Anatomy of a Disappearance (10 page)

“Yes. I think Mona would like it very much.”

He looked relieved. “I think she will. It’s beautiful. I will telephone Hass to book the rooms.”

Hass was Father’s Swiss lawyer and old confidant, and, although he was based in Geneva, he was the one who often booked our holidays. Even back when Mother was alive, Hass’s office handled such things.

“Perhaps we should stay there the whole week,” he went on. “What do you think? Or would that be boring?”

“But I am off for nearly four weeks.”

“I know,” he said, then took a slow sip of coffee. “You will
spend the rest of the time in Cairo. I will take her to Paris for a few days before joining you there.”

This was what he had been avoiding, knowing it colored everything that had come before: I imagined him thinking about it in the car, in the shop and even walking through the park.

“She has never been. And it’s about time she got to know Taleb and Hydar properly. You will have to return to Cairo because Naima misses you. I didn’t tell you this before, but more than once I caught her crying.”

He dropped me off at the boardinghouse and gave me a package from Mona. I stood watching the car turn and accelerate up the hill and into the trees. I could follow his lights in the darkness even when the car was deep into the wood: the light flickering in and out like a dying fire.

I turned to go into the house, my head busy with all the arguments I had not had with him. I ripped open the package on the way up to my room. Pajamas made by Hasan al-Eskandarani, the Cairo tailor who made all of our pajamas and bedding and towels. I pictured her going to his shop and selecting the fabric, discussing the cut. But, then again, for all I knew she might have telephoned her order in at the last minute. It was just before lights-out and several boys were already queuing outside the toilets with toothbrushes in their hands, the paste spread on.

Alexei was in bed but full of questions.

“Is it true today is your birthday? How come you didn’t tell me? Was that your father driving off? Where did he take you? Why didn’t you introduce us?”

It was nearly 10:30 p.m., and I could hear Mr. Galebraith’s heavy footsteps coming up the long corridor. I put on my old pajamas and quickly got into bed. I could not wait to start another letter to Mona, but then Mr. Galebraith put his head through the door and said what he said every night—“Good night, girls”—and switched off the light.

That night I blamed the same God I had countless times thanked for her: You should have made us the same age. Then my thoughts turned to Mother, and I panicked because I could not remember where I had last put her photograph. Before Father remarried I used to keep her always in my pocket.

“What are you looking for?” Alexei whispered.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

But I could see him in the black light, sitting up. He did not lie down until I returned to my bed. I pulled the blanket over myself and turned my back to him. When the tears came I did not sniffle, but then a succession of deep breaths gave me away. He did not say anything. I was relieved and cried openly now until the hardness passed. Long into the silence he spoke.

“You know what is the best thing about turning fourteen?”

Alexei was one year older, and I was in no mood for advice.

“Wet dreams. I got my first last year. They are fantastic. I don’t know if girls have them. I think they probably don’t. You see the woman of your dreams, the woman you will marry one day. That’s what my father told me, and it’s true.”

I could not sleep after that. And long after Alexei stopped talking, I had to wake him to borrow his pen-size flashlight, which he and I called the James Bond pen, so that I could write my letter from beneath the covers. I had to be careful because at this time Mr. Galebraith took his dog, Jackson, walking in the fields around the house.

I missed her so severely that I had to stop writing and shelter the hurt I felt for her in my chest. I shut my eyes and tried to see her eyes, hear her voice, smell that place on her neck that she said was mine and only mine. And that was how I slept.

At 6:40 a.m. I lay fully dressed in my uniform but under the covers, having a second go at that letter. It seemed even colder now that it was morning. The blue sky, if it was there, was entirely sealed behind rough clouds. The trees were leafless and black. When she had come here with Father, two weeks after I started at Daleswick, she said how she loved the English countryside, how romantic she found
winter, how much she missed England. And when I had said it was gloomy, she said it was exactly that gloominess that made it romantic and asked me to read
Wuthering Heights
. Now that I had read that book, I still could not understand what she meant. There were boys as old as eighteen at Daleswick; was that how long Father intended on keeping me here? I began by thanking her for the pajamas, and then I asked whether she knew about wet dreams and whether she, too, thought them fantastic. I asked whom she had seen in her dream, whether it was my father. Then I had to stop writing and rush to breakfast.

