The Return Page 2

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  In late August 2011, Tripoli fell, and revolutionaries took control of Abu Salim. They broke down the cell doors, and eventually all the men crammed inside those concrete boxes wandered out into the sunlight. I was at home in London. I spent that day on the telephone with one of the men hammering away at the steel doors of the prison cells. “Wait, wait,” he would shout, and I would hear his sledgehammer hitting steel. Not the sound of a bell in the open but one buried deep, like a recalled memory, ringing, I want to be there and I don’t want to be there. Countless voices were now shouting, “God is great!” He handed the hammer to another man, and I listened to him pant, purpose and victory in every breath. I want to be there and I don’t want to be there. They came to a cell in the basement, the last one remaining. Lots of shouting now, people vying to lend a hand. I heard the man call out, “What? Inside?” There was confusion. Then I heard him shout, “Are you sure?” He got back on the phone and said they thought the cell contained an important person from Ajdabiya, my father’s hometown, who had been in solitary confinement for many years. I could not speak. I want to be there and I want to be there. “Stay with me,” the man on the telephone said. Every few seconds, he would repeat, “Stay with me.” Whether it took ten minutes or an hour, I cannot say. When they eventually broke down the door, they found an old blind man in a windowless room. His skin had not seen the sun in years. When they asked him his name, he said he did not know. What family was he from? He did not know. How long had he been there? He had, apparently, lost his memory. He had one possession: a photograph of my father. Why? Who was he to Father? The prisoner did not know. And although he could not remember anything, he was happy to be free. That was the word the man on the telephone used: “happy.” I wanted to ask about the picture. Was it a recent one or an old one? Was it pinned to the wall, kept under the pillow, or did they find it on the floor beside the man’s bed? Was there a bed? Did the prisoner have a bed? I asked none of these questions. And when the man said, “I am sorry,” I thanked him and hung up.

  —

  By October, as I was attempting to concentrate on my teaching in New York, all the political prisons, every underground secret compartment, were falling one by one to the revolutionaries. Cells were opened, the men in them released and accounted for. Father was not in any of them. For the first time, the truth became inescapable. It was clear that he had been shot or hanged or starved or tortured to death. No one knows when, or those who know are dead, or have escaped, or are too frightened or indifferent to speak. Was it in the sixth year of his incarceration, when his letters stopped? Was it in the massacre that took place that year in the same prison, when 1,270 men were rounded up and shot? Or was it a solitary death, perhaps during the seventh or the eighth or the ninth year? Or was it in the twenty-first year, after the revolution broke? Perhaps during one of the many interviews I gave, arguing the case against the dictatorship? Or perhaps Father was not dead at all, as Ziad continued to believe even after all the prisons were opened. Perhaps, Ziad hoped, he was out and, owing to some failure—loss of memory, loss of the ability to see or speak or hear—was unable to find his way back, like Gloucester wandering the heath in King Lear. “Give me your hand: you are now within a foot / Of the extreme verge,” Edgar says to his blind father, who has resolved to end his own life, a line that has lived with me these past twenty-five years.

  It must have been the story of the prisoner who had lost his memory that made Ziad believe that Father might somehow be alive. A few days after I arrived in New York, Ziad called, asking me to find someone who could produce a picture of what Father might look like today so that we could post it around the country and online. “Someone might recognize him,” he said. I spoke to a forensic artist in Canada. She wanted copies of as many photographs as possible of my father, his siblings and my grandfather. After she received them, she called with a list of questions about the conditions he endured in prison: the food he ate, the possibility of torture or illness? Ten days later, the drawing arrived. She had ruthlessly dropped the cheeks, sunk the eyes, exaggerated a faint scar on the forehead. The worst thing about the portrait was its credibility. It made me wonder about other changes. What had become of the teeth, for example, those he bared to Dr. Mazzoleni in Rome on our annual checkup? The Italian dentist used to always say, provoking in us silent pride, “You ought to be grateful to Libya and its minerals for such excellent teeth.” And what of the tongue that had its own way of shaping my name, the amplifying throat and all the parts of that echo chamber, the head—its nostrils and cavities, the weight of its bone and flesh and brain—and how it alters the resonance of that gentle voice? How would this new, older voice sound? I never sent the portrait to Ziad, and he stopped asking about it. I showed it to him the next time we were together. He looked at it for a moment and said, “It’s not accurate.” I agreed and put the drawing back in its envelope. “Don’t show it to Mother,” he added.

  That cold October evening in New York, I began to doubt both my ability to return to Libya and my will not to. I entered our flat on the Upper West Side and did not tell Diana about the “immaculate” idea that had occurred to me on my walk. We ate supper. I collected the plates and washed them slowly. Afterwards, we listened to music, then took a walk through the dark streets. I hardly slept that night. Never returning to Libya, I realized, meant never allowing myself to think about it again, which would only lead to another form of resistance, and I was done with resistance.

