The Mirage

by Naguib Mahfouz

  Then she said breathlessly, “Don’t look at me that way! I really did make a mistake, but it’s your fault that I made it! You took me by surprise, and I got flustered. Then I fell into a needless lie.”

  Lord, how I needed to be delivered. How badly I longed for a drop of rain to wet my parched being.

  “It was a letter,” I said in consternation.

  “Yes, it was!” she rejoined hurriedly. “It had seemed trivial to me until you got suspicious over it. You got an angry look on your face, thinking that this trivial thing was something serious, so I tried to get out of the situation by lying. And then what happened, happened.”

  More confused than ever now, I asked her, “If it was a letter, then who sent it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sighing in exasperation, I said, “What sorts of riddles are these?”

  Getting over her fright little by little and heartened by the fact that my anger had abated, she said hopefully, “Let me tell you the story of this ill-fated letter in a nutshell. I received it at school this morning, and I was shocked, since I’m not used to getting letters from anybody. When I opened it I found that it was unsigned and that all it was was shameless nonsense. So it had been written by some vulgar person! I was really angry at first, but after that I didn’t let it bother me. I decided to keep it so that I could show it to you, since I thought I’d let it be a surprise that would give you a good laugh. But after you came home I changed my mind, since I was afraid it would cause you needless offense. So I hid it from you until I thought you’d left the house, then I got it out of my purse and reread it. I’d been intending to tear it up, but you took me by surprise when I was reading it. I realized the delicate position I was in, and it wasn’t possible anymore for me to admit the truth. So, as I told you before, I fell into a lie, but I’m being punished for it in a way I don’t deserve.”

  I listened to her with my undivided attention. However, when she came to the end of her story, I stood motionless and ambivalent. I feared the potential consequences of the madness that had overtaken me, yet it wasn’t easy simply to believe her and let it go. I was in the grip of a deadly uncertainty. I prayed for God to deliver me from it, and to grant me the insight I needed to penetrate to the depths of this lovely soul that seemed to have been made to torment me.

  Worn out with thinking and indecision, I said, half to myself, “Who sent it?”

  As if the question had pained her, she looked down, her brow furrowed, and said, “I told you it was anonymous.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I exclaimed.

  With a pained, miserable look on her face, she stamped her foot on the floor and said, “Are you accusing me of lying, Kamil, after I’ve told you the truth? I can’t take this!”

  Pained by her distress, I said, “I mean, what good would it do the person to send you the letter if he didn’t give any indication of his identity? Had he sent you a letter previous to this one?”

  “This is the first letter I’ve received.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “Silly things,” she said wearily as she looked down again.

  I thought back suddenly to the sight of her hands as they tore up the letter, and I felt a pang of suspicion that caused my body to tremble with fright.

  “Why did you tear it up?” I shouted. “Why did you tear it up?”

  She let out a sigh of near despair, then remained silent for some time.

  Finally she said in calm resignation, “I received this miserable letter at school. I don’t think you can possibly doubt this, since it would have been madness for him to send it to the house. And now, ask yourself this question: Why would I have kept the letter and brought it home if it contained something suspicious? Why didn’t I tear it up at school after reading it there?”

  Silenced by the cogency of her argument, I think I regretted my wild shouting.

  As for Rabab, she continued, “If I were guilty, you wouldn’t find me in this bad position, and you wouldn’t know a thing about it. I’ll never forgive you for thinking ill of me.”

  Stung by her words and painfully embarrassed, I lowered my glance lest she see the signs of defeat in my eyes. Yet, pained though I was, I hadn’t forgotten the mysteries I wanted to resolve.

  “What you’re saying is plausible,” I said softly, “but maybe the person who wrote the letter didn’t sign it because he thought it would be easy for you to guess who he is—somebody who stops you on the street, for example.”

  My gentle tone of voice did nothing to mitigate the effect of my words. In fact, it may even have exacerbated it.

