The Return Read online

  When we first arrived, Marwan, the cousin who picked us up at the airport, jokingly told me that I could not have come at a better time, because he, as were most of Benghazi’s judges, was on strike and therefore had all the time in the world to spend with me. He told me how, only the week before, armed men had burst into the courtroom in the middle of a trial and, at gunpoint, forced the presiding judge to sign a release form for the accused. Many in the legal community—judges, lawyers and counselors—feared reprisals. Marwan was busy investigating ways to pressure Tripoli to take the matter seriously. He took me to a couple of meetings, and I saw how he managed to rally the country’s most respected judges into forming what eventually became the Libyan Judges’ Organization, an NGO that monitors and campaigns for the independence of the judiciary.

  Similar struggles were happening on various other fronts. I have never been anywhere where hope and apprehension were at such a pitch. Anything seemed possible, and nearly every individual I met spoke of his optimism and foreboding in the same breath.

  —

  When we entered Ajdabiya, we stopped at the main roundabout, renamed Tim Hetherington Square after the British photojournalist who was killed covering the war in Misrata. We bought boxes of fruit. I felt that panic again at not knowing how to approach Libya. I stood beside the car as the fruit-seller loaded the boot. I recognized Ajdabiya’s dry light, the blue of its empty sky, the way the heat holds you.

  Uncle Mahmoud called my mobile. I told him we were only metres away, and when we reached the familiar street I saw him standing outside the house. He was tall and thin. My aunts clustered behind him. I embraced them first, and when they began to cry I knew they were crying for their missing brother. When Father’s sisters want their husbands or their children to promise to do something, they ask them to swear not on God or His prophets but on my father, Jaballa. Uncle Mahmoud, with his mischievous smile, said, “Come now, let’s not turn it into a Turkish soap opera.” When I embraced him, I held on to his bony frame for a long while.

  Not since my father’s disappearance had I felt closer to him. My aunts have his eyes. All they wanted was to look at me, and all I wanted was to look at them. We sat next to one another and held hands. My father had beautiful hands like theirs, the skin cool and soft.

  —

  Light is no longer welcome in the houses. It is shut out, like other things that come from outdoors: dust, heat and bad news. Architecture, the physical representation of considered gestures, has changed here in the years I have been away. It has turned its back on nature. When I was a boy, gardens had low fences or no fences at all and, outside the high sun hours, windows would be left open. Now high brick walls keep out the view and windows are almost permanently shuttered. I could not help but read, in this new determination to keep out the sun and the passing gaze, an inner upheaval, a private disquiet. I often found myself in rooms where the shutters had not been opened for a long time. I was obliged at midday, and after several attempts at trying to convince the expanded wood to let go of its frame, to walk to the switch beside the door and turn on the lights. Lunch was often eaten under a chandelier. All this gave me the impression, when I opened the door and was faced with a wall of light and the blue above hovering like an upturned sea, that the line separating the interior and exterior here was like one of those transformative boundaries we read about in ancient myths.

  After lunch, I sat with Uncle Mahmoud, the shutters closed against the sun. I thought about the endless questions I had for him. But he did not need me to encourage him; he wanted to speak about his time in prison. It was most of what we talked about. My uncle had spent twenty-one years in Abu Salim. And, like the things he had told me over the telephone when he was first released, his stories were aimed at proving that the authorities had failed, that he had not been erased, that he continued to remember and even managed to follow, through the radio the guards occasionally allowed him, what his nephew the novelist was up to in faraway London. His stories were an attempt to bridge the vast distance that separated the austere cruelty of Abu Salim and the world outside. Perhaps, like all stories, what Uncle Mahmoud’s recollections were saying was: “I exist.”

