The Return Read online

  One of the ways that my parents tried to shield Ziad and me from the madness that was unraveling outside our home was by making sure that every minute of our day was filled. We went to school, returned just in time for piano lessons, had lunch, then were off to El-Medina el-Seyahiya Club for swimming. We would spend the rest of the day by the sea; the sea was our territory. There were a few adults around, but they were so eccentric that they seemed part of our imagination. There was an old man with milky eyes who sat all day by the harbor, fishing. None of us ever saw him catch anything. Then there was El-Hindi, a Native American who had somehow ended up in Tripoli. One story was that he had run away because he had killed a white man back in America. Another was that on his travels around the world he had stopped in Tripoli and was so struck by our city’s beauty that he decided to never leave. Sometimes the two stories were interlaced. He used to stand on the bridge by the harbor and dive with his arms outstretched, bringing them together only before entering the water. We would all line up to watch. My idea of swimming then was to front crawl until I could no longer see land. I would float in the deep waters and then spin myself around until I lost direction.

  —

  That day in June, in southern France, the day Ziad entered Libya, I swam out alone into the same Mediterranean Sea. For some reason, I remembered, more vividly than ever before, that it was my father who had taught me how to swim: holding me up, one open hand against my belly, saying, “That’s it.” I never feared the sea until he was gone.

  4. The Land

  The plane was full. We sat down, but then Mother got up to let me sit beside the window. “To see your country,” she said. The plane door was shut. I took out my journal and began writing, slowly and deliberately. The panic, like the dreams in which I open my mouth and nothing comes out, was born of loss. Or that recurring dream I used to have after they took my father, in which I found I had drifted deep out to sea. All four horizons are water, and the feeling is not only of fear but also of a sort of vertigo of regret. The words I was trying to write, the notebook and pen, the aeroplane, the view of the runway outside my window, my companions—the woman who bore me and the woman beside whom I matured into a man—seemed theoretical propositions.

  Back in the terminal, Mother, no doubt detecting my anxiety, had asked a mischievous question. “Who’s returning?” she said. “Suleiman el-Dewani or Nuri el-Alfi?” Suleiman el-Dewani and Nuri el-Alfi are the exiled protagonists of my novels In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, respectively. She wanted to cheer me up, but also implicit in her question was a warning against what she knew I was intent on doing: searching for my father. She had seen, in the years since we lost Father, how I had changed. My initial shock and silence turned to anger, then hot activism, which determined a routine, culminating in managing a campaign that consumed me for the two years that preceded the revolution. Through it all, Mother worried. I have long suspected that her anxieties were not only about the dangers my search for my father was exposing me to, or indeed what it might lead me to uncover, but about something else far more specific, concerning the daily restlessness such a search demands, the way it reverberates through your body and days and everything you do. She knew that my will to find out what happened had turned into an obsession. And when we were sitting in the airport terminal, what her question, spoken in a tone that was perfectly balanced between seriousness and jest, was really saying was that she would much rather I return with my two fictional characters than be carrying the ghost of my father, the man she calls the Absent-Present.

  For months after we left Libya, when I was a child, I used to lie staring at the ceiling, imagining my return. I pictured how I would kiss the ground; take charge once again of my chariot, that bicycle I fussed over and oiled every week; embrace my cousins. Now they were all grown men and women with children. Our escape from Libya had been in stages. First, in 1979, it was Mother, Ziad and I. A year later, Father traveled south by land through the vast Libyan Desert and crossed the porous border into Chad. He made his way to the capital, N’Djamena, and boarded a plane for Rome. My parents’ main bank account was there. Free of the risk that the lines might be tapped, he and my mother were like new lovers, spending hours on the telephone from Rome to Cairo. Perhaps those conversations were not only attempting to resolve the two preoccupations of every exile: longing and logistics. Maybe he had had second thoughts; perhaps she, however determined, had suddenly perceived the reality of living away from home. He purchased some of the things he wanted for this new life: hand-painted china, feather pillows, silver candelabras. The consolation of fine objects. Once he joined us in Cairo, we moved to a bigger and better flat. It was there that I understood that we were not going back, that I had been tricked. I demanded to be returned to my country. My mother tried to console me. “Leave him be,” Father told her. “He’ll get used to it.” It was the cruelest thing he had ever said. Cruel and nearly true. Even then I knew, more from the voice than from the words, and also from the way he stood, not facing me, that he too was mourning the loss. There is a moment when you realize that you and your parent are not the same person, and it usually occurs when you are both consumed by a similar passion.

