My Friends

by Hisham Matar

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

When he would visit me upstairs and his eyes would fall on my wall of books, something resembling delight and regret would pass across his face, as though what he secretly found troubling was not the sight of a large number of books but the stability that such an acquisition assumes. Reading requires one to be still. So does writing.

‘But I was only once a writer. That ended long ago. Must accept fate.’ ‘But those ideas are also your fate,’ I said. ‘We call talent a gift for a reason. You are merely a custodian.’

I was convinced that my two friends represented two separate and irreconcilable parts of my life that I had somehow to keep in balance, and that if it were not for me, they would never see each other.

Hosam looked at Mustafa not harshly but with a sort of reflective bleakness, like a still sea under an overcast sky.

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.

Cairo’s Tahrir Square was packed with protesters, and it looked like there was no way now that the tide could be turned. Once, in between classes, I locked myself in one of the school toilet cubicles and cried into my hands, praying no one could hear, praying, suddenly I was now praying, for the end of tyranny, a word that was no longer abstract, no longer for slogans alone, but an intimate offence. I burned with hope; hope and fear and a violent impatience. I tried to keep it all at bay during the day but gave in to it entirely at night.

Love for my friend, opening now like a hunger in the chest. I was cleaving inside. With worry in the blood, I thought of how to restrain him, interrupt his momentum, give him a chance to reconsider. But reconsider what?

We are on the steps of the court house. Hundreds, maybe even thousands. Many women. Mama and Baba are here too. 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.

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

My mouth was full and empty all at once. Empty because everything in it had no shape or sound or form. And full of everything that I felt then and feel now. 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.

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.

‘What is it like being back?’ I asked. ‘What is it like? It’s beautiful. Fucking beautiful. Like being brought back from the dead. Air filling your lungs.’ And there it was again, the other new quality in his voice, the tone beside the admonishing one, that I could not immediately discern. He sounded strong, accompanied; that was the word: accompanied.

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. And so you keep your mouth shut because you don’t want to admit how different you have become. This is why it is perfectly reasonable never to come back (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), although I wish you would.

Mother’s eyes were happy and the way she smiled was beautiful, so full of all she was and is: the child, the adult and the ageing woman, her born and dying selves.

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.

If there’s anyone worthy of pity, it is not me, not even my wretched maid with all her troubles and misfortunes, troubles and misfortunes she has yet to find words for. No, it is not us but you, living outside your country and doing so for such a length of time that a sad distance, which you with your high ideals call objectivity, stretched and extended between you and your land, your people and your family

‘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.

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

She also found that the genderless nature of English renders the nouns ‘antiseptic’, that was the word she used, dispossessing inanimate objects of character. When I disagreed, she said, ‘I would be lost if the moon and sun had no gender.’

‘An English poet once said that arguments convince no one,’ I told her. ‘And about that I believe there should be no arguing.’

All words are like this, I thought, soldiers waiting to be marshalled, 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.

And, as all children seem to belong to the same universe of unmade innocence, their existence, their mouths and fingers and hair, their smell and voices, painfully wove together what is with what could have been.

Mustafa laughed. A grown man’s laugh. The laugh of a man who had witnessed death and decided that, in the light of that truth, one must laugh watchfully.

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. You could easily get swallowed up by it.

At times I believed I saw life as it truly is, naked, and it shook my soul. It is a terrible thing to see.

And yet the morning washes everything away. Even the relentless sound of bullets dies out momentarily, and I think, where would humanity be without morning? Even the most violent need is calmed by dawn, and you can almost catch the fresh scent of hope. The day is a child before it ages and it ages very quickly here, making those early hours all the more miraculous.

I think I want to have children with her, live and write books beside her, have hers be the first face and the last that my eyes see.

And there he was. His face lost. I believed my eyes and couldn’t believe my eyes. I had all of him, from the young idealist to the corrupt megalomaniac, and all the stages in between. The child in him has been all the while falling towards this moment, into this pipe and into my hands.

We had caught the spirit of things, the very essence of our lives, the source, the maker of our reality, the one who parted and gathered us, who took and gave, who punished and forgave.

Perhaps I will go see him now, spend a couple of days and then pay a similar visit to my parents, I thought. Pack a weekend bag and go in that light spirit, stay a few days and then return. Return. That word had always been reserved for going to them.

And, although it is perhaps odd to thank a city, this book owes much to London, as do I.