by Hisham Matar
When Kareem and his parents first moved in next door Mama went to pay them a visit. She asked me to put on my black leather shoes, which I hardly wore because they were heavy and scraped against my ankles, and she ironed my white shirt and insisted I button its collar. I didn’t mind because I was eager to meet my new next-door neighbour, who, the boys in the street had told me, was like me, without brother or sister. But when we arrived his mother, Auntie Salma, said that Kareem had gone out with his father to explore the area, then smiled, tilted her head to one side and said, ‘Sorry.’
Our street was mostly lined with building plots, the foundations dug up and abandoned. The only five completed houses, identical in design, huddled together in the centre of the street: ours and Kareem’s on one side; the other three, where Adnan, Masoud and Ali and Osama lived, on the opposite side.
I wandered around our new neighbours’ house amused by the strangeness of being in a building that was the mirror image of ours on the outside but on the inside was completely altered by the different furniture and the colours of the walls: like two brothers who had grown distant. Our walls were lined in Italian wallpaper, European flowers in full bloom, autumn leaves falling always, the same bird perched on top of the same branch and plucking at the same twig over and over again, foreign butterflies on arm chairs, tables in dark, satisfied woods and our windows dressed in Dutch cloth and French velvet. Their walls were painted pastel, the skirting-board a dark brown, ‘So that when they get dirty it won’t show,’ Auntie Salma explained, showing Mama around the house. ‘What a clever idea,’ Mama said, with worrying enthusiasm. Their windows were covered in the same cotton fabric, the sort of thing that was commonly found in Libya then, imported from Egypt. They weren’t as well-off as we were; Ustath Rashid was only a university professor, whereas Baba was a businessman who travelled the world looking for beautiful things and animals and trees to bring to our country. That night I thanked God for our wealth and asked him to keep us so for ever and ever.
A couple of days before Ustath Rashid was taken I joined him, his students and Kareem on a day trip to Lepcis. I felt a string in my heart break as I looked back at Mama waving goodbye. Baba wasn’t home.
At the beginning of the trip I was nervous, but then the whole bus began singing and clapping. Ustath Rashid’s students were wonderfully jubilant; watching them I burned with anticipation to be at university. A couple of girls were pulled up to dance. With eyes downcast they shook their hips and twirled their hands in the air. Passing cars blew their horns. We were like a wedding party.
Kareem and I were sitting in the back, Ustath Rashid in the front, occasionally looking back at us and smiling. When the dancing and the clapping subsided, a chant took hold: al-Doctor, al-Doctor, al-Doctor … We didn’t stop until Ustath Rashid stood up and turned to face us.
‘I am truly honoured to have such an orderly, well-mannered and respectable group of students. I would just like to know where you unruly bunch have hidden them.’
We all laughed, clapping and whistling as loudly as we could.
‘The city of Lepcis Magna was founded by people from Tyre …’
‘LEBANON.’
‘Yes – very good – modern-day Lebanon. Subsequently it became Phoenician, then, of course, Roman, when it was made famous by its loyal son, Emperor Sep …’
‘SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS.’
‘Yes, our Grim African, both a source of pride and shame.’
‘PRIDE PRIDE.’
‘Well, if you insist.’
Then the bus turned down a dirt road that led to the sea.
‘Welcome to Lepcis,’ Ustath Rashid announced.
He seemed transformed. Stepping down from the bus, smiling at the abandoned city scattered by the lapping sea, its twisted columns like heavy sleeping giants by the shore, he gave a deep sigh and recited a poem:
Why this emptiness after joy?
Why this ending after glory?
Why this nothingness where once was a city?
Who will answer? Only the wind
Which steals the chantings of priests
And scatters the souls once gathered.
Some of his students clapped. He smiled, bowed, blushing.
‘Sidi Mahrez’s lamentation for Carthage could have equally applied to Lepcis,’ he said marching ahead.
We all struggled to keep up.
