The Mirage by Naguib Mahfouz
What’s wrong with me? I wondered. I love her with everything in me! In fact, I adore her, and if she were to be absent from my home now, I would surely perish. Does the tragedy lie in the unexpected distress I felt from looking at her body? But that’s ridiculous, since I’d already died before I looked, so what I saw has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, I was quickly getting used to a reality that I hadn’t been aware of before, and childish delusions had nearly been defeated in the face of this true reality. Apart from this, nothing about me had changed. I was deeply affected by her embarrassment and discomfort as she put on her clothes, and I thought to myself: I swear I won’t remove another article of her clothing until God changes me!
Meanwhile, our days passed in pristine love, and our spirits merged until they were a single spirit in two separate bodies. If it hadn’t been for her deep love, her spontaneous exuberance, and the simplicity of her big heart, I would have died of sorrow.
They were extraordinary days, and it was a strange honeymoon. My beloved was the very essence of spirited feeling, perfect gentleness, and sincere affection. I would often steal searching, doubtful glances at her, and all I would see was serenity, gentle-heartedness, and contentment. It nearly persuaded me that she lacked nothing. Yet I can honestly say that those were the only moments when I experienced any sort of relief. At all other times, my life was a blazing inferno of which no one else knew. Happiness was limited to fleeting, scattered moments, like the occasional flashes of lucidity experienced by someone in the throes of death.
I was intensely aware of my need for someone to advise me, but my shyness stood as an impenetrable barrier between me and those from whom I might have sought counsel. Consequently, it was impossible for me to seek advice from anyone. The very thought of doing so would set a fire ablaze inside me and arouse an irresistible urge to flee. And as if that weren’t enough, I didn’t have any friends to begin with. My mother, who was the only friend I had in the world, was the last person I would have wanted to broach this particular subject with. Hence, I endured my affliction in a despairing, lonely silence.
The days were tolerable. In fact, they were happy thanks to my sweetheart, whose spirit would melt away anyone’s worries. When night fell, however, a pall of gloom would descend upon us that nothing in the world could dispel. Both of us were feeling ill at ease, anguished, and afraid. After the failures of those first two nights, I didn’t have the courage to try again. Instead, I contented myself with lying down beside her and holding her close to me as I waited—fearful, anxious, and restless—for the descent of mercy, when sleep would deliver me from my torment. Timidity continued to be a barrier between us. If we could have been physically united, the barrier would have been lifted little by little, but I wasn’t able to confide in her about my concern. There were countless times when I wished I could get things off my chest by talking, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than I’d close it again, flustered and ashamed.
On one such occasion she asked me in a whisper, “Were you wanting to say something?”
In her question I could hear an invitation to talk, and my heart started beating like mad.
However, with an agitation that I managed to conceal only with difficulty, I said, “I always want to say I love you!”
This was true in and of itself. However, I really did want to say something else, and I sensed that she could read my unspoken thoughts. The burden of having uttered an untruth weighed on me miserably.
After a bitter struggle with my timidity I murmured, “What we’ve shared so far is nothing compared to what we have in store for us.”
I thought I saw her blush, though it may just have been the effect of the nightlight’s soft glow. She caressed my hair with her fingertips. Then she kissed me sweetly on the lips, drew her mouth up to my ear and asked, “Is there something bothering you?”
My body was ablaze with embarrassment and pain as I said earnestly, “Not at all.”
I fell silent in spite of myself, my heart throbbing violently.
Then, wishing I could make myself invisible, I said, “It’s just a matter of time.”
This was how the days passed. And again I say: if it hadn’t been for her deep love, her spontaneous exuberance, and the simplicity of her big heart, I would have died of sorrow.
One evening, three weeks after our wedding, I noticed her stealing uncertain glances at me, and she seemed to have something to say.
Wanting to encourage her to talk, I said, “You look as though there’s something you’d like to say.”
“Yes,” she said with a nervous smile.
I went over to where she was sitting on the bench and sat down next to her.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked, still hoping to bring her out of herself.
“My mother …,” she replied.
The word went off in my ear like a bomb. It was nothing but a single word, but it contained an entire book. And I, stupid as I was, understood what it meant. Perhaps the mother had been facing her with a certain well-known, natural question, and was hearing a single reply that had yet to change: “No … not yet!”
After a long silence my beloved said gently, “She never stops asking me, and I don’t know why she’s so impatient.”
Mortified and furious at the same time, I said calmly, “These things are our business and no one else’s. Isn’t that right?”
“Of course,” she said apologetically. “She just wants to make sure we’re doing all right, that’s all.”
Grieved and distressed, I asked, “What did you say to her?”
“I didn’t say anything at all,” she replied hastily and a bit uneasily. “I just told her there was no reason to be in a hurry.”
