In the Country of Men

by Hisham Matar

  When he was home, Baba seemed distant. Away he seemed closer somehow, more alive in my thoughts. For this reason it was strange when Mama merged us together. She did this by using the plural form of ‘you’. ‘You always leave me alone,’ she would say, after I’d come in from playing in the street, meaning both of us, using the you that made Baba and me inseparable. It obliged me to defend him, to say, ‘But Baba is working hard for us,’ when I had no idea whether he was working hard for us or not. I defended him because I was defending myself. But I know now that that, of course, made us indistinguishable, the man who was her punishment and the boy that sealed her fate.

  Sometimes she would say, ‘All you men,’ ‘All you men are the same,’ combining me not only with Baba but with many other men. I never knew what to say to that. I couldn’t possibly defend all of them: all her brothers and her father – the men she called the ‘High Council’ – the men who met to decide her fate when she was only fourteen, after she was seen sitting across from a boy in the Italian Coffee House. And all the other men who met at the Italian Coffee House, where talk started and things were decided. These were the men who were bound to talk if she wasn’t married at once. The men whose threat of talking made my grandmother say, ‘If a slave came to propose, a slave as black as this night, I would give you to him.’ Those were the men the High Council imagined gossiping in low voices, saying, ‘Look, look who’s over there, sitting with a boy, and touching hands under the table, now above the table, daughter of a good family, the shameless creature, the boy is blushing like a pig, has more shame than her,’ in the Coffee House, the Coffee House from where shame was going to fall on everyone in the good family if they didn’t act quickly, if they didn’t marry her at once, even to a slave. She had told me the story so many times of how she and Baba came to be married, of that ‘black day’. Every time she would leave something out or remember something new. ‘It was because I was so beautiful,’ she sometimes began, or, ‘It was all because of Khaled, that stupid uncle of yours. He was the one who gave me up, betrayed me; the dagger was his.’

  Khaled was Mama’s brother. He had left for America to attend university, and everyone missed him. When I was born they asked him to choose a name. ‘Suleiman,’ he had told them, ‘after Suleiman the Magnificent.’ Later he returned with an American wife who didn’t like the taste of our water. Her name was Cathy, she smelled like no one else in our country, a mix of eucalyptus and grass. She was the reason why I had for a long time imagined America as a forest. She used to bring a book with her when the family gathered. She didn’t join the women in the kitchen, but sat alone and read. I once heard Auntie Nora, Mama’s only sister, whisper that what Cathy was reading was her Holy Book. But I didn’t think she was because the book had a picture of a woman in a sleeveless dress running from a man in a dark suit and hat holding a gun.

  I once saw them, Uncle Khaled and Cathy, argue under the glue tree in our garden. He slapped the tree, and she covered her eyes with one hand. Soon after that they returned to America. I missed Cathy. I liked having someone with yellow hair in my family. The boys used to elbow me and giggle whenever she visited us.

  Before America and Cathy Uncle Khaled lived in Tripoli and wrote poems that half of the family was ashamed of and the other half loved. When I asked Baba what he thought, he said, ‘A great poet, your uncle. Very important.’ And the only time I heard Baba shout at my grandmother, the one who had swallowed the entire book of A Thousand and One Nights, was when she had neglected Uncle Khaled’s wooden trunk of papers. She put it in the chicken shed, where the clever chickens picked at the lock and ate all the poems.

  ‘Ignorance!’ Baba shouted. Then, ‘Ignorance! Ignorance! Ignorance!’ he repeated like a bell.

  My grandmother seemed perplexed, perplexed and slightly embarrassed, as if someone had farted loudly in the room.

  ‘Don’t raise your voice at her,’ Mama told him.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ Baba said. ‘The only copy of The Feast of Ants is inside the chickens.’

  The Feast of Ants was a play Uncle Khaled had completed before he went off to America. It took him seven years to write and it read like a long poem, telling the history of our country.

  Mama said, ‘Feast or no feast. Don’t raise your voice at my mother again.’

  Baba looked at Mama, then at my grandmother, then at Mama again before he left the room.