  “It’s my habit when I walk down the street to look straight ahead and not pay any attention to anybody!” she said resentfully.

  I knew well enough the truth of her words, having experienced it first-hand. However, in my mind’s eye I could see the two men who had shared my admiration for her in the past.

  So I asked, “Might it not be your former neighbor, the one who asked for your hand? I mean Muhammad Gawdat.”

  She replied without hesitation, “He’s a dignified man who would never lower himself to such vulgar manners. Besides, I found out from my family around a month ago that he’s about to get married.”

  After some thought, I said uncertainly, “During the same period when I used to hover around you, there was a heavy man that would regularly devour you with his eyes. Isn’t it possible that he wrote it?”

  She knit her brow in an attempt to recall the person I was talking about. Then she shook her head, saying, “I don’t know anything about him.”

  I tried to remind her of who he was, but she seemed not even to have been aware of his existence.

  So, feeling angry and desperate, I said, “I want to know who he is so that I can put him in his place.”

  In a tired-sounding voice she said, “Who cares who it was! If I hadn’t been so flustered that I tore it up, we’d be sitting here now reading it and laughing about it! So why don’t you just forget about it? It’s caused us enough grief as it is!”

  I bit my lip and said nothing, still feeling angered and defeated.

  Then she continued, “It’s a trivial matter. In fact, it’s too trivial for us to be getting so concerned about it.”

  Heaving a sigh, I said mechanically, “If only you hadn’t torn it up!”

  “Are you still suspicious of me?” she asked me sharply, her eyes flashing with anger.

  “No,” I replied hurriedly, “but I won’t find any peace until I can teach him a lesson!”

  Irritably she replied, “But we don’t know who he is, so what can we do?”

  I was angered by what she’d said, but I avoided expressing how I felt lest I make her angry too. Apparently exhausted from standing, she moved over to the chair by the dressing table and sat down. At the same moment I felt a pain in my back, so I went over and sat on the edge of the bed. She was innocent and telling the truth, and the matter really was trivial. If only I could erase the memory of her tearing up that letter! Maybe the culprit was just some curious bystander who watched her coming and going. If only I didn’t fall prey so easily to jealousy. I knew myself well, and I knew that I could feel jealous of an illusion, that is, of nothing. So where could I find a far-away island on which no man had ever set foot?

  Then suddenly my imagination took me to my mother’s room, and a chill went through me as I imagined her saying to me, “Didn’t I tell you so?”

  I exhaled forcefully like someone trying to drive away a bad dream. I glanced over at Rabab and found her staring into my face in dismay.

  Then a new thought occurred to me that I didn’t hesitate to express.

  “Rabab,” I said, “why do you go on working for the government? Why do you endure such hardship unnecessarily? Why aren’t you content to stay at home like other wives?”

  After looking at me long and hard, she said calmly, “Don’t you trust me?”

  “God forbid that I shouldn’t trust you!” I said hurriedly, �
��But I.…”

  Interrupting me, she said, “If you don’t trust me, it’s better for me to leave your house!”

  “Rabab!”

  Ignoring my anguish, she said, “But if you do still trust me, I’ll stay at my job.”

  “As you wish,” I said with resignation.

  Then in the same tone she said, “I don’t want to hear another word on this subject.”

  And so it was. I left the house and went wandering about aimlessly till I was totally exhausted, then I went home again. We met as though nothing had happened between us. We had supper together, then went to our room and exchanged a meaningful look.

  Then, in spite of ourselves, we burst out laughing. We went to bed and lay down, and I gave her a good-night kiss. For some strange reason, I was tempted to make another attempt at what we had agreed to avoid. Even stranger is the fact that I didn’t have an ounce of confidence, yet I still almost tried, and would have done so if fear hadn’t brought me back to my senses. It occurred to me to ask her what had made her sentence herself to deprivation. My lips parted and I voiced the question in my heart, yet it froze on the tip of my tongue. And fear, again, was what stopped me.

