The Return

by Hisham Matar

  —

  I contacted the Foreign Office, and a couple of days later I was sitting with Declan Byrne, the FCO’s Libya desk officer, and his colleague Philippa Saunders. They told me that the minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, had recently met with the Libyan foreign minister, Abdul Ati al-Obeidi. Declan had been present at the meeting. When asked about Jaballa Matar, the Libyan foreign minister had noted the question but said nothing.

  They informed me that the letter requested by Seif had been sent that very same day by the prime minister’s office to the Libyan embassy.

  They then began to speak freely. Declan described the relationship of the British government with Libya as that of “leveraged engagement.”

  “Which, in the Libyan context,” Philippa Saunders said, “means carrots and nearly no sticks.”

  The phrase “leveraged engagement” reminded me of what Margaret Thatcher used to say in defense of her friendly relations with the South African apartheid regime: “constructive engagement.”

  “And what precisely are you leveraging?” I asked.

  They looked at each other, then Philippa said, “It isn’t what you think. It’s counterintuitive. Not trade, expertise, education, but Prime Minister David Cameron visiting Libya for the African Conference. But what Qaddafi wants most from Britain,” she said, blushing slightly, “is to be taken in a gold carriage down Pall Mall. He has several times requested to meet the queen.”

  “But in general,” Declan put in, “what Libya wants from Britain is international acceptability.”

  I asked why they thought Seif seemed willing to help.

  “To be seen as the reformer,” Declan said. I couldn’t help detect boredom in his voice.

  “Out of all the sons,” Philippa Saunders said, “he is the one that has very little inside Libya. His main credentials are with the West. He is always trying to overcome the gap by proving himself to be the better of the lot, the reformer and progressive. This is a good chance for him, especially in that it relates to Abu Salim and therefore will be seen as a step forward from that dark chapter.”

  “Do you believe my father met his end in that massacre?” I asked.

  “We don’t have any information on that,” Philippa said. “Frankly, I don’t even know if Seif or anyone else in Libya knows.”

  —

  As soon as I left the Foreign Office, I called Seif.

  “The letter you requested reached the Libyan embassy in London today,” I said.

  “OK, excellent, excellent,” he said.

  That was in August 2010. I had no contact with him or his aides until the 27th of January of the following year. Only a few days earlier, Tunisia had altered the political landscape, as well as the landscape of the imagination, changing what we could expect of the future and of ourselves. This was happening 700 kilometres west of Tripoli. Thousands of Tunisians gathered in the Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the main thoroughfare in the Tunisian capital, pulsing with songs and demands for democracy. They succeeded in peacefully ousting a 23-year dictatorship. Egyptian activists were also mobilizing. Two days before Seif’s call, Cairo’s Tahrir Square was filled with demonstrators. Libya’s two neighbors had risen. Something irreversible had begun.

  “There was a copy of The New Yorker magazine on the plane,” Seif said when I answered. “I saw you have a story in it.”

  “Did you read it?” I asked.

  “It was a short flight. Listen, the file I promised is now ready and will be delivered to you by Sheik Sulabi. Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “Sheik Sulabi,” he repeated, as though that alone would tell me more. “You really don’t know him?”

  “No, never heard of him.”

  “He will contact you. I gave him everything.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, soon,” he said.

  “Tell me now?” I said.

  “Wait for Sulabi.”

  I asked him about my imprisoned relatives.

  “I’m fighting a battle, and I will keep on the fight.” He said the release order had been issued by the prosecutor but then vetoed “by someone high up. But I’m doing all I can. It will be resolved soon.”

  —

  Six days later he telephoned at midnight.

  “Have you heard the news?” he said.

  “No, what?”

  “The release of your relatives—it’s done.”

  “Are they home?”

  “Either tonight or tomorrow. But it’s done.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “And your house too. I have started on it. I spoke to the people who took it and told them off. It will be resolved soon. I’ve done all this for nothing. It’s my moral duty. I only ask that you pray for me, wish me well.”

  “It’s a testament to your character,” I said. Then I asked him what he made of what was taking place in Egypt.

  “It’s good,” he said. “About time. People no longer can do without their freedom.”

  —

  Eighteen days later, on the 20th of February, Seif appeared on television from Tripoli. Behind him was a map of the world, so large that his bald head barely managed to fill South Africa. He sat slouched in his chair. The tiny island known as the French Southern and Antarctic Lands was a sizeable fleck beside his left shoulder. The South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands pointed at his right elbow. He was lost in the Southern Ocean. Below him a banner read: THE SPEECH OF THE ENINEER: SEIF EL-ISLAM MUAMMAR QADDAFI. The misspelling remained so until several minutes later, when it reappeared corrected: ENGINEER.

