The Return Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2016 by Hisham Matar

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in the United Kingdom by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Guardian News & Media Ltd for permission to reprint an excerpt from “An Obligation to Account” by Kamila Shamsie and Philippe Sands from theguardian.com, January 17, 2010, copyright © 2016 by Guardian News & Media Ltd. Reprinted by permission.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Matar, Hisham, 1970– , author

  The return : fathers, sons and the land in between / Hisham Matar.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-345-80774-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80776-2

  1. Matar, Hisham, 1970– . 2. Matar, Hisham, 1970– –Family. 3. Matar, Jaballa.

  4. Novelists, American—21st century–Biography. 5. Fathers and sons–Biography.

  6. Missing persons—Libya. I. Title.

  PR6113.A87Z4655 2016 813'.6 C2015-908575-6

  Map by Jeff Edwards

  Book design by Christopher M. Zucker, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover art: © Diana Matar (top photograph); Édouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (detail) © The National Gallery, London

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  1. Trapdoor

  2. Black Suit

  3. The Sea

  4. The Land

  5. Blo’thaah

  6. Poems

  7. Your Health? Your Family?

  8. The Truce and the Clementine

  9. The Old Man and His Son

  10. The Flag

  11. The Last Light

  12. Benghazi

  13. Another Life

  14. The Bullet

  15. Maximilian

  16. The Campaign

  17. The Dictator’s Son

  18. The Good Manners of Vultures

  19. The Speech

  20. Years

  21. The Bones

  22. The Patio

  Acknowledgments

  By Hisham Matar

  About the Author

  1. Trapdoor

  Early morning, March 2012. My mother, my wife Diana and I were sitting in a row of seats that were bolted to the tiled floor of a lounge in Cairo International Airport. Flight 835 for Benghazi, a voice announced, was due to depart on time. Every now and then, my mother glanced anxiously at me. Diana, too, seemed concerned. She placed a hand on my arm and smiled. I should get up and walk around, I told myself. But my body remained rigid. I had never felt more capable of stillness.

  The terminal was nearly empty. There was only one man sitting opposite us. He was overweight, weary-looking, possibly in his mid-fifties. There was something in the way he sat—the locked hands on the lap, the left tilt of the torso—that signaled resignation. Was he Egyptian or Libyan? Was he on a visit to the neighboring country or going home after the revolution? Had he been for or against Qaddafi? Perhaps he was one of those undecided ones who held their reservations close to their chest?

  The voice of the announcer returned. It was time to board. I found myself standing at the front of the queue, Diana beside me. She had, on more than one occasion, taken me to the town where she was born, in northern California. I know the plants and the color of the light and the distances where she grew up. Now I was, finally, taking her to my land. She had packed the Hasselblad and the Leica, her two favorite cameras, and a hundred rolls of film. Diana works with great fidelity. Once she gets hold of a thread, she will follow it until the end. Knowing this excited and worried me. I am reluctant to give Libya any more than it has already taken.

  Mother was pacing by the windows that looked onto the runway, speaking on her mobile phone. People—mostly men—began to fill the terminal. Diana and I were now standing at the head of a long queue. It bent behind us like a river. I pretended I had forgotten something and pulled her to one side. Returning after all these years was a bad idea, I suddenly thought. My family had left in 1979, thirty-three years earlier. This was the chasm that divided the man from the eight-year-old boy I was then. The plane was going to cross that gulf. Surely such journeys were reckless. This one could rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow.

  What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

  —

  Back in October 2011, I had considered never returning to Libya. I was in New York, walking up Broadway, the air cold and swift, when the proposition presented itself. It seemed immaculate, a thought my mind had manufactured independently. As in youthful moments of drunkenness, I felt bold and invincible.

  I had gone to New York the previous month, at the invitation of Barnard College, to lecture on novels about exile and estrangement. But I had an older connection to the city. My parents had moved to Manhattan in the spring of 1970, when my father was appointed first secretary in the Libyan Mission to the United Nations. I was born that autumn. Three years later, in 1973, we returned to Tripoli. In the years since, I had visited New York maybe four or five times and always briefly. So, although I had just returned to the city of my birth, it was a place I hardly knew.

  In the thirty-six years since we left Libya, my family and I had built associations with several surrogate cities: Nairobi, where we went on our escape from Libya, in 1979, and have continued to visit ever since; Cairo, where we settled the following year into indefinite exile; Rome, a vacation spot for us; London, where I went at the age of fifteen for my studies and where for twenty-nine years I have been doggedly trying to make a life for myself; Paris, where, fatigued and annoyed by London, I moved in my early thirties, vowing never to return to England, only to find myself back two years later. In all these cities, I had pictured myself one day calm and living in that faraway island, Manhattan, where I was born. I would imagine a new acquaintance asking me, perhaps at a dinner party, or in a café, or in changing-rooms after a long swim, that old tiresome question “Where are you from?” and I, unfazed and free of the usual agitation, would casually reply, “New York.” In these fantasies, I saw myself taking pleasure from the fact that such a statement would be both true and false, like a magic trick.

