Anatomy of a Disappearance (17 page)

Two months later Mona called to say she was in London.

“Where are you staying?”

“With a friend until I find a place.”

I wondered if, late into the night, she had confided in this nameless friend what had taken place between her and her stepson in Cairo.

“Who is your friend?”

“Someone I know from university.”

What she said next seemed a deliberate attempt to change the subject.

“I miss you. Are you well? How’s school?”

“What did you do with Naima?”

“I had to let her go.”

“And her salary?”

“I tried, but she refused. Tearful and proud. A good soul. In the end I gave the money to Abdu, who is much more pragmatic, of course. He will give it to her when she is less emotional.”

“How much?”

“The equivalent of three months.”

When I did not say anything she said, “We’ll talk when I see you.”

A couple of days later, while I was eating lunch, Mr. Watson, the maths teacher, zigzagged all the way to the opposite end of the dining hall, where I happened to be sitting that day, and bent close to my ear, causing everyone at the long table to look up.

“You have a guest waiting in the headmaster’s office.” A quick, sympathetic grin passed across his face.

Although I knew who the guest must be, I could not resist the possibility that I might find standing in the headmaster’s office not Mona but my father, altered, perhaps thinner, less certain, older and, although it was a perfectly sunny day, wrapped in the same raincoat that was hanging behind the door of his study. The desire to cling to this hope, coupled with the possibility of finding a changed man, did not speed my progress; I walked slowly, my hand tracing the wood-paneled walls.

The headmaster’s door was open. I could see him sitting behind his desk, his figure darkened by the large windows on either side, facing someone out of view. When I came close I saw that opposite the desk, a couple of meters away, far enough that anything spoken was in danger of being overheard, sat Mona. The sunlight that poured in through one of the windows landed on the carpeted floor just short of her chair, but somehow the edges of her hair were burnished by it. The headmaster’s head moved. Mona turned. She smiled. Now I could see Mr. Galebraith, leaning on a
bookcase in the corner. His tie was loose around the fastened collar. He seemed worried.

“Come in,” the headmaster said.

I did and when I was a step or two away from Mona I heard Mr. Galebraith close the door behind me.

I did not want to embrace Mona in front of the two men. I extended my hand and she kissed each one of my cheeks. I detected a new perfume.

The quality of the atmosphere somehow confirmed that she had told them something, but what precisely I was not sure. Did she tell them the truth, that my father and legal guardian had been kidnapped by his political adversaries from the bed of a Swiss woman neither of us knew? Or did she make something up, something simple and tidy for the Englishmen? Did she, for example, tell them that he had fallen critically ill, descended into a coma, that the doctors were pessimistic? Or did she say he had died? Had he died? Had she heard something? The continued silence and the way that they were all looking at me seemed to confirm that the three of them knew something I did not.

Mr. Galebraith was suddenly facing me. He could not have been more than an arm’s length away. His eyes softened. The transformation was as subtle as it was mysterious.

“So sorry, old chap,” he said.

He had never called me that before.

“Your stepmother has just told us,” the headmaster said. “I must say, although you ought to have informed us earlier,
I do admire your discretion. And, in light of it, we have all agreed that, besides Mr. Galebraith and me, no one else needs to know. We are determined to guard your studies and your place among your peers. Education must continue even in the darkest of times.”

He got up and, like Mr. Galebraith had done, came and stood in front of me.

“Not a million years ago, fine men like you attended this school while the nation went to war.”

He let his hand rest for the briefest of intervals on my shoulder.

“We are hopeful, of course. But in the meantime Mrs. el-Alfi will act as your legal guardian.”

Soon after my father disappeared Monsieur Charlie Hass began a regular correspondence with me that was formal and disciplined, sticking to the business that bound us: my inheritance. But in one letter, about a year after my father disappeared, he veered off the usual business line and expressed a perplexingly raw feeling. The letter arrived not with the quarterly bank statement and bill of his charges but on its own, written in a hurried, almost exasperated hand that covered both sides of an A5 notepad piece of paper with a torn, perforated edge. It started: “I have been thinking of you and of how you must be feeling. It’s terrible, just terrible. Your father was an excellent man.”

I felt a jealous anger at his referring to my father in the past tense, as if he knew more than I did, not only about Father but also about what might have befallen him.

“And how can anyone expect you to know all that he was and all that he did, the people he knew, the people who loved him? But know this: he loved you very much. If you need proof, look at how thoughtfully he arranged your affairs.”

He ended it with: “I am sorry to be writing you like this, but I felt compelled.” Then he signed his name.

It was well past midnight when, a few weeks after I received the letter, Mr. Galebraith came to wake me.

“El-Alfi,” he whispered, his figure black against the light of the corridor. “Phone call. From Geneva. Mr. Hass. Says he is the family lawyer. Says it’s important.”

Father has been found, I thought. Why else would a Swiss lawyer call at this hour? I did not run but only just managed to walk beside Mr. Galebraith. The telephone was all the way on the ground floor of the old mansion, in a musty corridor tiled in York stone worn to a shine and bulging out of the ground. I held the cold receiver to my ear and waited until Mr. Galebraith reached the end of the corridor.

“Hello?”

“Is this Monsieur Nuri?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I am sorry, did I wake you? I just wanted to make sure that you are all right. You didn’t respond to my letter.”

