by Hisham Matar
I heard his violent and useless splashes. I let go of my flippers and rushed to the end of the pier. I extended my hand to him. I wanted to save him – and he knew it too – he tried to slap his way towards me. He was swallowing water. His jallabia ballooned around him and hindered his efforts. I remembered Mama’s warning about diving in to save a drowning person. ‘Never do it,’ she said. ‘A drowning person is so hungry for life they can easily take you down with them.’ I reached as far as I could, but Bahloul was sinking. When I gave up trying to save him a surge of power came over him. He kicked and slapped the water until he managed to grab hold of one of the pier’s legs. I extended my hand but he spat at it, looking around as if expecting someone else to save him. But there was no one, no one but me. Without deciding to I found myself pushing him down with my foot. His knotted hair felt coarse and soggy. He tried to defend himself by grabbing my ankle. This angered me even more. In trying to release my ankle I kicked him in the face. Blood gushed out of his nose into the water. Salty sea water is good for a wound, I knew this well. He began to scream that horse-like scream of his, louder than ever now. I pushed him down again to silence him. Suddenly, without warning, his resistance sank away. I pulled my leg out of the water. After a silence that seemed to last for ever, Bahloul sprang up again, coughing and vomiting, dirtying the clear water. He took hold of the pier’s column again. He looked at me with a mixture of fear and outrage.
‘How’s your nose?’ I asked.
But he didn’t speak, hugging the column and keeping it between us.
I thought of saying sorry, but I collected my flippers and walked away. My heart had never ached with more longing, longing for my true friend, twelve hours away now in Benghazi.
22
The days that followed seemed muffled by dread. Anything that was said in them seemed meaningless and empty. I often felt a quiet anger rise in me, and heard the door slam behind me when I only meant to close it. The first few times this happened I went to where Mama and Baba were and looked at them, expecting one of them to tell me off, but neither did. When I helped Mama set the dining table I let the plates fall loudly. And I often threw my shoe at the wall when its lace refused to become untangled. I sensed a silent, nervous wave ripple around these sudden outbursts, making me feel that my influence in this world might not be as insignificant as I had thought. And sometimes, when I was in the bathroom and had flushed the toilet, I heard, in the hiss of the cistern filling up, Mama’s voice calling me. The first few times this happened I would walk out in an anxious hurry, yelling, ‘Mama?’ the silence seeming endless before I got her voice asking, ‘Yes, is anything the matter?’
Moosa didn’t visit. Once he called, the line crackling, ‘Slooma,’ I heard him say, then, ‘Where’s Mama?’ It wasn’t like him to be so brief. Mama rushed to the telephone, then snapped her fingers and pointed at the pen and pad. I handed them to her. She wrote something down quickly, asking, ‘Is it a good school? Are you sure?’ Then they were cut off.
One exceptionally warm night I woke up from a bad dream. There was no story, just a deep trembling dread hot in my chest. I saw a soft light coming from the sitting room. I couldn’t hear Baba snoring. Mama was spread on the sofa, the covers were off, the window beside her wide open. A cricket outside was piercing the night. There was no room to lie beside her. I stood for a moment, considering my options, then I lay on top of her. I hugged her. She woke up with a sudden jolt. ‘In the name of God,’ she mumbled quickly, her hand against her chest, her eyes squinting at me. ‘Suleiman? What are you doing here? Did you have a bad dream?’ She took me by the hand back to my room, turned on the beside lamp, kissed me on the forehead and left.
She never fell ill. She never came to my bed to whisper her secret stories of the past. She seemed quite happy with Baba. Some mornings I even heard them giggle together, but when they saw me they stopped. Their new life together, where Baba never went away and Mama was never ill, distanced me from them, and I began, for the first time ever, to long for the summer to end and for school to begin.
One night I was awakened by the sound of a strange moan. I went to their room and saw Baba on top of her again. But this time it was different. Mama didn’t lie beneath helpless, her face turned away, with one hand secretly stretched beside her and open towards the sky. Her eyes were glued to his and her legs curled round him, and the moan wasn’t his alone; they both shared the pain, it seemed. I didn’t wonder this time whether I should intervene. Nothing, it seemed, could stop them. I wanted to take a step further into the room. Maybe if they see me they will stop, I wondered. I wanted them to stop, or pause for a moment.
