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A Novel
by Hisham Matar
Book Reviewed by:
1
It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone's chest, least of all one's own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best, but, as I stand here on the upper level of King's Cross Station, from where I can monitor my old friend Hosam Zowa walking across the concourse, I 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, like someone walking toward us from a great distance, recognizable only when it is too late to turn away. No one has ever been a nearer neighbor to my heart. I am convinced, as I watch him go to his train for Paris, that city where the two of us first met so long ago and in the most unlikely way, that he is carrying, right where the rib cages meet, an invisible burden, one, I believe, I can discern from this distance.
When he still lived here in London, hardly a week would pass without us taking a walk, either through the park or along the river. We sometimes got into a debate, usually concerning an obscure literary question, arguments that, perhaps like all arguments, concealed deeper disagreements. I would sometimes, to my regret, for the gesture has always displeased me, tap my forefinger on his chest and let my palm rest there for a fleeting moment, as though to keep whatever it was that I believed I had placed there stable, and I would once again take note of the distinct pattern of his ribs, the strange way his bones protruded, as if in constant expectation of an attack.
He does not know that I am still here. He thinks I have left, rushed off to the dinner engagement I told him I was already late for. I am not sure why I lied."Who are you eating with?" he asked.
"No one you know," I replied.
He looked at me then as if we had already parted ways and the present was the past, I standing at the shore and he on board the ship sailing into the future.
That burden in the chest, I can see, has rolled his shoulders back a little, causing his hips to fall forward so as to compensate and stop him falling, at the slightest push, face-first. And yet he does look, from this distance, like a man possessed by action, moving forward, determined to enter his new life.
These past years since 2011, since the Libyan Revolution and all that had followed it—the countless failures and missed opportunities, the kidnappings and assassinations, the civil war, entire neighborhoods flattened, the rule of militias—changed Hosam. Evidence of this was in his posture but also in his features: the soft tremble in the hands, perceptible each time he brought a cigarette to his mouth, the doubt around the eyes, the cautious climate in them, and a face like a landscape liable to bad weather.
Soon after the start of the revolution, he returned home and, perhaps naturally, a distance opened between us. On the rare occasions he visited London, we were easy in one another's company but less full-hearted somehow. I am sure he too noticed the shift. Sometimes he stayed with me, sleeping on the sofa in my studio flat, sharing the same room, where we could speak in the dark till one of us fell asleep. Most of the time, though, he got a room at a small hotel in Paddington. We would meet there, and the neighborhood, arranged around the train station, which fills the surrounding streets with a transitory air, made us both feel like visitors and accentuated the sense that our friendship had become a replica of what it had once been when he lived here and we shared the city the way honest laborers share tools. But now when he spoke, he often looked away, giving the impression that he was thinking aloud or involved in a conversation with himself. And when I was telling him a story, I would notice myself leaning forward slightly and catch an almost querulous tone in my voice, as though I were trying to convince him of an unlikely proposition. No one is more capable of falsities nor as requiring of them than those who wish never to part ways.
2
Yesterday evening Hosam arrived from Benghazi. We sat up talking till dawn. He slept on the sofa and did not wake up till early afternoon. We had to leave immediately for St. Pancras Station, where he was to take the train for Paris, to spend two nights there and then fly to San Francisco. London was the place where he had lived. "I must see you," the text he sent from Benghazi read, "before I go to the ever, ever after." Paris was where, twenty-one years ago, when he was just young enough to sustain the fantasy of self-invention, he had lived for an interlude. "I want to see it one last time." He said this yesterday, just as we entered my flat.
Excerpted from My Friends by Hisham Matar. Copyright © 2024 by Hisham Matar. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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