by Hisham Matar
He laughed, and I thought it best to laugh too.
CHAPTER 16
The day before I was due to fly out to Montreux for the Christmas holiday, Mr. Galebraith stuck his head round the door and said, “A lady named Mona is on the phone.”
I shot past him, running down the stairs, taking three steps at a time, not stopping when he shouted, “Slow down!”
“I can’t wait to see you, my sweet peanut,” she said.
Longing was a stone in my mouth.
“I have just checked in. I love this hotel. I will see you at the airport,” she said and hung up.
The two-hour flight to Geneva seemed to last forever. How impatient I was with the hands of the wristwatch.
Father was in Zurich, Bern or Geneva; it was never clear. Mona and I had at least one or two or maybe even three days alone ahead of us. That was all I cared about.
Her cold-blushed cheeks seemed the only color in the gray arrivals lounge. She was not wearing the fur coat. He must have not told her, I thought, that I was the one who picked it out. We sat facing the same way on the train to Montreux. Several times I secretly dug my fingers into my thighs.
When we arrived at the hotel I had to abandon my luggage with the bellboy by the entrance because Mona was pulling me toward the lift. As soon as the doors drew shut she wrapped her arm in mine, turning her fingers round the part between the elbow and the wrist. I watched our foggy reflection against the polished brass doors. I had been wrong: I was not yet as tall as she was, but nearly.
There was always lightness to the way Mona held me, as if she were not really there. My mother, on the other hand, would always hold my hand too tightly. Whenever I pointed it out she would apologize and loosen her grip, only to forget and return to squeezing my fingers again as if they were strands of a slippery rope.
I suggested to Mona that, until Father arrived, we should share their suite. She looked at me as if I had asked her to take off her clothes.
“To save money,” I explained.
She laughed. “And since when have you worried about such things?” She kissed me below the jaw, then took me to my room. We both stood on the balcony that looked out onto the luminous blue lake. The surface was a mirror to the blue sky and the passing clouds. It turned the weak winter light a shade darker.
“Tonight,” she said. “Let’s dine at the Café du Soleil and stay there until they kick us out.”
When the bellboy walked in with the bags, she let go of my hand and cleared her throat. As soon as he left she let out a wicked laugh.
It shames me to admit that even the tragedy that followed did not corrupt the memory of those three days spent in Montreux alone with Mona. If anything, and perhaps exactly because of what happened next, it glimmers still in my mind with the vividness of a dark jewel.
We took long walks by the lake, excursions punctuated by stops at cafés for tea, cake and ice cream. I was always too willing to hold her coat as she slipped her bare arms into the black satin lining. She liked fur coats because they allowed her to continue wearing her favorite sleeveless fitted black blouses underneath.
“Where is your new coat?”
“I am saving it for when Kamal is here.”
My twenty-seven-year-old stepmother looked younger than her years, and I, even then, gave an impression that I was older. Few of the fourteen years that separated us would have been clear to a stranger. Once, in a busy café, aware of the attention of those at the table beside us, I leaned across, found a deviant strand of hair and tucked it behind her ear. She pulled back. I tried to imagine the questions our intimacy provoked: did they think her a careless adulteress occupying herself with a young lover? And when we left I took pleasure, too, from the envious, congratulatory looks I received from boys my age who walked in small groups by the lake. A scrupulous observer would have, of course, noticed the awkward nervousness her beauty caused in me, but my deliberate and shameful self-delusion, which she always found a way to encourage, persisted. She slipped her arm through mine, marrying her shoulder to my back so I was slightly in front, like an officer leading the way. After a few paces she let go and drifted ahead, looking at the water, no doubt wondering why Father had not telephoned. Her hair moved slightly against the afternoon breeze.
On the way back we passed two lovers locked in a kiss, and although I did not think I was staring, she pinched me and said, “Stop, you are too young for such things.” But then she insisted I try on a jacket and tie she spotted in a shop window near the hotel. When I put them on, she shook her head and said, “Too grown-up.”
Every time we returned to the hotel she would ask at the reception if anyone had called. And the answer was always no. Going up in the lift, she would take a long look at the ground or say, “I don’t know why he hasn’t called,” or, “He never tells me where he is.”
Father’s delay was like a cloud that grew thicker with each passing day. By the evening of the third day, even I wanted him to come or call. I was woken up that night by the stone-white light of a full moon. It held the room in its cold, harsh glare. My heart thundered. I called her room and let the telephone ring until she answered.
“Kamal?”
“No, it’s me. He’s not back?”
“No, darling, go to sleep. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
To restore her “fading French,” Mona had vowed to read La Tribune de Genève every morning over breakfast. If not for this detail, we would not have learned, the following morning, of the “lovers separated by force in the night,” for I was not then in the habit of reading newspapers.
CHAPTER 17
She let go of the newspaper, but only when I tugged.
“Oh God,” she said.
For a moment the terrace we were sitting on seemed in danger of tipping over and chucking us into the dark lake. I looked up, and the paragliders were still there, suspended in mid-distance.
