by Hisham Matar
During the Cairo years when he was still here, we lived in a penthouse that occupied the entire top floor of a tall building in Mohandeseen. When we first moved in, you could see for miles, all the way to where Cairo ended and the farms took over. But very quickly high buildings rose all around us and left only narrow views on to the horizon. In preparation for those dinner parties, men would come and hang precariously off the ledge to wash the glazing that covered the whole wall at one end of the drawing room. On the day, the brass incense cup would be taken into every room, the smoke deposited in each corner, trapped behind curtains. The doorbell would not stop ringing with deliveries. The kitchen, which was off the main entrance, would have my mother at its center, helped by the cook and a couple of maids. The radio would be on very loud, playing the songs of Farid al-Atrash or Najat al-Saghira or Oum Kalthum or Mohammad Abdel Wahab. My mother belonged to one of those Libyan families for whom Cairo was the cultural capital. She loved the city and moved in it with great ease. She would repeat what her mother used to say whenever she encountered a grim person: “Don’t blame them; they must’ve never been to Cairo.” In those days my mother operated as if the world were going to remain forever. And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.
Ours was a political home, filled with dissidents and the predictable and often tiresome conversations of dissidents. These high dinners were my mother’s retaliation against that reality. Her obsessiveness with where and when to get each ingredient, combined with her extraordinary talent as a cook, produced astonishing results that literally silenced these men of action. I would escape the activity and not return till evening. Mother would pull me into the kitchen, insisting I taste several of the dishes, asking if the salt was right, if she should not add more chili. The table would be set so magnificently that guests would either be speechless or induced to such heights of pleasure that they could not stop talking. I remember once a gregarious man who had been a minister under King Idris. He had dominated the conversation until soup was served. He took the first mouthful and fell utterly silent. The entire table took note of the sudden change. “All well, Minister?” Father asked. The man nodded without bringing his head up. He would occasionally dab his eyes with the napkin. I thought he was one of those men who break out in a sweat the moment they start eating. It wasn’t until his plate was empty and he had no option but to look up that we saw his eyes were red. When the main course arrived, his emotion shifted to laughter. All this gave Mother great satisfaction, and, even though Father tried to hide it, his pride was clear. Those were the strong years, when my parents had the confident manner of couples that, notwithstanding the usual apprehensions of parents, regard the future as a friendly country.
And it was usually after one of those dinners that the welcome request would arise, spoken softly at first, then less timidly by another guest, before the insistent calls would grow into a loud clamor. Father’s cheeks would redden slightly, his eyes betraying a twinkle of pleasure, and then he would yield. Nothing seemed to please him more than the presence of poetry. A good line reassured him, put the world right for a second. He was both enlivened and encouraged by language. It would become clear that his earlier resistance was merely to test the enthusiasm of his companions. He would lean slightly forward and it would happen: in that tentative silence, a new space would open up. He knew exactly what to do with his voice, where to tighten the strings and when to let them slacken. He always bracketed these recitations, perhaps out of reminiscence or loyalty to his hometown, with the alam.
He had, on several occasions, written in the genre. He recited them to me when he and I were alone in the car, which is to say, very rarely. My father hardly ever drove me to school, or to sports clubs, or collected me from a friend’s house. Once, on my mother’s insistence, he came to watch me compete in judo. I was distracted by how out of place he looked. He neither fitted in with nor could altogether hide his disinterest in Egyptian middle-class society. He almost never engaged in small talk or talking merely to pass the time. I cannot recall him speaking about money or property or the latest this or that. He had an astonishing ability to sustain social silences, which is why he was often mistaken for being haughty or cold. He was certainly proud. I recall him once saying to a member of the Egyptian government who was trying to convince him to quit politics: “The only thing standing between you and me is a suitcase. If I’m no longer welcome here, I’ll pack tomorrow.” He taught my brother and me to never accept financial assistance from anyone, especially governments, and when giving to give so discreetly that your “left hand does not know what the right hand has done.” Once he saw me count change before handing it to a beggar. “Next time, don’t make a display of it,” he said. “Give as if you were taking.” It took me a long time to understand this. If we passed laborers or street-sweepers eating their lunch and they invited us to join them, which was the custom—meaning they never expected you to actually join them—Father would sit in his fine clothes on the ground amongst the men and, if I was not as quick as he was, he would say, “Come, an honest meal feeds a hundred.” He would take a bite or two, then conduct his magic trick, sliding bank notes beneath the plate mid-sentence. He would look at the time and say, “Men, you are excellent, thank you.” His voice, which was always gentle, would rise if he learnt that one of the servants had turned away a needy person or shooed off a cat. The simple rule was never to refuse any one or thing in need. “It’s not your job to read their hearts,” he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. “Your duty is not to doubt but to give. And don’t ask questions at the door. Allow them only to tell you what they came for after they’ve had tea and something to eat.” The word got around. Our doorbell would ring two or three times a day. Most people needed money for food or school or medicine. Some wanted us to mediate in a dispute, to return to them a piece of property—a wagon, a bicycle, a basket—that someone had confiscated after an argument. My brother and I would often manage this without my father’s involvement, as if it were part of our education. It thinned the walls of our privilege a little and taught me something of the injustice and humiliation of being in need. The other thing he insisted on was that we learn how to ride a horse, shoot a rifle, and swim. It was something his father, Grandfather Hamed, believed and, I suspect, took from Umar ibn al-Khattab. Father would drive me into the desert on the edge of Cairo, beyond the Giza Pyramids, to teach me how to handle a rifle. It was on such rare afternoons, when we were alone in the car, that he would recite to me his new compositions. If I teased him, he would say, “They are masterpieces; you would’ve known this had you not been an ignorant boy,” which made me laugh like nothing else.
