by Hisham Matar
“We were all put on to large buses. I sat by the window. I saw a man; I didn’t know who he was, but from the way he was dressed and the way several people followed him around, I knew he was in charge. He entered the bus I was on and called out, ‘Who amongst you are from the Ajdabiya Group?’
“Ali was on the same bus; so was another man, seated right in front of me. I whispered to him that we should announce ourselves.
“No,” he said.
“The official repeated, ‘The Ajdabiya Group, the opposition, from the 1990 case: make yourselves known.’
“I put my hand up.
“ ‘Who else is with you?’ the man asked.
“I pointed to Ali. I didn’t mention the other man. I didn’t want to be responsible.
“Ali and I came down from the bus and saw Saleh, my brother Ahmed, Mahmoud and a couple of others from our group gathered there too. We were lined up and ordered to go down on our knees. The Israeli cuffs felt as though they were about to slice my hands off. We remained like this till morning broke. Then I heard from behind us the same senior official order one of his subordinates to place our names in our pockets. We were asked to state our names. They wrote each one down, folded the piece of paper and shoved it into our pockets. That’s it, I thought, my hour has come. But then there was confusion. They brought everyone down from the buses and packed them all into a sort of barn structure that we called the workshop. They took our small group back inside and locked us up in a new cell. A few seconds later we heard a loud explosion, then dense and unceasing gunfire—all sorts of weapons: pistols, machine-guns—and the sound of men screaming, all coming from the workshop. It turned out—we learned this much later from one of the guards who took part in the shooting—that Abdullah Senussi had initiated the massacre by throwing a hand grenade into the workshop. That was the explosion.
“But that was just the beginning. A dark atmosphere and a great energy was cutting through the prison now. Guards were rushing from one cell to the next with lists of names. Hundreds of prisoners were rounded up. They were handcuffed and taken into the courtyards. These spaces were roofless and rectangular, about ten metres by forty-five metres, the surrounding structure being about eight metres high. Six such courtyards were filled. Soldiers and prison guards took their places on the surrounding roof. The shooting began.”
“How did you know this?” I asked. “Did you see it?”
“No, but it was witnessed by those in the cells that overlooked the courtyards. And, later, some of the guards who were there told us what happened. But I heard it all. The shooting lasted for two hours.”
“I met a man once,” I told Hmad, “who had described it as a drill inside the head.”
“It was,” he said. “But worst of all was the screaming. You heard it clearly when the machine-gun fire stopped. Then came the sporadic pistol shots, the coup de grâce, we assumed. The dead were left there for four days. Until the smell caused many of us to vomit.”
My mind would not stop. It flashed images of my father in this diabolical nightmare. I saw part of his foot, then his ankle lying still on the ground, dusted by the movement of others. His creased palm, half closed. The gentle strength of his torso. And, for a quick instant, his face. An expression I couldn’t understand. Sadness and exhaustion and an infinite sympathy, as though his sorrow was not only for the fallen but for the perpetrators too. All this together with a final and inconsolable realization that he would never see us again. I felt the violent force of vertigo. As though he and I were standing on opposite sides of a brook, and the water was growing wider, as wide as an ocean now.
“Gradually, the guards began to talk,” Hmad said. “They wanted to talk because they saw everything. They were particularly interested in what happened to us, the Ajdabiya Group, and how we got away. ‘You were amongst the first,’ they would say. ‘How on earth did you manage to survive?’ They would laugh about it, as you would about a curiosity.
“Every day I think of that friend who was in the bus in front of me.”
The bodies were buried where they fell, in shallow mass graves. Months later, they were exhumed. The bones were ground to dust and the powder poured into the sea.
22. The Patio
Another round of tea was served and I lit up another cigarette. I was smoking too much. My chest felt fogged up with nicotine. Uncle Mahmoud said something to Hmad about not keeping me all to himself. Hmad smiled. They have an ease with one another. I noticed it too with Saleh. After their initial arrest, they were all put in the same cell. This arrangement, sitting and talking softly in clusters on different sides of the same room, must be familiar to them. I remembered how, on meeting Ali earlier in Cairo, we decided to telephone Uncle Mahmoud to tell him about the happy occasion. I handed the phone to Ali and was taken aback by the harsh tone he employed with his uncle. “So this is what you’re like?” he told him. “Days pass and you don’t even call.” I expected Ali to laugh, as usually happens after such affectionate admonishments, but he kept the stern face, ending the call with, “I’ll see you when I see you, then.” They were so close, I remember thinking, that they could do this, they could be upset at each other and could just leave it at that. When you live together in the same room you can leave it at that, but in a world where anything can happen, and where the distances are forever stretching, we must try to make amends at the very first opportunity. This sort of intimacy, the complicity and dismissal it allows, as though they didn’t have to pay attention to one another anymore, was rare and curious. It seemed they had no anxiety about losing one another. Perhaps it is the anxiety of losing someone that keeps us attached. But that is a different sort of attachment. This is another, much finer form, I remember thinking.
