Anatomy of a Disappearance (4 page)

It surprised me to hear Father talk like this; he rarely mentioned public life.

After a silence that the newly acquainted must occasionally allow themselves, Father said, “Before flying back to London, you must come visit us in Cairo.”

“Perhaps another time,” she told him and blushed slightly.

“No,” I said. “You must come now. I have so much to show you.”

“You can’t come all this way and not see the Nile, the museums, the Pyramids.”

Father and I were forming a united front.

“Well,” she said, tilting her head to one side.

“You can see all the way to the Pyramids from my room,” I said.

For some reason this caused them both to laugh.

“I wish,” she said, touching my hand. “But, darling, my ticket, I won’t be able to change it.”

Piling the last remaining grains of rice onto his fork, Father said, “I can take care of that.”

A new shyness showed itself in her eyes.

“I will call my secretary to rebook it,” he said and closed his lips on the loaded fork.

The following morning I found neither of them in the dining hall.

“They have already taken breakfast,” the waiter said, pouring the orange juice.

I ran out to look for them. I found them walking by the sea, not arm in arm, but their paces could not have been better matched. Neither of them reacted when they saw me approach. I walked next to her for a few paces, let them pass, then ran and, not finding room between them, this time I walked by his side. Their conversation, like their steps, rolled on regardless. Father was exercising one of his old theories on her.

“Caravaggio is more important than Michelangelo because he took more risks.”

“When was Caravaggio? And Michelangelo? I see. How interesting.”

But this was Father’s purpose, of course: to intimidate and impress. And Mona was easy prey, for she had little real interest in art.

They sat facing the sea. Their hands were resting side by side on the dry sand, his little finger over her little finger. I tried to imagine friends doing that.

“I cannot believe you have never been to Paris,” he told her.

“I know, I know,” she said, blushing but not pulling her hand away.

“Criminal,” he said.

She let out a laugh different from those I had heard her give before. This one was louder and had in it the hard edge of hunger.

“I was born in Paris,” I said.

“I know, darling,” she said, bringing a careless hand to my cheek, then letting it rest again on her chest, the forefinger reaching beneath the blouse.

“Nuri, go and get my diary,” Father said. When I was a few paces away, he added, “And the cigarettes, please.”

Two years earlier, my mother had died.

I recall how, during the edgeless hours of the afternoon, I would use her hip for a pillow. I would listen to the steady rhythm of her breath, the turning pages of her book. If I fell asleep, the sound would become a lazy breeze rustling a tree, or a broom brushing the earth. I hold the memory of her collarbone. I used to reach for it the way a rock climber would a sturdy ledge. I recall also her hair, strands as thick as strings. I would stretch one across my forehead, on my tongue, and feel it tighten like a blade. None of this would distract her from her reading. I would watch the wide blossom of her eyes scanning the lines, those same eyes that grew keen whenever I caught her standing behind a thick curtain in a game of hide-and-seek or when I revealed to
her a luminous butterfly I had captured. How quickly her cheeks would redden then. She would speak, a warm whisper, before laughter flexed her throat. I am now above the ground, surprised by the softness of her square jawbone when I rest my forehead on it. I look at the shape of her ear. She was as close as I ever came to having a sister.

And then there were those cruel, sudden gaps, the clearings where she stood alone, not knowing how to return. Those were the days when she was unreachable. How her eyes would then wilt, looking at me as if acknowledging someone she half knew. Sometimes at night I would wake up and find her there, studying my face. She would force a smile and depart, quietly closing the door behind her, as if I were not hers. Other times she would lie beside me, two heads sharing one pillow. Her hands, the pale thin fingers that never seemed to match her strength, would be frozen twigs. She would tuck them between my knees or, if I were lying on my back, slide them behind my lower back, the place that is still hers.

In her last year her silences grew deeper and more frequent. Some days she did not leave her room. When she called, she called only for her faithful maid, Naima, who would also refer to her as Mama.

“Of course, Mama.”

“Straightaway, Mama.”

Naima would often be sent to the pharmacy for aspirin, sleeping pills, painkillers.

So old and persistent did Mother’s unhappiness seem
that I had never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is more acceptable than that which we are born into.

I remember the last night.

It was late evening. Naima had already changed out of her house galabia and into the hard fabric of her black dress, a veil wrapped tightly round her head, revealing the delicate shape of her skull. And there was the familiar carrier bag slung on her wrist, containing one or two but never more than three pieces of fruit, the round forms pressing against the plastic.

At Mother’s instruction, every evening Naima had to go to the large fruit bowl that sat at the center of the long dining table and take home those guavas, apricots or apples that had passed their prime. Naima resisted this and would often argue the fruit was still good. Her resistance baffled me because I knew that on her birthdays Naima’s parents gifted her with only an apple or just a handful of mulberries.

She stood there now, silent and hesitant, at Mother’s door. She brought her hand up but did not knock.

“When she wakes up,” she whispered, “tell her I went home. See you tomorrow.”

She must have detected I did not want her to go, because she stopped and asked, “Did you brush your teeth?”

Every time I looked up from the sink I saw her in the mirror, standing outside the bathroom, her hands held against her waist like a person in prayer.

I followed her to the door and stood barefoot on the cold marble. She studied her foggy reflection in the long, narrow glass window in the lift door and with nervous hands tucked away stray hairs. She never stopped dreading the long journey home. On the occasions when her parents allowed her to spend the night with us, Naima would carry out her tasks in the house with renewed enthusiasm, insisting that she dust the bookshelves again, clean the bathrooms one more time, all the while cracking jokes at which no one laughed. The silences that followed these jokes always turned her cheeks red.

“Go on now, you will catch a cold.”

But I did not move until the lift arrived because, regardless of her words, I knew she welcomed my attachment. There was always that elusive thing about Naima that needed confirmation not so much of my attention as of my loyalty, as if she feared I might, one day, betray her.

I waited for Father and only once dared walk into Mother’s room. She lay on her side and did not move when I touched her ear. I went to my room and stood on my desk chair facing a photograph Mother had recently taken of herself. She was the one who had had it framed and hung it there. Her eyes stared back unflinchingly, but her jawbones were slightly out of focus, as if she were emerging from a cloud. I liked it because her face was nearly life-size.

I did not know then why Mother looked better in photographs taken before I was born. I do not mean simply younger but altogether brighter, as if she had just stepped
off a carousel: her hair settling, her eyes anticipating more joy. And in those photographs you could almost hear a kind of joyful music in the background. Then it all changes after I arrive. For a long time, before I knew the truth, I thought it was the physical assault of pregnancy that had claimed her cheery disposition. Occasionally it would reemerge, this happy outlook, awakened by an old memory, like when she told the story of Father slipping over and landing on his bottom on one of the steep alleyways in Geneva’s Old Town.

“His back white with snow,” she said, barely able to speak from laughing. “Calling my name as he nearly tripped up the Christmas shoppers.”

Father’s face changed, a solemn expression suggesting he might be taking offense, which of course made the whole thing funnier. “I nearly broke my neck,” he finally said.

“Yes, but your father has always been an excellent navigator,” she said, and they both exploded into laughter.

I do not recall ever being so happy.

I woke up on Father repeating, “Savior, Savior,” and the sound of his reaching, anxious steps.

I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, my eyes weak against the blazing chandelier in the hall. Other people were there, two men in white. They held the front door open as Father rushed toward them, Mother slack in his arms. Her long and disheveled hair trembled with every step he took.
One of her dangling feet seemed to swing more rapidly. I ran after him, down the stairs. I remembered him once daring me to a race down those stairs, saying that he could descend the three flights faster than it would take me to get down in the lift. When the lift landed on the ground floor he had pulled the door open, trying not to let his breathlessness show, his eyes sparkling with satisfaction. But now when he saw me running behind him, he stopped.

“Nuri.”

His eyes were red. Mother lay silent in his arms, her eyelids hard as shells. I paused for a moment, and the two men in white overtook me.

“Nuri,” he shouted, and the two men looked at me. The expressions on their faces are still a source of horror.

I climbed back up, pausing at every landing, looking down the well. Then I ran to our balcony, my hands holding the cold metal balustrade above my head. I watched him carry her to the ambulance. One of her breasts was almost out of the gray satin nightdress. When one of the men in white tried to take her, Father shook his head and shouted something. He laid her on the stretcher, straightened and covered her body, caught the fall of her hair, wrapped it like a belt round his fist and then tucked the bundle beneath her neck. A siren started up. Father ran back into the building, through the stiff figures of Am-Samir, the porter, and his sons. Early light was just breaking, and they, too, must have been startled out of sleep. Somehow they did not seem surprised, as if they expected such calamity to befall “the Arab
family on the third floor.” The Nile flowed by strong and indifferent. There was hardly a wind to make flutter the bamboo grasses that covered its banks. The leaves of the banana trees hung low, and the heads of the palms seemed as heavy as velvet.

I heard the door of the apartment slam shut.

“Where are they taking her?”

He kneeled before me so his face was level with mine.

“She needs to rest. For a while … in hospital,” he said and stopped as if to stifle a cough.

“Why? We can take care of her here. Naima and I can take care of her. Why did you let them take her?”