The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  So the people called the place Sidi Mohamed of the Crow, and it remained a place of pilgrimage for two centuries. Muslims and Jews visited at the weekends or holidays, when they would spend a whole week wearing pink clothes and performing ceremonies passed down from generation to generation. They offered pigeons in sacrifice and bathed in the warm waters of the rocky pool where tortoises once swam. Pilgrims lived off arrack and submitted to bouts of primitive dancing in circles in the open air to the rhythm of the poor women’s drums.

  Yet Constantine did not spurn her bey, who gave her so much status and luxury. Out of beneficence or madness she put the killer and the killed on an equal footing. The tomb of Sidi Mohamed of the Crow became the most famous of all Constantine’s sites of pilgrimage, and that in a city where every street bore the name of a saint. While the name of Saleh Bey alone, among the forty-one beys who had ruled, become immortal. Her most beautiful poetry was written about him, and her most beautiful lament was sung for his tragic death. Although she did not know it, she was still mourning for him today in the black shawls of the women.

  Such was Constantine. There was no difference between her curse and her mercy, no divide between her love and her hate, no known measure for her logic. She granted immortality to those she wished and punished those she wished.

  Who might make her pay for her madness? Who might make his position towards her clear? In love or hate, guilty or innocent, without confessing that in every situation she was a paradox?

  Every day that I spent in the city I became more entangled in her memory. In my evenings with Hassan, during our long, rambling conversations, which often went on very late, I searched for another recipe to help me forget.

  In that family atmosphere I had been missing for so long, I searched for a different self-assurance. My presence in the family house, which I knew and which knew me, had an effect on my spirits during those days. Perhaps it was my secret and unexpected prop.

  I would return to it every night as if ascending to the far recesses of my childhood to once again become unborn. I hid myself in the body of an imaginary mother, whose place here remained unfilled after thirty years.

  During those nights I would remember Ziyad – he had stayed with me in Algiers for a few months when his landlord had refused to renew his lease. At the time I got used to leaving him the bed. I would sleep on a mattress on the floor in another room. Ziyad protested and felt a little embarrassed, thinking I was doing it out of politeness.

  I kept stressing that thanks to him I had discovered I preferred sleeping on the floor. The mattress reminded me of my childhood, when for several years I slept next to my mother on the same woollen pallet whose blue colour I still remembered. Every autumn Mother washed and re-stuffed the blue wool mattresses that furnished my bedroom.

  I wished I could ask Atiqa to put a mattress on the floor for me in the guest room, like she did with her children. They slept in the other room on a shared mattress that exuded warmth and aroused a desire to slip under the beautiful wool blankets. I was envious, and longed for a time so distant I could no longer recall whether I had really lived it or only imagined it.

  But could I reasonably put such a request to Atiqa? She had given me the most beautiful room in her house: the modern bedroom that was arranged more for the benefit of guests than for their married couple’s nights of love.

  If I had asked, she would have found no explanation for my perversity, and I would probably have embarrassed her. Atiqa sometimes joined in our late nights and tried to appeal to me, as a civilised man from Paris, to persuade her brother to give up that old Arab house with its backward way of life. She practically apologised for all the things I found beautiful and unusual.

  Because I was unable to convince her of my view, nor bold enough to disagree with hers, I just listened to her discussions with Hassan. These almost turned into arguments before she backed down and went to bed. Semi-apologetic, Hassan would say, ‘You can’t persuade a woman who watches Dallas on television to live in a house like this and be grateful. They have to stop that soap as long as they can’t give people decent homes and a better life.’

  I envied Hassan’s sense of contentment and admired his philosophy of life.

  He would say, ‘To be happy, you should look at those worse off. If you’ve got a piece of bread and look at someone who has nothing, you’ll be happy and thank God. But if you raise your head and look at those with cake, you’ll never be satisfied. You’ll be made miserable by your discovery and die crushed!’

  In Hassan’s view, living in a house like that, with all its bad points (which at times were annoying) and its minor inconveniences surpassed by the modern age, was still better than what thousands had to endure. Tens of thousands, rather, who didn’t have a spacious house like that where they could live alone with their wife and children. No, they often had to share a cramped apartment with relatives for years.

  That was Hassan. He looked at things head on. Everything he had learned he had acquired as a boy from the blackboard. He was happy with that way of looking at things, which was also down to his mentality as a badly paid teacher with meagre dreams.

  What could he dream about, a teacher of Arabic who spent his days explaining literary texts and relating the lives of ancient writers and poets to his pupils whose grammatical and spelling mistakes he corrected? He didn’t have the time, or didn’t dare explain what was happening in front of him, to correct bigger mistakes made in front of his eyes in the name of words that had suddenly dropped out of the language and entered the lexicon of slogans and bids.

  Deep down there was something bitter about Hassan, apparent in all the details of his life. He kept it to himself, however. He was clearly exhausted, floundering in the problems of his six children and his young wife, who dreamed of a life other than Constantine’s straitened existence. Hassan, though, didn’t dare to dream or, more exactly, in those days he was dreaming of finding someone with the connections to get him a new fridge, no more!

