Anatomy of a Disappearance (15 page)

“Uncle Taleb, when do you think Baba will return?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it will take a long time?”

“I don’t know.”

I began to cry.

“Your father is brave,” he said.

I could not understand what that had to do with anything.

“You have to be just as brave.”

He took hold of my hand as if we were about to cross a main road.

“I was with him in the hospital when you were born. I had never seen a bigger smile. He took me by the shoulders,
nearly crushed my bones. And every test you passed, every new sport you started, he mentioned it in his letters.”

This surprised me. I had always had the persistent feeling that I was a disappointment.

“There was nothing you could do wrong. When you got accepted at that famous English boarding school, he called me. He was so proud.”

I wiped away the tears. My eyelids were heavy. A while later I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“Go to bed.”

After brushing my teeth I came back to ask, “Do you have to leave tomorrow?”

“Yes. But if you ever need me, I will fly back.” When I did not move, he said, “Here,” and handed me a piece of paper on which he had written, carefully and meticulously, his full name, telephone number and address.

The following night, long after Taleb had left for the airport and Naima had left on her long commute home, I heard a clank in Father’s study. It sounded like a nut cracking. I found Mona ransacking the drawers, wild with impatience. I went after her, ordered the papers and pushed shut a couple of drawers, then stopped. I watched her body bend and twist beneath the nightdress. I sat in Father’s padded desk chair. It was too big for me. The backrest that reached his shoulders was taller than my head. My eyes fell on the raincoat hanging behind the door, the fabric sculpting the ghostly shape of Father’s shoulders. I left the room. I paced up and down the corridor and when she eventually came out of the study I stared at her, and she said, with a voice as hard as a stick, “No, you won’t. You can’t blame me for this.”

Hass called daily, trying to reassure us that he was still following up with the Swiss authorities.

“I was in Bern again yesterday,” he would sometimes say before asking to speak to Mona.

I would sit beside her. She let me listen in on those calls, happy sometimes even to lean slightly toward me. Other times she would press the receiver tightly against her ear and point to the packet of cigarettes that was not entirely out of her reach, asking me to fetch it.

The minister’s aide had refused to give the journalist from
La Tribune de Genève
an interview. “They said better results could be achieved by not generating too much publicity,” Hass told Mona. “Clearly wary of getting involved in any kind of international trouble,” he had said.

He was also still trying to trace Béatrice Benameur. There was no answer when he called at her flat or rang the number he had for her.

“It’s obvious,” Mona told him. “She was part of the kidnapping.”

Hass did not respond.

Often before falling asleep I would lie in the black room and fantasize about how one day I would find Béatrice Benameur and take my revenge. I still remember the sound of my heart keeping me awake.

The telephone continued to ring incessantly. Then after a few days it grew quiet. Relatives and neighbors who might have filled the chairs in the hall if Father had died were silent in the face of his disappearance. Even my aunts and Taleb stopped calling so much. A great emptiness began to fill the place of my father. It became unbearable to hear his name. It must have been the same for Mona, for she, too, hardly mentioned him now. At times it was almost possible to imagine that he had never existed. Yet every morning, the moment I opened my eyes, I believed he was there, that I would find him sitting at the dining table, holding a cup of coffee in the air as he looked down at the folded newspaper on his lap.

As if expecting his vanishing at any moment, Father had drafted a will with the meticulousness of a heart surgeon. Neither Mona nor I had known of its existence. We found it when we managed to open the safe in the corner of the study.

I had secretly hoped to find a note explaining everything: his disappearance, instructions on where to find him, instructions on how to live. I had even allowed myself to hope to read, finally, an explanation for Mother’s sudden passing. Instead, we found his will sealed in an envelope, the insignia of a floating olive tree, its roots dangling in midair, embossed on the top center. After Father could no longer return home he had commissioned this design and had had it stamped on his stationery.

The will, effective in the event of “death or disappearance,”
left Mona three hundred thousand pounds sterling, “to be discharged in ten equal installments of thirty thousand paid annually.” The rest was to go to “my only son, Nuri el-Alfi.”

Why did he add “my only son”? I wondered. Did he think anyone would suggest otherwise?

