The Mirage

67

I know nothing about the long hours I spent in a complete coma. However, there were other times in which I would grope about in a darkness that lay somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. It was a strange, shadowy world interspersed with dreams. I would get the feeling I was alive, yet so weak and helpless, I was more like the living dead. I don’t know how many times I struggled, miserably and desperately, to move a part of my body, only to be so exhausted by the effort that I would surrender to the stifling pressure and vague fear that never seemed to leave me. At other times I would have the illusion that I wasn’t far from regaining consciousness. I would almost be able to make out familiar voices and see faces I knew well, and I would cry out to them to hurry and save me. I often called out to my mother, and I would be infuriated and bewildered at her failure to respond to me. Strange dreams would go through my feverish head. I would see myself riding on my mother’s shoulder as she carried me back and forth the way she used to do when I was a little boy, and at other times I would see myself grabbing hold of my brother Medhat’s collar in a noisy, violent struggle as he shouted at me, “Don’t kill me!” I imagined that I’d had many other dreams too, but that they’d been swallowed up by the darkness.

My unconsciousness went on for such a long time, I thought it would never end. But then I opened my eyes and returned to the light of the world. Heaving a deep sigh, my glance fell on a mirror that reflected my image. Feeling someone at my head, I looked in that direction and saw my sister Radiya sitting on the bed with her hand on my head. Our eyes met and her features brightened while a look of pity flashed in her eyes.

“Kamil,” she murmured tenderly.

I tried to smile, and as I did so she let forth a fervent sigh, saying softly, “I bear witness that there is no god but God.”

She uttered the testimony of faith in a voice that bespoke the fear and torment that had now left her. She didn’t take her hand off my head, but the next moment, however, I felt something under her palm.

In a feeble voice that sounded to my ears like a muffled shriek I asked, “What’s this thing on my head?”

Someone else’s voice then came to me, saying, “A bag of ice, sir.”

Turning in the direction from which the voice had come, I saw my brother Medhat sitting on the long seat. It was at that moment that I realized where I was, and I was assailed by the memories from which I’d fled through this heavy coma. Life peered at me with its ashen face once again. I looked over at the alarm clock, whose hands indicated that it was a bit after ten, ten in the morning judging by the sunlight coming into the room. So, then, I’d spent the dismal night in a deep sleep!

Looking at my brother brokenly, I asked, “Is the funeral over?”

He looked back at me for a long time, then said tersely, “Of course.”

After another long silence he continued, “Perhaps you don’t realize that you were gone for three whole days.”

I peered at him in disbelief. Then I closed my eyes in consternation and murmured woefully, “So, I was destined to escort neither my mother nor my wife to her final resting place.”

I looked over at my sister, whose eyes were filled with tears, and I was enveloped by an eerie melancholy that caused life to look like death. At that terrible moment, life looked utterly alien and empty to me, and I felt a terrifying void. The house was empty, my life was empty, the entire world was empty. When my mother was alive, I’d had a steady source of serenity, and deep in my heart I knew that no matter how miserable the world became, I had a room to go to that always glowed with smiles and affection. But now, I was like a boat that had been cut loose from its moorings in a stormy, raging sea. Even my sister, who was caring for me with such tender affection in my illness, was bound to tell me tomorrow or the next day that she needed to return to her house and her children, and I would be left alone. Lord, was I — the pampered child — made for this kind of life?

I cast my sister a long look of gratitude and affection. I gazed into her face with a longing of which she wasn’t aware, drawn to those aspects of it that resembled my mother’s. My chest heaved, overflowing with affection and profound grief. I cast an uncertain look at my surroundings, and found Rabab’s furniture staring at me in a weird sort of way.

Feeling anxious and dejected, I said, “I’ll never be happy staying in this house. I’ll live with you, Sister.”

“That’s what I’d decided myself,” came her earnest reply. “You’re most welcome.”

Then I whispered sorrowfully in her ear, “Take me to her room so that I can look at it.”

Her eyes clouded over and filled with tears as she murmured, “You can’t get out of bed now. Besides, there’s nothing left in it.”

I pictured the empty room: four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. How like my own life!

I sighed dejectedly and murmured, “I’m so miserable.”

To which Radiya replied imploringly, “Why not put off grieving until after you’ve gotten well?”

* * *

I was bedridden for about a month. Radiya stayed with me for a week, after which she had to return home. However, she visited me every afternoon, and she wouldn’t leave me until sleep had closed my eyes. Medhat also went back to Fayoum, but he would spend the weekends with me.

By the time I entered the recovery phase, the fever had left me nothing but skin and bones. The only life I had left was in my imagination, whose vitality flourished, and which became so vigorous and active that it nearly became an obsession. There wasn’t a waking hour when I wasn’t plagued by feelings of loneliness and fear. Consequently, life seemed too arduous and terrifying to endure, and my ears were filled with that old voice which — whenever I found myself faced with afflictions — would urge me to turn tail and run away. But where would I run to? If only I could be remade as a new person, sound in body and spirit, who didn’t have fear and alienation nesting in the corners of his soul. Then I could cast myself into the midst of life’s hustle and bustle without embarrassment or feelings of aversion. I would love people and they would love me, I would help people and they would help me. I’d find pleasure in their company and they’d find pleasure in mine, and I’d become an active, useful member of their grand, collective organism.

But where was I to find such happiness? And on what basis could I hold out such false hopes? I hadn’t been made for any of this. Rather, I’d been made for Sufism. It was strange to find this word inadvertently coming to mind. Yet it wasn’t long before I’d taken hold of it, albeit with astonishment and uncertainty. Sufism? I wasn’t even sure exactly what it was. However, I did know that it involved solitude, abstention, and contemplation. And how badly I needed those things. Strange … hadn’t I complained of too much solitude throughout the time I’d been bedridden? The fact of the matter, however, is that I hadn’t been complaining about the kind of solitude I’d been accustomed to throughout my life. Rather, the kind of solitude I was suffering from most recently was the forlorn sort of loneliness that had been left by the loss of my mother. As for the solitude I’d been familiar with before, I craved it badly. First of all, though, I would have to cleanse my body both inside and out, then devote my heart to heaven. For in reality, I’d been created a Sufi, but life’s desires and attachments had led me astray. I imagined myself in an extraordinary state of purity, my body being bathed in fragrant water and my spirit being lifted up, transparent and serene, with my sights set on nothing but heaven, and no thought springing up in my soul but the thought of God. These were the nightingales of paradise singing their sweet melodies in my ears, and this was the stillness of peace coming to rest in my heart. My imagination had been active in the past, but it had often been traitorous. It would lift me up to that plane only to abandon me without warning, and I would find myself plummeting from the heights, then returning once more to my old anxiety and chronic fear.

* * *

One morning during the final phase of my recovery, the elderly servant came and said to me, “A lady is here who would like to see you, and I’ve let her into the reception room.”

Looking up at her in astonishment, I asked, “Don’t you know her?”

She replied with a shake of the head, “I’ve never seen her before, sir.”

A certain apparition flashed through my mind, causing my feeble heart to tremble until it was pounding so hard that I became short of breath. Lord, might it really be her? Had she found the courage to storm the house? And hadn’t she taken thought for the consequences?

Looking at the servant hesitantly, I murmured, “Invite her into my room.”

I scrutinized myself in the mirror, then picked up a comb and hurriedly ran it through my hair. Feeling terribly self-conscious, I looked toward the door, wondering: Will my suspicion be confirmed? How could she have vanished from my memory all this time, as though she lived only in the healthy blood that had dried up? Then I heard footsteps approaching, and the visitor’s face looked in at me with a smile of longing and compassion.

When I saw her, I exclaimed in what sounded like a cry for help, my voice betraying the emotion that had welled up in my heart, “You!”