In the Country of Men

by Hisham Matar

  Medicine became my profession. I am now a pharmacist. A concoctor of remedies. My relationship to illness is purely formulaic. I stand in a white coat most of my days, behind a counter in an air-conditioned pharmacy in Cairo. It’s a bit of a joke. After all the hopes of becoming an art historian like Ustath Rashid, a highflying businessman like my father, a pianist, I became a pharmacist in a city where it is nearly impossible to look down any of its streets without spotting at least one pharmacy’s flashing sign of a serpent coiling up a Martini glass. I am fully aware of how even this choice was influenced by her, what she called her ‘illness’ and ‘medicine’, the colourless liquid supplied under the counter by the baker, still illegal in Libya. At times I wonder what Majdi the baker thinks of her now.

  I suffer an absence, an ever-present absence, like an orphan not entirely certain of what he has missed or gained through his unchosen loss. I am both repulsed and surprised, for example, by my exaggerated sentiment when parting with people I am not intimate with, promising impossible reunions. Egypt has not replaced Libya. Instead, there is this void, this emptiness I am trying to get at like someone frightened of the dark, searching for a match to strike. I see it in others, this emptiness. My expression shifts constantly, like that of the prostitute who waits in your car while you run across a busy road to buy a new pack of cigarettes for the night. When you walk back, ripping the cellophane, before she has time to see you, you catch sight of her, temporarily settled in another role as a sister or a wife or a friend. How readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves, deceiving the world and what we might have become if only we hadn’t got in the way, if only we had waited to see what might have become of us.

  24

  She sometimes telephones to describe a meal she has cooked for her brothers and sister and ageing parents. After Baba denounced his political convictions, or had them denounced in him, the relatives showed their approval by visiting my parents again. In fact, Mama has become the family darling, successfully matching some of my endless cousins, whose names I have never tried to remember, with suitable spouses. ‘The food was so delicious,’ she would say, ‘it deserved your mouth,’ and I would hear myself thinking, how could you possibly know what my mouth deserves?

  After it became clear that the road out of Libya rarely leads back without humiliation, she began to regret sending me away, began telling me about Osama, Masoud and his brother Ali, Adnan, Kareem, that although, yes, they had to do their military service, ‘God was gracious enough’ to end the war in time so none of them were sent to Chad. I reacted calmly to such repentance, but did feel the clasp of anger round my neck. ‘It was the best thing you ever did, sending me away,’ I would say, knowing full well that the line was tapped, that my words would be diligently recorded in my file, along with the eavesdropper’s comments, perhaps scribbled along the margin, kept for eternity.

  I hated how her confidence plummeted with time, how she reflected on the past and hunched in front of it in regret. I wanted her certainty back, even that ruthless, steely certainty that made her send me away against her husband’s reservations and her only son’s plea.

  In 1979, a few days after I was sent to Cairo, the entire Libyan population was given three days to deposit liquid assets into the National Bank. The national currency had been redesigned, they were told, to celebrate the revolution’s tenth anniversary. People deposited pockets of coins and others suitcases of notes and some a truck full of money only to be told afterwards that individual bank withdrawals would be limited to one thousand dinars annually. My parents were badly affected by this, their monthly output alone was in excess of that amount. The following year, private savings accounts, which is effectively what most accounts had become, were eliminated, and my parents watched their money vanish ‘like salt in water’. This meant that even when they were allowed to, during the first years of my stay in Cairo, my parents couldn’t afford to visit; and, more crucially, the cost of my education and living couldn’t be met and therefore had to be endured in total by Judge Yaseen, who was amiable about the whole thing. ‘You and I are one, man. Suleiman is like my own,’ he said to my father over the telephone.

  Father was left with no choice but to seek employment. He got a job as ‘machine operator’ in one of the nationalized factories. It was a pasta factory. Both he and Mother seemed to treat this as a novelty in the beginning, and I was encouraged by their high spirits, and smiled too when I received a bag of pasta with his beautiful handwriting on the plastic packing: ‘A souvenir,’ then in brackets, ‘My machine seals the packing.’ I admired how well he seemed to accept this mean fate. He seemed to find some pleasure in it, liked the hours, Mother said, the early start and the noon end. She said he had started translating a book from the Italian.

