In the Country of Men

by Hisham Matar

  ‘I am here,’ I heard her say from the sitting room. ‘Where have you been?’ she said, facing the television even though it was still showing the photograph of the pink flowers. Her tone, the way she sat stiff and unmoving, immediately unsettled me. This was a mood that overtook her at times, one I was familiar with, and which turned her in search of conflict. ‘Why did you pour the bottle down the sink?’

  ‘I didn’t know what it was,’ I lied. ‘I thought you wanted me to clean the bottle.’

  She sighed and lit a cigarette, throwing the lighter on the coffee table. ‘I see you don’t need me. You are quite capable of feeding yourself on your own.’

  She had mistaken Bahloul’s food, still on the kitchen table, for mine. What a relief, I thought. I stood there for a few seconds, watching her back stiff in the air, her knees touching, her cigarette burning in one hand in front of her face, wondering what I could do to untangle her. Her eyes remained on the pink flowers. I wondered when the Guide would switch the broadcast back on. I imagined him in his pyjamas, drinking tea, going to fetch something, or deciding to go for a pee and on his way flicking on the switch that controlled the broadcast. How will we find Ustath Rashid now, I wondered. Will he be sitting on the chair, or handcuffed on the floor, his cheeks crimson, a heroic drip of blood from one corner of his mouth? I thought of telling her about him, how he was sitting, as still as she was now, facing the camera, squinting against the light. And how when it came to Baba’s name he didn’t give in to the big man with the hairless head but said, ‘No.’ What heroic chords that word caused to resonate in my ears! It reminded me of a film that told the life of a group of African slaves in America. At one point the slaves threw down their tools, stood in silence and slowly, like a drum beaten to announce something dreadful, clapped their hands together in unison. Slaves clapping to their white masters, I thought, makes no sense. But when I looked behind me I saw Baba poised in admiration. Something in Ustath Rashid’s ‘No’ reminded me of that solemn standing ovation the slaves had given to their masters. As soon as the flowers came on Ustath Rashid was probably beaten, I was certain he was ‘taught a good lesson’, ‘his face spared’, as Moosa had said about those interrogated on television, but his body a ‘patchwork of bruises’. I was surprised the telephone hadn’t rung. At other times when we saw someone we knew interrogated several people would call to say: ‘Did you see? So-and-so was on television.’ I was certain that because it was aired during nap time, when under the full glare of the sun the whole world went to sleep, no one had seen it. Even Kareem and his mother probably missed it. I was probably the only one in the world who had seen it, I thought. I was suddenly thankful for the pink flowers and wished for them to stay until Ustath Rashid’s interrogation was over.

  ‘Call the bakery,’ she ordered. ‘When you get Majdi give him to me.’

  Sometimes when Mama was unwell or busy she got Majdi to deliver bread and, if we were alone, her medicine too. She called out his number and I dialled it. When Majdi answered, I said, ‘Just one moment, Mama wants to talk to you.’ He didn’t say a word. His silence seemed to know, as if he was expecting the call. I imagined his earnest face, his hand poking beneath the wide flour-sprinkled counter, looking about him before bringing out a bottle wrapped in black plastic.

  ‘Good evening,’ Mama said. ‘I need two loaves.’ There was plenty of bread in the kitchen, I knew this when I served Bahloul the food. ‘And, yes, one bottle.’ Her cheeks blushed. ‘No no. One will be enough,’ she said in an artificially formal tone.

  When Majdi arrived she sat him in the reception room because it’s impolite to just take what he had delivered from the door and leave it at that. He looked uncomfortable to be there. His blue jeans were dusted with flour, his hair made grey by it too. I remember thinking I couldn’t wait until I had grey hair, although I knew his wasn’t really grey, that when he showered all the flour would wash out to leave his hair black and ordinary. His hands clutched the armrests in a way that made me think of what Bahloul had said: ‘When the devil enters he clings to everything.’

