The Return

by Hisham Matar

  I had met cousin Ali in Cairo just before I flew to Benghazi. He was on a brief visit. I gave him directions over the phone and stood at the corner of the street, waiting. I felt such excitement at the prospect of finally meeting him. When he drove in, I could see that just like me he could not stop from smiling. He parked and we embraced. This is the body that has been locked away for two decades. This is the body that belongs to the name I repeated in my letters to various governments and NGOs. We sat side by side on the sofa and chatted until lunch was served. He said many things about life in prison, but what stayed with me most was his description of the loudspeakers. Father had mentioned them in one of his prison letters. But it was far worse than I had imagined. The speakers were not in the corridors but inside each cell, fixed to the high ceiling, where they could not be reached or torn off. They played speeches by Qaddafi, interrupted only by propaganda songs and slogans expounding the virtues of the regime. The broadcast was on every day from 6 a.m. to midnight, and at full volume.

  “So loud,” Ali said, “that it was hard sometimes to make out the words. You could feel your muscles vibrate. I used to lie down and watch the small empty plastic bottle tremble on the concrete floor.” Then, perhaps to console me, he added, “But you got used to it eventually.” Suddenly he said, “I want to thank you.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “For everything you did.”

  The tone in which he said this was complicated. It was sincere and reticent, both appreciative and regretful. It corresponded with that photograph taken on the day of their release.

  Later that afternoon, Ali disclosed a new piece of information. After Seif’s aides had informed him and the others of their release, that they were finally going home, after telling them that “tonight you’ll sleep in your beds,” after providing them with clean clothes, razors and shaving cream, after giving them a chance to say farewell to the other prisoners, after walking them across the courtyard and into an office furnished with large sofas and several armchairs, after they served them tea and coffee and handed them cigarettes, all done with an air of jovial courtesy and ease, they were told that their release was contingent on one final detail: “Signing a formal apology for having ever opposed the Great Leader.” Seif had already prepared it. Someone had typed it up and it was there, with a dotted line beside each man’s name. All must sign or none could be released.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” Ali told me. “But Mahmoud had reached the end of his tether. He was ill and frail. I was worried about him.”

  To have to sign an apology after twenty-one years of cruel and unjust imprisonment can break a man. Had I done nothing, they would have walked out anyway when the revolutionaries took over Abu Salim and hammered open the doors. But I acted on the facts I had then. Seif never mentioned an apology, and, even if he had, it would have been inappropriate for me to deny my uncles and cousins the choice. Nonetheless, this new piece of knowledge corrupted everything, and from then on, whenever anyone thanked or congratulated me on the role I had played in the release of my uncles and cousins, I quickly changed the subject.

  —

  Uncle Hmad seemed oddly young and old at once, as if his younger self, with its love for the theater and a thousand and one plans for the future, had been restrained and conserved by captivity. This is not unusual, I suppose; our younger selves are with us always. But in a life of activity, one free from dramatic rupture, where the progress of things is unbroken by catastrophe, where the skin of our thoughts is regularly touched by new impressions, discoveries and influences, our maturation comes to follow a gradient that creates the illusion of a seamless line. With Uncle Hmad, the young man he was at the point of his arrest and the man he had become seemed to exist in parallel, destined never to meet and yet resonating against one another like two discordant musical notes.

  His English was good and he was keen to speak to me in it. Part of his consciousness was constantly occupied with those around him. This exceptional thoughtfulness, I imagined, must have left him exhausted at the end of each social engagement. I am nowhere near as thoughtful, yet I find it impossible to be “myself” in the company of others. I am constantly thinking about those around me. If I like them, my opinions sway in their direction, and if for whatever reason they irritate me, I am willfully obstinate. Either way, I am left weary and unclear, regretting ever having relinquished my solitude, and, because I desire the company of others and always have, the cycle is endless. Perhaps, I thought, Uncle Hmad suffered from the same affliction. This was one of the reasons I felt an immediate sympathy towards him. I wanted to listen to him, and he, in turn, was eager to share his recollections. Perhaps we both suspected then that our time together was going to be limited, that the world was going to change and the routine of frequent trips to Libya, or possibly even living there for part of the year, was no longer going to remain an option.

  “Technically speaking,” Uncle Hmad said, talking in English, “Uncle Jaballa was my brother-in-law, but I regarded him as a father, and not only because of the age difference. He was a role model,” he added and looked at me with those eyes I had seen before on men who love my father. From then on, I dropped the “Uncle” and referred to him simply as Hmad.

