Anatomy of a Disappearance Read online

  In her last year her silences grew deeper and more frequent. Some days she did not leave her room. When she called, she called only for her faithful maid, Naima, who would also refer to her as Mama.

  “Of course, Mama.”

  “Straightaway, Mama.”

  Naima would often be sent to the pharmacy for aspirin, sleeping pills, painkillers.

  So old and persistent did Mother’s unhappiness seem that I had never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is more acceptable than that which we are born into.

  I remember the last night.

  It was late evening. Naima had already changed out of her house galabia and into the hard fabric of her black dress, a veil wrapped tightly round her head, revealing the delicate shape of her skull. And there was the familiar carrier bag slung on her wrist, containing one or two but never more than three pieces of fruit, the round forms pressing against the plastic.

  At Mother’s instruction, every evening Naima had to go to the large fruit bowl that sat at the center of the long dining table and take home those guavas, apricots or apples that had passed their prime. Naima resisted this and would often argue the fruit was still good. Her resistance baffled me because I knew that on her birthdays Naima’s parents gifted her with only an apple or just a handful of mulberries.

  She stood there now, silent and hesitant, at Mother’s door. She brought her hand up but did not knock.

  “When she wakes up,” she whispered, “tell her I went home. See you tomorrow.”

  She must have detected I did not want her to go, because she stopped and asked, “Did you brush your teeth?”

  Every time I looked up from the sink I saw her in the mirror, standing outside the bathroom, her hands held against her waist like a person in prayer.

  I followed her to the door and stood barefoot on the cold marble. She studied her foggy reflection in the long, narrow glass window in the lift door and with nervous hands tucked away stray hairs. She never stopped dreading the long journey home. On the occasions when her parents allowed her to spend the night with us, Naima would carry out her tasks in the house with renewed enthusiasm, insisting that she dust the bookshelves again, clean the bathrooms one more time, all the while cracking jokes at which no one laughed. The silences that followed these jokes always turned her cheeks red.

  “Go on now, you will catch a cold.”

  But I did not move until the lift arrived because, regardless of her words, I knew she welcomed my attachment. There was always that elusive thing about Naima that needed confirmation not so much of my attention as of my loyalty, as if she feared I might, one day, betray her.

  I waited for Father and only once dared walk into Mother’s room. She lay on her side and did not move when I touched her ear. I went to my room and stood on my desk chair facing a photograph Mother had recently taken of herself. She was the one who had had it framed and hung it there. Her eyes stared back unflinchingly, but her jawbones were slightly out of focus, as if she were emerging from a cloud. I liked it because her face was nearly life-size.

  I did not know then why Mother looked better in photographs taken before I was born. I do not mean simply younger but altogether brighter, as if she had just stepped off a carousel: her hair settling, her eyes anticipating more joy. And in those photographs you could almost hear a kind of joyful music in the background. Then it all changes after I arrive. For a long time, before I knew the truth, I thought it was the physical assault of pregnancy that had claimed her cheery disposition. Occasionally it would reemerge, this happy outlook, awakened by an old memory, like when she told the story of Father slipping over and landing on his bottom on one of the steep alleyways in Geneva’s Old Town.

  “His back white with snow,” she said, barely able to speak from laughing. “Calling my name as he nearly tripped up the Christmas shoppers.”

  Father’s face changed, a solemn expression suggesting he might be taking offense, which of course made the whole thing funnier. “I nearly broke my neck,” he finally said.

  “Yes, but your father has always been an excellent navigator,” she said, and they both exploded into laughter.

  I do not recall ever being so happy.

  I woke up on Father repeating, “Savior, Savior,” and the sound of his reaching, anxious steps.

  I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, my eyes weak against the blazing chandelier in the hall. Other people were there, two men in white. They held the front door open as Father rushed toward them, Mother slack in his arms. Her long and disheveled hair trembled with every step he took. One of her dangling feet seemed to swing more rapidly. I ran after him, down the stairs. I remembered him once daring me to a race down those stairs, saying that he could descend the three flights faster than it would take me to get down in the lift. When the lift landed on the ground floor he had pulled the door open, trying not to let his breathlessness show, his eyes sparkling with satisfaction. But now when he saw me running behind him, he stopped.

