The Return

by Hisham Matar

  “We were convinced,” Hamed told me, “that we would find Uncle Jaballa there.”

  With their comrades, the two brothers reached Qaddafi’s house. They found it empty. Izzo located a weapons depot that gave the rebels access to more ammunition. Feeling secure, they ran across to the next building. What they didn’t know was that a sniper remained on the roof of that building. He fired a single bullet. It entered Izzo’s forehead and exited from the other side. Izzo fell on Hamed’s shoulder. Hamed tried to stop the bleeding. The sniper fired again, wounding Hamed in the right leg and the left lung. But somehow he found the strength to carry Izzo to safety. A couple of hours later, at 9 P.M., Izzo died in hospital. His last words were that he wanted to be buried beside Marwan. The following morning he was laid to rest in Misrata.

  Uncle Mahmoud called to tell me the news.

  “I grieve to be separated from him,” he said.

  I felt dizzy. “It’s terrible,” I said.

  But Uncle Mahmoud did not call just to inform me of the bad news. He wanted me to speak to Aunt Zaynab.

  “She’s losing her mind,” he said. “Comfort her; tell her you will do what you can to bring Hamed home.”

  Hamed was recovering in a hospital in Misrata, intending, as soon as he was well enough, to return to Tripoli and continue fighting. Uncle Mahmoud and Aunt Zaynab went to try to convince him to return home to Ajdabiya. He refused and threatened to scream if they tried to force him. That, due to his wounded lung, the doctor warned, would kill him.

  Hamed recovered and went to the front again. He did not return to Ajdabiya until Tripoli was liberated. Once home, he started having a recurring dream. Izzo appears healthy and content. “Where I am is much better,” Izzo tells his brother in the dream. The dream unsettled Hamed. When I visited, I noticed how he hardly slept. He always looked tired. He rarely said much. I asked him once about the war. All he said was, “You have no idea.” One afternoon, without introduction, he listed for me some of the terrible crimes the Bashar al-Assad regime was committing against the Syrian people. His wounded leg had not recovered properly. He was in pain and had a pronounced limp. An operation needed to be done, but the medical facilities in Libya were poor. He would need to go abroad. A few months after I saw him in Ajdabiya, the health ministry paid for him to go for treatment in Turkey. His flight landed in Istanbul, but he did not call home. The surgeon who was going to operate on his leg said Hamed had not turned up at the hospital. For a whole week no one knew where he was. Then Hamed telephoned his father.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t call earlier. It took longer than I thought. But I’m now over the border in Syria. I’ve joined the resistance.”

  We all scrambled to try to get him to return. At one point I reached him on the mobile number he had given Uncle Mahmoud. I could not contain my anger.

  “This is not resistance,” I shouted down the line. “It’s suicide.”

  After a pause he said, very calmly, “We have to defeat these dictators.”

  A few days later he was wounded. His fellow-fighters transported him across the border to a hospital in Turkey. Uncle Mahmoud and Aunt Zaynab flew over to see him. After a long period of convalescence, Hamed returned with his parents to Ajdabiya.

  —

  Amongst the photographs Amal has been posting were those taken moments after Izzo died. The blood had been washed off his face, and the place where the bullet entered his skull was bandaged as if there were still hope he might recover. The emergency doctors must have used some disinfectant, or perhaps this is the color blood stains the skin, because around his right temple and cheekbone Izzo’s face is a shade of yellow. It brings to mind the color of the hot, waxy syrup my aunts cooked up—the smell of burning sugar and orange blossom pulling us children indoors to stick our fingers into the syrup. As soon as it cooled and hardened, the women would spoil it, spreading it in sheets over their arms and legs, snatching quickly and sucking in air from the pain; the sound like fabric tearing. On one occasion cousin Ibtesam—in those days she and I were inseparable—cried, not only upset at their ruining the syrup but also in anticipation of the torture womanhood promised.

  “There must be an easier way,” she screamed.

  I seconded her opinion.

  But we were told categorically that this was the best way, because it plucked the little black hairs right out at the roots. They asked Ibtesam and me to run our fingers on the skin, “smooth as marble,” but inflamed and lacquered a weak shade of yellow.

