The Return

by Hisham Matar

  “You know somebody?” she asked in that slightly pitying tone.

  “My father,” I said. “But he’s not here.”

  “These,” she said, looking at the photographs, “are only some of the victims. The aim is to have a complete record.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “One day.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What is your father’s name?” she said.

  “Jaballa Matar,” I said.

  “Jaballa Matar,” she said, looking at the neatly arranged pieces of paper on the desk in front of her. “Sounds familiar. Jaballa…Matar…” She traced her finger down the list.

  It’s possible, I told myself; it’s possible.

  “He doesn’t appear to be on the record,” she said. “These are the confirmed victims, you see. There are many others of course who are not yet confirmed. I know because my nephew died in the massacre.”

  “I am sorry,” I said. I had obviously misread her completely. “I am truly sorry.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  The tears started pushing up again. Silence, deep breaths—those help. But nothing is more effective than sheer suspicion of the desire to cry. Suspicion almost always keeps me in the clear.

  “Have you found any news?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure he died in the massacre?”

  “No.”

  “I hope you find out one day.”

  No one in Libya had ever told me this. No one told me they hoped I would find out, only that I will find out. And something about this made me drop my guard. The tears were here. I took a deep breath but it was too late. I faced away, pretending to be looking at the photographs. I clasped my hands behind my waist. I paced, looking at the gallery of faces as though I were one of those people you see in art exhibitions, moving sideways from one picture to the next with hardly a pause, covering up to fifty paintings in an hour, as if the point were to have looked rather than to look. I felt my heart contract and grow small. Pain shrinks the heart. This, I believe, is part of the intention. You make a man disappear to silence him but also to narrow the minds of those left behind, to pervert their soul and limit their imagination. When Qaddafi took my father, he placed me in a space not much bigger than the cell Father was in. I paced back and forth, anger in one direction, hatred in the other, until I could feel my insides grow small and hard. And, because I was young, and hatred and anger are a young man’s emotions, I tricked myself into thinking the transformation was good, that it was akin to progress, a sign of vigor and strength. That was how I spent most of my twenties, until, in the autumn of 2002, twelve years on from when I lost my father, I found myself standing at the edge of the Pont d’Arcole in Paris, staring into the green rushing waters below. The novel I was writing was not going well. I felt overwhelmed by the desire to be swept away. I wanted to descend into the depths and be lost forever, taken. Until I heard the bell toll: Work and survive. The following day, work on the novel went slightly better. In the days that followed, I threw myself into it completely, and before I knew it I was back inside the book, my thinking, as well as my hours, organized by it.

  —

  The first signs that something horrible had occurred inside the walls of Abu Salim did not surface until several years after the massacre. Small scraps of information began to emerge, each incomplete, as if careful not to reveal the whole picture at once. I heard the stories and registered them perhaps the way we all, from within our detailed lives, perceive facts—that is, we do not perceive them at all until they have been repeated countless times and, even then, understand them only partially. So much information is lost that every small loss provokes inexplicable grief. Power must know this. Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies. Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know. Power must believe, given how things proceed, that the world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice or accountability or truth. Power must see such attempts as pathetic, and yet the bereaved, the witness, the investigator and the chronicler cannot but try to make reason of the diabolical mess. Each motivated by his or her own need or idea or obsession, they rush this way and that, like ants after a picnic, attending to the crumbs, and time rolls on, infinitely duplicating the distances, furthering us from the original event, making it less possible with every passing day to account for exactly what happened or to be certain, indeed, that anything happened at all. Yet also, with every folding year, like the line of a step mimicking the one before it, it becomes increasingly difficult to escape, to give up altogether on what has been invested so far, least of all the person swallowed up by the injustice. Eventually, the original loss, the point of departure, the point from which life changed irrevocably, comes to resemble a living presence, having its own force and temperament. Like desire, its vitality is in what it withholds, until attachment and resentment are so closely intertwined that it is difficult at times to distinguish one from the other.

