like bridges. To tell you the truth, I hate them!’

  With the logic of the simple-minded, he replied, ‘Nobody would ever hate his home town. And what would Constantine be without its bridges? Just imagine if this bridge could speak!’

  He fell silent, and I left him to his thoughts.

  I decided not to argue with him. The logic of the elderly and simple-minded has a way of robbing you of your own, so it’s better not to quarrel with them over convictions they’ve held all their lives. After all, no matter what you say, they’re too old to change their minds!

  As though he’d noticed something, he said unexpectedly, ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  Seeing how late it had got, I said, ‘That’s right. It’s nearly nightfall!’

  As he went ahead of me to the car, I cast a parting glance at the barren valleys. I’d concluded now for sure that I really did hate this bridge and that whatever curiosity I’d had about it was dead and gone, just like my hope of meeting up with this man that I’d spent over two hours searching for in vain.

  My sadness was made all the more acute by an overpowering sense of disappointment, since I’d lost the crazy bet I’d made with Fate.

  Had I arrived too early for love, or too late? Or, rather than my having been too early or too late, had Fate’s timing been right on the mark, the way Death’s is?

  I was suddenly wrenched out of my reverie by the sound of gun shots. The report shook me with such force, it was as though the bullets had gone right through me.

  I jumped. Terrified, I looked behind me. All I saw was a young man, now a few metres away from me, shooting like an arrow through the crowd and disappearing down a side street.

  I looked for Uncle Ahmad, but I didn’t see him in the car or anywhere else. I took a few steps in the other direction, and what should I find but his body sprawled on the ground, with blood oozing out of his head and his chest.

  I felt as though I was about to faint. At least, I wished I could faint so that I wouldn’t have to see anything that was happening around me.

  I saw the pool of blood spreading, and felt my voice escaping from me.

  Passersby began gathering around, and someone asked me what had happened. Others had no need to ask, since they’d either witnessed it or figured it out for themselves.

  I heard some of them uttering prayers for God’s forgiveness as they shook their heads in disapproval, cursing a government that would let armed men roam so freely, while others stood looking on in silence. As for me, I was d
umbstruck. A police car finally drove up and two officers got out and made their way through the crowd, their siren still screaming.

  All I could think of to say when they asked me what had happened was, ‘Take him to the hospital. Please!’

  Seeing that he had a bullet in his head and another in his chest, they called an ambulance even though, as one of them put it, ‘He won’t make it.’

  The officers were visibly tense. Both of them were young and clutched their pistols nervously. It was as though, now that they knew there was no hope of saving this man’s life, their sole concern was to escape from the circle of human beings gathered around them, in the midst of whom might lurk another murderer only too happy to bag a policeman.

  One of them began examining the car, and took a close look at its number plate. From this he easily concluded what rank and position its owner had occupied. He then went over to the body lying on the ground and extricated the keys from its closed fist. It was as though Uncle Ahmad had been in a hurry to open the car and whisk me away from the danger he had percieved with his military sixth sense, or as though, like a good soldier, he’d wanted to die in the line of duty, weapon in hand.

  All of a sudden this government car had become more important than the person who’d driven it for years, and making away with it more important than saving the life of a man who lay dying in a pool of blood.

  I don’t know how long it took the ambulance to get there, but as far as I could tell, it was taking its sweet time. As we waited, one of the two policemen stood near the wounded man brandishing his pistol and ordering the crowd to scatter, while the other inspected the car and its contents. When at last a military vehicle arrived, the matter was settled. I watched them hurriedly move Uncle Ahmad to a stretcher and place him in the ambulance. Meanwhile, a soldier got in the car and drove it back to the house – without me.

  Someone asked me to accompany him to the police station to make a detailed statement about the incident. I tried in vain to convince them to let me go with Uncle Ahmad in the ambulance, but they refused, saying that my presence wouldn’t be needed.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked.

  ‘To the military hospital,’ someone replied impatiently, from which I understood that the matter wasn’t open to discussion.

  As they were about to shut the ambulance door and be on their way, I had a feeling I might never see him again. I ran over to the ambulance, took his hand and started kissing it. I buried my tear-stained face in his hand as though, since I hadn’t shared in his death, I wanted to transfuse him with life. After all, I was the one who’d brought him to this place.

  At the same time, I felt as though I were kissing the hand of death, the death that was about to take him, and that was waiting out of mere politeness for me to remove my lips so that it could snatch him away.

  I heard him mumble something, though I couldn’t make out the words. I think he said something like, ‘It’s all right, child’ or maybe, ‘Don’t cry!’ But I was crying anyway, since no one could see me in that car-turned-hearse.

  A soldier was waiting impatiently for me to get out so that he could close the door. So, followed by Uncle Ahmad’s vacant stares, I had no choice but to leave. After I let go of his hand, it dangled off the edge of the stretcher, his forefinger pointing forward as though he were uttering the testimony of faith during a ritual prayer.

