The Return

by Hisham Matar

  I have wondered ever since about the timing, about why my father chose that particular moment to tell me of his secret visits to Ajdabiya. I had then assumed it was because Grandfather Hamed had just passed away, but now I am not sure. On that same tape, which over the past twenty-five years I have managed to listen to only five times, he says, “Don’t come looking for me,” and every time that line brings to mind that afternoon when he and I stretched, side by side, facing one another, on my narrow bed in London. His words, “Now that he’s gone, there’s no need to worry,” which I had then taken as reassurance, I have come to see as a warning that I had missed. What he really meant was, now that his father was gone, he could take even greater risks.

  15. Maximilian

  Not knowing when my father ceased to exist has further complicated the boundary between life and death. But this can only partly explain why for the longest time, even before my father’s disappearance, the commonplace occurrence of being able to point to a calendar and say, it was on that exact day that a particular person’s life ended, has always seemed inaccurate. Perhaps we should be with the bereaved, cover our ears and insist, “No, he is not dead.” Perhaps that is not only a denial of terrible news but also a momentary recognition of a truth, one that passes and is buried along with the deceased. Disbelief is the right instinct, for how can the dead really be dead? I think this because absence has never seemed empty or passive but rather a busy place, vocal and insistent. As Aristotle writes, “The theory that the void exists involves the existence of place: for one would define void as place bereft of body.” He says nothing of time here, and time is surely part of it all, of how we try to accommodate the absence. Perhaps this is why, in countless cultures, people in mourning rock or sway from side to side—not only to recall infancy and the mother’s heartbeat, but to keep time. Only time can hope to fill the void. The body of my father is gone, but his place is here and occupied by something that cannot just be called memory. It is alive and current. How could the complexities of being, the mechanics of our anatomy, the intelligence of our biology, and the endless firmament of our interiority—the thoughts and questions and yearnings and hopes and hunger and desire and the thousand and one contradictions that inhabit us at any given moment—ever have an ending that could be marked by a date on a calendar? Hasn’t it always seemed that way? Haven’t I always detected the confusion of funerals, the uncertainty of cemeteries, the bewilderment of a headstone? Perhaps memorials and all the sacred and secular rituals of mourning across our human history are but failed gestures. The dead live with us. Grief is not a whodunit story, or a puzzle to solve, but an active and vibrant enterprise. It is hard, honest work. It can break your back. It is part of one’s initiation into death and—I don’t know why, I have no way of justifying it—it is a hopeful part at that. What is extraordinary is that, given everything that has happened, the natural alignment of the heart remains towards the light. It is in that direction that there is the least resistance. I have never understood this. Not intellectually anyway. But it is somehow in the body, in the physical knowledge of the eternity of each moment, in the expansive nature of time and space, that declarative statements such as “He is dead” are not precise. My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.

  A few days after my return to Libya, I flew to Rome and stood in front of Titian’s The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence. I had gone to Rome specially to see the exhibition. Several of the Italian artist’s masterpieces were collected in one place. Most of them had never been in the same room before. I had seen The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence in countless reproductions—in books and postcards and once in a large poster on a friend’s wall—but none prepared me for the real thing. It is massive in scale, measuring just less than five metres high by three metres wide. It is impossible to ignore Lawrence’s suffering. I stood there till closing time. I watched the fit body of a man, a body still good, pinned to a wooden bench. I thought of the carpenter who had constructed the bench. I saw the daughter handing him a glass of water. The bench had been constructed carefully to play its part effectively: to hold up the body until, at the right moment, it would burn too and crumble. But we are at an earlier stage. The bench is still holding up well. The fire beneath it is being stoked by a half-naked figure. Like the carpenter—or perhaps he is the carpenter—the man is diligent in his work. There is no end to Lawrence’s torment. He is surrounded by efficient men. Behind him stands one with strong arms. He is working hard to keep the victim down. Agony is twisting Lawrence’s body. His head is thrown back. The brute, either out of strain or shame, looks away. Meanwhile another man, barefaced, is stabbing Lawrence in the ribs, poking him as he might a chained animal, safe in the knowledge it cannot reach him. The light comes from the fires: the one burning beneath Lawrence and those of the torches of bystanders watching the spectacle. The only other source of light is a gash in the heavens, its edges bubbling with clouds, as though the sky has developed an infected wound. The moon’s glow pours through. It touches Lawrence’s outstretched hand and lights up his fingertips. There is a strange detail: Lawrence’s left foot is caught in a peculiar position, dangling off the bench, floating in the flames, as if enjoying the fire.

