The Return

by Hisham Matar

  Perhaps Uncle Mahmoud had called a truce, the specific terms of which were known only to him or maybe not even known consciously but was one of those silent maneuvers intended to veil us from a world of infinite danger. I wondered at what point it had taken place. Perhaps it was during the disappointed activity of mealtime, or in an empty moment captured inside a casual hour—if indeed casual hours exist in prison—walking in the courtyard under the enormous sun in the years when he was allowed out of the cell, pacing the long rectangular dirt ground, remembering to himself or recounting to a fellow-inmate, in the animated style for which Uncle Mahmoud remains well known, certain details of The Brothers Karamazov or Candide or Madame Bovary or any of the novels he loves, and doing so out of the same desire that leads free men to reread books: to replicate and deepen the pleasure. Or perhaps it was not a novel but a football match—for, although, like his older brother, Uncle Mahmoud’s enthusiasms for football and literature are distinct in quality, they are equal in intensity. I picture him now walking under the sun, recounting to a friend, out of the wish to awaken the happy memory, the details of the last football match he had watched with my father, which took place on the 13th of September 1989, exactly six months before the two brothers were imprisoned. I was attending university in London and therefore could not be in Cairo for Uncle Mahmoud’s momentous visit, the first since we had left Libya a decade before. The Libyan regime had forbidden nearly all of my father’s family from traveling outside the country. It was one of several tactics the authorities employed to punish my father and, by extension, his family. On account of Father’s politics, it was almost impossible for any male member of my paternal family (except for the odd exception who was loyal to the regime) to gain employment or receive a scholarship. Given the large number of uncles and cousins I have, many were affected by this. And, not wishing to strengthen the association and cause them more problems, we did not call or write to members of our paternal family. In fact, I had not heard Uncle Mahmoud’s voice since we had left Libya.

  The afternoon he arrived in Cairo, the telephone in my London flat rang. His voice was still familiar. It was as if, for the past ten years, it had been stored in my head. It seemed a little deeper and more rooted somehow. Although, of course, not having spoken to my uncle since I was nine, it was my vocal cords that, out of the two of us, had undergone the more dramatic transformation. He kept repeating, “Oh, my God, Hisham, you sound like a grown man.” I spoke to Aunt Zaynab, the woman he married after we left the country. I wondered what she was like, what my parents made of her. The couple brought with them the newest member of the family, their baby son, Izz al-Arab Matar. Instead of the usual weekly long-distance call, I now telephoned Cairo nearly every day.

  Uncle Mahmoud’s visit that autumn coincided with the European Cup. Only reading took charge of Father’s passions more intensely than football. And no team gave him more pleasure than Bayern Munich. When Father was away on work, my mother videotaped every one of their matches. She continued doing so after he was kidnapped, recording not only those of the German team but every football match broadcast, no matter how inconsequential, including Egypt’s Second Division tournament. Every time I came home on holidays, I would find the library of videotapes had grown by a metre. Each was labeled with not the usually careful turns of Mother’s handwriting but a hurried version of it, noting quickly the competing teams—“Mali–Senegal,” “Cameroon–Egypt,” “Juventus–Barcelona”—and the date. She only stopped when we received the first of Father’s prison letters, three years later. By then she had recorded hundreds of hours of football, which, I remember calculating, if Father had returned to us then with his passion for football intact, it would have taken several years for him to watch.

  But those were still happy days. My parents were reunited with Father’s dearest sibling, who, on account of the sixteen years that separated them, was brother and son to my father, and were meeting their sister-in-law and the new-born nephew who, to Father, must have been the closest he had ever come to holding a grandson.

  In the first round of the European Cup that year, Bayern Munich met Glasgow Rangers. Minutes before kick-off, my mother was, in her usual way, trying to decide which side to support. Like me, she had settled on Rangers, not only to give Father and Uncle Mahmoud the pleasure of adversaries but also because Rangers had the only black player on the field.