He took us to see a broken frieze that displayed part of the Emperor’s name. Absence was everywhere. Arches stood without the walls and roofs of the shops they had once belonged to and seemed, in the empty square under the open sky, like old men trying to remember where they were going. Coiled ivy and clusters of grapes were carved into their stone. White-stone-cobbled streets – some heading towards the sea, others into the surrounding green desert – marched bravely into the rising sand that erased them. Ferns, grass and wild sage shot through the stone-paved floor. Palm trees bowed like old gossiping women at the edges of the city.
He showed us the ‘Medusa medallions’ carved in marble and inset high between the leap and dive of the limestone arches. They were boys with healthy cheeks full as moons, encircled with lush curls, their foreheads flexed, eyes anxiously inspecting the distance, lips gently open. ‘They are also known as the “Sea-monsters”,’ Ustath Rashid said, ‘always facing the sea, always expecting the worst.’
Kareem continued staring up at the Medusa medallions long after the group had wandered off to the next object.
‘What’s the point?’ he said.
‘To scare away the enemy,’ I said.
‘And how do you expect them to do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said and walked away.
‘Children are useless in a war,’ he said following me.
We caught up with Ustath Rashid in what were the baths, tiled rectangular cubes carved into the ground and under domed roofs. Flaked frescoes of men stabbing spears into the necks of lions and cheetahs, others on boats in a river full of yawning fish, lined the walls and ceilings. Ustath Rashid stopped in front of a painting of a naked woman.
‘This is a Maenad, a follower of the cult of Dionysus, the god that alleviates inhibitions and inspires creativity.’
Her eyes were as strange as a bird’s, her lips full and melancholy, the area around her nipples glowed pink, and her stomach stretched down to hips that widened out softly. She was dancing, one hand above her head, the other out by her waist. I could hear Ustath Rashid’s voice going further, footsteps following him. I came closer to her, traced my finger round the dark swirl of her bellybutton. I turned my finger round the pink centre of her nipple. Then my eyes fell on her dark lips. I kissed them, hearing my own breath against the cool dry stone. Something like guilt or fear made me withdraw. I felt a swirl of excitement in my belly. Her eyes seemed to be looking at me. I quickly kissed her again and ran to catch up with the others.
We picnicked there and, when everyone was lying under trees resting, Kareem and I went exploring. We spotted two of Ustath Rashid’s students hugging below a chestnut tree. We watched him slip his hand beneath her jumper. She moaned a strange moan. Later the man got in a fist fight with another student. We weren’t sure if it was over the girl. When one punched the other in the face it didn’t sound like it did in the films; instead of a bang it was more like a wet kiss. Ustath Rashid put himself between them and got his spectacles knocked off. Everyone fell silent then. He smiled strangely while he searched for his spectacles. They all watched him. Kareem spotted them in the dirt and picked them up. He placed them in his father’s hand. Ustath Rashid fixed them over his ears and smiled again, facing the ground, as if it were he who had lost his temper and was now embarrassed.
Just when everybody was preparing to leave, Kareem took me to see the amphitheatre. We took turns running down to the stage to hear our voices amplified against the rising steps shaped in a crescent moon. By this time thick clouds were drifting into the sky, black and bruised. The sea was growing louder, crashing against the shore, t
hen the rain fell.
On the way back most of the bus was asleep. I watched Kareem nuzzle into his father’s side.
At times I used to wish that Baba was more like Ustath Rashid. The two men were good friends, if unalike. Baba was much more aloof. The times I felt closest to him were when he was unaware of my presence: watching him spread his library of neckties on the bed, for example, humming an unfamiliar tune. Even the way he swam seemed distant: floating on his back, his toes pointing to the sky, his eyes shut, unconcerned where the waters might take him. At home he was often busy with a book or the endless number of newspapers that appeared at our door every morning. I would sometimes curl up beside him, but his powers of concentration were amazing and he would hardly notice me. I would study his face as he read. Even the English mints he bought on his trips abroad, and which he kept in a small silver box, seemed mysterious: they were the size of small aspirin pills, but as soon as I put one in my mouth it set it on fire. He would sometimes say something in Italian at the newspaper. That always made Mama laugh. ‘Your father is swearing at the paper,’ she would say.
