The Bridges of Constantine (29 page)

‘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 the 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.’

Shutting the door behind me, as if slamming the doors of my heart, I answered her, ‘What of it? The country is theirs and the planes too. They can bring as much as they took!’

Where to escape? There was nothing in front of me except me. Unthinking, I fell in with the crowds of pedestrians who aimlessly roamed the streets every day. Here you had the choice between walking, leaning against a wall or sitting in a café to watch those walking or leaning on the wall opposite. I walked.

At some point I felt that we were all walking round this rocky city without quite knowing what we should do with our anger and misery, and whom to pelt with the pebbles that filled our empty pockets. Who was first in line for stoning in this country? Who? The one sitting atop everyone or those sitting on top of us?

The title of a novel by Malek Haddad came to mind:
Zeros
Turning Around Themselves
. I wished that I had read it. Perhaps I would have found an explanation for all these nothings that we had turned into.

My thoughts took me to a scene I had witnessed in Tunisia of a blindfolded camel turning endlessly around an open space in Sidi Bou Said to bring water up from a well to the delight and surprise of tourists. What had given me pause that day was the camel’s eyes, which had been blinkered so that it would imagine it was walking forwards and die without discovering it had been going around in circles. A whole lifetime spent going around in circles. Perhaps we had become that camel, which no sooner finished one circle than it began another, going around small day-to-day worries in one way or another.

Weren’t the newspapers, full of promises of a better tomorrow, just blinkers to hide the shock of reality, the catastrophic poverty and misery that for the first time assailed half this people?

Perhaps I, too, no longer knew how to go forward in a straight line that didn’t automatically take me backwards to the nation’s memory. The nation’s special capacity to take a straight line and twist it into a circle, into noughts, where did it come from?

Memory was an encircling fence that enclosed us from every side. It besieged me as soon as I set foot outside the house. Every direction I went in, distant memories walked alongside me.

I walked towards the past with my eyes shut. I looked for the old cafés, those where every scholar or personality had his own place and the coffee was made on a stone stove and served in a small copper pot. The waiters would be embarrassed to hassle you when your presence was an honour. In those days Ben Badis used to stop at the Benjamina Café on his way to school. There was the Bou Arour Café where Belattar and Bashtarzi held their meetings and where I sometimes spotted my father as I walked by.

Where was that café, so I might drink a cup of coffee in his memory that morning? How would I stumble upon a café that was only as famous as its patrons? How would I find it now that there were many large cafés to match the city’s misery, all of which had the same sad look as the people’s faces? Nothing distinguished them any more. Not even pride, characteristic of the people of Constantine, whose brilliant white sashes and hooded capes had become rare and faded.