Anatomy of a Disappearance Read Free Page B

lived, about her mother, what she remembered of her dead father, “Monir.” First name only, without a prefix, as if he were a friend or a lover. He had died when Mona was ten. He was a native of Alexandria. This was why she had decided to finally visit the city. Looking back now, I realize it must have been that early loss that had partly attracted Mona to my father, an Arab man fifteen years her senior.
    “Monir,” I said, as if in agreement. “He must have been the one who named you.”
    “I suppose.”
    I told her about my mother, how I, too, had lost a parent at ten.
    She looked at me, nodding. I sensed she doubted my story. After what seemed to be too long a silence, she said, “It must be hard, for your father.”
    She showed me a photograph of Monir: a young, solemn Egyptian face with an English haircut. His overtly careful dress—a stiff white collar, a slim necktie that looked as if it were cut from clay, black waistcoat and jacket—expressed an anxiety, a self-conscious attempt at being taken seriously.Later, when I lived in London, I often wondered how it was for him, an Egyptian, living in the Britain of the 1940s and 1950s. The slightly flexed eyebrows, sunken cheeks and pencil-line mustache seemed to signal something about this life.
    In contrast, the one of her mother was taken more recently, in color, and showed the face of a calmly resigned middle-aged Englishwoman: handsome, with delicately drooping shoulders and a strong neck, a woman in her own country.
    Mona, too, was an only child. She said she liked it that way, and I immediately said that I did too. And for a moment I believed it. I did not tell her how often I had longed for a sibling, particularly a brother; I did not tell her how, when Mother was alive, I felt like the minor character tossed between the only two protagonists who truly mattered, and how, after Mother’s death, with Father hardly ever uttering a mention of her, I longed to share my loss, the density of grief, with an ally, an equal. I did not tell her any of this, not because I did not know how to say it or because I did not feel I could confide in her but because, there and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.

CHAPTER 5
    There was no doubt then who among us was closer to Mona. She and I saw Father only at mealtimes. He spent his time sunbathing, reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis; another a biography of our late king, with a portrait of the monarch on the cover.
    Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country, he would immediately finger the index pages.
    “Who are you looking for?” I had once asked.
    He shook his head and said, “No one.”
    But later I, too, searched the index. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for. Kamal Pasha, those books would say, had been one of the king’s closest advisers and one of the few men who could walk into the royal office without an appointment. Andwhenever the young monarch was in one of his anxious moods—perhaps suspecting his end to be near—it was Kamal Pasha el-Alfi who was often called to ease his fears. In these books my father was also described as an aristocrat who after the revolution moved “gradually, but with radical effect,” to the left. I read these things about my father before I could know what they meant. And if I came to him with my questions, he would smoothly deflect them:
    “It was all so long ago.”
    I rarely persisted because I knew that he was being true to Mother’s wishes.
    “Don’t transfer the weight of the past onto your son,” she once told him.
    “You can’t live outside history,” he argued. “We have nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary.”
    After a long pause she responded, “Who said anything about shame? It’s longing that I want to spare him. Longing and the burden of your hopes.”
    Another book he had with him