Mahfouz Naguib. Fountain and Tomb

Three Continents Press, 1990. — 126 p. — ISBN: 0894105817.
"I enjoy playing in the small square between the archway and the takiya [monastery] where the Sufis live. Like all the other children, I admire the mulberry trees in the takiya garden, the only bt of green in the whole neighborhood. Our tender hearts yearn for their dark berries. But it stands like a fortress, this takiya, circled by its garden wall. Its stern gate is broken and always, like the windows, shut. Aloof isolation drenches the whole compound. Our hands stretch toward this wall- reaching for the moon."
So begins Naguib Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb, a kaleidoscopic novel set in Cairo during the 1920s. The narrator- now child, now adult reliving his childhood- tells takes of the street, of separated lovers, childhood games, workers, neighbors, loneliness. In his alley, his small slice of Egypt, he is presented with life's polarities: the excitement and harshness of Cairo at the one end, and the withdrawn but beautiful world of the sanctuary at the other.