The narrative shifts to 1980, when Matar’s family lived in Egypt, annually expecting to return to Libya. In 1985, after his brother’s close call in Switzerland, 15-year-old Matar requested boarding school in England. For safety, he lived under the pseudonym “Bob,” claiming to be Christian with an Egyptian mother and American father. He befriended a girl but felt wrong approaching her romantically because she did not know his real name. After a summer home, hearing Arabic and his true name, he reluctantly returned to school.

A new student, Hamza, arrived—a Libyan whose father worked for Qaddafi’s government. They became close friends. Matar’s housemaster, one of two people aware of his true identity, occasionally invited him to his flat for wine and eggs, offering him brief respites to be himself. When it was time to leave school, Matar and Hamza met friends at a pub. In the bathroom, Matar confessed his true identity to Hamza. Both wept. Hamza paid for a taxi to London; midway through the journey, Matar vomited on the roadside. Years later, they encountered each other in London with Diana, exchanged numbers, but never called.

Matar reflects on his decision to leave Egypt at 15. At 10, he had first visited the English countryside and felt that anything he placed there would remain safe and undisturbed. His first day at school turned difficult when his London cab driver got lost and threatened to abandon him. Two local sisters on horseback rescued him, directing the driver to the school.

Four days before the March 2012 trip, flying from London to Cairo, Matar realized that his friends always assumed he would eventually leave England because he had spent all the years since age eight waiting. He had condemned fellow exiles who assimilated, maintaining his rootlessness as fidelity to Libya.

At the Cairo airport, hesitating before boarding, Matar wonders why he wore an ill-fitting black suit he had purchased a year earlier. His mother speaks by phone with Ziad, who could not wait and had returned to Libya nine months earlier in June 2011 during the war. That day, Matar was in southern France writing an introduction to Turgenev’s On the Eve (1859), noting the parallel between himself and the novel’s protagonist, who studies medieval history on the eve of the Crimean War. When Ziad called from near the border, Matar and Diana walked to the Plage des Brouis. Anxious without phone signal, Matar drew Ziad’s new Libyan number in the sand with his foot before calling him. Ziad had made a second trip with their mother in August, making Matar the last to return.

The narrative reconstructs September 1, 1969, when Jaballa Matar learned at the Libyan Embassy in London that an unknown captain named Muammar Qaddafi had deposed King Idris. He rushed to Heathrow for the first flight to Tripoli, though a later retelling revealed his first act was to climb onto the reception desk and remove the king’s portrait, demonstrating initial enthusiasm for a republican age. Upon arrival, Qaddafi ordered all senior military officers—Jaballa included—arrested and imprisoned for five months. Jaballa was then released but stripped of his military rank and assigned to a minor diplomatic post at the United Nations (UN) in New York. Matar was conceived during this uncertain period between his father’s release and departure.

On Jaballa’s first day at the UN, he witnessed a truck collide with a cyclist. He collected the dismembered body parts and placed them respectfully beside the torso. In 1973, Jaballa resigned, and the family returned to Tripoli. His open criticism of Qaddafi’s regime began attracting dangerous attention.

Matar reflects on his father’s independent nature and how his unresolved fate has complicated the narrator’s own independence, recalling Telemachus’s lament from The Odyssey. He remembers living in central Tripoli and watching a sheep slaughtered for the first time, then eating its organs. The family later moved to a new house on the western edge as the political climate darkened. Revolutionary committees monitored all aspects of life, executing students in public and burning books deemed anti-revolutionary.

Matar’s parents shielded him and his brother with a strict routine: school, piano lessons, swimming at the El-Medina el-Seyahiya Club. The sea became their refuge. Among the eccentric adults at the club were an old, unsuccessful fisherman and El-Hindi, an Indigenous American who, according to local stories, had settled in Tripoli during his world travels and would dive spectacularly from the harbor bridge. Young Matar would swim out until land vanished, then float in deep water. Years later, he remembered that his father had taught him to swim and that he only began fearing the sea after his father disappeared.