  “Nuri.”

  His eyes were red. Mother lay silent in his arms, her eyelids hard as shells. I paused for a moment, and the two men in white overtook me.

  “Nuri,” he shouted, and the two men looked at me. The expressions on their faces are still a source of horror.

  I climbed back up, pausing at every landing, looking down the well. Then I ran to our balcony, my hands holding the cold metal balustrade above my head. I watched him carry her to the ambulance. One of her breasts was almost out of the gray satin nightdress. When one of the men in white tried to take her, Father shook his head and shouted something. He laid her on the stretcher, straightened and covered her body, caught the fall of her hair, wrapped it like a belt round his fist and then tucked the bundle beneath her neck. A siren started up. Father ran back into the building, through the stiff figures of Am-Samir, the porter, and his sons. Early light was just breaking, and they, too, must have been startled out of sleep. Somehow they did not seem surprised, as if they expected such calamity to befall “the Arab family on the third floor.” The Nile flowed by strong and indifferent. There was hardly a wind to make flutter the bamboo grasses that covered its banks. The leaves of the banana trees hung low, and the heads of the palms seemed as heavy as velvet.

  I heard the door of the apartment slam shut.

  “Where are they taking her?”

  He kneeled before me so his face was level with mine.

  “She needs to rest. For a while … in hospital,” he said and stopped as if to stifle a cough.

  “Why? We can take care of her here. Naima and I can take care of her. Why did you let them take her?”

  “She will be back soon.”

  He smelled of cigarettes, of others. He looked like he had not slept at all. I followed him into their room. An astonishing solitude was lit when he flicked on the ceiling light. Her form was still stamped into the mattress. Father’s side was undisturbed. The room had the air of a place that had witnessed a terrible confrontation, a battle lost.

  CHAPTER 7

  He spent most of the subsequent days at the hospital. Father, who had never had to look after me, was now continually asking Naima whether his son had eaten or if it was bedtime yet.

  “Has he bathed? Make sure he brushes his teeth.”

  I was suddenly spoken of in the third person. I had become a series of tasks. I could tell that Father was irritated by having to bear such domestic responsibility. And every time I cried for the mother from whom I had never before been separated, he looked at once fearful and impatient.

  “Naima,” he would call, louder than necessary.

  I asked to be taken to the hospital.

  “The doctors are doing everything they can. There is nothing more any of us can do.”

  “Then why do you spend the whole day there?”

  I watched his nervous eyes.

  Two days later he took us to visit Mother. At a set of traffic lights a boy, possibly my age, although he looked younger due to his thinness, tapped on my wind
ow. Round his arm hung necklaces of jasmine. He was wearing a red patterned T-shirt that reminded me of one I used to wear.

  Rigid with shyness, Naima asked, “Could we buy some? Madam loves jasmine.”

  Although Naima did not address him directly, the question was clearly intended for Father. She was often wary around him. She would usually send me to ask whether it was coffee or tea that he wanted, if he was expecting anyone for lunch, and if there was anything else he needed before she left.

  Father rolled down his window, and the thick heat of the day spilled in. The boy ran to him. Father bought the whole bunch, his eyes lingering on the boy’s T-shirt. He handed the jasmines back to Naima and rolled up his window. His eyes now were on the rearview mirror, trying to catch a last glimpse of the boy.

  Naima mixed the necklaces in her lap.

  “You will get them knotted doing that,” I said and immediately regretted it as she looked nervously at the rearview mirror.

  “Aren’t those the clothes we gave Ibn Ali?” Father asked.

  Relieved, Naima looked back. We watched the boy run through the cars and vanish.

  “Yes, Pasha,” she said. “It looks like the same T-shirt.”

