How would I know who killed Ziyad? Was it at the hands of criminal ‘comrades’ or the criminal enemy? Didn’t he say, ‘They’ve turned the cause into “causes” so they can murder us without calling it a crime’?
Which bullet killed Ziyad when the prime of Palestinian youth was being killed by Palestinian or Arab bullets?
That evening my hand shook as I opened the catches on the suitcase. Something made me remember I only had one arm. The case wasn’t locked with a key or padlocks. It was as though he intended to leave it to me half open like someone leaving a door ajar as a silent invitation to enter. I relaxed a little at this gesture, the prior or belated permission Ziyad had given me to enter his private world without feeling ashamed. Perhaps he had done so because he hated broken locks and doors forced open as much as he hated informers and jackboots.
Or because he had anticipated a day like this.
All these suppositions did not stop a shiver going through me and another thought crossing my mind. He had known in advance that he was going to die, and this suitcase was readied for me from the outset. I could have opened it months before. From the moment he left the apartment, it no longer existed for him. It was his way of severing the roots of memory, as usual.
I lifted up the top of the suitcase, after putting it on the edge of the bed, and took a first look at what was inside. Death and life assailed me equally as I saw his clothes and touched his grey woollen sweaters and the black leather jacket he always wore. I had proof of his presence, proof of his absence, proof of his death and proof of his life. The scent of life and of death breathed equally strongly from the corners of the suitcase.
Here I was before his remains, with him and without him.
An item of clothing, another. The external jacket of a human book. A cloth front to a house of glass. The house broke and the front remained, memory folded into a suitcase. Why had he left me his exterior? Among the clothes was a sky-blue silk shirt still unopened in its clear glossy wrapper. I easily deduced this had been a present from you.
Then three cassette tapes, one of Theodorakis, the others excerpts of classical music. I put them to one side as I remembered that Ziyad, whenever he went, left me cassettes, books and clothes – and a love in suspension.
But this was the first time he had left things packed in a suitcase, favourite objects carefully arranged. It was as though he had packed it with all the things he loved in preparation for a journey. The things he might want wherever he was going: his favourite black jacket and the music of Theodorakis.
My hand came across your novel at the bottom of the case. I trembled, and my hand shook and paused some moments before picking up the book. I sat down on the edge of the bed before opening it. It was as though I were opening a letter bomb. I flicked through the book as though I didn’t know it. Then I remembered something. I raced to the front page in search of a dedication. But there was only a blank page, not one word, no signature or inscription. I felt a wave of sadness that paralysed my hand and a vague urge to cry.
To which one of us did you dedicate your false version, when both of us had an unsigned copy? Which of us did you make imagine that he inhabited the book’s inside pages – like your heart – and had no need for a dedication?
Had Ziyad believed you? Did he, too, believe you to the extent that he decided to take this novel with him to reread wherever he went? This blank page was enough to condemn you. Its unwritten words spoke more eloquently than anything you could have written. Did it matter after this that I didn’t find a letter to you in the suitcase?
You were a woman expert in invisible ink, and only I knew it.
Apart from your novel, I only found a medium-sized black diary, nestled at the bottom of the case like a secret. As soon as I picked it up, the carte orange Ziyad had used on the Métro fell out along with a newspaper cutting from October, the month he had left. I took a quick look at the ticket, but was only thinking about reading the diary. His photo stopped me, however. Photos of the dead are disturbing; photos of martyrs more so. Always a source of pain, martyrs suddenly become sadder and more mysterious in their photographs.
As enigmas, they become suddenly more beautiful while we become more horrified. We’re suddenly afraid to stare at them. We’re suddenly worried about our photographs to come!
My, he was handsome, that man. A concealed, ambiguous handsomeness. Even in a quick snapshot taken in less than three minutes for less than five francs he could appear special. Even after his death he could be attractive with that vague, ironic melancholy. It was though he was making fun in advance of a moment just like this.
I understood once again that you loved him. But I loved him before you in another way, the way we love a person we admire and wish to emulate for one reason or another. We meet them, go out with them and are seen with them as much as possible, as though, deep down, we believe that their beauty, mad passion and talent, all their brilliant features, might be transmitted to us by proximity.
What a ridiculous idea! I only discovered that it was the root of my disaster too late. That was when I read the wonderful words of a French writer (and painter): ‘Do not seek beauty, because once you find it, you will have disfigured yourself!’ I made exactly that stupid mistake.
I put his ticket and photograph back into the case and started turning over the diary.
I felt it contained something that would surprise me, that might disturb my mood and open the door to unseasonal gales. What, I wondered, did he write in it? I knew that truth was always born small and felt that the truth here was as small as this fearful pocketbook. I looked for a cigarette to light and lay down on the bed to leaf through the diary at leisure.
The pages came filled with stanzas of poetry scattered among the dates. There were notes in the margins and other, long poems that might take up two or three pages or brief jottings of a few lines always written in red in the middle of a page. It seemed he had wished to make these stand out from the rest of what he’d written. Perhaps because they weren’t poetry, perhaps because they were more important than poetry.
