The Bridges of Constantine Read online

  Since realising that every city has the night it deserves, which resembles it and which alone exposes what is hidden by day, I have decided to avoid looking out of this window at night.

  All cities unconsciously undress at night and reveal their secrets to strangers, even when they say nothing. Even when they bar their doors. Because cities are like women, some of whom make us wish morning would come soon. But . . .

  ‘Soirs. Soirs, que des soirs pour un seul matin.’ ‘Evenings, evenings, how many evenings for a single morning.’ Why do I remember this line by the poet Henri Michaux and find myself repeating it in two languages? Why do I remember it, and when did I memorise it? Perhaps for years I’ve been expecting such despondent evenings that will only ever have one morning. I search my memory for anything about the poem and remember it is called ‘Old Age’.

  My discovery frightens me, as if I had suddenly discovered I had new features. Does old age really creep up on us over the course of one long night, with an inner darkness that makes us slower in everything, ambling along in no particular direction? Are boredom, disorientation and monotony characteristics of old age or of this city?

  Am I going senile, or is the whole nation having a collective mid-life crisis? Doesn’t this country have a marked capacity to make us old and decrepit in a matter of months, a matter of weeks, even?

  Before I didn’t feel the weight of the years. Your love kept me young and my studio was an abundant source of renewable energy. Paris is an elegant city where one would be embarrassed to neglect one’s appearance. But now the flame of my madness has gone out, and I have ended up here. Now we’re – all of us – standing over the nation’s volcanic eruption, and all we can do is fuse with the lava showers and forget our inconsequential fires. Nothing now warrants all that elegance and decorum. Our nation itself now struts shamelessly before us!

  At an age when others have said everything they have to say, there is nothing more difficult than starting to write. Picking up the pen for the first time after the age of fifty is as crazy and lustful as reliving the passion of adolescence. It is exciting and foolish, an affair between an ageing gentleman and a virgin quill. While he is confused and in a hurry, she is chaste, unsated by the ink of the world.

  I shall consider what I have written up to now as just preparatory, an overflow of desire for these sheets of paper that for years I have dreamed of filling. Maybe tomorrow I will begin writing in earnest. I’ve always liked to link the important things in my life with a particular date, in a nod to another memory. This idea seduced me again when I was listening to the evening news and discovered – having lost my relationship with time – that tomorrow will be 1 November. How could I not choose that as the date to start my book?

  Tomorrow will mark the passing of thirty-four years since the firing of the first shot in the war of liberation. I’ll have been here for three weeks, three weeks also since riots claimed the last martyred shahids, one of whom I came here to mourn and bury myself.

  Between the first and the last bullets, hearts have changed and aims have changed. The country has changed. That’s why tomorrow will be a down payment of grief. There will be no military parade, receptions or formal exchanges of congratulations. They will make do with an exchange of accusations, while we will make do with visiting the graves.

  I won’t visit that grave tomorrow. I don’t want to share my grief with the nation. I prefer complicity with paper and its silent pride. Everything annoys me tonight. I feel I might finally write something great, not tear it up as usual. For, after all these years, an agonising coincidence has brought me back to this very place on the anniversary of the original memory to find the body of someone I loved waiting for me.

  Tonight the past awakens bewilderingly inside me. It lures me into the labyrinth of memory. I try to resist, but can I resist my memory? I close the door of my room and open the window again. I try to see something other than myself, but the window looks back at me.

  Forests of bay and oak stretch before me. Constantine creeps towards me, wrapped in her old cloak, with all the familiar woods, cliffs and secret passes that once surrounded her like a security cordon. Her branching pathways and dense forests lead to the secret bases of the fighters, as if explaining to us tree after tree, cave after cave.

  All the paths in this ancient Arab city lead to steadfastness. All the forests and rocks here joined the ranks of the Revolution before we did.

  There are cities that don’t choose their fates. History and geography have condemned them not to surrender. So their sons do not always have a choice. Is it strange, then, that I resemble this city so much?

  More than thirty years ago, I walked these paths. I chose these mountains as my home and clandestine school where I studied the only subject whose teaching was banned. I knew that there were no re-sits, and that my fate was confined to the space between freedom and death.

  We chose a more enticing name for this death, so we could head towards it without fear and, perhaps, with secret desire, as though moving towards something other than our end. Why did we forget at the time to give freedom more than one name? Why from the outset did we limit our freedom to its original meaning?

  Death in those days walked, slept and ate hasty meals with us, just as yearning, patience, faith and a vague happiness never left us. Death breathed in sync with us. The days grew ever harder, only different from those before in the toll of shahids whose deaths were mostly never expected. For some reason, their end – theirs especially – was never envisioned as so close, so devastating. That was the logic of death that I hadn’t yet taken in.

  I still remember them, those who we later got used to talking of en masse. They were not shahids, plural: each one of them was a shahid in his own right. As though the plural in this case in particular didn’t abbreviate our memory of them, but rather diminished their claims on us.

  One died in the first battle as though he’d come just for martyrdom. One fell a day before a stolen visit to his family, having spent weeks working out the details and making preparations. One went to get married, then came back and died a married man. One dreamed of going back to marry, but never went back.

