Anatomy of a Disappearance

There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.

I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.

My father disappeared in 1972, at the beginning of my school Christmas holiday, when I was fourteen. Mona and I were staying at the Montreux Palace, taking breakfast—I with my large glass of bright orange juice, and she with her steaming black tea—on the terrace overlooking the steel-blue surface of Lake Geneva, at the other end of which, beyond the hills and the bending waters, lay the now vacant city of Geneva. I was watching the silent paragliders hover above the still lake, and she was paging through
La Tribune de Genève
, when suddenly her hand rose to her mouth and trembled.

A few minutes later we were aboard a train, hardly speaking, passing the newspaper back and forth.

We collected from the police station the few belongings that were left on the bedside table. When I unsealed the small plastic bag, along with the tobacco and the lighter flint, I smelled him. That same watch is now wrapped round my wrist, and even today, after all these years, when I press the underside of the leather strap against my nostrils I can detect a whiff of him.

I wonder now how different my story would have been were Mona’s hands unbeautiful, her fingertips coarse.

I still, all of these years later, hear the same childish persistence, “I saw her first,” which bounced like a devil on my
tongue whenever I caught one of Father’s claiming gestures: his fingers sinking into her hair, his hand landing on her skirted thigh with the absentmindedness of a man touching his earlobe in mid-sentence. He had taken to the Western habit of holding hands, kissing, embracing in public. But he could not fool me; like a bad actor, he seemed unsure of his steps. Whenever he would catch me watching him, he would look away and I swear I could see color in his cheeks. A dark tenderness rises in me now as I think how hard he had tried; how I yearn still for an easy sympathy with my father. Our relationship lacked what I have always believed possible, given time and perhaps after I had become a man, after he had seen me become a father: a kind of emotional eloquence and ease. But now the distances that had then governed our interactions and cut a quiet gap between us continue to shape him in my thoughts.

We met Mona at the Magda Marina, a small hotel in Alexandria’s Agamy Beach. Although the sea was nearby, we did not swim in it and I never asked to build sand castles. Most of the guests, too, ignored it and were content with the shelter and limited pleasures of the swimming pool. The concrete-box structures of the single-story rooms screened us from the surrounding landscape. You could hear the waves lapping lazily against the shore like a snoring guard dog, but we caught only narrow glimpses of the blueness.

Father had been bringing me here for the past two summers, ever since Mother’s sudden passing.

We never came to places such as the Magda Marina when my mother was alive. She did not like the heat. I never saw her in a swimsuit or in sudden surrender closing her eyes at the sun. The coming of Cairene spring would set her off
planning our summer getaways. Once we summered high up in the Swiss Alps, where my body stiffened at the sight of deep, hollow chasms emptied out of the rocky earth.

Another time she took us to Nordland in northern Norway, where austere black mountains reflected sharply their splintered peaks on the unmoving waters. We stayed in a wooden cabin that stood alone by the water and was painted the brown-red of withered leaves. Round its roof hung a gutter as wide as a human thigh. Here whatever fell from the sky fell in abundance. There was no other man-made structure in sight. Some afternoons Mother disappeared, and I would not let on to Father that my heart was thumping at the base of my ears. I would keep to my room until I heard footsteps on the deck then the kitchen door slide open. Once I found her there with hands stained black-red, a rough globe dyed into the front of her sweater. With eyes as clean as glass, wide, satisfied, she held out a handful of wild berries. They tasted of a ripe sweetness I found hard to attribute to that landscape.

One night fog gathered thickly, abstracting the licks and sighs of the northern lights. You need adulthood to appreciate such horror. An anxious heat entered my eight-year-old mind, and I curled up in bed, trying to muffle the crying, hoping Mother would pay me one of her night visits, kiss my forehead, lie beside me. In the morning the still world returned: the innocent waters, the ferocious mountains, the pale sky dotted with small, newborn clouds. I found her in the kitchen, warming milk, a glass of water standing on the
white marble counter beside her. Not juice, tea, coffee, but water was her morning drink. She took a sip and with her usual insistence on soundlessness muffled the impact with the soft tip of her little finger. Any sudden sound unsettled her. She could conduct an entire day’s chores in near silence. I sat at the rented table where, when the three of us gathered at mealtimes, Mother would occasionally glance at the fourth empty chair as if it signaled an absence, something lost. She poured the hot milk. A sliver of steam brushed the air then disappeared beside her neck.

“Why the long face?” she said.

She took me out onto the deck that stretched above the lake. The air was so brisk it stung my throat. We stood in silence. I remembered what she had said to Father in the car when the naked mountains of Nordland first came into view: “Here God decided to be a sculptor; everywhere else He holds back.”

“Holds back?” Father had echoed. “You talk about Him as if He’s a friend of yours.”

In those days Father did not believe in God. He often greeted Mother’s remembrances of the Divine with irritated sarcasm. Perhaps I should not have been surprised when, after Mother died, he would now and again voice a prayer; sarcasm, more often than not, hides a secret fascination.