Anatomy of a Disappearance Read Online Free PDF

that,” I said and immediately regretted it as she looked nervously at the rearview mirror.
    “Aren’t those the clothes we gave Ibn Ali?” Father asked.
    Relieved, Naima looked back. We watched the boy run through the cars and vanish.
    “Yes, Pasha,” she said. “It looks like the same T-shirt.”
    Ibn Ali was one of the orphanages Father occasionally visited, often taking Naima and me with him, to deliver food or clothes or make a donation. There was also Abd al-Muttalib and al-Sayeda Aisha and al-Ridha.
    “Don’t let it upset you,” Naima told him. “No matter what you do, you can’t stop them working.”
    “But so young,” he said.
    “Not much younger than I was,” she said softly and after too long a delay.

    Naima gripped my hand tightly as we went deeper into the maze of fluorescent-lit corridors. The jasmines were slung neatly around her other arm. The odor of the hospital was so unforgiving that every so often she would bring the small cloud of white flowers to her nose. I tugged, and she let me do the same. Father was already a few meters ahead. With every step he took the leather heels of his shoes were striped by the fluorescent light.
    We found Mother lying under a cold blue lamp. The bedcovers were folded beneath her arms, one wrist was encircled by a yellow plastic bracelet, and a bleep hammered the silence.
    Naima placed the jasmines at the foot of the bed and covered her face.
    “Did I not tell you …” Father said, pulling her out of the room.
    I was alone with Mother. I wanted to pull out the flattened pillows, to puff them up. Her skin had turned ashen. Her eyes were shut with an outrageous finality, a moistness lingering where the eyelids met. I thought of touching her, and the impossibility of it frightened me. My mind returned to a distant memory. I was four or five. She was getting ready for a party. I was crouched beneath the chiffonier, beside her feet: black high heels, stockings a color that made her skin look powdered. A thin fluorescent line hovered above where the black suede of her shoe met the stockings. An optical illusion. I traced it, erasing and redrawing the fluorescent with my finger. Then she moved. I looked up, smiling, thinking I had tickled her, but she was only moving closer to the mirror in order to scrutinize the exactness of her lipstick line.
    Father was right: there was nothing any of us could do here.

    A few days later Father came home from the hospital earlier than usual. He went straight to his room. I stood outside his door for a minute or two then knocked.
    “Not now, Nuri,” he said, his voice uneven.
    After a few minutes I heard the sound of running water in his bathroom. I remembered what Mother used to tell him whenever she found him in a bad mood: “Take a cold shower. It’s what the Prophet, peace and blessings be uponhim, used to do whenever he received bad news.” And I remembered Father shaking his head. But that was when he was in no need of God. When he got out of the shower he called for Naima.
    “Shut the door behind you. Where is Nuri?”
    “Ustaz Nuri is in his room,” she said, even though she saw me standing outside the door and passed her fingers through my hair and forced a smile before walking in.
    He began whispering. A few seconds later I heard her give a short scream. Had he placed a hand on her mouth?
    For the rest of that day Naima’s fingers trembled.
    Her eyes filled with tears when I asked, “Are you all right? Are you ill? Shall I pour you a glass of cola?”
    Every hour or so she would come to ask, “Has your father spoken to you yet?”
    Father stayed in his room, talking on the telephone. By sunset he called me in.
    “Sit down. Let me see your hand.” After a few seconds he said my name, then the words: “Mama will not be coming home.”
    After another pause he spoke again.
    “She will never be coming back.”
    I pulled my hand. I did not believe him. I insisted he take me to the hospital.
    “She is no