  Barely a minute had passed when he stood up and said he had to go. Mama paid him and walked him to the door. She then went to the kitchen, the black form of her medicine bottle stood on the kitchen table. She threw an impatient glance at me. We sat in an uncomfortable silence. I began to tap my foot against the leg of the table. ‘Stop,’ she said. I felt as awkward with her now as I did when I had to keep a guest company in the reception room while she made tea. She lit a cigarette, and I went to my room.

  I lay in bed, curling myself beneath the sheet. Going to bed in the middle of the afternoon had always felt strange, but now it seemed right somehow. Outside, I heard her walk to her room, a liquid being poured into a glass, the familiar chinks of ice. I remembered the cigarette that was burning in her hand. Mama only smoked when she was ill and then she didn’t allow one cigarette to die before lighting the next. Sometimes she would forget and have two going at the same time, one in the ashtray, the other between her fingers. I was nervous she would fall asleep while smoking. Several times I had woken up in the night to make sure all the cigarette butts in the ashtray beside her were out, looking under the bed in case one had fallen there. That was one of the reasons why I couldn’t leave her side when she was ill. I heard her move around the house. I could tell she was bored. She often, during those empty days when Baba was away, walked aimlessly around the house. And she never sang to herself in that soft, absent-minded way she often did when taking a bath or painting her eyes in front of the mirror or drawing in the garden. That singing that had always evoked a girl unaware of herself, walking home from school, brushing her fingers against the wall: a moment before the Italian Coffee House, a moment sheltered in the clarity of innocence, before the quick force which, without argument, without even the chance to say, ‘No,’ thrust her over the border and into womanhood, then irrevocably into motherhood. I wanted so much to make her happy, as happy as she seemed when Baba was home. Except it wasn’t happiness that came over her then but something like confidence: she moved faster and sounded more self-assured. Could I ever come to inspire that in her, I wondered from beneath the bed sheet.

  I had faded into sleep and woke up disoriented, not knowing what time it was. The sky was dark, the world was silent. But still I felt a warm comfort at having napped for the first time. I must be becoming a man, I thought. I noticed an odd smell in the house, but the tide of sleep was strong, it pulled me and I drifted back into the warmth and magic of its certainty.

  A few hours later I woke up dying, horses galloping up my nostrils, down my throat. I jumped out of bed and opened the window. I did this in every room of the house, opening windows and doors without knowing why. She had left the gas on in the kitchen.

  When she woke up the following morning she couldn’t understand why I was so upset and kept repeating, ‘What’s this smell, did you leave the gas on in the kitchen, Slooma?’

  I slammed the door shut and locked myself in my room. From the way she spoke through the door it felt as if it really was another woman who had left the gas on to kill us.

  ‘Why are you upset at me? How do I know you are all right if you don’t speak?’

  My mouth was about to utter something, but I held it shut with my hand.

  ‘How do I know that you are not dead?’

  I covered my ears and shut my eyes.

  ‘OK,’ she came to say in the late morning. ‘At least come out for some food. It’s almost lunch time and you haven’t even had breakfast.’ When she walked away, I heard her say to herself, ‘What a strange boy.’ After a while she returned to ask, ‘What if your father comes home now, what will he say about us?’

  By noon she slipped a note beneath my door. It read:

  I, therefore, hope that my beloved son will honour me with his visit, and I am sending my vizier to make arrangements for the journey. My one and only desire is to see you before I die. If you refuse my request, I shall not survive t
he blow. May peace be with you!

  It wasn’t funny. I recognized the words. They weren’t hers, they were from a letter King Shahryar had sent, when his heart was ill with sadness and he believed he was going to die, to his brother King Shah Zaman. She just replaced the word ‘brother’ with ‘son’. I folded it twice and pushed it back beneath the door. After a few seconds I heard her pick it up.

  By the afternoon knives were stabbing at my stomach, and I was dying for a pee. I walked out and went straight into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I couldn’t hear her outside. I went to the kitchen, poured myself a huge glass of milk, grabbed a loaf of bread and went straight back to my room, leaving my door ajar. It was past four, nap time was over. Where was she?

