The Mirage

by Naguib Mahfouz

  However, he said softly, “Your son’s had bad luck, Ru’ba Bey. He’s been deprived of the ability to express what’s going on in his mind. He’s a timid boy who knows nothing about the world, so show him compassion and don’t blame him.”

  “What’s this you’re saying, Abdulla Bey!” retorted my father crustily. “Timid? A virgin who doesn’t know a thing? What have you done to him? He had a sister who was a virgin, but she ran away with a man! So what stuff is he made of?”

  I felt as though someone had opened a gaping wound in my heart. The blood rushed to my grandfather’s face and his brow furrowed in anger.

  Proudly he said, “His sister chose to go to her husband after despairing of receiving justice from her father!”

  His words consoled me. However, my father let out a long laugh, his face more bloodshot than ever. He looked boorish, cruel, and revolting.

  Then he said sarcastically, “You say, ‘after she despaired of receiving justice from her father’! Allow me first to fill a glass (whereupon he filled the glass and took a swig from it). Would you like to join me? No? As you wish. After all, we all have our vices. And now, back to what you were saying: What did you say, Abdulla Bey? ‘After she despaired of receiving justice from her father’? And what about you? Haven’t you despaired of receiving justice from her father?”

  With a look of reproach and scorn, my grandfather asked, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean to say that although the girl may have given up on her father, her grandfather hasn’t, as evidenced by the fact that you’ve brought this boy to me today, not to introduce him to me as you’ve claimed—since you could have done that at any time in the past—but, rather, to inform me that he’s about to enroll in secondary school, which involves certain expenses. Hah!”

  Beside himself with rage, my grandfather roared, “I wore myself out trying to reform you in the past, and I’m a fool to try again now! I raised him till he became a man without it costing you a cent!”

  My father clapped his hands in derision. Then, his voice rising, he said, “Ah, how crafty men can be! Some time ago you came asking me to leave the boy in your care. And now you’re telling me I should be grateful to you for raising him to manhood! Well done, well done! But don’t you remember our previous agreement?”

  Seething with ire, my grandfather said, “What agreement, you …?” his tone of voice betraying his agitation. “We’re not talking about a business deal. We’re talking about your son! Where’s your sense of fatherhood and compassion?”

  “Fatherhood? Compassion?” my father asked. “What noble qualities to have! However, money corrupts them. Let’s leave idle talk aside, Abdulla Bey, since it doesn’t befit a military man like yourself who fought the wars in Sudan. You know me quite well. So, where on earth did you get the idea of coming to me with this sort of pointless request? Think it over carefully. Either you take care of him yourself as we agreed that you would, or you leave him to me.”

  When I looked at my grandfather, his face was flushed with rage. I expected him to blow up at my father. However, with a tremendous effort he managed to keep himself under control. Then he said calmly, “If it weren’t for my duty toward your son, I would never have asked such a thing of you. I’m not seeking anything for myself. Rather, I want to assure the boy’s future, especially in view of the fact that I’m an old man and might die tomorrow.”

  “If you die tomorrow, I’ll take care of him,” said my father impatiently.

  My grandfather knit his brow indignantly. I was appalled at the cruelty of what my father had said, and I hated him at that moment more than I’d ever hated him in my entire life. Then, as if his patience had run out, my grandfather rose sullenly to his feet, and I rose at the same moment as though I were fastened to him.

  Casting my father a haughty glance, he said, “I can’t say you’ve disappointed me, since I never thought well of you in the first place. However, there are mistakes we make against our will even though we know better. Good day.”

  He took me by the hand and led me out of the room as my father said disdainfully, “And a good day to you, Abdulla Bey!”

