3

In the frightening dream everything looked real. I was touching things and smelling them, and I could see sizes and colors and faces. I suddenly had an urge to tell my dream to someone and, without thinking about the embarrassing content, I found myself looking for my wife Shireen in the apartment. I moved slowly and calmly, like a homeless person who has broken into a stranger’s house, though I wasn’t embarrassed that I was naked.

She was sitting alone at the kitchen table, busy reaming out zucchini with a corer as bright and sharp as a knife. I started to pour out to her everything I’d seen in the dream: how I had been walking alongside Abdel Aziz, then my sudden fear, and how I held his hand and we were arrested, Hayatim the informer, the police truck and the cell, then the release of Abdel Aziz and how he had left me there alone. She worked the corer more rapidly, and I felt a strange and embarrassing desire throbbing below my waist. I simply reached out, took some of the pulp from the zucchini, and put it in my mouth. It was indescribably delicious, but then I found that my hand had been cut by a careless turn of the corer, and the little cut produced as much blood as you would expect from a bullet hole. But when I looked to Shireen for help all I saw in front of me was Aunt Husniya in the prime of her youth, calmly smoking a cigarette and laughing with abandon, and she soon started to sing the opening line of one of her songs: “Who will guide the stranger to the land of his beloved?” And as she sang, she raised her knee little by little to show her skeleton, bare of skin and flesh. I ran out of the apartment in horror at my dead aunt and her voice, which was a harrowing wail. Or perhaps I was trying to bandage my finger, which had covered the floor of the apartment with so much blood that I nearly slipped in it several times. I soon realized that I was wearing wooden bath clogs and that steam was rising around me and Abdel Aziz was sitting next to me, patting my shoulder and trying to comfort me with friendly words, and when I wanted to show him my finger I couldn’t find any cut, and he said he had to go now, and I found the steam around him was consuming him from bottom to top so that he gradually began to fade away in the billows. In the end the features of his face dissolved as he smiled in pity and embarrassment.

The first massive black spider appeared. I don’t know where it suddenly sprang from, but it headed toward me, and behind it marched two others, then five, and then I could no longer count the vast army of spiders, and I didn’t know where to hide from them, and then I felt the first of them climbing up my naked body. I screamed, but no noise came out, and I woke up to see the terrified faces of my fellow detainees.