Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘My mother would like this,’ she said, taking a sip and smiling. Not a smile of invitation, I thought, but one of gentle exhaustion and pleasure in good things.

‘Your parents are well? They like London?’

‘They seem fine, as much as they can be. I hate London myself. My father’s assets were frozen, but not my mother’s, I don’t quite understand why, and they are living in a house owned by my mother’s parents, so things are all right for now, although in fact my mother doesn’t have that much money. Economies have been made, though they still live like rich people. They both feel they’ve come down in the world. On the one hand I pity them but I also find the complaining insupportable.’

‘Do you see them much?’

She shook her head, swallowed, and ran the fingers of her left hand through her hair, sweeping its length behind her ears in a way that struck me, for the first time, as unconsciously flirtatious. It was a gesture I did not remember seeing her make in the past.

‘It’s strange of course to live with the knowledge that one’s father has probably done terrible things, torturing people, making them disappear, but has done them so — I don’t know — so cagily —is that right?’ I nodded. ‘—So cagily that I suspect he may never be called to account, and also there’s no extradition treaty between Britain and Egypt, so he’s safe here, and I wonder whether that was the reason they wanted me to end up here in the long run, instead of France, as if they had foreseen what has happened and feared that families might also be implicated. I don’t know. It’s a strange thing to consider. I can’t really look at my father anymore, not, you know, direct eye contact, because every time I do I imagine what he might have done. It would be better almost to know exactly what he did than to live with such uncertainty about him, but somehow I can’t bring myself to ask, and if I did, I don’t really believe he would tell me the truth. I didn’t even understand what he was, not properly, until I moved to Paris for school. And then it was my grandmother — I lived with my grandparents in their apartment, on rue Visconti — she helped me gradually to comprehend. Nothing was said directly, but there would be these articles left lying around about human rights abuses in Egypt, and then friends from school said things that made it clear. I was so naïve. Before I moved to Paris I thought everyone had servants in tuxedoes. I thought everyone had a driver and a police escort. I thought all little girls went on shopping trips to London and New York and Paris. Or at least, I thought this and yet I didn’t think it. I knew that the servants and the drivers, the people living in the poor neighborhoods I passed in the car as a child, were not living as I did, and yet I never thought about poverty, not in any considered way. I couldn’t even see it properly until I moved to Paris and began a life less chaperoned than what I had known in Cairo. And then, after I began to understand the nature of my family’s life, I found it difficult to be alone with my father, even to let him touch me. I have grown to hate the smell of him.’

‘And your mother? Can you speak with her?’

‘They have separate bedrooms, which is new, and I believe she will leave him if she can be sure of her security. I don’t just mean financial. I think she worries about what he might do if she left, or what his former colleagues might be persuaded to do. I don’t know whether this is paranoia or not. What do you think?’

‘Truthfully, Fadia, I have no idea. I’m not the person to ask. Where would she go?’

‘I think she will try to return to France, perhaps to live with my aunt or my grandparents. I love her so much but now that she is here she is always coming up to Oxford to take me to lunch. I’ve eaten everything on the menu at Gee’s and I just want to tell her to leave me alone so I can get on with my work but she is almost beside herself with panic, this weird anxiety that I totally understand given the circumstances but which I don’t know how to manage or help her overcome. How can you conquer anxiety like that, when your life is upset so quickly and people you love just disappear, or you disappear from them? Because of what we believe, my brother will no longer speak to us, and that is because of what he himself believes. Je crois que la foi elle-même est une sorte de terreur. Vous comprenez? ’

‘Just about. You’ve heard from your brother?’

At this she made a face, a reflex grimace of disgust and suspicion.

‘Did Stephen tell you to ask me?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I know you know, Jeremy, it’s okay. Stephen has been badgering me for weeks, as if I would know anything. I keep telling him I don’t.’ She sipped her wine and reached for another chocolate. ‘The heart does strange things to the head, and Stephen has a very strange heart.’

‘Then you’re still not in touch with Saif?’

She shook her head. ‘Why do you care?’

‘Curiosity. Concern. He’s your brother. Don’t you worry about him even if you disagree?’

‘You understand, we were never close. He’s fifteen years older. It was like I got all my mother’s genes, or at least her sensibility, and he got my father’s. He was, you know, to all intents and purposes, a member of the security police, so as soon as I understood what this meant, which was also pretty late in my life, only after I left for Paris, we did not get on. And now, having turned his back on all that, he’s found religion and in a way I find that more terrifying. I haven’t heard from him for a year almost. He just, I don’t know, he vanished. I bet Stephen’s spoken to him more recently than I have. Maybe he’s in Syria. That’s what Stephen thinks. My parents haven’t heard from him either, and I know they would tell me, or at least my mother, she’s terrible at secrets. My father would too, I think, since he feels betrayed by Saif. It would be a kind of victory if he had confirmation. .’

She trailed off as though unsure which outcome might be the worse betrayal. I cannot remember now whether it occurred to me in that moment that Saif could have been a terrorist, a member of one organization or sub-group or another that kept springing up and coalescing, subdividing and reproducing, an organization that went by so many names, ad-Dawlah al-Islamayah or Da’esh or any number of others. I suspect my mind shuffled Saif into a mental file of men who were anti-government freedom fighters and thus thought no more about it. In my naïveté, I remember thinking we should do something to arm the Syrian resistance. How foolish that now seems. How real has become my politik . Stay in bed with the dictator you know rather than give succor to groups so unpredictable, so little understood, groups which may just as easily turn back to attack the hand that first fed them.

Whatever my thinking at the time, I poured my student another glass of fortified wine, a smaller one this time, since she raised her hand to stop me, and we each took another chocolate. Neither of us was drunk, at least I know I could not have been, except perhaps drunk on need and loneliness and the chill of a dark night in the early English spring, and I assumed that a little dessert wine would not make Fadia drunk either, Fadia whom I had seen cavorting with fellow students such that I believed she knew how to handle her drink and did it well. Half-French, I reminded myself, an adolescence in Paris, intellectual relatives, the grandfather was a prominent critic, the grandmother an economist, Fadia would have been allowed wine at dinner, champagne on special occasions, I was sure she knew how to remain in control.

‘Why did you invite me over, Jeremy?’