I ran out through the kitchen, slamming the door behind me, and up to the roof, hiding where my workshop was. The sky was full of stars, I saw them blur beyond my tears, but there was no moon. I am safe, I thought, they wouldn’t be able to see me even if they came up here. I waited, breathing as quietly as I could, hugging my knees and the salty smell of their skin. I recalled Sheikh Mustafa’s words: ‘These bodies are our vehicle, they will perish while we will continue.’ I expected Baba, half naked, his waist wrapped in a towel, to climb up to the roof, angrily calling out my name, followed by Mama, begging him not to hurt me. But no one came. I dried my face and went back. Suddenly the darkness frightened me, and I ran, ran expecting a hand to reach out and grab me round the neck. I sneaked into the kitchen and tiptoed to my room. Their light was still on, they were awake, talking, discussing something in whispers that Mama in particular was barely able to keep down, not angry, but urgent, excited almost. I slammed my bedroom door behind me.
After a few minutes Mama came in and watched me in the faint light that came from their room. I looked straight back at her, not pretending to be asleep, not pretending anything. She closed the door behind her and went back to Baba. I heard them resume their whispered conversation.
The following morning I felt Mama’s weight sink beside me on the bed, then her fingers in my hair. ‘You are going on a trip,’ she said, ‘to Cairo, to visit Moosa and his family and see the Pyramids.’
‘But Moosa is here,’ I said, my voice made older by sleep.
‘He left a couple of weeks ago. He said to tell you he can’t wait to see you in Cairo.’
I turned away from her.
‘What’s the matter, don’t you want to see the Pyramids? They are much bigger than Lepcis.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ I cried.
Baba came and hugged me. ‘Come, Slooma,’ he said.
‘Many people would die to see the Pyramids,’ Mama said.
‘I don’t want the Pyramids.’
‘You always wanted to fly though, didn’t you?’ Baba said.
I nodded. ‘But school starts soon.’
They both looked at each other and, as if considering carefully what he was going to say, Baba said, ‘You will love Cairo,’ his voice cut by grief.
23
They drove me to the airport, arguing about which way to go: Baba wanting to take the direct route, Mama insisting we go via Martyrs’ Square. There was something she wanted to buy from there, she said. I was made to sit beside him, she sat in the back. The only time we had sat like this was four years before, when I was five, when they had driven me back from hospital. I had been wearing a white jallabia, the part in front of my groin stained blue-red with iodine. I kept my legs open to relieve the pain, sitting in the front, where there was more leg room, Mama behind, clapping, singing the usual songs. I remembered how I had trembled from the shock, from the violation.
Martyrs’ Square was thick with people. The sun as wide as the world. Baba parked beside the square.
‘I won’t be a minute,’ Mama said, crossed the square and disappeared.
Baba’s hands were clutched round the steering wheel. He had turned the engine off, but the indicator was still ticking. He stared blankly ahead.
I watched the square, thinking about Nasser. I recalled what his father had said in our house: ‘People
told me they saw a young man run across the square with a typewriter under his arm, chased by a group of Revolutionary Committee men.’ I pictured him with his typewriter, black and shiny, the same one he had under his arm when I spotted him following Baba into their ‘headquarters’, their secret location on the square, running barefoot, his eyes wide open with fear, his shirt full of air, for a moment hesitating – ‘This way? No, that?’ – before turning into the market, hoping to vanish amid the crowds, when one of his pursuers catches him by the shirt, causing him to turn so fast and the typewriter to fly to one side, the same typewriter on which he had tried, at Baba’s request, to teach me how to type, his hands above his head now in anticipation, like Ustath Rashid just before he was kicked in the behind – I think now that perhaps anticipation is the root, the source, of all misfortune – screaming like a horse, the way Bahloul the beggar had done, falling to the ground, the rest of his pursuers catching up with him, kicking him with authority, he is yelling now, calling out for his father to come and rescue him because it was all too much too soon, begging, crying, at one moment his face becomes visible through the forest of legs, a line of blood above one eye, the lower lip as fat as a baby aubergine like Baba’s was. Why did we have so much respect for the sight of blood? Why is the sun so unforgiving? ‘Where is Nasser?’ I asked out loud. Baba seemed to wake up from his thoughts. ‘Where is Nasser?’ I yelled at him. ‘Did they kill him too?’ He stared at me, his eyes frightened. I thought of clapping my hands in front of him, but instead dived into him. His body yielded. He held me, folded on to me. I remembered Ustath Rashid holding Kareem like this on the bus back from Lepcis, beautiful Lepcis. ‘I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to see the Pyramids,’ I tried to say, but my voice was muffled by his clothes.