  There it was, the land. Rust and yellow. The color of newly healed skin. Perhaps I will finally be released. The land got darker. Green sprouting, thinly covering hills. And, suddenly, my childhood sea. How often exiles romanticize the landscape of the homeland. I have cautioned myself against that. Nothing used to irritate me more than a Libyan waxing lyrical about “our sea,” “our land,” “the breeze of the homeland.” Privately, though, I continued to believe that the light back home was unmatched. I continued to think of every sea, no matter how beautiful, as an imposter. Now, catching these first glimpses of the country, I thought that, if anything, it was more luminous than I remembered. The fact that it had existed all this time, that it remained as it was all these years, that I was able to recognize it, felt like an exchange, a call and its echo, a mutual expression of recognition.

  We landed. I wrote the time and the date: 10:45 A.M., the 15th of March 2012. Only then did it occur to me that, after all the attempts to synchronize our schedules, the date that Diana, Mother and I had settled on, which, invariably, felt accidental, marked the twenty-second anniversary of my father’s first week in captivity. He had written to us about waking up on the floor of an Abu Salim prison cell, his hands tied behind his back, his eyes blindfolded. He could hear, a few doors down, the voice of the then deputy head of the Egyptian secret service:

  Colonel Mohamed Abdel Salam [el-Mahgoub], who was the man who orchestrated the whole thing, had preceded us to Libya. It was a dirty deal. The Egyptian regime sold itself and its conscience. The deal was in the full knowledge of President Hosni Mubarak.

  Looking out of the aeroplane window, I wondered if they had taken the blindfold off once Father was inside the plane. Did they allow him at least a chance to see the land from the air? Years later, I met a man who claimed to have met another man who worked on the runway in Tripoli and recalled seeing a private jet land and a man being escorted from it. The date and the time matched. The description of the prisoner suggested that he might have been my father. “His hair was completely white. Well dressed. Handcuffed and blindfolded. A proud gait.” This was the land my father loved more than anything else. “Don’t put yourselves in competition with Libya. You will always lose,” he had said, when once the three of us had tried to dissuade him from openly opposing Qaddafi. The silence that followed was the distance between him and us. The disagreement had a historical dimension. It placed a nation against the intimate reality of a family. I looked at the wildflowers beside the runway. Spring in full bloom. And, when we stepped out of the aeroplane, the familiar scents in the air were like a blanket you were not aware you needed, but now that it has been placed on your shoulders you are grateful. My childhood friend, cousin Marwan al-Tashani, a Benghazi judge, stood at the foot of the ladder, smiling, holding a came
ra.

  5. Blo’thaah

  The deeper we drove into Benghazi, the more material the world became. We went to Marwan’s house, where we found a large family gathering waiting for us. After lunch, I slipped away on a walk. I felt strong and oddly detached, separate, not what we say sometimes on recounting dreams, “watching myself from the outside,” but so involved that it seemed pointless to be anxious anymore.

  We checked in to our hotel just as the sun was setting. Diana and I in one room, Mother next door, both rooms with windows looking out onto the sea. We were on the fourth floor. The square frame of our window was half sea, half sky. The telephone kept ringing. I have only one sibling but 130 first cousins. This meant that there were hundreds of people to see. But I had made up my mind before leaving London that my first visit would be to Uncle Mahmoud and my aunts—my father’s siblings—in nearby Ajdabiya, the city where my father grew up. The following morning, we set off on the two-hour drive south.

