The Bridges of Constantine (24 page)

Ziyad had died.

His black suitcase, forgotten in a corner of his wardrobe, suddenly overshadowed all the furniture in the house. It became the only piece of furniture and I could see nothing else. When I returned home, I felt it was waiting for me and that I had an appointment with him. When I left the house, I felt I was running away from it, and that its riddle was weighing on me without my knowing. But how to run away from it when it lay in wait for me every evening? I would switch off the television and sit alone smoking a cigarette before going to bed, and the torture would begin.

I returned to the same question: what was inside the suitcase and what to do with it?

I tried to remember what people usually did with the possessions of the dead – their clothes, for example, and personal effects. Mother came to mind and with her the painful days around her death. I remembered her clothes and her things. I remembered her burgundy
kandoura
. It wasn’t her most beautiful item of clothing but the one I loved most. She wore it for every special occasion. It was the robe that was most redolent of her distinctive perfume, amber mixed with her sweat and something like jasmine blossom. A mix of simple, natural perfumes with which I breathed in motherhood.

I asked about the
kandoura
some days after she died. I was told in some surprise that it had been given, along with other things, to the poor women who had come to cook that day. I shouted, ‘It’s mine. I wanted it.’ But my eldest aunt said, ‘The things of the dead have to be taken out of the house before the dead person leaves. All except for a few very precious things that are kept as mementos or for luck.’

Mother’s
miqyas
, the bracelet that never left her wrist, as if she had been born wearing it, what do you think they did with it? I wasn’t bold enough to ask. My brother Hassan, who wasn’t even ten years old, wasn’t aware of anything happening around him except Mother’s death and permanent absence. I was surrounded by crowds of women who were deciding everything, as though the house were suddenly theirs. Where was Mother’s bracelet? Most likely it had become the share of one of her sisters, or perhaps my father had taken it along with the rest of her gold to give as a gift to his new bride.

Whenever I dwelt on the details of that memory, my relationship with that suitcase grew more complicated. Ordinary things left as a legacy sometimes had a value far beyond their worth to others. What should I do with a suitcase whose owner had left months before without instructions or explanation and then died?

If the things of the dead go to the poor, should I give it to charity? Or if we keep the precious objects, should I keep it as a memento of a friend?

Was it a burden or a pledge? If it was a burden, why did I accept it without any discussion? Why didn’t I persuade him to take it with him, using the excuse that I might leave Paris, for example? If it was a pledge, hadn’t its owner’s death turned it into a last request? Would we give the requests of martyrs away as charity? Would we leave them at our door as a present for the first vagrant?

I spent days obsessed by the suitcase, but I knew I was exhausting myself in vain. Only its contents could determine its value and character and so determine what I might do with it. As a result, I was suddenly afraid of it, even though I had paid it no attention before.

Did Ziyad’s death impart this confusing character to it? Or was I, in fact, afraid that it would reveal your secret to me, something about you I was afraid to know?

To shut the door on suspicion, I had to open the suitcase.

I took the decision on a Saturday night, a week after reading the report of Ziyad’s death.

There was only one other, not entirely sensible, option: to take it to the offices of the PLO and give it to someone there to send to Ziyad’s relatives in Lebanon or elsewhere.

But I rejected that naive idea when I remembered that Ziyad no longer had family in Lebanon. Who, then, would they send it to? With what kind of people would it end up?

Who would be its ‘father’? There was more than one ‘Abu’ who thought he alone was the father of the Palestinian cause and the sole legitimate heir of the martyrs. To him the others were traitors.

How would I know who killed Ziyad? Was it at the hands of criminal ‘comrades’ or the criminal enemy? Didn’t he say, ‘They’ve turned the cause into “causes” so they can murder us without calling it a crime’?

Which bullet killed Ziyad when the prime of Palestinian youth was being killed by Palestinian or Arab bullets?

That evening my hand shook as I opened the catches on the suitcase. Something made me remember I only had one arm. The case wasn’t locked with a key or padlocks. It was as though he intended to leave it to me half open like someone leaving a door ajar as a silent invitation to enter. I relaxed a little at this gesture, the prior or belated permission Ziyad had given me to enter his private world without feeling ashamed. Perhaps he had done so because he hated broken locks and doors forced open as much as he hated informers and jackboots.

Or because he had anticipated a day like this.

All these suppositions did not stop a shiver going through me and another thought crossing my mind. He had known in advance that he was going to die, and this suitcase was readied for me from the outset. I could have opened it months before. From the moment he left the apartment, it no longer existed for him. It was his way of severing the roots of memory, as usual.

I lifted up the top of the suitcase, after putting it on the edge of the bed, and took a first look at what was inside. Death and life assailed me equally as I saw his clothes and touched his grey woollen sweaters and the black leather jacket he always wore. I had proof of his presence, proof of his absence, proof of his death and proof of his life. The scent of life and of death breathed equally strongly from the corners of the suitcase.

Here I was before his remains, with him and without him.

An item of clothing, another. The external jacket of a human book. A cloth front to a house of glass. The house broke and the front remained, memory folded into a suitcase. Why had he left me his exterior? Among the clothes was a sky-blue silk shirt still unopened in its clear glossy wrapper. I easily deduced this had been a present from you.

Then three cassette tapes, one of Theodorakis, the others excerpts of classical music. I put them to one side as I remembered that Ziyad, whenever he went, left me cassettes, books and clothes – and a love in suspension.