“Come on, we need to leave. Call the police. Why didn’t we hear anything? Shit. Come on,” she said. Then she stood up and leaned for a moment on the breakfast table.
She hurried off toward the lift. I followed her.
In the room she began to pack. Her movements were furious. Every so often she would wipe the tears then continue.
I tried to read the article. The difficulty was not only due to my poor French but because my eyes could hardly focus on the words. Each letter seemed powered by its own little engine.
“Today, in the early hours of the morning, the ex-minister and leading dissident Kamal Pasha el-Alfi was kidnapped from an apartment belonging to a Béatrice Benameur, a resident of Geneva.”
The mademoiselle—or, who knows, madame—looked at least Father’s age, which, because of his preference for younger women, made her seem older and somehow formidable. But the name struck me as disingenuous. As indeed did her expression of grief in the black-and-white photograph that was printed beneath the headline of “Un couple séparé de force au milieu de la nuit.” I was irritated by this; no evidence was supplied that the “lovers separated by force in the night” were indeed lovers and not friends, colleagues, associates or even enemies. And these suspicions only hardened when I read that, along with his wristwatch, cigarettes and silver lighter, Father had apparently left his wedding ring on the bedside table. Father always slept with his wedding ring on. This was an important detail because, as far as I could see, these personal objects were the only evidence that he was ever in the room. Anyone could have stolen them or purchased replicas and planted them there in order to fabricate a kidnapping.
Mona was now nervously paging through the telephone book.
Perhaps, I thought, to elude his pursuers or escape some unwanted circumstance, Father himself might have orchestrated this vanishing act. He might need to send us a message or he might be on the way to the hotel as we packed.
“We mustn’t leave yet,” I said. “Not now; Father might come and not find us.”
She looked at me and I felt the need to explain myself
. But then a knock came. I ran to the door. It was the bellboy, handing me a small envelope. It contained a telephone message from the night before.
“Why was I not given this earlier?” Mona snapped.
“It arrived late, madame,” the bellboy said.
I stood beside her, and we both read the note:
“Call me immediately—Charlie HASS, Geneva.” It listed a telephone number.
Mona sat on the edge of the bed, the telephone on her lap. I sat beside her, desperate to hear every word. She let me; she did not move the receiver to the other ear. All that Father’s lawyer told us was, “You must come as soon as possible.”
On the train to Geneva we hardly spoke. I looked out onto the silver day. A slim road appeared down below, a black snake vanishing in and out of the thick growth. Houses on the passing hills, smoke seeping through the chimneys. How could I have not expected it? I did expect it. Did I not know that he had powerful enemies, that he was often followed? Why else was he so careful, so secretive? What would they be doing to him? Will I ever see him look at me again?
All that I did not know about my father—his private life, his thoughts, why he was kidnapped and by whom, what he had actually done to provoke such actions, where he was at this moment, whether he could be counted among the living or the dead—was like a mask that suffocated me. I felt guilty too, as I continue to feel today, at having lost him, at not knowing how to find him or take his place. Every day I let my father down.
I could no longer bear the presence of the woman who now sat beside me, hiding her eyes behind dark glasses, the tip of her nose glistening red. I could not understand why Father had married her. I held my palm out, and she handed me the article again.
The window behind Béatrice Benameur showed no morning, just two black rectangles separated by a thin white frame. Her eyes, delicate with sleep, fragile from the shock, peered out of the photograph. Her hair was flattened, and when I brought the newspaper close to my face I was able to see sleep marks on her cheek, the marks of folded fabric. The photographer must have arrived on the scene unusually quickly. And suddenly it became reasonable that, out of respect for his wife, Father had decided to take off his wedding ring before lying next to this Swiss woman. Or perhaps it was not respect at all but because he had been taking a bath or cooking a meal. Also, the name, Béatrice Benameur, which had sounded false, now seemed perfectly credible, and it was also perfectly credible that she should have been horrified on being awakened abruptly by balaclavaed men restraining the arms, taping the mouth of the hunted Arab lying beside her, his bare chest heaving, his place on the mattress remaining warm for a long time after they had taken him, her hand on it, and her eyes for many minutes disbelieving what had just taken place, the speed of it, hearing what he sometimes told her when she was impatient with their arrangement: “Everything can change in a blink of an eye, my love,” a statement designed, no doubt, to kindle hope. Or at least that was how, sitting between Mona and the window on that train to Geneva, my mind imagined it. For all I knew he never called her “my love” and she never had expressed impatience toward their “arrangement.” Then I saw him standing up and leaving, guided only by suggestion, a tilt of one of the balaclavaed heads. I imagined this even though the article stated that “there were visible signs of resistance,” that “blood was found on the victim’s pillow,” and that “the lamp shade beside him was smashed.”
CHAPTER 18
For some reason, I had imagined Monsieur Hass to be a short man with a round, bespectacled face. Instead, when the train pulled into the station at Geneva, Mona pointed out a tall, wiry figure standing on the platform.
“There he is.”
I watched him from the window of the train carriage. He had not spotted us yet. His features hinted at austerity. He had a head of straight black hair that was fixed back with the use of some sort of wax. He kissed Mona’s cheeks.