  Uncle Mahmoud is my father’s youngest brother. My father was born in 1939, Mahmoud in 1955. In old photographs, Father is serious and poised, well groomed even in his youth; Uncle Mahmoud has the long hair of the 1960s and ’70s, a smile always lurking. Father was born into a Libya ruled by Benito Mussolini. He was four in 1943, when the Italo–German armies were defeated in North Africa and Libya fell to the British and the French. On the 24th of December 1951, when, under King Idris, Libya gained its independence, Father was twelve years old. Uncle Mahmoud was born four years later. In 1969, the year of Qaddafi’s coup, Father was thirty, and Uncle Mahmoud fourteen. Mahmoud seemed both uncle and brother to Ziad and me, a rare ally with an insider’s knowledge of adulthood. When Father resigned from the diplomatic corps in New York and we moved back to Tripoli, Uncle Mahmoud came and stayed with us. He loved Voltaire and Russian novels. He had a dreamy sensibility and would often forget to turn the stove off. Unlike all the other adults, he never turned down my appeals to go out to the garden, even after lunch, when the sun was merciless and the household napped. We played football or sat in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. I knew that his love for me was uncomplicated and unequivocal, and knowing this felt like a great freedom. In our exile years, Father would often tell me that I reminded him of his little brother.

  In the same week in March 1990 that my father was kidnapped, Libyan secret service agents drove to Uncle Mahmoud’s home in Ajdabiya. Other officials went to Hmad Khanfore, my uncle through marriage, and to my paternal aunt’s sons, cousins Ali and Saleh Eshnayquet. All four men were arrested. They belonged to one of the underground cells that my father’s organization had set up inside the country. The arrests were so well coordinated that every man captured believed the others were still free. Each assumed that he was the only one being interrogated and tortured. In January 2011, as the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions unfolded, the Libyan dictatorship grew anxious. Wanting to appease popular discontent, it let out some political prisoners. I became hopeful. The public campaign for the release of my father and relatives, which I had started a couple of years earlier, went into full gear. On the 3rd of February of that year, and after twenty-one years of imprisonment, all except for my father were set free. Fourteen days later, bolstered by the successful overthrows of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators, a popular uprising exploded across Libya.

  I had spoken to Uncle Mahmoud on the telephone from London moments after he was released. He was in a car, being driven home. He did not talk about the role I might have played in gaining his liberty, but nonetheless I could sense his gratitude, and it made me feel uneasy. He asked if I knew of a certain Libyan poet living in Dublin: “You should look him up; he mentions you in an article. And do you recall giving an interview to the Arabic BBC?” It was one of the first interviews I gave on the publication of my first novel, and I remembered how I thought that, if my father was alive, he might hear it. “I put the radio next to my ear and heard every word,” Uncle Mahmoud said. Then he proceeded to quote to me, with extraordinary accuracy, some of the questions the interviewer had asked and my responses. And, for the following few minutes, everything he said began with “Do you remember…” listing memories, my childhood idiosyncrasies, the things we used to do together. Then, just before we hung up, he said, “Don’t lose hope.”

  —

  Preparing for the trip, I had vowed that, in the search for my father, I would take everything I had learnt about intuition, instinct and sensitivity and apply it as sharply as I could. I would keep myself available to what places might tell me about what had happened to him. One location that Diana and I had intended to visit in Tripoli was Abu Salim prison, where Father had been held. I imagined us walking across its infamous courtyard, where so much blood had been spilled, and into its long corridors lined with the doors that the revolutionaries had hammered open. But the closer the date of our trip approached, the less possible it seemed that I would be able to visit the prison. I knew that Diana wanted to photograph it. I could imagine those yet to be captured pictures in my mind. But even before we landed in Libya, I found myself telling her that under no circumstances were we to go to Abu Salim. I cannot think of any other instance when I forbade my wife from doing anything. I could not bear the thought of someone I love being in that place; that was the reason I gave Diana. The truth was that I lacked the strength to go to Abu Salim. I worried that if I found myself in those cells I had heard about, imagined, dreamt about for years—dark places where I had several times wanted to be, so as to finally be reunited with my father—that if I found myself in that place where his smell, and times, and spirit lingered (for they must linger), I might be forever undone.

