My Friends

by Hisham Matar

No one is more capable of falsities nor as requiring of them than those who wish never to part ways.

“We are in a tide,” he had said back in the passionate days of the Arab Spring, when he was trying to convince me to return to Benghazi with him, “in it and of it. As foolish to think we are free of history as it would be of gravity.”

Anyway, he seems already gone, already elsewhere, entranced by the plans he has made for himself, “To finally commit to the particulars,” as he put it last night as we ate in my kitchen, sitting at the small table by the window overlooking what once was his garden and those of the neighbors.

He does not appear to see me, continues on his way. Or perhaps he did see me and the blankness in his eyes is the blankness we all carry deep within us toward those we love.

He was obsessed with the political history of the Arab World, with a focus on the rise of nationalism, what he liked to describe as “the colonizers’ parting gift.” He conducted his research in the dark, in his spare time, never publishing a word of it. This policy turned his vocation into a hobby and a refuge.

I saw my father back then as a man living in the belief that the world does not require him. I sometimes accused him not so much of a lack of courage but worse: a lack of faith.

“Children,” he said, “your mother is a radical. A very beautiful radical, but a radical nonetheless.”

I have often pictured him, as he walked these same streets I am walking now, as someone, like me, moving forward while looking back, liable at any moment to crash into something.

That feature, I imagined, would not exist in the man who would have survived.

“When I’m old and everything is done,” he once told me in Edinburgh, “I want to speak only about three things: ideas, food, and dreams.”

Strange, I thought, that we both should feel the need to prove our commitment, given that no one could tell who we were and therefore no one could blame us for turning up late or accuse us of half-heartedness. Our names were protected.

I would tell them that I was too busy studying, that doing a degree in a language that is not your own is bloody hard, especially literature, where, naturally, the chief focus of the subject is language and each language is its own river, with its own source and ecology and tides. I would tell them all this and repeat that it really is bloody hard work, because you have to find the spirit of another culture inside you and to do that a part of you has to die.

A vast distance exists between a protester and his slogan; the entire history of politics exists in that gap.

I never did know how to be released from it and wanted this writer to do it for me.

one minute you tell me, Rana, let’s cure ourselves of our countries (“cure”: that was the word you used), then the next thing I know you are laying your life on the line for yours.

The genius of rumors is that they can coexist with the truth,

She was in her own world and I wondered how I could now ever be in my own world.

My father answered. His voice was astonishingly beautiful. I remember being surprised by it, by how broad and hospitable it was, the shade of a well-rooted tree. Given the chance, I thought, I would confide to it all my secrets, spread myself like a rug beneath it.

The talented historian who managed to remain independent, part of that silent army that exists in every country, made up of individuals who had come to the conclusion that they live among unreasonable compatriots and therefore must, like grown-ups in a playground, endure the chaos until the bell rings, resigned to the fact that this may come long after they are gone.

Abu al Ala al Ma’arri, and The Epistle of Forgiveness,

And the sun—oh my God, Khaled, the sun—will be good for our souls. Say yes.”

The sea was beautiful and unchanged, and its beauty was part of its fidelity. It was just as I remembered it, and this made it seem as if I too were being remembered by it. By day it was a well of light. It held the rays, obscuring them, a motif turning upon itself, vanishing here, advancing there, dying, continuously dying. Come night, the water turned thick and heavy and black. I entered and it made way.

In the deep I sensed that what lurked beneath was alive with intent. You have to be vigilant, I told myself, because perhaps the point is that there is no point: that the sea, its bright and its dark, is not concerned with human yearning.

insouciance.

She descended and emerged with her head tilted back, her hair combed by the water, and her face glazed and dripping.

We kissed long and I felt everything that I was fall and return, fall and return. I did not know that joy could be so painful.

I wished I could tell her what was on my mind, to ask her, for example, if she believed it was possible to live a happy life away from home, without one’s family, if she knew of anyone who had done it. It turns out it is possible to live without one’s family. All one has to do is to endure each day and gradually, minute by minute, brick by brick, time builds a wall.

