by Hisham Matar
CHAPTER 21
It took one and a half hours to drive to Bern. We were silent most of the way, as if each one of us were trying to settle some overworked valve in our head. When we entered Bern, Hass leaned slightly toward Mona and in a near whisper said, “Like I told you, the minister is busy, but we will meet his aide and my friend who is a member of parliament.” Then he added as an afterthought: “It’s a spectacular building.”
He parked in a side street, and we walked. When the large dark-stone building was in view, he pointed enthusiastically to it and said, “See what I mean?”
We looked up at the arches stacked maybe three or four stories high. Two square towers stood on either side, each with a small red flag on top. It did not seem spectacular at all but silly and overbearing, like a square-jawed bodyguard. I moved closer to Mona, relieved that she did not respond to his question.
A woman holding a purple spiral-bound notebook with brightly colored stickers on it led us through a long, polished hallway and up a grand staircase that was as wide as a car. Every so often she would look back to make sure we were still behind her. Eventually the wood-paneled corridors turned white, fluorescent lights replaced the chandeliers. We arrived at a room that looked like a classroom. It even had a blackboard on one wall. The three of us sat on one side of the long white table that stood in the middle. In the center of the table there was a jug full of water but with only two empty glasses beside it. I was thirsty but did not pour myself a glass. After a few minutes the same woman with the childish notebook walked in, followed by a man dressed in a dark-blue suit and bright red tie. He greeted Hass warmly while the woman watched and smiled.
“We were at university together,” Hass explained.
“I am very sorry to hear what happened,” he told Mona.
He shook my hand but without looking in my eyes.
He and the woman sat opposite us, with an empty chair between them.
“The minister’s aide is on her way,” the man said.
“Very kind of you to see us at such short notice,” Mona said.
“We want to do everything we can,” he said.
Then a tall woman walked in, shook the hand of each one of us and quickly took her seat in the middle. She looked at the woman beside her, who opened her notebook and held her pen at the top of an empty page.
“The minister apologizes. He wanted to see you personally as soon as he heard. But, as you might appreciate, he is very busy.”
“Of course,” Mona said softly, which surprised me.
“We have read the police report and the statement you gave to Monsieur Durand, so I won’t trouble you with repeating the story, but, like you, we are very concerned indeed.”
She had slim, elongated features. I was somehow sure she had her father’s face. Her arms were nearly as white as the table and completely hairless. The color altered a little at the hands: there was a hint of green to the heels of her palms, the knuckles were pink, but the fingertips were unhappily red, as if she spent a great deal of time washing dishes.
“My husband is a regular visitor to your country,” Mona said. “If something has happened to him it will be a scandal.”
None of the faces opposite reacted to this.
“You are meant to protect your visitors.”
“Like I said, we are very concerned,” the minister’s aide repeated. “The border police, as well as the intelligence services, have been notified.”
The water jug had tiny silver balls of air clinging to its sides. I wondered how long it had been standing there: how many days or weeks or even months.
“Would you like some water?” the woman taking notes said.
“Yes, sorry, I should have asked earlier,” the man said and stood up.
He did not have a belt on, and, although his fly was done up, he had missed the last short distance to the button. The zipper there widened like the open mouth of a small fish. He poured the water quickly, straightening the jug just before the water reached the rim. He placed one glass in front of Mona and the other in front of me. I had intended to drink mine in one go but could not take more than a sip.
“What I feel we must prepare for,” the minister’s aide said as she looked at her colleagues, “is the possibility that he was driven to one of the neighboring countries. France or Italy for example. It’s not unusual for our immigration officials not to check papers of those leaving the country.”
Mona made a strange sound, like a short wheeze. Everyone else must have noticed, but no one said anything.
“Is that what you think happened to my father?” I asked.
“No, we are just saying that it’s a possibility,” the man said.
I looked at Mona but she did not react.
“This is the fourth day,” she finally said.
And no one else spoke after that. Not until the woman with the notebook, who had filled a few pages by now, said, “So, to recap: we will make sure that all border-crossing stations are aware of this and will notify the authorities of the neighboring countries also.”
At the airport Hass did something unexpected. After kissing Mona on both cheeks, he hugged me. The edges of his eyelids, where a woman would wear her kohl, were as red as a fresh wound.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I will follow up with the police.”
When we were a few paces away, he shouted after us.
“Call if you need anything, anything at all.”
We got on an indirect flight home. We had a few hours in Athens. We tried to sleep on the airport benches. I watched her cheek pressed against her wrist. She seemed as foreign to me then as the figures that passed us in the airport lounge.
CHAPTER 22
We landed in Cairo in the early morning. The damp tarmac shone under the streetlights. The air was heavy with the human smell of the old and overpopulated city. I had never felt so deeply disoriented. Mother came into my thoughts. My need for her was sudden, bottomless and unendurable.