“There is so much I want to tell you,” Hmad said, smiling.
“And I want to hear it all,” I said.
“Did anyone tell you that I was a poet?” he said.
“No, no one told me.”
“But, unlike these ignorant fools,” he said, loud enough for Uncle Mahmoud and the others to hear, “I wrote my poems in English.”
“He has always been a foreigner,” Uncle Mahmoud said.
“They only came in English,” Hmad said. “They used to come in prison. Now I don’t remember any.”
“Didn’t you write them down?” I asked.
“We weren’t allowed to write anything down. I got beautiful letters from your father. I either burned them or tore them up and flushed them down the toilet as soon as I read them. If you were caught with one, you and the author of the letter would spend a day in hell.”
It was as though I were drowning. Anywhere I go here, I will stumble on my father.
“What did he write you?” I asked.
“There is one letter I remember well. Now, you have to keep in mind that these letters were smuggled through a long and convoluted network of secret passages between the cells, and sometimes they had to be destroyed before they could reach their intended reader.”
“Where did you find paper and pens?”
“There was always a guard who would sell us some and look the other way. At one point Uncle Jaballa fell silent for a long time. We wondered if he was all right. I wrote him, and several weeks later I got a reply. I still remember the line where he said, ‘Don’t worry; I am well. I am like the mountain that is neither altered nor diminished by the passing storms.’ ”
I felt numb and cold—I don’t mean indifferent but literally shivering inside and helpless. I remembered silently, for I would have never dared tell Hmad, Father’s intimate disclosure in the recorded letter he sent us, how at its end he allowed himself to weep and didn’t erase it. There was something desperate about having those two impressions, steadfastness and despair, sit side by side. I felt an abject confinement, as though I were lost in a tunnel. And I remembered once again Telemachus’s words:
I wish at least I had some happy man
as father, growing old in his own house—
but unknown death and silence are the fate
of him…
And for the first time those familiar words, which have been to me loyal companions for many years, moved and expanded in meaning. They were now just as much about Odysseus as they were about Telemachus; just as much about the father as they were about the son; just as much about the wish of the son to have his father spend the remainder of his days in the comfort and dignity of his own house as they were about the son’s wish to finally be able to leave the father at home, to finally turn and face forward and walk into the world. As long as Odysseus is lost, Telemachus cannot leave home. As long as Odysseus is not home, he is everywhere unknown.
—
“Speaking of poems,” Uncle Mahmoud said, “you must come see this.”
He stood up and I followed him to the cabinet. He pulled open a drawer and took out a folded piece of white linen. It used to be a pillowcase. It was so sheer you could see through it. He spread it out.
“I stole it,” he said, smiling. “Then I picked out the thread and turned it into a single sheet.”
Both sides of it were covered in writing. It looked like a membrane with intricate patterns. Uncle Mahmoud began to read to me. They were poems and letters he had written over several years to his children. A thin line separated each cluster of text. It resembled a diagram of the human anatomy: one letter in the shape of a kidney, another filling up a lung, a poem doing its best to occupy the gap between.
“These are the only jottings I managed to keep from all those years,” Uncle Mahmoud said. “They are possibly the only surviving literature from all the countless volumes that have been authored inside Abu Salim prison,” he said, laughing.
He had managed this by folding the fabric into a strip and sewing it to the waistband of his underpants.
—
We ate lunch. I felt exhausted and empty. I must have looked sleepy because Uncle Mahmoud insisted I take a nap in Izzo’s room. It was odd lying down on the bed of my dead cousin. There were pictures of him on each wall. I was conscious of the mattress pressing against the length of my body.
When I woke up, I went and stood with Aunt Zaynab in the kitchen. It was that afternoon hour I remember so well, when a Libyan house is neither asleep nor fully awake. It is when the entire street, indeed the world, seems vacant. The kitchen door to the patio was open. The sun was strong yet well past its summit. It entered in a skewed triangle, stretching across the kitchen floor, making the rest of the room oddly dull and static, like an abandoned place. Someone, probably Hamed or Amal, had taken a hose to the patio. The water had evaporated but the tiles were still dark with moisture. A cool soft breeze was swirling into the kitchen. Aunt Zaynab looked at me and smiled.
“You want to help?” she asked, kneading dough. Every time she folded it, tiny bubbles of air burst through. “Hand me that bowl,” she said.
