The Dreams (29 page)

T
he lovely young woman held on to my arm as we stood before the bookseller, who spread his wares on the ground. I saw that my own books took up a great deal of space.

Picking up one of them, I flicked back the cover—and was surprised to find its pages all blank. I tried another one, and another—and discovered they were all the same. There was nothing whatsover left inside them.

I stole a glance at my girlfriend—who was gazing at me in mourning.

I
was reading a book when the New Year’s drunks started throwing around their empty bottles, the shards of glass flying everywhere, menacing me with injury. I ran to the nearby police station, only to find its officers preoccupied with keeping bare law and order.

So I went to the top thug in our old neighborhood—and before I could finish my complaint, he and his men got up and attacked the tavern where the criminals were sitting. They beat them with their sticks until my former tormentors begged me to save them.

I
was the director of cinema affairs when the actress “F” asked to be excused from working with actor “A.” Annoyed, I pointed out that this would change our whole plan—but she stuck to her demand.

Next, “A” came to me, insisting that I put pressure on “F” to keep working with him, but I demurred. Meanwhile, “F” was telling the actors’ ombudsman that I was forcing her to collaborate with my friend “A” against her wishes. Then my friend claimed that I had eased her release from work for some private purpose.

I cursed the day that I took this job.

I
was watching a patrol of foreign soldiers when I pelted them with stones. I went up to our roof then crossed over to our neighbors’, before going downstairs to flee from the door of the house.

But I found it blocked by troops bristling with arms.

I
was setting the table and the invitees were in the next room. Their voices came to me—those of my mother, and of my brothers and sisters—while, in the interval, sleep stole me away.

For a moment, terror gripped me, before my memory came back to me. I recalled that they had all gone to dwell close to their Lord—and that I had walked in their funerals, one after the other.

“Only the past is real.… ”

—Lord Bertrand Russell,
Philosophical Essays
¹

O
n Friday, October 14, 1994, an Islamist militant, allegedly acting on orders from blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, stabbed Naguib Mahfouz in the neck with a switchblade as he sat in a car outside his Nileside home in Greater Cairo. The young man who attacked the then–eighty-two-year-old author, the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize in literature, clearly intended to silence him forever. Though the assault,
²
which damaged the nerve that controlled his right arm and hand, did prevent him from writing for over four years, the fanatic’s mission failed. Not only did Mahfouz survive this nightmarish crime, he lived to tell us his dreams—which he persistently recorded in his own hand and by dictation, until his death at age 94 on August 30, 2006.

The path to the present innovative and provocative work was not an easy one, and near its end came a brief, but very revealing, musical interlude. On February 14, 1999, after prolonged and intensive physiotherapy, Mahfouz began to
unveil his first new writing since the attempt on his life, with a short work called
The Songs
(
al-Aghani
),
³
in a Cairene women’s magazine,
Nisf al-Dunya
(
Half the World
), where he had been publishing all his latest fiction since the periodical first appeared in 1990. More a tribute to memory than imagination,
The Songs
is a series of deftly chosen quotations from popular Egyptian airs ranging back through more than nine decades that capture the spirit and mood of the various stages of Mahfouz’s life, from childhood to old age. The only work he published in colloquial Egyptian, it was also the only one made up entirely of verse.

A few months later, a new stream of Mahfouz stories once again began to appear in the pages of
Nisf al-Dunya
. This was a succession of numbered, extremely brief narratives that one could easily term “nanonovellas,” bearing the title,
Ahlam fatrat al-naqaha
—literally, “dreams of the period of recovery.” (A volume containing Dreams 1–104 appeared in English translation in 2004 from the American University in Cairo Press entitled
The Dreams
. A second volume,
Dreams of Departure
, featured the next 108 dreams, comprising numbers 105–206, published in
Nisf al-Dunya
between January 2004 and September 2006, as well as six dreams numbered I–VI that were published in the Cairo daily
al-Ahram
shortly before his final birthday in December 2005. Dreams 204–06 had been sent to the magazine just prior to Mahfouz’s death, and the last one, 206, seems uncannily prophetic.)
⁴
They were almost completely unlike anything Mahfouz—or anyone else, for that matter—had published before.

There was one precedent in Mahfouz’s work, however. In a 1982 collection of Mahfouz’s short fiction called
I Saw as the Sleeper Sees
(
Ra’aytu fima yara al-na’im
), the title piece is a
series of seventeen short, numbered “dreams”—each no more than a few paragraphs in length.
⁵
Meant to read like accounts of actual dreams, each begins with the phrase that gave the work its name. In a study of these “dreams,” Arabic literary scholar Fedwa Malti-Douglas notes that many are drawn from his reading of both the medieval adventures (
maqamat
) of Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, and the later allegorical ghost story by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi derived from them,
The Tale of ‘Isa ibn Hisham
(
Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham
, 1898 in newspaper serial, 1907 as a book). Malti-Douglas also points out that
I Saw as the Sleeper Sees
deliberately harks back to the ancient (and continuing) Arabic tradition of presenting and interpreting dreams. Even the title itself, she observes, is a variation on the sentence that typically begins a dream narrative in this genre, “
Ra’aytu fi-al-manam
” (“I saw in a dream”).
⁶
The extraordinary interest that dreams have long aroused among the Arabs can be found, for example, in the often-oneiristic chronicles of Abu Ali ibn al-Banna, who lived in eleventh-century Baghdad. Frequently dreams bring back the dead, who (as in Mahfouz’s Dream 89) scold the living. Here al-Banna recounts that:

Or such visions could be highly political (a point to which we shall return with regard to Mahfouz). Another medieval dream related by al-Banna warns of foreign invasion—which here could be an omen of ultimate good fortune:

I once asked Mahfouz what he thought was the greatest difference between
I Saw as the Sleeper Sees
and
The Dreams
. Without hesitation, he replied, “Composition.” The earlier work, he explained, was entirely a conscious authorial creation, while each episode of the present project is “a[n actual] dream, which I develop into a story.”
⁹
In this, he may have achieved the major ambition of the iconoclast André Breton, who declared in the
Surrealist Manifesto
(1924), “I believe in the future resolution of these two states—outwardly so contradictory—which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak.”
¹⁰

Mahfouz began his novelistic career with a series of three books set in the Pharaonic era:
Khufu’s Wisdom (‘Abath al-aqdar
, 1939),
Rhadopis of Nubia (Radubis
, 1943), and
Kifah Tibah (Thebes at War
, 1944), which indirectly critique contemporary society in symbolic terms.
¹¹
He is best known for his “realistic” works such as
Midaq Alley
(1947),
The Beginning and the End
(1949),
The Cairo Trilogy
(
Palace
Walk
,
Palace of Desire
, and
Sugar Street
(1956–57), and more. Yet Mahfouz has also been experimenting with virtually every style and type of fiction since serializing the book that later nearly got him killed—
Awlad Haratina
(available in English as
Children of the Alley
and
Children of Gebelawi
), itself a highy symbolic allegory of mankind’s corrupt ascent from the days of Adam and Eve to the era of modern science, set in a mythologized Gamaliya. As it ran in daily installments in Cairo’s flagship newspaper,
al-Ahram
, in the fall of 1959 a group of shaykhs from al-Azhar—Egypt’s great center of Islamic orthodoxy—denounced it for purportedly besmirching God and the prophets by representing them as earthly characters with human flaws. Demonstrations erupted at local mosques, and the government of then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser banned the novel’s appearance as a book in Egypt—though permitting its publication abroad. The ban still held at the time of Mahfouz’s death, at least so far as al-Azhar is concerned—and Mahfouz’s failure to “repent” for it led to his near-murder nearly twelve years before. In early 2006, Mahfouz came under enormous critical fire in Egypt for insisting that al-Azhar rescind condemnation of the novel before he would break this half-century-old “gentlemen’s agreement,” as he called the ban on the Arabic publication of his novel. And, as an additional precondition, he wanted an Islamist to write the book’s preface. As a result of these seeming concessions, fellow Egyptian author Ezzat al-Qamhawi accused him of having “betrayed his writing,” a remark typical of the views arrayed against him. But Mahfouz tried to calm his critics by saying that if he could get al-Azhar to change its mind about
Children of the Alley
, then that would have had great implications for other works proscribed.
¹²
In any case, after his
death, Mahfouz’s Arabic publishers, Dar El Shorouk in Cairo, brought out the book, complete with the Islamist’s preface (by Ahmed Kamal Abu al-Majd) that Mahfouz had requested, though it is not clear if al-Azhar has yet approved.