  Ibn Ali was one of the orphanages Father occasionally visited, often taking Naima and me with him, to deliver food or clothes or make a donation. There was also Abd al-Muttalib and al-Sayeda Aisha and al-Ridha.

  “Don’t let it upset you,” Naima told him. “No matter what you do, you can’t stop them working.”

  “But so young,” he said.

  “Not much younger than I was,” she said softly and after too long a delay.

  Naima gripped my hand tightly as we went deeper into the maze of fluorescent-lit corridors. The jasmines were slung neatly around her other arm. The odor of the hospital was so unforgiving that every so often she would bring the small cloud of white flowers to her nose. I tugged, and she let me do the same. Father was already a few meters ahead. With every step he took the leather heels of his shoes were striped by the fluorescent light.

  We found Mother lying under a cold blue lamp. The bedcovers were folded beneath her arms, one wrist was encircled by a yellow plastic bracelet, and a bleep hammered the silence.

  Naima placed the jasmines at the foot of the bed and covered her face.

  “Did I not tell you …” Father said, pulling her out of the room.

  I was alone with Mother. I wanted to pull out the flattened pillows, to puff them up. Her skin had turned ashen. Her eyes were shut with an outrageous finality, a moistness lingering where the eyelids met. I thought of touching her, and the impossibility of it frightened me. My mind returned to a distant memory. I was four or five. She was getting ready for a party. I was crouched beneath the chiffonier, beside her feet: black high heels, stockings a color that made her skin look powdered. A thin fluorescent line hovered above where the black suede of her shoe met the stockings. An optical illusion. I traced it, erasing and redrawing the fluorescent with my finger. Then she moved. I looked up, smiling, thinking I had tickled her, but she was only moving closer to the mirror in order to scrutinize the exactness of her lipstick line.

  Father was right: there was nothing any of us could do here.

  A few days later Father came home from the hospital earlier than usual. He went straight to his room. I stood outside his door for a minute or two then knocked.

  “Not now, Nuri,” he said, his voice uneven.

  After a few minutes I heard the sound of running water in his bathroom. I remembered what Mother used to tell him whenever she found him in a bad mood: “Take a cold shower. It’s what the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, used to do whenever he received bad news.” And I remembered Father shaking his head. But that was when he was in no need of God. When he got out of the shower he called for Naima.

  “Shut the door behind you. Where is Nuri?”

  “Ustaz Nuri is in his room,” she said, even though she saw me standing outside the door and passed her fingers through my hair and forced a smile before walking in.

  He began whispering. A few seconds later I heard her give a short scream. Had he placed a hand on her mouth?

  For the rest of that day Naima’s fingers trembled.

  Her eyes filled with tears when I asked, “Are you all right? Are you ill? Shall I pour you a glass of cola?”

  Every hour or so she would come to ask, “Has your father spoken to you yet?”

  Father stayed in his room, talking on the telephone. By sunset he called me in.

  “Sit down. Let me see your hand.” After a few seconds he said my name, then the words: “Mama will not be coming home.”

  After another pause he spoke again.

  “She will never be coming back.”

  I pulled my hand. I did not believe him. I insisted he take me to the hospital.

  “She is no longer there.”

  He restrained me, carried me to my room and locked the door on us. On the outside Naima cried, begging to be let in. Father opened the door and with astonishing tenderness pulled her to his chest and kissed her head. He held me too and began muttering that from here on life was never going to be the same, that God had felled his only tree and shelter. I searched but could not find a tear in either eye. This should not have surprised me, for I had never seen Father cry.