  50

  When I opened my eyes in the early morning, I recalled the events of the previous day and pondered them in amazement. It seemed to me now that the issue hadn’t called for so much suffering and pain. And I said to myself: If she’d torn up the letter at school, I never would have known about it, and the fact that she didn’t do that is testimony to her truthfulness. Then I recalled the image of her as she tore up the letter and threw it out the window, and it was as though she’d been tearing my heart to shreds and scattering them to the wind. Before I got out of bed, a violent shudder went through my body and I shook my head angrily, as though to shake off the illusions that had accumulated there. When we’d finished our breakfast and were sitting on the long seat sipping our tea, I looked over at her furtively and found her beloved face to be serene, smiling, and radiant with beauty and peace. Seeing her this way, I was stricken with remorse for the way I’d acted toward her, and I said to myself: Truly, Satan is an accursed tempter! The next morning a thought came to me like lightning: Isn’t it possible, I wondered, that she received the letter at home and that she hadn’t had the chance to tear it up elsewhere? But I soon rejected the idea. After all, it was ridiculous, as she had said herself, to think that anybody could be so foolish as to send a love letter to the husband’s home. Curses on illusions! My beloved was worthy of all trust, and trust is everything. If it weren’t for trust, there’s no telling what evil people might perpetrate.

  We went out together and got on the tram. Many people may have been looking at us enviously, but could they imagine how we actually lived together? Indeed, what odd worlds are contained within people’s souls. And the oddest of them all was the case of Rabab. How could she spurn marital relations with such peculiar resolve? How I longed to know her thoughts! As I thought about these things, I felt the need for a counselor to relate things to and listen to. Never before had I felt so lonely, isolated, or vulnerable. It was natural, of course, for me to think of my sole counselor in life, namely, my mother. Yet the minute she came to mind, I was gripped by shame and anger. After all, it would have been easier to announce my worries to the entire world than confide them to my mother!

  Could I get to the bottom of the mystery by myself? Was it possible that God had made her a chaste creature for whom life could only be sweet if she was celibate? It was a plausible hypothesis, which was supported by the data. Nor did I regret this actuality, since if it hadn’t been for this very fact, I would have been in an awkward position indeed. It was also a fact that my contact with her, even at the happiest of times, had never been without a vague anxiety and fear. It was during the time when she was distancing herself from me that my impotence had recurred. Consequently, I refused to see myself as anything but the victim of my beloved’s eccentricity, the ransom for her happiness. When I’d reached this point in my thinking—by which time I’d almost arrived at the ministry—my mind went into a jumble and I felt an overwhelming anxiety that I couldn’t explain. There seemed to be every reason for complete peace of mind, yet I was enveloped by an agonizing confusion, and I entered the ministry in a daze. Who was the scoundrel who had written that letter? It was quite reasonable to assume that he wasn’t the dignified Muhammad Gawdat. So who might it have been? Mightn’t it have been the other young man, the fat one with the disdainful look? It wasn’t unlikely. He was within my reach. In fact, I knew the spot where he stood waiting every morning. Had she really been unaware of him, or had she just been pretending not to notice him? At the same time, I hoped fervently that he wasn’t the one, since I hadn’t forgotten for a single moment that he could fell me with a single blow. I thought to myself bitterly: If she’d just kept the letter, I could have done anything. But what did I mean by “anything”? I didn’t know exactly. Be that as it may, I found myself obsessing about the matter again after it appeared to have been resolved. By God, I thought, she only tore it up to keep me from reading it. O Lord, was I descending into the infernal abyss again? Let her beware of going too far!