Where should I have begun this diary? Where was the entrance to Ziyad’s secret labyrinth, which I had always dreamed of sneaking into on the chance of finding you?
A title would stop me and I would start reading a poem. I would try and solve the clues and locate you, sometimes in the symbolism and sometimes in the most confessional details. But I couldn’t wait, and rushed to another page in search of other proofs and further explanation, for words to tell me what had happened in black and white.
I was, in fact, so worked up and so full of extreme, clashing feelings that I could barely think. I was unable to distinguish between what I read and what I imagined I was reading.
At that moment, the vision of the suitcase open before me, its strewn contents and the small black diary that I was holding made me ashamed of myself. It was as if in opening it I were performing an autopsy on Ziyad’s corpse, its remains strewn on my bed, in order to extract this notebook, which was nothing less than his heart.
Ziyad’s heart, which had once throbbed for you and which that day, even after his death, continued to beat in my hands to the rhythm of words fraught with loss and fear, sadness and lust.
Over my body run your lips
They only ran blades over me
Set me on fire, woman of flame
Love will bring us close one day
Death will part us one day
A handful of dust will judge us
Desire for the body will bring us close
Then one day
A wound the size of the body will part us
I was one in you
Woman of dust and marble
I watered you, then I cried and said:
Princess of my desire
Princess of my death
Come near!
I read this passage so many times, with new feelings and new doubts every time. I asked myself with the impotence of an amateur poet, where did imag
ination end and reality begin? Where was the line between the symbolic and the real?
Each phrase cancelled out the one before. The woman’s body so fused with the earth that it was impossible to separate or distinguish them.
Yet the reality of the words’ blatant desire was unmistakeable. ‘Over my body run your lips – Set me on fire, woman of flame – Desire for the body will bring us close – I was one in you.’
Was revolution nothing but a mess of words that Ziyad used to exonerate himself? He preferred defeat at the hands of death to defeat at the hands of a woman. It was a matter of pride and self-deception. ‘Princess of my death/Come near.’
Death did come at last. Did you perhaps come that day?
Was he really alone with you? Did you run your lips over his body? Did you set him on fire? Was he one in you? Did . . .?
Most likely, it did happen. The date of that poem matched the date of my trip to Spain.
My heart started to overflow with a strange emotion, nothing to do with jealousy. We can’t be jealous of the dead. Still, in cases like this we can’t change the taste of bitterness.
My eyes were arrested by the colour red. Should I have stopped their tears when they read:
Not much is left of life.
You standing at the crossing of opposites.
I know
you will be my final sin.
I ask you
till when will I be your first sin.
You have space for more than one beginning
and all endings are short.
Now I am ending in you.
Who will give a life fit for multiple endings!
Some of the words made me stop in my tracks.
The red ink suddenly turned the colour of blood, a blush of crimson sweeping over the page in the colour of ‘your first sin’.
I quickly shut the diary, as if afraid that if I kept looking I might catch you in an unforeseen position.
Something that Ziyad had said long, long before came back. ‘I have a great deal of respect for Adam,’ he had said, ‘because when he decided to taste the apple, a bite wasn’t enough. He ate the whole thing. Perhaps he knew that there are no half-sins and half-pleasures. That’s why there isn’t a third place between heaven and hell. To avoid any miscalculation, we have to enter one of them on merit!’
At the time I admired Ziyad’s philosophy of life. What was it that hurt me that day about the ideas we shared? Perhaps because he stole his apple from my secret garden or because he took a bite in front of me with the appetite of someone who, having made up his mind, had relaxed.
Trees can also only
make love standing up.
Palm tree of my desire, stand up!
I alone mourned the forests
they burned down
to force the trees to kneel.
Trees die standing.
Come and stand with me.
In you, I want to send my manhood
off to its final resting place.
I suddenly began to feel that opening the diary had been a stupid move, and started to regret it. My personal interpretations of every word had exhausted me. Despite everything, I didn’t want to hate Ziyad, and couldn’t. Death had given him immunity from my hatred and jealousy. I was insignificant compared to him and his death.
I had nothing to condemn him with except words open to interpretation. Why should I insist on the worst and stalk him with all these suspicions? I knew he was a poet who specialised in the violation of language, in revenge at a world not created to his specification, perhaps even created at his expense. Could I shoot him for words?
He had been born standing and shared the fate of trees. Should I blame him for the way he died – and the way he loved?
Now I remember that when I met him he had stood upright. I remember that day he came to my office for the first time, and I made some remarks about his poetry collection and asked him to cut some poems. I remember his silence, and his gaze lingering on my amputated arm. Then he said what went on to change the course of my life: ‘Sir, my poems do not undergo amputation. Give me back my book. I’ll publish it in Beirut.’