  He blamed the uprising on Libyans abroad.

  “There are times that demand me to be completely honest. We know that several opposition elements live abroad. What can you say? There are Libyans who oppose us. They have friends and associates and aides and people aligned to them inside the country. They wanted to mimic what happened in Egypt.”

  Every so often, he would make a slight movement with his hips, as if his trousers were too tight, then he would pull at his jacket lapels. The long pauses between his repeated statements were so extended it began to seem as if he were hearing voices: that of his father, with whom he had met just before the speech, and perhaps the voices of those who had once believed in him. In different ways, he repeated the same claim: Libyans abroad were conspiring against the country. Everything he said was repeated countless times. The contents of his speech, which lasted thirty-eight minutes, could have been communicated in three minutes. It seemed an appropriate articulation of his father’s reign.

  The most interesting part of the speech was when he began to offer his predictions. If people did not do as he said, he threatened with unnerving accuracy, a nightmare would follow: civil war, destruction and mass emigration. The carnage he promised proved correct but not for the reasons that might seem obvious. He knew, perhaps more than most, that the system his father built over forty-two years was based on the flimsy premise of “There is no other option.” But the people had spoken. They ripped open that false barrier. Those who would later lament Seif and his father’s regime are like a man who looks at the ashes and says, “I much prefer the fire.” The calamity that followed the fall of Qaddafi is more true to the nature of his dictatorship than the ideals of the revolution. All the slogans that were hammered into our ears, which, as children, we were forced to repeat at school, had formed our education. “A house belongs to whoever lives in it,” which legalized the theft of private property, had indoctrinated in many of us a disregard of the law. “The masses rule. Representative politics is not democracy. True democracy is by mass rule and the masses must be armed.” These were the slogans that bombarded us from 1969 till 2011. When in 2009 Larry King asked Seif el-Islam’s father, “What is your proudest achievement?” Qaddafi responded, “The emergence of the people’s authority.”

  Watching Seif’s speech was like witnessing someone tearing off a mask. He neither apologized nor offered condolences
to the families of the demonstrators recently killed by the authorities.

  “Instead of crying over eighty-four deaths,” he said with contempt, wagging his finger at the camera, “you will be crying over hundreds of thousands of deaths. There will be rivers of blood.” He spoke of Libya as if it were his family’s private property. “This country belongs to us.”

  After the speech, he joined his father’s savage campaign to crush the dissent. A few days later, Seif’s aide al-Hawni called from Rome.

  “Did you watch the speech?” he asked.

  “Yes. Did you write it?”

  “Of course not. I am so disappointed.”

  “What became of Mohammed Ismail?” I asked.

  “The dog. He was at the head of those who attacked the protestors in Benghazi.” Then he said, “I have written an article about Seif. May I send it to you?”

  I was too curious to say no. He called later that afternoon, wanting to know what I thought of it.

  “Notwithstanding the convenient timing, it is good that you have finally declared your position. But, to be honest, the article is sentimental and indulges too much in your personal disappointment. You take no responsibility.”

  “He was like a son to me. I believed him.”

  “But these things are structural. And you were one of those who helped him construct his theater. He represents a dictatorship, and you have always known that. What is needed now is not this sort of lament but something honest. You need to take responsibility for your misjudgment. For example, where did you think the money came from?”

  “What money?”

  “The money he was using to fly you around in private jets. The money he bought all that property with.”

  “Seif never took a penny from the Libyan people. And if he did, I never knew of it,” Mohammad al-Hawni said.

  “But, don’t you see, this is exactly the problem. You cannot expect me to believe this. You cannot lick from the honeypot, then pretend you didn’t know it was stolen. And do you really expect me to believe that you knew nothing about the Libyan Investment Authority and how Seif used it to bankroll his lifestyle?”

  “I didn’t know any of this,” he said. He said this in an ingenuous tone, at once disillusioned and disillusioning, betraying an astonishing ability for both sincerity and deception. “I have always thought Seif’s money came from his business. He had a fisheries company in Norway.”

  “A fisheries company in Norway,” I said. “Of course.” I could barely contain my rage. “It is such deception that needs to be exposed. If you care about Libya, it is this that is worse than the crimes, the murders and disappearances. This, this…barrage of endless lies. It stinks. Enough.” Struggling to keep the fire at bay, I took a deep breath. “Listen, listen,” I said, even though he was no longer speaking, “it’s your business what you do and what you write. What I want to know is one thing and one thing only. Now that history has moved on, will you finally tell me what happened to my father?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  —

  A few weeks later, when the cells at Abu Salim prison were hammered open and the blind man in solitary confinement was found with a photograph of my father, Mohammad al-Hawni telephoned again.