  It was in 2001 that we began to hear stories of plain-clothed officials arriving unannounced at homes all across the country. They would ask for the household’s Family Book—a legal document listing all the members of a nuclear family, their dates of birth and, if deceased, the date and cause of death. A couple of days later the book would be returned. It seemed to be a routine check, and, when asked, the officials said, “Yes, everything is in perfect order.” The one thing all the families visited had in common was that they had a father, a husband, or a son in Abu Salim.

  Most families did not notice the alteration until several days later. I heard of one family who discovered the change only when, a couple of months later, having taken the book out to register a new-born, they saw that the imprisoned grandfather had been dead for several years. One of the stories told is of a woman who looked through her Family Book when it was first returned but noticed nothing different. She searched it carefully and was relieved that all was as it should be. It wasn’t until a week or so later that, for reasons she could not account for, she woke up in the middle of the night and went to the drawer where the official document was kept. She could see now what her eyes had not been able to see the first time around. A line written in strong blue ink against her son’s name read: “Died 1996 of natural causes.” She was heard screaming. Her family tried to restrain her, but she managed to run out on to the street. Out of all the words she must have screamed that day, the only one that survived the various retellings of the story was “Years.” She screamed it over and over. She might have been referring to the years she would have to endure without her son, or those in the past, specifically from the year 1996, in which she continued to make the long journey from where she lived in Benghazi to Tripoli, hoping the prison guards would allow her to see her son. In the years before 1996, she had been allowed visits and even permitted to bring her son clothes, vitamins, food, toothpaste, aftershave. But since June 1996 her twelve-hour trips had been in vain. The guards seemed genuinely sorry. Visits had been indefinitely suspended, they told her, and promised to deliver her gifts, and they never neglected to tell her to try again next month. Every month for five years she cooked meals and purchased gifts for a dead son. She wrote him letters in which she pondered what to say and what to leave out. The guards took it all for themselves, throwing away the letters and eating the food, and sold the other items to the inmates, or took them for themselves, or gifted them to friends or to their own children. Perhaps an aftershave or new pajamas were given to a son on the occasion of his birthday. “Years.” That was probably what she meant.

  Soon after this, from 2001 onwards, mothers and wives began to camp outside Abu Salim prison, holding framed photographs of their sons and husbands. Their grief was never acknowledged. They kept growing in number, until the moment when a young human-rights lawyer decided to defy the wishes of the dictatorship and take up the case of the families. When in 2011 he was deta
ined, they all marched to the Benghazi Courthouse to demonstrate against his arrest.

  —

  I spent the rest of the evening walking with Diana through the city. I like watching her photograph. The stillness of concentrated effort. But I have never liked the attention it attracts. Although people here in Benghazi were relaxed. This too would soon change. Journalists, Libyan and foreign, were going to be prime targets for kidnapping and assassination; as a consequence, events in the country would go largely unreported and the only way anyone could hope to learn of what was going on would be through social-media websites.

  Diana went into a square off the Omar al-Mukhtar Street. At the center there was a large tiled rectangular area with benches and a few palm trees. It was surrounded on all four sides by low-rise blocks of flats. Something about the square appealed to her. She is not one to photograph a pretty sunset. She is after something else. She set up her tripod in the middle of the square and pointed the large box camera towards one corner. She often photographs at night and never uses flash or spotlights. She measured the lux level in order to determine how long the shutter would need to remain open. She clicked, keeping her finger on the button for two whole minutes. To be sure, she took two more shots: one at one minute and a half and another at three minutes. During this time I sat on one of the benches. The soft sounds of the lives of families—cutlery, television, chatter—floated out of the windows of the surrounding flats. Around one of the benches, a group of young men gathered. They were smoking. I could smell the sweet stink of hashish. Suddenly two young boys—they couldn’t have been more than ten—ran into the square and stood facing one another. Other boys their age circled around them. They were in all the Libyan skin colors: black, brown and white. A couple of the men smoking sauntered over and separated the boys before a fight could begin. There was something oddly predictable about it all, as though it were part of a pre-planned performance. The young boys scattered off in different directions.

  Once Diana was done, I helped her pack up and we left the square. We did not notice that we were being followed. We were already walking up Omar al-Mukhtar Street when a young boy called after us.