“And what did she say?”
She thought for some time as if to weigh her words. Then she said, “She told me that this type of situation isn’t an easy one, especially for a shy young man who’s lived a pure life, and if necessary, we could call on our cook, Sabah.”
“Sabah!” I cried in consternation, my eyes wide with amazement.
Flustered, she nodded in the affirmative.
“And what could Sabah do?” I asked in astonishment.
She hesitated for a moment, then began explaining what had been lost on me in the beginning. I listened to her with rapt attention until I’d understood everything, and little by little I began coming out of my stupor. I have to confess that I was relieved at the mother’s suggestion, since it would remove an obstacle from my path and relieve me of some responsibility, as well as exempt me from the mother’s surveillance. After all, once it was done, I didn’t think she would ask about anything again.
“And how will we tell Sabah?” I asked hesitantly.
“Sabah heard part of the conversation between my mother and me,” she said simply.
Feeling both embarrassed and irritated, I cried, “How on earth could that be?”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” she said with a smile. “She’s my mother, too, and we don’t hide anything from her.”
We exchanged a long, silent look.
Then I asked apprehensively, “Has anyone else learned of this?”
“No one at all,” she said unequivocally.
I was relieved. However, still feeling the need for more assurance, I said meaningfully, “I hope our ‘secrets’ won’t leave this room!”
“Do you really have any doubt about that?” she asked with a reproachful look.
43
But that’s not everything in marriage, I reminded myself. How could it be, when it was a “duty” that Sabah was capable of performing? With laughable naiveté, I wondered what our married life could possibly lack. After all, was such a thing really necessary in this life? Strangely, I hesitated to give a definitive reply to the question. Aren’t we happy? I wondered. We’re living comfortably and contentedly, we love each other with all our hearts, and no one could possibly doubt our happiness. So why am I troubled by illusions? However, human beings ar
Then one night as I lay on my back waiting for sleep to overtake me and as my beloved lay slumbering beside me, my thoughts took me to such faraway places that I forgot what was around me, or nearly so. There came over me a feeling of loneliness that was reinforced by the surrounding darkness. Then, ever so gradually, I felt an energy pulsating in my body, like the energy that used to be stirred up by darkness and loneliness. Beside myself with joy, I nearly shouted out loud. I turned to my slumbering beloved, wakening her with kisses until she opened her eyes with an irritation that soon turned to bewilderment. Several seconds passed before she came to. Then she put her arms around my neck and I drew her to me with passionate longing. However, no sooner had I done so than everything went back to the way it had been before. In less than a second, frigid death had stolen into my body, then taken it over entirely, and I reverted to a state of wordless confusion and humiliation. We exchanged a strange look in the night’s soft glow, and judging from the look on her face, she hadn’t understood a thing.
“Were you dreaming?” she asked.
What a fitting word she’d chosen, however arbitrary the choice. The incident shook me so violently, it put an end forever to the faint hopes I’d occasionally entertained. I experienced similar moments of solitude in the darkness of the night when my beloved was sound asleep and the strange pulsations would come back to me, but I didn’t have the courage to wake her up again. Instead, I found myself descending anew into the abyss from which marriage had extricated me just a month earlier. And without understanding how, I became enslaved once again to the infernal habit that no husband before me had ever known. The confusion and pain I felt were indescribable. How could this happen to me when I worshipped the very ground she walked on? How could it happen, when a single glance at her face was more precious to me than the world and all its consolations? She was my happiness, my world, my very life!
One day I noticed that she seemed to want to talk about something that was on her mind. My heart began fluttering with anxiety and fear. However, I couldn’t ignore what I saw, and I preferred to meet the danger head-on rather than add something new to the litany of secret worries and obsessive thoughts that were already plaguing me.
“What’s on your mind, sweetheart?”
Looking anguished and hesitant, she made no reply.
More worried than ever, I said fearfully, “Tell me what it is, and don’t hide anything from me.”
Then with a frustrated sigh she said, “My mother.”
What she’d said struck terror in my heart. What was wrong with this woman, who refused to live and let live? How I detested her at that moment.
However, feigning nonchalance, I said, “What about her, Rabab?”
With her eyes glued to her feet she said softly, “She keeps asking me if there’s something ‘on the way.’ ”
Amazingly, I caught on right away to what she meant by the figure of speech. I understood by instinct, or perhaps by virtue of an unspoken fear.
Even so, I asked, “What do you mean, Rabab?”
Pointing to her stomach she whispered, “She means: is there anything new here!”