  In war it isn’t so much those who die who are miserable. The most miserable are those they leave behind bereft, orphaned, with wrecked dreams.

  I discovered that fact early on, shahid by shahid, story by story.

  At the same time, I also discovered that perhaps I was the only one to leave nothing behind except the fresh grave of a mother who died ill and in despair, an only brother years younger than me, and a father preoccupied by the demands of his new young wife.

  The popular proverb has it right: ‘The death of a father doesn’t an orphan make. Only the death of a mother.’

  I was an orphan and intensely aware of it, all the time. Hunger for tenderness, a frightening and painful feeling, eats away at you inside until it crushes you in some way or another. Did I enlist with the Front at that time in an unavowed effort to find a more beautiful death – one untainted by the unhealthy feelings of resentment gradually overtaking me?

  The Revolution was entering its second year, and I was entering my third month as an orphan. I can no longer remember now exactly when the nation took on maternal features and unexpectedly lavished me with ambiguous tenderness and an extreme sense of belonging.

  Perhaps Si Taher’s disappearance from our neighbourhood in Sidi Mabrouk some months earlier played a part in resolving the matter and helped me to reach that surprising decision so quickly. It was no secret that he had moved to a hidden place in the mountains around Constantine to help establish one of the first cells in the armed struggle.

  Where has Si Taher’s name come from tonight, to add to my confusion? Which one of you led me to the other? Where has it returned from, and was it really absent, when only two blocks away from me lies a street that still bears his name?

  There is something called the power of a name. There are names the memory of which makes us sit
up straight and put out our cigarette. As soon as we talk about them, it’s as if we were talking to them with the old respect and admiration.

  Si Taher’s name is still sacred to me. Habit and familiarity haven’t killed it. Being in prison together and the years of the struggle haven’t turned it into the ordinary name of a friend or neighbour. Symbols always know how to put up an invisible barrier that divides the ordinary from the exceptional, the possible from the impossible, in everything.

  Here I am, remembering him during a night that I haven’t set aside for him.

  As I take a drag on a last cigarette, the minarets announce the dawn prayer. From a distant room comes the crying of a baby whose voice has awakened every corner of the house. I envy the minarets. I envy infants. They alone have the right and ability to scream, before life tames their vocal cords and teaches them silence. Who was it who said, ‘Man spends his early years learning to speak, and the Arab regimes spend the rest of his life teaching him to be silent!’

  Silence could have been a blessing this night in particular, just like forgetting. On such occasions memory doesn’t come in instalments, but overwhelms me in torrents, sending me tumbling down unknown slopes. At that moment, how can I stop it without crashing into the rocks and being crushed in a landslide of memory? Here I am, out of breath, chasing after a past I’ve never really left behind, after a memory I live in because it is my body. A disfigured body, no less.

  There are those who race from podium to podium on some pretext or another to condemn the history they were part of. Perhaps to jump on to the new wave before the flood sweeps them away. All one can do is pity them. How wretched for someone just emerging from the swamp to keep wet clothes on instead of waiting quietly while they dry!

  Si Taher appears silently. Silently, like the martyrs. Silently, as usual.

  I am embarrassed before him, as usual.

  The fifteen years between us had always seemed greater. They were a lifetime in their own right, a symbol of a man who combined an eloquence of speech – which marked out all those who mixed with the Association of Scholars and studied in Constantine – with an eloquent presence.

  Si Taher knew when to smile and when to be angry. He knew how to speak, but also how to remain silent. His face was always dignified, with its vague smile that constantly suggested a different interpretation of his features. ‘Smiles are punctuation marks. But only a few people still know how to punctuate correctly,’ wrote Malek Haddad.

  My first partisans’ meeting with Si Taher took place in Kidya prison. A meeting charged with extreme feelings and shock, the rawness and fear of a first detention. Si Taher drew me into the Revolution day by day. He knew he was responsible for my being there. Perhaps he secretly pitied my sixteen years, my truncated childhood and my mother. He knew her well and understood what my first spell of detention might do to her. But he concealed his pity from me, repeating to those willing to listen, ‘Prisons were built for men.’

  At the time, Kidya prison, like those throughout eastern Algeria, was suffering from a sudden influx of men. This followed the demonstrations of 8 May 1945 when the cities of Constantine, Sétif and their environs made the first pledge of Revolution in the form of a few thousand martyrs who fell in a single demonstration and the tens of thousands of prisoners who crammed the cells. This made the French commit their stupidest mistake, as for a few months they mixed political and criminal prisoners in cells that at times held more than twenty inmates.

  In this way, they helped the Revolution spread among the criminal prisoners, who seized the chance to acquire a political consciousness and cleanse their honour by joining a Revolution for whose sake many of them would subsequently fall as shahids. Some of them are still alive today, enjoying respect and veneration as veteran leaders of the war of liberation, after history restored their criminal records to their original spotless state. As a result of colonial stupidity, political prisoners took the opportunity to get to know each other, and had time on their hands to discuss affairs of state and to plan the next stage.

