Naguib Mahfouz: The Mirage

It was a large photograph that showed my grandfather decked out in his medal-festooned military uniform. He was sitting in a large chair with his voluminous body, his big potbelly, and the white mustache that looked like a crescent moon over his mouth. I was standing next to him, the top of my head hardly rising above his knees. I was looking into the photographer’s lens with smiling eyes, my lips pursed like someone who’s trying to suppress a laugh. My mother was standing to my grandfather’s right, resting her left hand on the back of the large chair. Clad in a long dress that enveloped her from neck to feet, its long sleeves revealing nothing but her hands, she stood there with her slender frame, her rectangular face, her delicate, straight nose, and wide green eyes that radiated tenderness, though her glance lacked that luster that bespeaks vigor and sharpness of temper. It was a face that the Merciful One chose to replicate so completely in my own that it used to be said that the only way you could tell us apart was by our clothes!

The picture peered out at me from the world of memories. I fixed my burning eyes on the beloved face for such a long time that I no longer saw anything else. Its features grew larger as I looked at them until I imagined myself a little boy again, living under her protective wing. The silence around me grew so thick, it seemed her closed mouth would open into a smile and allow me to hear the sweet conversation that I’d known until just a short while before. Photographs are an amazing thing. How could I have failed to notice this fact? This was my mother, with her body and her spirit. This was my mother, with her eyes, her nose, and her mouth, and this was the tender bosom that I’d clung to all my life. Lord! How can I convince myself that she’s truly departed from this world? Indeed, photographs are wondrous things, and it now seems to me that everything in this world is wondrous. Curses on habit that kills our spirit of wonderment and awe! This picture used to be hung in such a way that it was visible at all times. However, I was seeing it now as something new. In it I perceived a profound vitality, as though a breath from her liberated spirit were hidden within it. In her eyes I saw a distracted look that stirred up a sense of pain. This photograph was alive without a doubt, and I refused to withdraw my eyes from it even if it drove me mad not to do so.

I pored over it at length. Then I was gripped by a powerful desire to imagine the life of the woman depicted there in all its phases, from the cradle to the grave. I imagined her as a baby crawling, then as a little girl playing with her dolls. If only she’d left me pictures that could help me recapture the happy dreams of her childhood! Then I imagined the period of her tender youth, when she was a lovely young woman looking upon life through those tranquil eyes of hers with hope and delight and enjoying her impassioned adolescence. I’d witnessed a part of that sweet era, and was a fruit of its fertility and freshness. However, its signposts had now been lost sight of and its effects obliterated, enveloped in darkness as though I’d never nestled in her bosom or nursed at her breast. When I brought that era to mind later in life, the thought of it would bring confusion and anxiety, and I would wonder, dismayed and indignant: Didn’t the untamable desires that so preoccupy young people rage in her blood too? Perhaps it was these unexpressed emotions of mine that drove me in my boyhood to tear to pieces the only remaining trace of that early youth.

One day I came suddenly into our bedroom and found my mother leaning over an open drawer in the wardrobe and looking intently at something in front of her. I approached her gingerly, prompted by the mischievousness for which spoiled little boys are known. As I slipped my head under her outstretched arm, I saw her clutching a picture of her wedding. She tried to return it to its hiding place, but as she stared at me in astonishment, I stubbornly grabbed hold of it. I saw a young man seated and my mother standing and leaning against his chair like a succulent rose. My eyes clung to the man’s image, and I realized that he was my father even though I was seeing him for the first time. Indeed, I was seeing him after my heart had been filled with fear and loathing toward him. My hands trembled and my eyes grew wide with dismay. Then before I knew it, my hands were tearing it to shreds. She reached out in an attempt to rescue it, but I thwarted her in a furious rage. She didn’t utter a word, but in her limpid eyes there was a look of grief and disappointment. Then, as though I weren’t satisfied with what I’d already done, I turned to her angrily and asked her in a censorious tone, “What are you upset about?!”

With some effort she put on a happier face and said, “What a contrary child you are! Can’t you see that I’m sorry over the picture of my youth? You’ve torn up your mother’s picture without knowing it.”

Every now and then the memory of that incident would come back and pain me, filling me with consternation and angst. I would wonder what had really led her to keep that picture, and why it saddened her to see me tear it up. Then I would try to penetrate with my imagination to what I’d missed of her life, but the attempt would just leave me preoccupied and distressed.

This was how I lost the picture of her early youth, and I’m truly sorry now to have lost it — very sorry, indeed. But isn’t this a laughable sort of sorrow now that I’ve reached out and destroyed the picture’s very subject?

I took no notice of the one affliction that had been visited on her life. One day she told me the story of her marriage. She did so with great caution and care, especially in view of the fact that she was narrating the happy memories, rare though they were. She would mention them hurriedly, tersely and with restraint, as though deep down she feared me, or as though she feared that the pleasantness of the memory might mitigate the intenseness of my loathing for my father.

It was on the Ismail Bridge that my father had seen her for the first time. Some days in the late afternoon, my mother and grandfather would take an excursion in the Victoria. One day they were passed by another Victoria, in whose front seat there sat a young man with one leg crossed over the other. He appeared to take pride in his youth and his wealth — or, more properly speaking, in the wealth he anticipated. His glance fell upon her face, and before long he had steered his carriage behind theirs and begun following them to our house in Manyal. Whenever the two of them left the house, they would happen upon him in the road as though he’d been waiting. I didn’t allow this chapter of the story to go by without comment. I asked her about how flirtation took place in those days. She received my question warily. However, I kept after her until she gave in to me, surrendering to the geniality of the recollections. She told me that he would cast her furtive glances that subtly concealed a smile. Or he would turn toward her with interest as he twisted his luxuriant black mustache. At the same time, he never overstepped the limits of propriety. I mused for some time, lost in the wilderness of dreamy imagination and feeling astonished, bewildered, and distressed. Then I looked up at her — our sole comfort during those days being that of endless conversation — and I asked her with a smile how she used to receive these flirtatious overtures. Not missing the mischievousness in my question, she giggled. Her body shaking from head to toe as it did whenever she laughed, she told me that she would ignore them, of course, and look straight ahead. She would register no response at all, as though she were a statue clad in a white veil. Unconvinced of what she was telling me, I said I was asking about the inward, not the outward; about the heart, not the face. I was tempted to tell her frankly what was going on in my head. However, my courage failed me and shyness tied my tongue. Yet if I’d consulted my heart, I would have known the answer. After all, my own heart was part of hers, and the same blood flowed through both. Indeed, the two of them beat as one. And could I possibly have forgotten the many times when I myself had remained unmoved as a statue even though my heart was ablaze?