But this was the first time he had left things packed in a suitcase, favourite objects carefully arranged. It was as though he had packed it with all the things he loved in preparation for a journey. The things he might want wherever he was going: his favourite black jacket and the music of Theodorakis.

My hand came across your novel at the bottom of the case. I trembled, and my hand shook and paused some moments before picking up the book. I sat down on the edge of the bed before opening it. It was as though I were opening a letter bomb. I flicked through the book as though I didn’t know it. Then I remembered something. I raced to the front page in search of a dedication. But there was only a blank page, not one word, no signature or inscription. I felt a wave of sadness that paralysed my hand and a vague urge to cry.

To which one of us did you dedicate your false version, when both of us had an unsigned copy? Which of us did you make imagine that he inhabited the book’s inside pages – like your heart – and had no need for a dedication?

Had Ziyad believed you? Did he, too, believe you to the extent that he decided to take this novel with him to reread wherever he went? This blank page was enough to condemn you. Its unwritten words spoke more eloquently than anything you could have written. Did it matter after this that I didn’t find a letter to you in the suitcase?

You were a woman expert in invisible ink, and only I knew it.

Apart from your novel, I only found a medium-sized black diary, nestled at the bottom of the case like a secret. As soon as I picked it up, the
carte orange
Ziyad had used on the Métro fell out along with a newspaper cutting from October, the month he had left. I took a quick look at the ticket, but was only thinking about reading the diary. His photo stopped me, however. Photos of the dead are disturbing; photos of martyrs more so. Always a source of pain, martyrs suddenly become sadder and more mysterious in their photographs.

As enigmas, they become suddenly more beautiful while we become more horrified. We’re suddenly afraid to stare at them. We’re suddenly worried about our photographs to come!

My, he was handsome, that man. A concealed, ambiguous handsomeness. Even in a quick snapshot taken in less than three minutes for less than five francs he could appear special. Even after his death he could be attractive with that vague, ironic melancholy. It was though he was making fun in advance of a moment just like this.

I understood once again that you loved him. But I loved him before you in another way, the way we love a person we admire and wish to emulate for one reason or another. We meet them, go out with them and are seen with them as much as possible, as though, deep down, we believe that their beauty, mad passion and talent, all their brilliant features, might be transmitted to us by proximity.

What a ridiculous idea! I only discovered that it was the root of my disaster too late. That was when I read the wonderful words of a French writer (and painter): ‘Do not seek beauty, because once you find it, you will have disfigured yourself!’ I made exactly that stupid mistake.

I put his ticket and photograph back into the case and started turning over the diary.

I felt it contained something that would surprise me, that might disturb my mood and open the door to unseasonal gales. What, I wondered, did he write in it? I knew that truth was always born small and felt that the truth here was as small as this fearful pocketbook. I looked for a cigarette to light and lay down on the bed to leaf through the diary at leisure.

The pages came filled with stanzas of poetry scattered among the dates. There were notes in the margins and other, long poems that might take up two or three pages or brief jottings of a few lines always written in red in the middle of a page. It seemed he had wished to make these stand out from the rest of what he’d written. Perhaps because they weren’t poetry, perhaps because they were more important than poetry.

Where should I have begun this diary? Where was the entrance to Ziyad’s secret labyrinth, which I had always dreamed of sneaking into on the chance of finding you?

A title would stop me and I would start reading a poem. I would try and solve the clues and locate you, sometimes in the symbolism and sometimes in the most confessional details. But I couldn’t wait, and rushed to another page in search of other proofs and further explanation, for words to tell me what had happened in black and white.

I was, in fact, so worked up and so full of extreme, clashing feelings that I could barely think. I was unable to distinguish between what I read and what I imagined I was reading.

At that moment, the vision of the suitcase open before me, its strewn contents and the small black diary that I was holding made me ashamed of myself. It was as if in opening it I were performing an autopsy on Ziyad’s corpse, its remains strewn on my bed, in order to extract this notebook, which was nothing less than his heart.

Ziyad’s heart, which had once throbbed for you and which that day, even after his death, continued to beat in my hands to the rhythm of words fraught with loss and fear, sadness and lust.

Over my body run your lips

They only ran blades over me

Set me on fire, woman of flame

Love will bring us close one day

Death will part us one day

A handful of dust will judge us

Desire for the body will bring us close

Then one day

A wound the size of the body will part us

I was one in you

Woman of dust and marble

I watered you, then I cried and said:

Princess of my desire

Princess of my death

Come near!

I read this passage so many times, with new feelings and new doubts every time. I asked myself with the impotence of an amateur poet, where did imagination end and reality begin? Where was the line between the symbolic and the real?

Each phrase cancelled out the one before. The woman’s body so fused with the earth that it was impossible to separate or distinguish them.

Yet the reality of the words’ blatant desire was unmistakeable. ‘Over my body run your lips – Set me on fire, woman of flame – Desire for the body will bring us close – I was one in you.’

Was revolution nothing but a mess of words that Ziyad used to exonerate himself? He preferred defeat at the hands of death to defeat at the hands of a woman. It was a matter of pride and self-deception. ‘Princess of my death/Come near.’

Death did come at last. Did you perhaps come that day?

Was he really alone with you? Did you run your lips over his body? Did you set him on fire? Was he one in you? Did . . .?

Most likely, it did happen. The date of that poem matched the date of my trip to Spain.