  ‘Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio,’ he told me proudly, clearly enjoying the ‘r’s and the ‘o’s. ‘Only Principe and Dell’arte della guerra,’ he went on, ‘exist in acceptable Arabic translations. But I feel Discorsi sets the record straight about this misunderstood philosopher. He wrote it eighteen years after Principe. He was sixty-two, so much wiser, and didn’t have the Medici breathing down his neck.’ He paused, I could hear her voice in the background. ‘Your mother has no idea what I am talking about,’ he said, the smile clear in his voice. I could hear her laughing. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘helps keep the Italian alive.’

  But recently, fifteen years from when I was sent away, in May of this year, 1994, Baba was arrested. There was confusion at first; rumours of embezzlement had surfaced. How embezzlement could be possible from the position of machine operator I’ll never know. Then the truth emerged. After fifteen years of being a machine operator in the packing department of a pasta factory, Baba decided to take his book with him one day and read from it to his fellow factory workers, not Discorsi, but Democracy Now, the book I had rescued from the fire. Mother was furious.

  ‘How could he have done such a thing?’ she said over the telephone. ‘Has your father forgotten what kind of country we live in? And where did he find this book? Didn’t we burn it?’

  I knew it was best to say nothing, but the temptation to inform our eavesdropper was too great. ‘I saved it,’ I said. After a vacuous silence she yelled, like a child pleading, ‘Why? Slooma, why?’ and I, fully aware that the telephone line was tapped, that what we were having was a three-way conversation with the third party silent, said, ‘It’s my book, I am to blame, Baba never believed in such ideas,’ knowing that such words rescue no one but only implicate.

  There was indeed an element of intrigue and madness in the way Father had behaved. He, more than most, must have known that ‘walls have ears’, that informing on your fellow citizens is Libya’s national sport, that the Medici were breathing down all necks. Had he, at the young age of forty-eight, gone senile? Had he managed to delude himself that he could still change things? Had he come to prefer death over slavery, unlike my Scheherazade, refusing to live under the sword?

  I began to get telephone calls from her brothers, the ‘High Council’, urging me to return, promising I would be spared the Evader’s prison sentence, that they would see to it that ‘friends in high places’ would doctor my file, cross out the words ‘Stray Dog’. I began to consider this, consider it seriously. Particularly because Mother began to sound depressed, recalling all the missed opportunities: the education and careers she might have had. Loneliness seemed to remind her of all the things she had missed. Then once I telephoned and got that old voice, altered, her words lagging behind, that same nervous giggle that was somewhere between laughter and crying. I felt the room turn round me. I hung up. When she called back the following morning and I heard her voice, anxious, genuinely confused, I hung up again. The messages, the countless messages she left I erased without listening to their content. She didn’t go as far as calling Judge Yaseen, or asking one of her brothers or her father to call me.

  Then the most extraordinary thing happened. I rece
ived a letter from Kareem. The stamp told me that it was from Libya. It seemed a cruel intrusion into the life I was making in Cairo, where I was handsome and independent enough to be surrounded by all the illusions of immortality, a desire very similar to wanting to be free of the past. The delicate, nervous handwriting, the letters modestly inverted, scratched with a consistently needle-sharp pencil, no doubt rhythmically turned in the fingers with an obsessive diligence for evenness and consistency, made me long for my childhood friend.

  Dear Suleiman,

  For a long time your mother refused to give me your address. She offered several reasons, none of them convincing. Once she said that the judge didn’t allow you to receive letters. ‘Give it to me anyway,’ I said, ‘I won’t write, I’ll visit instead.’ ‘Stop pestering me, Kareem, I don’t want you to distract him,’ she said. So I stopped asking after that and was content only with hearing from her that you are well. I miss you, dear friend. And now I am sorry that when I have finally managed to write it’s to inform you of news that fills my heart with sorrow.

