Under the umbrella

Then many construction workers approached, followed by laden wagons with stones, cement, and construction tools, and with astonishing speed they built a remarkable grave, and nearby they made a large bed out of stones, covered it with sheets, and decorated its edges with roses, all under the rain. They moved to the wreckage of the two cars, extracted the bodies from it, heads crushed, limbs burned, and they gathered the body of the one lying face down beneath the lovers who did not stop making love. Naguib Mahfouz wrote this collection of stories and plays between October and December 1967; that is, immediately after the setback, and expressed what many Egyptians were thinking, and revealed many mistakes that led the country to this devastating defeat. In the story "Under the Umbrella," he talked about the absurdity of the regime and chaos in the political scene through an absurd, irrational scene where a group of people are standing under an umbrella, believing that this scene cannot be real, and must be a theatrical scene. In the story "Sleep," he narrates about a man sitting in a casino, approached by a girl crying out to him for help from a madman trying to kill her, but the man is sleeping and does not hear her screams, so the madman manages to kill her; this is symbolic of the indifference that led to the defeat... and other stories and plays filled with symbolism.