  On the other hand, I thought, anyone who would allow himself to doubt Rabab doesn’t deserve to be part of the human race. Might it not be best for me to ask her over the phone whether she’s received any more letters? I had an overwhelming urge to do so, but I was prevented by fear. In fact, an inner voice told me to run away. But who would I be running away from? And where would I go? I must be either crazy or just childish, I thought. In reality, we’re a happy married couple, but my mind is perverse. Ah, if only I could delete yesterday from the record! If only the memory of her tearing up that letter could be erased from my imagination! And here’s a new thought: If she read the letter at school, then why did she reread it in our room? Did it give her pleasure to reread it, or was she confirming a rendezvous? My forehead was about to explode from the intensity of my thoughts. When I left the ministry that day, the pleasant outdoor air ministered to me with a spirit of its own. I breathed in deeply and felt a refreshment that restored my tranquility. Then I started telling myself over and over: What a fool I am! When I arrived home, Rabab greeted me with a bright smile. My features relaxed and I asked her with a laugh, “Is there anything new?”

  “You mean any new letters?”

  “Yes,” I replied, still laughing.

  “No,” she said, smiling, “the mail’s stopped coming.”

  I left the house that afternoon without any particular destination in mind, and no sooner had I settled into my place on the tram than a lovely idea came to me, namely, to visit Sayyida Zaynab. For many years her tomb had been my refuge and sanctuary. I had no hesitations about acting on the desire, and it suddenly filled my being. When I crossed the mosque’s threshold, a breeze of blissful relief came wafting over me, and my head was filled with memories dear to my heart. In my mind’s eye I saw myself walking to the sacred tomb with my hand in my mother’s. I remembered the day when she’d brought me to repent of the sin that had now become almost second nature to me. The memory left a sense of such shame and remorse that I felt an urge to turn around and flee, but I kept on walking. I walked around the tomb reciting the Fatiha, drawing courage from my sense of lowliness and from the status I’d enjoyed since childhood with the saintly figure to whom it belonged. I placed my hand on the door and murmured beseechingly, “O Umm Hashim, you of all people know the goodness of my heart. You of all people know that never in my life have I harbored ill will toward anyone. So cause my reward to be in keeping with the things I’ve done. This is my prayer, Good Lady.” Then I retreated into a corner and sat cross-legged on the floor. My nostrils were penetrated by a sweet aroma that may have been some perfume being sprayed by a magzub, while the sounds of the supplications being made by those circumambulating the shrine filled its corners with melodic echoes. A sheikh passed near me chanting verses from the Holy Qur’an in a hushed voice,
and I remembered how I’d fallen away from the religion’s obligatory rites to the point where the only thing I did regularly anymore was to fast during Ramadan. I thought to myself: If I returned to the right guidance found in the prescribed prayers, might not my heart find serenity and assurance, and might I not experience relief from the burden of anxiety and fear? Despite the pain it had endured, my heart had continued to find refuge in the prophets and the guidance they brought, and to drink deeply from a wellspring of cool, pure waters. I was flooded with a tranquility so profound, I wanted to soak up all I could of the wholesome, untainted serenity that I was experiencing in those moments. In that peace-induced rapture, my sufferings appeared to me as nothing but a fine thread in the fabric of destiny’s invincible sway over all that is, and I was drawn into a state of contentment and surrender. A cloudlessness of the spirit set my soul in an upward spiral until I reached a pinnacle of bliss beyond anything I’d ever hoped for. It was as though my heart were a branch in paradise, swaying aloft as the dove of peace sat cooing upon it. I remained in this euphoric state for I don’t know how long until all of a sudden, my imagination was intruded upon by the image of a panic-stricken Rabab tearing up the letter. Thus was I awakened, cruelly and forcefully, from my blissful reverie like someone jolted out of his slumber by a violent earthquake. I sighed out of a wounded heart, then rose to my feet, recited the Fatiha one more time and left the mosque. As I was coming out the door, I happened to see a geomancer. I have faith in such people just the way my mother did. I waited until a group of inquirers who’d gathered around him had gone their ways, then I came up to him timidly and asked him to read my fortune. The man began making hollows in the sand with his thumb and moving his seashells back and forth between them. Clad in a white garment, he was pallid and thin as a mummy, and he had lost all his teeth except for his upper incisors.

  “You think and worry a lot,” he said.