  I find certain paintings mysterious. I am drawn to them as I am to certain individuals. I have been interested in art, architecture and music for as long as I can remember, but the fascination with pictures changed when I was nineteen, the year I lost my father. The usual way of going to a gallery, of spending a couple of hours passing from one painting to the next, until one finally comes to the end, no longer worked. In fact, it overwhelmed me. More than once I thought of screaming. Yet I kept returning, of my own volition. That was when I began what was meant to be a temporary solution to the problem but that has, over the years, become an integral part of my life. I was living near the National Gallery, and entry was free, so I thought I would choose one painting and pay it a brief, fifteen-minute visit every day and do this five times a week. I would switch to another painting whenever I felt I had exhausted my interest. In those days, that usually took a week; now, partly because I am able to visit the museum only once or twice a week, it can take much longer, sometimes as long as a year, before I move on to a new painting. For the past twenty-five years I have kept up this vigil in all the places I have lived. That day in Rome, after I had seen my country for the first time in thirty-three years, after I had found out all I could find out about what had befallen my father, I sat on the floor of the emptying gallery, looking up at The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, sketching in my notebook—in part to help me look, but in greater part to justify the length of time I was spending in front of the picture. And then, without noticing that I had surrendered to them, I was surrounded by sounds and images, coming at me in sharp broken fragments, of Father’s final moments: what they might have told him, what his last words might have been, the past and how it seemed to him then.

  —

  As with the carpenter of Lawrence’s bench, the architect of Abu Salim had applied practical thought to the design of Father’s prison cell, the room Father had ironically referred to in his letter as the “noble palace.” One of the things humanity seems to agree upon is how prisons should look and function. The design of Abu Salim adheres to this universal code. The man who designed the cell had never stood in it; in fact, he had never seen his building in the flesh. He had sat at a drawing table in another country and, between meals, visits to the bathroom and other obligations, he considered standard measurements, capacity, materials and layout. He opted for prefabricated concrete walls, which were then loaded onto ships and transported to Tripoli. The foreign laborers who assembled the building were all
otted reasonable working hours. Lunches were provided. Construction happened in record time. Locals living near the building site commented on how one day it wasn’t there and the next day there it was. The architect had specified that the manufacturer puncture a round hole at the dead center of each prefabricated wall. This way when the crane lifted the ready-made slab, it rose in perfect balance, as straight as a guillotine. The holes were then plastered over and concealed. But later, when the cells filled up, prisoners discovered their location. They found out that if they chipped away at the plaster, they could open a channel to the next cell, one big enough to pass a book through. I know this because Father describes these holes in his letter, then writes, “All sorts of goods pass this way. None are more precious than books.” And then he adds, “The prison is a great library,” which I found hard to believe. Every February, returning from the Cairo Book Fair, we would struggle to fit all the books my father bought in the boot and often had to hire a taxi. Every time I dared to read Father’s prison letters, my mind would search for signs of how he might have changed, been altered or reduced by his incarceration. Regardless of their quality, books passed through these openings, which were concealed by day and opened at night. They created a network connecting nearly all the cells. It was the unintended consequence of the architect’s decision. The floor plan was made up of wards constructed at right angles, grouped around rectangular open spaces. These courtyards were the only places where prisoners could walk under the sky. It was in these that, on June 29, 1996, 1,270 prisoners were executed. Although I never believed it, it is possible that Father was amongst them.

  A former prisoner I had met in 2004 told me that in April 1996, two months before the massacre, Father was taken away from his cell. His few belongings were left behind and later sold by the guards to other prisoners. Father was then moved to another wing in the same prison, or to another prison, or executed straightaway, or brought back two months later to die with the others, or killed later at an unknown time and place.

  Over the past two and a half decades, I have followed up every scrap of information concerning life in Abu Salim. I read every account I could find, and, whenever I heard of a former inmate who had left the country, I tried to make contact and meet him. On one occasion, I flew all the way to Oklahoma. I always went to these meetings with the same mixture of dread and tired hope. There was modesty in these men, one that expressed itself in not wanting to disclose all the facts at once. It reminded me of the misplaced pride of those who, having had a great fortune bestowed upon them, try to make light of their privilege. I thought this critically, out of frustration, for I often had to restrain myself, limit my questions, which I tried to ask with the least possible urgency. I met so many people, so many names. I know so many names. There are times when I lie on my back and close my eyes and see them floating above me like moths.

  In one such encounter, I met a man in an empty London café. We sat at a table in the back corner, from where the entire place could be seen. He sat with his back to the entrance, and I kept an eye on who came in. This was in the years after 2004, when Tony Blair had gone to Libya and stood shaking hands with Muammar Qaddafi. Ziad called me that afternoon. “Now we have lost everything,” he said. The dictatorship became more powerful than ever before. Some of its worst criminals began to buy houses in London. Qaddafi’s spymaster, Moussa Koussa—who, in 1980, had been expelled from Britain after advocating strong support, in an interview in The Times, for Libya’s policy of assassinating opponents abroad—was now a regular visitor. Following Tony Blair’s visit, the British capital became the number one place from which the Libyan secret service could monitor Libyans abroad. Britain helped to deliver dissidents to Tripoli. The Libyan Investment Authority, a corrupt institution that claimed to manage the national wealth, was based in London. The LIA purchased hotels, real estate and various investments, often in the names of individuals from the Qaddafi inner circle. Noted and powerful British financiers were board members. The dictator’s son and heir apparent, Seif el-Islam Qaddafi, became the darling of the British establishment. The London School of Economics awarded him a PhD, which later turned out to be fraudulent. Several British academics, politicians, lawyers and public relations agencies began working hard at washing the blood off the Libyan regime. None of us felt safe. Officials from the Libyan embassy attended the first reading I gave from my first novel. A report was sent to Tripoli and I became a watched man. It was deemed no longer safe for me to visit my family in Egypt, which caused a second exile. When friends or relatives visited London, many did not feel it was prudent to be seen with me. Every time I gave an interview criticizing the dictatorship, I walked around for days feeling the weight of the regime on my back. It was under such circumstances that the former prisoner and I met in the café in London.

