Anatomy of a Disappearance (14 page)

“We must leave. Immediately. Apparently we, too, are in danger. Might be needed to convince him to talk.”

Now the fear I had felt standing in front of Béatrice Benameur’s building began to make sense. Of course—why would those who stole Father not want the rest of us? Before I could ask who had told her this, she was on her way back to the telephone. She dialed a number, waved to the waiter, asked him a question, then impatiently handed him the receiver.

“Charlie’s on his way,” she said, taking her seat and lighting another cigarette.

“Who’s Charlie?”

“Hass.”

She waved to the waiter again. “You gave him the address?”

“Yes, madame.”

“Good,” she said, handing him some money. “Please bring the change straightaway.”

A few minutes later Hass walked into the café.

“We need to get on the first flight out,” she told him.

His eyes became alive with a sort of purposeful intelligence. I was sure this was how he looked whenever Father entrusted him with an important task.

Mona stood up, but he waved her down. He ordered a coffee.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Without saying a word, he went to the telephone.

When he returned he said, “A couple of minutes.”

He drank his coffee in silence. Then the telephone in the corner of the café began ringing. The waiter answered it and handed the receiver to Hass.

“My secretary found two seats on a midnight flight. This way we will have time for our appointment.”

He drove us to the hotel and waited outside until we packed. Mona asked me to put on a white shirt.

It took one and a half hours to drive to Bern. We were silent most of the way, as if each one of us were trying to settle some overworked valve in our head. When we entered Bern, Hass leaned slightly toward Mona and in a near whisper said, “Like I told you, the minister is busy, but we will meet his aide and my friend who is a member of parliament.” Then he added as an afterthought: “It’s a spectacular building.”

He parked in a side street, and we walked. When the large dark-stone building was in view, he pointed enthusiastically to it and said, “See what I mean?”

We looked up at the arches stacked maybe three or four stories high. Two square towers stood on either side, each with a small red flag on top. It did not seem spectacular at all but silly and overbearing, like a square-jawed bodyguard.
I moved closer to Mona, relieved that she did not respond to his question.

A woman holding a purple spiral-bound notebook with brightly colored stickers on it led us through a long, polished hallway and up a grand staircase that was as wide as a car. Every so often she would look back to make sure we were still behind her. Eventually the wood-paneled corridors turned white, fluorescent lights replaced the chandeliers. We arrived at a room that looked like a classroom. It even had a blackboard on one wall. The three of us sat on one side of the long white table that stood in the middle. In the center of the table there was a jug full of water but with only two empty glasses beside it. I was thirsty but did not pour myself a glass. After a few minutes the same woman with the childish notebook walked in, followed by a man dressed in a dark-blue suit and bright red tie. He greeted Hass warmly while the woman watched and smiled.

“We were at university together,” Hass explained.

“I am very sorry to hear what happened,” he told Mona.

He shook my hand but without looking in my eyes.

He and the woman sat opposite us, with an empty chair between them.

“The minister’s aide is on her way,” the man said.

“Very kind of you to see us at such short notice,” Mona said.

“We want to do everything we can,” he said.

Then a tall woman walked in, shook the hand of each one of us and quickly took her seat in the middle. She looked at
the woman beside her, who opened her notebook and held her pen at the top of an empty page.

“The minister apologizes. He wanted to see you personally as soon as he heard. But, as you might appreciate, he is very busy.”

“Of course,” Mona said softly, which surprised me.

“We have read the police report and the statement you gave to Monsieur Durand, so I won’t trouble you with repeating the story, but, like you, we are very concerned indeed.”

She had slim, elongated features. I was somehow sure she had her father’s face. Her arms were nearly as white as the table and completely hairless. The color altered a little at the hands: there was a hint of green to the heels of her palms, the knuckles were pink, but the fingertips were unhappily red, as if she spent a great deal of time washing dishes.

“My husband is a regular visitor to your country,” Mona said. “If something has happened to him it will be a scandal.”

None of the faces opposite reacted to this.

“You are meant to protect your visitors.”

“Like I said, we are very concerned,” the minister’s aide repeated. “The border police, as well as the intelligence services, have been notified.”

The water jug had tiny silver balls of air clinging to its sides. I wondered how long it had been standing there: how many days or weeks or even months.

“Would you like some water?” the woman taking notes said.

“Yes, sorry, I should have asked earlier,” the man said and stood up.

He did not have a belt on, and, although his fly was done up, he had missed the last short distance to the button. The zipper there widened like the open mouth of a small fish. He poured the water quickly, straightening the jug just before the water reached the rim. He placed one glass in front of Mona and the other in front of me. I had intended to drink mine in one go but could not take more than a sip.

