The year we moved to Cairo, the jasmine was in full bloom.<\/p>\n
I remember that detail precisely \u2014 the way it draped over the iron fence of our rented villa in Maadi, white flowers like dropped stars, the smell of it thick and sweet on every evening breeze. My husband, Robert, had been posted there by his architectural firm to oversee the restoration of a heritage building near the old Khan el-Khalili bazaar. It was supposed to be two years. We brought our children \u2014 Daniel, who was twelve, and Nadia, who was nine \u2014 and we told ourselves it was an adventure.<\/p>\n
And it was, for a while.<\/p>\n
Nadia took to Egypt the way a desert takes to rain. She absorbed everything. She picked up Arabic phrases from the neighbors’ children with a speed that embarrassed her father and me, who were still fumbling through a phrasebook after six months. She loved the gold light of late afternoon on the minarets, the way the call to prayer folded itself into the noise of the city until it became part of the city’s breathing. She had her father’s dark eyes and my restless curiosity, and she used both constantly, peering into every corner of every souk we visited, dragging us into conversations with shopkeepers who sold copper lamps and handwoven kilims and little blue faience amulets shaped like the Eye of Horus.<\/p>\n
“That one protects you,” she told me once, holding up a small pendant, utterly serious. “The shopkeeper told me. He says it keeps away bad things.”<\/p>\n
“Did you tell him we’re Christian?” I asked, smiling.<\/p>\n
She shrugged with the magnificent nonchalance of a nine-year-old. “He said it doesn’t matter. Protection is protection.”<\/p>\n
She bought it with her own pocket money and wore it every day on a thin cord around her neck.<\/p>\n
The day she disappeared, I was making tea.<\/p>\n
I know exactly where I was because that detail has been scraped into my memory like an inscription in stone \u2014 standing at the kitchen counter, filling the kettle, hearing the sound of the television in the other room where Daniel was watching football. Robert had gone to the site. It was a Tuesday in October, a school holiday because of a local feast day. I called to Nadia at half past ten to ask if she wanted to come to the market with me.<\/p>\n
No answer.<\/p>\n
I called again.<\/p>\n
Nothing.<\/p>\n
I went to her room. The bed was made \u2014 she always made her own bed, a habit she’d picked up from her Egyptian friend Amira, who lived next door and whose mother ran a strict and beautiful household. The room was tidy. Her backpack was on the chair. But the window \u2014 the window that overlooked the garden and the jasmine-draped fence \u2014 was open.<\/p>\n
I stood there for a moment, thinking she must have climbed out to play in the garden. She had done it before. I went downstairs, out the back door, and called her name. The garden was empty. I walked around the side of the house. The gate in the fence \u2014 the gate that opened onto the lane that ran behind the row of villas \u2014 was unlatched.<\/p>\n
I can’t explain the feeling that came over me. It wasn’t panic yet. It was something quieter and more terrible. A wrongness. The world had tilted by one degree in the wrong direction, and I could feel it in my chest before I understood it in my mind.<\/p>\n
I called her name again, down the lane. A cat looked at me from a windowsill. Nobody else.<\/p>\n
I went inside and phoned Robert.<\/p>\n
What followed was the kind of nightmare that blurs in the memory not because it’s forgotten but because the mind, in mercy, refuses to arrange it into coherent sequence. The Egyptian police were called. They were, in their way, diligent \u2014 a detective named Karim, a solid and careful man who spoke excellent English and who treated us with a decency I have never forgotten, even as he delivered news we didn’t want to hear. There were no witnesses. The CCTV camera at the end of the lane, the only one in the vicinity, had been broken for three days. A neighbor thought she might have heard a child’s voice in the lane around ten o’clock, but she couldn’t be certain of the time, and she hadn’t looked out.<\/p>\n
The blue pendant was not in her room.<\/p>\n
The British Embassy was involved. Robert’s firm flew in their own investigator. My parents came from Dorset, my mother white-faced and silent, my father making tea compulsively as if thermoses of Assam could hold the world together. The Egyptian newspapers ran the story. The English-language papers ran it. The expatriate community mobilized with the ferocious and helpless energy of people who need to do something, anything, and so organized searches and printed flyers and held vigils.<\/p>\n
Nadia was not found.<\/p>\n
After four months, Robert and I made the decision that broke us almost as much as her disappearance: we sent Daniel home to England, to Robert’s parents. He was twelve and he was frightened and he was being failed by us because we had nothing left to give anyone except the search. Robert stayed in Cairo, liaising with the detective, following every lead with the desperate thoroughness of a man trying to hold back a tide with his hands. I went home with Daniel.<\/p>\n
I never stopped looking. I want to be clear about that. For twenty years, I never stopped.<\/p>\n
People mean well.<\/p>\n
That is the sentence I have told myself approximately ten thousand times over the course of two decades. People mean well when they say that God has a plan, when they say that you need to move on, when they say she’s probably at peace now. They mean well when they stop mentioning her name after a certain point \u2014 when the casseroles stop arriving and the cards stop coming and the world, having done what it could, quietly gets on with itself. They mean well. They don’t know what else to do, and I don’t blame them for not knowing, because I don’t know what to do either, and she was my daughter.<\/p>\n
Robert and I lasted three more years. The grief did to us what grief sometimes does to couples who have loved each other very much \u2014 it drove us into our separate interiors and closed the doors. We didn’t fight. We barely argued. We just gradually became two people standing in the same rooms, each of us alone inside our grief, each of us failing to reach the other across the distance. The divorce was quiet and sad and entirely without malice.<\/p>\n
Daniel grew up. He studied law, married a woman called Gemma, had a son they named Leo and a daughter they named Isla. I became a grandmother, which is a joy I had not expected to be possible.<\/p>\n
I taught primary school for fifteen years. I kept a photograph of Nadia on my desk: she is eight in the picture, a year before Egypt, standing in the garden of our old house in Oxfordshire with a gap-toothed grin and mud on her boots from digging up something she’d decided was treasure. My colleagues knew about her. I never hid it. Some asked questions; I answered them plainly. A few made the mistake of using the word closure, which I corrected, gently, every time, because there is no such thing, only the decision to carry on anyway.<\/p>\n
I kept in contact with Detective Karim in Cairo. He retired in 2011, but we exchanged Christmas cards \u2014 unusual, perhaps, for a Muslim man and a Church of England woman, but Karim was that kind of person. His last card said simply: Mrs. Hartley, I have not forgotten. I never will.<\/em> I kept it in the same drawer as the letters from the Embassy and the file of documents that had once been a case and was now a history.<\/p>\n I did not go back to Egypt.<\/p>\n I had never been able to.<\/p>\n I retired from teaching in June of 2019. The summer passed gently \u2014 Daniel’s family visited, Leo taught me to play a video game I immediately found baffling, little Isla sat on my lap and let me read to her for hours, which is a gift beyond measure. I started painting again, watercolors mostly, landscapes. I felt, for the first time in a long time, something adjacent to peace. Not happiness, exactly, but its quieter cousin.<\/p>\n The postcard arrived on a Thursday in September.<\/p>\n I remember because it was Daniel’s birthday, and I had been on the phone with him in the morning, and I was still smiling when I came back from the post box with a small clutch of letters \u2014 a bill, a catalog, a card from an old colleague. And the postcard.<\/p>\n It was a photograph of the pyramids at Giza, taken at sunset, the sky behind them the color of a tangerine. Standard tourist issue. The kind you find in spinning wire racks at every hotel gift shop from Alexandria to Luxor. My name and address were on the front, handwritten in blue ink, in an elegant and unhurried script I did not recognize.<\/p>\n I turned it over.<\/p>\n For a moment, my vision went strange, as if the world had taken a step sideways. My knees buckled \u2014 truly buckled, the way they do in melodramas, the way I had always assumed was a figure of speech \u2014 and I sat down heavily on the hall chair.<\/p>\n This is what was written on the back of the postcard:<\/p>\n Mum\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I know this will reach you and I know it will be a shock and I am so sorry for every year of silence. I need you to understand first that I am alive and I am well. I am writing from Cairo. I have been here for most of my life. I cannot explain everything in this small space. I can only tell you that I was not taken by strangers. I went with someone I trusted, and I was wrong to trust them, and by the time I understood that I was wrong, it was complicated in ways that took me many years to untangle.<\/em><\/p>\n I have a daughter. Her name is Amina. She is seven. She has your eyes.<\/em><\/p>\n I don’t know if you can forgive me for the silence. I’m not sure I can forgive myself. But Amina asked me last week why she doesn’t have a grandmother, and I found I could not answer her. I couldn’t lie to her. She’s too much like I was.<\/em><\/p>\n My name now is Nadia Yousef. I’m a teacher.