  Your mother is unwell. She has not left your house for weeks. I visit her – don’t worry, what’s missing from her life is only to see you, I am making sure she needs for nothing. Stacked on her bedside table are sealed envelopes addressed to you. At first she would hide them from me, but lately she has been so unwell. Sometimes she can’t even recognize me, thinks I am you. I took the opportunity and copied your address. I hope this reaches you. I hope that it finds you well. I hope you still remember me.

  In this country we don’t understand the illnesses of the heart. What I tell her, no matter how sweet, I am sure tastes as bland as cotton wool. She needs you. Call her soon. Your friend and brother,

  Kareem

  I wanted to know his news, what had become of him and the rest of the boys. I wanted to know if he still remembered my betrayal. I had heard from Mama that Kareem and Auntie Salma, afraid of losing their house after Qaddafi decreed that anyone had the right to claim a vacant property as their own, had returned from Benghazi to Mulberry Street. Other than this I knew nothing of what Kareem’s life was like. I detested how she and her past, how her ‘illness’ injected the world with so much urgency that not even my childhood friend and I had time to reminisce. And so even this letter, with its careful and delicate handwriting, that had come through against her will, I refused to respond to.

  Then, on the first of September, an ‘amnesty’ was announced in commemoration of the revolution that had originally placed the now pardoned behind bars. Father was a beneficiary of this warped mercy, and Mother returned to her sober self, busy again with her duties, with the marriage she had resisted and now could not live without. He remained at home and would sometimes telephone me, saying, ‘I just wanted to hear your voice,’ and so I talked for long stretches of time to satisfy this desire. When he handed the receiver to her I noticed a peculiar aloofness enter my voice. She tried, always, to break the distance, to bring me back, to have me speak with love.

  One month after his release, and, cruelly, a few days after the ban on Libyans travelling abroad had been lifted – making me at once jubilant and nervous at the thought of seeing them again – my father died.

  It has been forty days now. Today the mourners, according to Libyan custom, can remove their black clothes, play music, whistle and sing to themselves as they paint their eyes in the mirror.

  He died two deaths, both existing simultaneously in my heart. The first was according to my mother.

  ‘Heart attack, in the night, during sleep,’ she said, and, to comfort me, added, ‘He died painlessly,’ whatever that means.

  I could hear in the background the piercing voice of Sheikh Mustafa, the house full of mourners. I didn’t ask if she was beside him when it happened, or if his snoring had driven her to the sofa. I didn’t ask what were his last words. Nothing seemed to matter. He was dead.

  Then she seemed distracted. She wanted to get off the telephone, attend to the countless people who had come to offer their commiseration. ‘Everything is fine,’ she said hastily. ‘Don’t worry, habibi. We’ll speak more later, OK?’

  How silly it is to still be the boy away, the one who interrupts the movement of life, and who always needs to be kept up with the news, actively included.

  ‘Siham,’ she called. ‘You remember Siham, Nasser’s sister? Here, she wants to speak to you,’ and Siham’s voice came on, shy, excited, intrigued.

  ‘Suleiman? Hi, how are you, do you remember me?’

  ‘Yes … Of course,’ I said, astonished at how vividly I could recall her chestnut hair, her soft virgin lips, and confused also by the heat that was, after all of these years, blushing my cheeks. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I am engaged,’ she said happily.

  I was relieved she didn’t utter the usual platitudes, hoping that God would compensate me for my loss. I didn’t want to ask about her old father, I was sure he was either dead or dying. ‘How’s Nasser?’

  ‘He’s very well, very well,’ she said excitedly. That mysterious melancholy she had as a child seemed to have been replaced with a lightness, a sparkling keen curiosity. ‘In India,’ she said, relishing the novelty.

  ‘India?’ I said, unable to conceal that amazement felt by Libyans living abroad when they hear that a compatriot has managed to pass through the gate, been miraculously exempt from the endless restrictions and decrees, feeling both a sense of triumph, in knowing that there still exists a thread connecting their country to the rest of the world, and jealousy, at not being permitted to return. ‘What is he doing there?’