  “Did you hear that they found a blind man in a cell in the basement? He had a photograph of your father. Do you think, perhaps, I mean, he might be your father, no?”

  I hung up.

  20. Years

  I discovered that the man who had telephoned me back in 2008 to tell me that he had seen my father inside the Mouth of Hell in 2002 was now living in Benghazi. I contacted him and we arranged to meet. We immediately shared our amusement at the fact that, as though by magic, there we were speaking in the open, without fear of being overheard, in a café in Libya. We smoked and talked like surveyors measuring the distance between two fixed points: the time when we spoke over the telephone in 2009, and the present, March 2012, burning brightly, as it seemed then, with hope for the future. And the fact that we were now not disembodied voices over the telephone but flesh and blood sitting across a table from one another, where it was possible for him to reach across and squeeze my shoulder and for me to do the same in a warm exchange of that victorious camaraderie many of us felt during those hopeful days, seemed to be yet another confirmation of the advantages the present had over the dark past. The present was physical and real; the past, Qaddafi’s Libya, was the nightmare from which we had finally awoken.

  I wanted to hear more about his encounter with Father, yet at the same time I darkly relished the option of not talking about it. It was somewhere between those two thoughts that I offered, as though we were old friends, to show him a photograph of my father I had stored on my mobile phone.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, taking off his glasses, leaning forward. His face, hovering close to the screen, became rigid and vacant.

  “This is Jaballa Matar?” he asked.

  It was a question—I was sure it was a question—but in the silence that followed I wondered if instead it was more a statement, as in, “So, this is Jaballa Matar.” The other thought that came to mind was that Father had changed so drastically that this witness was now experiencing the horror I had always feared, the horror of not being able to recognize my father, but experiencing it in reverse, thinking to himself, My God, how the man had changed.

  “But this is not Jaballa Matar,” he finally said, leaning back in his chair.

  “But, look, this is from many years before,” I said.

  “This is not what he looked like,” the man insisted.

  I handed him the phone so that he could inspect the picture more closely. He took it in his hand.

  “This is from the 1980s,” I explained. “Some twenty years before you saw him.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, handing me back the phone. “This is not the man I saw.”

  “What do you mean?” My words came out louder than intended.

  I made him nervous.

  “There must have been a mistake,” he said. “You see…I don’t know…”

  I must not make him nervous if I am to get the facts, I told myself; to get the facts I must keep him relaxed. I waved to the waiter and asked for a cold bottle of water, two glasses and two more espressos. I handed him a cigarette. We waited in silence until the drinks arrived. The pause transformed him.

  “Anyway,” he said, a hint of impatience now in his voice, “it wasn’t me who recognized him. I had no way of recognizing your father. It was one of the other prisoners. He pointed at an old man. ‘See him there?’ he said. ‘That’s Jaballa Matar.’ That’s why when I came out I went around asking for your number. I thought I was doing something good.”

  “And I am grateful,” I said. “The risk you took.”

  Instead of parting then and there, I went on trying to change the subject, trying to engage him in small talk, which, at the best of times, I am no good at. But the desire to put him at ease was overwhelming. I was ashamed. There is shame in not knowing where your father is, shame in not being able to stop searching for him, and shame also in wanting to stop searching for him. I continued babbling on, even though every few seconds the muscles in my throat rippled, swallowing, as though a mouthful I had just eaten was now trying to make its way back up my esophagus. Finally we stood up to say goodbye.

  “I am sure you’ll find him,” he said with peculiar optimism. “Nothing remains hidden forever.”

  What nonsense, I wanted to say. What complete fucking nonsense. But instead I said, “Of course.”

  —

  I remained in the café for a few minutes after he left. Then I wandered out onto the street. It was night, and it felt good that it was night. That man had been the only one who had seen Father alive after the prison massacre of 1996. All the consequences that built on that—the Human Rights Watch report, the campaign, the negotiations with Seif el-Islam—all seemed vacuous, a cruel joke. A great wave of exhaustion passed through me. I wished
I could cry. I sensed the old dark acknowledgment that Father had been killed in the massacre. I welcomed the feeling. Not only because it was familiar. Not only because certainty was better than hope. But because I have always preferred to think of him dying with others. He would have been good with others. His instinct to comfort and support those around him would have kept him busy. If I strain hard enough, I can hear him tell them, “Boys, stand straight. With hardship comes ease. With hardship comes ease.” Those other options of him dying alone—those terrify me.