Then I heard the back door open, Mama’s weight nudge the car. She waited in silence, not asking, ‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ Then she said, ‘Let’s go,’ and with that Baba and I came apart. He turned on the engine. It was a pleasant sound, a regular, comforting hum governed by tempered revolutions. He flicked the indicator in the opposite direction and pulled out. As he took the straight road it flicked obediently off. I looked back at Mama, she had a bag full of sesame sticks in her lap, sunglasses covering her eyes.
The airport was empty. I felt as nervous as I had on the first day of school. Orange plastic chairs lined up in rows like boy scouts across the dark marbled floor. I only noticed she didn’t have a bag with her when Baba was lifting my heavy suitcase on to the check-in conveyor belt and I remembered that she had said, ‘You are going on a trip.’ ‘You’, not ‘we’. I told myself off for not noticing this detail before, before when I could have clung to the door frame, the garden gate, could have run to the sea.
Baba was now busy talking to a woman dressed in a uniform. She had a brooch in the form of a wing fastened to her lapel. He pointed his finger at her, then placed money in her hand. She nodded, touched him on the arm and walked away, smiling the whole time. Then he dug his hands under my arms and lifted me into his embrace.
‘We will come and see you,’ he said, squeezing me too tightly.
Mama, standing behind him, had one hand over her mouth, her eyes concealed behind the black sunglasses. ‘You’ll be home soon,’ she said, nodding as if to reassure herself.
‘Please don’t cry, Slooma,’ Baba said.
Then I was taken by the stewardess, who seemed to know everything. I looked back and saw Mama in Baba’s arms. There they were, the two people I loved the most, the two people I was certain would do anything to keep the truth from me, huddled together in the empty airport, disappearing. Is this the time to wave? But I could no longer see them. In every direction I turned they weren’t there.
The truth couldn’t be kept away, it was cunning, sly-natured, seeping through at its own indifferent pace, only astonishing in how familiar, how known it has always been. I had known I was going to be sent alone to Cairo, that the name of the school she had written down, telephone receiver held between ear and shoulder, was of my future school, knew it before I noticed she had not brought a bag to the airport, knew it when I cried, ‘I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to see the Pyramids,’ into Baba’s belly while Mama was buying the sesame sticks meant to sweeten my mouth, cover the bitter taste, cheat me out of my grief. I knew it and didn’t run to the sea. And when I was finally brought to my seat inside the aeroplane, the aeroplane I had up to that moment fantasized about entering with my father, both men, both dressed in suits, busy with the world, heavy as all men are, I knew that I would never see my father again, that he would die while I was installed alone in a foreign country to thrive away from the madness.
The boom and thunder of the plane taking off frightened me before I looked around and saw how calm all the other passengers were. The hostess who had taken me from Mama and brought me to my seat, into whose delicate hand Baba had stuffed a bundle of tightly folded dinars, kept smiling at me and bringing me sweets with aeroplanes on their wrapping. The clouds were cotton, the blue tremendous, the world below the page of an atlas alive with worm-like cars, silent windows reflecting the light. Libya was coastline, on one side the relentless yellow desert stretching into Africa, on the other the foam-sprinkled and curling royal blue of my childhood-Mediterranean.
