The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

which I see now was a strange thing for a ten-year-old boy to think, that if I were to put something down here, something of personal value that might be, to anyone else, of no value at all and therefore more vulnerable to damage, it would not be moved. I would be able to come back later and find it exactly where I had left it.

I became grateful to have settled in a city whose most essential character is secrecy.

I realized that I have been carrying within me all these years the child I once was, his particular language and details, his impatient and thirsty teeth wanting to dig into the cold flesh of a watermelon, waking up wondering only about one thing: “What is the sea like today? Is it flat as oil or ruffled white with the spit of waves?”

The stories were a profound discovery. They were a gift sent back through time, opening a window onto the interior landscape of the young man who was to become my father.

The poor young flowers return confused, made old without having lived.

Every month for five years she cooked meals and purchased gifts for a dead son. She wrote him letters in which she pondered what to say and what to leave out. The guards took it all for themselves, throwing away the letters and eating the food, and sold the other items to the inmates, or took them for themselves, or gifted them to friends or to their own children.