Anatomy of a Disappearance

by Hisham Matar

  “Where is she now?”

  “Cleaning the flat. She kicked us both out. You know what she’s like,” he said, laughing.

  I lay in the curtained coolness of the room, on the bed where my father had slept, and paged through the newspaper, tilting it slightly, as he used to do, toward the lamp.

  The next few days were very much the same. My keenness for the sea persisted. I ate well. And slept even better. But as the days passed I began to long to get back to the Cairo apartment, to see Naima again. When the day came for me to return I felt sharply nervous. By the time the taxi entered the thick traffic of the city the nervousness turned to excitement.

  I found the flat clean, both the beds made, and was hit by the smell of the food I used to eat as a child. New shelves had been put up in the hall, and my books were unpacked and ordered neatly on them. Many of the spines were upside down.

  “Naima has just gone to the shops,” Am-Samir said. “Any minute now she will be back. She is very happy, Pasha. Cooking a feast. Your favorite: stuffed grape leaves. See how we remember?”

  I tried to ignore how violently my heart was beating.

  I do not know how long she had been standing there. She was older, tears clinging to her eyelids like diamonds. I hugged her. She kissed my hand, front and back, pulled me down to kiss my forehead. I could not stop smiling. When she saw my face, she plunged herself into my chest and wept silently.

  Am-Samir, too, was tearful, slapping one hand over the other and repeating, “How gracious is the Lord.”

  Gamaal stood to one side, his hands locked behind his back.

  I had come home to servants.

  I insisted that they eat with me. Gamaal said it was not possible. Am-Samir looked at him as if hoping his son was wrong.

  “What then,” I said, “you expect me to eat alone?”

  They sat with me but hardly ate.

  When Am-Samir and Gamaal left and Naima and I were alone, the silences assumed a new quality. Every time she finished asking if I wanted tea or coffee or what I would like tomorrow for breakfast, lunch, dinner, what dishes I missed most—“Do you remember my molokhia? You used to love my molokhia with stuffed pigeon”—and after every reply I made, it seemed that we were each slowly returning to the chain of our private thoughts. What I knew—and preferred that I did not know—could not be uttered. It was impossible to change our shared history, to be mother and son in the clear light of day. And this was not a hindrance, this impossibility—more a mercy.

  Before she left on her long commute home, she showed me what she had done. While I was at the Magda Marina she had arranged all of Father’s clothes in such a way that they now occupied only half of his wardrobe. She began unpacking my clothes. She hung the trousers and jackets opposite his suits. She stacked my underclothes beside his old, yellowing ones. She placed each one of my socks, with the tenderness of someone sowing seeds, in with the black, stone-like balls of Father’s silk socks.

  And that close photograph that Mother took of herself, the one that she had placed on the wall of my old bedroom only days before she passed away, was now standing on Father’s bedside table. I was happy to leave it there.

  Somehow Naima had assumed that I would take my father’s room, sleep in his bed. And I did.

  CHAPTER 36

  Naima came every day. She labored over each meal, cooking enough to feed a family.

  “The more mouths you feed, the more blessed your home will be,” she would say.

  She sent the leftovers to Am-Samir and the drivers who lingered downstairs.

  The windows sparkled, and the floors gleamed. The laundry basket hardly spent a night full. She insisted on washing everything by hand, because “soapy clothes are bad for your skin.” She would sit cross-legged on the tiled floor of the windowless laundry room and say, with raw motherliness, as her unhappy hands kneaded the garments I had worn only the day before, “I don’t care what you say, machines don’t rinse properly.” Her hands were covered in maps of pale scars from the repeated peeling over the years. I bought her rubber gloves, but she never wore them, not even when bleaching the whites.

  “You’ve spent too long abroad,” she would say, laughing away my concern.

  Every time I looked down I found a newly pressed shirt, the buttons marching up to my neck like the bolts of an ancient piece of armor. And if I dared pour myself a glass of water or attempt to make a cup of tea she would shoo me out of the kitchen.

  One evening, as she was preparing supper and repeating, “You won’t believe what I made,” the doorbell rang, slowly, with a long gap between rings. I did not leave Father’s study, which had become my refuge, particularly during these evening hours. I could hear Naima welcoming warmly, then the soft utterances of a deep, masculine voice. When I walked out I saw, standing opposite her, with his back to me, a man dressed in a smart suit. He turned around, and I saw the familiar, gentle face of our old driver, Abdu. His tightly curled hair was powdered white; otherwise, his Nubian face was pretty much unaltered.

  “See how lucky you are?” he said to Naima after embracing me.

  Naima held her hands tightly against her stomach, shielding that permanently damp patch on her dress, the place where she leaned against the kitchen sink. She gave a shy smile, looked proud.

  “I swear, God loves you,” he told her. “Oh, yes,” he went on. Then he looked at Naima, and at first I could not understand the meaning of his gaze. But then his eyes welled up. “Didn’t I tell you everything would turn out all right?” he said. He took her by the ear. “And I had to hear it from others. God forgive you for keeping such good news to yourself.”

  She smiled so broadly that her brown teeth showed.

  I took him to the study. He stood in front of the framed photographs on the shelf, those that were there from before, and the ones I had added since my return. He paused in front of each one before moving sideways, punctuating the silence with: “Welcome back, Pasha.”

  He refused to eat with me, and I was not quite ready for him to leave.

  “You know,” I said, “I haven’t been down to see the old wagon yet.”

  He laughed. “You’re still holding on to it? It’s a fine car.”

