My Friends

by Hisham Matar

feel I am seeing right into him, perceiving him more accurately than ever before, as though all along, during the two decades that we have known one another, our friendship has been a study and now, ironically, just after we have bid one another farewell, his portrait is finally coming into view.

And perhaps this is the natural way of things, that when a friendship comes to an inexplicable end or wanes or simply dissolves into nothing, the change we experience at that moment seems inevitable, a destiny that was all along approaching,

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

America, the country from where people never return.’

‘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.’

Even the shadows are allotted their places, and London is a city of shadows, a city made for shadows, for people like me who can be here a lifetime yet remain as invisible as ghosts. I see its light and stone, its shut fists and loitering lawns, its hungry mouths and acres of unutterable secrets, a muscle tightening all around me.

He opened his mouth and said, ‘No.’ The word filled the room. It sounded astonishingly clear. He knew he was not speaking for himself alone. The cat lifted its head and departed, leaving the man to finally resume his life.

he had to me the reliable air of one who believes in time, in the human initiative to measure it, but also in its supremacy over human affairs; that everyone, their deeds and character, will not only yield to time but be revealed by it, that the true nature of things is concealed and the function of the days is to strip away the layers.

‘Astonishing how most people take it for granted that they will have children and that they will spend many summers with them.’

The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue inside that dream. And, as in a dream, the shape of my days bears no relation to what I had, somehow and without knowing it, allowed myself to expect.

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.

Arab journalists, editors and publishers began to flee. Most went to London. Eventually, an entire people’s press was transplanted abroad, until the overwhelming majority of Arab newspapers and magazines then were written, edited and printed in London.

‘For a writer, exile is prison,’ he said, ‘a severing from the source, and so, courageous or not, he dies in front of our eyes.’

The sentences, which were now disembodied from the man who had written them, seemed suspended, so light on their feet that I hardly noticed my progress through the pages.

Then it slowly came. We, the same four people who had admired Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan and shed tears for him, began, while still enduring our grief, not so much to justify his murder but to find reasons for it, to try, in the absence of any justice, to make sense of the senseless act, and gradually, like a rising tide, we diverted some of the blame on to the dead man’s shoulders.

But even back then I sensed that Mustafa and I read differently. He entered books with pointed implements. It mattered to him whether he agreed with the author or if he believed them to be of sound character.

wondered what that anonymous third party had made of every sentence and, when it came time to reply, I never could altogether vanquish him from my mind. I felt myself to be if not writing for him then leaving things out for him. This changed the tone of our letters, and must have been, in part at least, the purpose of the policy. Our exchanges, in the company of a suspicious authority, became self-conscious, wary of mentioning personal details or expressing easy intimacies.

I was always pleased to lend him books. His only fault is a quick temper. I tried to teach him not to judge too quickly, that some books, like some people, are shy.’

I was not only learning the ways of a new life but felt myself to be engaged in an experiment in living, one that posed no risks, because I believed that at any moment I could press the ‘reset’ button and return home.

Here we have two untranslatable experiences. The first is the friendship, which, like all friendships, one cannot fully describe to anyone else. The second is grief, which again, like all forms of grief, is horrible exactly for how uncommunicable it is.’

‘On a clear day,’ I said, ‘you can see all the way to Crete.’ That was not true, but the lie seemed to happen ahead of me, without my full consent. This too was to become a habit. It is far too tempting, when you are away from home, to make stuff up.

The words ‘fallen’, ‘battle’, ‘innocent’, ‘martyr’, ‘fate’ ‘you’, ‘me’ all tumbled over one another. I had my own words, blades packed in the mouth, capable of cutting my tongue wide open. I feared speaking them and feared not speaking them, and I knew that, like all things of consequence, they could not be postponed or stored away for later use. If I missed my opportunity now, I thought, I would have to carry those words unspoken forever. Sounds in the dark.

All its twelve stories, in one way or another, concerned characters who were unmoored and who, like the man eaten by the cat, were at once innocent and implicated in their fate. Today I am less drawn to such writing. It seems too driven by allegory, too keen on a philosophical generality. These days all I want is to be with what is specific.

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.

‘Never forget,’ he used to tell me, ‘that the first poem ever written was from a father to a son. Adam’s elegy for Abel, which was also an elegy for Cain, who, having killed his brother, must wander the earth. And therefore, according to the history of love and poetry, the love of a father for his son is greater than all kinds of love, greater than that of Layla and Majnun, and greater even than the greatest of all loves, that of a mother for her child. But if you tell your mother, I will kill you.’