I said nothing.

“Did anyone come to see you, asking questions, hassling you?”

“No. Anyone like who?”

“Are you sure? You know you can tell me if they did.”

“Mr. Hass, I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“In that case, very good. If anything like that happens, call me immediately.”

Neither Mr. Galebraith nor the headmaster brought up the subject. And I mentioned Father’s disappearance to no one. It became my secret.

Some nights, lying in the dark after lights-out, I came close to telling Alexei, but I did not know what words to use. I did not know how to name what had taken place: kidnap, abduction, theft? None of them seemed right. And how was I to answer the questions that would surely follow, about why and who and how and wasn’t there anything I could do.

In March, three months after it happened, I had taken a long walk through the hills. Buds wrapped in their velvet caskets clung to the tips of branches. Everything was on the brink of change. For the first time since I had arrived at Daleswick, the English sun warmed my skin. I had been wrong, I thought; I ought to have told Alexei. I pictured us walking through the grove and up the steep hill. We would sit on the craggy boulder there and look out onto the hills rolling and fading into the distance. We would spot our boardinghouse, small enough to hide behind a thumb. And this time we would climb here not for cigarettes and vodka, and not so that he could tell me about his life back in Germany, but to discuss a matter of the utmost importance. I
could no longer wait. How ridiculous that I had left it this long, I told myself. The shock and anguish inflicted by the sudden and yet ambiguous loss of my father felt like a weight on my chest. It had never felt heavier. I wanted to roll it off onto the lap of a trusted friend who might help me make sense of it. I walked briskly back.

I could not find him anywhere. Then, just when I began to wonder if this was not a sign, I found him in the common room watching the news. I sat on the far side, tempering my breath. Besides the library, this was the only room where talking was not encouraged. I waited for him to look my way so that I could gesture to him to follow me. I began to take notice of the news item that was holding his attention. A mother had lost a child. He had been playing in the garden. When she looked up from the kitchen sink he was gone. The cameraman zoomed onto her face as she tried to answer the reporter’s questions. It was upsetting to witness such intrusion into another’s grief. It was as if the camera took delight in the woman’s shame. I wondered what Alexei made of it.

“How could you lose your son?” one boy called out and he was shushed down.

Alexei continued to face the screen.

“Stupid,” he said softly.

I was not sure if he meant the woman on the TV or the boy who had just spoken. And because no one turned to him or told him to be quiet, I convinced myself that he meant the boy. But then Alexei jutted his chin out toward the television
and got up and left the room. I watched the leather seat of his armchair fill with air.

Nothing would be lost, I reasoned, by holding off for a few days.

I remained agitated, uncertain whether to tell him or not, and at the height of my despair I would feel the sweat pool on my chest. One night a storm took hold of the trees outside our dormitory window. I watched them through the glass. The helpless things swung from side to side in the electric light. The mice in the attic above scurried back and forth. The wind moaned and whistled through the window. The rain, which came and went in sheets, was like a thousand fingernails tapping the glass.

“It’s nothing, go to sleep,” Alexei said when he heard the floorboards squeak.

The next time I woke up the world was a calm place. The leaves had hardly a breeze to contend with. In their stillness they looked exhausted. The trees on the outer perimeter of the grove had either collapsed or split into two. Alexei was fast asleep. He had slept through the rest of the storm. Something about that astonished me. What comfort allows such trust in the world?

The stillness of that morning seemed to confirm my old instinct not to tell Alexei about my father. I made up my mind: I must keep this private. I could not bear the disquiet of another or worse, far worse, to see him fascinated, entertained by the oddity of what had happened. What is a happy German boy with happy parents to know about this?

A couple of months later Alexei ran into the room we shared at Daleswick with a white piece of paper quivering in his hand. I took the letter, but it was in German.

“My father has been offered a job in Düsseldorf. He accepted it. Annalisa can’t believe her luck. She will become a day pupil and I will do my final year there. We will all be together again.”

He flung his arms around me. I tried to reciprocate the hug.

“Don’t you worry, we’ll spend summers together.”

Soon it was his last day at school. Before he had even gone to sleep he had packed his clothes, books, and records. He was leaving me Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for Cello in G Minor because it was then the most beautiful thing I had heard. We vowed to stay in touch.

His parents and Annalisa were coming to collect him. He seemed nervous. Then I heard he was looking for me. He took me to one side.

“Please don’t say anything if you notice something unusual about my mother.”

I went to the window when I heard a car come up the gravel path. Alexei ran into his father’s arms. Annalisa held her hands, waiting patiently to one side, before she, too, embraced him. She did not let go even after he had dropped his arms down. He laughed and held her again. Then his mother came, balancing on a cane. He was careful with her, hugged her softly and let his ear rest lightly on her shoulder. For a few seconds no one moved. When he let go, she leaned the stick against her hip and gestured fast with her hands. He nodded and said something in German, loudly, as if he were addressing someone hiding in the trees beyond. He looked back, and I thought it was time for me to appear. I was overtly conscious of the loud crunching noise my feet were making on the gravel. His mother was the only one who did not speak when I came to shake her hand. I understood then what Alexei had been anxious about and why that one time when he mentioned how much he missed his mother’s singing his eyes had welled. His mother, the singer, had completely lost her voice.