  CHAPTER 8

  The following day seventy-five wooden chairs, the sort most commonly found in Egyptian cafés, with a profile of Nefertiti printed on the seat, arrived. The porter, Am-Samir, and his silent children carried two huge speakers up the stairs. They slid off their slippers at the door, their stiff bodies swaying momentarily beneath the weight, and placed them, each taller than Father, in the middle of the hall. The angle at which the speakers were left facing each other suggested a quarrel. Then the porter and his children carried each piece of furniture that was in the reception hall into the dining room. Capsized armchairs were placed over the dining table, and their cushions were stuffed beneath. I watched Am-Samir’s dark, hard feet sink into the rug. Each toenail curved forward into the thick wool. Each joint was crowned with little gray stones of skin, and each heel was like the thick end of a club. At what point, I wondered, will his sons’ feet look like this? Noticing me follow him, Am-Samir placed a heavy hand on my head and, after a second’s hesitation, kneeled down and kissed my forehead. He looked at Father. And Father, choosing to give Am-Samir the approval he requested, said, “Thank you.” With lowered heads the sons followed Am-Samir out.

  Urgency and grief had rendered Father, Naima, and me nearly equal. We arranged the chairs together. And at one point Father asked Naima her opinion.

  “Where shall we place the speakers?”

  “By the entrance,” she said, embarrassed, and when he hesitated, she pressed on. “But that is where they are always placed, Pasha.”

  “Perhaps in your district,” he said.

  The possibility of a smile brushed both their faces.

  “But it’s people’s duty to attend, Pasha. It wasn’t I who set the custom.”

  “Enough. Lift,” he said, and together they carried the speakers to where she had suggested, placing one at either side of the entrance.

  We arranged the seventy-five chairs against the walls in conspiratorial silence. When we were done we stood in the middle of the room, and I hoped there would be something else for us to do, but then Father disappeared into his room and Naima returned to the kitchen.

  The front door was left open. The reception hall began to resemble a waiting room. Not knowing where to go, I sat on one of the rented chairs. I counted the chairs that now stood in a chain. The first time I came up with seventy-four. On the second attempt I had seventy-seven. Only the fourth or fifth time round did I get seventy-five. Then I saw our next-door neighbor walk out of the lift. He did a double take. The Quran was not playing yet, so he could have thought we were preparing for a party. But something about me must have suggested bad news. I went to Naima in the kitchen, and the
man followed in behind me.

  “Greetings, Ustaz Midhaat.”

  “What happened?”

  “Madam passed away,” Naima told him, and, just as she did, tears appeared in her eyes.

  Ustaz Midhaat looked at me now with eyes as wide as coffee cups. I moved behind Naima.

  A few minutes later he returned with his whole family. Father came out dressed in a white galabia. He only wore a galabia to bed and so he looked as if he had wandered out from a dream. He sat beside our neighbor, saying almost nothing, his cheeks covered in stubble. Naima served them unsweetened black coffee and asked me to pass around a plate of almonds. Then Father waved to me to come.

  “The Quran, turn on the Quran,” he whispered.

  By the afternoon more neighbors arrived, people we hardly knew, and by nightfall the place was packed with silent mourners. I had never seen our house so full yet so quiet. Naima was joined by an army of servants, lent by neighbors, whom she managed with a new authority.

  I took the lift up to the roof to escape. The city stretched in all directions. It hummed and clanked like an engine in the night. The streets coiling into knots here and there. Not even the Nile tempered it. If I could I would have erased it, wiped it clean. I have never before or since felt such a careless desire for violence. Then I could feel a presence behind me. Naima, even with her endless duties, had noticed my absence.

  In the morning my mother’s three siblings, Aunt Souad, Aunt Salwa and Uncle Fadhil, arrived from our country. I had never met them before, but recognized them from photographs. My aunts kept remarking how brave I was, how unusually long my eyelashes were, and teased me about my Cairene accent, my dark skin. They said because I was darker than Father and Mother that I was really my great-grandfather’s son, who was, by all accounts, nearly as dark as I am. They tickled my toes, hugged me when I laughed, dug their faces into my neck and inhaled deeply before kissing. At night they took turns lying beside me, telling stories in the dark that usually included a mention of the waterfalls or pomegranates or palm trees of our country. If in the night I went to get a drink of water, one of them would appear behind me, asking whether I was all right.