‘You’ll never find better conditions than these for going back,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that if I don’t take you in hand this time, it’ll be years before you go back. Are you going to spend your life painting Constantine? Plus won’t you be happy to attend the wedding of Si Taher’s daughter? She’s your daughter, too. You knew her as a child and you have to attend her wedding to give your blessings. Do it for her father’s sake. You have to stand by me that day in Si Taher’s place.’
Si Sharif knew that Si Taher was my weak point. He went and played on the loyalty I still owed to our shared past and memory. The situation was quite surreal, quite absurd. I was straddling the divide between reason and madness, between laughter and tears.
‘You knew her as a child.’ – No, my friend! I also knew her as a woman, that’s the problem. ‘She’s your daughter, too.’ – No, she wasn’t my daughter, she only might have been, but she might have been my lover, too. She might have been my wife. She might have been mine.
I asked him, ‘Whose will she be?’
‘I’ve given her to Si — —,’ he said. ‘You were at the party with him last time. I don’t know what you think of him. But I think he’s a good man despite what they say about him.’
His last sentence contained an answer in advance to the response he anticipated.
None less than Si — —, then! ‘A good man’. Was being good really his distinguishing feature? In that case, I knew more than one good man who could have become her husband. But Si — — was more than that. He was the man of secret deals and front companies. A man of hard currency and hard missions. He was the junta’s man, the man of the future. After that, did it matter if he was good or not?
More than one lump in my throat stopped me from really expressing my opinion about him, and from asking Si Sharif one question only: whether he thought a man without morals was capable of being good. Or maybe I shut up because I was no longer making any great distinction between him and his ‘in-law’. I asked myself a different question: Could a person related by marriage to a corrupt man really be clean?
I suddenly lost the desire to talk. The successive shocks within one conversation had made me mute. I summed it all up in one sentence, open to interpretation. ‘All things are blessed.’
Si Sharif gave the traditional response. ‘God bless you.’ Then he added in delight, as if he had passed an exam, ‘So, we’ll be seeing you. We’re counting on you. We’ll be travelling in about ten days’ time and the wedding’s on the fifteenth of July. Call me on the phone to fix the details.’
The conversation ended and a new phase of my life began. My other life began that day when it was made official that you would leave it. But had you truly left? I felt I was the only player at the board. All the squares were the same colour, and all the pieces had merged into one piece that I was holding – in one hand. Was I the sole winner or loser, and how could I tell? The board, along with room for hope and anticipation, had shrunk. Fate, the player we all stood in for from the beginning, was setting the rules.
Sometimes I did resent fate, but I often submitted without resistance. I took a strange pleasure in always wanting to know just how foolish fate could be. I was curious as to how unfair life could be. After all, life was a whore that only gave herself to those of suspect behaviour who got rich quick and took her in a hurry.
At the time, comparing myself with others’ inadequacy was a rare pleasure. My personal defeats were proof of other triumphs that were not available to all. Perhaps in a moment of derangement like that I accepted the idea of attending your wedding. I would witness my own funeral and the depths to which some people would stoop without the slightest shame. Alternatively, perhaps like all creative people, I was a supreme masochist. Given the absence of absolute bliss, I would insist on living in absolute sadness. To get over you, I would take self-abuse to the point of branding my own heart.
I hated you that day with a fierceness I had not experienced before. My emotions flipped in an instant into something new, mixing bitterness, jealousy and revulsion, and perhaps resentment too.
How did you get to this place? Do women, like nations, really go weak before a man in uniform, even if faded? Even today I’m still asking how I agreed to go to Constantine for your wedding. I already knew that inviting me wasn’t simply a pleasant gesture of affection and friendship on the part of a man I was close to in more ways than one.
Before everything else, it was exploitation of memory and misuse of one of the few pristine names left in an age of corruption. Si Sharif knew he was party to a dirty deal. In exchange for status and more deals, he was selling the name of his brother, one of the great shahids, in marriage. He was disposing of that name in a way Si Taher would never have accepted if he had been alive.
He needed me – friend and comrade in arms of Si Taher – and no one else, to give my blessings to your violation. I was the last disjointed skeleton from a bygone age still standing. He needed my blessings and presence to silence his conscience and be able to believe that Si Taher, whose name he had lived off for so long, would forgive him.
Why did I agree to play that game? Why did I agree, without argument, to hand you into their clutches? Is it because I knew that my blessings were for show? They wouldn’t change anything. If he didn’t marry you off to Si — —, you would be the lot of another Si among the new masters. In the end, what did it matter which of the forty thieves’ names you would carry?
Why did I agree to go? Was it because of all that, or did I submit to the seduction of Constantine? To its secret call that had pursued and haunted me for ages, like the song of the sirens haunted the sailors whose ships had been cursed by the gods. Perhaps I was simply incapable of resisting a date with you, even if the occasion was your marriage.