  When Uncle Khaled returned from America and found out that his poems and The Feast of Ants had been devoured by the family’s chickens he laughed, then laughed some more and laughed again until his laughing took him out of the house and to the end of the garden, where he sat for a long time alone not laughing. He refused to eat an egg laid by those chickens the whole summer. ‘They are full of poetry,’ my grandmother teased. He smiled but didn’t eat.

  Mama blamed Uncle Khaled for that black day she was forced to marry Baba because of what he had done when, on one of his visits from America, he saw her and her friend Jihan in the Italian Coffee House drinking cappuccino with two boys. Mama and Jihan were fourteen years old, as were the two boys.

  ‘The coward. Thinking himself the enlightened American. He was nice. Cordial. Said hello as if he admired his little sister and her friend. The foolish girl I was; I even thought, with his liberal ideas, he was proud of my little rebellion. He paid for our cappuccinos, said hello to my friends. When he left I cried with happiness and told Jihan how much I loved my brother. Having a brother like him was the only thing in my life that in any way resembled Jihan’s life.’ Jihan was Mama’s childhood friend, a Christian from Palestine. Her parents treated her the same as they did her brothers. ‘Talk about a rude awakening. When I got home every light in my life was put out. The High Council was already adjourned. Oh yes, when it comes to a woman’s virtue we are fierce. Fierce and deadly. And when it comes to a daughter’s virtue we are fierce, deadly and efficient. In such matters our efficiency rivals that of a German factory.’ A smile crossed her face and was gone. ‘Your grandmother grabbed me by the hair and threw me in my room. “You have shamed me, you little slut. Now your father will think I haven’t brought you up right.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was like a nightmare, no sense in it at all. But soon I learned that the poet-prince had run straight home after seeing me at the café and told his father, “Your daughter is fourteen and is already spending her days in cafés with strange men. I tremble to imagine what next. Marry her now, or she’ll shame us all.” “Strange men”? They were boys, just boys. “Tremble to imagine”? Only a poet would have the cruelty for such a phrase.’

  When she identified me with them, saying, ‘All you men are the same’– saying it and looking away from me as if at that moment the mere sight of me repelled her – I didn’t defend Uncle Khaled and all of those other men, but felt a hot anger burn in my belly. And at night, after she had stopped talking and shouting and smoking and had fallen asleep somewhere on the floor or in a chair where I couldn’t lift her, couldn’t carry her, because I was only nine, and instead took myself to bed, not caring whether I had brushed my teeth or washed my face, I lay there in my clothes and shoes like a travelling cowboy picturing how I could have saved her then, when she was fourteen, before what happened happened, falling asleep fighting and shouting and running away somewhere beautiful and green and cold like Scotland, where no one could ever find us, surrounded by silent cows with big, beautiful, glassy eyes.

  At such times I hated our house.

  And some nights what I imagined wasn’t good. I fantasized revenge, enacting it over and over until the black sky broke grey with dawn. It filled me with urgency. I couldn’t wait to be a man. And not to do all the things normally associated with manhood and its licence, but to change the past, to rescue that girl from her black day.

  The sun was on its way down, burning warmly now on the white wall of the garden. The solid, cloudless blue seemed eternal. Lying on my side, I shielded my eyes, placing one hand against my forehead, the
other between my knees. This is how the Bedouins sleep. Baba’s family were Bedouin. He, too, slept like this: one hand over the eyes, the other between the knees. It must have become a habit to him in the days before he left for university, before he left the place of great expanses and scarce shade, before becoming a suited afandi. And me, I wondered, what reason is there for me to sleep like this? How much of him is there in me? Can you become a man without becoming your father?

  14

  The following morning Bu Nasser arrived and wouldn’t let his finger off the doorbell. I opened the door and he walked in.

  ‘They took my boy. Where’s your mother?’ When he saw Mama he said, ‘The catastrophe has fallen. I called you yesterday to prevent it. Now it’s too late.’ He spoke the way some women do when they arrive at a funeral, swaying from side to side.

  ‘Calm down and tell me what happened,’ Mama told him.