‘The question’ – he spoke as if referring to a conversation we’d already had – ‘arguably the most important question of all – is how to escape the demands of unreasonable men.’

Independence, which I had up to then held in very high regard, indeed revered it, was now to me a curse, the devil himself. It is dependence that a sane mind should seek; to depend on others and be in turn dependable.

I walked the city until my legs grew tired. At certain turns I would sense a strange affection on the part of the city – except it was not affection exactly but a correspondence – that as I moved within it, it too moved within me. I felt protected by my anonymity but even more by London, its maze-like streets turning upon one another as though designed for the purpose of keeping secrets.

The grief and confusion and bewilderment and fear seemed no longer mine alone. I saw meadows too. I saw my sea and my parents. The familiar light. And when the morning came, I was undone again, I was cloven in the middle, coming apart. I was not a man but a set of components that each day needed to be reassembled.

As I listened to him, courage scaled the walls and smuggled itself in.

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.

at that moment I believed no one in the entire world knew me better than he did. That with him I did not have to pretend. I did not have to shield myself from his concern or bewilderment. I did not have to translate. And violence demands translation.

I did not know how to say such things then, I still do not, and the inarticulacy filled my mouth. This, I now know, is what is meant by grief, a word that sounds like something stolen, picked out of your pocket when you least expect it. It takes a long time to learn the meaning of a word,

I clenched my fists tighter. I hunched my back. Become smaller, diminish your scale, absent yourself, be as invisible as a ghost. You are now a danger to those you love the most.

And because one friend is never enough, I too had to be let go of in some fashion. None of this is dramatic, of course, nor is it unusual. Many people are frustrated by their friends. Some, like Mustafa, believe friendship, or the kind of friendship we had, one sanctified by blood, should be, like romantic love, monogamous. This made him perpetually overrun with jealousy.

I had never seen uncle Osama cry before. I do not know what came over me then. I felt I was not there at all. That it was all happening to someone else and I was merely a spectator. We embraced and I said, in the way an adult might tell a child who has yet to fully understand that time passes, that the present is impermanent, ‘Nothing lasts forever.’

He must have sensed my relief, because I then saw pass over him a shadow of that magnanimity that the merciful experience when they are reminded of their power over others, and reminded too of the pleasure that they take in their ability to restrain and moderate it.

I could sit without saying a word, enduring that discreet anonymity of Libyan male society, with its careful social architecture that allows each one to keep to himself all that matters, that one could come to know an individual intimately and yet have no idea of an essential fact about him.

realized then that this was why it had become impossible for me to feel ambivalence towards much at all. I suffered an opinion about nearly every detail of my new life.

We searched for places to rent abroad, possible jobs we could do. All the while the hourglass emptied. And with each day we became a little less Arab and a little more Anglo, like a wall gradually losing its colour to the weather.

She would get a hotel room by Hyde Park Corner and spend two or three days shopping for clothes and visiting museums. She was always so happy that it made me wonder whether this was what London was made for. Although living here often felt like hard labour, visiting must have seemed like life itself.

I knew this game: he would not ask where I was from and I would keep to the same policy. Whoever blinks first loses. An immigrant’s test of discipline, most probably ancient, for this instinct to pass unnoticed, to veil oneself, must surely be as old as time, as old as exile, as old as when Adam and Eve, cast out of Eden and sent down to earth, were made to live on opposite sides of the empty planet.

I found myself enjoying the impenetrable surface of the man. 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?

I felt such love for her, and such desire that she and Hyder should be happy. She was wrong, I thought, about the limits of a marriage. And, even if she is right and there are limits, they ought never to be accepted. I stopped at a bakery and got a large box of gateaux for the nurses.

Only when I was out on the street did I notice that I was trembling all over. The city was shrouded in night. The soft amber lights emerging from inside cafés and restaurants looked warm and inviting. A sensuous hunger swirled in my veins. I wanted to drink and eat and lie naked with someone, to burn or break something inside me.

He switched to Arabic, speaking it in a perfect Benghazi accent, which, out of all the dialects of the world, is the closest to my heart. Things said in it are not mere ephemeral utterances, but structures that are as known and reliable as the house I was born in.

‘I have always tried to be honest,’ he said. ‘With myself, if with no one else. Believing that there’s nothing more dangerous than a man who doesn’t know what he’s doing, a man who doesn’t know his own mind.’

‘In London, I’m writing or not writing. Everywhere else, I just live.’

‘Friend. What a word. Most use it about those they hardly know. When it is a wondrous thing.’

He was a fantasy, and fantasies can build lives but also bring them crashing down.