The Mirage Read online

  NAGUIB MAHFOUZ

  THE MIRAGE

  Naguib Mahfouz was one of the most prominent writers of Arabic fiction in the twentieth century. He was born in 1911 in Cairo and began writing at the age of seventeen. His first novel was published in 1939. Throughout his career, he wrote nearly forty novel-length works and hundreds of short stories. In 1988 Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 2006.

  THE FOLLOWING TITLES BY NAGUIB MAHFOUZ

  ARE ALSO PUBLISHED BY ANCHOR BOOKS:

  The Beggar, The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail

  (omnibus edition)

  Respected Sir, Wedding Song, The Search

  (omnibus edition)

  The Beginning and the End

  The Time and the Place and Other Stories

  Midaq Alley

  The Journey of Ibn Fattouma

  Miramar

  Adrift on the Nile

  The Harafish

  Arabian Nights and Days

  Children of the Alley

  Echoes of an Autobiography

  The Day the Leader Was Killed

  Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth

  Voices from the Other World

  Khufu’s Wisdom

  Rhadopis of Nubia

  Thebes at War

  Seventh Heaven

  The Thief and the Dogs

  Karnak Café

  Morning and Evening Talk

  The Dreams

  Cairo Modern

  Khan al-Khalili

  The Cairo Trilogy:

  Palace Walk

  Palace of Desire

  Sugar Street

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2012

  Copyright © 1948 by Naguib Mahfouz

  First published in Arabic in 1948 as al-Sarab

  English translation copyright © 2009 by Nancy Roberts

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States

  by The American University in Cairo Press,

  Cairo and New York, in 2009.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94767-3

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Cover photograph © Peter Adams/Corbis.

  Cover design by Eric Fuentecilla

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Glossary

  1

  I’m amazed at the fact that I feel called to take up the pen. Writing is an art I have no experience with, either as a hobby or as a profession. In fact, it might be said that with the exception of school assignments in my boyhood and the clerical tasks relating to my job, I’ve never written anything at all. Even more amazing is the fact that I don’t recall ever having composed a note or a letter in the entire time I’ve lived on earth, which comes to more than a quarter of a century. The truth is that letters—like speech—are a symbol of social life and an expression of the ties that bind people in this world, and these are all things of which I know nothing. Don’t we prune trees, cutting off the branches that have grown crooked? Why is it, then, that we keep people who aren’t fit for life? Why do we show such tolerance—nay, neglect—by imposing such individuals on life, or by imposing life on them against their will? As a result, they roam the earth as frightened strangers, and sometimes they’re gripped with such panic that they go wandering about like someone gone mad with fever, trampling innocent victims beneath their stumbling feet.

  I say once again that I don’t recall having written anything that deserves to be called “writing.” In fact, for as long as I can remember, I’ve found it an exhausting, nearly impossible enterprise even to converse. If I’ve had no choice but to speak, I’ve stammered helplessly, not knowing how to express myself. However, this helplessness goes beyond the matter of speaking or writing. It’s more serious and dangerous indeed, for the inability to express myself and the attendant sense of constriction and impotence are, without a doubt, the most trifling of its consequences. Hence, it’s only fitting that I should wonder what it is that now impels me to write. After all, it isn’t just a letter to be penned. Rather, it’s a vast distance to be covered, so vast it will leave me breathless. I’m astonished at the energy and fervor that compel me to write, feelings I’m not accustomed to. I imagine myself continuing to write, without hesitation and without growing weary, day and night, with a determination that knows no lassitude. But why subject myself to such torment? Haven’t I spent my entire life seeking refuge in silence and suppression? Haven’t the secrets in my heart been unable to find themselves a closed grave in which to rest and die? How to explain this passionate urgency? How is it that I’ve unsheathed the pen to unearth a grave over which the dust of concealment has accumulated? Life has been lost, and the pen is the refuge of the lost. That’s the fact. People who write are, generally speaking, people who aren’t alive. This doesn’t mean, of course, that I was alive before. However, I never ceased looking for a joyful hope by whose light I could find my way, and now that light has been extinguished.

  I’m not writing to someone else. After all, it isn’t in the nature of those afflicted with timidity and shame to bare their souls to another human being. Rather, I’m writing to myself, and to myself alone. I went on concealing my soul’s whispers until I lost sight of its reality, and now I need desperately to reveal its hidden face honestly, frankly, a
nd without mercy in the hope that this might lead, even in defiance of destiny, to healing. As for the attempt to forget, it offers no such healing. Truth be told, forgetting is nothing but a cleverly devised fairy tale, and of such fairy tales I’ve endured enough. Perhaps my beginning to write is a sign that I’ve given up the notion of suicide once and for all. Not that suicide wouldn’t be a fitting penalty for a man who’s taken two other lives. On the contrary, it’s far less than what such a man deserves. Yet what can I do in the face of life’s insistence on finding a way to defend itself? If the past were a piece of the physical place in which I find myself, I’d turn on my heels and flee. However, it follows me wherever I go like my shadow. I have no choice but to meet it face to face with a steady heart, and without blinking an eye. Be that as it may, death is easier to face than the fear of death, and the act of facing death has a magic to it that may turn these pages into a pristine, transparent soul.