<\/em><\/p>\n I have kept the pendant. I wear it every day.<\/em><\/p>\n Please write back. The address is on the envelope I’m enclosing separately.<\/em><\/p>\n I love you. I have always loved you. I was just lost.<\/em><\/p>\n I sat in that hall chair for a very long time.<\/p>\n Outside, the September light moved slowly across the garden. A wood pigeon settled on the fence post and regarded me with the dull and peaceful indifference of a creature for whom human grief is simply weather. Somewhere down the road, a child was calling to another child, a sound high and bright as a bell.<\/p>\n I have been a mother for forty-eight years. I have been the mother of a lost child for twenty. In those twenty years I have had my faith tested and bent and restored and tested again. I have prayed in churches and in the dark of my bedroom and in the garden in January with frost on the grass. I have sat with therapists who were skilled and kind. I have read every book anyone has ever pressed into my hands about grief and loss and missing persons and survival.<\/p>\n Nothing had prepared me for this.<\/p>\n Nothing prepares you for the moment when the door opens again.<\/p>\n I did not tell anyone for two days.<\/p>\n I needed to be alone with it first. I needed to sit with it the way you sit with something that might break if you breathe on it too hard. I read the postcard perhaps sixty times. I know every loop of her letters by heart now, the slightly formal elegance of the handwriting that is nothing like the loopy, exuberant scrawl of a nine-year-old’s birthday cards that I still have in a box upstairs.<\/p>\n On the third day, I phoned Daniel.<\/p>\n He didn’t speak for almost thirty seconds. Then he said, very quietly: “Are you sure?”<\/p>\n “I’m sure.”<\/p>\n “How can you be sure?”<\/p>\n “Because she mentioned the pendant. The blue pendant. I never told anyone about the pendant. It wasn’t in any of the reports.”<\/p>\n He came to see me that evening, and we sat at the kitchen table and read the postcard together, and he wept in the unguarded way that men weep when they have spent their whole lives being careful, and I held his hand, and we didn’t say much because there was too much to say.<\/p>\n I wrote back that same night.<\/p>\n My letter was four pages long and then I decided that was wrong, that four pages was too much, and I threw it away. I wrote a shorter one \u2014 one page, careful, steady. I said: I got your postcard. I have been waiting for twenty years to hear that you are alive. You don’t need my forgiveness. You have it. All of it. Every scrap. Write back when you’re ready. Or call. Or come. I will be here.<\/em> And then I signed it: All my love. Mum.<\/em><\/p>\n I have her phone number now. I have spoken to her four times. Her voice is lower than I remembered \u2014 of course it is, she is twenty-nine years old, she is a grown woman \u2014 but there are inflections in it that are mine, that are my mother’s, that are the Hartley family’s, running like a seam of gold through a stranger’s voice.<\/p>\n Her story is her own to tell, and I will not tell it here except in outline: she had formed an attachment, as a lonely expatriate child can do, to an adult who seemed kind and who had encouraged her trust over many months, and that adult took her \u2014 not violently, but manipulatively \u2014 to a family outside the city where Nadia was told that her parents had decided to leave Egypt and had left her in this person’s care. She was nine. She believed it. By the time she was old enough to understand she had been lied to, she had been absorbed into a life \u2014 a home, a language, a community, an identity. She carried the guilt of silence for twenty years, and it is a weight I cannot imagine, and I do not ask her to carry it anymore.<\/p>\n She is coming to England in the spring. She is bringing Amina.<\/p>\n I have been painting a watercolor of the Oxfordshire garden \u2014 the one from the photograph on my desk, with the mud and the gap-toothed grin and the dug-up treasure. I thought I might hang it in the room I am making ready. She’ll have my mother’s old room, which has the best light in the house in the mornings.<\/p>\n Amina will sleep in the small room next to it, the one with the sloped ceiling and the window that looks out over the garden.<\/p>\n I have already bought her a pendant. Blue faience. The Eye of Horus.<\/p>\n Protection is protection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The year we moved to Cairo, the jasmine was in full bloom. I remember that detail precisely \u2014 the way it draped over the iron fence of our rented villa … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8043,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8044,"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8042\/revisions\/8044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyreaders.store\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Part Three: September 2019<\/h2>\n
Part Four: After<\/h2>\n