by Hisham Matar
I must have turned red, because she laughed; she laughed and I did not know where to look.
She went to her room. I expected not to see her until morning, but then she called me. She had changed into one of the short cotton dresses she slept in. She looked like a girl dressed in an adult’s T-shirt.
“Put on your pajamas and come tell me a story,” she said.
I made something up, a story about my father. And although I felt guilty doing it, I excluded any mention of the woman Mona had never met, her rival, my mother. At one point in my story, which was about a walk Father and I had never taken around the oasis at Fayoum, eating grapes, she closed her eyes and smiled.
“The sun was shining, but not harshly,” I told her.
She nodded.
With every breath her nipples pressed against the thin cotton. Her smiling lips glistened under the brush of the bedside lamp. I had no doubt. My heart thundered as if it were a thing trapped. But my courage went only as far as running my fingers along my own lips. Just then she opened her eyes and they fell heavily on my mouth. Unlike mine, her body did not seem to lag behind her thoughts. She rose and kissed me on the lips. Had the brandy put her in a dream state? Were the lips she kissed my father’s? I never knew that horror and delight could be so sweet and potent. She reached behind her and turned off the light. I felt her arms pulling me to her chest, then the hot breath of her sigh burn my forehead. For a moment I changed my mind. There was no fire, and the house was not full of smoke, but I wanted to push her away and run to the window and let the air wash my lungs. But I remained slack and willing in her arms until the moment passed and sleep overtook me.
The next time I surfaced I found that the night had wrapped us even tighter, coiled her bare thigh round my waist and pushed mine up between her legs. Like branches of a tree, each limb had found its natural way. And although the shame was powerful, it remained distant. I moved against her and she moved with me. It must have been a cloudy night because the yellow city lights reflected off the sky and entered the room. I saw her eyes blink in the weak sepia.
CHAPTER 24
The sun did return. A stab of light was piercing through the window. Countless tiny fragments floated in its path. Every day it comes, this sun, newborn and fierce. I thanked God for the morning. I lay unmoving, tempering my breath, until Naima rang the doorbell. Mona sat up on the side of the bed, pulled a hand through her hair, then turned around and looked at me. She went to open the door.
Naima served breakfast then disappeared to tidy the bedrooms. There was only one bed to make. I wondered, if confronted, how we would explain that. She returned to the dining room and glanced at Mona.
I felt guilty the whole day. I became short with Mona. And she in turn became motherly, sitting on the edge of my bed, asking if I should not be reading a book. Then her eyes fell on my fingers.
“Your nails are too long. Here,” she said and ran to fetch the nail clipper.
That night I lay in my bed praying death would take me. In the middle of the night I was walking the apartment, wading through that peculiar stillness in which everything seemed possible: Mother’s voice, Father’s steps. I decided that by morning I would suggest to Mona that we close the apartment and move to London or Geneva or Alexandria or even Nordland—anywhere but here.
I went to her and found her spread on her back, taking long, deep breaths. I had the thought of strangling her. But then I wanted to kiss her, kiss her so hard as to suck the breath out of her. I lay beside her, but she went on sleeping. I pulled the covers over us. I crawled between her legs and there made myself as small as possible. I was on my side, my head near her groin and my knees in my chest. She hummed but did not stir. Now I could smell her. And the smell surprised me: moist and round, like your palms after a long hot day’s cycling. Then she was awake. It was a cloudless night, but still I could just about make out her face looking down at me, helpless in the dark.
Over breakfast the following morning I could not stop myself from watching her. She did her best to avoid my gaze, pulling tighter the wings of her dressing gown. There was nothing mysterious now about those breasts. Her nipples were like wilted grapes.
This time Naima was not only throwing glances but also setting the plates down noisily.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“This is wrong, Ustaz Nuri.” Then to Mona, “Wrong!”
Mona flinched.
I had never heard Naima shout before. She ran off to the kitchen crying. I heard her say, “It’s my fault. Forgive me, Kamal Pasha.”
“What’s the matter with her?” I asked, and shouted, “Naima.”
“Listen,” Mona said quietly.
“Naima, I am calling you.”
“You have to respect my wishes, Ustaz,” Naima said softly, as if I were there beside her in the kitchen. The belated insertion of Ustaz in the end brought on an aggressive melancholy that tied my tongue and made me want to rush to her, kiss her hands, beg forgiveness.
“Listen,” Mona repeated.
I could not stop the tears.
“I am sorry, Nuri, truly sorry. It has barely been a month and look how badly I am coping. I will be better, I promise. I have decided to move back to England, to be near you.”
Naima saw I was crying. She stood by the kitchen counter watching me.
Mona took a deep breath and seemed older all of a sudden.
“I will move to London. You will visit me there.”
“But you said you loved the English countryside.”
Her eyes blinked slowly like gates closing. Then, looking toward Naima, and in her broken Arabic, she said, “This time I will not fail.”
“I can help you. I can move to a school in London. I hate Daleswick.”
She shook her head again, tried to smile.
