The Return

by Hisham Matar

  When the city was secure, Izzo, along with several other young men from Ajdabiya, traveled the eighty kilometres east to Brega, a town that sits at the southernmost point of the Mediterranean Sea. Once Brega was won, the next destination was Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, some 600 kilometres east of Brega. Misrata was witnessing some of the bloodiest battles. It was widely believed then that if Misrata fell, Qaddafi would win the war, and if the rebels kept the city, they would have a strong base from which to organize the march westwards to the capital, Tripoli. Misrata therefore became existentially important to both sides of the conflict. Between Brega and Misrata was Qaddafi’s stronghold city of Sirte, making it too dangerous for Izzo to travel by land. Along with other fighters, ammunition and what medical supplies they could gather, Izzo boarded a small, crowded fishing boat and, like the recent migrants who regularly abandon the continent at Libyan ports such as Brega, he made the slow, precarious progress north. On account of the blond-white desert that loops up on either side of Brega, the waters there are some of the most luminous in the Mediterranean Sea. But the further the boat went, the darker and thicker the sea would have become. Once they gained a safe distance from the Gulf of Sirte, they turned west. The landing at Misrata must have been exhilarating. I can picture Izzo, with his usual affability, embracing brothers-in-arms. Perhaps they seemed familiar to him. Perhaps he recognized himself in them. Or perhaps he saw in their faces what I now, looking at the photographs, see in his.

  —

  The fighting in Misrata dragged on. Qaddafi’s desperation to recapture the city was matched by the determination of the resistance. We all came to know the names of the streets, the ingenious resourcefulness of the men and women of the city. Trucks that a few days before had been used to carry goods from the port were now driven down to the sea and filled with sand. What up to then had been regarded as a plentiful and useless material, carpeting the beaches and the surrounding desert landscape, begrudged for not being verdant, suddenly became an asset. The trucks were then driven into Tripoli Street and Benghazi Street, the two main avenues leading to the center, and parked sideways. The wheels were punctured and the engines disabled. Qaddafi’s tanks could not enter Misrata. That those two streets were named after Libya’s other two major cities gave the revolutionaries the strength to fight for the whole country. Suddenly the names of our streets mattered. The inhabitants of Misrata knew their city well, which seemed to confirm that the people and not the dictatorship were the true custodians of Libya.

  Whenever there was a lull in the fighting, Izzo would make the sea journey back to Brega, then the hour drive to Ajdabiya, to rest, eat his mother’s food and collect a clean set of clothes. There are photographs of him standing in the kitchen in military fatigues, holding a machine-gun, his face tired. He looked trapped, as if he had entered a tunnel and knew that the time for turning back had passed. On his last visit he tried to make his mother laugh, parodying the dictator’s speech given a few days after the rebellion began, in which Qaddafi called on his supporters to march until “the country is cleansed of the rats.”

  “Mama,” Izzo said. “Forward, forward.”

  “But forward till when?” Aunt Zaynab asked him.

  “Till Bab al-Azizia,” he told her.

  Bab al-Azizia was the military compound in Tripoli where Qaddafi lived. We had heard stories, which always seemed too fanciful to be believed, that beneath the compound lay underground prisons where the dictator’s most ardent dissidents were kept. Those accounts turned out to be true. Qaddafi liked to keep his strongest opponents nearby in order to be able to take a look at them from time to time: both the living and the dead. Freezers were discovered there with the bodies of long-deceased dissidents. “I have a feeling,” Izzo told Aunt Zaynab, “that Uncle Jaballa is there.” Izzo believed he would find my father alive.

  —

  On these brief visits home, Izzo showed his parents photos he took on his mobile phone of friends at the front. In most of these he looks earnest and out of place. He seems at ease only when he is with Marwan al-Towmi. The two met in Misrata and quickly became inseparable. One of their fellow-fighters told me later, “When you found one, you knew the other was nearby. They always went into battle side by side. They trusted each other and knew they could rely on that.” Marwan was an economics graduate from Benghazi and seven years Izzo’s senior. In photographs his exceptionally tall, slim figure is always leaning slightly to one side, like a windswept pine. When photographed by Izzo, he is smiling playfully with the expression of one who has just shared a joke, or facing the camera with a look of quiet assurance.

