Naguib Mahfouz - The Mirage

When I reached our flat, both my mother and Rabab were fretting over my delay, and I explained to them that my work would require me to stay late at the ministry every day for at least a week. In the late afternoon, Rabab began getting dressed to go out. She told me she was going to visit her mother and, as she usually did when she went out, she invited me to come along. I’d wondered to myself how I’d be able to keep an eye on her in the evening. It wouldn’t be as easy as it had been in the morning, since the houses she visited most often were in nearby neighborhoods and she would usually go from one to another on foot. Consequently, I knew that if I followed her, I’d run the risk of exposing myself. However, if I accompanied her personally, I’d ensure that the evening passed without incident, as it were, since I wouldn’t have given her a chance to do anything wrong. This way, if there had, in fact, been any wrongdoing, she would be obliged to commit it during the first half of the day, in which case she would fall into my trap unawares. Consequently, I accepted her invitation gladly.

Laughing, I said, “I’ll go with you to avoid the boredom that kills me when you’re not around.”

Pleased that I’d accepted her invitation, she said hopefully, “I wish you’d always come with me, since there’s nothing I’d love more than for us to go and come together.”

The next morning we went out together as usual, and I repeated what I’d done the day before. I took a taxi to the Nubians’ coffee shop and took up my position at its entrance. Rabab arrived at the same time she had the day before and went to the kindergarten. Then, as I was tracking her with my eyes, I happened to think: If she had the perceptivity of that strange woman — whom I hadn’t thought about from the time I’d left Abbasiya by taxi the day before until this thought leapt into my mind — and if she happened to look in my direction and saw me sitting here, she’d turn on her heels, march over to me in disbelief, and ask me what had brought me to this coffee shop. Envisioning the situation with terror in my heart, I shrank into my seat, smarting with shame and remorse. However, my wife turned into the schoolyard peacefully and unsuspectingly, oblivious to the eyes that were keeping their wary, suspicious vigil over her. When she disappeared through the door, my tension and fear left me, and I dreaded the prospect of the second day-long wait I’d have to endure. I cast a weary, sweeping glance around me, taking in the side street where the coffee shop was located, what I could see of Abbasiya Street, and the coffee shop itself with its dark-skinned clientele. These were the places where I’d been condemned to remain like a mad prisoner, wandering aimlessly through a maze of dark thoughts and hellish, fugitive apparitions.

As I watched my wife going to the school I remembered the strange woman, so I looked up toward the building across from the coffee shop, but found both the window and the balcony closed. I wondered how I could bear to wait the entire day without some sort of entertainment to help kill the time. It was a dubious question, one that concealed a desire to see her that I didn’t like to admit. Yet what reason did I have to deny such a desire? Wasn’t it a desire simply to amuse myself and kill time? It was true, of course, that the woman had stirred up something erotic in me. But there was nothing new in that, since I’d always responded erotically to the ugliest, filthiest of women. Marriage had done nothing to change me or heal me of my condition. On the contrary, it was after marriage that I’d gone back to all my old habits. I looked back at the window again as though I were enduring two long waits.

I decided to try to understand myself better. I wasn’t just looking for amusement. No, I really wanted to see her again. I wanted her to devour me with her eyes the way she’d done the day before, so that I could experience that deep sense of satisfaction and pride and salvage some of my lost confidence.

No sooner had I lost myself in thought than I heard the clattering of the window. I looked up and saw it being opened wide. The woman appeared in the window and our eyes met. She hadn’t been expecting to see me, of course, and a look of evident astonishment appeared in her eyes. She stood there looking at me for a minute or so, then moved away from the window and disappeared from view. With a happiness that ill-befit the miserable nature of the mission I’d come there to carry out, I shifted my gaze over to the balcony, waiting for it to open. And so it was: a hand pushed open the leaves of the door leading out to the balcony and they collided violently with the wall on either side, whereupon the woman came out, pulling a chair along with her short, solid body. She looked rather like a barrel in the pink dress she was wearing, though it was tailored in a crude sort of way. She placed the chair in the far corner of the balcony, sat down on it facing the coffee shop, and spread her arms out on the balcony’s wooden railing. We were face to face, there were no shops on the side street, and hardly anyone ever came down it. As for the coffee shop regulars, they were so engrossed in their chatter, they saw nothing outside. My table was situated so close to the entrance that it was more or less isolated from the others, and I imagined the two of us as being alone in a sense. A moment later, though, I felt flustered and embarrassed. I didn’t know how I could remain at the mercy of her brazen stares, and I wished my unspoken desire hadn’t been fulfilled. I began looking at the distant street part of the time, and part of the time over my shoulder at the inside of the coffee shop. Yet either way, I could feel the weight of her heavy eyes on my face.

I wanted her presence, of that there was no doubt. At the same time, though, I couldn’t bear it. Every time I stole a glance in her direction, I would find her scrutinizing my face calmly, thoroughly, and without the slightest embarrassment or hesitation. This sent me into raptures, while at the same time it left me unbearably flustered and embarrassed. Her eyes would spend a long time looking, but they didn’t just look. Rather, they spoke with the most eloquent of tongues. Whenever our eyes met, I would imagine her speaking to me, then lower my gaze as though I were running away from her. Once when I looked her way I found her lighting a cigarette. She put out the match with a couple of shakes of her hand, then threw it in my direction, and if it hadn’t been blown off course by the wind, it would have reached its target. She took a deep breath, her eyes smiling. Meanwhile, my heart started pounding wildly and I swallowed with difficulty.

What did this woman want? And how could she be so audacious as to ogle me in this brazen, intense fashion? Indeed, how could she engage in this silent pursuit of me when she had no previous acquaintance with me, and had only seen me twice in her life — once today and once the day before? I became muddled and agitated. In fact, I’d become so preoccupied with the balcony that I only cast the most fleeting, perfunctory glances at the entrance to the kindergarten, and when I did so, I hardly saw a thing. Noticing that I’d looked her way, she crossed her legs, thereby drawing my eye forcibly to a large swathe of her thighs, whose meeting and intertwinement caused alluring dark folds to appear. Feeling something akin to the rush brought on by a shot of booze, my throat went dry and my emotions overcame my shyness to the point where it melted as snow melts under the sun’s fiery rays. I stared at her without shame or hesitation. Then what should she do but get up and leave the balcony, leaving me in an unbearable tumult! I said to myself irritably: What sort of abyss is opening up under my feet? Gradually, however, I regained my composure, and I felt the sting of remorse and shame. Casting the balcony an angry look, I muttered as I had the day before, “May she never come back!” Waiting might be tedious, but it was better than this evil that had begun to threaten me. I had no doubt that she was coming back, and I could have left the coffee shop forever and gone in search of some new location from which to carry on with my surveillance and waiting. However, I persuaded myself that this out-of-the-way coffee shop was the ideal location for my task.