Anatomy of a Disappearance (23 page)

In his letters Am-Samir would always inquire, through his son: “How is your health, Nuri Pasha? When will we see you again?” and would always end with: “We will never forget your parents.” The last line sometimes read like an accusation that my absence was a betrayal of their memory. At other times it flattered me. These inquiries, accusations or compliments were always met by a reserve that I regretted as soon as I posted yet another letter. But I avoided any guilt by thinking these evasions were necessary given the reader, Gamaal, who stood between us. But now there I was, and there he was, with no one in between. I stood on the pavement, looking at him. He walked over to me, checked my face and then wrapped his arms around me. He smelled as dry and clean as plowed earth. He placed his coarse hand
on my cheek, patted my head although I was now taller than he was. I could see tears in his gray eyes.

“What good news,” he said. “What good news! Gamaal,” he called. “Look who’s here! Sir, we have missed you. Now happy days are back. Look how you have grown.”

I could not stop smiling.

Gamaal stood behind his father. He looked more circumspect, but the eager envy had gone from his eyes. No doubt, one by one, he had let go of his expectations.

I left father and son arguing over who was going to carry the suitcase. Gamaal got hold of the handle first.

“Move,” Am-Samir ordered. “I have been waiting for this day.”

“But your back?”

“Ten times stronger than yours.”

The lift seemed smaller. I pressed the number three. The feeling cast itself like a fisherman’s net around me: I was finally where I ought to be. After all, if Father returned, where else would he go but home?

Inside the apartment, I stood by the window and looked out at a view that had once been as familiar as my own reflection: the shoulder of the island nudging the river and the far bank bending a little in agreement. The wind was strong. It brought with it the sounds of the city.

“If you had warned us … Pointless otherwise to keep
clean an apartment not in use, don’t you agree, Nuri Pasha?” Am-Samir let go of the suitcase, placing his hand against his lower back. “Can’t quite believe my eyes. You have cheered us up, really, Pasha.”

I thanked him.

“Naima will be happy,” he said. “There isn’t a month, I tell you, where she doesn’t pass by to ask about you, I swear. In the early days she would come every other day. Poor girl, she never really found her feet.”

“Where is she now?”

“She hasn’t settled, Pasha. Every few months she moves to another family.” He looked at my suitcase. “Is this the entire luggage? Shall I put it in the bedroom? I hope this doesn’t mean you will be leaving soon?”

“No,” I said. “The rest of my things will arrive this week. I will stay in a hotel until then.”

“That’s excellent news. I will have the place sparkling. And with joy, Pasha, I swear, with joy.” He picked up the suitcase. “I will stop a taxi. The best car in Egypt.”

He left, and after a few minutes I followed him.

“I will see you in a week,” I said, getting into the cab.

“Everything will be ready,” Am-Samir repeated, Gamaal standing behind him. And only after the taxi drove off did I remember that I should have given him some money. But I felt too embarrassed to return.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

I could only recall the name of one hotel:

“Magda Marina.”

“Where is that?”

“Agamy Beach.”

He laughed, but when he saw in the rearview mirror that I was not joking, he said, “But that’s in Alexandria.”

We set off on the three-hour drive. For the first time in years I felt good.

A miracle that I managed to retrace my steps, and a miracle still that the Magda Marina had survived the relentless development inflicted on the coast. The 1960s southern Mediterranean architecture of the hotel, which had seemed naïvely optimistic, now struck me as elegantly old-fashioned. The same cropped lawns snaked around the same mirror-fronted concrete-box rooms. The same mock-Moorish tiles round the rectangular pool. I found the palm tree where I had sat all those years ago. The trunk had widened, and the canopy had climbed up too far for its shade to have much effect.

It was autumn, and the hotel was nearly empty. I could not remember the number of our old room, the room where Father and I used to stay, and so the receptionist guided me to the pool from where I was able to point it out.

“But that is a twin?”

“I know.”

“Have you stayed there before?” he asked, walking back.

“When I was a boy. Many years ago.”

He smiled at me.

When I had finished checking in, the bellboy, who waited eagerly to one side, led the way to the room. He took quick, short steps that suggested my bag was much heavier than it was.

I unpacked and went immediately to the sea. I swam so far out that I could no longer see land. I floated in the breathing silence. The water was so still and calm that I was not entirely certain which way was back. Suddenly I became conscious of how cold the water was. I began swimming, my face in the water, and tried not to get too nervous. After a few strokes I looked up and could see the thin sliver of land bobbing on the horizon.

After lunch I telephoned Am-Samir.

“She just missed you,” he said.

“Who?”