Why had I accepted his insult that day without responding? Why hadn’t I slapped him with my other, unamputated hand and flung his manuscript at him? Was it because I respected his tree-like courage and individuality at a time when pens bent like wheat to any rustle of breeze?
I met Ziyad standing tall, and standing tall he left; a manuscript in front of me like the first time, but this time without comment. Since the beginning we had shared the complicity of the forest, and now its silence.
All of a sudden the traces of a previous profession stirred within me. I started turning the pages of the diary, counting and examining them with a publisher’s eye. A sudden enthusiasm obscured my other feelings, and a crazy idea took hold. I would publish these writings in a poetry collection that I might call Trees or Drafts from a Man who Loved You, or some other title I might stumble across. What mattered was that Ziyad’s last thoughts be published, that I grant them another life, without summer. Poets would always take their revenge on fate, which pursues them as summer pursues butterflies. They are transformed into poetry, and who can kill words?
Ziyad’s diary rescued me from despair without my realising.
It gave me plans for days without plans. I spent hours copying out poems, hunting for another title or trying to arrange the chaos of these scattered thoughts and stanzas into a form suitable for publication.
I felt a mix of pleasure and bitterness. The pleasure of aligning with the butterflies and giving life to words that I alone had the right to bury alive in the diary or grant eternity in a book. The bitterness of delving into the papers of a dead poet, of exploring the blood in his veins, the beat of his heart, his sadness and his ecstasy, of entering his secret locked world without permission or licence from him, of selecting, adding and erasing on his behalf.
Did I really have such authority? Who could claim, for some reason, to have been given such a task? But would anyone dare to condemn the words of others to death and decide to appropriate them for himself?
Deep inside I knew that if the death of a poet or writer had an extra hint of sadness that distinguished it from the deaths of others, it might have been because when they died, they, like all creative people, left chapter headings, the headings for dreams and unfinished drafts on their desks. That was why their deaths shamed us as much as it grieved us. Ordinary people carried their dreams, worries and feelings on the surface. They put them on every day with their smiles and depression, their laughter and stories, and their secrets died with them.
To begin with, I was ashamed of Ziyad’s secret, before it induced me to confess that his writings had created within me an irresistible desire to write. A desire that increased when I felt his words did not reach my depths and fell short of my pain. Perhaps this was because he had been ignorant of the other half of the story, the part only I knew.
When was the idea of this book born? Perhaps during the period I spent besieged by Ziyad’s poetic testament, that unexpected reunion with literature and manuscripts, lost to me since I had lost my job in Algeria years before. Or was it during my other unexpected reunion, with a city? Belatedly, fate itself made that appointment.
Could I possibly find myself face to face with Constantine without advance warning, without floods of longing, madness and disappointment bursting inside me? The words swept me along to where I am!
Chapter Five
I still remember that incredible Saturday when the telephone rang at evening-news time. Si Sharif was on the line. His warmth and excitement delighted me to begin with, breaking the monotony of my nightly silence and loneliness.
His voice itself signified a celebration: it was my only link with you after all avenues had been blocked. I took it as a good sign, always bearing the possibility of a chance meeting with you. But this time it brought more than that.
First, Si Sharif apologised for not
being in touch since our last evening together. He had been very busy dealing with the non-stop flow of official visitors to Paris. He then added, ‘All that time, though, I haven’t forgotten you. I hung your painting in the living room and now I share the house with you. You know that your gesture has left a big impression on me and made people envy me. I keep having to explain that we’ve been friends since childhood.’
I was listening to him, but my heart foolishly raced ahead to you. Knowing that the conversation originated in the house where you were was sufficient to unleash all the emotions and folly of a new lover. His voice brought me back to reality when he asked, ‘Do you know why I’m calling you tonight? I’ve decided to take you with me to Constantine. You gave me a painting of Constantine, and I shall give you a trip to her.’
I exclaimed, ‘Constantine! Why Constantine?’
As if breaking good news, he said, ‘To attend the wedding of my brother Si Taher’s daughter.’ After a little thought he added, ‘Perhaps you remember her. She was at the opening of your exhibition with my daughter Nadia.’
I suddenly felt that my voice had separated from my body and was unable to utter a single word. Could words strike like lightning? At a word, could the body lose its ability to grip the telephone? At such moments I would suddenly remember that I had only one arm. I dragged a chair over with my foot and sat down.
Perhaps Si Sharif noticed my silence and that something had happened. He cut short my shock by saying, ‘My brother, what are you worried about? Only a few days ago your name came up at a meeting with a few friends in the security service. They assured me that there were no instructions concerning you and that you could visit Algeria whenever you wanted. Things have changed a lot since you came here. You must go back to Algeria, even if only for a flying visit. I’ll be responsible for making sure you come back. You’ll travel with me and at my expense. What have you got to be so worried about?’
Looking for a way out of my anxiety, I answered, ‘To be honest, I’m not mentally up to such a trip yet. I’d prefer it to be in other circumstances.’
The Bridges of Constantine Page 18