Uncle Mahmoud knew all of these details. In fact, given Father’s intention to covertly inform him of his presence, it is very probable that Father had chosen one of his own poems to recite, perhaps the one that starts:
Had the pain not been so precise
I would have asked
To which of my sorrows should I yield.
Uncle Mahmoud blamed his failure to recognize his brother’s voice on the general confusion of prison life, the shock of his capture, the endless interrogations, the disorienting confinement. “Such circumstances,” he said, “tamper with your cognitive powers.”
He could detect that I was not entirely convinced.
“In the end,” he added, “I just didn’t want to believe it.”
But shock and the refusal to accept bad news can only partly explain it. I was gradually surrendering to the only explanation that seemed credible. Father wanted to be recognized just by his voice. To be known without needing to provide any more evidence. Perhaps, like me, what was uppermost in hi
s mind was preservation. Part of what we fear in suffering—perhaps the part we fear most—is transformation. I still have recurring dreams in which I appear to him a stranger. One of these took place only months after his disappearance and yet I have never forgotten it. In it, Father had undergone an experience so extreme that he could not recognize me. He looked at me as if we did not know each other. Therefore, perhaps Uncle Mahmoud’s inability to recognize Father was not only due to the bewildering effects of prison life but more to Father having become a changed man. And perhaps Uncle Mahmoud knew this but did not want to say it out loud. Perhaps on hearing his brother’s voice, Uncle Mahmoud’s response was like that of Dante when, descending into the depths of hell, the poet comes upon Ciacco, a man he had known in the life before but who was now completely unrecognizable, and tells him:
The anguish you endure
Perhaps effaces whatever memory I had,
Making it seem I have not seen you before;
But tell me who you are, assigned to so sad
A station as punishment—if any is more
Agony, none is so repellent.
Like Dante, Uncle Mahmoud must have known it was my father’s voice, and, like Ciacco, Father was hoping to prove to himself that he was who he had been.
7. Your Health? Your Family?
The question of what Father went through during his captivity continues to haunt me. My mind fixes on the early days, the first few hours. It is as if my imagination, when focused on his life in prison, enters a fog. I am only able to see into a shallow distance. In the first couple of years, the thought alone of what Father was going through restricted me. We were repeatedly warned by the Egyptian authorities—who, to keep us silent, led us to believe that they had him at a secret location on the outskirts of Cairo—that if we campaigned or, in their words, “made too much noise,” it would “complicate the situation.” We believed them. I was nineteen. I turned into a bridled animal, cautious and quiet. I could not stop thinking of the detestable things that were surely happening to my father as I bathed, as I sat down to eat. I stopped speaking. I hardly left my London flat except to go to my lectures at the university or to the National Gallery. I flew back to Cairo, and because this was a delayed reaction, more than a year after the event, I had no words to explain it. I remained indoors for six months. Eventually, passing from one room to the other became a complicated activity. The threshold would begin twisting. I can still see the frame of the arch between the living room and the hall bending maniacally the closer I approached. Any repetitive movement increased my heartbeat. Looking out of the window, I had to make sure my eyes did not land on the wheels of a passing car. The sight of that revolution for a fraction of a second would leave me trembling. One day, provoked by something my mother or brother had said—the cause remains obscure in my memory—my leg began to repeatedly kick the underside of the table in the kitchen. The heavy wooden thing kept pulsing up and down, the plates on it jumping and landing nearly, but not quite, where they had been before. Ziad held me and unjustly admonished Mother, “See what you have done?” He felt responsible for her and me, and I felt responsible for him and her, and she for us all. Each one was parent and child. To make up for the missing pillar, the once balanced structure of four columns was now in perpetual strain.