  He told me that, although the prison authorities made sure Father did not mix with the other prisoners, he had managed to be in contact with my father.

  “We exchanged messages through the passages.”

  “So you never actually saw him?” I asked.

  “Only from a distance,” he said, and explained how he used to stand on the shoulders of one of his cellmates and watch through the high windows as Father paced the courtyard alone.

  I looked into the man’s face as he told me this. I felt the powerful urge not so much to know how Father had appeared to him but literally to possess his eyes, the eyes with which he had seen my father, to pluck them out of the man’s skull and insert them into mine.

  On another occasion around that time, I spoke to a former inmate who worked as a cook in the prison kitchen during the period when the massacre took place. After the shooting, which went on for several hours and was like “a drill inside your head,” the guards brought him a box full of blood-stained watches and rings. They asked him to wash them clean. Someone had obviously forgotten to ask the prisoners to take off their watches and wedding rings, or, more likely, the guards, who managed a clandestine economy of confiscated and stolen goods, could not be seen stealing in front of their superiors and, when no one was looking, went later from body to body, quickly unstrapping watches and pulling rings. The cook made a mental note of the number of watches. This is how his testimony, during those years when all news of the massacre was suppressed, gave campaigners and human-rights organizations an early indication of the numbers killed that day.

  —

  Father warns in his first letter, which we received in 1993, that no one should learn of the correspondence he has sent: “or else,” he writes, “I will fall into a bottomless abyss. I would prefer to die under torture than give the names of those who have delivered this letter.”

  Mother, Ziad and I were in my room in Cairo, crouched on the floor by the foot of my bed. I cannot remember why we came to be reading it in this odd position. It was as if the letter contained an explosive device we had hoped to render safe. This was not the first time we had read the letter but it was the first rereading, a day after the immediate shock of having received it and learning that Father was not in a secret location in Cairo, as the Egyptian authorities had led us to believe, but in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Mother started reading, then stopped. Ziad took over. Then it was my turn to continue. And so it went, until we reached the final line. On more than one occasion, Ziad and I had to ask Mother to help us make out a word. No one knows Father’s handwriting better than she does.

  Our gaze was so determined we could hardly see. Like figures moving in a fog. And each one of us worried about losing the others. But grief is a divider; it moved each one of us into a territory of private shadows, where the torment was incommunicable, so horribly outside of language.

  I kept thinking about the word “fall.” Why did he say “fall into a bottomless abyss” when surely he meant “be thrown”? “Fall” implied he had a role in the matter. It brought to mind a man being taken to the edge of sanity, then falling. And the description of the abyss as “bottomless” unnerved me even further
. The word “abyss” is bad enough; why add the adjective? That, for reasons I could not explain then, upset me more than any other detail in the letter. It shook a place in me that remains dislodged. By choosing to define the kind of abyss he would have been cast into, Father had, unintentionally, revealed a dark truth. In this underworld from where Father was writing, there were clearly a variety of abysses. Furthermore, he had, by the time he wrote his letter, been acquainted with several of them. Some had seemed bottomless but then turned out not to be. But the threat the letter presented was one that would not offer any relief.

  One of the frustrations of prison life, which is also one of its intended consequences, is that the prisoner is made ineffective. He is unable to be of much use. The aim is to render him powerless. The frustration builds up until he takes an unreasonable risk. In October 1995, five and a half years after his abduction, Father crossed this line. He wrote a letter to Saber Majid, a wealthy Libyan dissident living in London. In it, Father explained that a fellow-prisoner’s family had fallen on hard times and that he was writing to ask for a loan of $8,000 to be given to the bearer of the letter. “Let me be clear,” Father writes. “This is a loan which I will repay you once I am free. If that day never comes, then my sons, Ziad and Hisham, will repay it.” Included in the letter is the usual warning, emphasizing the importance of keeping the letter secret. When Ziad and I offered to repay Father’s loan, the man revealed that he had never given the bearer the money. This angered us. After all, Father and several others had risked their lives to deliver the message. Saber Majid simply said, “I couldn’t be sure the man who brought me the letter was genuine.” We asked if he knew how to reach the man. He said he didn’t and couldn’t even recall his name. Furthermore, whether deliberately or out of sheer stupidity, Saber Majid published Father’s letter in an Arabic-language newspaper. The bottomless abyss opened up.