The Mirage

49

Then something happened to me that seemed trivial, but that nearly turned my life upside down. Strangely, it came to light as a result of a coincidence, and it seems only right for me to wonder: Would my life have taken a different direction if it hadn’t been for that coincidence? Then again, what is a coincidence? Doesn’t life seem at times to be an endless chain of coincidences? What, other than coincidence, had placed Rabab in my path? Would it have been possible for me to marry her if my father had died a single month later than he did? What would have happened to me if my father had insisted on taking me back the way he did Radiya and Medhat? In the same vein I wonder: Isn’t it possible that my life would have gone on just the way it had been till the day I died if the time I spent with my mother on that unforgettable day hadn’t lasted a few extra minutes?

It was an afternoon in late autumn. I was planning to spend my usual evening out, and I’d just bidden Rabab farewell. As I left our room, I encountered my mother in the living room and discovered that she wasn’t feeling well. Consequently, I went with her to her room and we sat there talking for quite a long time. Then I excused myself and left. As I was on my way out, I happened to glance in the direction of our bedroom. The door was open as it had been before, and I saw Rabab sitting on the edge of the bed and reading a letter. I realized immediately that the postman must have brought it when I was sitting with my mother, since otherwise, I would have known about it when it arrived. I assumed it was a letter to me from my brother, since Rabab didn’t receive letters from anyone, so I went back to the room to inquire. As I approached the door, Rabab was so engrossed in reading that she didn’t notice me until I said to her, “Is that a letter for me?”

She looked up at me in astonishment and her hand folded up the letter in a rapid, robot-like motion.

“Did you forget something?” she asked, obviously uneasy.

Feeling an anxiety I didn’t quite understand, I said, “I was in my mother’s room, and as I was leaving her I saw you reading this letter, and I thought it was for me.”

She got up from where she’d been sitting and backed toward the dressing table. She was clearly trying to keep her emotions under control. However, her eyes betrayed the profound, unexpected effect my sudden appearance had had on her.

Letting forth a terse, dry laugh that did nothing to conceal her distress, she said, “It isn’t a letter. It’s just some comments I wrote down relating to my work at school.”

A fear came over me that numbed my joints. She may have been telling the truth. However, her distress was catching, and I too had begun to feel a strange sort of fear, as though some unnamed, ominous presence was gathering on my already cloudy horizon. What reason would she have to lie? Yet I was certain that I’d seen a letter in her hand! I feared acting too suspicious lest she be in the right and I find myself in an embarrassing position that I could well do without.

Even so, I couldn’t help but say, “But I saw a letter in your hand.”

My statement came out sounding bad to me, and I felt I hadn’t chosen my words well, since they expressed obvious suspicion.

I looked at her apprehensively, waiting for her to show me the paper irritably as she shot me a look of disdain and reproach. However, she was struggling with other sorts of feelings.

As if she were overwhelmed with some unnamed emotion, she turned her back to me, saying, “I told you it was comments having to do with my schoolwork.”

Then suddenly I saw her tear it up, walk over to the window and throw it out. The move she made came so unexpectedly, I froze in place as if I’d been paralyzed. She turned to face me with a show of nonchalance. Furious and desperate, I felt as though a huge wall had collapsed on top of my life and buried it beneath its rubble. My eyes were being opened — after the delusions of blindness — to ugly realities. After all, what but ugly realities would provoke such distress and such clever deceit?

Mad with rage, I screamed, “You’re lying! You said it was a paper with comments relating to your schoolwork, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. It was a letter! I saw it myself! And you tore it up to hide something shameful from me!”

The blood drained out of her face, leaving it deathly pale. However, she didn’t appear willing to give up without a desperate defense.

“You’re wrong,” she mumbled, “and you’re not being fair. It wasn’t a letter!”

By now I was seething with rage, and pain and despair were pounding on my head like a hammer.

“Why did you tear it up, then?” I cried. “Why did you panic? Talk to me! I’ve got to know the truth! I’m going down to the street to pick up the pieces.”

I rushed distraughtly over to the window and looked down into the street, where I saw the narrow blind alley that separated the back of our building from the church garden. The minute I looked out, I despaired, since it was obvious that the wind had carried the bits of paper over into the churchyard. The world looked black to me, and it seemed as though she had emerged from a world of demons dancing in a stream of fire. How was I going to extract the truth from her lips? I turned around and found her standing where she’d been before, with all the life drained out of her face and a look of terror and consternation in her eyes. My heart went cold and I shot her a long, hard look.

“It was a letter,” I insisted angrily, “and I won’t back down until you’ve confessed everything to me.”

She stepped back with a groan and leaned on the wardrobe mirror.

Then in a plaintive voice she said, “I beg you not to think ill of me. There’s nothing at all for you to be angry or suspicious about. Please, don’t look at me that way!”

However, I went on looking at her sternly and cruelly, my soul yearning to know the truth. It was either deliverance, or death. Lord! I thought. I’m having a nightmare! Could I ever have conceived of taking such a stance toward her in anything but a nightmare?

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.