  “Shall we go see it?” I said, and, after a slight hesitation, he stood up.

  He was now working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  “But I am semi-retired. They only call me when a foreign dignitary is visiting,” he said proudly.

  I nodded, my eyes on the fat knot of his tie. It was a pale purple with tiny white dots.

  When we were beside the car, his pager beeped. He stood to one side with his back to me. Am-Samir, who had followed us down, began stripping off the dusty gray cover. The old metal shone when he rubbed it with his palm. The wheels were entirely flat. I sat in the front passenger seat, where Father used to sit, particularly when he was riding alone with Abdu. The familiar smell of the leather made it seem as if the car had been holding on to the memory.

  I watched Abdu. There was something unsettling about how well he had survived the tragedy: his fine suit, shiny black shoes, his confidence.

  It took a good month before the old telephone line was reconnected. I called Taleb in Paris and left a message on his answering machine. He called back and immediately, without saying hello, said, “Bizarre to be dialing the old number again.”

  We both tried to laugh.

  “Hold on,” I said. “There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.” I handed Naima the telephone.

  “Who is it?” she whispered.

  “Taleb.”

  “Taleb who?” Then she remembered and took the receiver.

  I watched as her face smiled and reddened. She scratched repeatedly at a spot on the kitchen counter with her thumbnail.

  When I took back the telephone Taleb was silent a second too long.

  “God bless you,” he said, and stopped. “You are a decent fellow, Nuri.” The timbre of his voice deepened. Then it changed. He
told me about a call he had received from Mona. “She was terribly worried. Had no idea where you had disappeared to.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “What do you mean, what did I tell her? I told her you are in Egypt, of course. I can’t believe you didn’t tell her yourself.” When I did not respond he said, “You must call her.”

  But I did not call her.

  A few days after my conversation with Taleb, the telephone rang and I heard Naima say, “But I swear we have missed you, madam; the whole country misses you. And your Arabic is still good, mashallah.”

  Naima stuck her head into the study and whispered, even though the telephone was all the way by the kitchen, “It’s Madam Mona, calling from England.”

  “Tell her I have stepped out,” I said.

  She hesitated, then went back to the telephone.

  I waited a week then telephoned. She answered after the first ring. Instead of reproaching me for leaving without informing her, she surprised me with a warmth I had not known from her for many years.

  “I am so glad to hear your voice,” she said. “How is Cairo? Please tell me. So good to speak to Naima the other day. She sounds good. And so do you.”

  A couple of days later she called.

  “I’ve been thinking. Perhaps I could visit. It has been a long time.”

  “Yes,” I said, hearing the detachment in my voice.

  “Over the Christmas holidays, maybe?”

  I did not respond.

  “Will you be there?”

  “I am not sure.”

  I was surprised by how vulnerable she sounded from this distance.

  She continued to call every so often. She was working in one of the departments at Selfridges. And would say things like: “I enjoy it. The people are nice.”

  By November she began offering dates for when she might visit. My lack of enthusiasm probably made her as uneasy as it made me. The gaps between her calls increased until she stopped calling.

  CHAPTER 37

  One evening, after Naima had left for the day, I found myself taking out one of Father’s suits. I buried my face in the jacket. I put it on, but it held my shoulders and chest too tightly. I felt constricted by it. The sleeves hung horribly short above the wrists. I never knew clothes could shrink so much from lack of wear. The suit might have fit the fourteen-year-old boy I was when I last saw my father, when my head barely reached his shoulder. I unfolded the underclothes. Once as white as salt, they were now stained unevenly tobacco brown. The elastic that once held his waist was entirely gone, the band as hard as dried meat, and the double stitching round the neck and arms of the T-shirts had snapped between the loops.

  I could not sleep.

  I tried on more of his clothes. The tweed suit fit, albeit stiffly. When I pushed my arms forward I could feel the fabric stretch a little. Perhaps if I wear it often, I thought, it will gradually return to its original size. I found his old raincoat, the one that used to hang behind the door to the study. It, too, seemed to have shrunk, but I was able to button it all the way up. I put my hands in his pockets. He had neglected to empty them. There was a crumpled-up tissue in one, a half-used tube of peppermints in the other. I put them back. I tied the belt around my waist the way he used to do. He will need a raincoat when he comes back. This might still fit him. I returned it to its place.

  November 2010, London

  To J.H.M.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the following people: Mary Mount, Susan Kamil, Noah Eaker, Venetia Butterfield, Kevin Conroy Scott and Zoë Pagnamenta.

  Devorah Baum, Andrea Canobbio, Keren James, Peter Hobbs, Lee Brackstone, Carole Satyamurti, Charles Arsène-Henry, Hazem Khater, Andrew Vass, Roger Linden and Jalal Mabrouk Shammam.

  Dr. Mia Gray, Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, Peter Sparks and the faculty of Girton College, University of Cambridge. Beatrice Monti della Corte of the Santa Maddalena Foundation. Thea and Robyn Pender and Hephzibah Rendle-Short.

  Jaballa Hamed Matar, Fawzia Mohamed Tarbah, Ziad Jaballa Matar and Mahmoud Abbas Badr.

  And, most of all, Diana.

  H.M.

  ALSO BY HISHAM MATAR

  In the Country of Men

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HISHAM MATAR was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. His first novel, In the Country of Men, was published in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It won six international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book award for Europe and South Asia, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the inaugural Arab American Book Award. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Hisham Matar lives in London.