In the apartment, before we slept, Mona opened a can of tuna and heated a couple of loaves of frozen bread, nearly burning them. We ate in silence. I was not occupied by the obvious question of what happened to Father but by the physical need to be beside him.
In the morning, as soon as Naima arrived, she asked, “Where is the pasha?”
“Working,” Mona told her.
“Is he all right? Because, yesterday alone, Ustaz Nuri’s aunts, Madam Souad and Madam Salwa, called at least ten times. They said they’d heard bad news but wouldn’t say what.”
Later that day I heard Naima open the door and let someone in. I rushed to see who it was and found Taleb standing in the hall.
Mona pulled him into the sitting room.
“The regime—” he said, then stopped. When he resumed, he spoke his words quickly and in a near whisper, as if he could not wait to get to the other side. “The regime has issued a statement saying they have him, that he has, of his own volition, returned to the capital. But they didn’t show him. They could be bluffing. It’s possible.”
As he delivered these words, Taleb leaned toward Mona. When she neither spoke nor lifted her eyes from her hands, he looked at me and said, “I came as soon as I heard.”
For the rest of the day and whenever I was alone, Naima would follow me, asking, “What happened? Where is the pasha? I know something is wrong.”
In the end I told her. Panic and fear were in her eyes, but her voice remained reasonable and steady.
“Look, your father often did this. His work demands it. It has happened before.”
“Really?”
“Yes, many times. He would vanish for days, and your mother, God have mercy on her, would become sick with worry, but before long he was at the door as if nothing had happened.”
She tried to smile. She held me and I let her.
“You should call your aunts,” she said suddenly.
She fetched a number written in her own large hand.
Aunt Salwa said I sho
uld come immediately to live with them, then she began to cry. Aunt Souad took the receiver.
“Nuri, habibi, listen very carefully,” she said. “Ask your stepmother to put you on the first plane home, here where you belong. Don’t be frightened; no one will touch you; they are only interested in your father. This is your country.”
“But I have school,” I said.
“Give me your stepmother,” she said.
I sat beside Mona.
“I understand your concern,” Mona said, then waited patiently. “Yes, I understand.” My heart began to beat wildly. “Listen—” she said and was interrupted. I watched her cheeks turn red. “Auntie, please, you are being unreasonable.… No, you listen to me. I know I am only twenty-eight, but I am capable of looking after Nuri. Disrupting his education now would be hugely irresponsible. Thank you very much,” she said and hung up, her breath swelling the square sail of skin at the base of her neck. The telephone rang again. “Don’t answer it,” she told Naima.
I followed her to where Taleb was sitting at the dining table.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said and sat down.
I placed my hand over hers, hoping she would hold it tightly.
When it came time to sleep, and regardless of how much I insisted, Taleb would not take my bed. Mona stood by, saying nothing; so did Naima, which was when I understood that because Father was not home, it would have been improper for Taleb, being a single man, to sleep in the room next to Mona’s bedroom. Naima spread a sheet on the couch in the living room and brought him a blanket. He lay in his clothes. I sat on the floor beside him. I told him what Naima had told me, that this had happened before. He placed a hand on my head but did not say anything.
“Uncle Taleb, when do you think Baba will return?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think it will take a long time?”
“I don’t know.”
I began to cry.
“Your father is brave,” he said.
I could not understand what that had to do with anything.
“You have to be just as brave.”
He took hold of my hand as if we were about to cross a main road.
“I was with him in the hospital when you were born. I had never seen a bigger smile. He took me by the shoulders, nearly crushed my bones. And every test you passed, every new sport you started, he mentioned it in his letters.”
This surprised me. I had always had the persistent feeling that I was a disappointment.
“There was nothing you could do wrong. When you got accepted at that famous English boarding school, he called me. He was so proud.”
I wiped away the tears. My eyelids were heavy. A while later I felt his hand on my shoulder.
“Go to bed.”
After brushing my teeth I came back to ask, “Do you have to leave tomorrow?”
“Yes. But if you ever need me, I will fly back.” When I did not move, he said, “Here,” and handed me a piece of paper on which he had written, carefully and meticulously, his full name, telephone number and address.
CHAPTER 23
The following night, long after Taleb had left for the airport and Naima had left on her long commute home, I heard a clank in Father’s study. It sounded like a nut cracking. I found Mona ransacking the drawers, wild with impatience. I went after her, ordered the papers and pushed shut a couple of drawers, then stopped. I watched her body bend and twist beneath the nightdress. I sat in Father’s padded desk chair. It was too big for me. The backrest that reached his shoulders was taller than my head. My eyes fell on the raincoat hanging behind the door, the fabric sculpting the ghostly shape of Father’s shoulders. I left the room. I paced up and down the corridor and when she eventually came out of the study I stared at her, and she said, with a voice as hard as a stick, “No, you won’t. You can’t blame me for this.”
Hass called daily, trying to reassure us that he was still following up with the Swiss authorities.
“I was in Bern again yesterday,” he would sometimes say before asking to speak to Mona.