  I went out on to the street to see if any of the boys were there. I found them all gathered around Adnan. Adnan was the only one who had been absent when Kareem and I had fought. If he had been there I might have behaved differently. I was certain that Osama, Masoud and Ali were now telling him their version of the story. Kareem was leaning on a car. When they saw me they stopped talking. Ali said hello and Masoud stared at him. They had all agreed, I thought, to ignore me. ‘Let’s go and see the school,’ Masoud told them. But it wasn’t a school day, it was summer. To my surprise they all followed him. I watched them walk away. Osama put his arm round Kareem, talking to him as they walked. Adnan walked beside them, listening to Osama. When they reached the end of the street and turned out of sight I began to follow, walking slowly, kicking a pebble, digging my fists into the pockets of my shorts. I turned after them and they were in view again. In the distance their figures looked closer together.

  When they reached the school gates they stopped. Just before I caught up with them Kareem shouted, ‘Last to Mulberry is a girl,’ and like a herd they came running towards me. When they were close I thought of getting out of the way, but I suspected they were trying to frighten me so I didn’t move. I closed my eyes and stood still, making myself as thin as possible, listening to their panting, feeling the wind from their speed brush past me. And I heard Kareem shout again, ‘Last to Mulberry is a girl,’ and I knew he meant me.

  Adnan had remained by the school gates, weak with illness. He was as old as Kareem but couldn’t run very far. He wasn’t allowed to eat any sweets, and if his skin was punctured he was in danger of losing all of his blood. He had to take two injections a day, and he gave them to himself. Once we convinced him to show us. ‘If you laugh I’ll slap each one of you,’ he warned before taking us into his bedroom. None of us had ever been inside his house before. He had books on his disease that occupied a whole shelf. He had a huge dictionary open on his desk with a perfectly sharpened yellow pencil in its fold. Without a doubt it was the biggest book I had ever seen. Small brown medicine bottles clustered together on his bedside table. Each bottle had his full name, Adnan el-Melhi, hand-written on its label. His room was spotless, and his bed was made so tightly I wondered if it was comfortable. He had an entire box of syringes in his desk drawer, and another with miniature yellow sponges in plastic envelopes. ‘These disinfect the skin,’ he explained.

  ‘Why?’ Ali asked.

  ‘What do you mean, why?’ Adnan snapped at him. ‘So that no germs enter me, of course.’

  We all crowded round him. He pulled down his trousers, rubbed his skin with the sponge, then without introduction drove the long needle deep into his buttock. None of us said a word. He pulled it out and pressed the small yellow sponge in its place. His buttock was dotted with brown bruises. We never wanted to see him do that again.

  I envied Adnan. His illness had earned him a peculiar sort of strength and gained him something none of us had: a private world that involved books and syringes. His room was like a little house, with things that belonged only to him. And although the bruises on his buttock made me thank the Healer for my well-being, I also prayed for a disease that would give me what Adnan had, that thing that made him seem older and more independent than any of us and led us all to silently seek his approval, the approval of the only one among us who, with his own life and literature of illness, seemed to need no one. This is why, if he had been present the day before, I probably wouldn’t have betrayed Kareem. Adnan had that sort of effect. The fact that he was closer to death aged him and gained him a higher moral authority. Like my heroine, Scheherazade, he, too, was living under the sword. And so the challenge – ‘Last to Mulberry is a girl’ – didn’t apply to him.

  Adnan placed his arm on my shoulder. I continued to stare at the empty school yard, our dark green flag draped under its own weight on the high pole. I remembered how we used to stand every morning in parallel lines under the weak winter sun, our school bags dense on our backs, screaming the national anthem to the lazy flag, competing with the scratchy music that blared out of the grey, cone-shaped speakers fixed to each corner of the yard, high enough so none of us, even if piled on another’s shoulders, could reach them. Some mornings I stood so erect, tightening my fists and flexing my back, feeling tears sting my eyes as I sang our national anthem so loudly I had to spend the rest of the day trying to swallow the sore left in my throat. Other mornings I stood half asleep, miming the words, trying to hide my yawns under the cacophony.