—
When Uncle Mahmoud opened his eyes, the guests did not notice but continued to chat in loud voices. He smiled at me through their exchanges. More visitors arrived. Second and third cousins. I did not know them, and they did not know me, but we embraced and sat, talking, exchanging polite inquiries about one another’s lives. I felt recognized. I was convinced that if I packed all my belongings and appeared at their door they would take me in. This was an odd thought, particularly given how nervous a houseguest I am and how I usually try to avoid staying with other people. This is the drunkenness of return, I told myself. The symptoms will wear off soon. More tea, coffee and sweets were served. Some smoked in silence, and others looked down at their laps or studied their fingers. When the excitement and nerves left us with nothing to say, we did what most people do and Libyan Bedouin society excels at; we repeated platitudes that were courteous and impersonal, questions that, the etiquette here dictates, ought never to be specific. The main purpose is to steer clear of what the male members of my paternal family are always careful to avoid: intrusion and gossip. They distrust people who speak too much. As a result you can end up in situations where the conversation consists of a few sentences that are repeated ad infinitum, as happened with an elderly man who came after all the other visitors had left. He was slight, dressed in an old black English wool coat buttoned up to the collar. He had on a white turban that, although turned loosely around the shape of his head, seemed in no danger of slipping off. Either from the assumption that I knew who he was or else from the desire to ignore the 33-year handicap that divided me from them, no one introduced us. In some indefinable way, he was familiar. He held me by the arms and then without saying a word proceeded to look at me. His eyes were green and opaque like jade. His face, like his body, indulged no excess: thin, handsome, with a short, pure white mustache and beard. His skin was dark, leathery red, and the lines in it many and a slightly paler color. We embraced. I let go before he did. I hugged him again and this time made sure that my strength matched his. He pulled me to sit beside him. He wrapped my arm around his and, smiling, continued to look into my eyes. He asked me nothing about my life. All he said was, “Are you well? Your health? Your family?” and would repeat these three questions every two minutes or so.
“Haj, you disappeared,” Uncle Mahmoud said, I suspected more to break the monotony.
The man continued facing me, but his smile showed mischief now.
His son, an urbane-looking man about my age, began teasing his father. “His condition has grown severe,” he said to Uncle Mahmoud. “Now the maximum he can bear us for is a day, maybe two.”
“Where do you go?” I asked him, but, because of our close physical proximity and the fact that we were sitting to one side of the gathering, I spoke softly, which made it seem as if he and I were conspiring against the others.
He smiled and nodded, as though to say, “Pay no mind to their silliness.” The gesture seemed to also mean, “It will all pass.”
“He goes into the desert,” his son said, slightly blushing as he spoke and looking at me, in that way relatives I hardly know but who are close in age often do, with a shyness that both fears and desires my judgment. “He goes to be with his camels. He loves them more than his own family. Spoils them rotten.”
The man continued looking at me, refusing to comment.
Uncle Mahmoud tried to speak for him: “Who can blame him? He’s tired of people.”
We continued sitting in the silence that followed, my arm wrapped around his, his big hand gripping mine. He continued staring at me. I looked at him or at the others or at the floor or at his large hand on top of mine. His skin was like wood, his nails black. In contrast, my hand looked new and unused. “Are you well? Your health? Your family?” he asked again. I attempted, this time, to answer thoroughly, but he was not interested in the information I was providing. His questions continued and seemed more ridiculous yet also more poignant with each repetition. Together with his silence, his eyes—those eyes not leaving mine, not looking anywhere else but into my own—made me feel I had entered, and was somehow trapped inside, a state as pure as an allegory. He wanted nothing from my existence except itself.
When he and his son left, Uncle Mahmoud told me who he was:
“Muftah, your father’s cousin. They were very close. He prefers to be at Blo’thaah with the camels. As kids he and your father used to play there. He was with your father when your uncle Salah died.”
“Who is Uncle Salah?”
“Our older brother. He was one year older than your father, and one day he stepped on a mine that the Italians or the Germans or the English had left there. Your father was ten. He was spa
red only because he had gone off to pee. But the sight of Salah blown up traumatized him for a long time.”
Returning home after decades, I was confronted with such stories told with the casualness of an old anecdote and, as with this one, the information is shocking exactly because it was somehow anticipated. There was always a sense about my father, quieted and trained by the years of sustained grief, together with a certain distance from his relations, particularly from some of his siblings, that I could now see might have arisen from the gap left by that fallen brother.
“The desert there is still scattered with mines. Muftah was there too and saw what happened. He loved your father. You can tell, no?”
8. The Truce and the Clementine
The guests left. Uncle Mahmoud and I were alone again. His energy picked up. He was playful with his children, laughed loudly at their jokes. He was quicker than his sons, the first to carry plates back to the kitchen after a meal, the first to detect who was yet to have fruit, bouncing up to hand them the bowl. Only in the background, in some secret compartment of his being, did there seem to be a quiet, resolute withdrawal, a shyness not too unlike that of a believer who, once having had his faith challenged, was now resigned to nursing his convictions in secret. At times, in mid-conversation, his thoughts brought him to a sudden silence. When the call to prayer was heard, he would take himself to the corner of the room and, without the practice now fashionable across the Arab world of worshippers encouraging others to join them, he would spread a mat and softly conduct his prayers. His posture then—his pencil frame, the boyish agility of his movements—seemed to be an effort against erasure. It was at once specific yet part of our old human struggle against mortality. It cast a distance between him and the world that, like the fan shape the fisherman’s net leaves when it touches the surface of the water, was only momentarily perceptible.