  When I think of what might have happened to him, I feel an abyss open up beneath me. I am clutching at the walls. They are rough and unreliable, made of soft clay that flakes off in the rain. The pit is circular. Like a well. Our well. For although my family has been in Ajdabiya for generations, there is another place, about thirty kilometres deeper into the desert, which is our older and more private home. Until my grandfather died, the family used to decamp there every year for the spring months and live in tents. Now it is where the family keeps its camels and where my cousins often go to picnic. Two ancient Greek reservoirs carved deep into the belly of the desert, collecting the scarce rainwater. Its name, whose meaning and linguistic origin we do not know, is Blo’thaah. My father was born there, in the spring of 1939.

  The abyss opens too when I think why I never searched, when I was in Libya, for the men who knew Father in prison, particularly the man Ziad met on his return to Libya in 2011 and who claimed to have been in the cell next door to Father’s back in the mid 1990s. Neighbors. How often have I gone over his account—the account he gave Ziad—in my head or out loud to Diana. Yet the fear is there, too, when I think of finding this man, of doing what seems to be the loyal thing to do, the sensible thing to do, to hear from him all the things he had told Ziad about what life was like for Father in prison, to ask the questions Ziad might have missed, because I have always been known in my family for being good with details. “What time is your flight?” was my response to Father’s dramatic announcement in London, a few months before he was kidnapped, that he was going to his organization’s military camp in Chad, that it was time for him and his men to cross the border into Libya and finally act. They planned to make their way north to the capital and, with the help of associates in several Libyan towns and cities, strike at key locations and overthrow the regime. He did not tell us any of this. All he said was that he was going to Chad and might never return and that he wanted us to take care of our mother, to take care of ourselves, live as honest men. This was shortly after his father died, and I saw in his eyes that he was more determined than ever. “What time is your flight?” I had asked, refusing to turn down the volume on the TV, which was showing an opera, Pavarotti with his mouth wide open. Ziad was crying. I refused to cry.

  —

  The road to Ajdabiya had always been desolate, but this year th
e rains had been heavy, and the desert on both sides of the highway was dotted with wild green shrubbery. Small trees leant in the direction of the wind. Every now and then, we passed tanks and military trucks, hollowed out and rusting in the sun. At one point, we stopped the car and walked over to one of the tanks. The steel curled brown-red like a giant autumn leaf. On the 18th of March 2011, a loyalist armored column marched from Ajdabiya towards Benghazi. Qaddafi meant to punish the city, make an example of it, and put an end to the revolt. According to several accounts, some of these trucks and tanks were packed with green flags and placards that read: BENGHAZI USED TO BE HERE.

  At every major junction, a thick rope was stretched across the highway. Young men stood carrying rifles. They peered into the car and waved us on. They wore fatigues, and although they received funds from the fledgling Tripoli government, they were not under its authority. Every checkpoint was under the command of a “revolutionary,” who would distribute the salaries. There were countless claims of embezzlement. But these bands, I was told, were small fish. Larger militias controlled oil fields, ports and public buildings. A member of the National Transitional Council, the de facto government, told me that, because a national army and police force did not yet exist, the country relied on these men. He also said that the policy, conceived after the revolution, of compensating those who had fought against the dictatorship had produced unwanted results: thousands of men, attracted by financial gain, had since bought rifles and taken charge of crossroads or national assets. The situation was now so grave, he said, that the numbers of those claiming to have fought on the winning side of the war had reached a quarter of a million.