The Dreams (30 page)

Intriguingly, both
Children of the Alley
and the
Dreams
series marked new beginnings in his use of allegory, and each was connected to the attempt on his life: one as an indirect cause, the other as an indirect result. One of Mahfouz’s most starkly startling allegories is Dream 179—which yields an historic confession. The “big book” on “science, philosophy, and literature” from which the dreamer’s deceased friend has pledged to read a chapter to him each night, along with a chapter from the Qur’an until both books are finished, is undoubtedly
Children of the Alley
. Since the modern tome also interprets the Qur’an—which, like
Children of the Alley
, has 114 chapters—here Mahfouz finally admits that his novel really is meant to parallel the stories in the sacred scriptures, a fact he always denied.

The St. Valentine’s Day 1999 publication of Mahfouz’s
The Songs
, one should note, fell on the tenth anniversary of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the novel
The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie. Shaykh Omar Abdel-Rahman, in issuing his own alleged fatwa against Mahfouz in April 1989, is said to have declared that if Mahfouz had been punished for his novel
Children of the Alley
when it first appeared in 1959, then Rushdie would not have dared to bring out his own “blasphemous” book in 1988. Abdel-Rahman, a close associate of Osama bin Laden, is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for having plotted to blow up a number of major targets, including the U.N. headquarters and the World Trade Center in New York in the early 1990s.

By the late 1960s, Mahfouz turned to ever-more radical forms, including absurdist plays of pure dialogue, and stories that have grown shorter and increasingly compact over time. And so the view among some literary critics in his country that Mahfouz is a plodding nineteenth-century novelist compared to those of younger generations—none of whom have yet matched his magisterial output in either quality or quantity—would seem to be based on an incomplete view of his remarkably varied
oeuvre
.

In the case of
The Dreams
, the effort to produce at all was especially difficult for Mahfouz. Apart from the damage done by the assailant’s knife, he endured diabetes starting in the early 1960s, which enormously weakened his eyesight and hearing. Long before the attack, he could only write “by the feel of the shape of the letters,” as he told me once in the early 1990s. Then in 2003 he was twice hospitalized (once for pneumonia, the second time for a cardiovascular crisis). During his first stay in hospital, he confided to Mohamed Salmawy, who, after his stabbing, interviewed him most Saturday evenings for a weekly column in
al-Ahram
called “Dialogues with Naguib Mahfouz,” that he no longer dreamt when he slept—though he could continue to publish the material he had already stored for some time to come. “My drawer is still full,” he reassured Salmawy.
¹³

Adding to his travails that season, during a fall in his flat he evidently broke a bone in his right wrist. From that point on,
¹⁴
if not before, Mahfouz began to dictate his new writing—something he had previously refused even to consider. Luckily, however, he soon had new dreams to relate. Though he complained of little sleep, the time he had to dream was fertile. The result was some of his most remarkable writing. Indeed, his
Dreams
are a unique and haunting
mixture of the deceptively quotidian, the seductively lyrical, and the savagely nightmarish—the richly condensed sum of more than four score and ten years of artistic genius and everyday experience. Toward the end of his life, Mahfouz lamented to reporter Youssef Rakha of
al-Ahram
that “Now writing is restricted to the dreams.” He added ruefully, “It seems I gave myself the evil eye when I wrote
Ra’aytu fima yara al-na’im
[
I Saw as the Sleeper Sees
].”
¹⁵

According to al-Hagg Muhammad Sabri al-Sayyid, the secretary of the literary section of
al-Ahram
who read Mahfouz the newspapers in his home each morning, took his dictation, and delivered his manuscripts to
Nisf al-Dunya
for publication, whether the dreams were “real” or artistic inventions (he believes most were partly both, though some were likely entirely fictional), they all were born fully formed. Mahfouz created each dream in one draft, whether in writing or orally to al-Hagg Sabri (as he likes to be called), who insists that he never revised them at all.
¹⁶

As in anyone’s nocturnal visions, real memory and experience permeate
The Dreams
. Close friends long deceased often appear, as in the case of Dr. Husayn Fawzi (1900–88) in Dream 86, former permanent undersecretary to the Minister of Culture, an ophthalmologist famed for his study and patronage of Western classical music, and for his travel writing
¹⁷
—the latter gaining him the sobriquet, “the Egyptian Sinbad.” And there are teachers from his youth, such as Shaykh Muharram (Dream 6), one of the young Naguib’s two Arabic instructors in his secondary school in then-suburban Abbasiya, and his math teacher in the same period, Hamza Effendi (Dream 27).
The Dreams
recall them less kindly than Fawzi. Some other figures from real life,
who receive similarly sarcastic handling, are identified only by their initials, as in Dreams 72 and 73.

Inevitably, there are also references to Mahfouz’s past writings. In Dream 10, the “pharaonic queen” is Nitocris, the widow (and sister) of King Merenra II—characters in Mahfouz’s second published novel,
Rhadopis of Nubia—
and the “revenge” she takes on her husband’s murderers is from a legend recorded by both the ancient Greek writers Herodotus and Strabo. The woman who endowed the first major literary prize that Mahfouz would win (for
Rhadopis of Nubia
, in 1940)—Qut al-Qulub al-Damardashiya—is evidently the dangerous lady with a dainty gun in Dream 81. And Mahfouz’s writing for the screen flickers before us, as well. In Dream 13, his unconscious self meets a girl who identifies herself as “Rayya’s daughter.” To his horror, she then adds, “Maybe you remember Rayya and Sakina?” Very few Egyptians who lived through the time of their vicious career or who have seen the 1953 film about them—written by Naguib Mahfouz (who created many of the most praised scenarios in the history of Arab cinema) and directed by the legendary Salah Abu Seif—could ever forget them. Rayya and Sakina were women in their forties who lured gullible young members of their sex to their homes in Alexandria, where they were chloroformed and killed for their jewelry by a gang led by the malignant pair’s husbands. Before their apprehension in 1921, they had claimed up to thirty victims, whom they buried in the houses in which they had died.
¹⁸

Equally inevitable is an apparition of his greatest personal hero, Sa’d Pasha Zaghlul (1859?–1927), leader of the 1919 movement for Egyptian independence from Britain (Dreams 73 and 158).
¹⁹
And, in Dreams 30 and 48, Mahfouz rhapsodically
resurrects the mightiest musician that movement produced, the Alexandrian minstrel-composer Sayyid Darwish (1892–1923).
²⁰
A line from one of Darwish’s most famous songs, that Mahfouz chose to end his novel
Palace Walk
, the first in the
Trilogy
, could well represent one of the central themes of his
Dreams
as well: “Visit me once each year, for it’s wrong to abandon people forever.”
²¹

Perhaps it was both Zaghlul and Darwish who inspired Dream 170, in which Mahfouz revisits the house where he was born in December 1911 in Bayt al-Qadi Square in the old Islamic quarter of Gamaliya. There, aged about seven, he saw demonstrators gunned down by British-led forces in front of the police station—bordered by fragrant Pasha’s Beard trees—during the uprising of 1919. His boyhood friends (none of whom are known to be living), their songs of rebellion, and the army as well all soon visit themselves upon him in turn.

Mahfouz’s fierce nationalism manifests itself further in the frequent spectral appearance of Zaghlul’s Wafdist colleagues—such as his deputy, Mustafa al-Nahhas (1879–1965), in Dream 158. Al-Nahhas’s own deputy, the Coptic (Egyptian Christian Orthodox) politician William Makram Ebeid (1889–1961), expelled from the Wafd for publishing its scandalous secrets in the Black Book Affair of 1942, expires in a crowd in Dream 154 (though he actually died at home). Another intense nationalist of a more stridently pan-Arab sort who stalks this work is
Ustaz
(roughly, “Professor”) Sa’d al-Din Wahba (1925–97), prominent playwright and head of the Egyptian Writers’ Union as well as the Cairo International Film Festival, and a hardliner against any sort of contact with Israelis. (Mahfouz himself often met with Israeli intellectuals, both in his regular
nadwas
[literary salons] and in his home—he believed that only such engagement could lead to a full and lasting peace.) And the tragically vain dictator who came to rule Egypt after the Free Officer’s coup of 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70, cited above for banning
Children of the Alley
) is undoubtedly the beyond-discreet Don Juan in what was once Alexandria’s busiest bus station in Dream 118.

