The Bridges of Constantine (10 page)

‘What I want to know about my father isn’t the ready-made words in praise of heroes and martyrs. That’s what’s said on every occasion about all of them. It’s as though death suddenly made all
shahids
identical, copies of one template.

‘I’m interested to know what he thought, the minor details of his life, his good and bad points, his secret ambitions and failings. I don’t want to be the daughter of a myth. Myths are a Greek invention. I just want to be the daughter of an ordinary man with his strengths and weaknesses, his victories and defeats. Every man’s life contains disappointments and setbacks that might have spurred him on to success.’

A brief silence fell. I was contemplating you and probing the depths of my soul. I was seeking the boundary between my defeats and my victories. At that moment I was no prophet, and you were no Greek goddess. We were just two ancient statues with smashed limbs trying to restore their parts with words. I listened to you as you repaired the ruin in your depths.

You said, ‘At times, I feel that I’m the daughter of a statistic, one among a million-and-a-half others. Perhaps some of them were bigger or smaller, perhaps the names of some are written in bigger or smaller letters than others, but they all remain statistics in a tragedy.

‘That my father left me a big name means nothing. He left me a tragedy as weighty as his name, and left my brother with a constant fear of failure, obsessed with not living up to expectations. He’s the only son of Taher Abdelmoula. He has no right to fail at school or in life. Symbols don’t have the right to fall apart. As a result, he gave up university when he realised it was futile to pile up qualifications when others were piling up millions. Perhaps he was right. Qualifications are the last thing to get you a decent job these days.

‘He saw his friends who graduated before him going straight into unemployment or into jobs with limited pay and limited dreams. So he decided to go into business and, even though I share his view, I’m sad that my brother in the prime of his youth has turned into a small businessman running a small shop with a van given by Algeria as a privilege to the son of a martyr. I don’t think my father expected his future would be like that!’

I interrupted you in an effort to alleviate your litany of complaint. ‘He didn’t expect a future like this for you, either. You’ve surpassed his dreams and inherited all his ambitions and principles. Science and knowledge were sacred to him. He loved the Arabic language, and dreamed of an Algeria that had nothing to do with the superstitions and worn-out traditions that had exhausted his generation and finished them off. You don’t know how lucky you are today to live in a country that gives you the chance to be a cultured young woman who can study and work, and even write.’

You responded somewhat sarcastically. ‘I might be indebted to Algeria for being cultured or educated, but writing is something else. Nobody gave me that. We write to bring back what we have lost and what has been stolen from us by stealth. I would have preferred to have an ordinary childhood and life, a father and family like others – not shelves of books and a pile of diaries. But my father is public property in Algeria. Only writing is mine alone and no one is going to take it away!’

Your words stunned me. I felt a conflicting mix of emotions. Sadness yes, but not pity. An intelligent woman does not provoke pity. Even in her sadness, she always arouses admiration. I was impressed by you, by the defiance in your hurt, by your provocative way of challenging the homeland. You were like me, who painted with one hand to restore the other. I would have preferred to remain an ordinary man with two arms doing everyday things and not have been turned into a one-armed genius with nothing but drawings and paintings.

I didn’t dream of being a genius, a prophet or an artist – rejecting and rejected. I didn’t struggle for that. My dream was to have a wife and children, but fate chose another life for me. So I became father to other people’s children and the partner of exile and the paintbrush. My dreams were amputated too.

I said to you, ‘Nobody will take writing away from you. What is deep inside us is ours and nobody can touch it.’

You said, ‘But there’s nothing deep inside me except a void filled with newspaper stories, news broadcasts and artless books that have nothing to do with me.’

Then you added, as if entrusting me with a secret, ‘Do you know why I loved my grandmother more than anyone else? More than my mother, even? She was the only person who found time to talk to me about it all. She would go back to the past unbidden, as if she refused to leave it. She wore the past, ate the past and only enjoyed hearing songs from the past.