  Thus ended the first encounter between my father and me. I left it with a sense of loathing that was more than I could bear. No sooner had we walked out of the house and into the street than I breathed a sigh of relief, praying to God with all my heart that I’d never be obliged to darken his door again. As we walked toward Hilmiya Square, my grandfather quickened his pace, his head bowed and his face red. He was mumbling unintelligibly, and I began stealing glances over at him, grieved and remorseful. At the same time, I was afraid, since I felt responsible for what had led to their dispute. Then little by little his speech became more distinct, and I heard him say, as though he were talking to himself, “The barbarian! Why does God let people like that have children? Why didn’t He punish him by making him barren?!”

  He also said, “What a lout! Isn’t there even an iota of fatherly compassion in his heart? He didn’t leave the boy to us in response to our request. He sold him in return for the money he would have had to spend on him!”

  When we reached the tram stop, he fell silent. Then he glanced over at me harshly and ground his teeth.

  “And you, you little …! Will you go on being a mule for the rest of your life? Hasn’t God given you the ability to utter a kind word? What would it have cost you to pretend to feel friendly toward him? Did you think he was going to fall all over you, you fool?”

  I was terrified by his anger, just as I was terrified by anger in general, and my lips quivered like a little boy who’s about to cry. Seeing the state I was in, he began sputtering with rage.

  “How quick you are to cry!” he shouted. “What’s there to cry about? Have I been unfair to you? Have I done you some violence? I made an idiotic mistake, and all I said was that I’d made a mistake. Is that so unforgivable?”

  I didn’t utter a word the entire way home. I went on feeling grieved and disconsolate until I remembered that I was going home to my mother and that soon I’d be telling her about everything that had happened. And that made me feel better.

  13

  One day during the week that followed our meeting with my father, we received a visit from my brother Medhat. When I took a good look at his face this time, I could see that he was the spitting image of our father, and I wondered with some alarm what his lifestyle and morals would be like. Would he resemble his father in those areas the way he did in his physical constitution? I gave him a strange look that day that no one took any notice of. At the same time, I loved him dearly, just as he loved us. When my mother chided him for not visiting us more often, he said to her, “You, of all people, know what madmen’s morals are like!”

  His quip sent me into gales of laughter, and I looked over at my brother with gratitude.

  Then he turned toward me and said regretfully, “I heard about what happened during your last meeting with our father.”

  “Did he tell you about it?” asked my mother with interest.

  “No,” he said with a laugh. “Uncle Adam the gatekeeper did.”

  “The gatekeeper!” I cried censoriously, feeling quite indignant. “Was he eavesdropping?”

  “No,” Medhat assured me. “He has no need to, since my father fills him in on every little thing that happens to him. Uncle Adam is father’s long-time confidant and hears everything that’s on his mind, though most of the time he’s the butt of his sharp tongue. I can’t tell you how badly I feel about the attitude he took toward Grandpa. I wish I could have seen him here today so that I could kiss his hand and apologize to him.”

  We went on talking for a long time. Medhat was a skilled conversationalist who knew how to communicate with ease and warmth. His laugh was loud like his father’s, though without his father’s coldness or harshness. Hence, it wasn’t long before I’d come to love and admire him, and I wished I had some of his joviality and ease of expression. Eventually the conversation came around to the sub
ject of his future. He’d completed the Intermediate Agricultural Certificate in the summer of that year, and he said, “I went to see my uncle in Fayoum in hopes that he might help me find a job through one of his acquaintances, but he didn’t take to the idea of my looking for work with the government. Instead, he proposed that I practice on his farm for a high wage with the idea that he would rent out some land to me in the near future. I saw his offer as a way to start making a good living through agriculture, so I accepted it.”

  As for my mother, she wasn’t so sanguine about the idea.

  “Wouldn’t it be more respectable to get a job with the government?” she objected.

  My brother let forth a long laugh, then said, “My diploma doesn’t qualify me for a decent job. But my uncle can give me valuable work opportunities and the chance to make a fortune.”

  “And live the rest of your life in Fayoum?”

  “It’s a suburb of Cairo!” he replied consolingly.