  “Ustath, ustath.” He looked shy. “Are you journalists?” he asked. He was one of the boys who had nearly come to blows. He had an unforgettable face, tender and bright. Standing beside him was another boy, who looked as if he was there to offer support.

  “No,” I said. “Not journalists. My wife is an artist and I’m a writer.”

  “Are you part of those who came earlier asking about the families of the disappeared?”

  “No, why? Do you know one of the disappeared?”

  “My brother.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-five. He was arrested at a demonstration on the 25th of March 2011.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope you find him soon.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s hard to know what to do.”

  He looked away. I thought I must say something positive.

  “But have faith, and make sure you attend to your studies.”

  He nodded again.

  “My father too disappeared,” I said.

  “May God bring him back safely,” he said. Then, after a pause, he asked, “When did it happen?”

  “Many years ago. On the 12th of March 1990.”

  He looked at me and then looked away again.

  I translated to Diana, then told the boy what she said. “My wife says she hopes you find your brother very soon.”

  “Where’s she from?” his friend beside him, who was even smaller, asked.

  The other boy looked at him as if to say, “Don’t be rude.”

  “America,” I said.

  “America?” the friend said.

  I asked him if he too knew someone who had disappeared.

  “No,” he said, thrusting his little fists out against the fabric of his T-shirt.

  “I’m glad,” I said. Then, when neither of them spoke, I said, “OK, then, goodbye.”

  “Where are you staying?” the boy said.

  I gave him the name of the hotel.

  He thought a little, then asked, “The one on the water?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “OK. Good night,” he said.

  We walked away. When I looked back, I found them still standing in the same spot. I waved but they didn’t wave back. Several times on the way to the hotel, Diana and I thought of returning and finding some excuse to spend more time with them. The feeling persisted till the following day. We went back to the square and spent about an hour there, but the boys never turned up.

  21. The Bones

  In these days spent in Benghazi, I often detected a strange attachment to Ajdabiya. I never had it as a child. It has been growing through the years, snatching my longing away from Tripoli, where we lived and I spent my childhood, away from Benghazi, where my brother and I spent summers with cousins, and taking it to Ajdabiya, that austere and earnest town I was never fond of as a boy. If my father had been alive, he would have been seventy-three. When I used to imagine being reunited with him, I had always pictured it happening not in our home in Cairo, the place from which he was taken, not in London, where I lived and wondered at times, given Egypt’s betrayal, if he might choose to live after his release, but in my grandfather’s house in Ajdabiya. It was as though I were returning him, in my imagination, to his father’s house. I imagined it taking place not in secret, not in the night hours, as when he made those perilous visits, sneaking across the Egyptian–Libyan border in order to visit Grandfather Hamed, but in a day full of light.

  —

  I returned to Ajdabiya. This time I went alone.

  Uncle Hmad Khanfore had been away on my first visit. I had campaigned for his release for years, but we had never met before. He loved the theater, Mother had told me, and when in the old days he visited my parents in Cairo, she took him to at least three plays a week. There is a photograph of him with Mother and Cousin Ali, all sitting in a row on one of the decorated horse-drawn carriages by the Nile. Even the driver is smiling towards the camera, holding his long whip upright beside him. A few months after this photograph was taken, Uncle Hmad and Ali were arrested. I looked at the photograph several times during their twenty-one years of incarceration: Uncle Hmad, who had plans of becoming a playwright, and Cousin Ali, who had just returned from studying economics at the University of Düsseldorf and had about him, in the way he dressed and sat upright, a curious Germanic formality. The next photograph I saw of them was taken on the day of their release and emailed to me the following day. It shows uncles Mahmoud and Hmad and cousins Ali and Saleh standing in front of the prison gate. They are wearing clean, ironed clothes. Each man is two decades older. Not only the hair but the skin too seems to have faded in color. They are looking towards the camera, trying to smile, trying to seem comfortable. What did you expect, I told myself. Joy? This is no occasion for joy. When you are released from such a long incarceration, the full scale of the injustice takes shape. Only then can you realize how much time has passed, how much the world has changed, and how much has been lost. But even then I somehow knew it wasn’t only that. Something was off.