Anatomy of a Disappearance (7 page)

“Really?” I said. “I always thought they were there only a couple of months.”

“You breathed Parisian air for the first eight months of your life. You will be ruined forever.”

I liked Taleb. Unlike Nafisa’s, his sympathy was not patronizing. He took me to places I had never been. Once, as I
followed him through the arches of Ibn Tulun Mosque, I asked him, “Uncle Taleb?”

“Yes.”

“What did my mother die of?”

He stopped and looked at me in that same way again but said nothing.

Late one night, he on the bed, I on the floor, the room as black as a well and filling up with the smell of whisky, Taleb suddenly spoke.

“Sometimes it’s better not to know,” he said.

My heart jumped, but I attributed that partly to the fact that his words had snatched me from sleep.

“Some things are hard to swallow.”

I recalled a dog in our street that had choked on a chicken bone. It wheezed and coughed and then eventually lay on its side and surrendered, blinking at me.

“You must know, regardless of anything, of her great humanity,” he said, the word utterly new to me. I repeated it in my mind—humanity, humanity—so that I could later look it up. “She never ceased to be tender with Naima, who was innocent, of course. Ultimately, everyone is innocent, including your father.”

After a long silence, just when I suspected he had fallen asleep, Taleb spoke again.

“You have no idea what he was back home. It’s difficult, looking at him now, to believe he is the same person and
that the world is the same world. And he wanted someone to inherit it all.”

My eyes peered violently into the dark. I recalled sitting with my parents at some station high up in the snowy Alps. I was behind them, their backs black against the white abyss of the valley. The wind was a mountainous wind. It would stop, then blow again, and Mother’s scarf marked it. When they spoke they spoke in whispers.

“It’s what you have always wanted,” she said.

A long silence passed. Their heads followed a paraglider. Then Father turned with a hand pointing to the paraglider. When he saw my eyes on the target, he leaned back in the deck chair, the canvas sculpting his shape.

“What option did I have?” she said.

He did not respond.

The following day Taleb, Hydar and Nafisa flew back to Paris. And although Naima changed the bedsheets, I could still smell Taleb’s head on my pillow. I asked Naima to replace it.

“Why?” she said and pressed the pillow against her face. “It’s perfectly clean.”

It was a relief when school started. Father seemed to relax. He returned to talking at the dining table. He even began to speak about what we might do the following summer. But when summer break arrived, he fell completely quiet about that. I did not mind; it seemed odd anyway that we should go traveling without Mother.

“It’s not good for a boy to be home all day,” I heard Naima tell him one morning.

That same afternoon he asked me to pack some beach clothes. “We are going to Alexandria.”

Abdu drove us the following morning, and although Alexandria was only three hours away, for some reason Father insisted that we set off at six in the morning.

The Magda Marina seemed dull and depressing in comparison
to the places Mother used to take us. I could not wait for the two weeks to end and to return to Cairo.

I could not have felt more differently the following summer, the summer we met Mona, when I prayed each day would last forever.

She was twenty-six, Father forty-one and I twelve: fifteen years separated them, and fourteen separated her from me. He scarcely had any more right to her than I did. And the fact that Mother was also twenty-six when she and Father married did not escape me. It was as if Father was trying to turn back the clock.

In the early autumn of that year, after our first summer with Mona, he ordered Naima to pack up Mother’s things. And when she did not immediately comply, he repeated his order, using the same words spoken in the same tone, which was both gentle yet not to be questioned. As soon as she began, a new quality of silence descended on the room. He stood by, pretending to be looking through some loose sheets of paper. I watched helplessly as the sealed cardboard boxes began to mount in the hall.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

He did not respond.

“You can’t take them out of here,” I said.

He looked at me and I knew that, if I were to take my eyes off his, Mother’s things would disappear to some storeroom in the apartment block.

A couple of days later he ordered a carpenter to construct
a wardrobe across one end of his study. Mother’s things were unpacked and put there.

He then flew to London, where he and Mona got married. I did not attend the civil ceremony, which Father had assured me was going to be “a quiet affair attended only by Mona’s mother and, maybe, a few of their relatives.” School, of course, was the excuse why I could not come along. But later, when their photographs gradually replaced Mother’s pictures, I discovered that also present on that day were Hydar, Nafisa and Taleb, and other Arab-looking people, probably exiles from our country, their wives and children standing beside them.

