Anatomy of a Disappearance Read online

  Anatomy of a Disappearance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Hisham Matar

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DIAL PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this book appeared previously in The New Yorker in different form.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, Penguin Books Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Matar, Hisham.

  Anatomy of a disappearance : a novel / Hisham Matar.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64398-2

  1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—

  Fiction. 4. Stepmothers—Fiction. 5. Cairo (Egypt)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6113.A87A84 2011

  823′.92—dc22 2011001561

  www.dialpress.com

  Title page image by Julia Soboleva

  Jacket design: Lynn Buckley

  Jacket photograph: Serge Balkin/© Condé Nast Archive/Corbis

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.

  I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.

  My father disappeared in 1972, at the beginning of my school Christmas holiday, when I was fourteen. Mona and I were staying at the Montreux Palace, taking breakfast—I with my large glass of bright orange juice, and she with her steaming black tea—on the terrace overlooking the steel-blue surface of Lake Geneva, at the other end of which, beyond the hills and the bending waters, lay the now vacant city of Geneva. I was watching the silent paragliders hover above the still lake, and she was paging through La Tribune de Genève, when suddenly her hand rose to her mouth and trembled.

  A few minutes later we were aboard a train, hardly speaking, passing the newspaper back and forth.

  We collected from the police station the few belongings that were left on the bedside table. When I unsealed the small plastic bag, along with the tobacco and the lighter flint, I smelled him. That same watch is now wrapped round my wrist, and even today, after all these years, when I press the underside of the leather strap against my nostrils I can detect a whiff of him.

  I wonder now how different my story would have been were Mona’s hands unbeautiful, her fingertips coarse.

  I still, all of these years later, hear the same childish persistence, “I saw her first,” which bounced like a devil on my tongue whenever I caught one of Father’s claiming gestures: his fingers sinking into her hair, his hand landing on her skirted thigh with the absentmindedness of a man touching his earlobe in mid-sentence. He had taken to the Western habit of holding hands, kissing, embracing in public. But he could not fool me; like a bad actor, he seemed unsure of his steps. Whenever he would catch me watching him, he would look away and I swear I could see color in his cheeks. A dark tenderness rises in me now as I think how hard he had tried; how I yearn still for an easy sympathy with my father. Our relationship lacked what I have always believed possible, given time and perhaps after I had become a man, after he had seen me become a father: a kind of emotional eloquence and ease. But now the distances that had then governed our interactions and cut a quiet gap between us continue to shape him in my thoughts.

  CHAPTER 2

  We met Mona at the Magda Marina, a small hotel in Alexandria’s Agamy Beach. Although the sea was nearby, we did not swim in it and I never asked to build sand castles. Most of the guests, too, ignored it and were content with the shelter and limited pleasures of the swimming pool. The concrete-box structures of the single-story rooms screened us from the surrounding landscape. You could hear the waves lapping lazily against the shore like a snoring guard dog, but we caught only narrow glimpses of the blueness.

  Father had been bringing me here for the past two summers, ever since Mother’s sudden passing.

  We never came to places such as the Magda Marina when my mother was alive. She did not like the heat. I never saw her in a swimsuit or in sudden surrender closing her eyes at the sun. The coming of Cairene spring would set her off planning our summer getaways. Once we summered high up in the Swiss Alps, where my body stiffened at the sight of deep, hollow chasms emptied out of the rocky earth.

  Another time she took us to Nordland in northern Norway, where austere black mountains reflected sharply their splintered peaks on the unmoving waters. We stayed in a wooden cabin that stood alone by the water and was painted the brown-red of withered leaves. Round its roof hung a gutter as wide as a human thigh. Here whatever fell from the sky fell in abundance. There was no other man-made structure in sight. Some afternoons Mother disappeared, and I would not let on to Father that my heart was thumping at the base of my ears. I would keep to my room until I heard footsteps on the deck then the kitchen door slide open. Once I found her there with hands stained black-red, a rough globe dyed into the front of her sweater. With eyes as clean as glass, wide, satisfied, she held out a handful of wild berries. They tasted of a ripe sweetness I found hard to attribute to that landscape.