  ‘He’s Cultural Attaché at our embassy,’ she said proudly.

  Nasser must have been forgiven. No doubt a beneficiary of one of the arbitrary amnesties. Once labelled a ‘Conspirator’ and ‘Traitor’, he had become a leading member of the diplomatic community, installed in ‘our embassy’ in one of the most illustrious countries in the world. Will he be our Octavio Paz, I wondered.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Wonderful news.’ Then, after an awkward pause, ‘Will you be visiting him?’

  ‘Perhaps for the honeymoon,’ she said, laughing to someone beside her.

  ‘Who’s the lucky groom?’

  ‘Well, I won’t tell you,’ she said, teasingly. For a moment I had the absurd thought that it might be me, that Mother, with her new talent for matchmaking, had fixed it all up. ‘You know him very well,’ she said. ‘Here, he wants to talk to you. And, oh, Suleiman, I am very sorry about your father. He was such a lovely man. We have all lost a father.’

  ‘Hello? Suleiman?’ a deep male voice said. ‘You can’t recognize me? He can’t recognize me,’ he said again to Siham. ‘It’s me, Kareem.’

  It seemed I had lost my voice. Was I overcome with joy or grief? Ridiculous to feel either.

  ‘I wrote to you. Did you not get my letter?’

  From these distances only blame and regret seem possible.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, and immediately felt the need to repeat my apology.

  ‘May God compensate you and have mercy on Ustath Faraj,’ he said, and I could tell from the feeling in his voice that he meant it.

  I said nothing, couldn’t bring myself to say the same about his father. I felt deep gratitude and searing envy. He was there in all the ways I couldn’t be. Who knows what might have become of me, of Baba, of Siham, if I’d still been there? I imagined the new couple, strolling down a beach, perhaps in Goa, perhaps in Tripoli. Then I pictured them older, living on Mulberry Street, busy with children, because children change everything, reinvent life and make black days rosy, or at least that’s what I have heard people say. I doubt I will ever find out. I wanted to congratulate him, wish him a happy and prosperous life with his bride, but I felt impotent somehow. Is this some divine joke, I thought, having her marry my childhood friend; couldn’t you have had her marry someone else? But it made sense, of course: Siham’s brother was a friend of Kareem’s father. My mother might have orchestrated the matc
h, who knows? Perhaps Father did too, perhaps he looked after the orphaned Kareem as his own; taking care of Kareem as Judge Yaseen had taken care of me; perhaps the world is fair and balanced after all; no one gains and no one loses, or no one gains and everyone loses equally. I could see my father shaking the hand of his old clerk, the Cultural Attaché, to read the Fateha, to bless and seal the engagement. I could have given her a better life, away from the country that everyone wishes to escape. But the waters have returned and washed away the blood; everybody was getting on with their lives, busy forgetting, willing to forgive.

  ‘How’s Cairo?’

  ‘Cairo’s fine,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘Yes. Cairo is fine, I am fine.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, his voice withdrawing. ‘Perhaps we’ll come and visit you one of these days.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Siham loves Cairo from all the films.’

  ‘Yes. I would like that, I would like it very much, Kareem.’

  Soon after I learned that my mother had lied. Father did die of a heart attack, but it had happened during lunch, while sipping his soup – this is the second death – at that same breakfast table in our kitchen and not ‘painlessly’. He kicked as furiously as Ustath Rashid’s legs did above the National Basketball Stadium, clawing at the table, without me, without my hands, my now grown-up arms, strong enough to lift him, to press him to my chest, to say all the meagre things people say at such moments. I heard the truth of it from Uncle Khaled, the poet. Returning from the funeral, he had stopped over in Cairo before heading back to America. We had met like this before, always briefly, in transit. I sense he blames me for leaving, for abandoning my parents, but it’s a sign of madness, I know, to claim to know what is in another man’s heart. I never told him that it was his sister who had sent me away, because I knew what he would say, ‘But you have had many chances since to return,’ and he would be right. And so I am wary of him.