Naguib Mahfouz - The Mirage

With a worried look on his face, the young man got up. Then, looking me hard in the face, he said, “What do you intend to do with yourself? The funeral is just an hour away.”

“What?” I said in amazement. “You’re going to let the funeral proceed without conducting an investigation first? What a merciful brother you are! However, duty comes before brotherhood. Call the public prosecutor. I’ll tell you where the office is, since I found out myself yesterday. Tell the district attorney that you’re calling on him to interrogate the person who called on him yesterday to investigate his wife’s murder.”

Looking like someone who’s just remembered something distressing, my brother cried, “How awful! Why didn’t you send me a telegram, Kamil! The servant told me about it today, and I could hardly believe it!”

In near delirium I said, “Believe it, brother. If you don’t get yourself used to believing tragedies like this, you’ll leave the world the same way you came in: gullible and ignorant. I killed my wife, too. But I had an accomplice, namely, her lover.”

Clapping his hands, Medhat cried, “There’s no way you’re going to leave the room when you’re in this condition!”

Shaking my head angrily, I rose to my feet and said, “Let’s go.”

But no sooner had I finished speaking than I fainted.

I know nothing about the long hours I spent in a complete coma. However, there were other times in which I would grope about in a darkness that lay somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. It was a strange, shadowy world interspersed with dreams. I would get the feeling I was alive, yet so weak and helpless, I was more like the living dead. I don’t know how many times I struggled, miserably and desperately, to move a part of my body, only to be so exhausted by the effort that I would surrender to the stifling pressure and vague fear that never seemed to leave me. At other times I would have the illusion that I wasn’t far from regaining consciousness. I would almost be able to make out familiar voices and see faces I knew well, and I would cry out to them to hurry and save me. I often called out to my mother, and I would be infuriated and bewildered at her failure to respond to me. Strange dreams would go through my feverish head. I would see myself riding on my mother’s shoulder as she carried me back and forth the way she used to do when I was a little boy, and at other times I would see myself grabbing hold of my brother Medhat’s collar in a noisy, violent struggle as he shouted at me, “Don’t kill me!” I imagined that I’d had many other dreams too, but that they’d been swallowed up by the darkness.

My unconsciousness went on for such a long time, I thought it would never end. But then I opened my eyes and returned to the light of the world. Heaving a deep sigh, my glance fell on a mirror that reflected my image. Feeling someone at my head, I looked in that direction and saw my sister Radiya sitting on the bed with her hand on my head. Our eyes met and her features brightened while a look of pity flashed in her eyes.

“Kamil,” she murmured tenderly.

I tried to smile, and as I did so she let forth a fervent sigh, saying softly, “I bear witness that there is no god but God.”

She uttered the testimony of faith in a voice that bespoke the fear and torment that had now left her. She didn’t take her hand off my head, but the next moment, however, I felt something under her palm.

In a feeble voice that sounded to my ears like a muffled shriek I asked, “What’s this thing on my head?”

Someone else’s voice then came to me, saying, “A bag of ice, sir.”

Turning in the direction from which the voice had come, I saw my brother Medhat sitting on the long seat. It was at that moment that I realized where I was, and I was assailed by the memories from which I’d fled through this heavy coma. Life peered at me with its ashen face once again. I looked over at the alarm clock, whose hands indicated that it was a bit after ten, ten in the morning judging by the sunlight coming into the room. So, then, I’d spent the dismal night in a deep sleep!

Looking at my brother brokenly, I asked, “Is the funeral over?”

He looked back at me for a long time, then said tersely, “Of course.”

After another long silence he continued, “Perhaps you don’t realize that you were gone for three whole days.”

I peered at him in disbelief. Then I closed my eyes in consternation and murmured woefully, “So, I was destined to escort neither my mother nor my wife to her final resting place.”

I looked over at my sister, whose eyes were filled with tears, and I was enveloped by an eerie melancholy that caused life to look like death. At that terrible moment, life looked utterly alien and empty to me, and I felt a terrifying void. The house was empty, my life was empty, the entire world was empty. When my mother was alive, I’d had a steady source of serenity, and deep in my heart I knew that no matter how miserable the world became, I had a room to go to that always glowed with smiles and affection. But now, I was like a boat that had been cut loose from its moorings in a stormy, raging sea. Even my sister, who was caring for me with such tender affection in my illness, was bound to tell me tomorrow or the next day that she needed to return to her house and her children, and I would be left alone. Lord, was I — the pampered child — made for this kind of life?

I cast my sister a long look of gratitude and affection. I gazed into her face with a longing of which she wasn’t aware, drawn to those aspects of it that resembled my mother’s. My chest heaved, overflowing with affection and profound grief. I cast an uncertain look at my surroundings, and found Rabab’s furniture staring at me in a weird sort of way.

Feeling anxious and dejected, I said, “I’ll never be happy staying in this house. I’ll live with you, Sister.”

“That’s what I’d decided myself,” came her earnest reply. “You’re most welcome.”

Then I whispered sorrowfully in her ear, “Take me to her room so that I can look at it.”

Her eyes clouded over and filled with tears as she murmured, “You can’t get out of bed now. Besides, there’s nothing left in it.”

I pictured the empty room: four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. How like my own life!

I sighed dejectedly and murmured, “I’m so miserable.”

To which Radiya replied imploringly, “Why not put off grieving until after you’ve gotten well?”

* * *

I was bedridden for about a month. Radiya stayed with me for a week, after which she had to return home. However, she visited me every afternoon, and she wouldn’t leave me until sleep had closed my eyes. Medhat also went back to Fayoum, but he would spend the weekends with me.

By the time I entered the recovery phase, the fever had left me nothing but skin and bones. The only life I had left was in my imagination, whose vitality flourished, and which became so vigorous and active that it nearly became an obsession. There wasn’t a waking hour when I wasn’t plagued by feelings of loneliness and fear. Consequently, life seemed too arduous and terrifying to endure, and my ears were filled with that old voice which — whenever I found myself faced with afflictions — would urge me to turn tail and run away. But where would I run to? If only I could be remade as a new person, sound in body and spirit, who didn’t have fear and alienation nesting in the corners of his soul. Then I could cast myself into the midst of life’s hustle and bustle without embarrassment or feelings of aversion. I would love people and they would love me, I would help people and they would help me. I’d find pleasure in their company and they’d find pleasure in mine, and I’d become an active, useful member of their grand, collective organism.