Anatomy of a Disappearance

by Hisham Matar

  I did not know how to answer. The truth is, I don’t believe Father is dead. But I don’t believe he is alive either.

  She took out a photograph from her handbag and placed it in front of me. Father standing on a corner pavement, the cobbled street falling steeply behind him, then elbowing right. His arms hang slightly away from his torso, sleeves rolled up. His eyes have a hint of bewilderment. They know. The cheeks, too, know: sunken and a shade darker. And in the shirt pocket there is the top of a cheap pen. He looks like a schoolteacher. He looks wary, ready.

  “The Place du Bourg de Four, the day before it happened,” she said and looked at me. “We were walking, and I thought I must take a photograph. Strange, because I never was one for taking pictures. But there was something peculiar about that day. You could feel it pass. You can keep it,” she said, and then the tears came.

  I rescued one hand.

  “I should not cry. You lost so much more.”

  I wanted to ask about the blood on the pillow, the broken lamp shade, the signs of resistance reported in La Tribune de Genève. But then, looking out of the window, she said, “I hate this city, all the muck it gathers.”

  CHAPTER 32

  That afternoon I located the spot on the Place du Bourg de Four and stood facing the same direction Father faced, toward the blinking shutters that overlooked the Rue Saint-Léger. I thought perhaps I should ask one of the passersby to take a picture of me in the same spot. They would have had no reason to suspect anything unusual. After a quarter of an hour, I put the camera away and walked on.

  Béatrice had given me her number, but I wondered whether another conversation only a couple of hours after our meeting in the café would be too much for both of us. I stopped at a public telephone and, without knowing what I was going to say, I dialed her number. She answered.

  “Can I stop by?” When she did not respond, I said, “I want to see where it happened.”

  “Of course.”

  I pressed the buzzer, and she answered immediately. Standing in front of the apartment, I heard her light feet almost run to the door. She opened it and stood to one side. I could smell perfume. She pointed to the kitchen, where a newspaper was spread on a rectangular table that stood against the wall, a cup with something steaming beside it. The sun dappled through the yellowing leaves of a tree that reached above the window. When she saw me hesitate, she said, “Are you sure you want to?”

  “Yes.”

  I followed her to the bedroom. The same window. I walked around the bed to where I had always imagined he was when it happened. I pressed my hands into the mattress. I sat down, my back to her. The bedside table had nothing on it. A biography of our king and Philip K. Hitti’s History of the Arabs stood alone on a shelf on the wall. I lay down, still dressed in my coat and shoes. Only then did I realize she had left the room. I felt my body sink into the bed. The ceiling was perfectly white. There was not a crack or speck or insect or cobweb. I shut my eyes.

  I found Béatrice in the kitchen, her eyelids red. She stood up when she saw me and opened a hand toward the opposite chair. I sat down and watched the watery light pass through the leaves behind her. There was no need to talk.

  Some minutes later she spoke.

  “Everything you see we picked together. When we first moved here he insisted we even paint the walls ourselves.”

  I could not imagine my father doing that.

  “He was so excited: picking out the colors, learning how to use the roller. He made me laugh.”

  I looked around the room at the walls.

  “I had some of the gentlest, most beautiful times with him. I wanted it to last forever.”

  After a long silence I felt I needed to say something good.

  “Two days ago I watched a man almost drown. He was bleeding from the nose. He struggled with all his strength. I was certain he wasn’t going to make it. But he did.”

  When I looked at her she smiled.

  “How’s your stepmother?” she suddenly asked.

  I was surprised by the question as much as by my frank response:

  “Things between us have become very complicated.”

  “You need to be gentle with her. Her situation is more difficult. She must know that your father married her because of you. He always punished himself, wishing he were a better father. He used to say he loved you so much he froze around you. At first he thought Mona might be good for you because he saw how fond you both were of each other.”

  Later that day Charlie Hass called my hotel.

  “Monsieur Nuri, I must thank you. You have made Béatrice happy for the first time in a long time. I do hope you will remain in touch.”

  CHAPTER 33

  I flew back to London and immediately went to see Mona. I told her I had been in Geneva and I had news. Toby had lost his job and moved in with her. She threw her keys into her handbag and I followed her out. She walked half a step ahead, her boots angry at the pavement. We sat at a small table in a dark corner of the same pub, the Bridge House. She had her back to the wall. The light from behind me powdered her face white.

  “I met Béatrice.”

  “Oh yes? What did you find out? God, you should have called. Did you think she had had a tip-off? I wish I could have been there. She must have been paid an awful lot of money to sleep with your father.”

  I did not know how to answer. It was as if she was not really talking to me at all. Just reasoning it all out.

  “They were lovers. For a long time, Mona. He was in love with her. It wasn’t only that night. They had been together for years.”

  Her faced seemed to collapse. The corners of her mouth twitched, but she said nothing. I suddenly had the strange realization that I was almost enjoying myself. I did not mind telling her. I almost wanted to see how far I could push her. Then it was as if she was mustering every part of herself to speak:

  “Oh, of course she told you that. Wouldn’t want to seem like a whore to Kamal Pasha’s charming son. That’s hardly a surprise.”