  As the car ejected me at the entrance to the police station, I entered a state I’d never experienced before. It was a blend of sadness, stupefaction, dread and nausea. I found myself together with a motley crowd the likes of which I’d never encountered in all my life. They were scary-looking, their faces expressionless with the exception of their intimidating gazes. Some of them were wearing ordinary clothes, while a number of bearded men clad in what appeared to be Afghani attire were wearing their beliefs on their sleeves. A man in a track suit with a shaved head had his hands bound with iron chains behind his back while another, seated, had been beaten so badly that his features were barely recognizable.

  Masked military personnel milled about the place. Resembling woollen stockings, the black masks pulled over their heads concealed everything but their eyes and their mouths, which appeared through three openings that allowed them to speak and see out without being recognized.

  What kind of a nightmare was this?

  I concluded that this miserable-looking room with its bare walls and its filthy tile floor was an indiscriminate gathering place for a criminal, a suspicious-looking student, a citizen that had shown up for who knows what reason, a newly arrested thief, and me!

  I’d ended up there because I was in love with a fictitious man, because I hated iron bridges, and because I’d wanted to make sure that I hated them as much as I thought I did. By some strange coincidence, the room was furnished entirely in iron chairs, the men sitting behind its desks were made of iron, and they were interrogating other men bound with iron chains.

  So this was the Iron Age, then, a fact I could only have discovered by putting down my notebook.

  After I’d been standing there for a few moments, a policeman noticed my anomalous presence and escorted me to a small side office where I was to wait. I was happy to have some time to myself, and to get away from those men’s curious, unfriendly stares. They betrayed a hostility I could see no justification for apart from my being a woman, and my differentness.

  Constantine is a city that watches your every move. It lies in wait for your every moment of happiness, interprets your every moment of sadness, and calls you to account for being different. So in order to survive, you have to rethink your wardrobe, your hairdo and your vocabulary and try to look as ordinary and miserable as possible, since the one thing the state will never forgive you for is being different.

  What is freedom, in the end, but your right to be different?

  Another thing I couldn’t see any justification for was the fact that I had to wait so long in that little office. It was as though I was of no concern to anyone, or as though everyone was too busy with more important matters to concern themselves with my case.

  From time to time I’d hear a young man screaming. I concluded that they must be interrogating him in their own way, which made me feel all the more pained and helpless.

  For a moment it occurred to me that they might have caught the murderer, although I didn’t think it likely, since they’d never caught a murderer that fast before.

  Suddenly a policeman came in and asked me to follow him.

  This time I was ushered into an office whose furnishings were nicer, in keeping with the rank of the officer who occupied it. Above his desk hung a picture of President Chadli Bendjedid. When I came in, the officer stood up to shake my hand and invited me to sit down.

  ‘Have you found the murderer?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he replied as he arranged some of his papers. ‘We’re counting on your testimony to help us do that.’

  I gulped.

  ‘All the details are important to us,’ he went on, ‘so try to remember everything you can.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said.

  He took out a piece of paper in preparation to write down my answers.

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘did you see the murderer?’

  ‘I was looking towards the bridge when I heard gun shots. When I turned around, I saw a young man running and disappearing down a side street.’

  ‘Do you think he was alone, or that someone was with him?’

  I answered, ‘I only saw one man running. I don’t know whether there were others with him, or waiting for him somewhere.’

  ‘Approximately how old would you say he was?’

  ‘Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, maybe.’

  ‘Could you describe him for me?’

  ‘I don’t know how to describe him, actually. I only glimpsed him from the back.’

  ‘While you and the driver were on your way to the bridge, did you notice a motorcycle or car following you?’

>   ‘I don’t know. I was looking ahead. All I know is that while we were standing on the bridge, there was heavy traffic. There were a lot of people around us and, as you might expect in that sort of situation, some of them turned and stared at us out of curiosity.’

  ‘Did you stand there for very long?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not more than around ten minutes. I remember the driver saying all of a sudden, “Come on, let’s go,” as if he’d noticed something. Then he headed for the car. I’d just started towards the car after him when he was shot.’

  ‘Do you go there regularly?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Did you inform anyone in advance that you would be going there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The maid, for example. Didn’t you tell her where you were going?’

  ‘No. As I always do, I told her I was going out, and that’s all.’

  He paused briefly, fiddling with a small piece of paper in front of him. Then he asked me, ‘And your brother? Is he aware of your comings and goings?’

  ‘My brother?’ I asked, surprised. ‘He doesn’t live with me.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  Then he continued, ‘Had you noticed any change in the driver’s behaviour of late? Any visible nervousness or anxiety?’

  ‘No. He was a calm, peaceable sort of person, and during that last outing of ours, he was his usual talkative, jovial self.’

  After jotting down some comments, he got up, shook my hand again, and said, ‘We may be in touch with you again if we need to investigate any of these details further.’

  Then he added, ‘I’ve learned that your husband is on a mission in the capital at the moment. I’ll send him word of the incident through the Ministry. Then I’ll give him a report.’

  He walked with me to the door, asking a soldier to escort me home, and we shook hands again. In a voice that wasn’t mine any more, I said, ‘Thank you.’ Then I left the world of iron for the world of bewilderment and grief.

  * * *