Under the Umbrella

Author: Naguib Mahfouz

"Then many construction workers arrived, followed by lorries laden with stones, cement, and construction tools. With astonishing speed, they built a magnificent tomb, and nearby, they erected a large bed from stones, covered it with sheets, and adorned its legs with roses, all under the rain. They then went to the wreckage of the two cars and extracted the bodies, their heads crushed, their extremities burned, and added to them the body of the one lying face down from beneath the two lovers who had not stopped making love." Naguib Mahfouz wrote this collection of short stories and a play between October and December 1967, immediately after the defeat, expressing what was on the minds of many Egyptians and revealing many of the mistakes that led the country to this devastating defeat. In the story "Under the Umbrella," he spoke of the absurdity of the system and the chaos of the political scene through an absurd, irrational scene witnessed by a group of people standing under an umbrella, believing that this scene could not be real and must be a theatrical performance. In the story "Sleep," he tells of a man sitting in a casino when a girl approaches him, pleading for help from a madman trying to kill her, but the man is asleep and does not hear her screams, allowing the madman to kill her; this symbolizes the state of indifference that led to the defeat... and other stories and plays laden with symbolism.