  “For so long I’ve hoped for the day when you could be on your own and we could live together!”

  He kissed her hand gently and said with a smile, “You’ll see me so often, you’ll get sick of me!”

  Then he bade us farewell and departed.

  Heaving a deep sigh, my mother said forlornly, “He spent the first half of his life in that madman’s house, and he’ll spend the latter half off in Fayoum!”

  After a moment’s reflection, she said as if talking to herself, “His uncle didn’t make that offer just because he happens to like him so much. He must be planning to marry Medhat to one of his daughters.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” I asked ingenuously.

  In response, she cast me a strange look. More than once she began to speak, but thought better of it and held her tongue.

  My mother’s hunch proved correct. It wasn’t long before we received a letter from Medhat, informing us of his engagement to his paternal cousin, telling us the wedding date, and inviting us to attend. Scandalized that he would have become engaged without consulting her first, my mother made no attempt to conceal her indignation.

  “Do you see how that madman’s brother has gone and stolen my son?” she asked my grandfather furiously.

  We didn’t attend because I fell ill not long before the wedding and was bedridden for two weeks. Hence, my mother forgot all about the wedding with its joys and sorrows. And thus it was that Medhat’s nuptials were attended by neither his mother nor his father.

  Commenting sardonically as usual, my grandfather said, “God created this family as one of the wonders of mankind. Every family is a unit except this one, which is scattered this way and that and never comes together. O God, Your pardon and good pleasure!”

  The summer drew to a close and it was nearly time for the schools to be back in session, so my grandfather enrolled me in Saidiya. We went there together, and on the way he said, “If you were really a man, you wouldn’t need me to come with you, but you’re seventeen years old and you still don’t know the way to Giza. Memorize the route we take to get there. I was an officer at your age!”

  My grandfather was putting on a show of discontent and offense. However, in my heart I sensed that he was happy, even overjoyed, and I could feel his affection wrapped about me. Consequently, it shamed me to think of all the trouble he was going to for my sake even though by this time he was a seventy-year-old man.

  When we came home, he thumped me gently with his cane, saying, “You’re now a student at Saidiya, so do your best and make us proud. I want to see you an officer before I pass away.”

  And I prayed with all my heart for him to be granted length of days.

  He fell silent for quite some time. Then, without any apparent occasion, he said, “Back in my generation, a primary school certificate was a great thing. In fact, it was rightly considered the equivalent of the highest degrees they give out these days.”

  Then he continued with a nod of his head, saying, “Those were the days! And we were real men!”

  14

  The summer vacation ended and I was smitten with gloom. School was the bane of my existence, and I genuinely and profoundly detested it. It was true, of course, that I was about to start out at a new school that was associated in my mind with manliness and glory. However, it was still a school, which meant that like any other school, it would have scheduled times, classrooms, students, teachers, punishments, and lessons that were bound to be more difficult than the ones in primary school.

  On the first Saturday morning of October I woke up early, four months since the last time I’d had to engage in this wearisome habit. I put on a suit, spruced myself up as usual and chose a necktie out of my grandfather’s wardrobe. My mother took a long look at me, then said to me with satisfaction, “You’re as beautiful as the moon, I swear to God! You’ve got your mother’s face, but with a fair complexion the likes of which I’ve never had. May the Merciful One’s care protect you.”

  She instructed me to be careful when I walked, got on and off the tram, and crossed the street, then uttered a long prayer of supplication for me. When I left the house, she stood on the balcony watching me till I rounded the bend and disappeared from view. I kept walking, all the while feeling worried and dejected until I reached the tram station on Qasr al-Aini Street. As I stood waiting for the tram alone for the first time in my life, I had a sense of independence that I’d never had before. The feeling consoled me and afforded me some relief from the distress I was suffering. Then suddenly I began to entertain the hope of beginning a new life—a life untroubled by the misery that had been my constant companion at the Aqqadin School. I thought to myself: Here I am on my way to a new school. I’ll be meeting new people, so why can’t I turn over a new leaf? Just maybe, if I applied myself diligently, could I avoid the teachers’ cruelty? And if I managed to be friendly toward the other students, I could win their affection and keep them from despising me. It’s something that lots of other people can do, so why should I be the only one who can’t? A joyous enthusiasm danced in my heart, and I said to myself: If I succeed in what I’ve failed at in the past, I can make a good life for myself.

