Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar Read Free Book Online

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.”
    “Really?” I said. “I always thought they were there only a couple of months.”
    “You breathed Parisian air for the first eight months of your life. You will be ruined forever.”
    I liked Taleb. Unlike Nafisa’s, his sympathy was not patronizing. He took me to places I had never been. Once, as Ifollowed him through the arches of Ibn Tulun Mosque, I asked him, “Uncle Taleb?”
    “Yes.”
    “What did my mother die of?”
    He stopped and looked at me in that same way again but said nothing.

    Late one night, he on the bed, I on the floor, the room as black as a well and filling up with the smell of whisky, Taleb suddenly spoke.
    “Sometimes it’s better not to know,” he said.
    My heart jumped, but I attributed that partly to the fact that his words had snatched me from sleep.
    “Some things are hard to swallow.”
    I recalled a dog in our street that had choked on a chicken bone. It wheezed and coughed and then eventually lay on its side and surrendered, blinking at me.
    “You must know, regardless of anything, of her great humanity,” he said, the word utterly new to me. I repeated it in my mind—humanity, humanity—so that I could later look it up. “She never ceased to be tender with Naima, who was innocent, of course. Ultimately, everyone is innocent, including your father.”
    After a long silence, just when I suspected he had fallen asleep, Taleb spoke again.
    “You have no idea what he was back home. It’s difficult, looking at him now, to believe he is the same person andthat the world is the same world. And he wanted someone to inherit it all.”
    My eyes peered violently into the dark. I recalled sitting with my parents at some station high up in the snowy Alps. I was behind them, their backs black against the white abyss of the valley. The wind was a mountainous wind. It would stop, then blow again, and Mother’s scarf marked it. When they spoke they spoke in whispers.
    “It’s what you have always wanted,” she said.
    A long silence passed. Their heads followed a paraglider. Then Father turned with a hand pointing to the paraglider. When he saw my eyes on the target, he leaned back in the deck chair, the canvas sculpting his shape.
    “What option did I have?” she said.
    He did not respond.

    The following day Taleb, Hydar and Nafisa flew back to Paris. And although Naima changed the bedsheets, I could still smell Taleb’s head on my pillow. I asked Naima to replace it.
    “Why?” she said and pressed the pillow against her face. “It’s perfectly clean.”

CHAPTER 11
    It was a relief when school started. Father seemed to relax. He returned to talking at the dining table. He even began to speak about what we might do the following summer. But when summer break arrived, he fell completely quiet about that. I did not mind; it seemed odd anyway that we should go traveling without Mother.
    “It’s not good for a boy to be home