Anatomy of a Disappearance (19 page)

“Where have you been?” she asked again and walked away into the flat. “I have been worried sick about you.”

“But I told you I was staying with a friend.”

“Yes, and you said you would call. You gave me a fright. What if something happened? And where is your bag?”

“At the hotel.”

“What hotel?”

“The one I stayed at with Alexei. Here, on the same street.”

Her face changed. Tears appeared, and she opened her arms and came toward me. She held me for a few seconds, then said, “Come, let’s go,” and we walked to the hotel. I was relieved when she said she would wait downstairs. I did not
want her to witness the room, the messy bed. She paid the receptionist, and as we walked back to her building she handed me the deposit, then ran her fingers through my hair.

Neither of us mentioned Toby. I did not visit again until the summer before my final year at Daleswick, and then only for one night on my way to Heathrow and on to Tanzania, where my year spent a couple of months helping to build an orphanage. I sent her a postcard on which I wrote that I had never felt more at home than in Tanzania. I told her about a visit we had paid to the university of Dar es Salaam. I reminded her that I had only one year remaining before university and that I was still undecided where to go. But when she wrote back, she did not pick up on that; she did not say anything about wanting me to remain in England.

In the end I chose a university in London. I got a flat in Holland Park, not too far from Little Venice yet not so close that I might be accused of intruding.

Occasionally I met Mona. These encounters usually started the same way. I would go to her flat and watch her hover nervously for a few seconds before she grabbed her handbag and keys and said, “OK, let’s go.” We would walk by the canal, then sit in a nearby pub named the Bridge House. I felt observed and suspected she did too.

“What did Father tell you about his work?”

“You know he never talked about that.”

“But he must have told you something.”

“Your father had a gift for secrets—his final act proves it.” Then after a long silence she said, “He was fixated on that country. It was an obsession.”

“It was a noble cause,” I said because I did not like the word obsession. “He was very brave.”

“Yes,” she said. The agreement was genuine; it passed through her with unique gentleness.

Sometimes I would ask her to recall certain details from our last day in Switzerland, a country I had not returned to since Father’s disappearance; as far as I knew, neither had she.

“Tell me again what the policeman said.”

She would fidget. “Well, you were there, weren’t you?”

“Who was it that called our room? Remember? After Hydar and Taleb?”

“No one called.”

“They did. And I think in Athens you used the telephone again.”

“Athens?”

“Yes, we transited there.”

“I don’t remember. It all passed in a panic.”

I kept a small radius of friends, mostly from university, with whom I shared what I imagined some siblings share: a warm alliance that still assured the necessary distance. We went to concerts, ate at restaurants, called one another on birthdays. They seemed quite satisfied with the admittedly little I was able to give. They did not know much about me except that I came from Egypt—a fact in itself untrue. A certain kind of English temperament suited me because I
was never one given to confession. I did not dress as lavishly as Father yet avoided the deliberate casualness of the fashion of the time. When invited for supper at someone’s home, I made sure my gifts were moderate: neither too plain nor too enthusiastic. I never professed any strong or unyielding opinions, unless it was the only way not to stand out. And whenever someone said something about how racist the English were or expressed, in that subtle way, self-satisfaction at the fact that they counted among their friends a dark-skinned Arab, I simply pretended, in the way one does when an old person farts out loud, that I had not heard.

I occasionally had a lover, but with each act of lovemaking the old guilt I had felt during that night with Mona all those years ago did not become lighter but almost worse. I remember one woman—Katharine was her name, an architect—who asked me why I had tears in my eyes. I, embarrassingly, said nothing, hoping she might mistake them for the emotions of a lover. More often than not these bouts of guilt manifested themselves in a cold aloofness that left the woman—usually still naked at this point—either offended or perplexed, in both cases requiring an explanation. The morning after I would feel the need to call Mona. Attempting to sound casual, I would tell her about a new play I had seen, a new restaurant I had discovered. Sometimes I would even find myself saying something like, “I think you and Toby would enjoy it.”

I was twenty-four and had just earned a PhD in art history when, according to the rules of Father’s will, I was free to do as I pleased. The papers Monsieur Hass posted a week after my birthday confirmed this: they declared that I was in full control of my inheritance. The options of where and how to live seemed infinite. I found no comfort in this.

I began to feel I had been neglecting my father. I saw him waiting in a windowless room. I obsessed about what I could do to find him. I dreamed of him often.