Although he travelled more than Ustath Rashid he never took me with him. I begged him several times and once I felt so sick with sadness that I screamed, kicked his shins and pummelled his thighs, and, when Mama restrained me, I cried and called him ‘Ugly!’ He drove off just the same. I never again asked him to take me with him or cried in front of him when he came to leave.
At other times I secretly wished that Moosa, Baba’s closest friend, was my father instead. Moosa was much younger, closer to Mama’s age, and as tall as a tree. He often carried me on his shoulders to pick the high fruit, sweetened by the sun, on the crowns of the plum and orange trees in our garden.
Once Baba returned from one of his business trips with a huge open truck full of trees that had come by sea from Sweden. It was strange to have them sleep outside our house. They were dark and moist and smelled like human skin. Mama and I spread the atlas on the kitchen table to see where exactly Sweden was and by which sea route Baba’s trees had come. Another time the truck was full of cows, black and dark brown from Scotland. We – Baba, Mama, Moosa and I – fed them without letting them off the truck, stuffing the feed through the fence, their round big black glassy eyes following us in silence. Mama sang to them the way she sang to herself when she was in the bathroom, or when she was hanging clothes on the clothesline in the garden, softly like a little girl unaware of herself. Baba walked around the truck several times, making sure each cow got its share. The cows were silent the whole time, chewing gloomily.
I spent the whole of that day unable to leave them alone, turning around the truck, looking up at their pink titties, climbing to stare into their peculiar eyes. After nap time the boys came out and began teasing them too. Masoud wiggled his bum at them and mooed, causing his brother Ali to laugh so hard a vein on either side of his tiny neck bulged out. Osama wanted to hear them moo so he threw a couple of stones at them and the cows huddled together, their sudden movement causing the truck to rock slightly. This seemed to awaken a new fear in Ali; he ran to his front door, stood frowning at his fingers. ‘Come, don’t be such a baby,’ his brother Masoud said. Ali ran inside his house and didn’t come out for the rest of the day. When I threatened Osama I would tell Baba, he sighed and dropped the stones in his hands.
By nightfall the cows began to moo.
‘Maybe they are frightened,’ I suggested.
Moosa said it was the heat that bothered them. ‘Where they are from the sun has no heat and barely any light,’ he said.
‘So you want to convince us you’ve been to Scotland?’ Mama told him.
‘No. I saw it in a film. I felt a chill just watching it.’
Baba couldn’t say how cold Scotland was because he bought the cows off a man in Malta, which was only across the sea.
The following morning, after Baba had driven off with them, Um Masoud came to our door to complain. She was Masoud and Ali’s mother and lived in the house across the street from ours. Like her two sons, Um Masoud was fat. Her buttocks were the size of giant watermelons. Although I never tried it, of course, I was certain I could balance a glass of water on one of them. Holding her youngest, Ali, by one hand and waving the other beside her ear, she said, ‘I can still hear their mooing and suspect I will for a long time to come. Ali couldn’t even sleep.’ Ali was only six and, standing beside his huge mother, he looked like a dwarf. I stuck my tongue out at him. He frowned and looked away. ‘He woke up several times screaming. And this is to say nothing of the stink they left behind in our street.’
‘You just have,’ Mama murmured.
‘What did you say?’ Um Masoud said, suspicion forcing her eyebrows into a deep V.
‘Nothing,’ Mama said.
Um Masoud walked away, pulling Ali by the hand, and repeating, ‘Cows? Cows in our street?’
‘Next time we will import snakes,’ Mama said under her breath. ‘Silent, odourless snakes.’
‘What would people say?’ Um Masoud continued. ‘That we bring cows into our homes? It’s not normal, this.’
I was glad she hadn’t heard what Mama said about the snakes. Um Masoud’s husband, Ustath Jafer, was an Antenna, a man of the Mokhabarat, ‘able to put people behind the sun,’ as I had heard it said many times.
