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 195424 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”):
Crimson Lane has high stone walls; its doors are locked upon its secrets; there is no revealing of its mysteries without seeing them from within. There one sees a quarter for the poor folk and beggars gathered in the spot for their
housework and to take care of their daily needs; and one sees a paradise singing with gardens, with a hall to receive visitors, and a harem for the ladies. And from the little high window just before the
qabw
[a vaulted passage connecting the lane to its continuation beyond], sometimes appears a face luminous like the moon; I see it from the window of my little house which looks out over the
hara
and I wander, despite my infancy, in the magic of its beauty. I hear its melodious voice while it banters greetings with my mother when she passes out of the alley, and perhaps this is what impressed in my soul the love of song; Fatima al-Umari, the unknown dream of childhood.…
25
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.
No doubt the most painful to the author of all the dreams presented here, and the one that finally exposes the identity of the woman who was “Lady Eye,” did not appear in Nisf al-dunya. Instead it was published in al-Ahram, the third in a group of six carried in the daily (whose parent company also owns the magazine) on December 9, 2005, shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday (which sadly would be his last). In this dream, Mahfouz recounts a conversation with his sister in which she tells him that the woman he loves — whose name is Ayn — has died in Cairo’s Maternity Hospital. Based on my own research, the woman — who is the same “Ayn” found in Dream 10427—is actually Atiyah Shadid, one of Mahfouz’s neighbors in Abbasiyah — who died giving birth to her first child in Cairo’s Maternity Hospital in 1940. This is the real person whom he called Aïda Shaddad in the Trilogy—the great, unrequited love of his admittedly autobiographical character, Kamal Abd al-Jawad, and his own, as well — and who has many incarnations suffused throughout his fiction. (“Ayn” is also the name of the guttural first letter of both “Aïda” and “Atiya” in Arabic.)
Aïda’s father, Abdel Hamid Shaddad, guilelessly mirrors the actual Abdel Hamid Shadid, father of Atiya — both served as personal secretary to Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, ruler of Egypt from 1892–1914, even following him into exile in Europe after he was deposed by the British early in World War I. And in real life, Atiya had a sister named Aïda, and another called Budur, also the name of Aïda Shaddad’s younger sibling in the Trilogy. Aïda Shaddad dies 1943 in the Trilogy of pneumonia, in the Coptic Hospital in Cairo, loosely fictionalizing the death of her real-life counterpart.28
The true identity of “Aïda Shaddad” remained strictly secret all of Mahfouz’s life. He confirmed that she was Atiyah Shadid when I came to discuss this dream with him, one of the most moving moments of all my experience working with this most discreet of human beings.29 If I hadn’t met members of the Shadid family in 1995—who themselves seemed not to know which of the sisters really represented Aïda Shaddad, though they thought it was probably their own Aïda — I wouldn’t have known how to interpret this dream. The author was surprised finally to see his most-speculated-upon secret discovered, yet was very emotional, and — to my own subjective gaze — seemed somehow relieved, as well. Only the fact that, eleven years earlier, her relatives mentioned that one of the Shadid sisters, Atiya, had died in childbirth in 1940, provided the crucial clue, but even that would not have been enough without this encoded literary revelation. Faced with its detection, he said to me in apparent shock, “You got all that from a dream?”
In Dream 188, Mahfouz encounters many of the most important musical figures in Egypt (among them Darwish) stretching over the whole of the century just ended. Above them all is Umm Kulthoum, “the Star of the Orient” (1904?–75), who keeps chanting a haunting line from the Persian poet Omar Khayyam that she popularized in song. At the end, the dreamer recites the Fatiha—the opening chapter of the Qur’an — commonly compared to the Lord’s Prayer, and often read over those who have abandoned our world.
Though he has now departed, Mahfouz has not abandoned us — for, among many other treasures, he has left us his dreams. These on the whole express the longings — and embody the bittersweet recollections — that Naguib Mahfouz enlisted in The Songs, his heartbreakingly adept exercise in preserving the best of nearly a century of fleeting years and emotions through the remembrance of the lyrics that capture them. The seventh and final section of The Songs, “Old Age,” is the most powerful. There may be no better way to close an afterword to a book of prose that in so many ways is truly poetry, than to offer these verses in English:30