  I didn’t want to walk by the water. I didn’t want to stroll. I wanted the busy downtown. I wanted noise and movement. I found myself by the courthouse, where the lawyers and judges had gathered on the 15th of February 2011. Inside, it had become a shrine to the fallen. The corridors, those same halls where Marwan, Nafa and I used to play as children, waiting for their father, Sidi Ahmed, the High Court judge of Benghazi, to be done for the day, were lined with Photoshopped posters of young men who had died in the revolution. Most showed several images taken from different periods of the deceased’s life. They showed him as a toddler, a schoolboy in uniform, at university, at war and dead. They were montaged in a sequence, with the man’s name printed across, prefixed by the word MARTYR. This was a new development. The custom in Libya up to then was not to display photographs of the dead until one year had passed after the burial. It was thought the photographs would either interfere with the memory of the bereaved or else excite it too painfully. But now images of these recently deceased young fighters were everywhere. Some families went as far as hiring advertisement hoardings. It was as if the violence had awakened a forgotten ancient tradition. Like pictures of saints, the images of these young men had replaced those of the dictator. Where the various stern and smiling faces of Qaddafi had been, we now had the martyrs.

  In a large room down one of the long corridors there was a peculiar atmosphere, the sort of silence that is possible only in the presence of others. But the room was empty. Its four walls were clad not in graphically designed posters but in passport-type photographs taken years before, each blown up to the size of a standard letter. Judging from the hairstyles, the original photographs were from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. A scaled architectural model of Abu Salim prison occupied a table in the center. The room was a memorial to the 1,270 victims of the massacre, the incident that all those years ago had started a chain of events that ultimately led to the overthrow of Qaddafi. I immediately wanted to leave but felt what I had felt on first entering the room, the sensation of having been gripped by something. Even though I was alone, I pretended to be interested or to have the interest of an impartial observer. I tried to look at the faces of the men, but my eyes could not focus. Perhaps, I thought, I will find my father. Perhaps someone knows more than I know and placed his picture here. Perhaps I will find him and be able to inquire and get a piece of paper, a document, stating that Jaballa Matar was one of the 1,270 who perished on the 29th of June 1996, when I was twenty-five, the morning I was for some unremembered reason unable to get out of bed, full of self-pity and regret that, the evening before, I had confided in a friend my money troubles, then walked the fifteen minutes or so that separated my flat from the National Gallery, because I had decided, also for an unknown reason, to leave The Toilet of Venus, the goddess of love, by Velázquez, a painting that had awakened in me such sexual desire, and wander over to Manet’s unfinished painting, The Execution of Maximilian, at about the same hour as the executioners and prison guards in Tripoli were digging the mass grave, rolling the bodies that belonged to these young faces on the walls, one over the next, until the earth was full. Tears, the tears I almost never cry and which had been building up for so long that their place was no longer in the eyes so much as in the belly, began threatening to come up. I couldn’t breathe. The faces stared at me. I scanned the rows, searching for Father. It was then that I noticed a woman sitting at a desk in the corner. She had been there the whole time. She was looking at me. I knew that expression. I had seen it before on campaigners. Sympathetic, consoling, dogged. I saw it on volunteers in London, Paris, The Hague, Stockholm, who wrote even more letters than I did, sending one every week to the Libyan government and doing so for ten, fifteen, twenty years, enquiring about my father’s whereabouts. They signed petitions and pressured their local representatives. I recognized in this woman now the same unwanted sympathy, the same exercised will. And I recognized in myself the same solidarity, sense of brotherhood and unease I have felt towards such individuals. I still get postcards. The Dutch chapter of Amnesty International had informed their members of my address. Although the address is slightly incorrect, the postman knows by now where to deliver them. They all contain the exact same message, “Hisham, we support your campaign for truth and justice for your father. We hope you will succeed,” handwritten by children and adults on the back of postcards showing scenic views, a photograph of daffodils printed on a home printer, a child’s drawing of hearts with glitter sprinkled on, which sticks to your fingers and comes off only after a couple of washes, a watercolor of the Alps, an earnest white page with the careful, shaky handwriting of the elderly. Poor children, poor people, having to spend afternoons writing such postcards. I never know what to do with them. I put them in a drawer and then throw them away and feel guilty. The woman in the room inspired the same agitated feeling in me.