  When I learned of his simple but hard-to-obtain dream, I was sad to realise that we weren’t just backward when compared to Europe and France – as I’d thought, and a manageable and understandable matter – but we were also backward when compared to the way we had been under colonialism fifty or more years earlier. Back then, our hopes were more beautiful, our dreams bigger. Today, it would be enough to study people’s faces and listen to them talking or look into shop windows to understand that. Back then we were a country that exported dreams at every news broadcast to all the world’s peoples.

  Constantine alone exported more and better newspapers, magazines and books than the institutions of the nation as a whole did now. Back then we had intellectuals and scientists, poets, wits and writers who filled us with pride at our Arabism. No one would buy the papers and hoard them in the cupboard any more, as there was nothing left in the papers worth preserving. Nobody sat with a book any more to learn something. Cultural despair was a mass phenomenon, an infection that you might catch flicking through a book. Back then books were always right and we could speak as eloquently as those books. Now even books lied, just like the papers. So our honesty had diminished; our eloquence had died, since conversation revolved around scarce consumer goods.

  When I said all that to Hassan, he looked at me in shock, as though he’d discovered something that had never occurred to him before. With some sadness he said, ‘True. They’ve set us small goals unrelated to the issues of the day, illusory individual triumphs like finding a small apartment after years of waiting, getting a fridge or being able to buy a car, or just a set of tyres! No one has the time and energy to go further or ask for more.

  ‘We’re so tired. The difficulties of daily life have exhausted us. You always need connections to sort out ordinary hassles. How do you want us to think about other things? What cultural life are you talking about? Our concern is just surviving; anything more is a luxury. We’ve been turned into a nation of ants hunting only for food and a nest to hole-up
in with the children.’

  Naively I asked him, ‘And what do people do?’

  Joking, he said, ‘People? Nothing. Some wait, some steal, the rest kill themselves. This is a city that gives you three choices with the same justifications and the same grounds!’

  That day the city made me fear for Hassan. A dark shudder went through me.

  Without thinking, as if asking which of the three prescriptions he had chosen, I asked him, ‘Have you got any friends you see and go out with here?

  As though he found the question surprising or was happy at my sudden interest in the details of his life, he replied, ‘I’ve got friends, most of them teachers in the same school as me. Apart from that, there’s no one. Constantine has emptied. All the old families we know have left.’

  He reeled off a list of big families who had emigrated, gone to settle in the capital or abroad, leaving the city to strangers, most of whom came from neighbouring villages and small towns.

  Then he said something that didn’t strike me at the time, but that years later assumed fateful dimensions. ‘The natives of this city only come to visit for weddings and funerals.’

  Before I could comment, he continued as if he’d remembered something. ‘I’ll introduce you to Nasser, Si Taher’s son. He’ll definitely be coming the day after tomorrow for his sister’s wedding. You’ll see. He’s become a man as big and tall as you. He’s been visiting me for the past few months since he decided to settle down in Constantine. He’s the only one who’s migrated in reverse. He even refused a scholarship abroad – imagine! No one can believe that. When I asked him why he didn’t leave like all the rest and run away from this country, he said to me, “I’m scared that if I leave, I’ll never come back. All my friends who’ve left haven’t come back.’’’

  I laughed when I learned that he was an extremist like you, as if it ran in the family. I felt a desire to prolong the conversation that, in one way or another, was leading towards you.

  I asked him, ‘What’s he doing now?’

  ‘As a martyr’s son, they gave him a shop and a van that bring in a nice income. But he’s still lost, unconvinced. Sometimes he thinks about resuming his studies, then at others of devoting himself to business. Really, I’m not up to giving him advice. It makes me sorry that someone should give up their university education because they’ll always feel the loss. Then again, he says qualifications have no value any more, when he sees young people around him with university degrees unemployed, and other stupid people driving Mercedes and living in mansions. This isn’t a time for knowledge, but a time to be smart. Today, how can you persuade your friend, or even your student, to devote himself to knowledge? Standards have been completely upset.’

  I said to Hassan, ‘What matters is that a person knows his true goal in life. Is money the main problem, or knowledge and inner balance?

  Hassan responded, ‘Balance? What balance are you talking about? We’re half-deranged. None of us knows exactly what he wants, nor exactly what he’s waiting for. The real problem is the atmosphere the people are living in, the general dismay of an entire nation. It robs you of any hunger for initiative, for dreams, for planning any project. Intellectuals aren’t happy and neither are the illiterate, ordinary folks or the rich. Tell me, God have mercy on your parents, what you can do with your knowledge if you end up a civil servant with an ignorant supervisor who’s only in his job by chance not by merit, or rather because he has lots of contacts and is well connected! What, for example, can you do with your money in Constantine except pay it as commission to get an apartment that’s unfit for habitation most of the time, or hold a wedding where Fergani sings? But if all you have is less than 20,000 dinars, you’re left with the choice of spending them on “cups of coffee” for a local official hidden out of sight behind some other petty bureaucrat who is selling passports for the Hajj. Then you can perform the commandment and reserve yourself a small room in the afterlife. Once this world has squeezed you out!’

