What was even more extraordinary and more weird, something that was truly alarming, was that none of the passers-by in Opera Square, in Gumhouriyya Street or maybe in the whole of Cairo, was at all astonished or treated the matter as if it was anything untoward, but rather as something quite normal and unremarkable, as if the chair were light as a butterfly and was being carried around by a young lad.
This story opens with the first-person unnamed narrator directly addressing the reader by suggesting that few will believe his story, but he really doesn’t care. It happened and it was so remarkable as to qualify as a kind of miracle. He then describes this momentous moment: a frail old man carrying through the busy streets of the capital a chair of such immensity and luxury as to, yes, make the whole thing qualify as perhaps something akin to miraculous. The important part, however, is the reaction of the people around the narrator. He alone among the busy avenues of one of the most congest populations in the world takes any notice of this absolute bizarre occurrence. It is a story that points out a recurring theme in many of the author’s stories: the isolation and alienation of urban life which disallows even the potential for the miraculous for most people most of the time.
It was a joke at the start. Perhaps it was a joke in the end too. Actually, it was not a joke in the real sense, but an incident, rather, which happened to involve those fabricators of jokes who were past masters of the art.
The opening lines of this story are not exactly unique in the body of work of short fiction of Idris. Many—not a significant chunk, but enough to notice—tales commence with the narrator introducing the basic idea of an element of absurdity to the underlying foundation of the story. An example that is very similar to this particular story is “Vision at Fault” which begins with the idea of a joke of a donkey wearing glasses to improve failing vision but steadily moves far away from pure absurdity to literal reality. Both stories belong to a wider thematic reference point of the author delineating a basic assumption that life is an existential absurdity at all levels, but on some issues the joke is taken to its most radical extremity of literal implementation.
After having walked for a while we realized we had covered a large part of the way. Our town lay behind with its borders and its fields. Only then did we realize we were actually on our way to Mansourah. Already we could smell foreign soil beneath our feet. It felt different back home where everything was familiar, and we moved freely. Every palm tree, every field, every house where we had played and romped in our childhood was familiar, and every man was our kin. Each one of us, blindfolded, could tell the soil of our town from that of another. Suddenly we knew we were far from home.
In many ways, this is the most iconic of all the stories of Idris. It is a tale of a group of young men who live out in the country and work hard as farm laborers who are lying atop a pile of hay at the end of a long day and swapping stories most infused with fantasy. One of them swears to a story that promises an excitement and vision of great leisure such as can barely be dreamed possible and they get so worked up that the force him to prove his tale is true. So many of the recurring themes in the stories of Idris pop up here: rural versus city living, the cycle of poverty, the consequences of economic disparity, the exploitation of the working class and, especially, the gap between what is believed possible and not possible for the average person. The story ends with a horrifying work of brutal imagery in which returning back to the real world of the next day—and the day before and the day after and so on and so forth—looms over these young men like monster bigger than the sun itself, merciless in anticipation of eating their futures.