‘She dreamed of the past when others dreamed of the future. So she often told me about my father without me having to ask. He was the most beautiful thing about her fading past as a woman. She never tired of speaking about him, as though she brought him back and made him present with words. She did it with the grief of a mother who refuses to forget she’s lost her firstborn to eternity. But she didn’t tell me more about him than a mother would say about her son. Taher was the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the good boy who never said a single word to hurt her.

‘On Independence Day my grandmother wept like she’d never wept before. I asked her, “
Amma
, why are you crying when Algeria’s just gained its independence?” She replied, “In the past, I was waiting for independence for Taher’s return. Today I’ve realised that I’m not waiting for anything any more.”

‘The day my father died, my grandmother didn’t ululate with joy like in the made-up stories of the Revolution I read later. She stood in the middle of the house, racked with sobbing, trembling with her head uncovered, and repeating in primal grief, “Ah, black day of sorrow! Taher, my love, why have you gone and not me?”

‘My mother was crying silently and trying to calm her down. I was watching them both and crying, not fully understanding that I was crying for a man I had only seen a few times. A man who was my father.’

Why did your memories of
Amma
Zahra always stir unaccountable emotions in me? Before that day, they had been warm and beautiful, but they suddenly became painful to the point of tears.

I still remember the features of that dear old lady who loved me as much as I loved her. I spent my childhood and adolescence between her house and ours. That woman had only one way to love. I discovered later that this was common to all our mothers. They loved you with food. They cooked your favourite dish, came after you with delicacies, and plied you with freshly made sweets, bread and pastries.

She belonged to a generation of women who devoted their lives to the kitchen. For them, holidays and weddings were banquets of love. There they made all their overflowing femininity and tenderness into gifts, along with the secret hunger that found no expression outside of food.

Every day they fed more than one tableful, more than one sitting on the terrace. Then every night they went to sleep without anybody noticing their age-old, inherited hunger. I only discovered that fact recently, when I found myself – perhaps out of loyalty to them – unable to love a woman who lived on fast food and whose only banquet was her body.

As I fled those painful memories of my distant childhood, I asked you, ‘And your mother? You’ve never told me about her. How did she manage after
Si
Taher’s death?’

‘She didn’t talk about him much,’ you said. ‘Perhaps inside she blamed the people who had arranged the marriage. They married her to a martyr, not a man.

‘She already knew about his political activity. She realised that he would join the FLN after they got married and begin a clandestine life, sneaking home from time to time, and might return a corpse. Why marry, then? But the marriage was inevitable – there was the sniff of a deal in the air. Her family were proud to become linked in marriage with Taher Abdelmoula, a man with a name and money. It was fine for my mother to be his second wife, or his next widow. Perhaps my grandmother understood that he had been born to be a martyr, and so she visited the tombs of the holy and the good to beg in tears for her son to have children. It was just the same when she was pregnant with him, pleading that her newborn be a boy.’

I asked you, ‘Where did you hear all these stories?’

‘From her. From my mother, too. Imagine, as soon as my grandmother fell pregnant with my father, she didn’t stop visiting the tomb of Sidi Mohamed of the Crow in Constantine. She almost gave birth to him there. So she called him Mohamed Taher in his honour. Then she called my uncle Mohamed Sharif, also in honour of him. Later, I found out that half the men of the city have such names. Its people ascribe a lot of importance to names, and most of them bear those of prophets or holy men. She almost called me Sayida in honour of Sayida Menoubia, whom she’d visited in Tunis, always with a candle, a prayer mat and invocations. She’d move between Sayida Menoubia’s tomb and that of Sidi Omar el-Fayash. Perhaps you’ve heard of him – the saint who lived divested of everything. He made the Tunisian authorities chain his legs to stop him leaving his house naked. So he lived in chains, walking screaming around an empty room. Empty except for the women who scrambled to visit him. Some to honour him, others merely to see his manhood on display, or out of the curiosity of women wrapped in
sefsari
s
pretending to be shy!’