“Naima, Pasha, Naima. God in His grace. She passed by shortly after you drove off. The coincidence! She found us cleaning. ‘Nuri Pasha is back,’ I told her. She didn’t believe me. Gamaal convinced her.”

“Where is she now?”

“Cleaning the flat. She kicked us both out. You know what she’s like,” he said, laughing.

I lay in the curtained coolness of the room, on the bed where my father had slept, and paged through the newspaper, tilting it slightly, as he used to do, toward the lamp.

The next few days were very much the same. My keenness for the sea persisted. I ate well. And slept even better. But as the days passed I began to long to get back to the Cairo apartment, to see Naima again. When the day came for me to return I felt sharply nervous. By the time the taxi entered the thick traffic of the city the nervousness turned to excitement.

I found the flat clean, both the beds made, and was hit by the smell of the food I used to eat as a child. New shelves had been put up in the hall, and my books were unpacked and ordered neatly on them. Many of the spines were upside down.

“Naima has just gone to the shops,” Am-Samir said. “Any minute now she will be back. She is very happy, Pasha. Cooking a feast. Your favorite: stuffed grape leaves. See how we remember?”

I tried to ignore how violently my heart was beating.

I do not know how long she had been standing there. She was older, tears clinging to her eyelids like diamonds. I hugged her. She kissed my hand, front and back, pulled me down to kiss my forehead. I could not stop smiling. When she saw my face, she plunged herself into my chest and wept silently.

Am-Samir, too, was tearful, slapping one hand over the other and repeating, “How gracious is the Lord.”

Gamaal stood to one side, his hands locked behind his back.

I had come home to servants.

I insisted that they eat with me. Gamaal said it was not possible. Am-Samir looked at him as if hoping his son was wrong.

“What then,” I said, “you expect me to eat alone?”

They sat with me but hardly ate.

When Am-Samir and Gamaal left and Naima and I were alone, the silences assumed a new quality. Every time she finished asking if I wanted tea or coffee or what I would like tomorrow for breakfast, lunch, dinner, what dishes I missed most—“Do you remember my molokhia? You used to love my molokhia with stuffed pigeon”—and after every reply I made, it seemed that we were each slowly returning to the chain of our private thoughts. What I knew—and preferred that I did not know—could not be uttered. It was impossible to change our shared history, to be mother and son in the clear light of day. And this was not a hindrance, this impossibility—more a mercy.

Before she left on her long commute home, she showed me what she had done. While I was at the Magda Marina she had arranged all of Father’s clothes in such a way that they now occupied only half of his wardrobe. She began unpacking my clothes. She hung the trousers and jackets opposite his suits. She stacked my underclothes beside his old,
yellowing ones. She placed each one of my socks, with the tenderness of someone sowing seeds, in with the black, stone-like balls of Father’s silk socks.

And that close photograph that Mother took of herself, the one that she had placed on the wall of my old bedroom only days before she passed away, was now standing on Father’s bedside table. I was happy to leave it there.

Somehow Naima had assumed that I would take my father’s room, sleep in his bed. And I did.

Naima came every day. She labored over each meal, cooking enough to feed a family.

“The more mouths you feed, the more blessed your home will be,” she would say.

She sent the leftovers to Am-Samir and the drivers who lingered downstairs.

The windows sparkled, and the floors gleamed. The laundry basket hardly spent a night full. She insisted on washing everything by hand, because “soapy clothes are bad for your skin.” She would sit cross-legged on the tiled floor of the windowless laundry room and say, with raw motherliness, as her unhappy hands kneaded the garments I had worn only the day before, “I don’t care what you say, machines don’t rinse properly.” Her hands were covered in maps of pale scars from the repeated peeling over the years.
I bought her rubber gloves, but she never wore them, not even when bleaching the whites.

“You’ve spent too long abroad,” she would say, laughing away my concern.

Every time I looked down I found a newly pressed shirt, the buttons marching up to my neck like the bolts of an ancient piece of armor. And if I dared pour myself a glass of water or attempt to make a cup of tea she would shoo me out of the kitchen.

One evening, as she was preparing supper and repeating, “You won’t believe what I made,” the doorbell rang, slowly, with a long gap between rings. I did not leave Father’s study, which had become my refuge, particularly during these evening hours. I could hear Naima welcoming warmly, then the soft utterances of a deep, masculine voice. When I walked out I saw, standing opposite her, with his back to me, a man dressed in a smart suit. He turned around, and I saw the familiar, gentle face of our old driver, Abdu. His tightly curled hair was powdered white; otherwise, his Nubian face was pretty much unaltered.