  One night fog gathered thickly, abstracting the licks and sighs of the northern lights. You need adulthood to appreciate such horror. An anxious heat entered my eight-year-old mind, and I curled up in bed, trying to muffle the crying, hoping Mother would pay me one of her night visits, kiss my forehead, lie beside me. In the morning the still world returned: the innocent waters, the ferocious mountains,
the pale sky dotted with small, newborn clouds. I found her in the kitchen, warming milk, a glass of water standing on the white marble counter beside her. Not juice, tea, coffee, but water was her morning drink. She took a sip and with her usual insistence on soundlessness muffled the impact with the soft tip of her little finger. Any sudden sound unsettled her. She could conduct an entire day’s chores in near silence. I sat at the rented table where, when the three of us gathered at mealtimes, Mother would occasionally glance at the fourth empty chair as if it signaled an absence, something lost. She poured the hot milk. A sliver of steam brushed the air then disappeared beside her neck.

  “Why the long face?” she said.

  She took me out onto the deck that stretched above the lake. The air was so brisk it stung my throat. We stood in silence. I remembered what she had said to Father in the car when the naked mountains of Nordland first came into view: “Here God decided to be a sculptor; everywhere else He holds back.”

  “Holds back?” Father had echoed. “You talk about Him as if He’s a friend of yours.”

  In those days Father did not believe in God. He often greeted Mother’s remembrances of the Divine with irritated sarcasm. Perhaps I should not have been surprised when, after Mother died, he would now and again voice a prayer; sarcasm, more often than not, hides a secret fascination.

  Was it the romance of wood fires, the discretion of heavy coats, that attracted my mother to the north and unpeopled places of Europe? Or was it the impeccable stillness of a fortnight spent mostly sheltered indoors with the only two people she could lay claim to? I have come to think of those holidays, no matter where they were, as having taken place in a single country—her country—and the silences that marked them her melancholy. There were moments when her unhappiness seemed as elemental as clear water.

  After she died it soon became obvious that what Father had always wanted to do, in the two weeks he allowed himself off every summer, was to lie in the sun all day. So the Magda Marina became the place where he and I spent that fortnight. He seemed to have lost his way with me; widowhood had dispossessed him of any ease that he had once had around his only child. When we sat down to eat he either read the paper or gazed into the distance. Whenever he noticed me looking at him he would fidget or check his watch. As soon as he had finished eating he would light a cigarette and snap his fingers for the bill, not bothering to see whether I had finished too.

  “See you back in the room.”

  He never did that when Mother was alive.

  Instead, when the three of us went to a restaurant, they would sit side by side facing me. If we were all engaged in some conversation she would direct most of her contributions toward me, as if I were the front wall of a squash court. And when his unease led him to play the entertainer she would monitor, in that discreet way of hers, my reactions to his forced cheerfulness or, if he could bear it no longer, to his vast silences. With Mother’s eyes on me I would watch Father observe the other patrons or stare out at the view, which was often of some unremarkable street or square, no doubt daydreaming or plotting his next move in the secret work I never once heard him talk about. At these moments it felt as if he were the boy obliged to pass a meal with adults, that he was the son and I the father.

  After she passed away he and I came to resemble two flat-sharing bachelors kept together by circumstance or obligation. But then that tenderhearted sympathy, raw and sudden, would rise in him at the most unexpected moments, and he would plunge his face into my neck, sniff deeply and kiss, tickling me with his mustache. It would set us off laughing as though everything were all right.

  CHAPTER 3

  It is true; I did see Mona first.

  She was sitting on the ceramic tiles that surrounded the rectangular swimming pool of the Magda Marina, looking at the underside of her foot. The tiles were decorated in a pattern that many years later, on a trip to Granada, I learned was a factory copy of a wall mosaic at the Alhambra. When I saw the original I ran my fingertips over the mosaic and let my mind return to that distant summer’s day of 1971 in Alexandria, when I was twelve. Her hair was tied sensibly in a ponytail, and she had on an outrageously bright yellow swimsuit that made her skin seem darker, her age younger. For a moment, I thought her a girl. For a moment, the yellow strap running across her back brought to mind the yellow hospital bracelet that had been bound round my mother’s wrist. The light shimmered blue and weakly off the water and onto Mona’s body.

  “This bit of skin is Arab; this, from your English mother,” I would later come to tease her.

  She was pulling her ankle, arching her neck, the ridge of her spine pressing against the yellow strap. Thinking back on it now, I am envious of the confidence with which I had approached her, as if I were crossing the road to the aid of a turtle on its back. Such natural self-assuredness has since eluded me. Whereas Father managed to shake off that cloak of shyness over the years, mine only got heavier.

