The Dreams

~ ~ ~

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.”

Dream II

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.

Dream III

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.

Dream IV

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.

Dream V

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

!

Dream VI

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.