The Dreams (32 page)

As translator, I wish to thank Hussein Abdel Gawad, Roger Allen, Walter Armbrust, Hazem Azmy, Brooke Comer, Jennifer Cranfill, Mohamed el-Kafrawi, Mahmoud el-Shanawani, Ben Fountain, Nadine Gordimer, Fathi Hashem, Shirley Johnston, Klaus-Peter Kuhlmann, Mark Linz, Christian Lorentzen, Ben Metcalf, Fuad Ahmed Noaman, Jessica Papin, Adham Ragab, Michael Ray, Ahmed Said, Tawfik Saleh, Ali Salem, Mohamed Salmawy, al-Hagg Muhammad Sabri al-Sayyid, Ahmed Seddik, Aleya Serour, Sasson Somekh, Willard Spiegelman, Paul Theroux, Deborah Treisman, and especially Husayn Ukasha for their generous help with the current work; Prince Abbas Hilmi and the members of the Abd al-Hamid Shadid family (most notably Sami El-Behiri), for their efforts to help confirm the identity of Aïda Shadid; Zaki Salem and Hassan Ismail for providing me with the Arabic texts of the some of the dreams, as well as Jacinthe Assaad, R. Neil Hewison, Nadia Naqib, and Kelly Zaug of the AUC Press, and Diana Secker Tesdell of Vintage/Anchor, for their skillful editing. Most of all, I am grateful to Naguib Mahfouz, once more for his great openness and forbearance with my multifarious inquiries.

This translation is dedicated to my unwaveringly steadfast parents, John and Helen Stock—without whom it, or any
other dreams of my own, would not have been possible. Painfully, my mother, like Naguib Bey, has now passed away—but we hope (and believe) that both have since gone to the Seventh Heaven.