Anatomy of a Disappearance Page 6

  He nodded before she finished her sentence.

  Only then did I realize I had shown too much enthusiasm for the place.

  CHAPTER 14

  I could tell Father missed me, that in the act of putting me in boarding school he had run against his own heart. But my longing, growing more severe by the day, focused chiefly on Mona. She occupied my thoughts entirely. Odd to think this now that my whole capacity for hope and longing is directed at my missing father. Is the heart always failing itself or by nature unfaithful?

  I had to restrain myself from writing to her too often, especially because she rarely wrote back or responded with the speed and in the manner I had allowed myself to expect. Some people manage to escape the obligation a sincere letter places on them. Mona was one of those. And she never gave me reason to think she cherished my letters; she never mentioned them. Perhaps this was her wisdom, if wisdom is the word—another would be ruthlessness. She must have known that I would eventually give up. When she did write, she scribbled something on the back of one of the numerous postcards she collected from museum shops. What she wrote was always brisk and unconsidered—“With best wishes” or “Keep well”—but I tried to read deep meaning into these platitudes. She would often enclose the petal of a camellia or lotus or common Egyptian rose—the fragrance still detectable. I read these silent gestures as involuntary expressions of her desire. The incongruity between these pressed fragments and the hurriedly written postcards haunted me.

  The letters I sent were endlessly edited and pondered over and almost always too long. I kept a copy of the final draft. As soon as I dropped the envelope in the school postbox, the copy became more valuable, as it was then a record of what she would soon hold in her hand. I would reread it, finding more excesses.

  It was November. My fourteenth birthday was quickly approaching. I thought surely now I would receive a fitting reply to my letters. On the morning of the day, I looked at myself in the mirror and decided that I was taller than she was. I rushed to my pigeonhole and found it empty. I had been away from Cairo for nine weeks—sixty-one days exactly. The marks of the summer sandals had already vanished from around my feet. It was so cold that most mornings I had to wear one pair of socks over another, and still by the end of the day my toes would be balls of ice in my hands.

  Had Mona and Father forgotten?

  I hated everyone at Daleswick that morning. I had told no one, not even Alexei, that it was my birthday.

  Before morning class I ran to the front desk.

  “No, Mr. el-Alfi, no one called for you,” the head porter said.

  But then, before the clock struck ten, he opened the classroom door and told the teacher, “Excuse me, sir, but Mr. el-Alfi is wanted at the front desk.”

  And whom did I find standing in the hall, wrapped in a coat and scarf, but Father, smiling. I almost cried but then remembered what Mother had told me about how I must be careful with my sadness. I expected Mona to be outside standing on the gravel driveway with open arms. And when she was not there, I thought, Maybe in the car. But she was at home, in the third-floor apartment on Fairouz Street in Zamalek.

  Father had managed to convince stubborn Mr. Galebraith to let me skip school on account of it being my birthday. Mona was right: he could convince anyone of anything. I was even permitted to skip the evening study hour, and so was exempt from handing in my prep the following day. I only had to be back by lights-out. It was wonderful to sit in the soft, warm leather upholstery all the way to London when I should have been sitting on that hard wooden chair facing the blackboard. When we drove away, I hoped that by some miracle I would never have to return to that cold place ever again. Father let me choose the music.

  “I flew all the way from Geneva to spend the day with you,” he suddenly said, and I wondered if he had detected my disappointment about Mona not being there.

  We walked through Green Park. The shade was thick and private in among the trees. It was one of those English days suspended between the seasons: the air temperate yet alive to the coming winter. Occasionally you heard the distant moan of an engine making its way up Piccadilly. Otherwise, the city was unusually quiet. It started raining softly. After a few steps Father opened his umbrella and it covered us both. I wanted everything good in the world for him: every dream he had, all of his secret plans, to come true. I suddenly was glad that Mona was his. A strange contentment toward the order of things fell on me.

  We reached South Molton Street. We passed Browns, which used to be Mother’s favorite London shop. In its window I spotted a coat.

  “Mona would like this,” I told him, and Father gave a short hum.

  I went into the shop, and he followed me.

  It was a fur coat with an impressive collar. I could see her in it, her hair rolled up in that usual way, like an actress in one of the old films.

  “You should get her this.”

  Father’s eyes bulged when he inspected the price tag and in English said, “It’s horrendously expensive.”

  I suspected this was for the benefit of the shop clerk who was hovering nearby.

  “Extremely expensive,” he repeated.

  “Well, then,” I said, also in English, sounding like the fourteen-year-old boy that I was, “you ought to buy it because Mama Mona is both horrendously as well as extremely beautiful.”

  I called her Mama Mona because I knew that would please him.

  This made him laugh, and he took the coat to the cashier.

  I wondered whether he would ever mention that it was I who had spotted the coat or if he would quote to her what I said. Watching the lady work the silken tissue paper round the dark fur, I decided he probably would not, because when people buy someone a gift they like them to think it was all their idea.