  “His name is Mark Walters,” I told Mother over the telephone. “He’s only two years older than Ziad,” I said.

  “Is he African?” Mother asked.

  “I don’t know, but he’s the first black player to ever play for Rangers. His first match was a scandal. Supporters shouted and spat at him. Thousands of bananas were thrown on the pitch.”

  I exaggerated. Bananas were indeed thrown during Mark Walters’s first match, but not thousands.

  Mother handed me to Uncle Mahmoud. I gave him the same information about Mark Walters. He paused, then said what he would often say when we spoke on the telephone: “It’s a real shame you’re not here.” Then, “Your cousin Izzo says hello,” even though we both knew that Izzo, at only ten months old, was incapable of saying much at all. He handed me to Father.

  “Where will you watch it?” he asked.

  “At a friend’s place,” I lied.

  I hung up and went to the local pub, ordered a pint and sat with strangers watching the match. Twenty-five minutes into the game, Rangers were awarded a penalty. Mark Walters was to take it. I watched him walking back from the ball. I began reciting Surat al-Fatiha. Here was an eighteen-year-old Arab Muslim praying in an English pub for a Scottish team because they had a black player who might or might not have been African, while his Libyan family, exiled in Cairo, was rooting for a German team. Thank God, Mark Walters scored. Two minutes later Bayern Munich equalized. Final score was 3–1 in favor of the Germans. It did not matter; it was not the black man’s fault.

  After the match I called home again. Father, who was rarely the one to answer, picked up.

  “I knew it was you,” he said. “Did you see the artistry? Pure genius. Here; your uncle wants you.”

  “Hisham, listen, your cousin is a born Bayern supporter. He started crying the moment your African friend…What’s his name?” I could hear Mother in the background, saying, “Mark Walters,” spoken as if the name belonged to a great philosopher or poet. “Izzo screamed the moment this Mark Walters scored.”

  —

  Recently, Izzo’s younger sister, Amal, born the year after Uncle Mahmoud and Aunt Zaynab’s visit, located a photograph with the date in orange digits in the bottom-right-hand corner, 09/13/89: the same day as the Bayern–Rangers match. It shows ten-month-old Izzo on my father’s knee. The child’s miniature hand is reaching towards a clementine that Father is tempting him with. Father is wearing his dark blue farmala, the traditional Libyan suit. I recall choosing the wool with him and taking it to the tailor in Cairo’s old district of Khan el-Khalili. Father’s hand—it is difficult to convey the effect that seeing Father’s hand can still have on me—occupies the center of the photograph, holding between the tips of his fingers the bright clementine. Izzo’s eyes are on the fruit; Father’s are on the camera and therefore on us, or, I should say, on me. In the foreground is the fruit bowl; to the right of Father are the legs of another man. From their slender and long frame I suspect they belong to Uncle Mahmoud. He is wearing an identical farmala. Father must have taken him to his tailor. I wonder if the two brothers had stopped for lunch at the restaurant I took Father to when I accompanied him to the tailor. It was in one of the back alleys, up a narrow flight of stone steps. I remember Father following me up, saying, “But where are you taking us?” and feeling that thrill as I introduced my old man to something new and unusual, enjoying the quizzical expression on his face as he navigated the old broken steps, his fine leather shoes scraping the stone, and that readiness of his, wanting to prove that, no matter his fine tastes, he was still a man of the people. It alway
s pleased him to know that I had my own way. When we entered the old working-class eatery, he greeted everyone, wishing them good appetite. They watched us with an expression of curiosity and amusement. And we were of course foreign, in nationality and class. The difference was clearer for him than for me, because by then I had perfected the Egyptian dialect and could pass for a Cairene, which, given the locals’ exceptional talent in detecting a foreigner, was a feat that attracted the admiration of several family friends and the displeasure of our Libyan relatives. “You order,” he said when we sat down. I got us the special: grilled goat chops. It reminded him of the Libyan dish mardoma, where the meat is slowly cooked in cinders. We ate well. “I’ll never find this place again,” he said as we were leaving. I stood him in the middle of the alleyway and pointed out the silver shop on the corner, the large brass lantern blackened with age on the opposite side, the old man selling pickled lupins and the sign above him that read: MERCIFUL. Father took note of all of these markers, but then repeated, “I’ll never find it.” But perhaps taking Uncle Mahmoud to the tailor had reminded him of our meal together and the location of the restaurant. Very few restaurants there serve goat meat. If he had asked, he would have been led to it.

