The Mirage

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 reverted 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.

One day I told my mother, who was the only beloved, friend, and companion I’d ever known, “I don’t have any friends. The other students despise me.”

In a fit of anger she cried, “Your shoe is worth a thousand of their heads! They only like people who go along with them in their silly pranks and bad manners. They envy you for your shyness and politeness. So don’t you be sad. There’s no virtue in getting close to other people!”

“I feel alone sometimes,” I said dejectedly, “and loneliness is hard for me to bear.”

Horrified by what I’d said, she looked at me reproachfully and said, “And where is your mother? How can you say such a thing when your mother is alive? Don’t I devote my life to your service and care?”

Indeed, she was devoting her entire existence to me, and she was everything in my life. But who did I have outside our home?

Meanwhile, my academic life hobbled sluggishly along despite being supported on the crutches of private tutors.

My grandfather suffered terribly whenever I failed an examination, and he no longer made fun of me the way he had before. Perhaps the fact that he was getting on in years had caused him to be more fearful than ever for our future.

He would say to me, “Why do you fail this way, Kamil? Aren’t you able to pass a grade in less than two years? Don’t you realize how anxious I am to see you working before I die?”

His words would fall like a heavy weight on my heart, and I would say, “There isn’t an evening when I don’t study till midnight.”

My mother would be quick to affirm the truth of what I’d said, whereupon he would shake his white head and mutter, “All things are in God’s hands.”

For this reason, I would anticipate test season with disquiet, dread, and bad dreams. For this reason also, I would be tempted by a combination of shame and conceit to feign exhaustion and illness during the months leading up to the examination so that I could use them as an excuse for my anticipated failure. As for my mother, she would visit Umm Hashim’s shrine, make vows, and tie protective amulets around my neck. I’ll never forget the time when, not long before my proficiency examination, she brought me a fortune teller, trusting in her ability to bring me success. The woman burned some incense in front of me, then propped a short stick up against the heater and instructed me to jump over it three times. I did as I’d been told, and she said to me confidently, “You’ll pass the test, God willing.”

When I failed the test, I said to my mother incredulously, “How could I have failed after jumping over the stick those three times?”

Yet in spite of everything, I kept on studying. And eventually I put the era of secondary school behind me and finished the baccalaureate when I was twenty-five years old.