Naguib Mahfouz - The Mirage

Gesticulating wildly in the mother’s face, I asked her in a voice that I was hearing for the first time, “How? How?”

She spread her arms in despair, too choked up to speak. However, Sabah came toward me, terrified and delirious, and in a muffled scream, said, “The miserable operation! God damn the operation!”

Turning toward the servant in bewilderment, I shouted, “Operation? What operation?”

It was then that I knew something suspicious was afoot. I looked around the room until my eyes fell on a table in one corner. On the table I saw some medical instruments arranged together with some containers and cotton. I came up to the table and examined it with eyes that could hardly focus. When had they brought all this? When had the decision to do it been agreed on? How had this happened? Then I looked at my mother-in-law and found her eyeing the servant with a strange, cruel look. Now I was more alarmed and confused than ever, and my heart turned hard, unforgiving, and frantic.

“What operation is Sabah talking about?” I asked in a terrible voice.

The woman looked at me in bewilderment and alarm. Then, in a low voice choked with tears she said, “My daughter’s condition suddenly got worse, so I called the doctor, and he advised that an operation be performed right away.”

Having been transformed into a new, formidable person quite unlike the one the world had known thirty years earlier, I asked her, “In which part of the body?”

She said, “The doctor said it was the peritoneum.”

I was hearing the word for the first time. However, I passed over the matter and asked in the same fearsome voice, “And was the operation performed?”

“Yes,” she said, weeping, “and it ended with what you see before you!”

Stamping the floor with my foot in a rage, I screamed, “But I was here two hours ago and there was nothing wrong with her! Didn’t you assure me that her condition was nothing to worry about?”

In a voice choked with tears, she said, “Her pain got suddenly worse! What could I do? What could I do?”

“And who might be the doctor who murdered her?”

Looking at me brokenly through her tears, she mumbled, “He did everything he could. But God’s decree intervened!”

“Who might he be?”

She fell silent for a moment as though she were taking a breath, then she said, “Dr. Amin Rida.”

A violent tremor went through my body as I repeated over and over, “Amin Rida!”

Then I cried in fury and contempt, “Dr. Amin Rida? He’s just a beginner! Besides, his specialty is reproductive disorders!”

Flustered, she said he’d been the nearest doctor, that she thought doctors understood all sorts of disorders whatever their specialties happened to be, that there hadn’t been time to hesitate, and so on. Trembling with rage, I waited until she was finished.

Then I let forth a frigid laugh and cried, “An obstetrician who performs an operation on the peritoneum! It’s no wonder you killed her!”

I did an about-face, walked quickly to the door and thundered, “Doctor!”

I repeated the summons until he came from the other end of the house, his face white as a sheet. He entered the room with a meekness that ill befit his usual pompous bearing. Feeling a hatred and bitterness toward him that would have filled the earth itself, I said to him, “The Madame tells me that you performed the operation that killed my wife. Now, would you care to tell me what prompted you to take it upon yourself to perform a dangerous surgical operation when surgery isn’t your specialization?”

With a distressed expression on his face, he shot Madame Nazli a strange look that brought to mind the way she had looked at Sabah, and I nearly exploded with rage. I’d begun to get a vague feeling that they were hiding something critical from me.

“Answer me!” I screamed at him savagely.

He turned to me with a furrowed brow, then remained silent for a moment as though he were consulting his lost dignity.

Then he said in a low voice, “She needed an urgent operation.”

Clapping my hands together, I said, “So why didn’t you call me to come? Why didn’t you call for a surgeon?”

“There wasn’t time!” said the mother nervously.

“But there was time to kill her!” I screeched.

The woman stared into my face as though she’d lost her mind, then she began to repeat, “Kill her … kill her … kill her!”

Then she lost her senses and exploded suddenly, slapping her cheeks uncontrollably. Wanting to come between the woman’s hands and cheeks, Sabah came up and tried to stop her. However, she struck the servant in the face with such force that she reeled backward in terror. Then she stopped slapping herself, turned toward us and screamed in our faces — the doctor’s and mine — in a voice that sounded like a roar, “You’re the ones who killed her! Get out of my face!”

The doctor then slipped out the door and I remained alone, eyeing her with a cruel stare that had no regard for her outburst. “You’re the ones who killed her!” The woman was talking nonsense, and I would have no mercy on her. I wouldn’t rest until I’d done something that would send people reeling. I was faced with a crime. And unless it was merely a crime of ignorance and stupidity, he would pay for it dearly. The meek submission of an entire lifetime had now given birth in me to a devastating eruption, a fiery rage, and impending wickedness. I forgot the corpse and my grief and demons appeared before my eyes. To hell with the criminals!

Filled to saturation with the woman’s obnoxious wailing and Sabah’s incessant sobbing, I suddenly turned away from them and left the room without looking back. Then I rushed outside as though I were fleeing for my life.

The whole world looked bright red to me, and I was filled with a hellish determination, the likes of which I’d never seen in myself before, to commit any sort of wickedness as a way of releasing what I felt inside. I doubted that I’d be able to achieve any sort of result that would actually quench my thirst for revenge. Even so, I didn’t hesitate for a single moment. I hailed a taxi and instructed it to take me to the public prosecutor’s office. Entering the place without any particular plan or explicit accusation in mind, I found myself in the midst of a stifling crowd and my ears were bombarded with a din like the roar of the sea. I stood there uncertainly for a few moments until I caught sight of a policeman. I came up to him and asked him to tell me where the district attorney’s office was.

“On the second floor,” he replied gruffly.

I went up the stairs and found my way to the room with the help of an employee. After receiving permission to go in, I saw before me a desk behind which there sat a short, slender young man who was poring over some papers in front of him. He looked up when I came in, eyed me with a penetrating glance and said, “What do you need?”

Shocked by this simple question, my mind went blank, and I stood there in a daze as though I didn’t know exactly why I’d come.

With a questioning look on his face, the young man repeated his query, saying, “What do you need?”

I had to speak no matter what it took. So, letting my tongue lead the way, I said, “My wife … has died.” I nearly said, “has been murdered,” but fear held me back.

Furrowing his brow in bewilderment, he said, “What does the public prosecutor have to do with that? And who are you?”

I took a deep breath and found my fear gradually leaving me. I introduced myself, then said, “Here is my story, Your Honor: This morning I left my wife at her mother’s house, since she was feeling ill. Two hours after leaving the house, I went back and found her dead. They told me she’d suddenly begun to feel much worse and that they’d called a doctor who is a relative of her mother’s. This doctor was of the opinion that her condition required immediate surgery, so he performed the operation, and she died.”