The Mirage

65

As I was going up the stairs to our flat, I remembered my mother and I was seized by a violent fear. At the same time I was gripped by a terrible rage as though it were Satan himself. What had made me so angry? I wondered what on earth I might say to her. Lord! What had brought me home in the first place? Did I really think I’d be able to spend the night in Rabab’s room and on her bed? Nonetheless, I continued up the stairs as though it were my ineluctable fate. As I entered the flat, my chest was tight and gloom was written all over my face. I could hear my mother’s voice as she asked anxiously, “Who is it?”

I froze in place, furious and bitter.

“It’s me,” I replied gruffly.

In a tearful voice she cried, “Kamil! Come here, son!”

My heart pounded violently, and I knew for a certainty that she’d heard about Rabab’s fate. I went to her room and found her sitting in bed.

Sobbing, she reached out to me with her hands, and in a tear-choked voice, she said, “If only I could have died in her place. She should have remained alive for you!”

I stood in the middle of the room, ignoring her outstretched hands.

“How did you hear the news?” I asked her in a stiff, harsh voice.

“How could you have forgotten to tell me yourself, son?” she cried in the same muffled voice. “From this I can see how grieved you are. My heart is breaking for you. If only I could have been the ransom for both of you. After all, I’m just a sick old woman. But this was God’s decree.”

Her emotion didn’t make a dent on my hardened soul, and I made no reply.

Then, as if I hadn’t heard what she said I asked again, “How did you hear the news?”

“I’d been waiting anxiously for you to come home today, and when it got to be evening and you still weren’t back, I got scared. So I told the servant how to get to the building where her family lives and sent her there. Then she brought me the horrible news.”

Looking at her suspiciously, I asked in a low voice, “Do you know how she died?”

“No, son!” she replied, crying again. “I’m still completely in the dark about it. I feel so sorry about the poor girl. How could she have suffered such an untimely death?”

Upon hearing her response, I felt a relief that soon grew tepid and lost its effect. Why deceive myself with false comfort when I knew that there was no power in the world that would be able to keep my scandal a secret? Her weeping annoyed me, since to me there was no questioning the fact that it was a phony show of grief of the sort that women sometimes put on.

So I said rudely, “She died the way people do every day and every night. The way my grandfather and my father died, and the way all of us will die.”

In my anger, I stressed the word “all.”

Then I asked her wearily, “Why are you crying?”

Looking at me dolefully through her tears, she murmured, “I wish I’d died in her place.”

Too agitated to contain myself any longer, I said testily, “That’s a lie! No one would ever be willing to die in someone else’s place! Would you have said that if she were still alive?”

She gaped at me in alarm, then looked down in pained silence.

No one said anything for a long time.

Then she broke the silence, murmuring, “May God send His peace into your heart.”

“I don’t need prayers,” I said harshly, “and I hate hypocrisy. I’ll never forget that you hated her even before you’d laid eyes on her!”

Looking up at me with a pained look on her face, she said, “Kamil! Have mercy on your mother! God knows I’m not being dishonest with you. You’ll hardly find a household anywhere that doesn’t witness the kinds of disagreements we used to have.”

However, I showed her no mercy. At the same time, I don’t know what sort of force moved me to remind her of the unfortunate past as though I were really grieving over Rabab. I was so hard on her, you would have thought she was the cause of the catastrophe that had befallen me. And what made me even more bitter and angry was my sense that through her show of grief, she was concealing a malicious glee.

Hence, I added furiously, “The fact is that you’re beside yourself with joy! I know you as well as I know myself, so don’t try to deceive me. You’re hiding your joy with these crocodile tears of yours!”

“Kamil!” she groaned. “Don’t be cruel to your mother! Don’t say that! God knows I didn’t hate her! And whatever grieves you, grieves me!”

I let forth a cold laugh like the cracking of a whip in the air, and said, “And in case you’re not happy enough yet, let me tell you that she didn’t just die. She was killed!”

She gaped at me in terror and, perhaps fearing that I’d gone mad, murmured, “God have mercy.”

Then I shouted with the nonchalance of a madman, “She was killed when the doctor was performing an abortion on her.”

“An abortion!” she cried, striking her chest with her hand. “Was she pregnant? Lord, I didn’t know that!”

“Neither did I! She hid it from me because I wasn’t the child’s father.”

“Kamil!” she cried in distress. “Have mercy on yourself, and on me! You don’t know what you’re saying!”

“I know more than you’d expect me to. I found out in one day more than what someone like me would normally find out in a generation. As I told you, she’d hidden the matter from me. Then she went to the child’s father to perform an abortion on her, but he made a mistake and killed her.”

“Have mercy, O Most Merciful of the merciful!”

“Is He still the Most Merciful of the merciful? Farewell, since I won’t be worshipping Him from now on. As for you, you may be saying to yourself with a strange sort of satisfaction, ‘The sinful woman has gotten some of what she deserved. I had a feeling something like this might be happening from the very beginning. But you didn’t listen to me!’ ”

My mother heaved a miserable sigh. Then in a voice that sounded more like a moan she said, “What you’re saying grieves me no end. You’re killing me without mercy.”

In reply, I screamed at her like a lunatic, “Revel in your malicious glee all you like! But don’t you dare imagine that we’ll live together. The past is over, with its good and its bad, and I’ll never go back to it as long as I live. I’ll be alone from now on. I won’t live with you under one roof. I’ll ask the ministry to transfer me somewhere far, far away, and I’ll live there for the rest of my life.”

With tears glistening in her eyes and pain tying her tongue, she sat there looking at me in terror and speechless indignation.

Then, as if what I’d said already weren’t enough, I seethed, “Go to my sister or my brother, and from now on, consider me dead.”

Then I turned my back to her and left the room as her sobs rang in my ears.