  I sat cross-legged beside her on the tiles and, without asking permission, placed the complaining foot in my lap. I proceeded to inspect each toe. She did not resist. Then, embedded in the soft underside of one toe, I found it: a brown speck of a thorn fading into the pink flesh.

  “Last week,” I told her, turning her foot in order to gain a better angle, “the same thing happened to me. It drove me crazy the whole day until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and just before going to bed I pulled it out.”

  I captured the thorn between two fingernails. She flinched, but I did not draw back.

  “Just like that,” I said and held it on the tip of my forefinger to show her. Our heads were so close now that I could feel a strand of her hair touch my temple.

  “Thank you,” she said in an angular Arabic.

  I could see now that her shoulders had eased.

  “What is your name?”

  It was an English accent. I was sure.

  She ran her hand down my cheek, then held my chin and gazed at me. She had inconstant eyes: brown, green and silver all at once.

  “Nuri,” I finally said, pulling away. “Nuri el-Alfi.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Nuri el-Alfi,” she said and smiled a smile I could not understand.

  I walked back to where Father was sunbathing. Now he had his broad chest propped up on his elbows.

  “Who is she?” he asked, his eyes on her.

  I thought of running back to ask her name, but she stood up, slid two fingers beneath the bottom of the swimsuit and stretched the fabric around her buttocks. The pattern of the ceramic tiles was faintly imprinted on the underside of one thigh. She turned toward us. I wondered if she was looking at me or at Father, or at us both together. Then she went to sit at a table where a glass of lemonade had been waiting. Father reclined, his elbow red with pressure, and closed his eyes. Under a perfectly cropped mustache his lips stretched into a precise smile, knowing, ironic, as if he was satisfied at his own intelligence, at having figured out a riddle in half the time. She looked our way again, lit a cigarette, then pretended to be looking elsewhere. Finally she closed her eyes at the sun. I watched her without restraint. I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth. I made as if I were walking around the pool to watch her from all angles. Suddenly she opened her eyes, looked at me, unsurprised, unmoving. She came to the pool’s edge, dipped one foot in the water, then the other and tiptoed away. I watched the trail of wet prints evaporate. The glass of lemonade was still there, patient and full. One of the sweating waiters dressed in black bow tie and waistcoat took it away. I regretted not beating him to it. How wonderful it would have been to drink something intended for her.

  I found Father turned on his stomach, the wood slats of the sun lounger marked red across his back.

  I did not see her for the rest of the morning. And before we sat at our table to lunch I noticed that Father, too, was scanning the dining hall. I looked up from my plate every time someone walked in and, having his back to the entrance,
Father glanced at my face as if it were a mirror. At one point he turned around to see who had come in, and I felt I had misled him.

  After lunch most retreated to their rooms to escape the sun. A few Europeans remained stretched outside the shade by the pool, their skin the color of orange peel. A breeze would occasionally ruffle the pages of the books and magazines on the floor beside them, but the bodies lay shiny and still in the white heat.

  I took my ball to the tended lawns that snaked around the rooms. Each room was constructed in the shape of a box with the front façade in glass sliding doors, mirrored for privacy. The structures hummed with their own air-conditioning, which on the outside hissed and blew hot. I felt spied upon by the guests in each room, even though I suspected they were probably dozing like Father. He would lie in the curtained coolness, one ankle resting on the other, the newspaper crackling between his hands, as he leaned slightly toward the lamp shade.

  One room had its door open the width of two fingers. I could hear running water, an English song and along with it a woman’s voice. I drew the door wide enough to enter but waited until my eyes adjusted to the shade. The room was an exact replica of ours, the same bedcovers, the same wallpaper and furniture, except that it had one bed that was as large as our two single beds combined. The bathroom door had also been left ajar, the yellow swimsuit hanging from the handle. I realized then that I had been searching for her, hoping to encounter her away from my father’s gaze. I felt a feverish excitement at being in her room, inside the private chamber of this mysterious woman who was traveling alone. Who was she? How did she come to speak our language? So very few non-Arabs speak Arabic that when you encounter one it is as thrilling as spotting a friend in the audience of a vast theater just before the lights go down. And the way she moved, the way she looked at me across the pool, expressed a confidence of purpose that suggested she was not on holiday, that she had not come to just hang around, and so she immediately acquired the allure of those who, like my father, seemed to live their lives in secret.