Laughing, I asked you, ‘Did you visit him?’

‘Of course,’ you said. ‘And I visited with every one of the women individually afterwards. I also visited Sayida Menoubia, whose name I would have got had my mother not spared me that disaster. She decided to call me Hayat until my father, who had the final say, came back.’

My heart stopped at that name. Memory raced backwards. My tongue tripped as it tried to utter it after exactly a quarter of a century. ‘Would you be happy if I called you Hayat?’

My question surprised you, and in astonishment you said, ‘Why? Don’t you like my real name? Isn’t it nicer?’

‘It is nicer,’ I said. ‘I was amazed at the time how your father thought of it. When I heard it for the first time there was nothing in his life to inspire such a beautiful name. Still, I’d like to call you Hayat, because I’m probably the only person apart from your mother who knows that name now. I want it to be like a password between us, a reminder of our remarkable relationship. That you’re also somehow my child.’

You laughed and said, ‘You know, you’ve never left the days of the Revolution. You feel a need to give me a codename, even before you love me. It’s as if you were signing me up for a secret mission. I wonder what it is?’

I laughed in turn at the startling accuracy of your observation. Maybe you had begun to know me that well. ‘Listen, my budding revolutionary,’ I said. ‘There has to be more than one test before we entrust someone with a guerrilla operation. I shall begin with your initial training to assess your level of readiness!’

At that moment, I felt the time was finally right to tell you the story of my last day at the Front. The day
Si
Taher spoke your name to me for the first time as he was saying goodbye and entrusted me to register you, if I made it to Tunis alive.

That night, feverish and with a bleeding arm, I crossed the Algerian–Tunisian border. In my delirium I kept repeating your name. In the midst of exhaustion and loss of blood, it became the name of
Si
Taher’s final mission for me. I wanted to fulfil his last request of me, pursue his fleeting dream and grant you an official, legal name unconnected with superstitions and saints.

I remember the first time I knocked on the door of your house on Toufiq Street in Tunis. I remember all the details of that visit as though my memory had read in advance what fate had written and kept a space for it. That autumnal September day, I waited in front of your green iron door for what seemed like hours until
Amma
Zahra opened it.

I still remember her double-take, as though she had been expecting someone else, not me. She stood bewildered before me, taking in my sad grey overcoat and my pale, thin face. She lingered over my one arm holding a box of sweets and the empty sleeve of my coat which, for the first time, was tucked into a pocket out of shame.

Before I said a word, her eyes flooded with tears. She started crying without thinking to invite me in. I leant down to kiss her, with the accumulated longing of the years I had not seen her, with the longing imparted by her son, with longing for my own mother, to whose loss I was still not reconciled after two-and-a-half years.

‘How are you,
Amma
Zahra?’

Her sobbing rose as she hugged me and asked in turn, ‘How are you, my son?’

Was she crying with joy to see me, or with sadness at my state, at my amputated arm, which she was seeing for the first time? Was she crying because she expected to see her son, but saw me? Or just because someone had knocked at the door and brought joy and a little news to a house that a man had not entered for months?

‘You’re safe. Come in, my son, come in.’ She spoke as she finally made it through the door and wiped her tears. Before I spoke she repeated, ‘Come in. Come in,’ in a loud voice like a signal to your mother, who came running when she heard the words. I only saw the back of her robe as she walked in front of me and then disappeared behind a door quickly closed.

I loved that house with its trellised vines climbing the walls of the small garden and hanging over it so that the rich red grapes dangled in the middle of the courtyard. The jasmine tree that spread and peered from the outside wall, like an inquisitive woman fed up with the confines of her house who goes to see what’s happening outside and seduces passers-by to pick her flowers or gather those fallen to the ground. The reassuring smell of food and a vague warmth that made a person reluctant to leave.