  There is a sequence of pictures showing them both in what appears to be a hallway connecting several rooms. The building is old and dilapidated. The walls, having once been blue, are an azure that glows oddly, as though it were frescoed. The ground is bare earth. There is a white plastic chair in the corner, not the flimsy sort commonly found today in Libya but one of those solid modernist Italian garden chairs you used to get in the 1970s. Two new-looking mattresses wrapped in an art deco black-and-white pattern are spread on the floor. They are so thin that they could not have made much of an improvement on the hard ground. Izzo is asleep on one, his head resting on an old lumpy pillow; its gauzy casing shows the dark forms of the stuffing. On the other mattress, Marwan is sitting up. His hands are just out of view; perhaps he is reading a book or cleaning a gun. In another picture, clearly taken only moments later, because the direction of the light coming in from the window has not changed that much, the arrangement is reversed: Marwan is now the one fast asleep, and Izzo is lying in the same place but awake, staring up at the ceiling. Both men are darker, sunburnt from the fighting. Even though there must have been at least one other person there, the man who took the photographs, they seemed to trust only each other to keep watch.

  —

  By the summer of that year, 2011, the fighting in Misrata had reached such a state of equilibrium that it seemed the war could go on forever. Sixty kilometres to the west, Zliten became of immense strategic importance to both sides. To Qaddafi loyalists, the coastal town was a crucial channel for reinforcements heading for Misrata and a major barrier guarding Tripoli. Zliten could help them turn the tide of rebellion. To the revolutionaries, winning Zliten would secure Misrata and offer a base from which to continue the march westward on to the capital. Whoever had Zliten was likely to win the war.

  Back in February 2011, at the outset of the revolution, spontaneous popular protests had erupted in Zliten. They were quickly and ruthlessly quashed. Several months later, in early May, another peaceful protest was violently suppressed. The protesters made contact with rebels in Misrata, who supplied them with arms. On the 9th of June there was an armed assault on the military garrison in Zliten. I remember the day well because, in my efforts to supply international journalists with information about what was happening in Libya, I got the telephone number of a man involved in the attack. All I knew was that up to then he had been a diplomat and that his name (I was only given his first name) was Hisham.

  When I called he said, “I was expecting you. How are you? It is a real pleasure. And your family? Are they all well?”

  He said this in the same automatic way in which such platitudes are often delivered, but in this context, hearing them spoken through a current of fear, by a man who sounded about my age and with whom I shared a name, unnerved me. My emotions were so sudden and intense that all I could do was plunge straight into the usual questions I had come to ask during those days: questions about when and how and what, the exact time, the numbers of those involved, the casualties, how many dead. During those days my flat in London had become a makeshift newsroom, where, together with a couple of friends, we were making up to fifty calls a day to men like Hisham, who were either part of the fighting or were bearing witness to it. Hisham was taken aback by my brisk manner, but he answered my questions in the same courteous tone he had used at the beginning of the conversation.r />
  “We pushed them back. It’s quiet now.” Then after a pause he said, “They’ll be back. They ran too quickly,” and repeated, “They’ll be back.” He sounded breathless, I assumed from fear, but then he said, “I have to go. The troops can come back at any moment. Before they do, we must bury the dead.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Where are you burying them?”

  “Here,” he said. He sounded like a man who had just realized he was trapped. “In the square.”

  —

  I called Hisham several times every day after that but didn’t manage to get hold of him till about one week later. I was relieved he was OK. This time I asked about his family. He said, “Everyone is fine,” then shot the same questions back at me. We were suddenly speaking as if there were no war. “Are you having a good day?” he asked.

  I remember once hearing a conductor say that he had always, ever since he was a young boy, heard music in his head and that it wasn’t until he was an adult that he realized this was not the same for everyone else. That has been my experience too, but with words and images. And in my conversation with Hisham I saw sunlight on a wall, a woman’s hand, shadows of trees on the ground, a shut window with the sun lighting up the particles that clung to the pane, and I heard the sound of cloth being beaten outdoors, as though someone were airing linen, and the words “together” and “maybe” and “I am.”