“What I feel we must prepare for,” the minister’s aide said as she looked at her colleagues, “is the possibility that he was driven to one of the neighboring countries. France or Italy for example. It’s not unusual for our immigration officials not to check papers of those leaving the country.”

Mona made a strange sound, like a short wheeze. Everyone else must have noticed, but no one said anything.

“Is that what you think happened to my father?” I asked.

“No, we are just saying that it’s a possibility,” the man said.

I looked at Mona but she did not react.

“This is the fourth day,” she finally said.

And no one else spoke after that. Not until the woman with the notebook, who had filled a few pages by now, said, “So, to recap: we will make sure that all border-crossing stations are aware of this and will notify the authorities of the neighboring countries also.”

At the airport Hass did something unexpected. After kissing Mona on both cheeks, he hugged me. The edges of his eyelids, where a woman would wear her kohl, were as red as a fresh wound.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I will follow up with the police.”

When we were a few paces away, he shouted after us.

“Call if you need anything, anything at all.”

We got on an indirect flight home. We had a few hours in Athens. We tried to sleep on the airport benches. I watched her cheek pressed against her wrist. She seemed as foreign to me then as the figures that passed us in the airport lounge.

We landed in Cairo in the early morning. The damp tarmac shone under the streetlights. The air was heavy with the human smell of the old and overpopulated city. I had never felt so deeply disoriented. Mother came into my thoughts. My need for her was sudden, bottomless and unendurable.

In the apartment, before we slept, Mona opened a can of tuna and heated a couple of loaves of frozen bread, nearly burning them. We ate in silence. I was not occupied by the obvious question of what happened to Father but by the physical need to be beside him.

In the morning, as soon as Naima arrived, she asked, “Where is the pasha?”

“Working,” Mona told her.

“Is he all right? Because, yesterday alone, Ustaz Nuri’s aunts, Madam Souad and Madam Salwa, called at least ten
times. They said they’d heard bad news but wouldn’t say what.”

Later that day I heard Naima open the door and let someone in. I rushed to see who it was and found Taleb standing in the hall.

Mona pulled him into the sitting room.

“The regime—” he said, then stopped. When he resumed, he spoke his words quickly and in a near whisper, as if he could not wait to get to the other side. “The regime has issued a statement saying they have him, that he has, of his own volition, returned to the capital. But they didn’t show him. They could be bluffing. It’s possible.”

As he delivered these words, Taleb leaned toward Mona. When she neither spoke nor lifted her eyes from her hands, he looked at me and said, “I came as soon as I heard.”

For the rest of the day and whenever I was alone, Naima would follow me, asking, “What happened? Where is the pasha? I know something is wrong.”

In the end I told her. Panic and fear were in her eyes, but her voice remained reasonable and steady.

“Look, your father often did this. His work demands it. It has happened before.”

“Really?”

“Yes, many times. He would vanish for days, and your mother, God have mercy on her, would become sick with
worry, but before long he was at the door as if nothing had happened.”

She tried to smile. She held me and I let her.

“You should call your aunts,” she said suddenly.

She fetched a number written in her own large hand.

Aunt Salwa said I should come immediately to live with them, then she began to cry. Aunt Souad took the receiver.

“Nuri, habibi, listen very carefully,” she said. “Ask your stepmother to put you on the first plane home, here where you belong. Don’t be frightened; no one will touch you; they are only interested in your father. This is your country.”

“But I have school,” I said.

“Give me your stepmother,” she said.

I sat beside Mona.

“I understand your concern,” Mona said, then waited patiently. “Yes, I understand.” My heart began to beat wildly. “Listen—” she said and was interrupted. I watched her cheeks turn red. “Auntie, please, you are being unreasonable.… No, you listen to me. I know I am only twenty-eight, but I am capable of looking after Nuri. Disrupting his education now would be hugely irresponsible. Thank you very much,” she said and hung up, her breath swelling the square sail of skin at the base of her neck. The telephone rang again. “Don’t answer it,” she told Naima.

I followed her to where Taleb was sitting at the dining table.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said and sat down.

I placed my hand over hers, hoping she would hold it tightly.

When it came time to sleep, and regardless of how much I insisted, Taleb would not take my bed. Mona stood by, saying nothing; so did Naima, which was when I understood that because Father was not home, it would have been improper for Taleb, being a single man, to sleep in the room next to Mona’s bedroom. Naima spread a sheet on the couch in the living room and brought him a blanket. He lay in his clothes. I sat on the floor beside him. I told him what Naima had told me, that this had happened before. He placed a hand on my head but did not say anything.