Authors: Naguib Mahfouz
“What might the cause be, then?” asked an indignant Dr. Amin Rida.
“That’s a question you’d best answer for me yourself!”
In the same tense, nervous tone of voice, the doctor said, “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I’ll clarify the matter for you, then. The medical examiner states that the peritoneum was, in fact, punctured, but that there was no pathology or inflammation to be seen in it. In fact, he states that it required no treatment of any kind, much less surgery.”
“But I performed the operation myself!”
“You performed no operation whatsoever with the exception of puncturing the peritoneum.”
His voice trembling, the doctor said furiously, “Do you mean to say that I punctured the peritoneum for no reason? What’s the meaning of this?”
“You punctured the peritoneum and killed her!”
“In the course of performing the operation.”
“I assure you, you did not perform an operation on the peritoneum.”
“Are you accusing me of pretending to perform the operation in order to kill her?” shouted the doctor in a rage. “Are you accusing me of murder, sir?”
“Yes, I am,” replied the interrogator. “And before long you’ll come around to my point of view. You’ll see for yourself, without any need for my advice, that nothing will be of any use to you but complete honesty and candor.”
The doctor’s face turned pale and gloomier than ever, and he appeared to be in a miserable state of defeat. Casting
a final glance at the medical examiner’s report, the interrogator continued, “Why did you make this deadly puncture in the peritoneum?”
In a morose, almost despairing tone the doctor replied, “I answered this question before!”
“You’d be well advised not to act stupid, since you’re undoubtedly an intelligent young man. You punctured the peritoneum in order to create an apparent, ‘legitimate’ cause for a death you believed to be inevitable.”
The doctor lowered his head in silence like someone who’s confessing and giving up the fight.
Then the interrogator went on, saying, “You were, in fact, performing an operation on another part of the body. Then a perforation occurred by accident in this other part and, given your lack of experience as a surgeon, you thought that this perforation was bound to lead to the patient’s death. So what did you do? If the true cause of death were known, the illegal operation you were performing would come to light. And it was at this point that your disturbed mind led you to resort to a maniacal ruse, namely, to puncture the peritoneum so that it would be thought that
this
was the cause of death. Now you claim falsely that you were performing an operation on the peritoneum, and in this way you conceal the crime of having performed the illegal operation. If you had caused a patient to die by accident, this wouldn’t be considered a crime according to the law. However, contrary to what you may have thought, the patient didn’t die from the first perforation. Rather, you killed her when you made a hole in the peritoneum.”
Trembling violently, the doctor shouted at the interrogator like a madman, “No! No!! She’d already died when I punctured the peritoneum!”
With a faint smile on his lips, the interrogator looked triumphantly at the doctor. As for the latter, he closed his mouth in dismay. Enraged and desperate, he looked up twice at the interrogator, and as he did so, he reminded me of someone who’s been knocked prostrate by a blow from the enemy. However, my mind was in a state of such heated turmoil that I paid him no attention. An illegal operation? The operation on the peritoneum had been nothing but a ruse to cover up a crime? Either I was crazy, or these two men were crazy! She’d already died before he punctured the peritoneum? Lord! I was nearly beside myself, and I almost started raving like a lunatic despite the presence of this daunting interrogator.
However, he broke the oppressive silence, saying calmly, “So we agree. And I think the time has come for you to confess that you in particular, out of all the doctors in Egypt, were chosen to perform an abortion!”
And he didn’t stop there. He went on talking. He may have mentioned, among other things, anesthesia and its effect, or something of that sort. And the other may have said a few words as well. However, I was no longer aware of a thing being said. My mind stopped at the word “abortion” and refused to go a step further. I fell on the word and it split me in two, then ripped me to shreds. It rang in my head till I was oblivious to everything. The three men disappeared from before me, the room disappeared, and I saw nothing but a terrifying, red and black void where terrifying specters of memories and thoughts danced. An abortion. So Rabab had been pregnant! The letter. This young doctor. Satan could undoubtedly have woven the tale of a horrific crime out of these disconnected facts, mocking both the suspicion that had, at one time, driven me to
spying, and the peace of mind in which I’d mistakenly taken refuge at another. The interrogator was doing his utmost to expose a medical crime, but along the thorny path leading there he was going to stumble upon a crime far more heinous and inhuman. Hadn’t my heart perceived the catastrophe from the beginning? Might the doctor be the person who had written the letter? Or had they called on him due to the fact that he was a relative and could thus help them keep things quiet? The mother must have known everything … everything about my married life, and about her daughter’s slip-up. Perhaps she’d wanted to wipe out evidence of the scandal through the operation, only to have death ruin her plans. Ah, Rabab! We deserve every tribulation we’re afflicted with in this world, since we give ourselves over to it heart and soul when, in reality, it deserves nothing but loathing.
I was roused from my thoughts by the voice of the interrogator as he called out to me, “Hey there … wake up!”
I looked up at him, trembling, and little by little I recovered my awareness of my surroundings.
The man said, “I’m asking you: Hadn’t your wife spoken to you about not wanting to be pregnant? Hadn’t she told you of her desire to have an abortion?”
I cast a quick glance at Dr. Amin, thinking to myself: He knows the entire secret from beginning to end. In fact, he may know far more than I know myself. It pained me to lie and expose myself to another insult.
“No,” I muttered.
“Did you think she was happy to be pregnant?”
In a listless, doleful tone I said, “It’s only now that I’m finding out that she was pregnant.”
The interrogator raised his eyebrows so high that they
appeared above his spectacles, and I fixed my gaze on his eyes as he ruminated.
Then he asked me, “How do you explain the fact that she was hiding the matter from you?”
His question shook me to the depths of my being. All I had to say was one word, and my secret would become the butt of everyone’s jokes. Feelings of rage and the desire for revenge tempted me sorely to reveal what I’d striven so mightily to keep hidden so that I could likewise expose the secret that had been kept hidden by my depraved wife and avenge myself on the criminal. I wanted to say that there was nothing in the past year or more of our married life that could have led to pregnancy so that the interrogator could put his callous hand on the wanton trespasser. I was sorely, sorely tempted to do so, and the words were almost on the tip of my tongue. However, I didn’t say a thing. Instead, I was stricken with a total paralysis that I couldn’t explain. Could shyness influence me even in a situation like this? Was my desire to conceal my impotence so great that it overrode my longing for revenge? I wasn’t able to utter the decisive word, and with every second that passed I grew more helpless and resigned to defeat.
“I don’t know,” I muttered breathlessly.
And before I knew it, Dr. Amin had jumped to his feet and taken two steps back, folding his arms over his chest in pompous defiance.
Then in a confident, supercilious voice he said to the interrogator, “You’re asking him something he knows nothing about. She was a wife in name only, and I’m responsible for everything from beginning to end!”
I
left the house without seeing any of those who lived there. After all, it wasn’t my house any longer, nor were its residents my family. As I stood at the door to the building, my gaze shifted over to the tram stop, the tram stop of memories. I looked back and forth between it and the balcony, then closed my eyes to see the procession of memories marching past in the twinkling of an eye. It was a true picture of life, one that brought together its joys and its tragedies. Then I took off down the street without any destination in mind as though I were running away as fast as I could. My heart had turned into a firebrand from which sparks of rage, misery, and hatred were flying in all directions. I figured that this world, so preoccupied with its own concerns, would forget its sorrows the next day and drown itself in talk about my scandal. At the same time, I still hadn’t gotten over my shock, and I kept wondering what on earth had prompted that crook of a doctor to confess the terrible truth. I’d been so defeated by cowardice
that I’d concealed the truth, and in so doing I’d given him a chance to flee if he had wanted to take it. But instead, he’d jumped to his feet in a rage and, in that self-important, arrogant way of his, he’d let the truth come out through his own two lips: “Don’t ask him something he knows nothing about. She was a wife in name only …” My God! Why hadn’t I beaten him to a pulp? Why hadn’t I hurled myself at him and dug my fingernails into his heart? It was a memory that would sting me like a flaming whip till the day I died. But what had made him fling himself into perdition?
Had his despair of being acquitted of one of the two charges led him to confess to the other? Was he so dismayed at the fate to which love had doomed his lover that he was moved in a moment of despair to share with her in her dreadful fate? Was it an uprising of the conscience, of the heart, or both? How could I possibly become privy to the secrets of that disdainful heart? At the same time, I became increasingly bewildered and wondered to myself: How could he have permitted himself to send her to the grave shrouded in disgrace? Wouldn’t it have been more fitting for him to seize the opportunity at hand to save himself and protect the honor of the woman he had loved, and who had loved him? Do you suppose he now regretted what he had said, or was he still holding his head high in arrogance and conceit? It was a puzzle to me then, and it always will be. My heart was so bloated with bitterness and rage that the fate that had been meted out to them—her in the grave, and him in prison—was a source of relief and joy to me.
By this time my feet had carried me to Ismailiya Square. Finding no place better to flee to than the Qasr al-Nil gardens, I headed toward the bridge. I thought: If only I could
disappear from Cairo for a whole year. It hadn’t even occurred to me to attend the funeral of this woman who’d been my wife. After all, I wouldn’t be able to face any of the people who knew of the tragedy. But had I really even married? It had been nothing but a long, drawn-out farce or, more properly speaking, a tragedy. My family were sure to be shocked when they learned that my wife had died and been buried without any of them being invited to the funeral. However, their shock would be quick to dissipate once they knew the truth, and it wouldn’t be long before they were too distracted telling jokes about it to think of anything else. Anybody who got hold of this story would be the life of the party. My heart shrank, and I felt a coldness flowing through my limbs. How badly I wanted to flee, just as I always had in such situations. Where could I find a distant land in which no one had ever set foot? And how could I cut off every tie that bound me to my odious past? If only I could be born again in a new world in which I wasn’t haunted by a single memory from this one! Indeed, I wouldn’t be able to carry on with my life as long as I was being followed about by my past like a heavy shadow.
I spent the rest of the day wandering down streets or sitting like a vagrant in public parks. I felt no heat, no cold, no thirst. Then at last the sun announced its imminent departure and evening shadows spread over the treetops. I went back the way I’d come with heavy steps, and by the time I reached Ismailiya Square, darkness had fallen over the universe. I was gripped with uncertainty, not knowing where to go. Then suddenly, an image of the pub flashed into my mind. I heaved a deep sigh and my taut, frayed nerves uttered a sigh of relief as though I’d suddenly caught a glimpse of happiness after a long, oppressive ordeal. The
very next moment, a taxi was taking me to Alfi Bey Street, but my relief was short-lived and soon replaced by anxiety, dejection, and indecision. Wondering whether I shouldn’t be heading somewhere else, I got out of the taxi in front of the pub, but didn’t go in. Instead I began walking slowly down the sidewalk with a heavy head and heart. Overcome by despair, however, I let it lead me back to the pub. After finding myself an isolated corner, I drank one glass, then another, and kept on drinking. My head was hardly responding to the liquor, but I suddenly felt ravenous, so I ate with an astounding, voracious appetite. And no sooner had I finished eating than I was overcome with a fatigue that enveloped my stomach, my head, and my entire body. It was as though the effort I’d expended in the course of the excruciating day, catching me in an unguarded moment, had come marching over me with its hordes and crushed me beneath their weight. I got up unsteadily, left the pub, and got into a nearby taxi that took me in the direction of Qasr al-Aini. Overwhelmed with fatigue, a numbness spread through my body, and a sudden feeling of apathy came over me. I looked with a mocking eye upon my tragedy, and for a moment it seemed as though it were someone else’s misfortune rather than my own, or as though it had been removed from my personal life and taken its place in the procession of shared human heartbreaks. The taxi continued down the road until we were within sight of the building through which the world had put me to the test. I looked toward it with open eyes and with a timorous, racing heart. I saw light emanating from the balcony and the windows, and in front of the building I could see two tall poles from which two large lights were suspended. So, it was all over.…