  Along with the word surprise, specks of saliva shot out into the light like fine pieces of broken glass.

  I felt obliged to defend her—the woman my father loved last.

  “She wasn’t like that at all,” I said. When she did not speak I felt I could go further. “He clearly loved her. He was good to her. She knew him better than we did.”

  “You go tell that to Naima,” she spat.

  “What does Naima have to do with any of this?”

  “Oh, please, don’t tell me you never suspected it. I mean, you must have looked at yourself in the mirror and wondered … I mean, look at the color of your skin, for God’s sake. And how she always fussed over you.”

  I thought of running. I remembered how Naima would take my mother’s place by my bedside whenever I was ill. And how once, when I was feverish, Mother stepped to one side when Naima walked in breathless. The next time I looked up, Mother was gone. I confronted her about this. It was late in the evening; the sky had but a thin veil of light. I babbled and stuttered, and she held me and said, “I know, it breaks my heart too. But we mustn’t see it this way. We are all lucky. We must count ourselves lucky,” and she began to kiss each hand, each cheek, my forehead. And, as was often the case with Mother, whether naturally or by sheer force, she managed to steer the conversation away from painful subjects. She stood up and, doing a sort of Charlie Chaplin impression, twisted an invisible mustache and started to recite some lines by al-Jahiz about the appropriate manners a man must show his donkey.

  I hated Mona at that moment. I hated her spite and anger and sadness. I was determined to hold on to my composure. I looked at her. The skin around her neck looked iridescent in the light, her lips a careless dab of paint. She shut her eyes and pressed the tips of her fingers to the bridge of her nose. Then she sighed, and her hand was around her drink once more. All but a transparent coin of ice had melted. Without taking a sip, she let go of the glass and rubbed her hand on her thigh. I wondered i
f she needed money.

  “I look like my great-grandfather,” I said after the long silence. “That’s why I’m darker.”

  But these words left a desperately hollow feeling. She looked up at me but did not speak. I stood up. She reached for her bag, and we both walked out of the pub and into the bright afternoon.

  “I must go,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  She walked off, and I turned and walked away in the other direction. As soon as I turned the corner I vomited onto the pavement. Tears covered my eyes. An old lady with a dog stopped to ask if I was all right. I managed to nod, and she walked on. That was the last time I saw Mona.

  One night, a couple of months later, I found myself standing again in the rain, on the opposite side of the canal from her flat, facing the lit window. I felt a fire in me, and it was not good. I asked myself what would help and could find no answer. Not even possessing her would have done it. I watched her shadow pass across the ceiling of her bedroom. I knew I had to leave London then.

  CHAPTER 34

  The plane landed in Cairo just as day was breaking. When I sat in the back of the taxi, I was surprised how ready the old address was on my tongue: “Twenty-one Fairouz Street, Zamalek.” A thin mist waxed the warming, empty streets. Memories returned. I remembered how my mother used to pass the brush through her hair, unhurriedly and away, like someone pushing away bad news. Then I recalled standing on my knees on a bed in a cabin aboard the Isis as it made its way up the Nile and deeper into the continent, combing Mona’s hair. Everything I loved and all of what was lost was once here. And now I was arriving into absence, after everyone had gone.

  Deeper into the city, the streets tangled. Cairo was almost fully awake. I tried not to let the swollen pavements, the choked lanes, unnerve me. It was as if, in the eleven years I had been gone, a terrible truth had disquieted the city of my childhood.

  And here were the familiar streets of the river island district of Zamalek. All of us—Mother, Father and even Mona—were everywhere I looked.

  When we reached Fairouz Street I could see Am-Samir, the porter, sitting on the steps of the building, facing the road and the Nile beyond. There were mornings in London when I used to wake up agitated by the possibility of his dying or moving away. He had been a constant figure in the desolate landscape. I had not told him I was coming. I wanted to keep open the option of turning back. He did not recognize me when I got out of the taxi and started to unload the suitcase. But how could he have recognized the fourteen-year-old boy I was in the twenty-five-year-old man I had become? He looked older. The strong trunk of his neck had withered, and his Adam’s apple protruded more prominently and seemed as delicate as a bird’s skull. His mustache had thickened with white, wiry hairs. It was as if the years had gathered their forces around him and were now a company and a comfort. He looked at me with a kind of benign curiosity.

  I had kept the scantest correspondence with Am-Samir over the years: always brief and concerning the upkeep of the family apartment. The man could not, as the expression here went, disentangle a line, and so he dictated his brief letters to his son Gamaal, who was only a year older than me.

  As soon as Gamaal had learned how to read and write Am-Samir pulled him out of school to sit on the rickety wooden bench in the drafty entrance. I remember how Gamaal used to sit there, watching me with a kind of bewildered, envious curiosity whenever I ran down the stairs to catch the school bus or, in the late afternoons, when I would walk out holding my mother’s hand as we strolled together up the corniche. And he watched me when I returned from horseback riding or tennis or croquet too, and would tap my shoulder nervously and hand me a ball or riding whip that I had accidentally dropped in the hallway.

