Читать онлайн «Anatomy of a Disappearance»
Автор Хишам Матар
Copyright © 2011 by Hisham Matar
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. , New York.
DIAL PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. , and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this book appeared previously in
Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, Penguin Books Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matar, Hisham.
Anatomy of a disappearance : a novel / Hisham Matar.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64398-2
1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—
Fiction. 4.
Stepmothers—Fiction. 5. Cairo (Egypt)—Fiction. I. Title.PR6113. A87A84 2011
823′. 92—dc22 2011001561
Title page image by Julia Soboleva
Jacket design: Lynn Buckley
Jacket photograph: Serge Balkin/© Condé Nast Archive/Corbis
v3. 1
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
CHAPTER 1
There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.
I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.
My father disappeared in 1972, at the beginning of my school Christmas holiday, when I was fourteen. Mona and I were staying at the Montreux Palace, taking breakfast—I with my large glass of bright orange juice, and she with her steaming black tea—on the terrace overlooking the steel-blue surface of Lake Geneva, at the other end of which, beyond the hills and the bending waters, lay the now vacant city of Geneva. I was watching the silent paragliders hover above the still lake, and she was paging through
