Anatomy of a Disappearance Read Online Free PDF Page A

with satisfaction. But now when he saw me running behind him, he stopped.
    “Nuri.”
    His eyes were red. Mother lay silent in his arms, her eyelids hard as shells. I paused for a moment, and the two men in white overtook me.
    “Nuri,” he shouted, and the two men looked at me. The expressions on their faces are still a source of horror.
    I climbed back up, pausing at every landing, looking down the well. Then I ran to our balcony, my hands holding the cold metal balustrade above my head. I watched him carry her to the ambulance. One of her breasts was almost out of the gray satin nightdress. When one of the men in white tried to take her, Father shook his head and shouted something. He laid her on the stretcher, straightened and covered her body, caught the fall of her hair, wrapped it like a belt round his fist and then tucked the bundle beneath her neck. A siren started up. Father ran back into the building, through the stiff figures of Am-Samir, the porter, and his sons. Early light was just breaking, and they, too, must have been startled out of sleep. Somehow they did not seem surprised, as if they expected such calamity to befall “the Arabfamily on the third floor.” The Nile flowed by strong and indifferent. There was hardly a wind to make flutter the bamboo grasses that covered its banks. The leaves of the banana trees hung low, and the heads of the palms seemed as heavy as velvet.
    I heard the door of the apartment slam shut.
    “Where are they taking her?”
    He kneeled before me so his face was level with mine.
    “She needs to rest. For a while … in hospital,” he said and stopped as if to stifle a cough.
    “Why? We can take care of her here. Naima and I can take care of her. Why did you let them take her?”
    “She will be back soon.”
    He smelled of cigarettes, of others. He looked like he had not slept at all. I followed him into their room. An astonishing solitude was lit when he flicked on the ceiling light. Her form was still stamped into the mattress. Father’s side was undisturbed. The room had the air of a place that had witnessed a terrible confrontation, a battle lost.

CHAPTER 7
    He spent most of the subsequent days at the hospital. Father, who had never had to look after me, was now continually asking Naima whether his son had eaten or if it was bedtime yet.
    “Has he bathed? Make sure he brushes his teeth.”
    I was suddenly spoken of in the third person. I had become a series of tasks. I could tell that Father was irritated by having to bear such domestic responsibility. And every time I cried for the mother from whom I had never before been separated, he looked at once fearful and impatient.
    “Naima,” he would call, louder than necessary.
    I asked to be taken to the hospital.
    “The doctors are doing everything they can. There is nothing more any of us can do.”
    “Then why do you spend the whole day there?”
    I watched his nervous eyes.
    Two days later he took us to visit Mother. At a set of traffic lights a boy, possibly my age, although he looked younger due to his thinness, tapped on my window. Round his arm hung necklaces of jasmine. He was wearing a red patterned T-shirt that reminded me of one I used to wear.
    Rigid with shyness, Naima asked, “Could we buy some? Madam loves jasmine.”
    Although Naima did not address him directly, the question was clearly intended for Father. She was often wary around him. She would usually send me to ask whether it was coffee or tea that he wanted, if he was expecting anyone for lunch, and if there was anything else he needed before she left.
    Father rolled down his window, and the thick heat of the day spilled in. The boy ran to him. Father bought the whole bunch, his eyes lingering on the boy’s T-shirt. He handed the jasmines back to Naima and rolled up his window. His eyes now were on the rearview mirror, trying to catch a last glimpse of the boy.
    Naima mixed the necklaces in her lap.
    “You will get them knotted doing