The Bridges of Constantine by Ahlem Mosteghanemi Read Free Book Online Page B

were a few days older and it was actually a few months younger. A painting that marked my beginning twice: once, when I picked up a brush and first started to paint; the other, the day you stood before it and I began my adventure with fate.
     
    In a diary full of insignificant dates and addresses, I circled that date in April 1981 as though I wished to single it out. There had been nothing throughout the previous years worthy of mention. My days, like the pages of my diary, were all rough drafts. Usually I would write something simply so as not to leave the page blank. White sheets of paper always frightened me.
    Eight diaries for eight years, with nothing remarkable in them. Together they formed a single page of exile whose years, by a process of false accounting, I tried to condense into eight diaries. That was all. They were still stacked in my cupboard, one on top of the other. They hadn’t been kept according to any calendar, but counted off the years of my voluntary emigration.
    I ringed that date as if locking you within, as if fixing you and your memory in my spotlight for ever. It was in anticipation that this date would be a turning point in memory, my rebirth at your hands. At the time I was well aware that being reborn through you, like reaching you, would be no easy matter. The fact that your phone number and address weren’t on that page was proof enough. Ultimately, only the date was recorded. Was it reasonable to ask for your phone number at our first meeting or, rather, our first chance encounter? What possible justification or pretext did I have for that? Any reason would have seemed contrived – a man asking a pretty girl for her phone number.
    I felt a need to sit with you, to talk to you, to listen to you. There was a chance I would encounter that other version of my memory. But how to convince you of that? How to explain in a few minutes that I – a man you were meeting for the first time – knew a great deal about you? You were even talking to me in a formal French, as if to a stranger. I had no choice but to respond in the same formal way.
    The words got caught on my tongue that day, as though I were speaking to you in an unfamiliar language, a language that didn’t know us. How could I, after more than twenty years, have shaken your hand and asked in neutral French, ‘ Mais comment allez-vous, mademoiselle ?’ You responded with the same coolness, ‘ Bien, je vous remercie .’
    My memory was on the verge of tears; this was the memory that knew you as a crawling baby girl. My one arm was almost shaking in an effort to resist the unruly desire to embrace you and ask in the Constantine accent that I so missed, ‘ Washik ? How are you?’
    Ah, how are you, my little one who grew up out of sight? How are you, strange visitor who no longer knows me? Baby girl, wearing my memory and my mother’s bracelet on her wrist.
    I gathered in you all those I loved. I contemplated you: your smile and the colour of your eyes brought back the features of Si Taher. How beautiful that the martyrs lived again in your face. How beautiful that my mother lived again in the bracelet around your wrist. Your appearance brought the homeland back to life. How beautiful that you should be you !
    ‘When people encounter something extremely beautiful, they want to cry,’ Malek Haddad wrote.
    Encountering you was the most beautiful thing that had happened to me in a lifetime.
    How could I explain all of this to you in one go as we stood there, surrounded by eyes and ears? How could I explain to you that I longed for you even without knowing? That I had been waiting for you without believing it? That it was inevitable we would meet?
    To sum up that first meeting: fifteen minutes or thereabouts of talking, most of which I dominated, a stupid mistake that I regretted afterwards. I was actually trying to keep you there with words, neglecting to give you more of a chance to speak.
    I was happy to discover your passion for art.