Monsieur Charlie Hass, who held the original copy of the will, was to “fully administer the inheritance” until I reached eighteen, and then “administrate it partially” until I was twenty-four, when I would become “in complete charge of my inheritance.” Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, in order to qualify for my allowance, I had to be engaged in studies leading to a PhD, “in any subject except business or political science, because both politics and business benefit from an indirect education.” I remembered how Father used to say “a man must not take up employment until he has completed his education.” He could not understand why some well-to-do families encouraged their sons to work summers. “How is a young man to know himself if he is required to plunge into the first job offered him? Humility is not earned through humiliation.” And so I could not secure any form of employment, “voluntary or otherwise,” until twenty-four, when I could do whatever I pleased, according to my father.

I hid the police plastic bag that contained Father’s last things in my wardrobe. I dreaded Mona asking me about it.
I could not imagine ever parting with it. I did not dare unseal the bag again but spent hours with the newspaper article, rereading it, studying every part of the photograph, not only the features of Béatrice Benameur but everything else contained in the frame. I discovered things I had not noticed before. Then I saw something that had me reeling for days afterward. It looked like a corner of a baby’s crib. I showed it to Naima.

“But that is a chair, Ustaz Nuri,” she said, continuing to peer into the picture.

By the evening I had convinced myself she was right. It was only a shawl resting on a ladder-back chair.

There is a moment in the Cairo day when the sun seems to hover motionless. In the days that followed, I would sit beside Mona at the dining table, watching the fading light bounce off the Nile and paint her neck fiery red. Suddenly her beauty would look sorrowful: a fruit bruising in front of my eyes. The sun would roll off the horizon and leave the river mute and gray. It was difficult then to imagine the light ever returning. A smog-stained cloud would enter the sky. Naima would creep up from behind and switch on the lamps. Only then could you feel the pain and longing ease and it was possible then to play a game of cards.

Cards became our nightly ritual. And I let her win most times. She was terrible at chess and backgammon, but in poker she could hold her own. Sometimes, when she was
really restless, I would beat her, and she would turn wonderfully competitive and ask Naima, who hated to touch the bottle, to bring over the brandy.

“I mustn’t let this boy get the better of me.”

Which made Naima blush and say, “May God preserve the goodwill, madam.”

One such evening, after Naima had washed the dinner plates, placed the bottle with a hand gloved in a kitchen rag on the table and left on her long journey home, I let Mona win several games in a row and watched her sink a quarter of the brandy. She turned up an English song and began to dance around the room. Then she said, “You like to watch me, don’t you?” She came close and into my eyes whispered, “You are a strange boy. If I let you, you would spend a lifetime watching me.”

I must have turned red, because she laughed; she laughed and I did not know where to look.

She went to her room. I expected not to see her until morning, but then she called me. She had changed into one of the short cotton dresses she slept in. She looked like a girl dressed in an adult’s T-shirt.

“Put on your pajamas and come tell me a story,” she said.

I made something up, a story about my father. And although I felt guilty doing it, I excluded any mention of the woman Mona had never met, her rival, my mother. At one point in my story, which was about a walk Father and I had never taken around the oasis at Fayoum, eating grapes, she closed her eyes and smiled.

“The sun was shining, but not harshly,” I told her.

She nodded.

With every breath her nipples pressed against the thin cotton. Her smiling lips glistened under the brush of the bedside lamp. I had no doubt. My heart thundered as if it were a thing trapped. But my courage went only as far as running my fingers along my own lips. Just then she opened her eyes and they fell heavily on my mouth. Unlike mine, her body did not seem to lag behind her thoughts. She rose and kissed me on the lips. Had the brandy put her in a dream state? Were the lips she kissed my father’s? I never knew that horror and delight could be so sweet and potent. She reached behind her and turned off the light. I felt her arms pulling me to her chest, then the hot breath of her sigh burn my forehead. For a moment I changed my mind. There was no fire, and the house was not full of smoke, but I wanted to push her away and run to the window and let the air wash my lungs. But I remained slack and willing in her arms until the moment passed and sleep overtook me.