Unnerved, I looked down, grieved and not knowing what to say. What was the woman really asking about? Perhaps she wanted to know about other things indirectly. Be that as it may, I felt unspeakably bitter toward her. I stole a glance over at Rabab and found her looking somber and pensive. Was she really upset about her mother’s question, or did she have some other motive for telling me about it? Had she come to share her mother’s concern and apprehension? And why would she hide behind her mother? Guile didn’t befit someone with her beauty and purity of heart! Besides, there was no need for her to beat around the bush. And thus it was that fear prevented me from appreciating the position that my poor girl found herself in. I was embarrassed to the point of exhaustion. However, I focused my attention on a single aim, namely, determining how much Madame Nazli knew of our secrets.
“What did you say to her?” I inquired.
“I told her the truth,” she said simply.
“The truth!” I cried fearfully, my heart convulsing sharply.
“What’s wrong?” she asked with a bewildered stare.
“Did you really tell her the truth?!” I shouted.
“Yes,” she stammered quickly. “I told her there wasn’t anything new!”
And with that, I heaved a sigh of relief! She’d been referring to a “truth” other than the one I’d had in mind. Yet I was still bothered.
“Rabab,” I said fervently, “is that all she said? Please don’t hide anything from me. You know how much you mean to me!”
I could see the innocence in her eyes as she said uneasily, “What are you wondering about, Kamil? I didn’t tell her a thing more than what I’ve told you. She asked me about the matter, and I had no choice but to answer her honestly. As you know, it’s something it wouldn’t do any good to lie about. Do you think I was wrong? Or did you want me to pretend to be pregnant?”
Somewhat relieved, I said, “Of course not, sweetheart. You did the right thing by being honest.”
To myself, though, I was thinking: I’ll never know a moment’s rest as long as that woman is near me. O Lord! I’m keeping my worries all to myself, without a single friend or advisor to my name. I’ve had it with her mother, my mother, and myself! Then the old question came back to me: Is the thing we lack really necessary for married life? Does my beloved experience the same sorts of animal desires that drove me to take up my iniquitous habit? Is it conceivable that my pristine, chaste beloved would feel that same sort of untamed lust? The possibility was too abhorrent to imagine!
At last my vacation came to an end and I went back to the warehousing section at the ministry, where the employees gave me a warm welcome back. I didn’t have a single friend among them, but the nature of the occasion—namely, a newlywed husband’s return from his honeymoon—caused them to forget their usual reserve, and they approached me, some of them with congratulations and others with jokes, all of which I received with discomfort and embarrassment. They talked a lot, and one of them warned me against overdoing it. They got so involved in their conversation, in fact, that they forgot all about me. They got on the subject of the nature of man and nature of the woman and started citing examples, incidents, and anecdotes. My heart burdened and my soul in agony, I listened to them covertly while pretending to examine the typewriter. How I wished one of them would cite a case like mine! However, “a case like mine” hadn’t even occurred to any of them. I listened till I thought my head would burst. Rabab was a woman. So, was what was true of other women—if the things I’d heard from the other employees were accurate—true of her also? Might she be getting bored with me? On the other hand, she seemed content. Never once had I seen her face but that it was aglow with happiness. Never once had she looked at me with anything but love and devotion, and surely her face wouldn’t lie. On the contrary, it was like an open book that couldn’t possibly conceal deceit or wrongdoing. They were lying! They were animals, and they saw other people as animals like themselves. However, I wasn’t fully reassured, and I wasn’t going to be reassured no matter how I tried to convince myself that things were all right. After all, the seed of doubt had been planted now.
When I was alone with my beloved that day, I looked pensively at her for a long time without saying a word.
Laughing, she said, “Do you miss your old habit of looking at me without talking?”
A pleasant gentle breeze wafted over my heart as I thought back to the old days when my heart was aflame, hope was alive, and the possibility of an ordeal like the one I was going through hadn’t so much as occurred to me. I drank in the memory with relish.
“Rabab,” I said apprehensively, “are you happy?”
She look
Then, looking down diffidently I asked, “Do you love me?”
She’d been sitting a handspan away from me, and when she heard my question, she moved over toward me till we were touching, looked up at me with a blush and murmured, “Yes, I do!”
I put my arm around her waist and kissed her lips and her cheeks. Then I took her lovely, petite hand in mine and began kissing her fingertips one at a time with tenderness and ardor. By what I had said, I’d actually been trying to prepare the way to talk about what I’d been keeping to myself with such grievous consequences. But when I was about to speak, I lost my nerve, and my tongue too. I wanted to tell her what was bothering me and confess to her that the problem I was facing in relation to her was a strange, passing thing that I didn’t understand. I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t been this way, and in fact, still wasn’t this way when I found myself alone, and I wanted to ask her for counsel and help. These were the kinds of things I’d wanted to say. However, my determination gave out on me and I retreated in helplessness, conceding defeat as usual. Then I started justifying my retreat to myself, saying: It might offend her or make her angry for me to reveal such secrets. In fact, it might ruin her happiness forever!