“Please be happy for me.” “I am,” he said. “But not to call or come home the whole summer.” “I’m doing very well here. I just got distracted. The world took me.” I began to cry. I cried and apologized again.

There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river.

“The question is, my boy—and it has always been the most important question—how to escape the demands of unreasonable men.”

“Isn’t it just terrible how life keeps on? It just keeps on and on and on, without a pause.” “Terrible and beautiful,” I said.

I deployed this old artillery, while all along a fury was burning inside me, unable to rid myself of the image of my father’s face, broken and tearful, lost, bowed in front of me, as he traced my scar, as though hoping to find his way back to the boy he knew.

“You should tell them,” I said. “It’s another thing to have to deal with other people’s fears. I thought you especially would understand that.”

Why this suspicion of what is concealed, I thought, when there is pleasure in opacity? Is it not more revealing to observe a person clothed than naked?

‘God veil our faults,’ as the old folks say. A simple, much overused prayer. But what little wisdom it contains. A philosophy of sorts. I love how modest it is. I mean, they could have said, ‘God erase our faults.’ Now that would’ve been ambitious. But ‘veil’ is better. It presupposes that to live a life is to have faults, that no one is perfect and certainly no one is innocent. Not even you and I.”

What struck me most, what kept me awake that night, was the men’s impatient boredom as they went about their business. Ever since, I have associated political violence with boredom and impatience.

“It’s not true what some say, that dying, when it comes, brings with it its own acceptance. The opposite, if you ask me. It brings rebellion. Because you realize then that you’ve spent every day of your life learning how to live. That you don’t know how to do anything else. Certainly not death.

how did we become so unmoored? I tried to imagine the people Mustafa and I would have become if we had never left and were meeting at a café in Benghazi instead. Those two, I imagined, embedded in the society that formed them, would have had less time to listen to the past.

One evening in Paris, Hosam told me that he believed that the most important human dramas take place not on battlefields but in the quiet hours.

To live so close to someone he knew. After all, to go home is to disappear. I too feared being witnessed.

I realized as I spoke that this was again me trying to tell him that he ought to write, stop this historical romanticism, and get down to business. The world was burning.

What I did not realize was that all the while the silences were doing their work on us, gradually driving us apart, until the places where we connected became few and slender. If friendship is, as it often seems, a space to inhabit, ours became small and not terribly hospitable.

The man screamed with a desperate but controlled fervor, repeating “Ben Ali h’rub,” Ben Ali has fled, over and over, his voice hoarse and strong and empty, seemingly not only echoing against the silent buildings under the streetlamps, with their electric-blue light, but also emanating from within a private desolation.

Baba says to tell you that the time you have been waiting for has come. We’ve been here since midnight. The sea behind us. Black because it’s night. But you can hear it. I wish you were here, I wish you were here, and I wish you were here. The whole country is holding hands, stepping over an invisible line together. Mama says it’s now or never. Pray for us.

The life I have made for myself here is held together by a delicate balance. I must hold on to it with both hands. It is the only life I have now. I would have to abandon it to go back, and, although I wish to abandon it, I fear I might not be able to reconstitute a new life, even if that would be in the folds of the old one.

It is a myth that you can return, and a myth also that being uprooted once makes you better at doing it again.

“You grow and live and you come to know how things are likely to be. A certain feature, the way someone holds their head. And you, my dearest child, have always been a careful angel, even as a baby, born with your own basket of worries.”

That what I want to return to I cannot return to because the place and I have changed and what I have built here might be feeble and meek, but it took everything I had and I fear if I leave I will not have the will to return and then I will be lost again and I have been lost before and will do everything not to be that again and that I do not know if it is cowardly or courageous and I do not care and I have decided without deciding, because it is my only option, to keep to the days, to sleep when it is good for me to sleep and wake in good time to attend to my work and the people who depend on me.

That, although all these people would be fine without me, I am held together by their demands and that I am very sorry not to be beside her, to be the son I had always imagined I would be and desired to be.

My friends never stopped wanting a different life, I wanted to tell her. But I have managed, Mother, not to want a different life most of the time and that is some achievement.