Anatomy of a Disappearance (2 page)

Was it the romance of wood fires, the discretion of heavy coats, that attracted my mother to the north and unpeopled places of Europe? Or was it the impeccable stillness of a fortnight spent mostly sheltered indoors with the only two people she could lay claim to? I have come to think of those holidays, no matter where they were, as having taken place in a single country—her country—and the silences that marked them her melancholy. There were moments when her unhappiness seemed as elemental as clear water.

After she died it soon became obvious that what Father had always wanted to do, in the two weeks he allowed himself off every summer, was to lie in the sun all day. So the Magda Marina became the place where he and I spent that fortnight. He seemed to have lost his way with me; widowhood had dispossessed him of any ease that he had once had around his only child. When we sat down to eat he either read the paper or gazed into the distance. Whenever he noticed me looking at him he would fidget or check his watch. As soon as he had finished eating he would light a cigarette and snap his fingers for the bill, not bothering to see whether I had finished too.

“See you back in the room.”

He never did that when Mother was alive.

Instead, when the three of us went to a restaurant, they would sit side by side facing me. If we were all engaged in some conversation she would direct most of her contributions toward me, as if I were the front wall of a squash
court. And when his unease led him to play the entertainer she would monitor, in that discreet way of hers, my reactions to his forced cheerfulness or, if he could bear it no longer, to his vast silences. With Mother’s eyes on me I would watch Father observe the other patrons or stare out at the view, which was often of some unremarkable street or square, no doubt daydreaming or plotting his next move in the secret work I never once heard him talk about. At these moments it felt as if he were the boy obliged to pass a meal with adults, that he was the son and I the father.

After she passed away he and I came to resemble two flat-sharing bachelors kept together by circumstance or obligation. But then that tenderhearted sympathy, raw and sudden, would rise in him at the most unexpected moments, and he would plunge his face into my neck, sniff deeply and kiss, tickling me with his mustache. It would set us off laughing as though everything were all right.

It is true; I did see Mona first.

She was sitting on the ceramic tiles that surrounded the rectangular swimming pool of the Magda Marina, looking at the underside of her foot. The tiles were decorated in a pattern that many years later, on a trip to Granada, I learned was a factory copy of a wall mosaic at the Alhambra. When I saw the original I ran my fingertips over the mosaic and let my mind return to that distant summer’s day of 1971 in Alexandria, when I was twelve. Her hair was tied sensibly in a ponytail, and she had on an outrageously bright yellow swimsuit that made her skin seem darker, her age younger. For a moment, I thought her a girl. For a moment, the yellow strap running across her back brought to mind the yellow hospital bracelet that had been bound
round my mother’s wrist. The light shimmered blue and weakly off the water and onto Mona’s body.

“This bit of skin is Arab; this, from your English mother,” I would later come to tease her.

She was pulling her ankle, arching her neck, the ridge of her spine pressing against the yellow strap. Thinking back on it now, I am envious of the confidence with which I had approached her, as if I were crossing the road to the aid of a turtle on its back. Such natural self-assuredness has since eluded me. Whereas Father managed to shake off that cloak of shyness over the years, mine only got heavier.

I sat cross-legged beside her on the tiles and, without asking permission, placed the complaining foot in my lap. I proceeded to inspect each toe. She did not resist. Then, embedded in the soft underside of one toe, I found it: a brown speck of a thorn fading into the pink flesh.

“Last week,” I told her, turning her foot in order to gain a better angle, “the same thing happened to me. It drove me crazy the whole day until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and just before going to bed I pulled it out.”

I captured the thorn between two fingernails. She flinched, but I did not draw back.

“Just like that,” I said and held it on the tip of my forefinger to show her. Our heads were so close now that I could feel a strand of her hair touch my temple.

“Thank you,” she said in an angular Arabic.

I could see now that her shoulders had eased.

“What is your name?”

It was an English accent. I was sure.

She ran her hand down my cheek, then held my chin and gazed at me. She had inconstant eyes: brown, green and silver all at once.

“Nuri,” I finally said, pulling away. “Nuri el-Alfi.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Nuri el-Alfi,” she said and smiled a smile I could not understand.

I walked back to where Father was sunbathing. Now he had his broad chest propped up on his elbows.

“Who is she?” he asked, his eyes on her.

I thought of running back to ask her name, but she stood up, slid two fingers beneath the bottom of the swimsuit and stretched the fabric around her buttocks. The pattern of the ceramic tiles was faintly imprinted on the underside of one thigh. She turned toward us. I wondered if she was looking at me or at Father, or at us both together. Then she went to sit at a table where a glass of lemonade had been waiting. Father reclined, his elbow red with pressure, and closed his eyes. Under a perfectly cropped mustache his lips stretched into a precise smile, knowing, ironic, as if he was satisfied at his own intelligence, at having figured out a riddle in half the time. She looked our way again, lit a cigarette, then pretended to be looking elsewhere. Finally she closed her eyes at the sun. I watched her without restraint. I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth. I made as if I were walking around the pool to watch her from all angles. Suddenly she opened her eyes, looked at me, unsurprised, unmoving. She
came to the pool’s edge, dipped one foot in the water, then the other and tiptoed away. I watched the trail of wet prints evaporate. The glass of lemonade was still there, patient and full. One of the sweating waiters dressed in black bow tie and waistcoat took it away. I regretted not beating him to it. How wonderful it would have been to drink something intended for her.

I found Father turned on his stomach, the wood slats of the sun lounger marked red across his back.

I did not see her for the rest of the morning. And before we sat at our table to lunch I noticed that Father, too, was scanning the dining hall. I looked up from my plate every time someone walked in and, having his back to the entrance, Father glanced at my face as if it were a mirror. At one point he turned around to see who had come in, and I felt I had misled him.

After lunch most retreated to their rooms to escape the sun. A few Europeans remained stretched outside the shade by the pool, their skin the color of orange peel. A breeze would occasionally ruffle the pages of the books and magazines on the floor beside them, but the bodies lay shiny and still in the white heat.

I took my ball to the tended lawns that snaked around the rooms. Each room was constructed in the shape of a box with the front façade in glass sliding doors, mirrored for privacy. The structures hummed with their own air-conditioning,
which on the outside hissed and blew hot. I felt spied upon by the guests in each room, even though I suspected they were probably dozing like Father. He would lie in the curtained coolness, one ankle resting on the other, the newspaper crackling between his hands, as he leaned slightly toward the lamp shade.

One room had its door open the width of two fingers. I could hear running water, an English song and along with it a woman’s voice. I drew the door wide enough to enter but waited until my eyes adjusted to the shade. The room was an exact replica of ours, the same bedcovers, the same wallpaper and furniture, except that it had one bed that was as large as our two single beds combined. The bathroom door had also been left ajar, the yellow swimsuit hanging from the handle. I realized then that I had been searching for her, hoping to encounter her away from my father’s gaze. I felt a feverish excitement at being in her room, inside the private chamber of this mysterious woman who was traveling alone. Who was she? How did she come to speak our language? So very few non-Arabs speak Arabic that when you encounter one it is as thrilling as spotting a friend in the audience of a vast theater just before the lights go down. And the way she moved, the way she looked at me across the pool, expressed a confidence of purpose that suggested she was not on holiday, that she had not come to just hang around, and so she immediately acquired the allure of those who, like my father, seemed to live their lives in secret.

I sat at the foot of the bed, placing the ball beside me. There was a pair of shoes in front of the armchair. One shoe lay on its side, revealing the pressed and molded cream leather of the interior. On the chiffonier there was a pearl necklace, a perfume bottle and a hairbrush. With my hand on the bathroom door handle, resting on the damp swimsuit, I looked with one eye through the narrow opening. I saw her naked body fogged by the shower curtain: the triangle of black hair blurred and moving like one of those blots that appear after looking directly into the sun. I made no sound and was certain she could not see me, but suddenly she said, “Who’s there?” I ran, not caring what noise I made now, as fast as I could out of the room, remembering my ball only when it was too late to return for it.

As soon as Father rose from his nap, I told him.

“My ball wandered inside one of the rooms and I didn’t feel it was right to get it.”

“So?” he said, shaving. He usually shaved early evening, before dinner, and not in the mornings like most men.

“I just don’t want anyone to think I was spying or anything.”

“But I’ve always known you were a little spy,” he said, smiling through the mirror.

He brought the blade to his neck and shaved off a strip of foam in one easy stroke.

In the evening I found her standing in a black dress by our table in the dining hall, talking to Father, one hand on the backrest of the opposite chair, my chair. The pearls were encircling her neck. Her brushed hair fell heavily and knew exactly where, just above the jawbones, to curve back. And as I came close I caught the fragrance of her perfume.

“Here is your little friend,” Father said in English when I was close enough to hear.

She held out a hand. I shook it, unable to look her in the eye.

“Speak, don’t be shy,” Father said into the awkward silence. “He attends English school,” he told her.

Another chair was brought, another place set, and we dined together. She did not mention a word about that afternoon, but when Father went to answer a telephone call she smiled.

“Earlier there was a mouse in my room. A very large mouse.”

And, again, with that feathery clasp, she took hold of my chin.