  —

  Six months after the photograph was taken, Father and Uncle Mahmoud were arrested and Izzo was separated from his father. They met briefly in 2001, when the authorities decided to put Uncle Mahmoud and the others on trial. Hearing of the news, the families of the accused rushed to the courthouse and, for the first time in more than eleven years, laid eyes on their men. Izzo was thirteen. Uncle Mahmoud remembers the day vividly: “I was standing with Hmad, Ali, Saleh, and all the others in the dock, surrounded by high bars. The judge read out our names, including your father’s name. Jaballa was described as the commander of our group. His whereabouts, the judge said, were ‘unknown.’ ”

  Shortly after the trial, one of my cousins sent me a copy of the transcript of the court’s proceedings. I remember reading the word “unknown” and thinking, I know what that means; it means they killed him. But then hope, cunning and persistent, crept back in, and I convinced myself that because the Egyptian government had handed over my father on the condition that, as Father puts it in his first letter from prison, “I never see the light,” the court was doing what the authorities had done: they were hiding the fact that Jaballa Matar was in their custody. But now, hearing Uncle Mahmoud use that word, I was jolted once more, annoyed at my inability to resist hope. One needs to be vigilant with such a fate, I thought, looking out for the smallest clue, words that arise after long silences, words such as “unknown.” Thinking this, I became convinced that Uncle Mahmoud too knew what this word meant. Instead of leaving it there, I could not help asking the stupid question.

  “But this means they killed him?”

  “I don’t know,” Uncle Mahmoud said. “I don’t believe so. I still believe Jaballa is alive.”

  “But how could that be?” I said, feeling myself grow impatient. “If he is alive, then where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that he’s my brother and I don’t believe he’s dead.” Then he told me what he had told me over the telephone the day he was released: “Don’t lose hope.” And with that he returned to telling me about the day in the courtroom, the day he saw his son, Izzo, for the first time in eleven years.

  “We were all charged with treason,” he said. “We weren’t assigned a defense, and there was confusion in the courtroom as to who was going to address the charge. At that moment women and children began coming into the room, peering towards us. I immediately spotted Zaynab. I did my best to look strong. I couldn’t recognize the children. They had all grown so…”

  “And Izzo?” I asked.

  “He approached the dock with Zaynab and the children. He was tall, thirteen years old, and very shy. I tried to joke with him.”

  A couple of days after this conversation with Uncle Mahmoud, Uncle Hmad Khanfore described that scene to me. Unlike Uncle Mahmoud, he could not see his family in the crowd.

  “I watched the people,” he said, “and I was asking myself, how after so long will the children know their fathers? The man beside me had been in prison for exactly the same length of time as the rest of us. He had a strange affliction that meant he stopped breathing whenever he experienced a strong emotion. Anything that made him laugh or cry could stop him breathing. Whenever this happened, the only way to help him was to slap him hard on the back. The courtroom was very loud by this stage, with people calling out to their relatives, so I spoke into his ear. I told him, ‘See that fellow over there, that teenager looking at us? Well, he would have been a boy when his father was arrested. I bet you, if he is here looking for his father, that he wouldn’t recognize him—how could he?’ ‘Nonsense,’ the man said. ‘How could anyone not recognize his own father?’ I waved to the teenager to come. ‘Who are you here to see?’ I asked him. The boy said he had come to see his father. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘And who is your father, what is his name?’ The teenager answered, ‘His name is Hmad Khanfore.’ The man beside me fainted,” Uncle Hmad said, laughing. “He collapsed to the ground, and no beating on the back could help. The comedy continued, because my nervousness made me silly. So there I was, telling tired old jokes to the son who could not recognize me.” Uncle Hmad laughed and I laughed with him. Then he stopped and said, “We don’t even know our children.”