  I left my building at daybreak. I was glad for New York’s indifference. I had always regarded Manhattan the way an orphan might think of the mother who had laid him on the doorstep of a mosque: it meant nothing to me but also everything. It represented, in moments of desperation, the possibility of finally cheating myself out of exile. My feet were heavy. I noticed how old I had become but also the boyishness that persisted, as if part of me had stopped developing the moment we left Libya. I was like David Malouf’s imagining of Ovid in his banishment—infantilized by exile. I headed towards my office at the college. I wanted to immerse myself in work. I tried to think about the lecture I was going to deliver that afternoon, on Kafka’s The Trial. I thought about K’s tenderness towards the two men who come to execute him; his dark and heroic surrender; the words he thought to himself: “the only thing I can do now is keep my mind calm and analytical to the last”; and the corrective, regretful discovery of: “I’ve always wanted to seize the world with twenty hands….” I told myself it was good that I had the lectures to think about. I crossed over a grille in the sidewalk. Beneath it, there was a room, barely high enough for a man to stand and certainly not wide enough for him to lie down. A deep gray box in the ground. I had no idea what it was for. Without knowing how it happened, I found myself on my knees, looking in. No matter how hard I tried, I could not find a trapdoor, a pipe, anything leading out. It came over me suddenly. I wept and could hear myself.

  2. Black Suit

  In 1980, my family was living in Egypt. On several occasions as a child I would sit in my room with the atlas and try to calculate the number of kilometres between our flat and the border. Every year, Qaddafi was going to die or be forced to flee the country. Every year, we were going to return home. In 1985, a couple of years after Ziad’s close call in Switzerland, I asked to go to boarding school in Europe. I decided on England. Because of what had happened to Ziad, I would need to use a pseudonym. We liked the music of Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, so Ziad suggested I go by the name of Bob. I was to pretend to be Christian, the son of an Egyptian mother and an American father. A year later, in 1986, I went to boarding school in England and for the following two years I lived under this identity. In the beginning, it seemed surprisingly easy. I even enjoyed pretending to be someone else.

  There was a girl I liked. She had skin the color of set honey. Her eyes were wide and gleamed like polished wood. She was a voracious reader. Every other day I saw her in the library with a different book. She had a poise that seemed my
sterious to me and a warmth that I was sure derived its strength from a stable life. I imagined how words passing through her throat might sound, but I never dared approach, and, as she was not in any of my classes, I didn’t hear her voice until, at the Spring Party, she walked across the room and, to my utter surprise, asked me to dance. We danced through several songs and then stood side by side against the wall. When it was time for us boys to be bused back to our house, she accompanied me down the long path. The crickets in the hedge, the only light coming from a far-off lamp-post. We stopped. She placed her mouth on my cheek and left it there for a long time. I still remember the delicate temperature of her lips. I could hardly sleep from happiness. But then the following morning, when she ran over to me as I stood queuing to enter the dining hall, I turned all cold and silent. I couldn’t imagine kissing a mouth that had never spoken my real name. The look on her face—taken aback, betrayed—is still with me.

  The year passed and I was home for the summer, eating Mother’s food and hearing my name, and its various diminutive forms, spoken out loud at home and in public. I missed the Arabic language and everything Arabic: the gestures, the social code, the music. I became less boisterous as my departure date approached. My parents noticed. One afternoon Father came into my room. “I hope you know you can always change your mind,” he said gently. But given how hard I had lobbied to be sent abroad, I felt I must persist.

  On my return to school one of my friends came to tell me about a new boy.

  “He’s Arabic,” he said. “His name is Hamza.”

  “Do you know where from?” I asked.

  “Libya, I think, or was it Lebanon?”

  I went to look up the name. It was definitely Libyan. His father worked for the government. I had no doubt that if he discovered my real family name he would recognize it. By then Father had become one of the most noted leaders of the opposition. When Hamza and I met, he extended his hand and said, “Marhaba.” He smiled in a way that would soon become familiar. We became friends immediately. We liked similar music. On Wednesdays, when we got the afternoon off and most of the other boys went to the pub, he and I would hunt for a good restaurant. Once he told me he loved me like a brother. I said I did too.

  He hardly ever talked about Libya. I hadn’t seen the country for eight years. I wished I could ask him about it. Once, on a group hike through the woods, I absent-mindedly began to hum a Libyan folk song. He noticed. “My brother’s best friend is Libyan,” I said. “Invited us to a wedding once. Crazy event. He’s always bringing music tapes around. Do you know the tune? Where is it from? What are the words?”

  It was at that time that my housemaster, the only person besides the headmaster who knew my true identity, began to invite me into his home. He was Welsh. He looked like Ted Hughes and, like the poet, was a keen fisherman. He always smelled of cigar. Some nights, just after lights out, he would knock on the door and whisper, “Robert, telephone call.” I would follow him down to his flat, where he lived with his wife, their four children, and two dogs. We would sit at the kitchen table. He would pour me a small glass of red wine and his wife would fry me an egg. He never called me by my real name. He simply afforded me the chance every now and then to be who I really was.

