Now they all lie in their graves, leaving behind them only silence — a warning against forgetfulness.
Exalted is He who alone remains!
Dream 202
The 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.
Dream 203
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.
Dream 204
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.
Dream 205
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.
Dream 206
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.
Translator’s Afterword
“Only the past is real.… ”
— Lord Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays1
On 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: