Anatomy of a Disappearance (6 page)

In the morning my mother’s three siblings, Aunt Souad, Aunt Salwa and Uncle Fadhil, arrived from our country. I had never met them before, but recognized them from photographs. My aunts kept remarking how brave I was, how unusually long my eyelashes were, and teased me about my Cairene accent, my dark skin. They said because I was darker than Father and Mother that I was really my great-grandfather’s son, who was, by all accounts, nearly as dark as I am. They tickled my toes, hugged me when I laughed, dug their faces into my neck and inhaled deeply before kissing. At night they took turns lying beside me, telling stories in the dark that usually included a mention of the waterfalls or pomegranates or palm trees of our country. If in the night I went to get a drink of water, one of them would appear behind me, asking whether I was all right.

They sweetened my name to Abu el-Noor, calling it out
whenever they saw me daydreaming. Silence, solitude, the roof, the slightest hint of contemplation worried them. If I was in the bathroom for a little longer than usual, I would hear one of my aunts whisper, “Abu el-Noor, habibi, are you all right?”

Father let his beard grow. It surprised me how heavily streaked with gray it was; he was only thirty-nine and the hair on his head was completely black.

Once, Uncle Fadhil embraced him, speaking solemnly and with a hint of urgency. Father eventually began nodding in a resigned sort of way, his eyes still facing the ground.

Another time the door of his bedroom was ajar, and I saw him cornered by my two aunts.

“He is unusually aloof for a boy his age,” Aunt Salwa was saying.

“Let us take him back. He will grow among his cousins,” Aunt Souad added.

“We will bring him up as our own,” Aunt Salwa said. “This way, when the country comes back to us, he could play a role.”

After a long pause Father spoke.

“I could not do that to Naima. She would never forgive me.”

Long ago, when Naima was ill with bilharzia, Father, under Mother’s insistence, brought me to visit her. It took about an hour to reach the narrow maze of her neighborhood by car. But, as our driver, Abdu, was keen to tell Father, the journey on public transport took at least one and a half hours.

“Three hours round-trip, Pasha.”

Father did not react.

Every time Abdu rolled down his window to ask for directions, the pedestrian would lean down and look at each of our faces. Eventually we found her street. It was so narrow that the car could barely fit through.

“Careful,” Father would say in a near whisper while holding on to the handle above his window.

“Don’t worry, Pasha,” Abdu would reply, also in a whisper.

Raw sewage meandered down the middle of the road, passing neatly between the wheels. Father asked Abdu to roll up his window, but by then the stench had already entered the car. Above us clotheslines sagged under the weight and veiled most of the sky. Every so often Abdu had to press the horn, which sounded like an explosion in the narrow street. People then had to find a doorway to stand in, and even then we had to pass ever so slowly, brushing against their bodies. I watched a buckle, the detail of fabric, the occasional child’s face. These people who lined the road stood still and kept their arms by their sides. I was sure from that angle they could see my bare knees on the beige leather upholstery.

Naima, her seven siblings and her parents all lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a building on the corner of that street. The side of the four-story building was covered in flaking red paint with the words “Coca-Cola” repeated across it. Abdu waited with the car. Children preceded Father and me up the stairs, calling out our arrival and occasionally stopping to look back, giggle, elbow one another before running up again. On each landing small plastic bags sat bulging with rubbish, many of them punctured and torn. Flies the size of bees weaved lazily around them.

“Don’t touch,” Father said, and I immediately pulled my hand off the railing. I placed it in his open palm. He did not let go until we were at the door of the apartment.

Naima’s father, who was a security guard at one of the museums, met us on the landing in his uniform. He looked worried. The mother cried when she saw Father, then was ordered by the husband to go and make tea. There was hardly any furniture in the living room. One carpet, the size of a prayer rug, lay in the center of the tiled floor as if concealing an imperfection or some secret passage. Naima lay on a mattress in the corner. I sat beside her. She took hold of my hand. My skin burned in her grip. She neither smiled nor cried, but stared at me with a peculiar gentleness, as if I were a kind of nourishment.

“Nothing, really,” the father said. “Her mother spoils her. She’s just after attention. Aren’t you?” he asked loudly toward Naima.

She did not respond.

“She will be up in no time,” he told Father, anxiety blinking his eyes.

“She should take as long as she needs,” Father told him. “We only came to wish her well.”

The mother returned with a plate and placed it on the rug: crumbled feta and sliced tomato submerged in the pee-yellow of cotton oil. She stopped for a moment and looked at Naima and me.

“Isn’t that right, um-Naima?” the father said. “You spoil your daughter.”

She waited a few seconds before speaking.

“She loves him like a son,” she said toward Father.

“Yes,” he told her.

Although Naima would not let her eyes leave my face, she had taken note of this exchange. I squeezed her hand. I thought of saying something. Instead, I placed my palm on her cheek. She held it there. I thought perhaps the relative coolness of my skin was a comfort to her. But then tears welled in her eyes.

“Come, girl, don’t be afraid,” her father said, fear detectable in his voice.

And just as suddenly Naima’s tears vanished.

The parents insisted we eat. Father shook his head. I wished he had been better able to conceal the frown on his face. Naima’s father handed us loaves of bread. Mine was hard and speckled with flour-stones. The mother poured a thick black liquid, and when I asked what it was, the father said, “Tea, of course,” and I was convinced I had offended him. About two centimeters of the powdered leaf sat in the base of the glass. Father kneeled down, broke a small piece off his loaf and dipped it in the solitary dish on the floor.

“There, thanks very much.”

I bowed all the way down, feeling the blood gather in my head, and kissed Naima’s hot forehead.

Uncle Fadhil seemed to have come mainly to accompany the women. Being a man, for him the risk of retaliation for visiting his “backward, traitor” relatives was greatest. He was oddly awkward and mostly sat smoking. Whenever I sat next to him he would squeeze my skinny upper arms and say, “Flex.”

Three days after they arrived, he told my aunts it was time to go. “Just in case the authorities think we are enjoying ourselves,” he said, weariness curling his eyebrows.

Naima and I stood watching Am-Samir and his eldest son, Gamaal, fasten the luggage on the roof rack. We waved when the car pulled off, then went back upstairs. When I was in my room, surrounded by the smell of my aunts, I wept.

Our apartment struggled to resume its original character. Naima moved soundlessly, cleaning the indifferent surfaces, preparing our joyless meals. I felt a tremor whenever I heard the clang of pots in Mother’s kitchen. Father seemed awkward and nervous around me. The beard was gone, and now he spent most of his time out or in his room. Naima no longer slept at her home but on the floor in my bedroom. There was an abstract urgency in the air.

The arrival of Hydar and Taleb, Father’s old friends from Paris, rescued us. Hydar brought his wife, Nafisa, who spoke a little louder every time she addressed me.

Father gave up his room to Hydar and Nafisa. When they resisted, he said, “Listen, ask Nuri, I hardly sleep there. I prefer the couch. Honestly.”

Then he insisted Taleb take my bed.

“This man knew you before you were born.”

Taleb blushed, nodding.

I slept on the floor, in Naima’s place, and she returned to the kitchen floor, where for a while, when she was young, she used to sleep in the winter when the sky got dark early and Mother worried about her on the long commute home.

Father relished his new freedom. Mother had not liked having guests, particularly those two, and this had been a recurring source of disagreement between my parents. But now he and his friends could stay up drinking whisky until the early hours. I would hear Taleb getting into bed. I think
if he had not tried so hard to be quiet he might have made less noise. His breath would quickly fill the room with the chemical smell of alcohol.

I could not help but feel that Mother’s coldness toward Father’s old Parisian friends was somehow part of the general unease that marked my parents’ relationship to Paris. They almost never talked about their time in that city. And on the rare occasion that Mother did speak about how I came to be born there, she would always begin by telling me how Naima came to work for the family. I did not then understand how this detail mattered at all to the story.

She told me how she and Father had gone to Cairo expressly to employ a maid. And how, on the two-day drive back to our country, thirteen-year-old Naima hardly stopped crying. But every time they tried to turn back, she would object.

“At one point she began begging, so we continued.”

Perhaps mistaking my silence for disapproval at the maid’s young age, Mother said, “I wanted someone young, to get used to our ways, to be like a daughter,” then she stopped, looked at her fingers, and only when she glanced up again did I realize that tears had been gathering in her eyes.

Eighteen months after my parents employed Naima, our king was dragged to the courtyard of the palace and shot in the head. Father was a government minister by this stage
and, instead of risking ill treatment, detention or even death, he decided to flee to France. Naima was the last to step onto the boat, right behind my parents, pulled on board by Abdu the driver. They all stood watching the coast drift away, the smoke rise.

When the boat arrived at Marseilles, Taleb was standing at the dock waiting for them. Was he smiling, was he sucking at the end of a cigarette, did he wave? Mother did not like to talk about Taleb.

“Why? Is he a bad person?”

“No, not at all.”

It never seemed like anger that she felt toward him. More like shame. And I think she thought of Paris and the time in Paris in the same way. So I was eager to ask Taleb, to find out what had happened after they arrived.

“Poor Naima could hardly stand,” he said. “She had been throwing up the whole way. But your mother was determined. She didn’t want to stay in Marseilles. I never understood that. She didn’t even want to rest the night. She insisted we go directly to the train station and get on the first train for Paris.”

I pictured her marching ahead and imagined Father behind her, glad for her stubbornness, glad that someone at least knew what to do next.

“And how was she on the train?”

“Who? Your mother? Like the Sphinx. I cracked jokes, but they were obviously bad ones.”

“And Naima and Abdu? Did they go back to Egypt?”

Here Taleb looked at me as if I were suddenly standing a long way away. He seemed to consider the distance and whether it was a good idea to cross it.

“Abdu went back from time to time, but Naima didn’t, of course.”

“Where did they stay?”

“In Paris.”

He seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. I thought of how to bring him back.

“Uncle Taleb?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you lived in Paris?”

“Since university. Too long.”

“Do you like it?”

“What does it matter? It seems to like me.”

“Did Mama and Baba stay with you?”

“No, I found them an apartment in the Marais. Not ideal, but close to the hospital. A nice place, but a big step down from what they were used to.”

“Not a hotel?”

“Six months is too long for a hotel. And in the end they stayed a year.”