  Uncle Mahmoud started by telling me about his first interrogation, a few minutes after his arrest. He had sat handcuffed in a room. He did not know its location. He was shown reams of paper: transcripts of every telephone call, no matter how insignificant, made from my family’s home in Cairo. He was shown a large, six-drawer cabinet full of documents and photographs of my father in public places in Egypt, sometimes with my mother, my brother and me, at weddings, social gatherings, sitting in a restaurant, crossing a street. “They knew everything,” Uncle Mahmoud said. They had been monitoring my father, with the help of the Egyptian authorities, for years. “They did not tell me that they had Jaballa,” he said. “It was the furthest thing from my mind.”

  —

  At 1 A.M., twelve hours after his arrest, Uncle Mahmoud was blindfolded and put in a truck. “I still had no idea where we were,” he said. “The truck began to move. The journey seemed to go on forever. Then we stopped. I was led off the truck. I was taken down to a basement. I thought perhaps they had brought me to those old Ottoman prison cells beneath Al-Saraya al-Hamra, in Tripoli. It turned out we were not underground at all, that we had only gone down a little ramp or something. They led me, turning left, right, left, right several times, until I was told to stop. ‘Extend your hands.’ I extended my hands. A man gave me a blanket. ‘Extend your hands,’ he said again, and handed me a mattress. Then he opened a door. This was the first time I heard the horrific noise—a noise that was to become familiar—of the heavy door, rusted or not opened in ten years, being unlocked and swung open. He pushed me in and slammed the door, bolting it shut. My hands were no longer handcuffed, but I still had the blindfold on. I feared what I might find, so I waited a few minutes before taking it off. I found myself in a place that was absolutely dark. Gradually, I began to see a little. I was terribly thirsty. It felt as if someone were telling me to turn around. I turned and found a tap. Clean, sweet water. I drank and thanked God. Slowly, like a cat’s eyes, I began to see in the dark. I saw now that I was in a small room, four walls. I felt dizzy and still had no idea where I was exactly. I spread the mattress on the floor and, I’m not joking, I was asleep before my head touched it.

  “I woke up in the morning to the sounds of two men speaking. I had no idea where I was, if this room was in a desert, standing alone, or part of a compound. One man called out, ‘Hamid,’ and the other said, ‘Yes, Saad.’ ‘Do you know where you are?’ ‘No, where am I, Saad?’ ‘You are in Abu Salim.’ That was how I learnt that I had fallen into this terrible place. We had all heard about Abu Salim. I had assumed the two men speaking were in the same room, perhaps beaten so badly that each had collapsed at either end of the cell. It turned out—and later I got used to the peculiar world of the prison—that they were in different cells, about five doors apart, in fact. I didn’t have my glasses. I walked around the room to read up close the names and dates scratched into the walls. I then found a tiny hole in one of the walls. I looked through it and saw a man walking in a room very similar to mine. This was how I discovered I had a neighbor. He spotted me. He came close, looked through the hole and then said, ‘Uncle?’ It was your cousin Saleh.”

  —

  During those early few days, Uncle Mahmoud and Uncle Hmad and my cousins Saleh and Ali came to learn of each other’s presence in the prison. Being in the same section, they could hear one another. “Our wing was full,” Uncle Mahmoud told me. “But the opposite wing was empty. Not a movement. Just one door that occasionally opened and shut. There was someone there. Who he was, no one knew. After seven days, we heard him. Every night, when the prison fell silent, he recited poetry late into the night. The poems belonged to a specific form, popular in Ajdabiya, often used in elegies because of its mournful repetition. The voice was that of an elderly man. We listened to him but didn’t k
now who he was. One day, he called out my name. I answered, asking him who he was. ‘You don’t recognize me?’ he said. I told him, ‘No.’ He didn’t speak after that. Do you know how long he fell silent for? A whole week. After that, he called my name again and asked if I still couldn’t recognize him. ‘I will give you a clue,’ he said. ‘Your trousers are falling.’ This was a joke I’d had with your father from when we were children. I did not reply. I thought it must be a trap. I just couldn’t imagine Jaballa being there. Another week passed before I heard him calling my name again. Ali called out and said, ‘It’s Uncle Jaballa.’ Hmad said, ‘Don’t believe him. Ask him for another sign.’ I did and he said, ‘I am from Blo’thaah.’ I felt sick, as if my heart had split.”

  —

  Just then we were interrupted. The door to the garden opened. Light entered as solid as a wall, blackening the three or four figures walking in. We stood up to greet them. Relatives and friends of the family. Tea was brought. Uncle Mahmoud went around the room serving it, I following behind with biscuits and nuts. The usual platitudes were repeated. Then the conversation settled on the security problems facing the country. The more passionate the exchanges, the quieter Uncle Mahmoud became. Now he responded to a question or a proclamation with a simple nod or a weary smile. He closed his eyes and fell asleep, his tea untouched.

  6. Poems

  The country that separates fathers and sons has disoriented many travelers. It is very easy to get lost here. Telemachus, Edgar, Hamlet, and countless other sons, their private dramas ticking away in the silent hours, have sailed so far out into the uncertain distance between past and present that they seem adrift. They are men, like all men, who have come into the world through another man, a sponsor, opening the gate and, if they are lucky, doing so gently, perhaps with a reassuring smile and an encouraging nudge on the shoulder. And the fathers must have known, having once themselves been sons, that the ghostly presence of their hand will remain throughout the years, to the end of time, and that no matter what burdens are laid on that shoulder or the number of kisses a lover plants there, perhaps knowingly driven by the secret wish to erase the claim of another, the shoulder will remain forever faithful, remembering that good man’s hand that had ushered them into the world. To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.

  I think this as I consider Uncle Mahmoud’s account of learning that Father was not safely home in Cairo but a few metres away in a cell in the opposite wing. Like many of the stories I heard from men who were in prison at the same time, this one, too, offered more questions than it did answers. I wondered why Father waited so long before speaking. He had already been in Abu Salim for a few days and must have heard uncles Mahmoud and Hmad, cousins Ali and Saleh, talking loudly across the cells. And why, once he had spoken and was not recognized, did he wait a whole week before trying again and then, after that second attempt failed, wait yet another seven days? What was he thinking about in that time? From where did the doubt or reticence stem? And why the secrecy; why not simply say “Mahmoud, it’s me, your brother, Jaballa”? On the other hand, I could not understand why Uncle Mahmoud and the others were unable to make out the voice of the man they knew so well. In fact, even before Father spoke directly to Uncle Mahmoud, calling out, “Mahmoud, you don’t recognize me?” how could they not have realized that the man reciting poems at night was Jaballa Matar? They may not have recognized the voice, but how could they have missed the clue in the poems Father selected for those night-time recitations? Father’s literary memory was like a floating library. It would have been unusual for him not to be able to recall at least one poem by every significant Arabic poet from the modern era. But in prison he did not go to the poems of Ahmed Shawqi or any of the numerous poets from the period of Al-Nahda, the so-called Arabic Renaissance that took place at the turn of the twentieth century, nor did he turn to Badr Shakir al-Sayyab or the various other modernist poets he admired. Instead, in those dark and silent nights when, as Uncle Mahmoud had put it, “the prison fell so quiet you could hear a pin drop or a grown man weep softly to himself,” Father sought refuge in the elegiac Bedouin poetry of the alam. The word means knowledge or banner or flag, but has always, at least to my mind, signified an apprehension gained through loss. It’s a poetic form that privileges the past over the present. It is popular across Cyrenaica, but no more so than in Ajdabiya.

  I picture him reciting the alam in the same voice he used at home, a voice that seemed to open up a landscape as magically uncertain and borderless as still water welded to the sky. This happened rarely. It would often take several obliging individuals to get him to start. Friends would turn to him towards the end of one of those epic dinner parties my parents used to host at our Cairo flat. This stage in the evening, which always arrived too late, was for me the moment that made sense of all the preceding madness. It was like one of those villages perched high in the mountains, reached after too many dizzying turns and arguments: Mother saying, “Enough, let’s turn back,” and Father answering, “But, look, we’re nearly there.” Then the incline would flatten and we would be inside the village, protected from the vastness of the landscape.

  First, there was the menu, which shifted several times before agreement was reached. And then the machinery would start. Every resource would be employed—servants, children and a handful of committed friends—until each desired ingredient was located and delivered. My mother managed this complicated operation with the authority of an artist in the service of a higher cause. She spent hours on the telephone, handing out precise instructions to the butcher, the farmer who brought us our milk, yogurt and cheese, and the florist. She made several trips to the fruit-seller. She would drive into the Nile Delta, down narrow dirt roads, to a small village near Shibin El Kom in the Monufia Governorate, to select, as she used to say, “with my own eye,” each pigeon. I would be sent to get nutmeg from one spice shop west of the city, then gum arabic from another in the east. There was only one vegetable-seller in the whole of Cairo from whom to buy garlic at this time of the year. Several samples of pomegranate would be tasted before she placed the order. And because, she maintained, Egyptians have no appreciation for olive oil, she would order gallons from her brother’s farm in the Green Mountains or, if the Libyan–Egyptian border was closed, from Tuscany or Liguria. Ziad and I would then have to accompany the driver to the airport to explain to the customs officials why our household consumed so much olive oil, pay the necessary bribes and return home to Mother’s happy face. Orange blossom water was delivered from her hometown, Derna, or, if that wasn’t possible, from Tunisia. On the day of the party, a dash of it would be put onto the pomegranate fruit salad and into the jugs of cold water. The marble tiles would be mopped with it too.

  The combination of Mother’s eccentricities and Father’s wealth—he had made a small fortune importing Japanese and Western goods to the Middle East—meant not only that we could live lavishly but also that the money helped fuel Father’s political activism. He set up a fund for Libyan students abroad and supported various scholarly projects, such as an Arabic translation of a legal encyclopedia. But what made my father dangerous to the Qaddafi regime was that his financial resources matched his political commitment. He was a leader. He knew how to manage and organize a movement. He coordinated several sleeper cells inside Libya. He set up and led military training camps in Chad, close to the Libyan border. He did not only pour his own money into this; he also had a gift for raising large donations and would shuttle around the world convincing wealthy Libyan exiles to
support his organization. Its annual budget in the early 1980s was $7 million. A few years later, by the late 1980s, that figure had gone up to $15 million. But he did not stop there. He personally commanded the small army in Chad.

  Growing up, I had somehow always suspected that our money would all disappear. I worried about it. On more than one occasion I asked him, “How much is left?”

  “Well, Minister of Finance,” he would say, smiling. “Let’s just say it’s none of your business.”

  “But I want to make sure we’ll be all right.”

  “You’ll be all right,” he would say. “All I owe you is a university education. After that, you are on your own.”

  After he was kidnapped, we found that the bank account was nearly empty. According to the statements, the balance in 1979, the year we left Libya, was $6 million. In a little over a decade, it had all vanished. I felt terribly resentful, particularly since the day Father had disappeared, the countless so-called activists who used to float in and out of our flat, and even Father’s closest allies, vanished. It was as though we had contracted a contagious disease. Most of all, I couldn’t believe he would leave Mother, who had never worked a day in her life, without a proper income. Ziad and I had to immediately find ways to support the family. The only explanation I could think of was that Father must have been certain of imminent victory. He must have thought he and Mother would return to Tripoli, sell the Cairo flat and perhaps live off the land he had in Libya. It took me time to understand the implications of Father’s actions. When it came to Mother, he considered Ziad and me as his guarantors. He believed he could rely on us. It was a profound gesture of trust. I know, not least of all from his letters, that from within his incarcerated existence the thought of his sons brought him comfort and reassurance. He had given me something priceless: namely, his confidence. I am grateful I was forced to make my own way. His disappearance did put me in need and make my future uncertain, but it turns out need and uncertainty can be excellent teachers.