  —

  These encounters with my relatives who had spent decades in prison, whose names have been on my tongue and between my fingers repeatedly over the many years I campaigned and wrote letters about them to various governments and human-rights organizations, exposed the riptides between us. They wanted to tell me about what life was like during the two decades in prison, and I was keen to let them know how much I thought of them. It was an exchange of promises and devotion, one colored, on their part, by the excitement of those who have survived an accident, and, on mine, by the guilt of having lived a free life—guilt but also a stubborn shamelessness that, yes, I had lived a free life. In other words, our company provoked an assault of judgments inflicted by the self and therefore always possibly imagined. They wanted me to know that their loyalty to Father had not faltered, and I wanted them to know that I had not neglected them but done all I could. They wanted me to know how they felt about my father, and in doing so, I felt, they were acknowledging what they refused to accept; that he was dead. They had more things to tell me than I had to tell them. They wanted to bring me into the darkness, to expose the suffering and, in doing so, discretely and indirectly emphasize the bitter and momentous achievement of having survived it. Is there an achievement greater than surviving suffering? Of coming through mostly intact? And I sensed enjoyment in their telling, in having the savage horror of their time in prison—a period covering between one third to one half of each man’s life so far—sit side by side with the gentleness of a liberal afternoon with tea and cigarettes.

  “I will die for his right to speak his mind,” I heard Uncle Mahmoud say. Then he cut someone off to call out to me, “Isn’t that right, Ibn Jaballa? Do you know that line? Voltaire, isn’t it?” and he repeated it with relish.

  On my previous visit, in a moment when we were alone, Uncle Mahmoud had told me how he had had everything done to him. “They beat me, deprived me of food and sleep, tied me down, spilled a bucketful of cockroaches on my chest. There is nothing they didn’t do. Nothing can happen to me now that can be worse than that time. And always, I managed it. I kept a place in my mind, where I was still able to love and forgive everyone,” he said, his eyes soft and lips smiling. “They never succeeded to take that from me.”

  —

  Hmad and I sat on the floor in one corner of Uncle Mahmoud’s living room. We talked in soft voices so as not to disturb the other half of the room, now engaged in a conversation focusing on the current situation: the lack of security and the proliferation of arms.

  “Who on earth will collect all these weapons?” one asked.

  “There are guns in every house across the country,” another said.

  Hmad began talking of the massacre. I assumed he wanted to start t
here because it was this event that sparked the blaze. Like the beginnings of those fires that eat up entire forests, the 2011 revolution too had had a specific beginning, one to marvel at, we then felt. But I suspected Hmad started there also because it was after the Abu Salim massacre that my father was never seen again. Did Hmad believe Father died in the massacre? Exactly at the moment I thought I dared not ask, I heard myself say, “Was Father killed there?”

  “Only God knows,” Hmad said.

  “I know,” I said, checking that my voice was soft, as if we were talking about the waters this time of the year. “But what do you think?”

  “Only God knows,” he said again. “In the early days we could hear and talk to him. He was in a cell not too far away, but then they moved him and we were no longer in contact, except by the occasional letter.”

  I needed to change the subject. I asked him about his children, if it was true that now he lived in Grandfather Hamed’s old house.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling. “But it’s not as you remember it. So much has changed. You must visit.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Anyway, my dear man, let me bring it to you from the beginning. Months before the massacre,” Hmad said, resuming his account, “there was a protest in the prison. The causes were cumulative. Conditions had always been dismal, but mostly stable and predictable, but then, in November 1995, thirteen prisoners escaped. Our treatment deteriorated drastically.

  “The most terrible man—I will never forget him—was El Magroos. When he sat on a chair, it was as though he were sitting on a tin of baby milk powder. A stick in his hand looked as small as a toothpick. The man was a giant. And all muscle. When he was done interrogating you, he would begin to taunt you. This was the custom. Not only to ridicule and provoke but also to kill time. The thing was, these guards and interrogators were terribly bored, always looking for something to amuse them.

  “I remember once, after they questioned me for hours, El Magroos asked, ‘Do you want to go back to your cell?’

  “Now, this will be hard for you to believe,” Hmad said, “but when I was asked this question, it landed on my ear as sweetly as though I were being asked if I wanted to go home. Imagine?” Hmad said, tapping my leg. “The interrogations were so awful that when they finally took you back to the cell, you were as happy returning to that miserable place as you would be going home to your wife and children. I was finished, exhausted and bleeding from several places.

  “ ‘OK, then,’ El Magroos said. ‘You can go back to your cell, but only after I hear you say that Jaballa Matar is a stray dog.’

  “ ‘But what good would that do?’ I said.

  “ ‘I want to hear you say it,’ he said.

  “I told him, ‘Listen, I would rather speak words that would cut off my head than those that would lower it.’

  “The other interrogator was moved by this and told him, ‘Let him go.’ El Magroos refused.

  “ ‘I am no hero,’ I told him, ‘but I tell you, you can beat me with that stick for as long as you like; I won’t say it. And what good would it do you anyway if I were to say it? Nothing. Whereas for me, it would break me.’

  “Thankfully the other man intervened again. I was lucky, because if they had beaten me I would have said it—I would have said anything.

  “When Mahmoud and the others saw me,” Hmad said, laughing, “they were baffled. I was black and blue but happy. I could sleep.”

  With every vapor in my body I longed to smoke. I offered Hmad a cigarette and we both lit up.

  “Anyway, let me return to the events that preceded the massacre,” he said, exhaling. “Like I told you, the dismal treatment worsened after those men escaped. The few luxuries we had were taken away: soap, pillows, mattresses—till all that remained was the concrete floor. We became as thin as ghosts.