  11. The Last Light

  We stood outside Uncle Mahmoud’s house in the evening sun and said goodbye. I promised to be back in a few days. I wondered if I was being taken for a shy swimmer who plunges into the river, then gets out immediately. Guilt is exile’s eternal companion. It stains every departure. The excuse—for there must always be an excuse—was that I was obliged to visit other relatives in Benghazi. We set off.

  The last light stretched long and yet as bright as the skin of a ripe orange. It had been an exceptionally wet winter. Spring was more verdant than anyone could remember, which was taken as an omen for the better future that would surely follow. Greenery thinly covered the desert floor on either side of the road. Feathers of colored plastic clung to it. Waste wrapped itself around fences and lamp-posts too. Rubbish collection had been practically nonexistent since the war. It wasn’t until we were out on the open road that the earth shook off the debris and stood as all the unpeopled landscapes of Libya stand, clean and witnessing. The trees, sporadically scattered across the floor of the desert, leant in the direction of the wind, each keeping a distance from the next. They looked as feeble and fragile in the expanse as I remembered them from my childhood, when Father used to drive us from Tripoli to visit his family in Ajdabiya. The twelve-hour journey, from which we all emerged stiff-bodied and tired, seemed part of the dreary effort of making the world monochrome. How colorless this landscape seemed to me then. And now, as much as I resisted disliking a place my father loved, I also enjoyed the familiarity of this old, childish longing for the colors and distractions of the capital and its sea. How odd to enjoy a longing now superseded by other places and the fragile life I had made for myself some 3,000 kilometres north, in a land where none of the words I grew up hearing are spoken, where my grandfather, had he been alive, would not be able to read a word of what I have written, and where the colors contradict, as though deliberately, those of the southern Mediterranean. And, although over time I have grown affectionately accustomed to the palette of London’s weather—accustomed but also appreciative of its dour beauty—its colors have remained to me as unnatural as the invisible film placed on windows to dull the light. In the car driving away from Ajdabiya, towards Benghazi and its coast, I realized that I have been carrying within me all these years the child I once was, his particular language and details, his impatient and thirsty teeth wanting to dig into the cold flesh of a watermelon, waking up wondering only about one thing: “What is the sea like today? Is it flat as oil or ruffled white with the spit of waves?”

  —

  When we reached Benghazi I found my cousin Marwan al-Tashani waiting at the hotel. He was sitting at one of the small round tables in the cafeteria, hunched over his laptop, an empty cup of coffee beside him and a cigarette burning between his fingers. He was energized by the positive response his legal NGO was receiving from lawyers and judges across the country. Encouragements and support were also coming in from colleagues in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. The revolution had transformed Marwan. He went from being a prosecutor infamous for not being able to get out of bed before noon to one of the most energetic and articulate campaigners for human rights and the importance and inviolability of legal institutions. He saw in the revolution an opportunity to free the courts from political interference. He also wanted to guard due process from revolutionary fervor.

  “What do you think?” he said under the noise of the television pinned to the wall high above our heads.

  He showed me th
e logo he had just received from the graphic designer. It had the familiar winding line of the Libyan Mediterranean coast and, towering above it, giant scales. At the bottom there were the words LIBYAN JUDGES’ ORGANIZATION, written in simple modern type.

  As a boy, Marwan was always keen to impress. I remember him as a sensitive child often trying to second-guess the opinions of others. I am a year older and that, back when we were seven and eight, seemed an age. We did not meet again until 1992, when I was twenty-two and Marwan twenty-one. My brother, Ziad, who is only four years my senior, was getting married. The timing coincided with improvements in Libyan–Egyptian relations. The Libyan dictatorship had just lifted restrictions on travel to Egypt, which allowed Marwan and several other relatives to attend the wedding in Cairo. It had then been thirteen years since I had seen my relatives and two years since we lost Father. I did not tell Mother what time my flight was due to land. I didn’t want anyone to pick me up. I needed to compose myself in the taxi ride from the airport. I stood at the door to our flat and, before ringing the bell, listened to the familiar voices, all grown up but the child in each still perceptible. I looked down at my own grown-up leather shoes. They did not seem to belong to me.