  I make no claim to knowledge. In fact, there’s nothing to which I’ve been more hostile than knowledge, and I confess to being a stupid, lazy man. However, I’ve endured bitter experiences that have shaken me to the core, and there’s nothing like experience to unearth what lies buried in people’s souls. I long to lift the veil and penetrate my secrets, to put my finger on the site of my malady, the seat of my memories, the wellspring of my pain. Perhaps in this way I can avoid a lamentable end and escape this pain that is more than I can bear. I’m feeling my way in the darkness.

  In reality, I’m nothing but a victim. I don’t say this in order to mitigate my own guilt or shirk my responsibility. Nevertheless, it’s the honest truth. The truth is that I’m a victim. However, I’m a victim with two victims of my own. And what pains me beyond words is that one of these two victims was my own mother! As unbelievable as it is, it’s the dreadful reality. How could I have allowed myself to forget that she was the secret of my life and happiness, and that I couldn’t bear to live without her? But I was living on the brink of madness, and thus I lost everything and found myself in a terrifying, lightless void. I’m a man of deep faith, and I know for a certainty that I’ll be raised to life on the Appointed Day. I don’t fear the sufferings and horrors of that day—when I’m stripped bare in the presence of God, with nothing to show but my good deeds and my bad—half as much as I fear being raised in a state like the one I’ve endured in this world. I truly desire resurrection to a new life, and when that happens, my sufferings will become as nothing, to be annihilated for all eternity, and I’ll be able to meet my loved ones with a tranquil heart and a pure, untainted soul.

  My mother and my life were one and the same. My mother’s life in this world has ended, but it still lies hidden in the depths of my own. Hardly can I think of any aspect of my life without her beautiful, loving face appearing before me. She stands ever and always behind both my hopes and my sufferings, behind both my love and my hatred. She gave me more happiness than I could ever have hoped for, and more misery than I could ever have imagined. It’s as though she herself was everything I’ve ever loved or hated, since she herself is my whole life. Is there anything beyond love and hate in a person’s life? So let me confess that I’m writing in order to remember her and in order to recover her life, since with the recovery of her life, all life will be restored. In this way, I may be able to repair the thread of my life that’s been broken. Perhaps hope will be renewed through such a recovery. At this time, everything seems vague and obscure, as though Satan had cast sand into my eyes. Even so, I feel my way patiently and deliberately, led forward by the hope of rescue to which a drowning man clings.

  What moves me is a genuine intention to renew my life and resurrect it as a new creation. So, if the path is too arduous, if despair overwhelms me, or if shame and diffidence get the better of me, nothing will remain for me but death.

  2

  What reward do the dead receive from the living once they’ve disappeared under the ground? We flee from their memory the way we flee from death itself. Perhaps this fact conceals a precious wisdom. However, our selfishness insists on concealing it beneath a veneer of bitter, laughable sorrow. I fled in terror from our house, leaving everything behind. Then I began to come to my senses and regain some degree of composure. I realized the terrible momentousness of what had befallen me, and my hands sought refuge in the closet of memories. As I brought out everything that remained there, what should I find but a photograph.

  It was a large photograph that showed my grandfather decked out in his medal-festooned military uniform. He was sitting in a large chair with his voluminous body, his big potbelly, and the white mustache that looked like a crescent moon over his mouth. I was standing next to him, the top of my head hardly rising above his knees. I was looking into the photographer’s lens with smiling eyes, my lips pursed like someone who’s trying to suppress a laugh. My mother was standing to my grandfather’s right, resting her left hand on the back of the large chair. Clad in a long dress that enveloped her from neck to feet, its long sleeves revealing nothing but her hands, she stood there with her slender frame, her rectangular face, her delicate, straight nose, and wide green eyes that radiated tenderness, though her glance lacked that luster that bespeaks vigor and sharpness of temper. It was a face that the Merciful One chose to replicate so completely in my own that it used to be said that the only way you could tell us apart was by our clothes!

  The picture peered out at me from the world of memories. I fixed my burning eyes on the beloved face for such a long time that I no longer saw anything else. Its features grew larger as I looked at them until I imagined myself a little boy again, living under her protective wing. The silence around me grew so thick, it seemed her closed mouth would open into a smile and allow me to hear the sweet conversation that I’d known until just a short while before. Photographs are an amazing thing. How could I have failed to notice this fact? This was my mother, with her body and her spirit. This was my mother, with her eyes, her nose, and her mouth, and this was the tender bosom that I’d clung to all my life. Lord! How can I convince myself that she’s truly departed from this world? Indeed, photographs are wondrous things, and it now seems to me that everything in this world is wondrous. Curses on habit that kills our spirit of wonderment and awe! This picture used to be hung in such a way that it was visible at all times. However, I was seeing it now as something new. In it I perceived a profound vitality, as though a breath from her liberated spirit were hidden within it. In her eyes I saw a distracted look that stirred up a sense of pain. This photograph was alive without a doubt, and I refused to withdraw my eyes from it even if it drove me mad not to do so.