In one dream I am sitting on a bench, knowing he will come. Suddenly he is beside me. I do not know how, but we are the same age. There is something tragic about this fact. He is silent. He is wary of me. Perhaps, I hope from within the dream, one day I might put him at ease. In these dreams I am always the talkative one, like a nervous fellow train passenger. He hardly looks at me. Each time I see him I notice something else about him that has changed: the rhythm of his breath, the way an unpressed collar curls round his neck. In one dream he places a hand on my back, between the shoulder blades, and the heat of his palm bothers me, but I say nothing. Another time he is hungry. I break off pieces of cheese into my lap and feed him with my hand. In another dream he tells me, “I wish I had more world in the world.” When I ask what he means, whether he means more children, he says nothing. I want to know how to comfort
him. Then he says, “She whispers in my ear at times,” and I know he means Mother. “Her voice. Her warm breath at my ear, across my neck.” His cheeks turn red, like a young man’s, like his face in that picture I keep, taken by my mother, when they were newlyweds. He touches my arm, and I think, happily, we have become friends. Then a tear that had slid down the side of my face dropped into the shell of my ear and woke me.

One morning I packed a small suitcase and flew to Geneva.

I left my bag at a hotel named Eden and went wandering the streets. It was ten years since I had last been in the city. The sun was out and, although it was the afternoon, it shone as pale as an early morning sun. I was walking down the Grand Rue when I began to feel myself relax. The shift in mood was as inexplicable as it was wonderful.

By nightfall I located the street, Rue Monnier, on which Béatrice Benameur had allegedly lived. The street name had been fixed in my memory since that December day ten years earlier when Hass had attempted to introduce us to the mysterious Swiss woman. It would not have been strange if the street had seemed smaller—as indeed most places one knew as a child do seem—but instead the tarmac was wider than I remembered it, the pavements on either side broader and the buildings taller and more dominant against the night sky. I stood on the opposite pavement from the arched
building entrance that was flanked by those two hideous plaster cupids. I thought of what I might do if I saw her. I watched the windows. Only a few were lit. I took out the map and by the streetlight found the most direct route downtown—the way I suspected Father might have walked. I located what I surmised was the nearest tobacco shop and bought a packet of Dunhill, the brand of cigarettes my father smoked. The familiar flat pack fit perfectly in my shirt pocket.

For all I knew, Béatrice Benameur might have moved during the ten years—if indeed she ever lived there—but nonetheless I was so unsettled by having successfully located the building that after breakfast the following morning I wandered back to Rue Monnier. This time I had the courage to consult the names on the buzzers—why had I not done this the day before? Dread and excitement were in my throat. And there it was: “Mlle. BENAMEUR.” I had to read it more than once. The name seemed oddly new, as if I had never seen it before.

Suddenly I needed to be out of the narrow maze of streets. After a couple of turns I found a café on one of the nearby avenues. At first the place seemed like any other, but then as soon as I sat down I became convinced that I had been there before, perhaps with my parents on one of the numerous visits we made to this city. I sipped the coffee quickly and left.

The avenue looked onto a park. I walked around it a few
times then sat on a bench. After a couple of hours I began to feel calmer.

I returned to the same café for lunch. I had been sitting there in the corner for some time—doing what Mona used to do, “polishing my French” on a copy of
La Tribune de Genève
—when, after the lunchtime crowd thinned, I realized I recognized the woman in the tapered skirt sitting by the window. Before I recognized her, I had taken note of how she would bring one hand between her thighs and clench it while still holding a cup of coffee close to her mouth in the other hand, sometimes resting the rim on her lower lip long after she had taken a sip. She looked like Béatrice Benameur. I was still uncertain: was she really the woman with whom Father had spent his last hours? It was ten years later, and the newspaper photograph was not very well printed. I wished I had brought the cutting with me. But I was as familiar with that picture as if it really were a picture of my own father. Looking at her now—immaculately dressed, makeup so subtle and considered—I could not move. She did not seem to have aged much in the last ten years. It was as though no time had passed at all, as though Father might still be lying in her bed or might suddenly walk into the café and sit opposite her. I was grateful for her beauty, pleased for him. I wanted to walk over to her table, but I was gripped by the conviction that
any action I might take would cause the moment and its possibilities to vanish. Besides, what would I say? All I could do was watch her beyond the newspaper. She stood up to leave. This was my chance. But when she looked in my direction I lowered my eyes.