  Today when I remember that experience, which for me lasted only six months, its intensity and shock make it seem longer than it actually was. I was released along with two others on account of our youth, and because others were of more concern than us.

  I went back to Constantine secondary school, having fallen a year behind. I found the same classes and the same works of philosophy and French literature waiting for me.

  Some schoolmates were absent, either in jail or shahids. Most of these were students in the top stream, which was supposed to produce the top rank of Gallicised Algerian intellectuals and civil servants. It was a matter of honour for them when some ventured to call them traitors simply for choosing French secondary schools and culture in a city where it was impossible to ignore the authority of Arabic and its esteemed place in people’s hearts and memories.

  Was it surprising that many of them were to be found among those imprisoned and tortured after the demonstrations? By virtue of their Western culture, they enjoyed an early political awareness and were full of nationalism and dreams. When World War II ended in victory for France and the Allies, they realised that France had used Algerians to fight someone else’s war, sending thousands to their deaths in battles that did not concern them, only for the survivors to return to slavery.

  The coincidence of sharing a cell with Si Taher was the stuff of legend. A taste of struggle that accompanied me for years and perhaps went on to alter my destiny. Meeting some men is like meeting one’s destiny.

  Si Taher was exceptional in all things, as if he had been preparing himself all along to be more than a man. He was born to be a leader. He came from the stock of Tariq ibn Ziyad and Emir Abdelkader, of those who could change history with one speech. The French, who imprisoned and tortured him for three years, were well aware of this. But they did not know that Si Taher would take his revenge years later, becoming the man most wanted after every military operation in eastern Algeria.

  What a coincidence that fate came full circle after ten years and placed me with Si Taher in another experience of struggle, this time armed.

  In 1955, September to be precise, I joined the National Liberation Front, the FLN. My comrades were starting a decisive academic year. In my twenty-fifth year, I was beginning my other life.

  I remember that I was surprised at the time by Si Taher’s reception. He didn’t ask for any details of my life or studies. He didn’t even ask why I had decided to join the Front, or how I had found him. He kept looking at me and then embraced me passionately as though he’d been waiting for a year.

  He said, ‘You’ve arrived!’

  ‘Yes, I’ve arrived,’ I replied with a mixture of joy and vague sadness.

  Si Taher could be like that. Terse, even in joy. In my sadness, I was equally terse with him.

  Then he asked about my family, Mother in particular. I told him she had died three months previously. I think he understood the whole thing. While patting my shoulder and with half a tear sparkling in his eyes, he said, ‘God have mercy on her. She suffered a lot.’

  He became lost in thought, far from me at that moment.

  Later, I envied that sudden tear in his eye, which elevated my mother to the rank of shahid. I only ever saw Si Taher cry over his men who had been killed. For a long time afterwards, I wished to be laid out as a corpse before him and enjoy, even from beyond the grave, an irrepressible tear in his eye.

  Was it for all this that my family was suddenly reduced to this man? I devoted myself to demonstrating my heroism to him, as if I wanted to make him a witness to my manhood or my death. I wanted him to witness that I no longer belonged to anyone except this country, that I had left nothing behind except the grave of a woman who had been my mother and a younger brother for whom my father had already chosen a new mother.

  I hurled myself at death every time, as if in defiance, or desiring it to take me rather than my comrades whose children and families awaited their retu
rn. But death decided to reject me, and I returned every time while others fell.

  After I’d taken part in a few victorious battles, Si Taher came gradually to rely on me for difficult missions. He would assign me the most dangerous ones, those that demanded direct confrontation with the enemy. After two years he promoted me to lieutenant so that I could command some battles on my own and take military decisions as circumstances required.

  Only then did the Revolution start to turn me into a man. As if my rank certified that I had been cured of my memory and my childhood. I was happy at the time, having finally achieved the serenity that only comes with peace of mind. Little did I realise then, but my ambitions weren’t to be. At the very time I believed that my sadness had become a thing of the past, fate was lying in wait.

  The fierce battle on the outskirts of Batna turned everything upside down. We lost six fighters, and I was one of the wounded. Two bullets hit my left arm and the whole course of my life suddenly changed. I was among the wounded who had to be transferred quickly to the Tunisian border for treatment. As the bullets were impossible to remove, my left arm had to be amputated. There was no room for discussion or hesitation. The only question was the safest route to Tunis, where the rear bases were situated.

  I was facing another reality.

  Fate expelled me from my only refuge, the life of night battles. It brought my clandestine world into the light and set another dimension before me, not of life or death, but one of pure pain that would be my lookout post over events on the battlefield. Si Taher’s words made it clear that I might not return to the Front.

  On that last day, Si Taher tried to maintain his normal tone. He said goodbye in the same way as he had done before every new battle. But this time he knew he was steeling me for my battle with fate. He was unusually brief. Maybe because no special orders are given in such cases. Maybe because he had endured the loss of ten of his best men, dead or wounded, in a single battle. He knew the value of every fighter and, with the Revolution beset from all sides, the need for every single one of them.