Some decisions are counterintuitive. How, today, can I explain an illogical decision? I was like a mad scientist who wanted to combine two explosive mixtures – you and Constantine. Two mixtures I created myself in a fit of longing, love and mad passion. I had calculated their destructive power individually but wanted to try them together, like testing an atom bomb in the desert. I wanted to experience them both together in one internal blast that would shake and destroy only me. I would then emerge from the firestorm and devastation as either a new man or the remnants of one.
Didn’t you once say that all of us have a secret desire called ‘the hunger for flames’? Afterwards I discovered for myself the symmetry between you and that city. Both of you possessed an unquenchable fire and a supernatural power to set things alight. But both of you pretended to declare war on fire-worshippers. That was the falsity of ancient, respectable cities and the hypocrisy of girls from good families, wasn’t it?
Your voice came out of the blue on Monday. It held no special note of sadness or joy, no awkwardness or obvious embarrassment. You started talking to me as though resuming a conversation from the day before, even though your voice had not been on the line for more than six months. You had such a strange relationship with time, such a strange memory!
‘Hi, Khaled. Have I woken you up?’
I could have said no, although it would have been more correct to say yes. But in the voice of someone coming out of an amorous coma, I said, ‘You!?’
You laughed the childish laugh that had once captivated me and said, ‘I believe I’m me. Have you forgotten my voice?’ Faced with my silence you added, ‘How are you?’
‘Trying to keep going.’
‘Keep going against whom?’
‘Against time.’
After a silence, as though you were feeling guilty about something, you said, ‘We’re all trying to do that.’ Then you added, ‘Is it my news that has upset you?’
Your question was as incredible as your memory, as your relationship with those you loved!
I said, ‘Your news is only part of the ups and downs of fate.’
In false innocence you replied, ‘I was expecting you to take the news of my marriage differently. I heard my u
ncle on the phone with you yesterday and was amazed that you agreed to come to Constantine without any argument or hesitation. That made me really happy, and I decided to call you. I gathered you no longer blamed me. I want you come to the wedding. You must come.’
I didn’t know why your words made me recall my earlier conversation with Si Sharif – the unbelievable situation of his persuading me that you were my daughter. Once again I felt I was straddling the divide between reason and madness, between laughter and tears.
‘I wish I understood why you’re all so insistent that I be there,’ I said.
‘My uncle’s reasons for insisting don’t interest me in the slightest. But I do know that I’ll be miserable if you don’t come.’
I replied sarcastically, ‘Is being sadistic your latest hobby?’
In a tone that surprised me you said, ‘I loved that city because of you.’
I adopted the words you had used when I admitted that I fell in love with you the day I read you. Then, you had said that I shouldn’t have read you. Now I said, ‘You shouldn’t have loved the city, then.’
The response you gave stunned me fully awake and sent a jolt of electricity through me. ‘But I loved you.’
Here were the words I had been awaiting in vain for a year. Should I thank you or cry? Or ask you why now and why all the suffering then? I just asked, ‘And him?’
As if talking about something that didn’t at all concern you, you answered, ‘He’s a ready-made fate.’
I interrupted, ‘Everyone gets the fate they deserve. I expected a different fate for you. How did you agree to be joined with him?’
‘I’m not joining with him,’ you said. ‘I’m running away with him from a memory unfit for habitation after I filled it with impossible dreams and successive failures.’
‘But why him? How could you tarnish your father’s name with garbage like that? You aren’t just any woman – you are a homeland. Don’t you care about the verdict of history?’
You replied, ‘You’re the only person who believes that history sits on our shoulders, like the good angel and the bad angel, to record our minor unknown victories or our sudden slips and downward descent. History no longer records anything. It only erases!’
I didn’t ask you what you wanted erased, and I didn’t raise your mistaken view of values.
I asked you, ‘What exactly do you want from me?’
‘I want you,’ you said, like a child choosing a sweet.
It occurred to me at that moment that perhaps you were a woman incapable of loving one man, that you always needed two. In the past it had been me and Ziyad, and now it was me and that other.
Your voice returned, saying, ‘Khaled, do you even know that I loved you? I wanted and desired you to the point of madness. Something about you once robbed me of my mind. But I decided to get over you. Our love affair was unhealthy. You yourself said that.’
I asked you, ‘Why have you come back today, then?’
‘I’ve come back to persuade you to come to Constantine. I want that city to give us her blessing, even if only once, even if falsely. She was complicit with us and led us to this madness of ours. I know that we won’t meet there. We might not talk to each other. We might not shake hands. But I will be yours as long as you are there. We will defy them as she watches. Only she will know that I have given my first night to you. Does that make you happy?’
How many first nights could you have? How many imaginary first nights could you sign away like your first novel: two fake copies, for me and for Ziyad, unsigned.
After each imaginary night, who would have you? With whom did you first start lying? To whom did you dedicate your first booby-trapped gift?
When I recall your words now, I laugh as I compare myself to a starving Ethiopian who’s being read a menu of delicious dishes he’ll never taste and who’s then asked what he thought of them and whether it made him happy. But at the time I didn’t laugh. Perhaps I even cried as I answered you with the idiocy of a lover. ‘It makes me happy.’