  That special thing, when a friendship comes to resemble a shelter, began to occur between Hamza and me. When the year ended and we were to go our separate ways, I wondered how our bond, hermetically sealed within the school, could ever survive. I was secretly relieved when he got a place at Cardiff University; I was going to university in London. For the farewell, Hamza and I met with a group of other students at a pub in the nearby village. It was an exuberant night, full of promises that we would stay in touch forever. More than once I would look at their faces and hear the word “impossible” ringing in my head. How could I ever see these people again, even the dearest one amongst them? I decided to leave. I went to use the toilet before heading off to the station. Hamza followed me. I remember our parallel images in the mirror as we stood washing hands. We embraced. “Man,” he said, “I’m going to miss you.” I remember the shape of his ear, how my eyes focused on it. I said the words as though involuntarily:

  “Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.”

  He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid.

  “I am sorry,” I said. I was not sure what exactly I was apologizing for.

  When we looked at each other we had tears running down our faces. We embraced again, rushed back to the bar and continued drinking. We all stayed there until the place closed. Neither of us mentioned a word to the others. He never called me Hisham.

  He insisted, swearing on his father’s life, on paying for a cab to take me all the way to London. Midway through the journey I had to ask the driver to pull over. I vomited on the side of the motorway.

  Years later, walking with Diana up the Marylebone Road, I saw him coming in the opposite direction. He had clearly spotted me first, because that same smile was drawn on his face. We shook hands and embraced. I introduced him to Diana. And he had that proud shyness intimate friends feel on first meeting your beloved. We searched our pockets for pieces of paper. We wrote our telephone numbers down. But even as we did, I was sure that we both knew that neither of us would ever call.

  —

  I am still not entirely clear why my fifteen-year-old self, living inside a loving, unrestrictive family, would choose to leave Egypt, the horses, the Red and Mediterranean seas, the friends, Thunder—the German Shepherd I fed with my own hands (and who was anything but thunderous)—and, perhaps most importantly, my own name and fly 3,500 kilometres north to live in a large, unheated stone house with forty English boys in the middle of soggy fields and under a sky that almost never broke, where I was Robert and only sometimes Bob.

  I had fallen for the landscape some five years before, when I was ten. We were visiting London, but then, hearing that a cousin was boarding in a school in Somerset—or was it Dorset or perhaps even Devon?—we decided to take the train west from Paddington. I remember the station, and the way the carriage seemed to become lighter as the density of the capital fell away, as though the pull of gravity was stronger in the city. It was impossible to stop looking out of the window. The thick green hedgerows, now coming closer, now vanishing. Water running in rivers, or lingering in drops on leaves, making the air sharp and damp. Once we were off the train, we drove through hedges that rose high on either side of the road. The further we went, the narrower and deeper the lanes became, as if the earth were folding us in. The light did not alter. The variation was only in the clouds, interlaced thickly together, their bellies pale and their edges a shade darker. It all gave me the impression, which I see now was a strange thing for a ten-year-old boy to think, that if I were to put something down here, something of personal value that might be, to anyone else, of no value at all and therefore more vulnerable to damage, it would not be moved. I would be able to come back later and find it exactly where I had left it.

  This, however, could only partly account for the decision to go to English boarding school. After all, I had a choice. I could have gone to Switzerland, a country that has always appealed to me, or to America, which then seemed the most exciting place in the world. But I think I had spotted, even then, from that first visit when I was ten, a correspondence with this strange place. Over the years, that correspondence gained such depth that now I feel bound to England not so much by the length of time I have spent here but by nature.

  If this explains my coming to England, it does not explain my departure from Cairo. Perhaps I did not trust in the constancy of my parents’ life, or the life they had created for themselves in Egypt, where many decisions were suspended because “We’ll be in Libya by then.” It’s not that England felt more permanent but that here I thought I could be in charge of my own fate.

  However, this love affair with the English landscape turned dark on my first day. The instructions from my parents were that,
on landing at Heathrow, I was to take a black London cab directly to school. What my parents thought would be a comfort turned into a stressful journey. The London driver got lost. Night was falling. The man became more and more impatient. He threatened to leave my giant suitcase and me in one of the deserted country lanes.

  Looking back, I think I might have annoyed him earlier. He had stopped at a petrol station to refuel and left the engine running. Coming from Cairo, where drivers turn off the ignition at traffic stops, this seemed horribly wasteful. My upbringing placed a heavy moral value on waste. A few grains of rice left on my plate would provoke my mother to say, “But how precisely have these grains offended you now?” When the London cabby got back into the car, I asked him, “Excuse me, please, why didn’t you switch off your engine?” He looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “You’re right there, mate; it’s my engine.” After about an hour more of driving around in the dusk, he stopped the car and asked me to get out. I decided to remain silent. Exasperated, he swung the car arbitrarily into the next lane, and, as the road rose, I spotted two horseback-riders some fifty metres away.

  “Stop,” I said, and proceeded to wave desperately to the riders, shouting, “Hello! Hello!”

  They saw me. Two women. I was later to learn that they were the local farmer’s daughters and that they almost never rode this late, but, as luck had it, they were looking for their dog, which had gone missing that afternoon. They looked slightly older than Ziad and me, but the age difference between them seemed similar. They remained on their horses: a mare and stallion, each taller than the cab, coats brushed, glistening.