  During those days surrounding Ziad’s wedding, we all fell so completely back into a family again. The past, like a severed limb, tried to fix itself onto the body of the present. Unlike my paternal family, my maternal aunts and cousins were constantly reaching out and touching one another, as though one of us might suddenly disappear. Unlike the austerity of Ajdabiya, where idle talk is suspect, my mother’s landscape, the Green Mountains, is verdant with vegetation and talk. I remember how, when we used to drive there, the green landscape would gradually take over and the earth would rise. Mountains would suddenly enclose us. Looking down, I would occasionally spot a stream or waterfall. Then eventually the twisting road would release us at the open sea. In this region, light and shade were not definite, as they were in Ajdabiya, but moved with the leaves and the breeze. Conversation here too, or at least amongst my maternal family, reflected this variety. They had an exceptional gift for gossip, a good memory for songs, took delight in conversation and knew how to enjoy themselves. It made leaving them in Cairo very difficult.

  On the flight back to London after the wedding, I tried to keep awake. I was flying KLM, stopping briefly at Amsterdam before continuing on to London. The plane was full of Dutch families. But, even with eyes wide open, I remained convinced that they were all speaking Arabic and in an accent more authentically Libyan than my own. I felt the shadows of my aunts’ and cousins’ hands, now round my wrist, tapping my shoulder, through my hair, then with a feathery touch brushing my ankle. I was twenty-two and my small London flat was crowded with old questions, more severe now than ever.

  In the early 1990s, after the border was opened, no one visited Mother in Cairo more frequently than Marwan. I would often see him during my holidays there. A distance had grown between us, and not only because of our time apart. Like the rest of my cousins, Marwan had endured the restrictions and interferences of Qaddafi’s Libya. He had witnessed the militarization of schools, where, as a young boy, he had to turn up in military uniform and crawl on the ground with a rifle before morning class. He had seen the banning of books, music and films, the closure of theaters and cinemas, the outlawing of football, and all the other countless ways in which the Libyan dictatorship, like a crazed jealous lover, infiltrated every aspect of public and private life. He had a certain air of unease, fortified by both pride and anxiety.

  Over dinner at our house, if someone criticized the dictator, Marwan would fall silent or leave the room. I understood why. We all knew of people who had been arrested only because they were present when the dictatorship had been criticized. Nonetheless, it created a fog between us. I wanted him to condemn the regime. Every time my eyes fell on Father’s portrait in the dining room, my heart grew small and hard. I was an angry young man then. We tiptoed around each other, trying our best to avoid confronting the ways in which political reality manages to infiltrate intimacies, corrupting them with unuttered longings and accusations.

  In January 2011, as the Libyan dictatorship attempted to prevent the kind of uprisings seen in Tunisia and Egypt, not only did the regime free political prisoners, such as my uncles and cousins, but it also promised interest-free loans to young people and a dramatic increase in foreign scholarships for university students. This was happening in tandem with violent crackdowns on journalists and human-rights activists. Fathi Terbil, a lawyer who had represented the relatives of over one thousand political prisoners killed in Abu Salim prison, was arrested. It was in response to this that on the night of the 15th of February 2011, two days before the planned beginning of the Libyan revolution, Marwan, together with a dozen or so judges and lawyers, staged a protest that even they at the time saw as nothing more than a symbolic gesture. They stood on the steps of the Benghazi Courthouse, where, many years before, when Marwan’s father, Sidi Ahmed, was the High Court judge, Marwan, his brother, Nafa, and I used to run up and down the corridors, thrilled by the need to keep quiet, making sure the tennis ball we threw from one end to the other did not knock against any of the closed doors. I called Marwan that evening, as he stood with the others on the steps of the courthouse in the cold winter breeze, with the sea, invisible in the night, murmuring in the background.

  “Can you hear it?” he said, and I pictured him holding the mobile phone up towards the mass of black water.

  “All good courthouses should face the sea,” I told him.