Alexei’s world was completely new to me. Even though he had a tendency to boast, when he talked I rarely wanted him to stop. I would lie on my bed, hands clasped behind my head, and watch him like you would a film.

“Papa is now in Hamburg.”

“What is he doing in Hamburg?”

“He’s principal conductor of the symphony orchestra,” Alexei said proudly.

This conversation took place early in our acquaintance. I had just arrived at Daleswick. Alexei had been there a year already, but he still had a thick German accent.

“Before Hamburg we were in Jena, where he was conductor of the philharmonic, and before that we were in Stuttgart because he conducted the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. He had been offered the job of principal
conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Canada, but he did not want to disturb our education. Which is why my sister and I finally had to be sent to boarding school: Annalisa had to go somewhere near Düsseldorf, poor her.”

“Do you miss Germany?”

“I miss Annalisa. She can be very annoying, but she’s also really funny. She knows the names of most stars.”

“Actors?”

“No, the ones that light up the sky. And I miss Papa too. In the mornings he would always be the one to wake us. If I was being lazy, he would scrape his chin against my face before shaving. And my mama, of course. I miss her very much. Mostly her singing.” Then he looked at me with tearful eyes and said, “I don’t know why I said that.”

After a long pause, he added, “They named me Alexei after Alexeyevskaya, the Moscow Metro station where Papa first kissed Mama. He says his knees wobbled. She says she did not notice a wobble. They met in Moscow because Mama was also a musician there. She was a singer. But not anymore. And they named Annalisa after Annalisa Cima, Eugenio Montale’s ‘muse’—that means the person who made him write good poems. My parents love the poems of Montale. Have you ever read them?”

Some boys at Daleswick never stopped trying to go back. They would tell you about the lives they came from, the lives from which they were now excluded. But such boys were usually dull, did not know nearly as much about music and poetry as Alexei did. I almost called him my Alexei
there, because, among the mild yet constant disdain of the English, this German boy and I had formed an alliance. We took pleasure in the knowledge that being Arab and German were equally disapproved of here, and that intensified our intimacy and the allegiance we felt toward each other. This is why we insisted on always calling each other by first name.

“Does your name have a meaning in your language?”

“It means my light. My father chose it.”

“What does your father do?”

I never was quite sure how to answer this question. Back in Cairo, when I was asked, I used to say retired minister, because that was what my mother told me to say. For a long time I thought that was an actual job title. I knew that Father did not have a job; that he did not need to work for money; that he had inherited a good amount from his father, who was the last in a long line of silk merchants: there was a book on the shelf by the man who had started it all, Mustafa Pasha el-Alfi, chronicling his long and slow travels to China some six hundred years ago. And, of course, I assumed all fathers were like my own: the little time they spent at home they spent, like recovering warriors, resting, reading in their studies, before returning to the secret obsession to which they were devoted. And although he never spoke about it, I always had a vague notion of what my father’s obsession might have been. Perhaps those silences when someone, usually a guest, mentioned the military dictatorship that ruled our country, or when a visiting relative
would say things like, “The road you are traveling has only one end,” were what told me, even as a young boy, that my father had committed himself to fighting a war.

“So?” Alexei persisted.

“He’s also a conductor,” I said.

“Really? What a coincidence! Which symphony? I knew we were brothers, I knew it. So which one?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean, ‘not sure’? How could you not be sure? It doesn’t matter if it’s a small orchestra, just tell me.”

“I can’t remember,” I said and felt my face burn under his gaze.

“Or do you mean a bus conductor? Or maybe he’s a conductor of traffic? Or an electrical conductor?”

He laughed, and I thought it best to laugh too.

The day before I was due to fly out to Montreux for the Christmas holiday, Mr. Galebraith stuck his head round the door and said, “A lady named Mona is on the phone.”

I shot past him, running down the stairs, taking three steps at a time, not stopping when he shouted, “Slow down!”

“I can’t wait to see you, my sweet peanut,” she said.

Longing was a stone in my mouth.

“I have just checked in. I love this hotel. I will see you at the airport,” she said and hung up.

The two-hour flight to Geneva seemed to last forever. How impatient I was with the hands of the wristwatch.

Father was in Zurich, Bern or Geneva; it was never clear. Mona and I had at least one or two or maybe even three days alone ahead of us. That was all I cared about.