Anatomy of a Disappearance (11 page)

Her cold-blushed cheeks seemed the only color in the gray arrivals lounge. She was not wearing the fur coat. He must have not told her, I thought, that I was the one who picked it out. We sat facing the same way on the train to Montreux. Several times I secretly dug my fingers into my thighs.

When we arrived at the hotel I had to abandon my luggage with the bellboy by the entrance because Mona was pulling me toward the lift. As soon as the doors drew shut she wrapped her arm in mine, turning her fingers round the part between the elbow and the wrist. I watched our foggy reflection against the polished brass doors. I had been wrong: I was not yet as tall as she was, but nearly.

There was always lightness to the way Mona held me, as if she were not really there. My mother, on the other hand, would always hold my hand too tightly. Whenever I pointed it out she would apologize and loosen her grip, only to forget and return to squeezing my fingers again as if they were strands of a slippery rope.

I suggested to Mona that, until Father arrived, we should share their suite. She looked at me as if I had asked her to take off her clothes.

“To save money,” I explained.

She laughed. “And since when have you worried about such things?” She kissed me below the jaw, then took me to my room. We both stood on the balcony that looked out onto the luminous blue lake. The surface was a mirror to the
blue sky and the passing clouds. It turned the weak winter light a shade darker.

“Tonight,” she said. “Let’s dine at the Café du Soleil and stay there until they kick us out.”

When the bellboy walked in with the bags, she let go of my hand and cleared her throat. As soon as he left she let out a wicked laugh.

It shames me to admit that even the tragedy that followed did not corrupt the memory of those three days spent in Montreux alone with Mona. If anything, and perhaps exactly because of what happened next, it glimmers still in my mind with the vividness of a dark jewel.

We took long walks by the lake, excursions punctuated by stops at cafés for tea, cake and ice cream. I was always too willing to hold her coat as she slipped her bare arms into the black satin lining. She liked fur coats because they allowed her to continue wearing her favorite sleeveless fitted black blouses underneath.

“Where is your new coat?”

“I am saving it for when Kamal is here.”

My twenty-seven-year-old stepmother looked younger than her years, and I, even then, gave an impression that I was older. Few of the fourteen years that separated us would have been clear to a stranger. Once, in a busy café, aware of the attention of those at the table beside us, I leaned across, found a deviant strand of hair and tucked it
behind her ear. She pulled back. I tried to imagine the questions our intimacy provoked: did they think her a careless adulteress occupying herself with a young lover? And when we left I took pleasure, too, from the envious, congratulatory looks I received from boys my age who walked in small groups by the lake. A scrupulous observer would have, of course, noticed the awkward nervousness her beauty caused in me, but my deliberate and shameful self-delusion, which she always found a way to encourage, persisted. She slipped her arm through mine, marrying her shoulder to my back so I was slightly in front, like an officer leading the way. After a few paces she let go and drifted ahead, looking at the water, no doubt wondering why Father had not telephoned. Her hair moved slightly against the afternoon breeze.

On the way back we passed two lovers locked in a kiss, and although I did not think I was staring, she pinched me and said, “Stop, you are too young for such things.” But then she insisted I try on a jacket and tie she spotted in a shop window near the hotel. When I put them on, she shook her head and said, “Too grown-up.”

Every time we returned to the hotel she would ask at the reception if anyone had called. And the answer was always no. Going up in the lift, she would take a long look at the ground or say, “I don’t know why he hasn’t called,” or, “He never tells me where he is.”

Father’s delay was like a cloud that grew thicker with
each passing day. By the evening of the third day, even I wanted him to come or call. I was woken up that night by the stone-white light of a full moon. It held the room in its cold, harsh glare. My heart thundered. I called her room and let the telephone ring until she answered.

“Kamal?”

“No, it’s me. He’s not back?”

“No, darling, go to sleep. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

To restore her “fading French,” Mona had vowed to read
La Tribune de Genève
every morning over breakfast. If not for this detail, we would not have learned, the following morning, of the “lovers separated by force in the night,” for I was not then in the habit of reading newspapers.

She let go of the newspaper, but only when I tugged.

“Oh God,” she said.

For a moment the terrace we were sitting on seemed in danger of tipping over and chucking us into the dark lake. I looked up, and the paragliders were still there, suspended in mid-distance.

“Come on, we need to leave. Call the police. Why didn’t we hear anything? Shit. Come on,” she said. Then she stood up and leaned for a moment on the breakfast table.

She hurried off toward the lift. I followed her.

In the room she began to pack. Her movements were furious. Every so often she would wipe the tears then continue.

I tried to read the article. The difficulty was not only due to my poor French but because my eyes could hardly focus
on the words. Each letter seemed powered by its own little engine.

“Today, in the early hours of the morning, the ex-minister and leading dissident Kamal Pasha el-Alfi was kidnapped from an apartment belonging to a Béatrice Benameur, a resident of Geneva.”

The mademoiselle—or, who knows, madame—looked at least Father’s age, which, because of his preference for younger women, made her seem older and somehow formidable. But the name struck me as disingenuous. As indeed did her expression of grief in the black-and-white photograph that was printed beneath the headline of “Un couple séparé de force au milieu de la nuit.” I was irritated by this; no evidence was supplied that the “lovers separated by force in the night” were indeed lovers and not friends, colleagues, associates or even enemies. And these suspicions only hardened when I read that, along with his wristwatch, cigarettes and silver lighter, Father had apparently left his wedding ring on the bedside table. Father always slept with his wedding ring on. This was an important detail because, as far as I could see, these personal objects were the only evidence that he was ever in the room. Anyone could have stolen them or purchased replicas and planted them there in order to fabricate a kidnapping.

Mona was now nervously paging through the telephone book.

Perhaps, I thought, to elude his pursuers or escape some unwanted circumstance, Father himself might have orchestrated
this vanishing act. He might need to send us a message or he might be on the way to the hotel as we packed.

“We mustn’t leave yet,” I said. “Not now; Father might come and not find us.”

She looked at me and I felt the need to explain myself. But then a knock came. I ran to the door. It was the bellboy, handing me a small envelope. It contained a telephone message from the night before.

“Why was I not given this earlier?” Mona snapped.

“It arrived late, madame,” the bellboy said.

I stood beside her, and we both read the note:

“Call me immediately—Charlie HASS, Geneva.” It listed a telephone number.

Mona sat on the edge of the bed, the telephone on her lap. I sat beside her, desperate to hear every word. She let me; she did not move the receiver to the other ear. All that Father’s lawyer told us was, “You must come as soon as possible.”

On the train to Geneva we hardly spoke. I looked out onto the silver day. A slim road appeared down below, a black snake vanishing in and out of the thick growth. Houses on the passing hills, smoke seeping through the chimneys. How could I have not expected it? I did expect it. Did I not know that he had powerful enemies, that he was often followed? Why else was he so careful, so secretive? What
would they be doing to him? Will I ever see him look at me again?

All that I did not know about my father—his private life, his thoughts, why he was kidnapped and by whom, what he had actually done to provoke such actions, where he was at this moment, whether he could be counted among the living or the dead—was like a mask that suffocated me. I felt guilty too, as I continue to feel today, at having lost him, at not knowing how to find him or take his place. Every day I let my father down.

I could no longer bear the presence of the woman who now sat beside me, hiding her eyes behind dark glasses, the tip of her nose glistening red. I could not understand why Father had married her. I held my palm out, and she handed me the article again.

The window behind Béatrice Benameur showed no morning, just two black rectangles separated by a thin white frame. Her eyes, delicate with sleep, fragile from the shock, peered out of the photograph. Her hair was flattened, and when I brought the newspaper close to my face I was able to see sleep marks on her cheek, the marks of folded fabric. The photographer must have arrived on the scene unusually quickly. And suddenly it became reasonable that, out of respect for his wife, Father had decided to take off his wedding ring before lying next to this Swiss woman. Or perhaps
it was not respect at all but because he had been taking a bath or cooking a meal. Also, the name, Béatrice Benameur, which had sounded false, now seemed perfectly credible, and it was also perfectly credible that she should have been horrified on being awakened abruptly by balaclavaed men restraining the arms, taping the mouth of the hunted Arab lying beside her, his bare chest heaving, his place on the mattress remaining warm for a long time after they had taken him, her hand on it, and her eyes for many minutes disbelieving what had just taken place, the speed of it, hearing what he sometimes told her when she was impatient with their arrangement: “Everything can change in a blink of an eye, my love,” a statement designed, no doubt, to kindle hope. Or at least that was how, sitting between Mona and the window on that train to Geneva, my mind imagined it. For all I knew he never called her “my love” and she never had expressed impatience toward their “arrangement.” Then I saw him standing up and leaving, guided only by suggestion, a tilt of one of the balaclavaed heads. I imagined this even though the article stated that “there were visible signs of resistance,” that “blood was found on the victim’s pillow,” and that “the lamp shade beside him was smashed.”