  “They dug up the graves and burnt the bodies,” he said. He began to tell me of an elderly man in the town but then stopped. “Do you want to speak to him?” he asked.

  “Who dug up the bodies?”

  “Qaddafi’s men, of course,” he said in a mildly offended tone. “Reinforcements arrived in buses. The situation here is very bad.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you want to speak to the old man? I have his number here,” he said, and without waiting for an answer he began reading it out. “Wait two minutes, then call. Tell him you are my friend.”

  Without knowing anything about the old man or why Hisham wanted me to call him, I looked at my watch until exactly two minutes had passed, then dialed the number. An old voice answered straight away.

  “Welcome, my son,” he said. He sounded like he was unaccustomed to speaking on the telephone.

  “Hisham asked me to call,” I said. “We are friends.”

  “But what can you do? No one can do anything.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I watched them from my window. They came with bulldozers and dug up the graves, one after the other. They burnt the corpses, and now everyone is afraid to touch them.” Then he said, “But, thanks be to God, my son is here.”

  “He’s safe?” I asked.

  “Yes. He’s in his room. The air conditioner has been on the whole time.” Then after a pause he added, “But it’s been three days now. I am doing my best but he’s beginning to smell. I must find a way to bury him soon.”

  When I hung up I could not write down the account or share it with the other people in the room. I went to the kitchen. I put on the kettle. I looked at the floor tiles and tried to imagine the possibility of breaking them with the hammer that was in the bottom drawer. I was sure the hammer was there. It is not unusual to keep a hammer in the kitchen, I thought. Perhaps the old man too had one in his kitchen drawer. I pictured him hacking away at the masonry until he reached the earth.

  10. The Flag

  A month later, Izzo and Marwan were amongst a small group of revolutionaries who traveled the 55-kilometre journey from Misrata and slipped into Zliten. There is a video that was shot on Izzo’s mobile phone on the 12th of July, which happened to be Marwan’s thirtieth birthday. The camera shakes. It stops on a view of marble steps and a wrought-iron balustrade—ornate, copying some distant European staircase. Izzo adjusts the zoom. For a moment his finger is pressed against the glass of the lens. The blood-filled flesh lights up a luminous pink. It reminds me of when, as a child, I used to lock myself in the cupboard and press a torch against my palm, marveling, with horror and curiosity, at the mysterious web of veins, the opaque sticks of bone. There is the echo of a distant gunshot, then another. Izzo’s finger moves out of the frame and we see the ceiling, dotted in a line of spotlights.

  “Are you filming?” Marwan whispers.

  “Take this,” Izzo tells him and hands him a wooden pole with the red, black and green flag of the revolution.

  For a fraction of a second we see Marwan’s face, his eyes. He takes the flag in one hand; in the other he is carrying a Kalashnikov. “Stay close,” Marwan whispers, and begins climbing, two steps at a time. He repeats, “Stay close.”

  “OK, let’s do it,” Izzo says, and asks for God’s protection.

  On every landing there is a wall of brown-tinted glass. Several of the panes are smashed. The sun pours through unevenly.

  Izzo whispers his commentary: “We are going up to the roof to take down the dictator’s flag,” and asks again for God’s protection.

  The flagpole now crosses Marwan’s back; its new pale wood is fixed behind his belt, and the fabric is above his head, draping over his right shoulder. Izzo reminds him to be vigilant, but Marwan pushes on ahead. Izzo repeats the prayer. The sun has made a polished steel plate of the roof. Marwan leans into the shade of a corner, taps the floor. “Leave them here,” he whispers, and several similar flagpoles that Izzo had been carrying clank cleanly against the tiles.

  Television satellite dishes, as large as elephant ears, are dotted around the rooftop, each pointing in a different direction. There is a water tank. Marwan climbs to the top of it, using an old wooden ladder. The rusty hinges of an old door nearby can be heard. But Marwan doesn’t stop to look around. He is moving with the impatient confidence of someone who has not thought a lot about what he is doing. The water tank is just taller than him, and above it two small green flags flutter furiously in the wind.

