Anatomy of a Disappearance

by Hisham Matar

  I left the bathroom light on and entered the cold sheets. Every time I heard someone come up the stairs my heart quickened. I was certain the footsteps were coming to my door, and only after they passed could I start breathing again. At one point I was convinced that one of the voices approaching was that of Toby. And when the woman beside him answered and she did not sound like Mona, I argued that perhaps that was how she spoke to him, that, like the tone she used to reserve for Father, she had one especially for Toby too.

  The following day a fever set in. By eleven the receptionist called to ask if I intended to stay another night. “Yes,” I answered, and that was that. An hour later I ordered soup and tea, and the receptionist hesitated before saying, “I will see what I can do.” The man who delivered them kept looking around the room as I counted the money. By early afternoon I was wrapped in my coat again and making my way down the staircase. I walked to Mona’s building and rang the bell. She answered quickly.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Where have you been?” she said, and pressed the buzzer.

  When I got out of the lift I found her waiting.

  “Where have you been?” she asked again and walked away into the flat. “I have been worried sick about you.”

  “But I told you I was staying with a friend.”

  “Yes, and you said you would call. You gave me a fright. What if something happened? And where is your bag?”

  “At the hotel.”

  “What hotel?”

  “The one I stayed at with Alexei. Here, on the same street.”

  Her face changed. Tears appeared, and she opened her arms and came toward me. She held me for a few seconds, then said, “Come, let’s go,” and we walked to the hotel. I was relieved when she said she would wait downstairs. I did not want her to witness the room, the messy bed. She paid the receptionist, and as we walked back to her building she handed me the deposit, then ran her fingers through my hair.

  Neither of us mentioned Toby. I did not visit again until the summer before my final year at Daleswick, and then only for one night on my way to Heathrow and on to Tanzania, where my year spent a couple of months helping to build an orphanage. I sent her a postcard on which I wrote that I had never felt more at home than in Tanzania. I told her about a visit we had paid to the university of Dar es Salaam. I reminded her that I had only one year remaining before university and that I was still undecided where to go. But when she wrote back, she did not pick up on that; she did not say anything about wanting me to remain in England.

  CHAPTER 29

  In the end I chose a university in London. I got a flat in Holland Park, not too far from Little Venice yet not so close that I might be accused of intruding.

  Occasionally I met Mona. These encounters usually started the same way. I would go to her flat and watch her hover nervously for a few seconds before she grabbed her handbag and keys and said, “OK, let’s go.” We would walk by the canal, then sit in a nearby pub named the Bridge House. I felt observed and suspected she did too.

  “What did Father tell you about his work?”

  “You know he never talked about that.”

  “But he must have told you something.”

  “Your father had a gift for secrets—his final act proves it.” Then after a long silence she said, “He was fixated on that country. It was an obsession.”

  “It was a noble cause,” I said because I did not like the word obsession. “He was very brave.”

  “Yes,” she said. The agreement was genuine; it passed through her with unique gentleness.

  Sometimes I would ask her to recall certain details from our last day in Switzerland, a country I had not returned to since Father’s disappearance; as far as I knew, neither had she.

  “Tell me again what the policeman said.”

  She would fidget. “Well, you were there, weren’t you?”

  “Who was it that called our room? Remember? After Hydar and Taleb?”

  “No one called.”

  “They did. And I think in Athens you used the telephone again.”

  “Athens?”

  “Yes, we transited there.”

  “I don’t remember. It all passed in a panic.”

  I kept a small radius of friends, mostly from university, with whom I shared what I imagined some siblings share: a warm alliance that still assured the necessary distance. We went to concerts, ate at restaurants, called one another on birthdays. They seemed quite satisfied with the admittedly little I was able to give. They did not know much about me except that I came from Egypt—a fact in itself untrue. A certain kind of English temperament suited me because I was never one given to confession. I did not dress as lavishly as Father yet avoided the deliberate casualness of the fashion of the time. When invited for supper at someone’s home, I made sure my gifts were moderate: neither too plain nor too enthusiastic. I never professed any strong or unyielding opinions, unless it was the only way not to stand out. And whenever someone said something about how racist the English were or expressed, in that subtle way, self-satisfaction at the fact that they counted among their friends a dark-skinned Arab, I simply pretended, in the way one does when an old person farts out loud, that I had not heard.

  I occasionally had a lover, but with each act of lovemaking the old guilt I had felt during that night with Mona all those years ago did not become lighter but almost worse. I remember one woman—Katharine was her name, an architect—who asked me why I had tears in my eyes. I, embarrassingly, said nothing, hoping she might mistake them for the emotions of a lover. More often than not these bouts of guilt manifested themselves in a cold aloofness that left the woman—usually still naked at this point—either offended or perplexed, in both cases requiring an explanation. The morning after I would feel the need to call Mona. Attempting to sound casual, I would tell her about a new play I had seen, a new restaurant I had discovered. Sometimes I would even find myself saying something like, “I think you and Toby would enjoy it.”