  We ate at Mona’s favorite restaurant, Clarisse’s. I chose it because I knew she would have. She believed they made the best cheese fondue in London, although she had agreed with me when I said it was nowhere near as good as at the Café du Soleil, a restaurant in Switzerland that we both liked but had yet to go to together. I, of course, ordered the fondue. Father ordered a large steak that bled each time he dug his knife into its thick flesh.

  At one point, when I was returning from the toilet, I watched him from across the restaurant. He seemed a wholly different man from that distance. All the confidence was gone. He was leaning on the table with his elbows, one leg rocking. When I took my place opposite him again, he looked at me for a while before he spoke.

  “Do you usually do this?”

  “What?”

  “What you just did: do you usually leave your food and go to the toilet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He leaned farther across the table and in a near whisper spoke quickly. “From now on, never do that. And don’t frequent the same places. Don’t make it easy for anyone to know your movements.”

  I watched his face: his eyes wide open, anxiety curling his lips. He looked like a child who had just seen a ghost.

  “Understood?” he asked when I did not respond.

  I nodded. “Understood.”

  “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  After we finished our food I asked for ice cream, and he ordered black coffee. When it arrived he lit a cigarette, which kept smoking in my direction. He seemed to have reached some other place in his thoughts. Now, from this proximity, I could see what she saw in him. His elegant, tailored clothes, his perfectly manicured fingers, and that defiance in the eyes. A man who followed his own law. And I wanted to be him. I wanted to have believed in and indeed served a constitutional monarchy. I wanted to hate, with the same passion, what he used to call “that infantile impertinence that passes for a revolution,” then suddenly to re-emerge, with all of my refinement intact, a Marxist, “because each age calls for its own solution.” I, too, wanted secret meetings in Geneva, allies in Paris with whom I had watched history march and worked to change its course. Sitting there at Clarisse’s, I wished I could come to him a
s a stranger.

  “Looking forward to the holidays?” he asked.

  I nodded because my mouth was full.

  “We will meet in Montreux. You two will probably arrive before me. I might be one or two days. But then we could all set off to the mountains.”

  I had no interest in skiing. All I could think of was being alone with her.

  “What do you think? Is the Montreux Palace the right place?”

  It was not his habit to consult me about such things. The Montreux Palace was where we always stayed. What he was really asking was whether I thought Mona would like that hotel.

  “Yes. I think Mona would like it very much.”

  He looked relieved. “I think she will. It’s beautiful. I will telephone Hass to book the rooms.”

  Hass was Father’s Swiss lawyer and old confidant, and, although he was based in Geneva, he was the one who often booked our holidays. Even back when Mother was alive, Hass’s office handled such things.

  “Perhaps we should stay there the whole week,” he went on. “What do you think? Or would that be boring?”

  “But I am off for nearly four weeks.”

  “I know,” he said, then took a slow sip of coffee. “You will spend the rest of the time in Cairo. I will take her to Paris for a few days before joining you there.”

  This was what he had been avoiding, knowing it colored everything that had come before: I imagined him thinking about it in the car, in the shop and even walking through the park.

  “She has never been. And it’s about time she got to know Taleb and Hydar properly. You will have to return to Cairo because Naima misses you. I didn’t tell you this before, but more than once I caught her crying.”

  He dropped me off at the boardinghouse and gave me a package from Mona. I stood watching the car turn and accelerate up the hill and into the trees. I could follow his lights in the darkness even when the car was deep into the wood: the light flickering in and out like a dying fire.

  I turned to go into the house, my head busy with all the arguments I had not had with him. I ripped open the package on the way up to my room. Pajamas made by Hasan al-Eskandarani, the Cairo tailor who made all of our pajamas and bedding and towels. I pictured her going to his shop and selecting the fabric, discussing the cut. But, then again, for all I knew she might have telephoned her order in at the last minute. It was just before lights-out and several boys were already queuing outside the toilets with toothbrushes in their hands, the paste spread on.

  Alexei was in bed but full of questions.

  “Is it true today is your birthday? How come you didn’t tell me? Was that your father driving off? Where did he take you? Why didn’t you introduce us?”

  It was nearly 10:30 p.m., and I could hear Mr. Galebraith’s heavy footsteps coming up the long corridor. I put on my old pajamas and quickly got into bed. I could not wait to start another letter to Mona, but then Mr. Galebraith put his head through the door and said what he said every night—“Good night, girls”—and switched off the light.

  CHAPTER 15

  That night I blamed the same God I had countless times thanked for her: You should have made us the same age. Then my thoughts turned to Mother, and I panicked because I could not remember where I had last put her photograph. Before Father remarried I used to keep her always in my pocket.

  “What are you looking for?” Alexei whispered.

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  But I could see him in the black light, sitting up. He did not lie down until I returned to my bed. I pulled the blanket over myself and turned my back to him. When the tears came I did not sniffle, but then a succession of deep breaths gave me away. He did not say anything. I was relieved and cried openly now until the hardness passed. Long into the silence he spoke.

  “You know what is the best thing about turning fourteen?”

  Alexei was one year older, and I was in no mood for advice.

