Why does our country long for us so savagely? What could we possibly give her that hasn't already been taken?
I yearned for them, my room, my workshop on the roof, the sea, Kareem. What I missed most was the smell of our house. Once, but only once, when I was still a boy, I cried and screamed, throwing things as I had done before to stop Baba going on one of his endless business trips. Judge Yaseen reacted nobly. He simply shut the door to the room that he had given me in his house, then later sent the maidservant in with a cold glass of sugarcane juice. I buried my face into the sharp lavender smell of the pillow, mourning the familiar: digging my face into her neck, kissing his hand.
Medicine became my profession. I am now a pharmacist. A concoctor of remedies. My relationship to illness is purely formulaic. I stand in a white coat most of my days, behind a counter in an air-conditioned pharmacy in Cairo. It's a bit of a joke. After all the hopes of becoming an art historian like Ustath Rashid, a highflying businessman like my father, a pianist, I became a pharmacist in a city where it is nearly impossible to look down any of its streets without spotting at least one pharmacy's flashing sign of a serpent coiling up a Martini glass. I am fully aware of how even this choice was influenced by her, what she called her 'illness' and 'medicine', the colourless liquid supplied under the counter by the baker, still illegal in Libya. At times I wonder what Majdi the baker thinks of her now.
I suffer an absence, an ever-present absence, like an orphan not entirely certain of what he has missed or gained through his unchosen loss. I am both repulsed and surprised, for example, by my exaggerated sentiment when parting with people I am not intimate with, promising impossible reunions. Egypt has not replaced Libya. Instead, there is this void, this emptiness I am trying to get at like someone frightened of the dark, searching for a match to strike. I see it in others, this emptiness. My expression shifts constantly, like that of the prostitute who waits in your car while you run across a busy road to buy a new pack of cigarettes for the night. When you walk back, ripping the cellophane, before she has time to see you, you catch sight of her, temporarily settled in another role as a sister or a wife or a friend. How readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves, deceiving the world and what we might have become if only we hadn't got in the way, if only we had waited to see what might have become of us.
24
She sometimes telephones to describe a meal she has cooked for her brothers and sister and ageing parents. After Baba denounced his political convictions, or had them denounced in him, the relatives showed their approval by visiting my parents again. In fact, Mama has become the family darling, successfully matching some of my endless cousins, whose names I have never tried to remember, with suitable spouses. 'The food was so delicious,' she would say, 'it deserved your mouth,' and I would hear myself thinking, how could you possibly know what my mouth deserves?
After it became clear that the road out of Libya rarely leads back without humiliation, she began to regret sending me away, began telling me about Osama, Masoud and his brother Ali, Adnan, Kareem, that although, yes, they had to do their military service, 'God was gracious enough' to end the war in time so none of them were sent to Chad. I reacted calmly to such repentance, but did feel the clasp of anger round my neck. 'It was the best thing you ever did, sending me away,' I would say, knowing full well that the line was tapped, that my words would be diligently recorded in my file, along with the eavesdropper's comments, perhaps scribbled along the margin, kept for eternity.
I hated how her confidence plummeted with time, how she reflected on the past and hunched in front of it in regret. I wanted her certainty back, even that ruthless, steely certainty that made her send me away against her husband's reservations and her only son's plea.
In 1979, a few days after I was sent to Cairo, the entire Libyan population was given three days to deposit liquid assets into the National Bank. The national currency had been redesigned, they were told, to celebrate the revolution's tenth anniversary. People deposited pockets of coins and others suitcases of notes and some a truck full of money only to be told afterwards that individual bank withdrawals would be limited to one thousand dinars annually. My parents were badly affected by this, their monthly output alone was in excess of that amount. The following year, private savings accounts, which is effectively what most accounts had become, were eliminated, and my parents watched their money vanish 'like salt in water'. This meant that even when they were allowed to, during the first years of my stay in Cairo, my parents couldn't afford to visit; and, more crucially, the cost of my education and living couldn't be met and therefore had to be endured in total by Judge Yaseen, who was amiable about the whole thing. 'You and I are one, man. Suleiman is like my own,' he said to my father over the telephone.
Father was left with no choice but to seek employment. He got a job as 'machine operator' in one of the nationalized factories. It was a pasta factory. Both he and Mother seemed to treat this as a novelty in the beginning, and I was encouraged by their high spirits, and smiled too when I received a bag of pasta with his beautiful handwriting on the plastic packing: 'A souvenir,' then in brackets, 'My machine seals the packing.' I admired how well he seemed to accept this mean fate. He seemed to find some pleasure in it, liked the hours, Mother said, the early start and the noon end. She said he had started translating a book from the Italian.
'Niccolo Machiavelli's Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio,' he told me proudly, clearly enjoying the 'r's and the 'o's. 'Only Principe and Dell'arte delta guerra,' he went on, 'exist in acceptable Arabic translations. But I feel Discorsi sets the record straight about this misunderstood philosopher. He wrote it eighteen years after Principe . He was sixty-two, so much wiser, and didn't have the Medici breathing down his neck.' He paused, I could hear her voice in the background. 'Your mother has no idea what I am talking about,' he said, the smile clear in his voice. I could hear her laughing. 'Anyway,' he said, 'helps keep the Italian alive.'
But recently, fifteen years from when I was sent away, in May of this year, 1994, Baba was arrested. There was confusion at first; rumours of embezzlement had surfaced. How embezzlement could be possible from the position of machine operator I'll never know. Then the truth emerged. After fifteen years of being a machine operator in the packing department of a pasta factory, Baba decided to take his book with him one day and read from it to his fellow factory workers, not Discorsi, but Democracy Now, the book I had rescued from the fire. Mother was furious.