  I was twenty-four and had just earned a PhD in art history when, according to the rules of Father’s will, I was free to do as I pleased. The papers Monsieur Hass posted a week after my birthday confirmed this: they declared that I was in full control of my inheritance. The options of where and how to live seemed infinite. I found no comfort in this.

  I began to feel I had been neglecting my father. I saw him waiting in a windowless room. I obsessed about what I could do to find him. I dreamed of him often.

  In one dream I am sitting on a bench, knowing he will come. Suddenly he is beside me. I do not know how, but we are the same age. There is something tragic about this fact. He is silent. He is wary of me. Perhaps, I hope from within the dream, one day I might put him at ease. In these dreams I am always the talkative one, like a nervous fellow train passenger. He hardly looks at me. Each time I see him I notice something else about him that has changed: the rhythm of his breath, the way an unpressed collar curls round his neck. In one dream he places a hand on my back, between the shoulder blades, and the heat of his palm bothers me, but I say nothing. Another time he is hungry. I break off pieces of cheese into my lap and feed him with my hand. In another dream he tells me, “I wish I had more world in the world.” When I ask what he means, whether he means more children, he says nothing. I want to know how to comfort him. Then he says, “She whispers in my ear at times,” and I know he means Mother. “Her voice. Her warm breath at my ear, across my neck.” His cheeks turn red, like a young man’s, like his face in that picture I keep, taken by my mother, when they were newlyweds. He touches my arm, and I think, happily, we have become friends. Then a tear that had slid down the side of my face dropped into the shell of my ear and woke me.

  One morning I packed a small suitcase and flew to Geneva.

  I left my bag at a hotel named Eden and went wandering the streets. It was ten years since I had last been in the city. The sun was out and, although it was the afternoon, it shone as pale as an early morning sun. I was w
alking down the Grand Rue when I began to feel myself relax. The shift in mood was as inexplicable as it was wonderful.

  By nightfall I located the street, Rue Monnier, on which Béatrice Benameur had allegedly lived. The street name had been fixed in my memory since that December day ten years earlier when Hass had attempted to introduce us to the mysterious Swiss woman. It would not have been strange if the street had seemed smaller—as indeed most places one knew as a child do seem—but instead the tarmac was wider than I remembered it, the pavements on either side broader and the buildings taller and more dominant against the night sky. I stood on the opposite pavement from the arched building entrance that was flanked by those two hideous plaster cupids. I thought of what I might do if I saw her. I watched the windows. Only a few were lit. I took out the map and by the streetlight found the most direct route downtown—the way I suspected Father might have walked. I located what I surmised was the nearest tobacco shop and bought a packet of Dunhill, the brand of cigarettes my father smoked. The familiar flat pack fit perfectly in my shirt pocket.

  For all I knew, Béatrice Benameur might have moved during the ten years—if indeed she ever lived there—but nonetheless I was so unsettled by having successfully located the building that after breakfast the following morning I wandered back to Rue Monnier. This time I had the courage to consult the names on the buzzers—why had I not done this the day before? Dread and excitement were in my throat. And there it was: “Mlle. BENAMEUR.” I had to read it more than once. The name seemed oddly new, as if I had never seen it before.

  Suddenly I needed to be out of the narrow maze of streets. After a couple of turns I found a café on one of the nearby avenues. At first the place seemed like any other, but then as soon as I sat down I became convinced that I had been there before, perhaps with my parents on one of the numerous visits we made to this city. I sipped the coffee quickly and left.

  The avenue looked onto a park. I walked around it a few times then sat on a bench. After a couple of hours I began to feel calmer.

  I returned to the same café for lunch. I had been sitting there in the corner for some time—doing what Mona used to do, “polishing my French” on a copy of La Tribune de Genève—when, after the lunchtime crowd thinned, I realized I recognized the woman in the tapered skirt sitting by the window. Before I recognized her, I had taken note of how she would bring one hand between her thighs and clench it while still holding a cup of coffee close to her mouth in the other hand, sometimes resting the rim on her lower lip long after she had taken a sip. She looked like Béatrice Benameur. I was still uncertain: was she really the woman with whom Father had spent his last hours? It was ten years later, and the newspaper photograph was not very well printed. I wished I had brought the cutting with me. But I was as familiar with that picture as if it really were a picture of my own father. Looking at her now—immaculately dressed, makeup so subtle and considered—I could not move. She did not seem to have aged much in the last ten years. It was as though no time had passed at all, as though Father might still be lying in her bed or might suddenly walk into the café and sit opposite her. I was grateful for her beauty, pleased for him. I wanted to walk over to her table, but I was gripped by the conviction that any action I might take would cause the moment and its possibilities to vanish. Besides, what would I say? All I could do was watch her beyond the newspaper. She stood up to leave. This was my chance. But when she looked in my direction I lowered my eyes.

  “A bientôt, Mademoiselle Benameur,” the waiter said.