I didn’t notice that you were giving me an imaginary night that I would have to give up straight away to that other man who would actually enjoy it. But did it matter as long as I was giving up something that, in any case, wasn’t mine?
History and the past are always like that, my darling. We invite them to special occasions to take care of the crumbs on the table. We deceive memory, throwing it a bone to chew on, while setting the tables for others. Peoples are also like that. They’re fed illusions, loads of bottled dreams and delayed gratification and they close their eyes to the banquets they will never be invited to.
But I was only conscious of all this once it was too late, once everyone had got up from the tables and gone home, leaving me alone with crumbs of memory.
I said, ‘I want to see you.’
‘No!’ you cried. ‘Meeting is no longer possible. Perhaps that’s for the best. We have to find a less painful ending to our story. Let Constantine be our reunion and our parting. There’s no need for more suffering.’
Like that, then, you decided to kill me decorously with one stab of the knife, in and out, one meeting and one separation. How compassionate you were with me, and how stupid I was!
More than one question that I didn’t ask you that day has remained stuck in my throat. More than blame, more than reproach, more than desire.
Your call ended as it had begun, outside of time with me hovering between sleep and waking, stretched out in bewilderment on my bed.
I even asked myself afterwards: Did you really call me that morning or was it just a dream?
So we were like children, always rubbing away the chalk on the ground to draw the rules for a new game. We tricked everything to win everything. Dirtying our clothes and getting scratched as we hopped from one impossible square to another.
Each square was a trap set for us where we stood and let a few dreams slip to the ground. We ought to have admitted that we were too old for hopping and for skipping ropes, for living in imaginary chalk squares.
We got it wrong, my love. The homeland doesn’t get drawn in chalk. Love doesn’t get written in nail varnish. We got it wrong. History doesn’t get written on a blackboard, chalk in one hand, duster in the other. Love doesn’t seesaw between the possible and the impossible.
Let’s stop playing games for a moment, stop running in every direction. In this game we have forgotten who was the cat and who the mouse, which one of us would eat the other. We forgot that we would be eaten together.
There’s no longer space for lies. There’s only this final descent. There is nothing beneath us but the abyss of destruction. Let’s admit that we’ve disintegrated together. You are not my lover. You are my draft love for days to come, my draft story and joy to come, my draft other life.
In the meantime, love any man you wish and write any stories you wish. Only I know your story, which won’t ever appear in print. Only I know the heroes you overlooked and those you made up. Only I know your perverse way of loving, the singular way you have of killing those you love, just to fill up your books. I am the one you killed for inscrutable reasons, and who loved you for other inscrutable reasons. I am the man who turned you from a woman into a city, and whom you turned from a precious stone into gravel. Don’t offend my ruins too much.
The age of earthquakes has not ended, and in the depths of this homeland the volcanoes still have rocks to spew.
Let us stop playing games for a moment. You’ve told enough lies. I know you’ll never be mine. Allow me, then, on the day of resurrection, to be resurrected with you wherever you are, that I might be your better half.
Allow me to reserve in advance a spot next to you, seeing as all the places around you here are taken and your diary is filled up to the end of your days.
Woman in the shape of homeland, does it matter any more if we stay together?
Just a small suitcase to meet the homeland. For your wedding reception, I only needed a black suit, two bottles of whisk
ey, some shirts and some razorblades. (There are nations that produce every justification for death but forget to produce razorblades!)
Tiptoeing around my wound, I returned to the homeland without personal effects, without excess baggage or an excessive bank balance. Memory alone had become too much to bear, but who would call me to account for the memory that I bear alone?
Walking on my latest wound, I returned in haste. Nearly ten years’ absence followed by a sudden return. I expected a different reunion. I would have reserved myself a first-class seat, for example. Memory on such occasions might refuse to take the back seat.
It didn’t matter in any case, my lady. All the front seats had been reserved in advance for those who had taken positions of power by order. So let me return as I left, on a sad seat to one side.
We leave the homeland with suitcases full of our lives and the papers from our drawers. We pack our photo albums, books we loved and gifts with sentimental value. We carry the faces of those we loved, the eyes of those who loved us, letters to us, and others we wrote. A final glance at an old neighbour whom we might not see again; a kiss on a young cheek that will grow up after we’re gone; a tear for a homeland we might not return to.
We carry the homeland to furnish our exile. The homeland puts us out the door and shuts its heart in our face without so much as a glance at our suitcases. Our tears have no effect, and we forget to ask who will fill the homeland after us.
Then, when we come back, we return with suitcases of nostalgia and a handful of dreams. We return with rose-tinted dreams, not rose-patterned bags – dreams aren’t imported from cheap shops. It’s disgraceful that we buy and sell the dream of the homeland on the black market. There are worse insults to the martyrs than a thousand kinds of hard currency.
With a small holdall in nowhere land, suspended between heaven and earth, escaping from one memory to another, I took a second-class seat in forgetting.
The Bridges of Constantine Page 19