On the plane to Benghazi, Matar’s mother insists he take the window seat to see his country. As he writes in his journal to quell panic, he feels like a man lost at sea—a recurring dream since his father’s disappearance. His mother’s earlier question at the airport returns to him: Is he returning as himself or as one of his fictional protagonists, Suleiman el-Dewani or Nuri el-Alfi? He interprets this as a warning against his obsessive search for answers about his father’s fate, whom she calls the “Absent-Present.”

After the family’s 1979 escape to Cairo, Jaballa traveled alone through the Libyan Desert into Chad, then flew to Rome. Once reunited in Cairo, young Matar realized they were not returning and demanded to go back to Libya. His father’s response, that he would get used to being away from Libya, felt cruel, though Matar knew his father was also mourning.

From the window, Matar sees the luminous Libyan landscape. They land at 10:45 am on March 15, 2012, exactly 22 years since his father’s first week in Abu Salim. Matar recalls his father’s letter describing his kidnapping by Egyptian Colonel Mohamed Abdel Salam el-Mahgoub as a “dirty deal” approved by President Hosni Mubarak. He wonders if his blindfolded father was allowed to see Libya from the air during that flight to prison. Years later, a runway worker claimed to have seen a well-dressed, white-haired prisoner escorted from a private jet on the matching date. Matar remembers his father’s immense pride in being Libyan. Stepping from the plane, Matar encounters familiar scents. His cousin, Marwan al-Tashani, a Benghazi judge, waits at the bottom of the steps with a camera.

They drive to Marwan’s house for a family gathering, then check into a hotel with sea views. The next morning, they drive to Ajdabiya to visit Matar’s father’s siblings. Uncle Mahmoud, born in 1955, is Jaballa’s youngest brother—more like a brother to Matar and Ziad during their Tripoli years. Unlike the serious, poised Jaballa, Mahmoud had long hair and a perpetual smile. He loved Voltaire and Russian novels and would play football with young Matar even in the merciless midday sun.

In March 1990, the same week Jaballa was kidnapped, Libyan agents arrested Mahmoud, uncle Hmad Khanfore, and cousins Ali and Saleh Eshnayquet—all members of an underground opposition cell. The arrests were so coordinated that each man believed the others remained free. After 21 years in Abu Salim, all except Jaballa were released on February 3, 2011, 14 days before Libya’s uprising. When Matar first called Mahmoud after his release, his uncle recited from memory a BBC interview Matar had given years earlier, which he heard in prison. Before hanging up, Mahmoud urged him not to lose hope.

Matar reveals he had forbidden Diana from photographing Abu Salim prison, lacking the strength to visit the place where his father had suffered. He sadly considers finding the man who claimed to have been in the cell next to his father’s. He mentions Blo’thaah, the family’s ancestral desert home where his father was born.

On the road to Ajdabiya, they pass destroyed military vehicles from the 2011 war and checkpoints manned by young revolutionaries operating outside the government’s authority. Marwan explains that Benghazi’s judges are on strike after armed men stormed a courtroom. A quarter-million men now claim revolutionary status, attracted by financial compensation.

In Ajdabiya, they stop at Tim Hetherington Square, named for the British photojournalist killed in Misrata. At the family home, Mahmoud and Matar’s aunts wait outside. When they embrace, the aunts weep for their missing brother. Matar observes how modern Libyan architecture has turned inward with high walls and shuttered windows.

After lunch in a shuttered room, Mahmoud begins recounting his imprisonment. During his first interrogation, authorities showed him transcripts of every phone call from the family’s Cairo home and six drawers of photographs tracking Jaballa’s movements. They had monitored him for years with Egyptian help. Blindfolded and driven to Abu Salim, Mahmoud was placed in a dark cell. He heard two other prisoners talking and learned where he was. Through a tiny wall hole, he discovered his cousin, Saleh, in the next cell. The arrested family members gradually learned of each other’s presence.