“I am so sorry,” he said.
When he shook my hand, his eyes remained on me a second too long.
His suit was black, his raincoat was black, and his tie was a matte slate gray with tiny white dots.
“This way,” he said, and we followed him.
He walked quickly, the split tail of his coat lifting. When we were inside his car, he spoke.
“I saw him the night before. Everything was all right.”
“When did you hear?”
“The night it happened.”
“Then why didn’t you call?”
“I did.”
“You called the following evening.”
After a long pause, he said, “I was waiting for something good to report.”
He booked a twin room at a three-star hotel, the sort of place where I could never imagine Father staying. After we checked in he drove us to the police station. A man behind the counter listened to Hass, then handed him a form to fill out. The inspector would contact us, Hass said.
“I will leave you to rest,” he said when he dropped us off at the hotel.
Mona and I spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel room, by the telephone. Around sunset Mona called the police station. She was handed from one official to the next until her French failed her. Then I tried, and the same thing happened. After a short while the telephone rang. It was Hass. Mona spoke to him so softly I could barely make out what she was saying.
“He will stop by first thing in the morning,” she said.
By nightfall she and I pulled ourselves out of the room. We walked slowly, aimlessly and a few steps apart. We passed the Café du Soleil and neither of us said a word. Eventually we walked into a fast-food restaurant and sat down under the indifferent lighting and ate in silence.
The following morning we walked behind Hass, who walked faster than anyone I had ever met, to the police station. We stood facing the same attendant. This time he nodded and pointed to the chairs lined against one wall. Mona and I sat down, but Hass stood in his long coat. The attendant whispered down the telephone, and after a few minutes another man, dressed in a suit, appeared through a door on the other side of the counter. He stood beside the attendant, looking through some pages. Mona was already making her way to the counter. The man extended his hand.
“Inspector Martin Durand,” he said.
Hass then introduced himself as “the family lawyer.”
The inspector unfastened an invisible latch and lifted up the counter. Mona, Hass and I passed through. He led us into a room that had nothing in it but a table and four chairs. He apologized for not seeing us sooner. He asked us to tell him what we knew. We told him we did not know anything, that we only knew what we had read in the paper.
“What were you doing in Switzerland?”
Mona spoke, he wrote and only occasionally did he look up from his pad. Whenever he asked a question his head would begin nodding even before Mona answered. Every time she mentioned a place he would repeat the name out loud: “Cairo,” “Daleswick College,” “Montreux Palace,” until it began to seem as if these places were somehow guilty or at least partly to blame. Perhaps this was why Hass felt obliged to clarify:
“They are here on holiday.”
“I see,” the inspector said.
“Can we see the woman?” I asked.
He looked at me. “Which woman?”
“Béatrice Benameur.”
Mona said nothing. Her eyes were on the edge of the table.
“Do you know Béatrice Benameur?”
The inspector’s question was aimed at Mona, but she did not answer.
“Then I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said toward Hass, whose face remained as still as a wall.
Suddenly, Mona began to object. Her voice rose in fury. But Durand silenced her with a move of his hand and firmly repeated, “It would not be a good idea.”
Hass did not speak.
After a short silence the inspector spoke again.
“We are doing all we can in difficult circumstances. This is a complicated case,
not helped by the fact that the journalist was on the scene before us, therefore compromising the evidence. But I assure you we are treating it as a priority. Now, if you would like to follow me to the front desk, you can collect your husband’s personal items.”
We were handed a small sealed plastic bag that contained Father’s wristwatch, cigarettes, silver lighter and wedding ring.
“We found these on his bedside table,” he said.
Mona looked at the inspector. I knew what she was thinking: Father’s “bedside table” was not in Geneva, but with her in Cairo.
Back at the hotel Mona sat at the edge of the bed with her small address book open beside her. She turned the pages slowly.
“Do you need the bathroom?” she said.
I waited until I heard the shower, then located Hass’s number and dialed it.
“Why won’t the police let us see Béatrice Benameur?”
“She doesn’t know any more than what you know,” he said. The silence that followed seemed to trouble him too. “She just happened to be there,” he added.
A little while later, he called back. Mona answered.
She fell silent for a while, listening to him. I wondered what he was telling her.
“You spoke to her?” she said. “I see. And what did she say? … What, right now? OK, give me half an hour,” she said, and hung up. “He’s on his way.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That she’s willing to see us.” Then, to herself, she repeated, “ ‘Willing to see us.’ ”
After a few seconds I could no longer stand the boom of her hair dryer. I waited in the lobby, occasionally going out onto the street, walking back and forth in front of the entrance to the hotel.
In the car I watched the back of Monsieur Hass’s head as he drove. I wondered what he knew, what he was thinking at that moment. The slicked-back black hair looked part of the effort to keep what he knew silent. There was something unrelenting about the strong neck too. And from this proximity I could detect the familiar musky fragrance of Father’s aftershave cream. Mona sat beside him, facing ahead, her eyes hidden behind the sunglasses. Her neck, rigid and slim, seemed in danger of snapping.