Naguib Mahfouz: The Mirage

The doctor’s face turned pale and gloomier than ever, and he appeared to be in a miserable state of defeat. Casting a final glance at the medical examiner’s report, the interrogator continued, “Why did you make this deadly puncture in the peritoneum?”

In a morose, almost despairing tone the doctor replied, “I answered this question before!”

“You’d be well advised not to act stupid, since you’re undoubtedly an intelligent young man. You punctured the peritoneum in order to create an apparent, ‘legitimate’ cause for a death you believed to be inevitable.”

The doctor lowered his head in silence like someone who’s confessing and giving up the fight.

Then the interrogator went on, saying, “You were, in fact, performing an operation on another part of the body. Then a perforation occurred by accident in this other part and, given your lack of experience as a surgeon, you thought that this perforation was bound to lead to the patient’s death. So what did you do? If the true cause of death were known, the illegal operation you were performing would come to light. And it was at this point that your disturbed mind led you to resort to a maniacal ruse, namely, to puncture the peritoneum so that it would be thought that this was the cause of death. Now you claim falsely that you were performing an operation on the peritoneum, and in this way you conceal the crime of having performed the illegal operation. If you had caused a patient to die by accident, this wouldn’t be considered a crime according to the law. However, contrary to what you may have thought, the patient didn’t die from the first perforation. Rather, you killed her when you made a hole in the peritoneum.”

Trembling violently, the doctor shouted at the interrogator like a madman, “No! No!! She’d already died when I punctured the peritoneum!”

With a faint smile on his lips, the interrogator looked triumphantly at the doctor. As for the latter, he closed his mouth in dismay. Enraged and desperate, he looked up twice at the interrogator, and as he did so, he reminded me of someone who’s been knocked prostrate by a blow from the enemy. However, my mind was in a state of such heated turmoil that I paid him no attention. An illegal operation? The operation on the peritoneum had been nothing but a ruse to cover up a crime? Either I was crazy, or these two men were crazy! She’d already died before he punctured the peritoneum? Lord! I was nearly beside myself, and I almost started raving like a lunatic despite the presence of this daunting interrogator.

However, he broke the oppressive silence, saying calmly, “So we agree. And I think the time has come for you to confess that you in particular, out of all the doctors in Egypt, were chosen to perform an abortion!”

And he didn’t stop there. He went on talking. He may have mentioned, among other things, anesthesia and its effect, or something of that sort. And the other may have said a few words as well. However, I was no longer aware of a thing being said. My mind stopped at the word “abortion” and refused to go a step further. I fell on the word and it split me in two, then ripped me to shreds. It rang in my head till I was oblivious to everything. The three men disappeared from before me, the room disappeared, and I saw nothing but a terrifying, red and black void where terrifying specters of memories and thoughts danced. An abortion. So Rabab had been pregnant! The letter. This young doctor. Satan could undoubtedly have woven the tale of a horrific crime out of these disconnected facts, mocking both the suspicion that had, at one time, driven me to spying, and the peace of mind in which I’d mistakenly taken refuge at another. The interrogator was doing his utmost to expose a medical crime, but along the thorny path leading there he was going to stumble upon a crime far more heinous and inhuman. Hadn’t my heart perceived the catastrophe from the beginning? Might the doctor be the person who had written the letter? Or had they called on him due to the fact that he was a relative and could thus help them keep things quiet? The mother must have known everything … everything about my married life, and about her daughter’s slip-up. Perhaps she’d wanted to wipe out evidence of the scandal through the operation, only to have death ruin her plans. Ah, Rabab! We deserve every tribulation we’re afflicted with in this world, since we give ourselves over to it heart and soul when, in reality, it deserves nothing but loathing.

I was roused from my thoughts by the voice of the interrogator as he called out to me, “Hey there … wake up!”

I looked up at him, trembling, and little by little I recovered my awareness of my surroundings.

The man said, “I’m asking you: Hadn’t your wife spoken to you about not wanting to be pregnant? Hadn’t she told you of her desire to have an abortion?”

I cast a quick glance at Dr. Amin, thinking to myself: He knows the entire secret from beginning to end. In fact, he may know far more than I know myself. It pained me to lie and expose myself to another insult.

“No,” I muttered.

“Did you think she was happy to be pregnant?”

In a listless, doleful tone I said, “It’s only now that I’m finding out that she was pregnant.”

The interrogator raised his eyebrows so high that they appeared above his spectacles, and I fixed my gaze on his eyes as he ruminated.

Then he asked me, “How do you explain the fact that she was hiding the matter from you?”

His question shook me to the depths of my being. All I had to say was one word, and my secret would become the butt of everyone’s jokes. Feelings of rage and the desire for revenge tempted me sorely to reveal what I’d striven so mightily to keep hidden so that I could likewise expose the secret that had been kept hidden by my depraved wife and avenge myself on the criminal. I wanted to say that there was nothing in the past year or more of our married life that could have led to pregnancy so that the interrogator could put his callous hand on the wanton trespasser. I was sorely, sorely tempted to do so, and the words were almost on the tip of my tongue. However, I didn’t say a thing. Instead, I was stricken with a total paralysis that I couldn’t explain. Could shyness influence me even in a situation like this? Was my desire to conceal my impotence so great that it overrode my longing for revenge? I wasn’t able to utter the decisive word, and with every second that passed I grew more helpless and resigned to defeat.

“I don’t know,” I muttered breathlessly.

And before I knew it, Dr. Amin had jumped to his feet and taken two steps back, folding his arms over his chest in pompous defiance.

Then in a confident, supercilious voice he said to the interrogator, “You’re asking him something he knows nothing about. She was a wife in name only, and I’m responsible for everything from beginning to end!”

I left the house without seeing any of those who lived there. After all, it wasn’t my house any longer, nor were its residents my family. As I stood at the door to the building, my gaze shifted over to the tram stop, the tram stop of memories. I looked back and forth between it and the balcony, then closed my eyes to see the procession of memories marching past in the twinkling of an eye. It was a true picture of life, one that brought together its joys and its tragedies. Then I took off down the street without any destination in mind as though I were running away as fast as I could. My heart had turned into a firebrand from which sparks of rage, misery, and hatred were flying in all directions. I figured that this world, so preoccupied with its own concerns, would forget its sorrows the next day and drown itself in talk about my scandal. At the same time, I still hadn’t gotten over my shock, and I kept wondering what on earth had prompted that crook of a doctor to confess the terrible truth. I’d been so defeated by cowardice that I’d concealed the truth, and in so doing I’d given him a chance to flee if he had wanted to take it. But instead, he’d jumped to his feet in a rage and, in that self-important, arrogant way of his, he’d let the truth come out through his own two lips: “Don’t ask him something he knows nothing about. She was a wife in name only …” My God! Why hadn’t I beaten him to a pulp? Why hadn’t I hurled myself at him and dug my fingernails into his heart? It was a memory that would sting me like a flaming whip till the day I died. But what had made him fling himself into perdition?