  “Wet dreams. I got my first last year. They are fantastic. I don’t know if girls have them. I think they probably don’t. You see the woman of your dreams, the woman you will marry one day. That’s what my father told me, and it’s true.”

  I could not sleep after that. And long after Alexei stopped talking, I had to wake him to borrow his pen-size flashlight, which he and I called the James Bond pen, so that I could write my letter from beneath the covers. I had to be careful because at this time Mr. Galebraith took his dog, Jackson, walking in the fields around the house.

  I missed her so severely that I had to stop writing and shelter the hurt I felt for her in my chest. I shut my eyes and tried to see her eyes, hear her voice, smell that place on her neck that she said was mine and only mine. And that was how I slept.

  At 6:40 a.m. I lay fully dressed in my uniform but under the covers, having a second go at that letter. It seemed even colder now that it was morning. The blue sky, if it was there, was entirely sealed behind rough clouds. The trees were leafless and black. When she had come here with Father, two weeks after I started at Daleswick, she said how she loved the English countryside, how romantic she found winter, how much she missed England. And when I had said it was gloomy, she said it was exactly that gloominess that made it romantic and asked me to read Wuthering Heights. Now that I had read that book, I still could not understand what she meant. There were boys as old as eighteen at Daleswick; was that how long Father intended on keeping me here? I began by thanking her for the pajamas, and then I asked whether she knew about wet dreams and whether she, too, thought them fantastic. I asked whom she had seen in her dream, whether it was my father. Then I had to stop writing and rush to breakfast.

  Alexei’s world was completely new to me. Even though he had a tendency to boast, when he talked I rarely wanted him to stop. I would lie on my bed, hands clasped behind my head, and watch him like you would a film.

  “Papa is now in Hamburg.”

  “What is he doing in Hamburg?”

  “He’s principal conductor of the symphony orchestra,” Alexei said proudly.

  This conversation took place early in our acquaintance. I had just arrived at Daleswick. Alexei had been there a year already, but he still had a thick German accent.

  “Before Hamburg we were in Jena, where he was conductor of the philharmonic, and before that we were in Stuttgart because he conducted the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. He had been offered the job of principal conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Canada, but he did not want to disturb our education. Which is why my sister and I finally had to be sent to boarding school: Annalisa had to go somewhere near Düsseldorf, poor her.”

  “Do you miss Germany?”

  “I miss Annalisa. She can be very annoying, but she’s also really funny. She knows the names of most stars.”

  “Actors?”

  “No, the ones that light up the sky. And I miss Papa too. In the mornings he would always be the one to wake us. If I was being lazy, he would scrape his chin against my face before shaving. And my mama, of course. I miss her very much. Mostly her singing.” Then he looked at me with tearful eyes and said, “I don’t know why I said that.”

  After a long pause, he added, “They named me Alexei after Alexeyevskaya, the Moscow Metro station where Papa first kissed Mama. He says his knees wobbled. She says she did not notice a wobble. They met in Moscow because Mama was also a musician there. She was a singer. But not anymore. And they named Annalisa after Annalisa Cima, Eugenio Montale’s ‘muse’—that means the person who made him write good poems. My parents love the poems of Montale. Have you ever read them?”

  Some boys at Daleswick never stopped trying to go back. They would tell you about the lives they came from, the lives from which they were now excluded. But such boys were usually dull, did not know nearly as much about music and poetry as Alexei did. I almost called him my Alexei there, because, among the mild yet constant disdain of the English, this German boy and I had formed an alliance. We took pleasure in the knowledge that being Arab
and German were equally disapproved of here, and that intensified our intimacy and the allegiance we felt toward each other. This is why we insisted on always calling each other by first name.

  “Does your name have a meaning in your language?”

  “It means my light. My father chose it.”

  “What does your father do?”

  I never was quite sure how to answer this question. Back in Cairo, when I was asked, I used to say retired minister, because that was what my mother told me to say. For a long time I thought that was an actual job title. I knew that Father did not have a job; that he did not need to work for money; that he had inherited a good amount from his father, who was the last in a long line of silk merchants: there was a book on the shelf by the man who had started it all, Mustafa Pasha el-Alfi, chronicling his long and slow travels to China some six hundred years ago. And, of course, I assumed all fathers were like my own: the little time they spent at home they spent, like recovering warriors, resting, reading in their studies, before returning to the secret obsession to which they were devoted. And although he never spoke about it, I always had a vague notion of what my father’s obsession might have been. Perhaps those silences when someone, usually a guest, mentioned the military dictatorship that ruled our country, or when a visiting relative would say things like, “The road you are traveling has only one end,” were what told me, even as a young boy, that my father had committed himself to fighting a war.

  “So?” Alexei persisted.

  “He’s also a conductor,” I said.

  “Really? What a coincidence! Which symphony? I knew we were brothers, I knew it. So which one?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not sure’? How could you not be sure? It doesn’t matter if it’s a small orchestra, just tell me.”

  “I can’t remember,” I said and felt my face burn under his gaze.

  “Or do you mean a bus conductor? Or maybe he’s a conductor of traffic? Or an electrical conductor?”