  ‘I looked everywhere, Nasser has vanished.’

  Bu Nasser was much older than I expected, perhaps as old as my grandfather. Instead of opening the curtains in the reception room and letting in the heat, Mama put on the light. ‘Suleiman,’ she said, ‘Fetch your uncle a glass of water.’ I waited for him to do what all guests do when offered something, to refuse, but the old man didn’t say a word, he must have been very thirsty. I stood outside of the entrance, listening.

  ‘He was there, beside me, when I telephoned. He got upset at what I had told you. He always gets upset at what I say, said exactly what you told me, that he was old enough to make up his own mind. But,’ whispering now, he added, ‘Um Suleiman, this is a dangerous path. These people have no mercy.’ He sighed, then said, ‘I was only blessed with two, a boy and a girl. Nasser is from the Precious One, may God have mercy on her soul. The girl is from the second marriage, she’s only nine, young enough to be Nasser’s daughter. He’s our only shelter in the world.’

  Throughout all of this Mama put in a few good wishes: ‘May God reward you. May He bless them.’

  Then a girl walked timidly into our house. The main door must have been left ajar after the old man walked in. She had long chestnut hair, her skin was cinnamon from the sun, and her lips slightly open and purple-pink. She must be Nasser’s sister, the one who is nine years old, I thought, exactly my age and therefore too old for me to marry. The acceptable age difference had to be at least three years. Baba had been my age when Mama was born, old enough to walk into her family home bearing flowers for the new arrival. He was twenty-three when he married her, she fourteen. With such a gap no one could object or say she would grow barren and old before he did. Because you had to think ahead. A woman had to be young and strong enough to bear children and serve the man well into his old age, so that her locks would remain black as coal when his head was bald as the moon. She looked at me and saw exactly what I was doing. She shut the door behind her, louder than was necessary.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Mama said.

  ‘Come. We are here,’ the old man said. Then softly to Mama he added, ‘It must be Siham, my daughter.’ Siham walked into the reception room.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you to wait in the car?’ the old man said.

  ‘But why?’ Mama asked him, in a way to welcome the girl. ‘Why sit out in the sun when she can be here with us. Come here, sit beside me. Mashaa Allah, Mashaa Allah. You are so pretty. What school …’

  I ran to the kitchen. I giggled to myself for some reason.

  ‘Slooma,’ Mama called.

  I ran there but just before I had reached the reception room I stopped and walked in slowly. ‘Yes,’ I said calmly, hearing my heart thump.

  ‘Come say hello to Siham, she’s Nasser’s sister. Slooma is so very fond of Nasser,’ she told them. ‘Aren’t you, dear?’ I felt my cheeks blush at her calling me ‘Slooma’ then ‘dear’ in front of them, in front of her, Siham, the one with the chestnut hair.

  ‘What would our young bride like to drink?’ Mama asked. Siham said nothing. She didn’t seem embarrassed, more withdrawn. ‘How about some Coca-Cola?’

  ‘Speak up,’ her father said, irritated.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Siham said. Her voice had a bodily pleasure, like the sun warming your skin after a swim in the cool and calm early-morning sea.

  I left to bring her the Coca-Cola – I had completely forgotten about the old man’s glass of water – but then her father ordered Siham to go with me. And so there I was, walking side by side with Siham along our hallway, feeling my chest glow with the excitement that moments ago had caused me to jump around the kitchen. I held the hallway swing-doors open for her, then followed her through.

  ‘You were eavesdropping,’ she said. These were the first words Siham had spoken to me. I made myself busy with the Coca-Cola. But then she rescued me. ‘I too like to eavesdrop.’

  ‘Would you like to see my workshop?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Is it far?’ Her eyebrows rose slightly.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s on the roof. And it has shade too.’ I handed her the glass of Coca-Cola, filled to the brim.

  She brought her mouth to it and slurped. ‘Aren’t you going to pour one for Baba?’

  I remembered that the old man wanted a glass of water, but I was too embarrassed to admit to her that I had forgotten, so I poured him Coca-Cola instead and walked quickly to the reception room.