Today’s politics naturally intrude in Mahfouz’s dreams. Among the most dramatic are the apparent allusions to his views of the Arab–Israeli conflict (Dream 90) and the war on terrorism (Dreams 74 and 103). But these are in the eyes of the reader, of course—and he has always encouraged others to reach their own conclusions about what he is saying. In this vein, the most jarring to me is Dream 151, which obviously recalls the mysterious case of Dr. Reda Helal, a former regular at Mahfouz’s weekly gatherings at a Garden City hotel. Helal, the dynamic forty-something deputy editor of Cairo’s famous daily,
al-Ahram
, and a noted pro-Western liberal, reportedly ordered food to be delivered to his flat one afternoon in August 2003. When the deliveryman arrived, he discovered all the doors locked, with no one home to take the meal. The debonair, pipe-smoking book author and columnist, one of America’s few (though not uncritical) defenders in the Arab press, had vanished without a trace. To this day, there has been no public explanation of his disappearance, though rumors abound.
²²

Among those who continually find new life in Mahfouz’s
Dreams
is one of his greatest intellectual influences, Shaykh Mustafa Abd al-Raziq (1885–1947), whom Mahfouz served as parliamentary secretary when the moderate Muslim cleric was Minister of Religious Endowments in the late 1930s and early ‘40s. Abd al-Raziq, a lucid, French-educated
littérateur
who later became head of al-Azhar, appears in Dream 155, asserting the superiority of science-based faith over superstition.

Eternal patriotism, with roots in Pharaonic Egypt that continue to flourish today, is the theme of Dream 146. The “golden statue of the nation’s reawakening” is undoubtedly Mahmoud Mukhtar’s renowned sculpture, “The Awakening of Egypt” (1920), which now sits by the Nile near the entrance to Cairo University. (Though not fashioned in gold, it shows a reclining sphinx next to a standing woman in traditional peasant dress.) The serpent, of course, is the uraeus cobra, the goddess Wadjet, symbol (and guardian) of pharaonic power. But the fear that the nation’s “historic treasures” might be stolen perhaps reflects the obsession of modern Egyptian intellectuals (and many others) that globalization has brought “cultural invasion”—a concept that Mahfouz himself rejected.
²³

More than anything, however,
The Dreams
is a monument to the women that Mahfouz loved early in life, and whose images never left him. Though happily married from 1954
²⁴
until his death, two of these now-distant bewitchings particularly possess him here, as in many other of his works. One is the “enchantress of Crimson Lane” (in Arabic, Darb Qirmiz, the narrow street in front of his first boyhood home in the old Islamic quarter of Gamaliya), in Dream 83. She has many incarnations throughout Mahfouz’s vast
oeuvre
, as in his 1987 story, “Umm Ahmad” (“Mother of Ahmad”):

Just as unforgettable—to the reader as well as to Mahfouz himself—is the creature who stays ethereally out of reach to the writer, not only in Dreams 14, 84, and 85, but also elsewhere, particularly in his most celebrated work,
The Cairo Trilogy
. In the second volume,
Palace of Desire
, Mahfouz’s admittedly autobiographical character, Kamal Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, is fatefully smitten (and ultimately rejected) by an aristocratic neighbor in Abbasiya—the same district to which Mahfouz’s family moved from Gamaliya when he was about age ten. Mahfouz has said that the trauma of the actual lost teen romance upon which this was based afflicted him severely for about ten years—and remained vivid within him more than seventy years later. (That his feelings were probably never reciprocated—as in the
Trilogy
—means that Mahfouz, in reality, had been dreaming about a dream.)
²⁶

In Dream 104 it seems that the dreamer invites this person’s apparition to a meeting with a mutual friend, now long dead, in a place where all were happy in days of yore.
Her name, the “Lady Eye” as translated, is actually the spelling of the guttural Arabic letter
‘ayn
—(also meaning “eye”), and at the same time is the first letter of the name of Kamal’s impossible love object in the
Trilogy
, Aïda Shaddad. The man she is brought to meet is identified only as “
il-mi’allim
,” a dialect word meaning anything from shop owner, to top thug in a neighborhood, to head of a small business. One person it most could have fit in the Fishawi Café in the midst of Cairo’s Khan al-Khalili bazaar, where the dream ends, is a man who used to sell Mahfouz books there—who also happened to be sightless. Perhaps the blindness of love is at work here—and yet the woman whose very name signifies vision is the one scolded for failing to see.