  “A few months into this hell, a new group was put in the cell opposite ours. In comparison, our conditions were luxurious. They had staged an armed confrontation in Benghazi, trying to take over a garrison. One of them was a man called Khaled al-Baksheesh. They beat him till they broke his thigh, then left him without treatment or painkillers. We used to hear him moan. His leg began to rot. One day his cellmates kept banging on the door till the guards came. They took Khaled al-Baksheesh to the courtyard beside our wing. We were relieved, thinking they would take him to hospital. I saw his withered leg. I couldn’t believe it. It stretched horribly behind him like a rope. They placed him in the middle of the courtyard and aimed water hoses at him. They kicked him all the way back to his cell. That night we heard nothing. In the morning his cellmates told us he was dead.

  “It was this group in the cell opposite—Cell Number 9—that set off the disobedience. I remember the day well. It was a Friday, Friday, the 28th of June 1996. As soon as the afternoon prayer was over, I heard shouting, a scuffle and gunshots. What had happened was that when the guards opened Cell Number 9 to push in the food, the men jumped the guards. They took their guns and keys and let out all the prisoners. We gathered in the corridor, not really sure what to do next. Guards on the floor above began firing. Some prisoners were killed and others wounded. We hid back in our rooms. We would occasionally risk it and run from one cell to the next. The standoff remained for hours.

  “Something strange happened. You are not going to believe it, but I swear to you on my children’s life. One of the prisoners killed, his body remained exactly the same, only a little paler in the cheeks, but otherwise unchanged. It smelt of musk. We didn’t have musk or such things in the prison. And the face of the prison guard who had been dead the same number of hours was now black and his body bloated like a balloon and stinking horribly. We all marveled at this.

  “By sunset, one of the guards called out, promising water—they had turned off the mains to force us to surrender. He asked us to nominate one man from each wing to negotiate with them. Our representatives went off and were gone a long time. When they returned, they were accompanied by three of the most senior figures in the regime: Abdullah Senussi, who was the intelligence chief and brother-in-law to Qaddafi; Abdullah Mansour, also in intelligence; and Khairi Khaled, the head of prisons and brother of Qaddafi’s first wife. Basically, some of the most important people, none more so than Abdullah Senussi, who was very cordial.

  “ ‘What’s the problem, my brothers?’ he asked. ‘Why are you so upset?’

  “We told him our treatment was unbearable and that we preferred to die than live like this. ‘Human rights—what human rights?’ we told him. ‘We don’t even have animal rights. At least animals are fed and watered and not beaten. We get none of these privileges and our ill are left to die.’

  “ ‘These are all your demands?’ Abdullah Senussi asked. ‘In that case, these are very reasonable demands,’ he said. ‘I don’t even need to consult anyone. I will implement your requirements right away. Consider all of your grievances to be behind you now.’

  “Throughout these exchanges, Senussi was in regular contact with Qaddafi. His phone would ring and he would stand as straight as a reed and start whispering. His phone rang again now, and once more we watched him take a couple of steps away before answering, ‘Yes, Your Excellency. The situation is completely under control, Your Excellency. Absolutely, we will do exactly that. Rest assured.’ He hung up and asked us all to go back to our cells. ‘When you wake up,’ he told us, ‘you will find everything has changed.’

  “We asked for senior figures from the legal community as well as foreign ambassadors to witness the agreement.

  “ ‘We are the government and you are the prisoners,’ Senussi said. ‘If we want, we can tonight send fighter jets to bomb the entire prison with you and the guards in it. We neither fear you nor feel for you. But we decided, out of humility and kindness, to reason with you,’ he said. A few minutes later he called out, ‘Listen, to reassure you of our good intentions, give us 120 men, those most in need of medical care, and I will personally, with my own hand, deli
ver them to the Salah el-Din Hospital.’

  “This final promise,” Hmad told me, “was a huge temptation. Arguments ensued amongst us.

  “ ‘In the meantime, as you are trying to make up your minds,’ Senussi shouted across the corridor, ‘gather up the ill and wounded. We will even take the dead and bury them. Tomorrow I promise you a new set of guards, respectable food and respectable treatment. You will think you woke up in a five-star hotel,’ he said.

  “The prisoners argued. There was real tension now. Several called out, ‘Come on, let’s assume the best. Select 120. Thirty men from each wing.’

  “From our wing the thirty men included my brother Ahmed, your cousins Ali and Saleh, a couple of others from Uncle Jaballa’s group, your uncle Mahmoud and me. None of us slept that night.

  “At dawn, before daybreak, when the sky was still completely black, we were marched into the big open yard. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Rows and rows of soldiers, all dressed for battle, several of them poised in firing positions. They numbered so many that it seemed the entire Libyan Army was gathered there. How did we not hear them arrive, I wondered. The prison guards carried the dead prisoners in wheelbarrows and dumped them in the large rubbish bins. The rest of us were handcuffed with what we called Israeli cuffs. They were manufactured there. The latest design. A thin plastic wire that drew tighter with the slightest resistance. You felt the pain not so much around the wrists but inside the head.