  Adnan pulled at my sleeve and together we walked back to our street. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was trying to comfort me. We could see the boys gathered by the entrance of our street, panting. Osama, who always won these races, leaned against the lump of stone that had the name ‘Mulberry’ written on it. Ali was standing beside his brother, looking unhappy. He always came last, he must have been whacked on the head by everyone and called a girl. They were all looking down our street at something Adnan and I couldn’t see. When we reached them I whacked Ali on the head and called him a girl. I had no right, I hadn’t taken part in the race. Still, I wasn’t satisfied so I whacked him again and called him a girl three times. He tried to hit me, but it was easy to hold him off with one arm. Adnan pulled me to one side and with his shoulder nudged me away. When we were out of earshot he said, ‘Is your father home?’ Adnan rarely asked me a question, I couldn’t help but feel flattered.

  ‘He’s on a business trip,’ I said.

  He looked ahead and said, almost to himself, ‘That’s lucky,’ and walked on, his step much livelier than usual.

  Beyond him I saw the same white car that had taken Ustath Rashid. This time it was parked in front of our house. ‘That’s the same car …’ I heard one of the boys say from behind. I wondered what Kareem was thinking. I expected him to rush beside me, take hold of my arm and say, ‘Now we are one, brother.’ Adnan walked past the white car, looking only at the ground, pushed the garden gate to his house open and let it swing shut behind him. I could see only one head in the car. I looked back. All the boys were gone except for Kareem. He stood still, looking at me. I wanted to run to him, but turned instead towards the car and began walking forward. I tried to think of Scheherazade, her bravery, but no matter how hard I tried I kept hearing Mama’s words: ‘You should find yourself another model. Scheherazade accepted slavery over death.’ I thought of Sinbad, but I never liked him because he was a thief. I thought of the slaves clapping in unison, but they had each other, one person clapping wouldn’t do; besides, hadn’t they also accepted slavery over death? I was close now to the car. The man spotted me in his side mirror. When I reached his window and saw his face I froze. I remembered him. He was the one with the old woman’s voice who had stood in the doorway of the sitting room, blocking the way, looking down at me sitting on the floor beside the tray of food, shaking my head and waving my hand close to my chest as if to say, ‘It’s not me, I swear, it’s not me,’ the one who had slapped Ustath Rashid, the one who had followed Mama and me from Martyrs’ Square. His skin was etched with small holes, like tiny chisel marks. His eyes were narrow and the white in them dull. His lips were dark, as if they were painted with blue dye. He could have been eating mulberries or drinking blood. Tight curls
formed a helmet on his head. He smiled at me.

  ‘Suleiman,’ he said lazily, as if my name was chewing gum in his mouth. ‘We meet at last.’

  I couldn’t stop looking into his eyes, a strange force within them seemed to be pulling me. I thought of the flames of Hell Eternal licking the sides of the Bridge to Paradise, how they will seem like a familiar voice to the unfaithful who will turn towards them the way you can’t help but turn when you hear your name called, because, as Sheikh Mustafa said, ‘Fear enters the hearts of only those who have a cause to fear.’ ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  He placed his palm against his chest and said, ‘My name is Sharief. I am a friend of your father.’ I knew he was lying. ‘You don’t remember me?’

  ‘You searched our house.’

  ‘Yes. I needed to ask him an important question.’ He faced forward and smiled to himself. He almost looked embarrassed. ‘I suppose I was in a bit of a hurry.’

  ‘So you weren’t going to take him away like you did Ustath Rashid?’

  ‘Ustath who?’

  I pointed at Kareem’s house. ‘I saw you.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said as if it was something he had just remembered, then laughed. ‘No, no, no. Your father is not like that. He’s a good friend of mine. We have known each other for years, like brothers really. In fact, it was he who sent me to see you. I had heard so much about you, Slooma.’

  I knew he was lying, but how did he know my nick-name? I remembered the way he had pushed Mama’s medicine bottle against her stomach. He knew our secret, I thought, knew it and chose to keep quiet. ‘Is Ustath Rashid a traitor?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said without hesitation.

  ‘And Baba, is he …’

  ‘That’s why I am here. I am trying to defend him, but I need evidence.’ The word ‘evidence,’ so full of needles.

  ‘Is that what you wanted to search for?’