  I paid and left. I caught a glimpse of her turning in to another street. I ran after her. I looked back and saw the waiter standing outside the café in his long white apron, perfectly pressed in large square creases, his eyes on me. I did not run after that and made sure my steps were measured. I turned the corner after her. She was already a good way down. I tried to run again, but my shoes hammered loudly on the cobbled stones. It did not matter; my steps were faster than hers, and eventually I was an arm’s length away, inhaling deeply, trying to smell her. But I caught nothing, not even when she stopped to look at the time and I stood so close behind that, when I blew, the outer strands of her hair parted. She lit a cigarette and walked through the plume. I watched her cross the road. She rang the doorbell of an understated building that had a pale wooden door with a small brass plate. A Swiss flag hung from a mast at the second floor. The cloth was so large that its red corner brushed against the top of her head as she pushed the door and disappeared inside.

  That night I could not sleep from the excitement, the possibilities. I decided that I would try to get to know her without revealing my identity. I was worried that if she knew who I was she would be frightened away, like she had been ten years earlier.

  The following day, walking across the Pont de la Machine under the white September sun, the lake opening and glittering toward the snow-patched mountains in the distance, I found a cluster of figures gathered, gloved hands on the railing, heads bent, a couple of them shouting instructions at the fully dressed man below who was desperately trying to climb out of the water.

  He hugged the bridge column, managed to extract his torso from the fast current and then slipped again. He was looking desperately up at the bank beneath the bridge where I could see a woman kneeling over, her hair tied in a scarf as if she had just stepped out of a convertible. I could not see her face, but from the way she held her arm I suspected she had her hand against her mouth. His head was bobbing above the water. His nose began to bleed. He wiped it, threw his head back. For a moment his eyes looked up at us, but he seemed to take no notice of the anxious calls to hurry, to reach once again for the column, to not give up. His body was moving furiously beneath the water. No sooner had he brought his head upright than his lips and chin were covered in blood. He began another attempt at scaling the bridge. He slipped and splashed back into the waters. The woman under the bridge did not move.

  “Call the fire brigade,” one man shouted.

  “We have,” another told him. “A while ago.”

  “Why are they taking so long?” the woman behind me said so softly that I felt obliged to look back at her.

  The man in the water was working hard now, a new strength in his arms. The column was less than a meter away. He took hold of it and managed to make it up to the first beam. He was now out of view. The water looked darker without him. Being against the railing, I leaned over like the others to see. Whenever someone from behind asked whether the man had made it, we ignored them. I kept my eyes on the woman. She was still on her knees, but her hand had now left her mouth and was stretched out as if she was saying, “Stay there.” When he finally jumped onto the sloping bank, water jetting through the stitching of his black leather shoes, we all clapped. The woman opened her arms and the man fell into her, his head quickly finding her lap. She fingered his wet hair, combing it, tucking it behind his ears and, because from that angle she could not bend to kiss him, she pulled his palm to her face. She untied her scarf and collected it in a ball beneath his nostrils. Her hair relaxed into the air, as if it were breathing it, and fell thick and black. And now, as the distant siren grew nearer, the stillness of those around me seemed less an expression of concern and more a celebration. I walked hurriedly away toward the café, overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of recklessness and of hope.

  CHAPTER 30

  It was lunchtime, and the café was nearly full. The only free table was by the window. The waiter watched me from the doorway without speaking. Eventually he came to my table. I ordered the steak, rare, as I remembered Father liking it. I thought of him sitting in this restaurant, in one of his dark-gray suits. I wondered if I would be able to locate his tailor. I remembered how I used to sit on a stool in the shop, watching him being measured. Perhaps I could order a three-piece in the style he preferred, I thought. The lunch crowd left, and I was the only one in the place. Béatrice Benameur never came. At one point I had the idea that the waiter was on the telephone with her. As he
talked he glanced over in my direction then turned his back, whispering, nodding. I became certain he was taking instructions. When he hung up I waved for the bill.

  I went to my room and remained in bed until the following morning, hardly sleeping. I wondered how she would react if I were simply to ring her buzzer and introduce myself. I thought of calling Taleb and asking what he suggested I should do. I thought of calling Mona, asking her to come. At nine in the morning I finally telephoned the office of Monsieur Hass. I had been meaning to call him as soon as I arrived in Geneva but somehow had not been able to face it. I got no answer. I redialed every five minutes until, at around 9:45, his secretary answered.

  “Did you call before?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  She put me on hold, then returned to say, “Monsieur Hass would like you to come as soon as you are able. Can you come now?”

  The ten years that had passed since I had last seen Charlie Hass had thinned his already slender frame; his suit hung a little loosely now. He seemed shorter somehow, and there was a slight hunch in the shoulders. His hair was no longer black. Thin strands clung to his scalp. But the most significant yet subtle change was in the eyes. They had become less certain, more wary. He seemed to have given way to the inevitability of his doubts.

  We shook hands, then he held me by the shoulders.

  He sat behind his desk and I in the small armchair opposite.

  “You look like your father,” he said. “You hold yourself in the same way.”