After breakfast I listened to her showering. At one point she hummed a tune, then stopped. I wondered whether she had bent to scrub her shins or had suddenly thought, Be quiet, silly woman; this is no time for singing.
I returned to the dining table, pretending I had not left my seat. She emerged dressed and perfumed, the apartment keys jingling off the medallion in her hand. She went into the kitchen and without a word hugged Naima and kissed her on both cheeks. Naima instinctively bowed and kissed Mona’s hand.
“Do we need anything from the shops? I will be back soon,” she said and walked out.
After a few seconds I rushed to the door and caught her stepping into the lift.
“Where are you going?”
She held a hand out and the sliding doors shuddered back. “To the doctor,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“It’s nothing, darling. Just a bad headache.”
I went to Father’s study and felt a panic at sitting in his chair. The room looked undisturbed. Naima—or, who knows, perhaps even Mona—must have come in and closed all the drawers and placed every object where it belonged. Father had left a book on the desk, with a page folded a quarter of the way in. I could pick up where he left off, I thought.
On the morning of my departure, Naima scrubbed the fridge door, although it looked perfectly clean. She did not respond when I said good morning, and whenever I came close her body hardened. Mona seemed impatient with Naima’s behavior. She kept saying, “You will see him soon,” which even Naima knew was a lie.
“Perhaps we should say goodbye here,” Mona said.
I stood beside my suitcase. Abdu, in his modest and quiet manner, crept soundlessly from behind and removed the luggage.
“No, that is not a good idea,” Mona then said, more to herself.
Naima stood still, her soapy hands clasped together. Her figure looked as stiff and precarious as a reed in water. I wandered over to her. She hugged me. There was nothing more convincing than Naima’s embrace.
Mona and I sat in the back of the car. She looked out of the window, and I pretended to do the same. Abdu was also silent. He pulled the seat belt across his chest and looked at m
e in the rearview mirror. Although I could not see his entire face I knew he was trying to smile. Just then we heard Naima’s breathless plea.
“Wait.”
She got in the front passenger seat, and the usual argument ensued. But this time Naima did not resist for long. She did what she was told and fastened the seat belt. Every so often she would turn, take my hand and kiss it three or four times.
In the departure lounge the sheets of marble and glass amplified every sound.
“Call as soon as you arrive,” Mona said.
“What will happen to Naima?” I asked in English.
“Her salary will continue until we see what happens. And the same with Abdu.”
And when she spotted a tear filling my eye, she said, “It’s better this way. I will come see you as soon as I settle in London, if not before.”
And even though I recognized tenderness in her manner, I wondered if this was not punishment for what had taken place the night before.
She and I embraced. She let go before I did, then awkwardly tried to hug me again.
“OK, young man,” Abdu said, and we shook hands.
Naima hugged me too tightly. She held my face in her hands. They were unusually cold.
“Promise you will never forget me.”
She rubbed her wrists, brought a hand to her neck and left it there. She turned to Abdu, looking at him as if hoping for rescue.
Waiting in line, I could feel their gaze on my back, the weight of it. I spotted a man closed in behind glass partitioning, sitting at an empty desk and looking out of the window. Behind him and farther away from the window, a woman sat on a chair against the wall. She, too, was looking out of the window. The light paled their faces. There was a tender quality to their stillness. Then she moved, took out two sandwiches and handed him one. She might have been his wife or perhaps his sister visiting during the lunch hour. The world had to be sliced into hours to fill; otherwise you could go mad with loneliness.
I turned around and saw that they were gone. Lines stretched in all directions. I smelled my father: his musky, warm skin. I looked about and, even though he was not there, the smell persisted.
CHAPTER 25
It was late January, winter just as dominant as it was when I left for Switzerland. I had been gone only six weeks, but it felt like an entire lifetime had passed. At Heathrow I had to force myself down to the Underground station. My heart was as tight as a knot. And when I boarded the train at St. Pancras and the door was shut, the racing pulse returned. I could not look anyone in the eye. My fingers were ice cold, the color beneath the nails white. I watched the fast-skipping fields. When the cab pulled up the long gravel path to my boardinghouse I saw that, despite everything, nothing at Daleswick had changed.
I was late by two weeks and felt overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to catch up on. Mr. Galebraith had telephoned Cairo after the first day of absence. Mona told him that I was ill. “Terrible flu,” I heard her say.
“So is it true or were you just skiving off?” Alexei asked.
“Actually,” I said, feeling my heart rise, “I wasn’t ill. Don’t tell anyone, but it was my father.” When he did not immediately respond I added, “But he’s fine now.”
Two months later Mona called to say she was in London.
“Where are you staying?”
“With a friend until I find a place.”
I wondered if, late into the night, she had confided in this nameless friend what had taken place between her and her stepson in Cairo.
“Who is your friend?”
“Someone I know from university.”
What she said next seemed a deliberate attempt to change the subject.
“I miss you. Are you well? How’s school?”
“What did you do with Naima?”
“I had to let her go.”
“And her salary?”
