Anatomy of a Disappearance Read online

  I sat at the foot of the bed, placing the ball beside me. There was a pair of shoes in front of the armchair. One shoe lay on its side, revealing the pressed and molded cream leather of the interior. On the chiffonier there was a pearl necklace, a perfume bottle and a hairbrush. With my hand on the bathroom door handle, resting on the damp swimsuit, I looked with one eye through the narrow opening. I saw her naked body fogged by the shower curtain: the triangle of black hair blurred and moving like one of those blots that appear after looking directly into the sun. I made no sound and was certain she could not see me, but suddenly she said, “Who’s there?” I ran, not caring what noise I made now, as fast as I could out of the room, remembering my ball only when it was too late to return for it.

  As soon as Father rose from his nap, I told him.

  “My ball wandered inside one of the rooms and I didn’t feel it was right to get it.”

  “So?” he said, shaving. He usually shaved early evening, before dinner, and not in the mornings like most men.

  “I just don’t want anyone to think I was spying or anything.”

  “But I’ve always known you were a little spy,” he said, smiling through the mirror.

  He brought the blade to his neck and shaved off a strip of foam in one easy stroke.

  In the evening I found her standing in a black dress by our table in the dining hall, talking to Father, one hand on the backrest of the opposite chair, my chair. The pearls were encircling her neck. Her brushed hair fell heavily and knew exactly where, just above the jawbones, to curve back. And as I came close I caught the fragrance of her perfume.

  “Here is your little friend,” Father said in English when I was close enough to hear.

  She held out a hand. I shook it, unable to look her in the eye.

  “Speak, don’t be shy,” Father said into the awkward silence. “He attends English school,” he told her.

  Another chair was brought, another place set, and we dined together. She did not mention a word about that afternoon, but when Father went to answer a telephone call she smiled.

  “Earlier there was a mouse in my room. A very large mouse.”

  And, again, with that feathery clasp, she took hold of my chin.

  “Tomorrow come fetch your ball.”

  She sipped some water, dabbed the corners of her lips with the white napkin.

  “Your father tells me you are twelve. For some reason I thought you were older.”

  She was no longer speaking in Arabic now and so lacked the vulnerability I had first detected by the pool. And because it was Father who had chosen to speak in English when I approached the table, I saw him as the one behind this transformation.

  CHAPTER 4

  The following morning I did not attend breakfast. I walked past the main hotel building, where the restaurant was, and on to the grassy paths that meandered around the rooms. The sea was quiet. I could just about catch the broken chatter and laughter of Europeans breakfasting in the dining hall. I pictured Father sitting there alone, reading the paper. I felt guilty. Then that turned immediately to jealousy, because the next picture my mind drew had Mona sitting opposite him.

  I sat against the prickly bark of a date palm. The shadow of its crown spread around me and moved in the wind. I had her room in view. Were she to leave or enter I would see her. I then began to cry with a pain new and confusing. One of the gardeners in blue overalls noticed. The wide rim of his canvas hat rose and fell as he ran over. I thought of getting up and going, but the crying only became stronger. He bent over. “Malish, malish,” he said, patting my shoulder. He never asked the reason behind my tears. My mind has often returned to this act of kindness. I remember laughing with him, but not about what. I remember his weathered face, his heavy eyes, unshaven cheeks, yellowed teeth, the smell of moist earth, but I cannot recall what had set him off laughing so infectiously.

  I went to wash my face in the sea. A couple of dressed women, probably servants, stood waist deep in the water. Balloons of black fabric surrounded them and glistened whenever one of them moved. Their conversation turned to whispers when they saw me, whispers barely louder than the ripples lapping at my feet. I wished Naima had come with us. She had been our maid since before I was born. At that moment I felt she knew me better than anyone in the entire world.

  A man in shorts and a baseball cap—in retrospect, he was probably a retired diplomat—with a tuft of gray hair at the center of his bronzed chest, jogged briskly along the shore.

  “Morning,” he shouted in English although it was nearly noon and we were both Arab.

  I felt like going after him, shouting, “Morning morning morning,” making stupid faces. Instead, I licked the salt off my lips and wandered back into the gardens of the Magda Marina.

  Although I did not see a shadow appear beside me or hear her approach, I did not flinch when she sneaked from behind and threaded an arm through mine. Her lips were smiling. Her cheeks glowed with mischief.

  “I have been looking for you,” she said, and I felt the lump in my throat dissolve.

  She walked ahead, leading the way to her room. As she moved, the wind moved and caused the slack gray cotton of her dress to hold for a moment the curve of her calf, the strong tremor of her thigh, the arc of a buttock.

  “Stay here,” she said and went into her room.

  I caught my reflection in the mirrored glass: eyes red, cheeks puffy.

  She came back and handed me my ball.

  “Next time, knock.”

  I nodded and went to leave.

  “No, silly, come back,” she said, laughing, and drew the door wide.

  I stood unsure of what was expected. Then she pointed to the armchair. I sat there, inhaling her smells, remembering Mother’s wardrobe and how it smelled once I was inside it and the doors were pulled shut. But now everything was spilling out of the open door. I thought of asking her to close it, but it was a hot day.