  That I should move to Manhattan in my fortieth year, as Libya was ripping itself apart, and for this to take place on the 1st of September, the day when, back in 1969, a young captain named Muammar Qaddafi deposed King Idris and many of the significant feature
s of my life—where I live, the language in which I write, the language I am using now to write this—were set in motion: all this made it difficult to escape the idea that there was some kind of divine will at work.

  —

  In any political history of Libya, the 1980s represent a particularly lurid chapter. Opponents of the regime were hanged in public squares and sports arenas. Dissidents who fled the country were pursued—some kidnapped or assassinated. The ’80s were also the first time that Libya had an armed and determined resistance to the dictatorship. My father was one of the opposition’s most prominent figures. The organization he belonged to had a training camp in Chad, south of the Libyan border, and several underground cells inside the country. Father’s career in the army, his short tenure as a diplomat, and the private means he had managed to procure in the mid-1970s, when he became a successful businessman—importing products as diverse as Mitsubishi vehicles and Converse sports shoes to the Middle East—made him a dangerous enemy. The dictatorship had tried to buy him off; it had tried to scare him. I remember sitting beside him one afternoon in our flat in Cairo when I was ten or eleven, the weight of his arm on my shoulders. In the chair opposite sat one of the men I called “Uncle”—men who, I somehow knew, were his allies or followers. The word “compromise” was spoken, and Father responded, “I won’t negotiate. Not with criminals.”

  Whenever we were in Europe, he carried a gun. Before getting into the car, he would ask us to stand well away. He would go down on his knees and look under the chassis, cup his hands and peek through the windows for any sign of wiring. Men like him had been shot in train stations and cafés, their cars blown up. During the 1980s, when I was still in Cairo, I had read in the newspaper about the death of a renowned Libyan economist. He was stepping off a train at Stazione Termini in Rome when a stranger pressed a pistol to his chest and pulled the trigger. The photograph printed beside the article had the figure of the deceased covered in newspaper sheets, presumably from that day’s paper, which stopped at his ankles, leaving his polished leather shoes pointing up. Another time there was a report of a Libyan student shot in Greece. He was sitting on the terrace of a café in Monastiraki Square in Athens. A scooter stopped and the man sitting behind the driver pointed a gun at the student and fired several shots. A Libyan BBC World Service newsreader was killed in London. In April 1984 a demonstration took place in front of the Libyan Embassy in St James’s Square. One of the embassy staff pulled up a sash window on the first floor, held out a machine gun, and sprayed the crowd. A policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, was killed and eleven Libyan demonstrators were wounded, some of them critically.

  Qaddafi’s campaign to hunt down exiled critics—which was announced by Moussa Koussa, the head of foreign intelligence, at a public rally in the early 1980s—extended to the families of dissidents. My only sibling, Ziad, was fifteen when he went off to boarding school in Switzerland. A few weeks later, mid-way through term, he returned to Cairo. We had all gone to collect him from the airport. When he appeared amongst those spilling out of the arrivals lounge, his face looked paler than I remembered it. A few days earlier, I had seen Mother make several telephone calls, her finger trembling as she spun the dial.

  The Swiss school was remote, high up in the Alps. Public transport to the nearest village was in the form of a cable car, which operated for only a few hours in the middle of the day. For two days running, Ziad noticed a car parked on the path outside the school’s main gate. It had in it four men. They had the long hair so typical of members of Qaddafi’s Revolutionary Committees. Late one night, Ziad was called to the school’s office telephone. On the other end of the line, a man said, “I am a friend of your father. You must do exactly what I tell you. You have to leave immediately and take the first train to Basle.”

  “Why? What happened?” Ziad asked.

  “I can’t tell you now. You must hurry. Take the first train to Basle. I’ll be there and will explain everything.”

  “But it’s the middle of the night,” Ziad said.

  The man would not offer any further explanations. He simply kept repeating, “Take the first train to Basle.”

  “I can’t do that. I don’t know who you are. Please don’t call here again,” Ziad said, and hung up.

  The man then called Mother, who then telephoned the school. She told Ziad he needed to leave the school right away and told him what to do.

  Ziad woke up his favorite teacher, a young Cambridge graduate who had probably thought it would be fun to go and teach English literature in the Alps, skiing between classes.