  The accused were convicted of conspiring against the state. My father was sentenced to death in absentia. The rest all got life. They were, from time to time, allowed visits after that. That was how, over the years, Izzo got to know his father a little.

  9. The Old Man and His Son

  Amal has become obsessed with Izzo. Nearly every day she posts at least one photograph of her brother on Facebook, pictures made available for anyone to see. Izzo as a young boy, with eyes curious and shy; Izzo by the sea, the blue pulsing behind him, not minding the wind in his hair, looking at us through a teenager’s face, newly conscious of adulthood yet not quite resigned to it. Then there are those of Izzo the freedom fighter. These form the majority of the pictures Amal has been posting: tens of photographs taken in the six months he fought in the armed rebellion against the dictatorship. They show him carrying a Kalashnikov, an RPG, his chest crossed with bullet belts. They show him driving a pickup truck that has lost its doors. Knowing he is being watched, he looks as shy and pensive as a young man off on a trip with people he hardly knows. Then he is resting on a thin, browned mattress in some bombed-out building, probably in the latter months of the fighting, because beneath the well-worn yellow T-shirt his torso looks more muscular. In another he is standing against a broken-down wall. The house had been destroyed, but this part of the wall, like a map of an unknown country, stands, persisting. It keeps his shadow. Then there is a series of him showing his wounds: a face freckled by shrapnel, white cotton in the ears, pupils as red as plums. Over the six months of the war, his expression changes a little. In the early days he has the earnest sense of purpose of those who are anxious to do well. That keen desire to succeed remains but is gradually erased by a new fatigue that enters the eyes and fastens the eyebrows. A veil of bewilderment has fallen, endured and enduring. Something has changed, and, although perhaps it won’t last forever, it seems limitless. Looking at these pictures, I hear his voice repeat, “Is it too late? Perhaps it is too late,” and I know that what he means has nothing to do with retreating but is a response to the nature of war, the momentum sustained by conflict.

  —

  A few months before these war pictures were taken, Izzo was in his final year at university, studying to become a civil engineer. When my long years of campaigning for the release of my relatives coincided with the dictatorship’s last-minute attempts to avoid a popular uprising, Uncle Mahmoud was one of several political prisoners released in early February 2011. For the first time since Izzo was a toddler, he was sleeping and waking up in the sam
e house as his father. The news of Uncle Mahmoud’s release had caused a huge traffic jam in Ajdabiya. Hundreds of well-wishers descended on the family. They came from neighboring villages and towns and some from as far away as the capital, Tripoli. To many it offered a safe opportunity for an act of protest. No one could have known then that a fortnight later several towns and cities were going to rise in open revolt against the dictatorship.

  Ajdabiya was amongst the first. The city changed hands three times. But on every occasion, what Qaddafi’s tanks could not secure was the narrow network of streets at the heart of the city. When the fighting was at its fiercest, the women, children and the elderly were moved to the relative safety of Benghazi. Uncle Mahmoud refused to leave. As all lines of communication were down, I sent him, through a journalist friend who was going to report on the war, a satellite telephone. When eventually we spoke, he said, “The time for retreat has passed. We either win or I’ll meet my end here. No one dies before his time. Besides, your uncle is not as old as you think. I can fight, and I’m a good cook. Here I can be useful to the boys.” I knew he didn’t want to leave Izzo, who was taking part in the street battles around the family house. For Izzo, the war started on his doorstep.