  In his letters Am-Samir would always inquire, through his son: “How is your health, Nuri Pasha? When will we see you again?” and would always end with: “We will never forget your parents.” The last line sometimes read like an accusation that my absence was a betrayal of their memory. At other times it flattered me. These inquiries, accusations or compliments were always met by a reserve that I regretted as soon as I posted yet another letter. But I avoided any guilt by thinking these evasions were necessary given the reader, Gamaal, who stood between us. But now there I was, and there he was, with no one in between. I stood on the pavement, looking at him. He walked over to me, checked my face and then wrapped his arms around me. He smelled as dry and clean as plowed earth. He placed his coarse hand on my cheek, patted my head although I was now taller than he was. I could see tears in his gray eyes.

  “What good news,” he said. “What good news! Gamaal,” he called. “Look who’s here! Sir, we have missed you. Now happy days are back. Look how you have grown.”

  I could not stop smiling.

  Gamaal stood behind his father. He looked more circumspect, but the eager envy had gone from his eyes. No doubt, one by one, he had let go of his expectations.

  I left father and son arguing over who was going to carry the suitcase. Gamaal got hold of the handle first.

  “Move,” Am-Samir ordered. “I have been waiting for this day.”

  “But your back?”

  “Ten times stronger than yours.”

  The lift seemed smaller. I pressed the number three. The feeling cast itself like a fisherman’s net around me: I was finally where I ought to be. After all, if Father returned, where else would he go but home?

  Inside the apartment, I stood by the window and looked out at a view that had once been as familiar as my own reflection: the shoulder of the island nudging the river and the far bank bending a little in agreement. The wind was strong. It brought with it the sounds of the city.

  “If you had warned us … Pointless otherwise to keep clean an apartment not in use, don’t you agree, Nuri Pasha?” Am-Samir let go of the suitcase, placing his hand against his lower back. “Can’t quite believe my eyes. You have cheered us up, really, Pasha.”

  I thanked him.

  “Naima will be happy,” he said. “There isn’t a month, I tell you, where she doesn’t pass by to ask about you, I swear. In the early days she would come every other day. Poor girl, she never really found her feet.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She hasn’t settled, Pasha. Every few months she moves to another family.” He looked at my suitcase. “Is this the entire luggage? Shall I put it in the bedroom? I hope this doesn’t mean you will be leaving soon?”

  “No,” I said. “The rest of my things will arrive this week. I will stay in a hotel until then.”

  “That’s excellent news. I will have the place sparkling. And with joy, Pasha, I swear, with joy.” He picked up the suitcase. “I will stop a taxi. The best car in Egypt.”

  He left, and after a few minutes I followed him.

  “I will see you in a week,” I said, getting into the cab.

  “Everything will be ready,” Am-Samir repeated, Gamaal standing behind him. And only after the taxi drove off did I remember that I should have given him some money. But I felt too embarrassed to return.

  “Where to?” the driver asked.

  I could only recall the name of one hotel:

  “Magda Marina.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Agamy Beach.”

  He laughed, but when he saw in the rearview mirror that I was not joking, he said, “But that’s in Alexandria.”

  We set off on the three-hour drive. For the first time in years I felt good.

  CHAPTER 35

  A miracle that I managed to retrace my steps, and a miracle still that the Magda Marina had survived the relentless development inflicted on the coast. The 1960s southern Mediterranean architecture of the hotel, which had seemed naïvely optimistic, now struck me as elegantly old-fashioned. The same cropped lawns snaked around the same mirror-fronted concrete-box rooms. The same mock-Moorish tiles round the rectangular pool. I found the palm tree where I had sat all those years ago. The trunk had widened, and the canopy had climbed up
too far for its shade to have much effect.

  It was autumn, and the hotel was nearly empty. I could not remember the number of our old room, the room where Father and I used to stay, and so the receptionist guided me to the pool from where I was able to point it out.

  “But that is a twin?”

  “I know.”

  “Have you stayed there before?” he asked, walking back.

  “When I was a boy. Many years ago.”

  He smiled at me.

  When I had finished checking in, the bellboy, who waited eagerly to one side, led the way to the room. He took quick, short steps that suggested my bag was much heavier than it was.

  I unpacked and went immediately to the sea. I swam so far out that I could no longer see land. I floated in the breathing silence. The water was so still and calm that I was not entirely certain which way was back. Suddenly I became conscious of how cold the water was. I began swimming, my face in the water, and tried not to get too nervous. After a few strokes I looked up and could see the thin sliver of land bobbing on the horizon.

  After lunch I telephoned Am-Samir.

  “She just missed you,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Naima, Pasha, Naima. God in His grace. She passed by shortly after you drove off. The coincidence! She found us cleaning. ‘Nuri Pasha is back,’ I told her. She didn’t believe me. Gamaal convinced her.”