  “Sir, my father is about to have surgery and asked to see me before going into the operating theater. I need to take the first train to Basle. Would you please drive me to the station?”

  The teacher telephoned my mother, and she backed up Ziad’s story. The headmaster had to be woken up. He telephoned Mother and, once he too was satisfied, Ziad’s teacher checked the train timetable. There was a train for Basle in forty minutes. If they hurried, they might make it.

  They had to drive past the car; there was no other way out. Ziad pretended to be tying his shoelace as they passed the men. The teacher drove carefully down the twisting mountain road. A few minutes later, headlights appeared behind them. When the teacher said, “I think they are following us,” Ziad pretended not to hear.

  At the station, Ziad shot into the concourse and hid in the public toilets. He heard the train roll in. He waited until it had come to a complete stop, counted a few seconds for the passengers to disembark and board, then ran and jumped on the train. The doors shut and the carriages moved. Ziad was sure he had lost them, but then the four men appeared, walking up the aisle. They saw him. One of them smiled at him. They followed him from one carriage to the next, muttering, “Kid, you think you are a man? Then come here and show us.” At the front of the train, Ziad found the conductor chatting to the driver.

  “Those men there are following me,” Ziad told him, no doubt with fear rippling through his voice, because the conductor believed him at once and asked Ziad to sit right beside him. Seeing this, the four men retreated to the next carriage. When the train arrived, Ziad saw men in uniform waiting on the platform. My father’s associate, who had telephoned that night, was standing amongst them.

  I remember Ziad telling us these details as we sat around the dining table. I was utterly overwhelmed by a feeling of safety and gratitude, as well as by a new fear, sharp and pulsing, in my depths. Looking at me, though, you would not have known it. All the while, as Ziad spoke, I was pretending to be excited by his adventure. It wasn’t till later that evening that the whole thing weighed down on my consciousness. I kept thinking about what the men had said, which Ziad whispered to us several times, perfectly mimicking the menacing tone and the Tripoli accent: “Kid, you think you are a man? Then come here and show us.”

  Shortly after this, when I was twelve, I needed to see an eye specialist. Mother put me on a plane and I flew alone from Cairo to Geneva, where Father was to meet me. He and I spoke on the telephone before I left for the airport.

  “If, for any reason, you don’t see me in arrivals, go to the information desk and ask them to call out this name,” he said, and read out one of the names he traveled on. I knew it well. “Whatever you do,” he repeated, “don’t give them my real name.”

  When I got to Geneva, I didn’t see him. I did as he said and went to the information desk, but when the woman behind the counter asked me for the name, I panicked. I couldn’t remember it. Seeing how flustered I was, she smiled and handed me the microphone. “Would you like to make the announcement yourself?” I took the microphone and said “Father, Father” several times, until I saw him running towards me, a big smile on his face. I felt embarrassed and remember asking him on the way out of the airport, “Why couldn’t I simply say your name? What are you afraid of anyway?” We walked through the crowd, and as we did so we passed two men speaking Arabic with a perfect Libyan accent. Encountering our dialect duri
ng those years was always disconcerting, provoking in me, and with equal force, both fear and longing. “So what does this Jaballa Matar look like anyway?” one of them asked the other. I went silent and never complained about my father’s complicated travel arrangements after that.

  It was out of the question for Father to travel on his real passport. He used false documents with pseudonyms. In Egypt, we felt safe. But in March 1990, Father was kidnapped from our Cairo flat by the Egyptian secret police and delivered to Qaddafi. He was taken to Abu Salim prison, in Tripoli, which was known as “The Last Stop”—the place where the regime sent those it wanted to forget.

  In the mid-1990s, several people risked their lives to smuggle three of my father’s letters to my family. In one of them, Father writes, “The cruelty of this place far exceeds all of what we have read of the fortress prison of Bastille. The cruelty is in everything, but I remain stronger than their tactics of oppression….My forehead does not know how to bow.”

  In another letter, there is this sentence: “At times a whole year will pass by without seeing the sun or being let out of this cell.”

  In calm, precise and at times ironic prose, he demonstrates an astonishing commitment to patience:

  And now a description of this noble palace…The cell is a concrete box. The walls are made of pre-fabricated slabs. There is a steel door through which no air passes. A window that is three and a half metres above ground. As for the furniture, it is in the style of Louis XVI: an old mattress, worn out by many previous prisoners, torn in several places. The world here is empty.

  From these letters, and from prisoner testimonies that I’ve been able to gather with the help of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Swiss NGO TRIAL, we know that Father was in Abu Salim at least from March 1990 to April 1996, when he was moved from his cell and either taken to another secret wing in the same prison, moved to another prison or executed.