Naguib Mahfouz - The Mirage

Over and over I said to myself with bitter resolve, “I’ll never go back, I’ll never go back.”

This resolve was the healing balm I needed for the wound I’d received that day. Indeed, I would never go back. They would never lay eyes on me again, and never again would I expose myself to their contemptuous grins. Besides, what was the use of going back to the Faculty of Law if a lawyer’s life was full of such situations? It would be better to draw the curtain altogether on the era of academics. I’d been a slave to torment long enough. My new resolve comforted me in the face of all the humiliation and embarrassment I’d endured. In fact, it was like a breath of fresh air to my suffocating heart, and it caused me to forget my pain and bitterness. I returned home with nothing on my mind but this same determination.

After lunch, I told my mother and grandfather about the affliction I’d suffered that day.

My voice choked with tears, I said, “This is an unbearable life, and I’ll never go back to the university.”

Shocked by what I’d said, my grandfather rejoined, “Are you really a man? If you’d been born female, you would have made the best of girls! Do you want to quit your education when you’re on the last lap just because you weren’t able to say a couple of words? I swear, if your mother had been in your place, she would have delivered a speech to the people there!”

My mother began clenching her right hand, then releasing it in a kind of spasmodic motion as she said, “They envied him. O Lord, they envied him!”

My grandfather tried to talk me out of my decision, sometimes with gentle persuasion and other times with threats, but desperation had entrenched me in my obstinacy, and I wouldn’t bend. When his patience had run out, he said, “So then, the whole year is a loss. There’s no point in enrolling you in some other faculty when we’re already more than two months into the school year.”

Fearful that I might be cast once again into the educational hellhole, I said, “There’s no use in my going on with my education.”

Interrupting me in a pained voice, my mother cried, “Don’t say that, Kamil! You will continue your education, whether in this institution or in another one!”

Clapping his hands together, my grandfather said, “He’s lost his mind. And this is the end of the pampering!”

However, I was like someone defending himself in the face of certain destruction. Knowing I no longer had it in me to cope with lessons, examinations and other students, I cried desperately, “I can’t! I can’t! Have mercy on me!”

A fierce argument then broke out which I handled with a strength I hadn’t known I had in me — a strength derived from fear and despair. Finally my grandfather fell silent, furious and exasperated.

After a period of enervating silence, he asked me, “Do you want to get a job with nothing but a high school diploma?”

“Yes!” I replied, without looking up.

When I stole a glance at him, he was calm, his brow was furrowed, and he was fiddling with his silver mustache. I then looked over at my mother, whose eyes were filled with tears. Even so, I felt certain that my grandfather’s opposition was only half in earnest, and that if he had really wanted to break my resolve, he would have had the last word. The fact was that the matter of our future occupied his thinking a great deal during those days, especially now that he’d entered old age, and he may even have been relieved at the suggestion that he help me find work, since in this way he could set his mind at rest concerning my mother’s fate.

Thus it was that my academic life drew to a close barely two months after I’d enrolled in the Faculty of Law. However, I didn’t find the happiness I’d dreamed of. It’s true, of course, that not for a moment did I consider going back to the cruel experience of academic life. At the same time, though, I felt an intense need to portray myself as an innocent victim, making up hollow excuses for myself for having withdrawn from the pursuit of knowledge and fled its institutions. Although this attempt of mine succeeded to some extent with others or, at least, with my mother — my true-blue friend for right or wrong — I just barely managed to convince myself. I was filled with a bitterness and discontent that triggered within me a desire to discipline and punish myself. This desire took the form of an offensive launched against myself, and I subjected myself willingly for the first time to an honest confrontation with my faults and shortcomings.

I saw my life as it was: childish, fugitive dreams, timidity and fear that put aspirations to death, and an utter self-centeredness that had doomed me to an isolation devoid of a single friend or companion and to an ignorance of the world and everything in it. There was no time and no place, no politics and no sports. As for the large metropolis in which I’d been born and raised, all I knew of it was a couple of streets, as though I’d been living in a cell in the desert. A heavy pall of gloom settled over me, and I mulled over my grief in a deadly, heartfelt loneliness. However, my mother didn’t abandon me for a single moment of those dark days, nor could she bear to stand opposed to me for long. Hence, it wasn’t long before she abandoned her opposition and came over to my side, pretending to be pleased and content.

One day she said to me consolingly, “The best thing lies in what God has chosen. Do we have the power to do anything for ourselves? Before long you’ll become a responsible man, and it will be your turn to pamper your mother and repay some of the debt you owe her.”

We spent long hours together in which I basked in her gentle, healing words. It was thanks to her alone that my ordeal passed, my heart was opened anew to life, and I ceased to labor under the weight of scruples, misgivings, and obsessive thoughts.

In his efforts to find me a job in the Ministry of War, my grandfather sought the good offices of a high-ranking army officer who had once worked as a petty lieutenant under his command in Sudan. And his efforts were crowned with success. However, the officer informed him that I might be appointed to Salloum. When my grandfather mentioned this, my mother’s face clouded over.

“Salloum!” she cried in horror. “Don’t you know that Kamil wouldn’t be able to live by himself?”

She thought that Salloum was a nearby town like Zagazig, or possibly one as far away as Tanta. When she found out that it was really next to the border with Libya, she let a nervous laugh escape, thinking it was a joke.

“Find a job for him yourself!” shouted my grandfather in frustration. “Or appoint him to work in your lap and give me a break!”

However, continuing to spare no effort on my behalf, he approached old acquaintances of his who had been born in the nineteenth century and who had worked under his command many years before. They may have been touched by his venerable age and his long, active military career, not to mention the memories he stirred up in them, so they promised to do their best. And sure enough, they found me a job in the warehousing section of the Ministry of War’s general administrative office. The ministry was only three tram stops and a ten-minute walk from our house. Hence, my mother approved and was visibly pleased. The justifications for the appointment were presented, and I was seen by the general medical committee in keeping with routine procedures. In short, I became an employee of the government. The feeling I had as I left home for the ministry for the first time was a complex one: it included an element of pride, as well as a sense of delight over being liberated from slavery to both home and school. At the same time, it wasn’t without an element of anxiety of the sort that would come over me whenever I embarked on some new venture.