Two days after we returned from Lepcis, and a week before I had seen Baba walk across Martyrs’ Square, Ustath Rashid was taken.
I had seen men interrogated on television before. I remembered once a man who used to own a clothing factory in Tripoli. He was accused of being a bourgeois and a traitor. He was dressed in a light-grey Italian suit that shimmered slightly under the spotlight. He sat stiff in his chair, as if he were in pain. I was standing just outside the entrance of the room, where I wouldn’t be seen. Baba and Moosa sat on the sofa, Mama beside them in the armchair. Moosa said softly to Baba, ‘They deliberately spare the face. I bet his body is a patchwork of bruises.’ Then a dark cloud grew out of nowhere on the man’s groin, a stain that kept spreading. I saw it first. I ran to the screen, stabbing my finger at it. ‘Move,’ Baba yelled. I ran and stood beside Mama. ‘Go to your room,’ he said. ‘It’s all right,’ Mama told him and he shouted, ‘He shouldn’t see this.’ ‘It’s his country too,’ she said calmly, facing the screen. He stormed out of the room. We watched the man trying to cover the wet patch with his hands, squirming in his chair.
But to see Ustath Rashid arrested was different. I had heard it said many times before that no one is ever beyond their reach, but to see them, to see how it can happen, how quickly, how there’s no space to argue, to say no, made my belly swim. Afterwards, when Mama saw my face, she said, ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ When I told her what I had seen she brought her hand to her forehead and whispered, ‘Poor Salma.’ She took me to the bathroom and washed my face. ‘You shouldn’t have watched. Next time run straight home.’ Then she made me soup and tea as if I had flu.
Somebody, a traitor, was printing leaflets criticizing the Guide and his Revolutionary Committees. They came in the middle of the night and placed them like newspapers on our doorsteps. I say somebody, but there must have been hundreds, maybe even thousands of men. The boys and I took turns staying up, hoping to catch sight of one. We imagined them to be all in black, masked and very fast. Ali claimed he saw one. Masoud whacked him across the head and said, ‘If you lie about such things again I’ll tell Baba.’
Everyone feared these leaflets and made a point of tearing them up in full view of their neighbours. Others, like Mama, took them inside only to watch them burn in the kitchen sink, then ran cold water over the ashes. I overheard her once say to Auntie Salma, ‘They are going to get us all in trouble.’ When I asked her what she meant, she sighed and said, ‘Nothing.’ Another time she stood stiffly out on the pavement listening to Um Masoud speak against the ‘traitors’, saying, ‘Jafer is very distressed by these leaflets.’ Mama spoke differently to Um Masoud, she seemed sympathet
ic. She frowned and shook her head and agreed with everything Um Masoud said. ‘May God forgive them, they don’t know how wonderful the revolution has been for this country.’
The morning before Ustath Rashid was taken the boys and I were so bored we took the leaflets the traitors had left during the night and tossed them over the garden walls, where they immediately became, officially, inside people’s houses. We only did this in neighbouring streets, where we didn’t know anyone. We tied their light paper bodies to small stones and hurled them over the high walls like the way grenades were thrown in war films. The act was exhilarating, but soon boredom set in again, so we returned to our street and began preparing it for a football match.
Gergarish was a newly constructed district and apart from the main roads that connected it to the centre of the city, most of its streets were yet to be named or tarmacked. We called ours Mulberry because there used to be an orchard of mulberry trees here, the last one remaining was next door in Ustath Rashid and Auntie Salma’s garden.
The sun reached the centre of the sky. We heard the crackle of the local mosque speaker. We could see the pencil-like minaret rise in the distance above the low houses of our street. Then Sheikh Mustafa’s voice came.
We marked the goal posts with rocks and empty plastic bottles, argued about the sides, and finally the game kicked off. After a few minutes a car hurtled towards us, billowing dust as if it were the only creature in the world. When we saw it, white in the sun, we stopped playing and ran to the pavement, letting the ball roll away.
