The Return Page 3
In Cairo, between the ages of eleven and fifteen, I used to rise at 5 A.M. each morning to ride before school. And on the nights I went out with the boys and our gallivanting lasted until we heard the call for dawn prayer, we would head out to the stables behind the Giza Pyramids and ride out into the desert. When the horses were warm and the sun had appeared above the horizon, we would gallop the whole way back. I would bring my face as close as possible to the mane, against the warmth of the animal’s neck, listening to its breath racing in and out as though through a piston. The stable boy would rub his hand on the horses and show us the sweat’s white foam, shouting that we had ruined the animals for the rest of the day. We would pay him double and, if he was still cross, bring him with us to the Mena House Oberoi for breakfast.
These English horses were at least double the size of those we rode in Cairo, bred for winter farm work and hunting rather than racing. The sisters knew of the school. The older one pointed out a building in the distance, then told the driver, in a commanding voice that secretly pleased me, “Well, you won’t see it from down there now, will you?” He stepped out and saw the dark stone tower jutting out of a clump of high trees, their leaves already discoloring. As the older sister gave the driver directions, the younger one sat perfectly still and looked at me. She had red hands, sore from riding in the cold evening, and the difference in color between her dark fingers and pale pink face seemed so strange to me then.
—
Four days before Mother, Diana, and I were due to go to Benghazi, I flew from London to Cairo. On the way, an old question resolved itself. It suddenly made sense why my friends have always assumed that, after more than a quarter of a century of living in England, I will eventually move to another country. Something about me, or about the life I have created in London, seems impermanent. This suspicion, that at any moment I might leave, has disturbed but also reassured me. I am often unnerved by exiles I meet who, like me, have found themselves living in London but who, unlike me, have surrendered to the place and therefore exude the sort of resigned stability I lack. Naked adoption of native mannerisms or the local dialect—this has always seemed to me a kind of humiliation. And yet, like a jealous lover, I believed I knew London’s secrets better than most of its natives. When, after Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to Libya in 2004, members of Qaddafi’s inner circle began to buy houses in the British capital, sometimes in my neighborhood, I told myself that my London was not theirs. I became grateful to have settled in a city whose most essential character is secrecy. On the plane from London to Cairo, I understood the logic of these contradictions; they were informed not by London but by the condition of waiting. It turns out that I have spent all the time since I was eight years old, when my family left Libya, waiting. My silent condemnation of those fellow exiles who wished to assimilate—which is to say, my bloody-minded commitment to rootlessness—was my feeble act of fidelity to the old country, or maybe not even to Libya but to the young boy I was when we left.
—
I remained standing to one side of the queue in the Cairo airport, pretending that I had lost or suddenly remembered something. I was secretly longing for our London flat. I could see its kitchen worktop unattended, the view from the rear windows, the gray stillness of the twilight, the furniture, our pictures, the rows of books. We should spend a few days in Cairo, then return to London. I had the number for Mustafa, the driver Diana and I have when we are in Cairo. He could not be that far from the airport. In a few hours, we could all be gathered around Mother’s dining table for lunch. And perhaps one day we might even laugh as we recalled the day we came dangerously close to returning to Libya.
I wondered why I had worn a black suit, a suit I had bought a year before, when I was, for a fleeting moment, persuaded that there was something monastic and peaceful about a life spent in black suits. I had worn it only twice since buying it and on both occasions felt uncomfortable with how badly the cut fitted me and with the knowledge of the exorbitant amount I had spent on it. And now, for some reason, I was traveling home in this ill-fitting suit. I had got up very early that morning. I had put on a white shirt and the black suit, and taken a few moments to choose a tie, knotted it around my neck, then took it off and hung it in the wardrobe, the same wardrobe that had been mine when I was a boy, because the room in Cairo where Diana and I slept the night before we flew to Libya, lying on our sides to fit on the narrow mattress, was my old room. I was now fifteen. I was now forty-one. I was now eight.
At the airport, my mother was still by the windows, talking on the telephone to Ziad. This was the third time he had called that morning. The three of us—Ziad, Mother and I—had planned to return to Libya together, since (and this was not mentioned but understood) we could never go back together, not completely, because Father was no longer with us. Ziad had not been able to wait. He had gone to Libya nine months earlier, in June 2011, when the war was still raging. I remember the day he telephoned to say that he was 200 kilometres from the Libyan border. Diana and I were in a remote part of southern France, where I was writing an introduction to Turgenev’s On the Eve. Ziad’s voice kept breaking up. I drove up the hill to try to get a better signal. In the past, whenever he considered returning, he would call me, and I managed to dissuade him. This time, he did not dial my number until he had driven for six hours: first north towards Alexandria, then west, following the coastal road to the Egyptian–Libyan border. He did not want to discuss it; he just wanted me to know. We were disconnected. Every time I tried, his line was engaged. Everyone, I imagined—relatives, friends and even acquaintances—was calling to wish him well.
I had spent that morning, while Ziad was bidding his wife and four children farewell, thinking about the actions of a fictitious man, Andrei Bersyenev, in On the Eve. There was a detail about him that I had overlooked on previous readings: a “vague, unfathomable emotion lurked secretly in his heart; he was sad with a sadness that had nothing noble in it. This sadness did not prevent him, however, from setting to work on the History of the Hohenstaufen, and beginning to read it at the very page at which he had left off the evening before.” Bersyenev is a Russian student of philosophy who concerns himself, on the eve of the Crimean War, with a German monarchic dynasty from the High Middle Ages; that is perhaps as absurd as a Libyan novelist, during the bloody days of the 17th of February Revolution, sitting in a small cabin in France, trying to write a couple of thousand words about a Russian novel published a century and a half earlier.
In the few seconds we talked, I heard in Ziad’s voice that resolute tone he uses when he is about to tell me something he thinks I may object to. It would have been pointless to warn him of the danger, to remind him of the promise we had made to return together. So, when I got through to him again, I told him how wonderful it was that he was finally going home. He said he would call as soon as he was inside the country.
Later that day, Diana took me to the Plage des Brouis, a beach she had discovered along the coast on the way to Cap Lardier. We climbed up into the rocky reserve. We entered the unexpected silence trees create by the sea. The changed light. The moistness in the air becoming slightly more material. The trail was often too narrow to allow us to walk side by side. It was comforting to walk behind her. There were tall pines and eucalypti. There were wild flowers and occasionally a butterfly. The path curved and descended. Sometimes we were right by the water, close enough to touch it, and at other moments we climbed so high we were looking down at the sea from a great height. We often stopped and glanced at the view. I had my mobile phone in the pocket of my swimming trunks. Since the revolution, I had had it near me at all times: on the kitchen worktop when I was cooking, on the tiled floor when I was taking a bath. We had walked out so far that there was no signal now. I suggested we turn back, but Diana wanted to keep going. We were more than halfway to the cove. Anxiety is a shameful business. I followed her, but I was silent and impatient. When we arrived at the Plage des Brouis, my telephone caught a signal. I had a voicemail
from Mother. Ziad had arrived. He had a local SIM card. She read out the number. I did not have a pen. I listened to the message again and drew the digits in the sand with my foot, large enough for a small plane flying by to see them. Diana was looking up, towards one end of the cove, where three seagulls floated in mid-air. They held their wings out and every so often would bend them to drop a metre or two, as if pretending to fall, as if playing dead, then glide up again and repeat the maneuver. The activity seemed to have no clear motive. Perhaps it was for the pleasure of it. Perhaps this was a spot they returned to, knowing how the arch of the cove traps the wind. Ziad answered after the first ring. He called me by my old nickname and then laughed. I laughed too.
That was his first time back. He went again after Tripoli fell, in August, and Mother went with him. I was the last, the youngest and the last, just as when I was a boy and was told to always fill the glasses of my parents and older brother before my own.
3. The Sea
On the 1st of September 1969, fourteen months before I was born, an event took place that was to change the course of Libyan history and my life. In my mind’s eye, I see a Libyan army officer crossing St James’s Square at about 2 P.M. towards what was then the Libyan Embassy in London. He had gone to the British capital on official business. He was popular amongst his peers, although his gentle reserve was sometimes mistaken for arrogance. He had committed to memory pages of verse that, many years later when he was imprisoned, would become his comfort and companion. Several political prisoners told me that, at night, when the prison fell silent, when, in Uncle Mahmoud’s words, “you could hear a pin drop or a grown man weep softly to himself,” they heard this man’s voice, steady and passionate, reciting poems. “He never ran out of them,” his nephew, who was in prison at the same time, told me. And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that “knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”
It was a routine visit to the embassy, perhaps to collect the post or to file a report on the progress of his mission. I imagine him taking off his cap as he entered the building. The corridors were busy with clerks running here and there. Others gathered around a radio. A 27-year-old captain no one had heard of had marched on Tripoli and assumed power. My father ran out of the embassy and hailed a cab for the airport.
That is what I remember him saying the first time he told me the story. We were in London; Ziad and I were at university by then, and Father was passing through town. We had cooked him a meal in the small flat we shared. We all ate too much and either went to Regent’s Park, my father walking between us, or retired to the room next door and lay on the two single beds, talking. I cannot remember clearly. If we had been in the park, then it was one of those long summer afternoons when the light remains unchanging for hours, as if the sun has stopped moving; and, if in the bedroom, then talking in low voices, sleepy but still missing each other too much to nap. Either way, I remember him saying that he had run out of the embassy and hailed a cab. But St James’s Square is not known for traffic. He probably waited in front of the embassy for a few seconds and then circled around the green before walking (I picture him walking, not running) into one of the neighboring streets. He did not know London well. He might not have gone east to Regent Street or south to Pall Mall. Had I been with him, I would have known exactly which way to go. He took the taxi directly to Heathrow and found a seat on the first flight to Tripoli.
In Cairo, shortly before he was kidnapped, Father retold the story, adding a new detail. When he entered the embassy and heard that a coup d’état had taken place, he jumped onto the reception desk in the lobby and took down the picture of the monarch he had served and admired. It was only then that I understood that it was not out of concern alone that my father rushed home on hearing of the overthrow of King Idris but also out of enthusiasm for a modern republican age. I understood then why I had always found something melancholy about an old newspaper cutting showing a portrait of King Idris jammed between the frame and the mirror of the chiffonier in my parents’ bedroom. No one spoke about it, and no one removed it. It stood fading during the years of my childhood.
When my father was on that flight home from London, Libya’s new ruler, Muammar Qaddafi, promoted himself from captain to colonel and issued orders that senior military officers be arrested. My father was taken straight from the Tripoli airport to prison. Five months later, he was released and stripped of his rank and uniform. He returned to his wife and three-year-old son, Ziad. The new regime then did with my father what it did with most officers who were high-ranking under Idris. Not wanting to make enemies of senior military men, yet at the same time fearing their potential disloyalty, it sent them abroad, often as minor diplomats. This allowed time for the new security apparatus to form. My father was given an administrative role in Libya’s Mission to the United Nations soon after his release. I was conceived in that short window of time between my father’s release and his departure for New York: a time of uncertainty, but also a time of optimism, because, as his retelling of the embassy story suggested, Father had high hopes for the new regime. Maybe he saw his imprisonment, removal from the army and temporary banishment as natural repercussions—perhaps even reversible—of the country’s historical transformation. He, like many of his generation, was inspired by the example of Egypt, where, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a young, secular and nationalist pan-Arab republic replaced a corrupt monarchy. Qaddafi had declared his admiration for Nasser, and Nasser gave his full support to Qaddafi. So, as reluctant as my father must have been to leave Libya, I don’t imagine he went to New York in despair. It took a couple of years—after Qaddafi abrogated all existing laws and declared himself de facto leader forever—for Father to discover the true nature of the new regime.
Even he, with his intolerance for superstition, must have sensed an ill omen in an event that took place on his first day at work in New York. Crossing First Avenue towards the UN building, my father saw a lorry collide with a cyclist. The limbs of the cyclist were scattered across the asphalt. My father’s response was to collect the pieces of flesh and bone and respectfully place them beside the torso, which, like the twisted bicycle, had landed on the pavement. I have always associated the irrevocable and violent changes my family and my country went through in the following four decades with the image of my father—a poet turned officer turned, reluctantly, diplomat—dressed in a suit and tie, far away from home, collecting the pieces of a dead man. He was thirty-one years old. I was born later that year.
In 1973, before I turned three, my father handed in his resignation from his UN job. He said that he and his wife missed home and wanted their two sons to grow up in Libya. This was true but certainly not the whole story, and I suspect the regime knew it. Surely his objections to government intrusion into civic society, the deliberate ways in which Qaddafi compromised the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the press, had been noted. He had voiced them at public social gatherings. From this point on, my father had the attention of the dictatorship. It was said that even the way he walked irritated the authorities. It exuded defiance. When I first heard this, I thought, how perceptive it was. Even as a young child, I could never imagine my father bowing, and even then I wanted to protect him. He has always seemed to me the quintessence of what it means to be independent. This, together with his unresolved fate, has complicated my own independence. We need a father to rage against. When a father is neither dead nor alive, when he is a ghost, the will is impotent. I am the son of an unusual man, perhaps even a great man. And when, like most children, I rebelled against these early perceptions of him, I did so because I feared the consequences of his convictions; I was desperate to divert him from his path. It was my first lesson in the limits of one’s ability to dissuade another from a perilous course. My ambitions, when it came to my father, were ordinary. Like that famous son in The Odyssey—like most sons, I suspect—I wished that “at least I had some happy man / as father, growing old i
n his own house.” But, unlike Telemachus, I continue, after twenty-five years, to endure my father’s “unknown death and silence.” I envy the finality of funerals. I covet the certainty. How it must be to wrap one’s hands around the bones, to choose how to place them, to be able to pat the patch of earth and sing a prayer.
—
In the ’70s, we lived in central Tripoli, a short distance from my maternal grandfather’s house. I remember the high eucalyptus trees in the front garden, their big and vivid shadows on the ground, black claws on the cars. If there was a breeze, shade and light moved. Ziad and I played football on the paved part to the side of the house, where I watched for the first time a sheep being slaughtered. It was alive, and then suddenly it was not. The animal kicked furiously, snorting for air, which entered its nostrils and escaped through the open neck. The blood poured out black and thick like date syrup. Small translucent bubbles grew and burst around its mouth. I snapped my fingers, I clapped my hands beside its wide-open eye. When it did not respond, I began to cry. I went back when the corpse was headless, skinned and hanging from a pole. The layer of fat around the body was as thin and luminous as a veil of clouds at dusk. Moments later, I sat around the table with the others and ate liver and kidneys sautéed with chili, onion, garlic, parsley and coriander, and agreed that the dish did taste better than at any other time because the meat was, as one of the adults had said, “unbelievably fresh.”
A few years later, we moved near El-Medina el-Seyahiya Club, on the western fringe of Tripoli. A new house. The smell of fresh paint. The vacant atmosphere of rooms where no one had ever slept before. A barren garden. My mother planted rosebushes in the front, a new baby vine in the back. Every year, it fruited grapes as small as pearls. If you ate them a week or two after they had become ripe, the sugar burnt in your throat. We planted lemon and orange trees. Those were some of the most tumultuous years in the Qaddafi era. Revolutionary Committees were set up to punish dissent. They monitored every aspect of life. Critics of the dictatorship were executed. The Committees hanged students in front of Benghazi Cathedral and from the gates of the universities. Traffic was diverted to ensure that commuters saw the dangling corpses. Books and musical instruments that were deemed “anti-revolutionary” or “imperialist” were confiscated from shops, schools and homes, piled high in public squares and set alight. Intellectuals, businessmen, union organizers and students were shown on television, sitting handcuffed on the floor, dictating confessions to the camera.