  The same pearl necklace lay curled in a figure 8 on the coffee table. I imagined her coming in every night after dinner and not descending into this armchair but sitting at its edge, wondering what to do next.

  “Would you like some juice?” she said, opening an identical minibar to the one we had in our room. “Guava?”

  She placed the small bottle in front of me but did not unscrew the top, and I did not think it polite to do so.

  She sat on the end of the bed, where I had sat the day before listening to her sing under the shower. I noticed a small cassette player on the bedside table.

  “Do you like music?”

  When I did not answer she pressed a button on the player, and an English song, fast and silly, filled the room.

  She extended her hands to me then pulled me up. I pretended to be looking at the room. She closed her eyes and raised her arms above her head. With every move her breasts trembled a little beneath the gray cotton.

  I spent every minute I could with Mona. Whenever I had to leave her to go to the toilet my heart raced until I returned. And at night, when I had to go to bed, the longing and the excitement about seeing her the following day kept me awake. We swam in the sea, built sand castles and shared our bewilderment at the guests who would not venture beyond the swimming pool. We danced in her room to English pop songs that suddenly took on hidden depths to my boyish mind. My eyes were no longer downcast; indeed, I often lost control of them altogether and would gaze without restraint at a particular part of her anatomy. Once, when she was looking at the sea, I studied her neck, a place where the skin was so delicate you could see the emerald veins weave their complex network. I kissed her there. She looked at me. Then, not so much out of shyness but horror, I looked away.

  She told me about London, the city where she lived, about her mother, what she remembered of her dead father, “Monir.” First name only, without a prefix, as if he were a friend or a lover. He had died when Mona was ten. He was a native of Alexandria. This was why she had decided to finally visit the city. Looking back now, I realiz
e it must have been that early loss that had partly attracted Mona to my father, an Arab man fifteen years her senior.

  “Monir,” I said, as if in agreement. “He must have been the one who named you.”

  “I suppose.”

  I told her about my mother, how I, too, had lost a parent at ten.

  She looked at me, nodding. I sensed she doubted my story. After what seemed to be too long a silence, she said, “It must be hard, for your father.”

  She showed me a photograph of Monir: a young, solemn Egyptian face with an English haircut. His overtly careful dress—a stiff white collar, a slim necktie that looked as if it were cut from clay, black waistcoat and jacket—expressed an anxiety, a self-conscious attempt at being taken seriously. Later, when I lived in London, I often wondered how it was for him, an Egyptian, living in the Britain of the 1940s and 1950s. The slightly flexed eyebrows, sunken cheeks and pencil-line mustache seemed to signal something about this life.

  In contrast, the one of her mother was taken more recently, in color, and showed the face of a calmly resigned middle-aged Englishwoman: handsome, with delicately drooping shoulders and a strong neck, a woman in her own country.

  Mona, too, was an only child. She said she liked it that way, and I immediately said that I did too. And for a moment I believed it. I did not tell her how often I had longed for a sibling, particularly a brother; I did not tell her how, when Mother was alive, I felt like the minor character tossed between the only two protagonists who truly mattered, and how, after Mother’s death, with Father hardly ever uttering a mention of her, I longed to share my loss, the density of grief, with an ally, an equal. I did not tell her any of this, not because I did not know how to say it or because I did not feel I could confide in her but because, there and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.

  CHAPTER 5

  There was no doubt then who among us was closer to Mona. She and I saw Father only at mealtimes. He spent his time sunbathing, reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis; another a biography of our late king, with a portrait of the monarch on the cover.

  Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country, he would immediately finger the index pages.

  “Who are you looking for?” I had once asked.

  He shook his head and said, “No one.”

  But later I, too, searched the index. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for. Kamal Pasha, those books would say, had been one of the king’s closest advisers and one of the few men who could walk into the royal office without an appointment. And whenever the young monarch was in one of his anxious moods—perhaps suspecting his end to be near—it was Kamal Pasha el-Alfi who was often called to ease his fears. In these books my father was also described as an aristocrat who after the revolution moved “gradually, but with radical effect,” to the left. I read these things about my father before I could know what they meant. And if I came to him with my questions, he would smoothly deflect them:

  “It was all so long ago.”

  I rarely persisted because I knew that he was being true to Mother’s wishes.

  “Don’t transfer the weight of the past onto your son,” she once told him.

  “You can’t live outside history,” he argued. “We have nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary.”

  After a long pause she responded, “Who said anything about shame? It’s longing that I want to spare him. Longing and the burden of your hopes.”

  Another book he had with him at the Magda Marina, one with which he had hardly parted since Mother died, was Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s Rain Song. At that time I would read passages of Father’s books or a newspaper article that I was certain he had read because I wanted to follow a trail he had taken. And most of the time I could see what interested him. But I still cannot understand what the man I took Father to be, a man so single-mindedly committed to never-uttered plans, a man who consulted only history and news and who seemed to apply his attention with efficient precision to his designs, saw in al-Sayyab’s poetry. I could not imagine him, for example, in the world of a line such as “the sea stroked by the hand of nightfall.” This was Mother’s territory. Several times I felt the impulse to say, “It’s too late now to pretend you understood her.” But perhaps I had misread him. Perhaps he did find a small landing place on the verses of al-Sayyab. Perhaps he did understand her. Still, part of my heart never ceases to blame him for her death.

