In the few seconds we talked, I heard in Ziad’s voice that resolute tone he uses when he is about to tell me something he thinks I will object to. It would have been pointless to warn him of the danger, to remind him of the promise we had to return together. So, when I got through to him again, I told him how wonderful it was that he was finally going home. He said he would call as soon as he was inside the country.

Later that day, Diana took me to the Plage des Brouis, a beach she had discovered along the coast on the way to Cap Lardier. We climbed up into the rocky reserve. The unexpected silence that thick vegetation creates by the sea. The way the light changes color. The moistness in the air becoming slightly more material. The trail was often too narrow to allow us to walk side by side. It was comforting to walk behind her. There were bushes and pine and eucalyptus. There were remarkable wildflowers and occasionally a butterfly. The path curved and descended. Sometimes we were right by the water, close enough to touch it, and other times we climbed so high we were looking down at the sea from a great height. We often stopped and looked at the view. I had my cell phone in the pocket of my swimming trunks. Since the revolution, I had it near me at all times: on the kitchen counter when I was cooking, on the bathroom floor when I was taking a bath. We had walked out so far that there was no signal now. I suggested we turn back, but Diana wanted to keep going. We were more than halfway to the cove. Anxiety is a shameful business. I followed her, but I was silent and impatient. When we arrived at the Plage des Brouis, my telephone caught a signal. I had a voice mail from Mother. Ziad had arrived. He had a local SIM card. She read out the number. I did not have a pen and did not want to move in case I lost the signal. I listened to her message again, and drew the digits in the sand with my foot. Diana was looking up, toward one end of the cove, where four seagulls floated in midair. They held their wings out and every so often would bend them to drop a metre or two, as if pretending to fall, then glide up again and repeat the maneuver. The ritual seemed to have no motive but pleasure. Perhaps this was a spot they returned to, knowing how the arch of the cove traps the wind. Ziad answered after the first ring. He called me by my old nickname, and then laughed. I laughed, too.

That was his first time back. He went again after Tripoli fell, in August, and Mother went with him. I was the last; the youngest and the last, like when I was a boy and was told to always fill the glasses of my parents and older brother before mine.

3. THE SEA

On September 1, 1969, fourteen months before I was born, an event took place that was to change the course of Libyan history and my life. In my mind’s eye, I see a Libyan Army officer crossing St. James’s Square toward what was then the Libyan Embassy in London at about 2 P.M. He had come to the English capital on official business. He was popular among his peers, although his gentle reserve was sometimes mistaken for arrogance. He had committed to memory pages of verse that, many years later when he was imprisoned, became his comfort and companion. Several political prisoners told me that, at night, when the prison fell silent, “when you could hear a pin drop or a grown man cry softly to himself,” they heard his voice, steady and passionate, reciting poems. “He never ran out of them,” his nephew, who was in prison at the same time, told me. And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that “knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”

It was a routine visit to the Embassy, perhaps to collect the mail or to file a report on the progress of his mission. I imagine him taking off his cap as he entered the building. The corridors were busy with clerks running here and there. Others gathered around a radio. A twenty-seven-year-old captain no one had heard of had marched on to Tripoli and assumed power. My father ran out of the Embassy and hailed a cab for the airport.

That is what I remember him saying the first time he told me the story. We were in London that day. Ziad and I were attending university, and Father was passing through town. We had cooked him a meal in the small apartment we shared. We all ate too much and either went for a walk in Regent’s Park, my father walking between us, or retired to the room next door and lay on the two single beds, talking. I cannot remember. If in the park, then it was one of those long summer afternoons when the light remains unchanging for hours, as if the sun had stopped moving; and, if in the bedroom, then talking in low voices, sleepy but missing each other too much to nap. Either way, I remember him saying that he ran out of the Embassy and hailed a cab. But St. James’s Square is not known for traffic. He probably waited in front of the Embassy for a few seconds and then circled around the green before walking (I picture him walking, not running) into one of the neighboring streets. He did not know London well. He might have not gone east to Regent Street or south to Pall Mall. He took the taxi all the way to Heathrow and found a seat on the first flight to Tripoli.

In Cairo, shortly before he was kidnapped, Father retold the story, adding a new detail. When he entered the Embassy and heard that a coup d’état had taken place, he jumped onto the reception desk in the lobby and took down the picture of the monarch he served and admired. It was only then that I understood that it was not out of concern alone that my father rushed home on hearing of the overthrow of King Idris but also out of enthusiasm for a modern republican age. I understood then why I had always found something melancholy about an old newspaper cutting showing a portrait of King Idris jammed between the frame and the mirror of the chiffonier in my parents’ bedroom. No one spoke about it, and no one removed it. It stood fading during the years of my childhood.

When my father was on that flight home from London, Libya’s new ruler, Muammar Qaddafi, promoted himself from captain to colonel, and issued orders that senior military officers be arrested. My father was taken straight from the Tripoli airport to prison. Six months later, he was released and stripped of his rank and uniform. He returned to his wife and three-year-old son, Ziad. The new regime did with my father what it did with most officers who were high-ranking under Idris. Not wanting to make enemies of senior military men, yet at the same time fearing their potential disloyalty, it sent them abroad, often as minor diplomats. This allowed time for the new security apparatus to form. My father was given an administrative role in Libya’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations. I was conceived in that short window of time between my father’s release and his departure for New York: a time of uncertainty, but also a time of optimism; as his retelling of the Embassy story suggested, Father had high hopes for the new regime. Maybe he saw his imprisonment, removal from the Army, and temporary banishment as natural repercussions—perhaps even reversible—of the country’s historical transformation. He, like many of his generation, was inspired by the example of Egypt, where, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a young, secular, and nationalist pan-Arab republic replaced a corrupt monarchy. Qaddafi had declared his admiration for Nasser, and Nasser gave his full support to Qaddafi. So, as reluctant as my father must have been to leave Libya, I don’t imagine he went to New York in despair. It took a couple of years—after Qaddafi abrogated all existing laws and declared himself de-facto leader forever—for Father to discover the true nature of the new regime.