The dish was made of wafer-thin aluminum hammered into a perfect contour, as if a third of a globe had been sliced off. Its weight was nearly nonexistent. She placed it upside down on top of a flame. With the amused pride of a talented cook who knows she is being observed, she worked the dough in her hands, stretching it. She wet a finger and tested the metal. It made a sizzling sound when she touched it. She pulled the dough into a thin sheet and dropped it on to the metal helmet of the bowl. The dough drew together tightly as soon as it touched the heat and slowly began to rise.
“How was your nap?” she asked.
I chose not to say anything about how odd it was to be in Izzo’s room, to have my head rest on his pillow. Nor did I tell her about how, although I had slept for only about twenty minutes, I had had a powerful dream that seemed to last for hours. It had incorporated a real television interview with a rebel from Benghazi that I had watched immediately after that city was liberated. The man stood out because he was exactly my age, and, amongst the jubilations of that day, he did not seem all that happy. “I want to publicly apologize,” he started. “I want to publicly apologize, on behalf of my entire generation, to all the young boys who had to fight. We should have done it for you earlier….You needn’t have died like this.” In my dream the man had been transformed into Izzo, surrounded by children, some of them laughing and pulling faces at the camera. I said none of this to Aunt Zaynab. Instead, I said, “I slept well.” Which was true.
“Was the bed comfortable?”
“Very.”
“It’s Izzo’s bed,” she said.
She kept turning the pastry until it was golden on both sides. The kitchen smelt like warm skin. She handed me the tub of date syrup. I poured some of the thick black liquid into a small white bowl. I could hear the voices of Uncle Mahmoud and his children outside. I filled several glasses with yoghurt milk and carried it all on a tray to the patio.
Acknowledgments
Expressing gratitude is never straightforward, particularly with a book like this where one feels enormously grateful that, for the three years it took to write it, the earth held firm. Notwithstanding my guaranteed failure in being able to adequately convey my appreciation, I would like to thank the following people:
My dearest father, mother and brother for the horizon; uncles Mahmoud Matar, Faraj Tarbah, Fathi Tarbah and Hmad Khanfore for the doors they opened; Aunt Badria Tarbah for the space that is only hers; cousins Hosam Matar, Mohamed Tarbah, Tariq Tarbah, Nasser al-Tashani, Marwan al-Tashani, Nafa al-Tashani, Saleh Eshnayquet and Ali Eshnayquet for helping me enter.
Paul van Zyl for his steadfastness and clarity; Mungo Soggot for his unshakeable, calm and true affinity; Jalal Shammam, who is as vivid, varied and dependable as a mountain; Nathalie Latham for India and Spain, for the five trees, her two hands and countless prayers; Bashir Abu Manneh for his encouragement and humor; David Austen and Rupert Thomson for the hours on the roof; Peter K. Isele for the refuge in the Piedmont; Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi for the refuge in Hammersmith, and their minds and exquisite sympathy; Khaled Mattawa for his comradeship and poems; Rachel Eisendrath for her intellectual eloquence and breadth; Professor Nicola Labanca for lending me his ear and knowledge; and, in memoriam: Maha Darbi for her gentle wisdom that never lost faith in all Libyans of all persuasions, and Andrew Vass, who died before I could bring this book to his doorstep, and without whom I am all the poorer.
David Remnick’s confidence and encouragement helped me to start The Return. The piece he commissioned, which was published under the same title in the New Yorker’s April 8, 2013 issue, still opens the book—albeit in a slightly expanded version—and was the first dig at the well. I would also like to thank other editors who over the years commissioned articles and essays that, although not in the book, served as useful notes. Amongst them are Charlie English and Lisa Allardice of the Guardian and Sue Matthias of the Financial Times.
The person who, from the first couple of chapters, could see the future book, and whose foresight and faith I’m indebted to and amazed by, is my US publisher Susan Kamil. I am grateful to her and to Noah Eaker. Mary Mount in the UK, Louise Dennys in Canada, Andrea Canobbio in Italy and Georg Reuchlein and Christine Popp in Germany followed, and it was the early confidence of such excellent publishers that helped to fortify my determination. As always, I am hugely indebted to the editorial subtlety, intelligence and thoroughness of Mary Mount. My occasional conversations with her during the writing of this book were as useful to me as her sharp pencil when I finished.
I owe a great deal to the passion, scrupulosity and good humor of my excellent agents: Zoe Pagnamenta in New York and Georgia Garrett, Peter Straus, Laurence Laluyaux and the rest of the team at Rogers, Coleridge & White in London.
My immeasurable gratitude is to my companion, my first reader, the woman and artist with whom I walk, Diana Matar. She said it would be so.
Hisham Matar
BY HISHAM MATAR
In the Country of Men
Anatomy of a Disappearance
The Return
About the Author
; Born in New York City to Libyan parents, HISHAM MATAR spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. He lives in London and New York.