  In this way I endeared to myself the school life I’d been fated to endure whether I liked it or not, and I continued on my way to Saidiya, luxuriating in the new hope that had sprung up suddenly in my heart at the tram station.

  However, life at the new school was harsher than hope had given me to believe. My extreme shyness and aversion to people prevented me from making a single friend, while my tendency to daydream made my diligent efforts go up in smoke. And oh, the suffering I endured on account of that tendency! It robbed me of my senses and of all ability to pay attention and focus my thoughts. Hence, it made me easy prey for teachers. During the second week of my new school life, I was jolted awake from a daydream by the teacher’s ruler as it struck my forehead, and by his voice as he asked me menacingly, “I said, what borders it on the north?”

  I gazed into his face in bewilderment, so terrified I even forgot to stand up.

  “Please be so kind as to stand when you answer your father’s servant!” he screeched.

  I rose to my feet in a fright, then stood there motionless without making any reply.

  Slapping me on the cheek, he shouted, “What borders it on the north?”

  When I failed to come out of my silence, he slapped me on my other cheek.

  Then he said, “Leaving aside for the moment what borders it on the north, what is the ‘it’ that I’m asking you about?”

  My cheeks ablaze, I persisted in my silence. He struck me successively on the right cheek, then the left without my daring to cover my face with my hand until, his rage quenched, he ordered me to sit down. Part of the class broke out in loud laughter, and I sat there fighting back the tears. Once again, then, I’d become the butt of teachers’ harassment and students’ ridicule. I nursed my wounds in silence, consumed by despair. With hope extinguished and my new effort having ended so quickly in failure, I rever
ted to my accustomed misery. Even so, clinging to a fine thread of hope, I devoted all my time to studying. I’d pore over my books for hours on end, but the effort was all but wasted. For while my eyes were fixed on the page, my imagination would be soaring through valleys of dreams, and I had no ability to rein it in. Stirred by physical desire and populated by ill-mannered servant girls, my daydreams would generally end with the infernal habit to which I’d been addicted since I reached puberty. Not a night would go by but that I would be melted down in its furnace with an affected pleasure followed by prolonged, painful regret.

  I wasn’t utterly passive in the face of my desire to make friends, but my efforts in this area met with utter failure. For one thing, the desire for friendship was countered by a genuine predilection for solitude, an aversion to and fear of people, and an introversion that thrust me into an excessive concern for privacy. I didn’t like anyone to know my secrets, nor even where I lived or how old I was. This was compounded by an inability to engage in conversation or catch on to people’s jokes, still less make up any of my own. Consequently, none of the other students found anything about me to like. They went back to accusing me of being disagreeable, and I lived a friendless existence. At the same time, though, I didn’t see myself as I really was. I accused others rather than myself of the faults that had deprived me of friendship, and for some time I believed that I had no friends because there wasn’t anyone who was good enough for me. Incredible, the conceit and self-deception a person is capable of: the heavens and the earth aren’t vast enough to contain them. Despite my faults and shortcomings, I used to imagine sometimes that I was the embodiment of absolute perfection. Hence, my deadly shyness was good manners, my academic failure was a genius that was slow to develop, and my abject poverty where friendship and love were concerned was a sign of superiority. Psychology—which we studied in the fifth year—supplied me with mysterious-sounding terms that I put to use in satisfying my false pride. Even so, I was weighed down by hours of desolation during which I would almost glimpse the truth.