  “Exactly,” he said, laughing. “This way there is nowhere to run.”

  The following night, the evening of February 16, Marwan and his colleagues took their places again in front of the courthouse.

  “It was like stepping off a cliff,” he said. “It was more frightening than the first night. We heard what they had done to demonstrators in Al-Bayda and elsewhere.”

  That night, the lawyers and judges expected a crackdown. Instead, what emerged through the surrounding dark streets were the families of the deceased, those whose cases Fathi Terbil had taken on. Hundreds of people came, and the following day the numbers grew into the thousands. On February 17, the date after which the revolution was named, the authorities attacked and killed several demonstrators. Instead of scaring people away, it had the opposite effect. I called Marwan. He sounded as if he had been arguing. His wife had been trying to convince him to stay at home.

  “She said, ‘Aren’t you frightened for your daughter?’ I told her, ‘It is exactly because I am afraid for my daughter’s future that I am going out.’ ”

  Revolutions have their momentum, and once you join the current it is very difficult to escape the rapids. Revolutions are not solid gates through which nations pass but a force comparable to a storm that sweeps all before it. One of Turgenev’s most affecting characters does not come from his best-known novels. Alexey Dmitrievich Nezhdanov, the hero of Virgin Soil, Turgenev’s last novel, is the illegitimate son of an aristocrat. He is young and trapped between two powerful impulses: a romantic sensibility that makes him ill-suited for absolute certainty, and a revolutionary heart that craves that certainty. These opposing forces in his nature eventually destroy him. Nezhdanov has always interested me, and now it seemed Marwan and I and nearly everyone we knew were falling into a similar predicament.

  —

  Marwan took me to meet the author and editor Ahmed al-Faitouri. In the early days of the revolution, Ahmed had got my number from a mutual acquaintance and called me in London. He had wanted to revive Al-Haqiqah, a newspaper that Qaddafi closed back in the early 1970s. To writers of Ahmed’s generation, born in the 1950s and ’60s, Al-Haqiqah was a valued source of independent news and high literary discourse. When he could not acquire the name from the publisher, he set up Al-Mayadin instead. The name means “squares.” He wanted to call it that because, he had explained over the telephone, “the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and he
re all broke out from public squares.” The mission of Al-Mayadin was to “document the February 17 revolution at the political, economic, social, cultural, and judicial levels.” He was obviously a man of great energy and ability, because, in the midst of the fighting and instability of the time, he managed to bring out the first issue three months after the revolution started, when the regime was yet to fall. He was not alone. Libyan journalism, that frail and battered institution, was experiencing a resurgence at the time. For four decades under Qaddafi, journalists were censored, imprisoned and sometimes killed. In the few months after the uprising, Libya went from producing a handful of government-administered periodicals to up to 200 newspapers, magazines and leaflets. Running short of space, newsagents began spreading out the periodicals on the pavement in front of their shops. Most of the publications were amateur, but they expressed the country’s appetite for a free and plural press. Leafing through them, you sensed the urgency not only to monitor the evolving present but also to engage in the past, publishing accounts and personal testimonies of life under the dictatorship. When Ahmed al-Faitouri telephoned in 2011, he did not do so just to tell me of his dream, “a dream that had been, up to now, a sin,” but to persuade me to write for Al-Mayadin, “on any subject: politics, literature, art, anything.” I did not need much convincing. Until then, my books and journalism had been banned in Libya. I vividly remember the day when I discovered that the authorities had censored my work and had even forbidden editors from printing my name. It was in July 2006, a month after the publication of my first novel. I had just given a reading at the Poetry Café on Betterton Street in Covent Garden and, hoping to calm my nerves, I went outside to smoke. A man stepped out of the café behind me. He turned out to be a Libyan journalist living in London. He freelanced for several of the main publications and had been looking forward to writing a review of my novel. When he told his editor in Tripoli of his plan, the editor responded, “Please, nothing on Hisham Matar. We have direct orders.” But my book had already been smuggled into the country by then. Photocopies were made and circulated. My articles were also translated, often without my knowledge, and posted on the Internet.