  I said in disbelief, ‘What? Is it true? They sell passports for the Hajj for 20,000 dinars?!’

  ‘Of course. The government has set an annual number of pilgrims because they cost so much hard currency. That was after they discovered that most went quite a few times, and for purely business reasons unconnected with the Hajj. How else can you explain why there’s been no noticeable effect on the morals or behaviour of people who’ve been on the pilgrimage half-a-dozen times? I know one pilgrim who’s a drunkard who’s always got a bottle at home, and another who’s a bit of a wheeler-dealer and exchanges currency on the black market. Such people still go on Hajj every year. They can easily get hold of 20,000 dinars. As for me, where can I get that sort of money from and perform what I’m commanded? My income is less than 4,000 dinars a month.’

  I said to him, ‘What? Are you planning to go on the Hajj?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And why not, I’m a Muslim, aren’t I? I started praying again two years ago. Without my faith, I would have gone out of my mind. How could you bear all this wickedness and injustice without faith? Only belief gives you the strength to survive. Look around you: everyone has reached the same conclusion, perhaps young people more than most because they’re the chief victims of this country. Even Nasser has started praying since coming back to Constantine, maybe because of that, or because faith is like heresy – catching! I swear to God, Khaled, on Fridays thousands pack the mosques and block the streets. If you saw it, you’d pray with them without wondering why!’

  I found I had nothing to add to Hassan’s words on that marvellous evening that lasted until two in the morning. Hassan was happy I was there and because it was the summer holiday, which meant he could stay up late talking to me after all the years that had kept us apart.

  I let him talk and lay bare the homeland that I had covered up with nostalgia, longing and obsession.

  Was he worried in case I was disappointed, afraid of losing the joy that my return to him and the homeland had brought? Did that make him stop talking and move on to another subject? Indirectly he was leading me towards religion, piety and faith. He was tempting me to repent, as though being in Paris was an act of sinful apostasy. Was that Hassan?

  At the time I couldn’t stop myself smiling when I remembered the two bottles of whiskey I had brought.

  That night when I was in bed I wondered about my sins. I tried to summarise and enumerate them. I didn’t think they were worse than other people’s – in fact, I thought they were far, far fewer. I wasn’t a criminal, a gambler, an atheist, a liar, a drunkard or a traitor.

  I didn’t have a wife and a marital bed to swap for another. Fifty years of being alone, half of which I could call the ‘wounded years’ and that I spent with only one arm, disfigured in body and dream.

  How many women had I loved? I no longer remembered. From my first love for the Jewish neighbour I seduced, to the Tunisian nurse who seduced me, there were other women whose names and faces I no longer remembered who took turns on my bed for purely physical reasons and who left laden with me while I remained empty of them.

  Then you came along.

  My greatest sin of all was you. The only woman I didn’t have, the only sin I didn’t actually commit.

  My sins with you were what I might call ‘sins of the right hand’ – the hand with which I painted, and with which I summoned and had you in fantasy.

  Would God punish me for the sins of the only hand he left me with?

  I don’t recall who said, ‘Virtue does not mean not sinning, it means not wanting to.’ Only on that basis would I say I wasn’t a good man.

  I shouldn’t have desired you and started sinning with you. Loving you had a taste of the forbidden and the sacred that we ought to avoid, but which I slid into without thinking. The really shocking thing about my story with you was that the reasons that made me love you were the very ones that should have stopped me.

  Because of this, perhaps I loved you and stopped loving you several times a day, with th
e same extremity each time. Ultimately, I was only here to find an end to the high and low tides of emotion I went through with you at every instant.

  I knew that someone in love was like an addict, unable to decide to give up on his own. Every day he descended a little further towards the abyss. But he couldn’t stand on his own two legs and run away before he had reached the ultimate point of hell and touched the bitter depths of disappointment.

  I was happy that night. A bittersweet happiness, because I knew that everything would be resolved in the next two days. That one way or another I would finish with you.

  That evening, Hassan’s wife had been exhausting herself getting ready for the main event of the next day: the procession of women to the baths and the henna party for the bride. She was in constant motion and too busy for us and her children with her woman’s concerns. Among these were the clothes she would pack to take to the baths where, as customary, the women would display everything, even their lingerie. They would do so to flaunt their wealth, which was mostly false, or just to convince themselves that in spite of everything they were still able to attract a man. Just like the bride they were with and whom they secretly envied.

  Let it be. The next day, your marriage rituals would begin, and the time we had stolen from fate would come to an end.

  Sweet dreams then, my lady, for tomorrow.

  Goodnight then, sadness!

  Anti-love woke me up that summer morning and turned me out on the street.

  As soon as I was awake, I decided to get away from the house. Atiqa was talking incessantly about wedding traditions, about the important people and families who had come specially for the event, the likes of which Constantine hadn’t witnessed for years. She followed me all the way to the door to keep talking. ‘You know, they say everything was brought from France a month ago by plane. If only you could have seen the bride’s things and what she was wearing yesterday. Like they say, some people have a life and others just keep them company.’