I would sit beside her. She let me listen in on those calls, happy sometimes even to lean slightly toward me. Other times she would press the receiver tightly against her ear and point to the packet of cigarettes that was not entirely out of her reach, asking me to fetch it.
The minister’s aide had refused to give the journalist from La Tribune de Genève an interview. “They said better results could be achieved by not generating too much publicity,” Hass told Mona. “Clearly wary of getting involved in any kind of international trouble,” he had said.
He was also still trying to trace Béatrice Benameur. There was no answer when he called at her flat or rang the number he had for her.
“It’s obvious,” Mona told him. “She was part of the kidnapping.”
Hass did not respond.
Often before falling asleep I would lie in the black room and fantasize about how one day I would find Béatrice Benameur and take my revenge. I still remember the sound of my heart keeping me awake.
The telephone continued to ring incessantly. Then after a few days it grew quiet. Relatives and neighbors who might have filled the chairs in the hall if Father had died were silent in the face of his disappearance. Even my aunts and Taleb stopped calling so much. A great emptiness began to fill the place of my father. It became unbearable to hear his name. It must have been the same for Mona, for she, too, hardly mentioned him now. At times it was almost possible to imagine that he had never existed. Yet every morning, the moment I opened my eyes, I believed he was there, that I would find him sitting at the dining table, holding a cup of coffee in the air as he looked down at the folded newspaper on his lap.
As if expecting his vanishing at any moment, Father had drafted a will with the meticulousness of a heart surgeon. Neither Mona nor I had known of its existence. We found it when we managed to open the safe in the corner of the study.
I had secretly hoped to find a note explaining everything: his disappearance, instructions on where to find him, instructions on how to live. I had even allowed myself to hope to read, finally, an explanation for Mother’s sudden passing. Instead, we found his will sealed in an envelope, the insignia of a floating olive tree, its roots dangling in midair, embossed on the top center. After Father could no longer return home he had commissioned this design and had had it stamped on his stationery.
The will, effective in the event of “death or disappearance,” left Mona three hundred thousand pounds sterling, “to be discharged in ten equal installments of thirty thousand paid annually.” The rest was to go to “my only son, Nuri el-Alfi.”
Why did he add “my only son”? I wondered. Did he think anyone would suggest otherwise?
Monsieur Charlie Hass, who held the original copy of the will, was to “fully administer the inheritance” until I reached eighteen, and then “administrate it partially” until I was twenty-four, when I would become “in complete charge of my inheritance.” Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, in order to qualify for my allowance, I had to be engaged in studies leading to a PhD, “in any subject except business or political science, because both politics and business benefit from an indirect education.” I remembered how Father used to say “a man must not take up employment until he has completed his education.” He could not understand why some well-to-do families encouraged their sons to work summers. “How is a young man to know himself if he is required to plunge into the first job offered him? Humility is not earned through humiliation.” And so I could not secure any form of employment, “voluntary or otherwise,” until twenty-four, when I could do whatever I pleased, according to my father.
I hid the police plastic bag that contained Father’s last things in my wardrobe. I dreaded Mona asking me about it. I could not imagine ever parting with it. I did not dare unseal the bag again but spent hours with the newspaper article, rereading it, studying every part of the photogra
ph, not only the features of Béatrice Benameur but everything else contained in the frame. I discovered things I had not noticed before. Then I saw something that had me reeling for days afterward. It looked like a corner of a baby’s crib. I showed it to Naima.
“But that is a chair, Ustaz Nuri,” she said, continuing to peer into the picture.
By the evening I had convinced myself she was right. It was only a shawl resting on a ladder-back chair.
There is a moment in the Cairo day when the sun seems to hover motionless. In the days that followed, I would sit beside Mona at the dining table, watching the fading light bounce off the Nile and paint her neck fiery red. Suddenly her beauty would look sorrowful: a fruit bruising in front of my eyes. The sun would roll off the horizon and leave the river mute and gray. It was difficult then to imagine the light ever returning. A smog-stained cloud would enter the sky. Naima would creep up from behind and switch on the lamps. Only then could you feel the pain and longing ease and it was possible then to play a game of cards.
Cards became our nightly ritual. And I let her win most times. She was terrible at chess and backgammon, but in poker she could hold her own. Sometimes, when she was really restless, I would beat her, and she would turn wonderfully competitive and ask Naima, who hated to touch the bottle, to bring over the brandy.
“I mustn’t let this boy get the better of me.”
Which made Naima blush and say, “May God preserve the goodwill, madam.”
One such evening, after Naima had washed the dinner plates, placed the bottle with a hand gloved in a kitchen rag on the table and left on her long journey home, I let Mona win several games in a row and watched her sink a quarter of the brandy. She turned up an English song and began to dance around the room. Then she said, “You like to watch me, don’t you?” She came close and into my eyes whispered, “You are a strange boy. If I let you, you would spend a lifetime watching me.”