My Friends

by Hisham Matar

“What will happen will happen, with me or without me.” “It’s narcissism,” he said, his tone hardening, “to hide one’s intentions behind theories of the inevitable.”

“Every evening,” Hosam wrote in one of his early emails, my father forgets who I am and we have to meet for the first time all over again. He prefers to speak in English. Doctor says this is normal, to be expected. It is impossible then not to forgive him. I sit beside him and we talk like fellow passengers on a train while the room darkens around us.

“Aren’t you going to come see us?” he said. “Freedom is at the door. Or so everyone keeps saying.”

I tried to remain with the song, but my mind was already telling me that something breaks when you’re away so long: ties and modes of being and days—the days themselves, they shatter in halves—and so much else I can’t describe. And other things are born too, but those become unkind to share, because they help only to remind us and those we have left of what has been erased in their place.

Love is as much a miracle as it is an education.

“Constant,” several now echoed, as if in agreement that Malak’s words had launched themselves into poetry. “Constant in his love and in his prayers and, when those prayers are not answered, I want him to change reality with his own hands.

And then I want him to return to me, to prosper by my side. I want to take him to the clearest stream, one only I know the way to, and there quench his thirst. I want him to look at me sometimes as if he does not know who I am. But I want to be forever recognized by him, come what may, to point me out in a crowd when, after the passage, we are reunited. I want him to see me when I cannot see myself.

I saw the small space between us opening, sunlit and warm, and it made me hopeful and it made me sad, because I could see how much effort it would take to broaden it, to make it hospitable again.

“No man should seek to see his family objectively,” she said. “Not only because of the sheer impossibility of the task, but because such an ambition alone breaks the covenant between kin. The whole point, silly child, is to love unfathomably. Where hate and affection, bewilderment and clarity, are braided so tightly that they form an unbreakable cord, a rope fit to lift a nation.

but this, this above all else lights the fire in my veins: you sit, as a stranger would, as a member of the audience, observing, affording yourself the space created by that objectivity of yours, which is nothing but a cold and empty schoolyard at night, a sad and abandoned place, in order to watch from a distance.

Watch, then, as we lift our loads, as if you were the master and we the slaves. For the point about this life, my boy, is not to be good or wise but to be human, not to show the rest of us up.”

“At first I thought, to be a parent you have to be an idealist. Then I learned that to be a parent is to be continually coming up against everything that is not ideal about you.”

How strange, she thought, that there is no word in English for “injustice,” for example, that a state of injustice is, to that language, merely the opposite or absence of justice. Whereas the Arabic thulm, which shares its root with thalam, or “darkness,” is far more profound.

I must sound like a boy in love. I am. And the man in me knows I am, and knows that the fervor will pass and I will see her faults and will then believe that I’m seeing clearly. But today I am brave. My heart has never been stronger.

We lit up and even then, and from within my torment, the thought struck me, as agile as reflected light, that it is a mercy to be caught in the schemes of others.

All words are like this, I thought, soldiers waiting to be marshaled, and the purpose of living is to enliven the words we have been taught, and people die or take their own lives when words fail them.

I couldn’t understand it then, but now I do. In war you are nowhere, neither part of the past nor the future, and it opens up a hunger in you that widens with each day. Until that is all you are.