When we landed in Cairo International Airport my hostess took me by the hand. The ladies that worked in the duty-free shops gathered round me, kissed me, then wiped their lipstick off my cheeks. Each smelled different, none like Mama. I filled my pockets with more aeroplane-wrapped sweets. My heart leaped when I saw Moosa, his head above the crowd, his arms waving in a half-moon. I hugged him and had to restrain myself from asking to be sent back. He shook hands with my hostess, bowing shyly. She kissed me goodbye. ‘When will he be flying back?’ she asked. Moosa hesitated, then said, ‘Soon, God willing.’
Cairo was green, crowded, busy with farmers’ turbans and women in short French dresses. An endless labyrinth stitched with cars, the wide eyes of nervous donkeys and the cry of street pedlars: clamorous, restless and darkly jubilant. I immediately liked the city. Moosa knew it well, told me stories all the way from the airport about the different neighbourhoods we passed, stopped at the famous decline at Muqattam Mountain, put the car into neutral, and I was amazed how it kept ascending. It was the only place in the world, he said, where things are pulled upwards by gravity. He then stopped at a fruit-juice stand and bought me a huge glass of sugarcane juice.
Judge Yaseen took immediate command of my affairs. And shortly after my arrival Moosa got a job in one of the new quarries that furrowed the Egyptian desert for gravel and sand. The job seemed to suit him: stone, big tractors, jeeps, the monumental scale of the land. It also helped keep him away from his father’s grip. Every few weeks he would come home for a week’s rest, his hair dusty, his hands parched, his neck bronzed by the sun, and be met by Judge Yaseen’s disappointed gaze, mournful that instead of following in his footsteps his eldest son was squandering his time as a quarry foreman.
My life was spent mostly with his parents. His father, the solemn judge, liked how obsessive I was about my studies and so spared no expense or effort in supporting me. He was kind, generous and often reminisced about his days in Libya. I guessed he was trying to compliment me. But Libya grew distant in the background, began to mean little. All that tied me to it were the increasingly sparse telephone calls with my parents. My accent had quickly become Caireen, and I stopped trying to adjust it when calling home. Baba, in particular, disliked this. ‘You have become a foul-eater.’
I had integrated rather smoothly into my new Egyptian existence. My young age and the judge helped make this possible. His wide circle of friends and associates became mine, and those old moist-lipped Egyptian judges that used to meet on his balcony in Tripoli, all those years ago, close to our house, in the neighbourhood the judge liked to call Gorgi Populi, regarded me with particular affection. Doors, in a country full of closed doors, opened effor
tlessly, easing my progress and my definition of myself.
What was astonishing is how free I came to feel from Libya. If one of my friends teased me about my ‘Bedouin origins’ or about our ineffective football team, I smiled only to please them, but truly felt nothing, none of the fervour that had once caused me to cry, after six hours of watching a chess match in which a Libyan had lost to a Korean at the International Chess Championship in Moscow. Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that’s why many feel it must be anxiously guarded. I neither sought nor avoided the Libyans who lived in Cairo. This even when I knew that the embassy had a file on me. I was down as an ‘Evader’ because I had not returned for military service. Then, when I became too old to be militarized but was still too young to be forgiven, another decree meant that if I were to return I would serve the same period in prison. And like all Libyans who don’t return, the shadow of suspicion fell firmly on me, strengthened further by yet another decree, issued when I was fourteen, promising that all ‘Stray Dogs’ who refused to return would be hunted down. These decrees got ever more desperate. The government’s next move was to refuse my parents a visa to leave the country, holding them hostage, as it were, until the evading Stray Dog returned.
Why does our country long for us so savagely? What could we possibly give her that hasn’t already been taken?
I yearned for them, my room, my workshop on the roof, the sea, Kareem. What I missed most was the smell of our house. Once, but only once, when I was still a boy, I cried and screamed, throwing things as I had done before to stop Baba going on one of his endless business trips. Judge Yaseen reacted nobly. He simply shut the door to the room that he had given me in his house, then later sent the maidservant in with a cold glass of sugarcane juice. I buried my face into the sharp lavender smell of the pillow, mourning the familiar: digging my face into her neck, kissing his hand.