At first Father did not say anything when he saw me peering at the photographs. Then he came into my room.

“Those people you saw in the pictures: they were passing through London.” Then he returned again. “And what is wrong with having a few friends attend a happy day?”

I had gone with Abdu to collect them from Cairo International Airport. On the way Abdu stopped by a florist.

“Nuri Pasha, I think it would be very thoughtful if you got them flowers. Your father would appreciate that.”

I thought of what excuse I could give. Then, to make up for the hesitation, bought a huge bouquet whose giant fan could barely fit in the boot. Abdu carried it behind me into the arrivals lounge. The smell of jasmines, orange lilies and roses competed for space. Then Mona and Father appeared.
Behind their linked bodies there were two men, each with a trolley high with luggage.

She moved in with us, in the Zamalek apartment Mother had picked for its intimate view of the Nile. During those first few days I almost forgot our time at the Magda Marina. Every morning Father took his car to some appointment or meeting and Abdu drove me to school. Mona, more comfortable in the world than Mother had ever been, spent most of her time at the Gezira Club, where she played polo and tennis and drank tea with people Father and I were never introduced to. She had that English quality of placing the people she knew in compartments, as if fearing they would contaminate one another. Before long she had formed a wide circle of friends. Eventually, it would become necessary to resent her.

But then in November, under the excuse of celebrating my thirteenth birthday, we took a boat up the Nile to Luxor, and the fire was reignited. The same sad hunger, only darker and harder to bear.

The boat was moving soundlessly. I could see through the small window in my cabin the waters parting behind us, the discrete ripples running wide like pressed skin, gathering pace then collapsing gently against the soft grassy banks of the river. This was our first morning aboard the
Isis
, clamorous Cairo far behind now. The capital’s fat river had withered to a provincial waterway. Its banks pressed
close and so seemed more reticent somehow. We were traveling upstream, south into the continent. Already the skin of the boys who occasionally ran along with our speed—waving, sticking out tongues, revealing buttocks—was a shade darker, as dark as Naima’s. Another four days and we would reach the pale waters of Luxor, where, the captain had told us when we boarded, the waters are so clear you can see right to the bottom of the ancient river. Will we see jewels and ruins and things down there? I had thought to ask. But from where I was standing on the narrow lacquered deck behind Mona and Father and their two giant suitcases, speaking seemed impossible.

That night I could not sleep. The fluid motion of the boat combined with the muffled happy voices from the cabin next door kept me awake most of the night. The newlyweds did not fall asleep until the water’s surface had turned silver: giggling, shushing, then a breathless silence, then sudden laughter. At one point, delirious with exhaustion and jealousy, I thought, They mean to do this; they mean to torment me.

Now that we were farther south, the sun had become braver. I lay uncovered, unready for morning, which came thick with heat. My T-shirt and trunks were sticky against my skin, my jaw slack on the pillow, when Mona walked in without knocking. I held my eyes shut, but she was not convinced.

“I have tried everything. It’s past nine and he still won’t wake.”

She walked into the bathroom, leaving the door open. Without needing to move I could see part of her thigh. I heard the sound of her pee pouring into water—closer to a small stream than a fountain—then the scrape of paper. She washed her hands, splashed her face, gasping against the cold water. She sat on the bed. I turned and faced the wood paneling, reading the lines and twirls of the grain. She placed a hand on my back.

What I then took for adoration was Mona’s fancy to be adored. I imagine she found the torment and slow discovery of a boy-admirer all at once entertaining, flattering and pathetic. I think this now as I recall what happened next.

The three of us were taking turns diving into the passing river, then hurrying to catch up with the steamer. The other two would cheer as the swimmer chased after the ladder. The pace of the boat was gentle, but our excitement feigned danger. Every time the swimmer grabbed hold of the first tread, the other two would clap. Mona put her thumb and index finger in her mouth and whistled loudly. I wished I could do that. And ever since I have looked up to people who can as a kind of elite. At one point Father lifted her in his arms and kissed her. We had caused a spectacle. Clothed passengers stood leaning on the rail, watching us. They
clapped as we climbed up onto the deck. Children looked at me. It was a performance, and we knew it. Our strangeness urged us on to act more, and we relished the questions we imagined our appearances and accents, our tongues that switched comfortably from Arabic to English to French, provoked in others.