  I had often dreamed of this, but up until this point the girl in my dreams had only been the girl Mama once was, before what happened happened, before she was forced into marrying the man who was to become my father. It was an infinite longing, hideous and unbidden, beyond reason or fulfilment, like a sick dog gnawing at its own limbs. But this was sweet.

  I handed the old man the glass. I had spilled some on the way, making my fingers and the glass sticky. ‘Put it there,’ Mama said, pointing at the coffee table. ‘The line was tapped, so I didn’t take his call. I thought it better this way. Better for him, I mean,’ Mama said.

  ‘He left in a hurry, annoyed at me, didn’t even say goodbye. I am sure he went to that wretched flat on Martyrs’ Square.’

  The words caught my ear. I stopped outside the entrance.

  ‘I went looking for him there. My heart shuddered when people told me they had seen a young man run across the square with a typewriter under his arm, chased by a group of Revolutionary Committee men.’

  I felt dizzy, sick.

  Once I had skipped school with this other boy. I don’t even remember his name, we weren’t friends, the only thing that had united us was the desire to skip school. When I was caught and flogged with a bamboo stick on the front and back of my hands I lied and told them it was his idea. It didn’t feel wrong at the time, but when he eventually was brought into the room and saw me I felt terrible. I had betrayed him. This felt the same. How could I ever marry her now when I had betrayed her brother, the man who was to be an uncle to my children?

  I walked back to the kitchen, dragging my feet. She wasn’t there. Her glass stood empty on the breakfast table. The door to the garden was open. I walked out and found her there. She looked irritated. ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘It’s this way,’ I said, leading the way up the staircase to the roof, my head lowered. I hadn’t imagined it to be like this. ‘This is my workshop,’ I said. The roof was ablaze with morning sunlight, my tools strewn beside the water tank now that my bucket was ruined.

  ‘Baba says your father has brought ruin on my brother’s head. I love my brother. Your father must not be a very nice person.’

  ‘Nasser is like an older brother to me,’ I lied. Her eyes kept squinting at the roof. ‘I, too, love your brother.’ The air was still. I put my arm round her shoulders and caught the smell of oranges. She turned away and ran down the steps.

  When I reached the reception room I found her standing between her father’s knees.

  ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ Mama asked her. ‘Who upset you?’

  I stood at the mouth of the room, frozen, my skin itching with shame.
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  ‘Slooma, what did you do to Siham? Did you upset her?’

  Siham said, ‘I know who that is,’ pointing at the huge picture of the Colonel. The shoulders of his military suit glittered with golden decorations. The sky behind him cloudless, the blue luminous and sweet like candy.

  Mama suddenly excused herself. I didn’t want to be left alone with them. When Bu Nasser wasn’t looking at me I watched him and his young daughter staring up at the photograph. He was too old. He will probably never see her marry; her children will probably never see their grandfather. I ran after Mama.

  She was kneeling before the safe, dialling the code, mumbling the words Bu Nasser had told her: ‘ “The catastrophe has fallen. I called you yesterday to prevent it.” Why come, then? What do you expect me to do?’ The safe didn’t open. She was dialling it too fast. There is no margin for error: any slight variation on the secret code and the safe wouldn’t open. She tried again, repeating what she had said before in front of me and Moosa, ‘Children playing with fire.’ The heavy steel door swung open, indifferent, mighty. She took out a stack of ten-dinar bank notes and rolled them up tightly into her fist.

  They were still staring up into the photograph of the Colonel. But when we walked in the old man stood up and said, ‘We must leave now.’

  ‘Stay for lunch,’ Mama said with such insincerity the man didn’t even feel the need to reply. ‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘Stay.’ But the old man, holding Siham’s hand, was already walking towards the door. ‘Honestly,’ Mama repeated, following them out. The old man shook his head and patted his chest. Siham mimicked him. Seeing her imitate such an old person’s gesture saddened me. Then Mama quickly reached for the man’s chest pocket. With amazing speed the old man clinched her wrist. His quick reflex was surprising, as if he had lived his whole life ready for attack. Then the usual argument ensued: