Naguib Mahfouz - The Dreams

“Next,” I said in conclusion, “he began to take part in running the country — and his creativity soared in every realm of life!”

I was director of the Estates section of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. There I discovered that some of the residents were not paying their rent, in collusion with some of the employees.

So I resolved to recover the lost revenue and to put those responsible under investigation. But then I found myself all alone, heading toward an inquiry, accused of defaming the minister’s reputation — and such a war ensued!

I was an officer sent to arrest the artist “Y.” In truth, I was one of his biggest fans; I loved him despite my scorn for his addiction to drugs.

The artist invited me to a singing party. I came, but put off arresting him until he finished his songs, as he kept chanting repeatedly:

You are entrusted to go to him

And kiss the fair one’s mouth for me—

And say his lovestruck slave is at his command

.

I received my sister, who said to me, “Your wedding has been fixed for next Thursday.” Reaching her house at the appointed time, when I entered the hall for invitees, I was greeted by loud applause.

At that moment, I realized that I did not know who my bride was to be. Too embarrassed to ask my sister, I looked around at the women present — and found that they were those who had given my life its light. Yet some of them were now quite old — and the rest had already left this world.

Finally, I told myself, “I’ll have to wait to know my fate.”

I saw myself receiving an important piece of information — the building of the new Opera House had been completed. I went with my colleagues to inspect it thoroughly, and found it an exact copy of the original, which had been destroyed by fire.

We agreed on a work for the place’s opening; we wrote the play, and composed the songs and the music for it, but we differed over its title. The discord intensified until it broke into open warfare, threatening the safety of the opera’s new home.

Returning to our house, in my room I found my sister, who had come to visit us. I told her hello, then looked out toward the window in which — for a whole year — my adored one had not appeared. Not since the day of her wedding.

“I have a not very cheerful piece of news,” my sister remarked, “that nonetheless might help to console you.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“ ‘Ayn died while giving birth — her first — at the Maternity Hospital,” she replied.

A ferocious pain pierced my head, as darkness rose like a tent over the heaven and the earth.

I was a censor charged with reading a play by the littérateur “Y,” entitled Death .

The first act was a dialogue between Death and the generation of pioneers such as Taha Husayn and Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad.

In the second act, the conversation was between Death and members of my own generation, such as Ali Ahmad Bakathir and Mahmud al-Badawi.

Act Three, though, was a musical in which young girls and boys of about age seven danced in a circle around Death, singing: Your fate in life must befall you .

And so I approved its performance for the public at large.

There I was in Abbasiya, on Lover’s Lane. Her sky, though missing a full moon, was able nonetheless to muster a few stars.

The breeze was pure and the water sweet, the street graced with a profound silence, but for a lone voice singing:

Visit me once each year

!

I was called to meet with President al-Sadat, who informed me that he’d decided to appoint me as governor of Alexandria. Though I warned him that my eyesight and hearing were weak, and my right hand paralyzed, he wouldn’t change his mind.

Going back to my office, I ran into my sister’s son, whose name begins with “Sh.”

“Don’t worry,” he told me. “I will be the eye through which you see and read, the ear through which you hear, and the hand with which you write.”

Still my anxiety would not leave me.

A great pavilion was set up to celebrate the new party’s birth, and Mustafa al-Nahhas appeared on the dais. Greeted with cheers, he proclaimed the party’s principles, foremost of which were democracy, social justice, and national unity.

When we went back to the place where we gathered every evening, I told them that when I saw them applauding, I remembered their joy on the day that Cairo burned and al-Nahhas’s government fell.

“Our glee at that time was our greatest sin,” one of them answered, “for which we repented in our meeting today.”

A decree declared that the best and highest posts would be reserved for Egyptians of Turkish or Mamluk origins.

I found myself walking on the street going nowhere in particular, until a friend who owned a sweet shop called me over and offered me a job as the accounts writer in his store.

At that moment his father’s voice reached us from where he sat in the shop’s corner. “Don’t let personal feelings corrupt your work,” he warned.

So I went back to walking aimlessly on the street once again.

My dear, deceased friend came to visit me. He queried me, “Why are you so sad?”

I told him that my weak eyesight and hearing had cut me off from the sources of culture that I used to read, hear, and see. So he took me to a publishing house managed by one of our university colleagues, and asked him for a work on all the modern ideas about science, philosophy, and literature.

The man produced a big book. Along with it, he gave us a brand-new printing of the Holy Qur’an, saying that the hefty tome contained an interpretation of the sacred text that had never been seen before.

We took these gifts with us. On the street my friend said, “I will come to you every evening to read you a chapter from the Glorious Qur’an, as well as a chapter from the other book, until we finish them both.”

“May God grant you mercy,” I welcomed him, “and set you to dwell in the broadest glades of Paradise.”

I dreamt of my mentor, Shaykh Mustafa Abd al-Raziq, when he was the head of al-Azhar.