  “The rags of the tyrant,” Izzo whispers.

  Marwan snatches the pole of one of the green flags and throws it on the roof tiles.

  “Gently,” Izzo tells him. “Gently, I said.”

  But Marwan is already reaching for the second flag. He chucks it down with the same irritated force. He takes up the new flag. Perhaps emboldened by his friend, Izzo continues his commentary but is now no longer whispering. He sounds young.

  “God is great,” he says. “Here is the flag of freedom, the flag of life.” Then he watches silently as Marwan fastens the top of the flagpole to a metal rod above the water tank.

  As the red, green and black colors of the flag rise and catch the sun, Marwan shouts, “God is great,” and Izzo joins him, then adds, “God bless our country.”

  The anxious silence returns as Marwan struggles to tie the pole in place with one hand. More gunshots tear the silence. The wind ripples in loud bass notes against the microphone.

  “There is the beautiful flag,” Izzo says softly. “The flag of life and liberty.” Then in the manner of a news reporter, he says, “The freedom fighters of eastern Libya fly the first liberation flag in the town of Zliten.”

  The flag is now fixed firmly in place and reaches at least two metres above the water tank. Marwan checks it, then walks away.

  “God bless you,” Izzo tells him.

  A broad white smile is carved into Marwan’s face.

  Izzo laughs quietly. “Shall I stop filming?” he asks.

  “No, carry on,” Marwan tells him, and the two descend the staircase.

  At the first landing Marwan stands in front of a flat door and kicks it in. They slowly make their way through the rooms. The furniture is upturned, the curtains ripped.

  “See what they’ve done?” Izzo tells Marwan.

  “The dogs,” Marwan says. “They’ve trashed the place.”

  On the wall of the dining room there are pro-Qaddafi slogans written in red lipstick. Marwan tries to rub them out.

  “Here,” Izzo s
ays and hands him the lipstick.

  “Let’s go,” Marwan says.

  “No,” Izzo insists. “We must write ‘Libya is Free’ and ‘Down with Qaddafi.’ ”

  Marwan begins to write, but someone comes in behind them and says, “Where the hell are you? We have to go. Right now.”

  Marwan takes the camera, and for a second Izzo can be seen writing with the lipstick, his back hunched. It reminds me of our grandfather Hamed’s back in his latter years.

  They exit the building and are in the bright sun. They are moving fast. One of their companions, who were guarding the building, boasts, “Did you see them run away?”

  “How many were they?” Izzo asks, moving ahead, sounding older now.

  “They had two cars,” the other answers.

  Marwan asks, “Were they many?”

  In the distance, Izzo can be heard saying, “They must be hiding over there.”

  Marwan points the camera back and you can see the flag high above the water tank. There is no mistaking it.

  —

  Thirty-eight days later, thirty-eight days into his thirtieth year, on the 19th of August, in a battle in Zliten, Marwan was shot several times in the chest, neck and head. Izzo rushed him to hospital. A few hours later Marwan was photographed lying in a dark green body bag, blood-stained bandages around the top of his head, neck and torso, leaving only the face bare: the skin is clean, the eyes are shut, and the lips open. It cannot be described as an expression but rather as the absence of one. An infinite rest that was always there, behind all of the other faces of his life: the boy sitting proudly by the window on an aeroplane, the young graduate in a suit and tie, the freedom fighter in a beard and red beret, and all the other photographs Marwan’s family has posted on the Internet. It makes me think that we all carry, from childhood, our death mask with us.

  The two friends had made a promise. If either of them fell, the other would bury the body in the city where they had first met, Misrata. Izzo carried Marwan there, then returned to Zliten and continued the push till the revolutionaries reached Tripoli. On the 23rd of August 2011, they entered the capital. Izzo found his older brother, Hamed, who had joined another rebel unit, waiting for him by the gates of Bab al-Azizia, Qaddafi’s compound. They were amongst the first to break into the fortified compound.