I fled after learning an unforgettable lesson — one that would take solid form whenever I met a woman. Yet I found myself face to face with the ravishing lady again.
I started to run away — and she kissed me, smiling, and took me by the arm. “My husband,” she assured me, “has now embraced the call for absolute freedom.”
Dream 141
Our dear old neighborhood. I’m rambling around it, my mind flooded with memories.
Then it occurs to me that I should live in our former place until the housing crisis eases.
But after only one day I see it’s simply not suitable for life in modern times.
Dream 142
This empty plot of land is my sole inheritance. I call it “the ruin,” because it has been neglected for so long.
After making a bit of money, I thought of building on it. Yet I made no progress, due to what I knew about the prevalence of fraud and financial corruption.
Finally, I asked a wise woman who lived next to me, “Is there an honest person left in the world?”
She answered that he existed indeed — but endless courage and resolve were needed in the ceaseless quest to find him.
Dream 143
Hearing an unfamiliar voice, I hurried over to the stairwell to find a strange man who aroused my suspicion.
I called to the doorman to take a look at the stranger. He calmly informed me that this person was a civil servant carrying out his official duty.
That was, he explained, to take individuals out of overcrowded buildings and to transfer them to places which have more room. I objected — for this, I said, was to tear people away from their own families, only to put them somewhere they would not be welcome.
But the doorman insisted that such was the law, and one could only obey and comply.
Dream 144
Peering into the shadowy past, I saw my sweetheart’s luminous face, though she’d been dead for fifty years. I asked her about the letter I’d sent her a week ago.
She said that she found it filled with affection. But she noted that the script of the person who’d written it revealed he was struck with the fear of life — especially of love and marriage.
“I was afflicted with the same fear,” she added, “and changed my mind about going to you.
“To save myself,” she concluded, “I decided to flee instead.”
Dream 145
Such a grand festival — all the top people from the government were there. The festival’s head summoned me and presented me with a ball, which he said was the event’s official prize.
The ball was made of solid gold. Congratulations rained down on me, and when I had recovered, I announced my desire to donate the gift to charity. So some men came with a saw and began cutting the ball up in order to divide it.
But when the saw bit into the ball’s core, the place went up in a huge, earth-shaking explosion, as bits of humans, animals, plants, and inanimate things flew everywhere through the air.
Dream 146
The enemy was triumphant. Yet before he’d cease fighting, he demanded that the golden statue of the nation’s reawakening, kept in the storehouse of historic treasures, be surrendered forthwith.
So a group of us went to fetch the storehouse key from the strongbox. But when we removed the box’s lid, a terrifying serpent rose up before us, threatening anyone who drew near with death.
As we hastily retreated, I concealed my joy — praying for the snake’s safety, and his success in guarding the key.
Dream 147
I was called to an important meeting of the building’s residents, where they drew my attention to a decision issued against me, that I must vacate my flat.
I appealed to their sense of justice and of mercy until the building’s owner said to me that the meeting hadn’t been held to seek justice and mercy. Rather it was to insure that the decision was applied as the law decrees.
Dream 148
The competition between trains to Alexandria and autos on the Agricultural Road grew more and more intense.
Finally, the directors of the railroad met and decided to create a special car for uproar, with women and complete liberty of behavior. There would also be a salon in every wagon dedicated to drinking, singing, and dancing.
So I kept on drinking, singing, and dancing, waiting for the chance to slip away to the rumpus room of delights.
Dream 149
Revolution gripped the city and the king was slain while defending his capital. Immediately there was a banquet held in honor of the revolution’s commanders.
The queen invited their chief to her private wing, where she greeted him, completely naked, revealing all she had.
Dream 150
The crisis kept going from bad to worse, until the great merchant was on the brink of bankruptcy. He couldn’t find anyone to loan him money among his own class, which the crisis had destroyed.
But then a man who sells licorice-drinks on the street lent it to him without interest. When the time came to repay him, the crisis reached its peak, to the point that the merchant thought of taking his own life. At that moment, the refreshments peddler saved him with another loan, telling him to consider both amounts as a dowry for his daughter.
They say that the merchant had finally found a solution to his problem. Meanwhile, the drinks seller said to himself that he, too, had found a remedy for his own emergency, whose existence he’d never confided to anyone.
Dream 151
Under the tree we would sit with him, for evenings of both enjoyment and learning, when once he excused himself in order to take his medicine. He went up to his flat — but didn’t come back.
When one of us went to check on him, he found the apartment locked up tight from the outside. So began a fruitless search for him in all his haunts, as anxiety gripped us all equally — those who loved him, and those who hated him, and those who were indifferent to him as well.
Meanwhile, at our mosque, the imam led the Prayer for the Absent on the soul of the one who was no longer seen.