“I tried, but she refused. Tearful and proud. A good soul. In the end I gave the money to Abdu, who is much more pragmatic, of course. He will give it to her when she is less emotional.”
“How much?”
“The equivalent of three months.”
When I did not say anything she said, “We’ll talk when I see you.”
A couple of days later, while I was eating lunch, Mr. Watson, the maths teacher, zigzagged all the way to the opposite end of the dining hall, where I happened to be sitting that day, and bent close to my ear, causing everyone at the long table to look up.
“You have a guest waiting in the headmaster’s office.” A quick, sympathetic grin passed across his face.
Although I knew who the guest must be, I could not resist the possibility that I might find standing in the headmaster’s office not Mona but my father, altered, perhaps thinner, less certain, older and, although it was a perfectly sunny day, wrapped in the same raincoat that was hanging behind the door of his study. The desire to cling to this hope, coupled with the possibility of finding a changed man, did not speed my progress; I walked slowly, my hand tracing the wood-paneled walls.
The headmaster’s door was open. I could see him sitting behind his desk, his figure darkened by the large windows on either side, facing someone out of view. When I came close I saw that opposite the desk, a couple of meters away, far enough that anything spoken was in danger of being overheard, sat Mona. The sunlight that poured in through one of the windows landed on the carpeted floor just short of her chair, but somehow the edges of her hair were burnished by it. The headmaster’s head moved. Mona turned. She smiled. Now I could see Mr. Galebraith, leaning on a bookcase in the corner. His tie was loose around the fastened collar. He seemed worried.
“Come in,” the headmaster said.
I did and when I was a step or two away from Mona I heard Mr. Galebraith close the door behind me.
I did not want to embrace Mona in front of the two men. I extended my hand and she kissed each one of my cheeks. I detected a new perfume.
The quality of the atmosphere somehow confirmed that she had told them something, but what precisely I was not sure. Did she tell them the truth, that my father and legal guardian had been kidnapped by his political adversaries from the bed of a Swiss woman neither of us knew? Or did she make something up, something simple and tidy for the Englishmen? Did she, for example, tell them that he had fallen critically ill, descended into a coma, that the doctors were pessimistic? Or did she say he had died? Had he died? Had she heard something? The continued silence and the way that they were all looking at me seemed to confirm that the three of them knew something I did not.
Mr. Galebraith was suddenly facing me. He could not have been more than an arm’s length away. His eyes softened. The transformation was as subtle as it was mysterious.
“So sorry, old chap,” he said.
He had never called me that before.
“Your stepmother has just told us,” the headmaster said. “I must say, although you ought to have informed us earlier, I do admire your discretion. And, in light of it, we have all agreed that, besides Mr. Galebraith and me, no one else needs to know. We are determined to guard your studies and your place among your peers. Education must continue even in the darkest of times.”
He got up and, like Mr. Galebraith had done, came and stood in front of me.
“Not a million years ago, fine men like you attended this school while the nation went to war.”
He let his hand rest for the briefest of intervals on my shoulder.
“We are hopeful, of course. But in the meantime Mrs. el-Alfi will act as your legal guardian.”
CHAPTER 26
Soon after my father disappeared Monsieur Charlie Hass began a regular correspondence with me that was formal and disciplined, sticking to the business that bound us: my inheritance. But in one letter, about a year after my father disappeared, he veered off the usual business line and expressed a perplexingly raw feeling. The letter arrived not with the quarterly bank statement and bill of his charges but on its own, written in a hurrie
d, almost exasperated hand that covered both sides of an A5 notepad piece of paper with a torn, perforated edge. It started: “I have been thinking of you and of how you must be feeling. It’s terrible, just terrible. Your father was an excellent man.”
I felt a jealous anger at his referring to my father in the past tense, as if he knew more than I did, not only about Father but also about what might have befallen him.
“And how can anyone expect you to know all that he was and all that he did, the people he knew, the people who loved him? But know this: he loved you very much. If you need proof, look at how thoughtfully he arranged your affairs.”
He ended it with: “I am sorry to be writing you like this, but I felt compelled.” Then he signed his name.
It was well past midnight when, a few weeks after I received the letter, Mr. Galebraith came to wake me.
“El-Alfi,” he whispered, his figure black against the light of the corridor. “Phone call. From Geneva. Mr. Hass. Says he is the family lawyer. Says it’s important.”
Father has been found, I thought. Why else would a Swiss lawyer call at this hour? I did not run but only just managed to walk beside Mr. Galebraith. The telephone was all the way on the ground floor of the old mansion, in a musty corridor tiled in York stone worn to a shine and bulging out of the ground. I held the cold receiver to my ear and waited until Mr. Galebraith reached the end of the corridor.
“Hello?”
“Is this Monsieur Nuri?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I am sorry, did I wake you? I just wanted to make sure that you are all right. You didn’t respond to my letter.”
I said nothing.
“Did anyone come to see you, asking questions, hassling you?”
“No. Anyone like who?”
“Are you sure? You know you can tell me if they did.”
“Mr. Hass, I don’t know what you are talking about.”