Anatomy of a Disappearance (9 page)

Then came the loud whistle of the conductor.

Father tested me one last time, asking me to recite the school address.

The train jerked into motion, its long, sad weight yielding.

“Call as soon as you arrive,” Father said again.

Mona waved energetically. He remained still, his face solemn. Then—they must have thought I could no longer see them—she looked at him and he looked away.

Seeing me struggle off the train with the suitcase, Mr. Galebraith wandered over to me. He smiled when we shook hands. Forgetting that it was mainly an Arab custom, I started to employ my left hand, but it landed not on the hand I was shaking but on his arm, round the bristly sleeve of his tweed jacket.

“Your father asked that we call as soon as you arrived,” he said, leading me to a telephone box.

“Yes, Mr. el-Alfi, he is here, safe and sound.”

But Father wanted to hear my voice, or that was how Mr. Galebraith had put it: “He wants to hear your voice,” he said, handing me the receiver, now warmed a little by his ear. I could smell his breath: a sharp metallic smell. It might
have been the breath of the callers before him, but somehow it left me feeling that there was something cold and hard about Mr. Galebraith.

Two weeks later, without warning, they turned up. The head porter came into maths class.

“El-Alfi, you have guests.”

Everyone at Daleswick, even the students, called one another by their last name.

“Ooh,” the boys cooed.

“Better bring your things,” the head porter said.

I collected my books, blushing the whole time, feeling embarrassed that I was having “guests” so soon after arriving.

I found them standing beside the rented car. Mona opened her arms. Father shook my hand, but then pulled me into an awkward embrace, kissing my cheek with too much force.

I showed them around, took them to the house where I boarded and brought them all the way up to my room. Father stood in his coat between the two narrow beds that were placed on either side of the square window, his head nearly touching the sloping eaves. The floorboards seemed to creak more loudly beneath his polished leather shoes. His eyes landed on the alarm clock he had given me.

“Is this your bed?” he asked, then sank a hand into the mattress. The bedsprings sang horribly. “Very poor quality,” he whispered to Mona.

“That’s what these schools are like,” she said defensively.

“But for the money?”

I pretended I had not heard this exchange. The room embarrassed me; you want the people you love to desire your places. But as she was following him out of the room, Mona looked back at me and winked. I moved quickly to the front and continued the tour. I told them about the rituals of the place, and it pleased me then whenever someone greeted me by my last name.

“Here are the showers. And this is where on the weekends I make breakfast.”

“You learned how to cook?” Father asked.

“Yes, my roommate Alexei taught me how to make an omelette,” I said, hoping we would not encounter Alexei, as he was the only person on earth to whom I had confided my feelings for Mona.

After I was done showing them around, I could not wait for them to leave. And when we sat for lunch in the musty atmosphere of a pub in a nearby village, I felt impatient for the meal to end. Having them there was nowhere, neither the home I longed for nor the school I dreaded.

When they were leaving I overheard her say, “See, didn’t I tell you? He has already got used to it.”

He nodded before she finished her sentence.

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

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 as 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.