The opposite wing was empty except for one prisoner who, after seven days, began reciting poetry late at night. The elderly voice called Mahmoud’s name, but Mahmoud did not recognize it. The prisoner fell silent for a week, then called again, recounting an old family joke. Mahmoud suspected a trap. After another week, cousin Ali identified the voice as Uncle Jaballa’s. When Mahmoud demanded another sign, the prisoner said he was from Blo’thaah, and Mahmoud was heartbroken. Their conversation is interrupted by arriving relatives. As guests debate security problems, Mahmoud grows quiet and falls asleep.

Matar reflects on the universal theme of sons trying to understand their fathers, citing Telemachus, Edgar, and Hamlet as examples of men adrift in the country that separates fathers and sons. He questions why his father waited weeks before identifying himself and chose such cryptic clues, and why his relatives failed to recognize Jaballa’s voice or the significance of his choice of alam—elegiac Bedouin poetry specific to Ajdabiya.

The narrator recalls his father reciting poetry at the end of elaborate dinner parties in their Cairo penthouse. His mother’s obsessive preparations and extraordinary cooking were her response to the tiresome political talk of dissidents. While she devoted herself to the present, Jaballa focused on Libya’s past and future. The parties showcased both her talent and the family’s wealth, which funded Jaballa’s political activism. He coordinated sleeper cells inside Libya, ran military training camps in Chad near the Libyan border, and personally commanded a small army. His organization’s budget grew from $7 million to $15 million annually.

Young Matar worried about their finances, but his father dismissed his concerns, saying he only owed his sons a university education. After the kidnapping, they discovered the $6 million balance from 1979 had vanished. Initially resentful—especially as former allies disappeared—Matar gradually understood this as a profound gesture of trust: His father believed his sons would care for their mother. This confidence became something priceless.

At those Cairo dinners, guests would eventually ask Jaballa to recite poetry. He would yield, reciting alam poems. He had also written his own compositions, which he would recite to Matar during rare moments alone in the car.

Returning to the prison story, Matar accepts Mahmoud’s explanation that he didn’t want to believe his brother was there. However, the narrator chooses to believe his father wanted to be recognized by voice alone, to prove to himself that he remained unchanged. Perhaps, like Dante encountering the transformed Ciacco in hell, Mahmoud failed to recognize Jaballa because prison had fundamentally altered him.

Matar remains haunted by what his father endured during his first days in captivity. After the kidnapping, Egyptian authorities warned the family to stay quiet or risk worsening the situation, leading them to believe Jaballa was held near Cairo. At 19, Matar became withdrawn and nearly housebound in London, then returned to Cairo and remained indoors for six months. Suffering anxiety and depression, he, his brother, and his mother all struggled to support each other.

In Mahmoud’s house, more guests arrive. The narrator feels convinced that if he appeared at these relatives’ doors with his belongings, they would take him in, despite his usual discomfort as a houseguest. Conversation consists of repeated, courteous platitudes, steering clear of intrusion and gossip.

An elderly man arrives wearing a black wool coat and white turban. Unintroduced, he holds Matar’s arms and stares into his eyes with opaque green irises. They embrace twice, then sit with arms wrapped together, the man’s large, aged hand gripping Matar’s newer one. He only repeats the same three questions about Matar’s well-being, health, and family every two minutes. His son explains his father’s condition and that he prefers remaining in the desert with his camels for days on end. The man’s presence felt both unsettling and poignant to Matar.

After they leave, Mahmoud identifies him as Muftah, Jaballa’s cousin. They were very close as children, playing at Blo’thaah. Mahmoud then reveals that Muftah was present when Jaballa’s older brother, Salah, stepped on a land mine left by occupying forces. Jaballa was 10 and survived only because he had walked away to urinate. The sight traumatized him for years. Matar understands this previously unknown loss helps explain the sustained grief and distance he had always sensed in his father.