  Only years later, after his disappearance, when I returned to the family home in Cairo, did I notice that beside Mother’s name, “Ihsan,” inscribed on the inside of the front cover, Mother had also written: “November 1958, Paris.” The month, the year and the city of my birth.

  When Mona and I joined Father in the dining hall, he never read the paper or looked into the distance but talked, looking more at me than at her. You could tell, though, that everything he said was colored by the intention of impressing her. She would sit between us at the table that was meant for two. And for the first time since Mother’s death I watched that sparkle return to Father’s eyes as he retold old anecdotes from when he was “a proud servant of the king.” Father spoke animatedly about how, in 1941 when he was twelve, he had met the king’s legendary uncle: a general who had led Ottoman troops in the First World War and spoke seven languages. The national hero shook Father’s hand with the might of a “stone grinder,” and when a few days later the Pasha died in an attempted coup, Father walked in the front line of the funeral. The closeness of the events was dazzling, but then, when after a perfectly timed pause he added that both events had made him cry, he provoked a smile from Mona.

  It surprised me to hear Father talk like this; he rarely mentioned public life.

  After a silence that the newly acquainted must occasionally allow themselves, Father said, “Before flying back to London, you must come visit us in Cairo.”

  “Perhaps another time,” she told him and blushed slightly.

  “No,” I said. “You must come now. I have so much to show you.”

  “You can’t come all this way and not see the Nile, the museums, the Pyramids.”

  Father and I were forming a united front.

  “Well,” she said, tilting her head to one side.

  “You can see all the way to the Pyramids from my room,” I said.

  For some reason this caused them both to laugh.

  “I wish,” she said, touching my hand. “But, darling, my ticket, I won’t be able to change it.”

  Piling the last remaining grains of rice onto his fork, Father said, “I can take care of that.”

  A new shyness showed itself in her eyes.

  “I will call my secretary to rebook it,” he said and closed his lips on the loaded fork.

  The following morning I found neither of them in the dining hall.

  “They have already taken breakfast,” the waiter said, pouring the orange juice.

  I ran out to look for them. I found them walking by the sea, not arm in arm, but their paces could not have been better matched. Neither of them reacted when they saw me approach. I walked next to her for a few paces, let them pass, then ran and, not finding room between them, this time I walked by his side. Their conversation, like their steps, rolled on regardless. Father was exercising one of his old theories on her.

  “Caravaggio is more important than Michelangelo because he took more risks.”

  “When was Caravaggio? And Michelangelo? I see. How interesting.”

  But this was Father’s purpose, of course: to intimidate and impress. And Mona was easy prey, for she had little real interest in art.

  They sat facing the sea. Their hands were resting side by side on the dry sand, his little finger over her little finger. I tried to imagine friends doing that.

  “I cannot believe you have never been to Paris,” he told her.

  “I know, I know,” she said, blushing but
not pulling her hand away.

  “Criminal,” he said.

  She let out a laugh different from those I had heard her give before. This one was louder and had in it the hard edge of hunger.

  “I was born in Paris,” I said.

  “I know, darling,” she said, bringing a careless hand to my cheek, then letting it rest again on her chest, the forefinger reaching beneath the blouse.

  “Nuri, go and get my diary,” Father said. When I was a few paces away, he added, “And the cigarettes, please.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Two years earlier, my mother had died.

  I recall how, during the edgeless hours of the afternoon, I would use her hip for a pillow. I would listen to the steady rhythm of her breath, the turning pages of her book. If I fell asleep, the sound would become a lazy breeze rustling a tree, or a broom brushing the earth. I hold the memory of her collarbone. I used to reach for it the way a rock climber would a sturdy ledge. I recall also her hair, strands as thick as strings. I would stretch one across my forehead, on my tongue, and feel it tighten like a blade. None of this would distract her from her reading. I would watch the wide blossom of her eyes scanning the lines, those same eyes that grew keen whenever I caught her standing behind a thick curtain in a game of hide-and-seek or when I revealed to her a luminous butterfly I had captured. How quickly her cheeks would redden then. She would speak, a warm whisper, before laughter flexed her throat. I am now above the ground, surprised by the softness of her square jawbone when I rest my forehead on it. I look at the shape of her ear. She was as close as I ever came to having a sister.

  And then there were those cruel, sudden gaps, the clearings where she stood alone, not knowing how to return. Those were the days when she was unreachable. How her eyes would then wilt, looking at me as if acknowledging someone she half knew. Sometimes at night I would wake up and find her there, studying my face. She would force a smile and depart, quietly closing the door behind her, as if I were not hers. Other times she would lie beside me, two heads sharing one pillow. Her hands, the pale thin fingers that never seemed to match her strength, would be frozen twigs. She would tuck them between my knees or, if I were lying on my back, slide them behind my lower back, the place that is still hers.