  I pored over it at length. Then I was gripped by a powerful desire to imagine the life of the woman depicted there in all its phases, from the cradle to the grave. I imagined her as a baby crawling, then as a little girl playing with her dolls. If only she’d left me pictures that could help me recapture the happy dreams of her childhood! Then I imagined the period of her tender youth, when she was a lovely young woman looking upon life through those tranquil eyes of hers with hope and delight and enjoying her impassioned adolescence. I’d witnessed a part of that sweet era, and was a fruit of its fertility and freshness. However, its signposts had now been lost sight of and its effects obliterated, enveloped in darkness as though I’d never nestled in her bosom or nursed at her breast. When I brought that era to mind later in life, the thought of it would bring confusion and anxiety, and I would wonder, dismayed and indignant: Didn’t the untamable desires that so preoccupy young people rage in her blood too? Perhaps it was these unexpressed emotions of mine that drove me in my boyhood to tear to pieces the only remaining trace of that early youth.

  One day I came suddenly into our bedroom and found my mother leaning over an open drawer in the wardrobe and looking intently at something in front of her. I approached her gingerly, prompted by the mischievousness for which spoiled little boys are known. As I slipped my head under her outstretched arm, I saw her clutching a picture of her we
dding. She tried to return it to its hiding place, but as she stared at me in astonishment, I stubbornly grabbed hold of it. I saw a young man seated and my mother standing and leaning against his chair like a succulent rose. My eyes clung to the man’s image, and I realized that he was my father even though I was seeing him for the first time. Indeed, I was seeing him after my heart had been filled with fear and loathing toward him. My hands trembled and my eyes grew wide with dismay. Then before I knew it, my hands were tearing it to shreds. She reached out in an attempt to rescue it, but I thwarted her in a furious rage. She didn’t utter a word, but in her limpid eyes there was a look of grief and disappointment. Then, as though I weren’t satisfied with what I’d already done, I turned to her angrily and asked her in a censorious tone, “What are you upset about?!”

  With some effort she put on a happier face and said, “What a contrary child you are! Can’t you see that I’m sorry over the picture of my youth? You’ve torn up your mother’s picture without knowing it.”

  Every now and then the memory of that incident would come back and pain me, filling me with consternation and angst. I would wonder what had really led her to keep that picture, and why it saddened her to see me tear it up. Then I would try to penetrate with my imagination to what I’d missed of her life, but the attempt would just leave me preoccupied and distressed.

  This was how I lost the picture of her early youth, and I’m truly sorry now to have lost it—very sorry, indeed. But isn’t this a laughable sort of sorrow now that I’ve reached out and destroyed the picture’s very subject?

  3

  I took no notice of the one affliction that had been visited on her life. One day she told me the story of her marriage. She did so with great caution and care, especially in view of the fact that she was narrating the happy memories, rare though they were. She would mention them hurriedly, tersely and with restraint, as though deep down she feared me, or as though she feared that the pleasantness of the memory might mitigate the intenseness of my loathing for my father.

  It was on the Ismail Bridge that my father had seen her for the first time. Some days in the late afternoon, my mother and grandfather would take an excursion in the Victoria. One day they were passed by another Victoria, in whose front seat there sat a young man with one leg crossed over the other. He appeared to take pride in his youth and his wealth—or, more properly speaking, in the wealth he anticipated. His glance fell upon her face, and before long he had steered his carriage behind theirs and begun following them to our house in Manyal. Whenever the two of them left the house, they would happen upon him in the road as though he’d been waiting. I didn’t allow this chapter of the story to go by without comment. I asked her about how flirtation took place in those days. She received my question warily. However, I kept after her until she gave in to me, surrendering to the geniality of the recollections. She told me that he would cast her furtive glances that subtly concealed a smile. Or he would turn toward her with interest as he twisted his luxuriant black mustache. At the same time, he never overstepped the limits of propriety. I mused for some time, lost in the wilderness of dreamy imagination and feeling astonished, bewildered, and distressed. Then I looked up at her—our sole comfort during those days being that of endless conversation—and I asked her with a smile how she used to receive these flirtatious overtures. Not missing the mischievousness in my question, she giggled. Her body shaking from head to toe as it did whenever she laughed, she told me that she would ignore them, of course, and look straight ahead. She would register no response at all, as though she were a statue clad in a white veil. Unconvinced of what she was telling me, I said I was asking about the inward, not the outward; about the heart, not the face. I was tempted to tell her frankly what was going on in my head. However, my courage failed me and shyness tied my tongue. Yet if I’d consulted my heart, I would have known the answer. After all, my own heart was part of hers, and the same blood flowed through both. Indeed, the two of them beat as one. And could I possibly have forgotten the many times when I myself had remained unmoved as a statue even though my heart was ablaze?