Naguib Mahfouz - The Mirage

Her worries dispelled, a look of relief flashed in her eyes. Then she moved up close to me until we were touching and kissed me.

Thus we went back to the way we’d been before, and I went back to being a chaste husband with an ugly habit. I would say to myself: It isn’t my fault that we’ve ended up this way. I’m an able-bodied man, and if it weren’t for her disposition, I wouldn’t have suffered this relapse. On the contrary, I’m enduring this strange life for her sake! It was a solace I’d badly needed. But did I really believe myself?

Whatever the answer, the memory of our era of blessedness didn’t leave me for a single moment. How had it passed with such astonishing rapidity? And how could my beloved have been so troubled that she would end up breaking her silence with this sort of manifest grievance? Didn’t this mean that I was a wretched soul with no way out of my wretchedness? I was sorely tempted to flee and reclaim my freedom, and I would think back nostalgically to the days when I’d go wandering aimlessly in the streets.

Had everything gone back to point zero?

Love continued to bring us together in embraces and sympathy, and my beloved went back to being her smiling, cheerful self as she divided her days between her school and the houses of her family and relatives. It sufficed me to see her happy and content. At the same time, her disposition may have undergone a slight change, a change that became apparent in recurrent episodes of gloom, as well as in a quickness to lose her temper over the slightest thing my mother would say.

Was I happy?

As far as I could tell, my beloved was happy, so it was only natural that I should count myself happy too. I hadn’t stopped suffering from obsessive thoughts. But then, when had my life been free of obsessive thoughts? Life’s current flowed inexorably along, its waves tossing me to and fro, with my beloved’s happiness bringing me joy, and my mother’s severity bringing me equal misery. I would spend tedious hours at the ministry followed occasionally by dreamy hours at the pub. As for my conscience, on account of which I’d long suffered a feeling of guilt, I regularly drowned out its wails and laments with mirthful laughter and carousing. Hence, whenever its pangs beset me, I would say to myself in a loud voice: I’m happy, and everything is fine.

Another winter passed, followed by spring and summer, until it was time to greet the autumn and the new school year together with the precious memories they ushered in.

Then something happened to me that seemed trivial, but that nearly turned my life upside down. Strangely, it came to light as a result of a coincidence, and it seems only right for me to wonder: Would my life have taken a different direction if it hadn’t been for that coincidence? Then again, what is a coincidence? Doesn’t life seem at times to be an endless chain of coincidences? What, other than coincidence, had placed Rabab in my path? Would it have been possible for me to marry her if my father had died a single month later than he did? What would have happened to me if my father had insisted on taking me back the way he did Radiya and Medhat? In the same vein I wonder: Isn’t it possible that my life would have gone on just the way it had been till the day I died if the time I spent with my mother on that unforgettable day hadn’t lasted a few extra minutes?

It was an afternoon in late autumn. I was planning to spend my usual evening out, and I’d just bidden Rabab farewell. As I left our room, I encountered my mother in the living room and discovered that she wasn’t feeling well. Consequently, I went with her to her room and we sat there talking for quite a long time. Then I excused myself and left. As I was on my way out, I happened to glance in the direction of our bedroom. The door was open as it had been before, and I saw Rabab sitting on the edge of the bed and reading a letter. I realized immediately that the postman must have brought it when I was sitting with my mother, since otherwise, I would have known about it when it arrived. I assumed it was a letter to me from my brother, since Rabab didn’t receive letters from anyone, so I went back to the room to inquire. As I approached the door, Rabab was so engrossed in reading that she didn’t notice me until I said to her, “Is that a letter for me?”

She looked up at me in astonishment and her hand folded up the letter in a rapid, robot-like motion.

“Did you forget something?” she asked, obviously uneasy.

Feeling an anxiety I didn’t quite understand, I said, “I was in my mother’s room, and as I was leaving her I saw you reading this letter, and I thought it was for me.”

She got up from where she’d been sitting and backed toward the dressing table. She was clearly trying to keep her emotions under control. However, her eyes betrayed the profound, unexpected effect my sudden appearance had had on her.

Letting forth a terse, dry laugh that did nothing to conceal her distress, she said, “It isn’t a letter. It’s just some comments I wrote down relating to my work at school.”

A fear came over me that numbed my joints. She may have been telling the truth. However, her distress was catching, and I too had begun to feel a strange sort of fear, as though some unnamed, ominous presence was gathering on my already cloudy horizon. What reason would she have to lie? Yet I was certain that I’d seen a letter in her hand! I feared acting too suspicious lest she be in the right and I find myself in an embarrassing position that I could well do without.

Even so, I couldn’t help but say, “But I saw a letter in your hand.”

My statement came out sounding bad to me, and I felt I hadn’t chosen my words well, since they expressed obvious suspicion.

I looked at her apprehensively, waiting for her to show me the paper irritably as she shot me a look of disdain and reproach. However, she was struggling with other sorts of feelings.

As if she were overwhelmed with some unnamed emotion, she turned her back to me, saying, “I told you it was comments having to do with my schoolwork.”

Then suddenly I saw her tear it up, walk over to the window and throw it out. The move she made came so unexpectedly, I froze in place as if I’d been paralyzed. She turned to face me with a show of nonchalance. Furious and desperate, I felt as though a huge wall had collapsed on top of my life and buried it beneath its rubble. My eyes were being opened — after the delusions of blindness — to ugly realities. After all, what but ugly realities would provoke such distress and such clever deceit?

Mad with rage, I screamed, “You’re lying! You said it was a paper with comments relating to your schoolwork, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. It was a letter! I saw it myself! And you tore it up to hide something shameful from me!”

The blood drained out of her face, leaving it deathly pale. However, she didn’t appear willing to give up without a desperate defense.

“You’re wrong,” she mumbled, “and you’re not being fair. It wasn’t a letter!”

By now I was seething with rage, and pain and despair were pounding on my head like a hammer.

“Why did you tear it up, then?” I cried. “Why did you panic? Talk to me! I’ve got to know the truth! I’m going down to the street to pick up the pieces.”

I rushed distraughtly over to the window and looked down into the street, where I saw the narrow blind alley that separated the back of our building from the church garden. The minute I looked out, I despaired, since it was obvious that the wind had carried the bits of paper over into the churchyard. The world looked black to me, and it seemed as though she had emerged from a world of demons dancing in a stream of fire. How was I going to extract the truth from her lips? I turned around and found her standing where she’d been before, with all the life drained out of her face and a look of terror and consternation in her eyes. My heart went cold and I shot her a long, hard look.