Текст книги "No One Sleeps in Alexandria"

Автор книги: Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

15

I did not hold myself back

I gave in completely and went.

I went to those pleasures

That lie on the edge

Between reality and imagination

I walked in the brilliant night

And drank the strong wine the valiant

seekers of pleasure drink.

Constantine Cavafy

Japan attacked Indochina, expanding its war along the western and southern coast of Asia, since it was already at war with China. The Japanese giant was restless, and it began to stretch and spew forth its fire. America saw Japan’s military power and ventures as a threat and began to stand on guard. People everywhere began to realize that the entire globe would soon be engulfed in the flames of war.

In Egypt, British planes attacked the new Italian positions in Sidi Barraní, in raids that lasted four hours and extended into Benghazi to hit the Italians’ lines of communication. The ministry of supply decreased the amount of coal sold to ironers and pressers, since no coal was being imported from England and a large number of trains were being used for military transport. Ironers and pressers complained vociferously. Some brazen young men started going out at night, wearing frightening gas masks to take girls and women by surprise in the dark alleys. Groups of such masked youth appeared at times like herds of bulls going to their bullpens or leaving them for the faraway grazing pastures. The Italians started using a new kind of bomb that looked like a thermos bottle, which did not explode on impact but afterwards, when moved or touched. A campaign began to warn Alexandrians against such bombs, which had shiny surfaces that could not be seen clearly in bright sunlight. People were distressed because for the second year in a row, the month of Ramadan came and no lights or public celebrations were permitted. The price of many commodities went up, and kerosene was rationed. The price of potatoes rose from fifteen milliemes an English kilo to twenty-seven and from ten milliemes an Egyptian kilo to twenty. A large section of the wall of the corniche at Sidi Bishr collapsed as a result of water seepage. The royal banquets of Ramadan were no longer enough to keep the poor happy. In Alexandria there was only one banquet, held in front of the Mursi Abu al-Abbas mosque, whereas in Cairo, people said, they were held everywhere. In that banquet, taro root, meat, rice, fava beans, vegetables, and pastries were served for free. The deputy-governor himself inaugurated the banquet and ate with the poor, apologizing for the absence of the governor, who had gone to Cairo to congratulate His Majesty the King on the advent of the month of Ramadan. The ministry of social affairs formed a commission to study the increasing immodesty of women, as a result of the increase in the number of foreigners and their need for entertainment and the need for money among many segments of the population.

For Magd al-Din, Ramadan was no different from the year before, only now the women stayed up without Lula. Zahra noticed that Camilla had once more become silent and oblivious to others. She spoke once and said it was no longer permitted to stay in the cinemas during raids, night or day. Maryam asked Zahra why she did not leave Alexandria when everyone was leaving, especially since she was now pregnant and it would be better for her to give birth in her village. Zahra said that was a long way away, but that she would surely do that. She was lying, for she could never leave Magd al-Din. But she had no choice, as she could not explain how her husband had been expelled from his village.

As the feast celebrating the end of Ramadan approached, the world watched with bated breath as Italy started its predations of Greece. On October 28, which coincided with the feast in Alexandria, Italy invaded Greece from Albania. The Greek prime minister, Metaxas, displayed great courage in rejecting the Italian ultimatum, and Greece launched a counterattack. The Greeks in Alexandria rose up against the invasion. Young Greek men gathered in front of the Greek consulate, volunteering to fight in defense of the country of Achilles, Agamemnon, Hercules, Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo, the Muses, Oedipus, Electra, and Pygmalion – the country that no one had ever disliked or could dislike now. The Egyptians admired the courage of the Greeks and began to greet their Greek neighbors with admiration and respect, The Greeks continued to be optimistic: “Il Duce is a miserable fellow,” they told their Egyptian neighbors. They held enthusiastic poetry readings and sang and danced fervently.

Hitler had met with Franco a few days earlier at the French-Spanish border, but there was no indication that Spain would join in the war. New instructions were issued in France to exclude Jews from working in administrative and government posts, the press, cinema, or radio. Exceptions were made for those who had performed distinguished scientific services or who were decorated veterans of the previous world war.

In Alexandria, a train arrived from Suez carrying troops from South Africa who were said to be young Jews escaping the Nazi inferno. Those who survived, it was said, would go to Palestine after the war. They were welcomed in Alexandria at Sidi Gabir Station by the notables of the Jewish community, Sidnawi, Cicurel, Salvago and others. Young Jewish women showered them with flowers and blew kisses from their windows, and many Egyptians in the station greeted and applauded them. The train left for the desert in the evening, made no stops, and did not come across any workers until it arrived at Marsa Matruh two days later, when it dropped off the soldiers and brought back a batch of Australian soldiers for rest and recreation. A car was set aside for Italian prisoners of war, including a number of Libyans who were released later in Alexandria after it was established that they had been forced to serve with the Italian forces, and after they said that they were looking forward to the Allies entering Libya to rid them of Graziani, representative of the crazy Duce.

In Alexandria the fame of the new dancer Lula spread like wildfire. She danced to the Greek tunes of her doting accordion-playing husband, who never took his eyes off her. A drummer, who also sang, mainly to point out how curvaceous she was, accompanied her. She now only danced for the pashas at their mansions. A war had been raging over her among the dancing and singing women. She had previously been working with Usta Naima al-Saghir in Bahari and Sayyala, but she had disappeared with her lover until she was found by her husband, who had left the troupe and joined that of Bata al-Salamuni, whose turf extended from Karmuz to Kom al-Shuqafa and Qabbari. Usta Suma al-Nagili from Farahda and Labban entered the fray, as did Usta Fawziya al-Massiri, Naima’s archrival in Bahari. But the impresarios, who were out of work because of the ban on public nighttime celebrations and whose only job was to organize parties for the pashas, arranged a meeting among the Ustas and stopped the war. “The world war is enough,” they said. Bata al-Salamuni paid twenty pounds in reparation to Naima al-Saghir and the rest of the troupes agreed that Lula would dance for them once a month at any place they chose. The same terms were made available to the men’s troupes: Hamama al-Attar from Bahari, Said al-Hadrawi from Hadra, Anwar Salama from Karmuz, and Sayyid al-Halawani from Bacos. Thus Lula became a boon to the dancing and singing troupes in Alexandria. The only thing left for her to do was to dance at the Atheneos or Windsor or other such corniche nightclubs, which were always full of soldiers and ATS women.

The story of Lula reached Sitt Maryam and Zahra, who were surprised at the wiles of women and also of men, for Lula’s husband, who had seemed so jealous the day she was arrested, was now the very one accompanying her as she danced in the mansions. They had forgotten all about her, until the day they went out to the piazza in Karmuz. In the midst of the fishmongers and greengrocers and the stifling smells of the market, Sitt Maryam and Zahra saw a taxicab parked at the entrance of Sultan Husayn Street and a woman signaling to them from inside the taxi. They looked at each other in hesitation as they heard her voice, “Sitt Umm Camilla, Sitt Umm Yvonne.” It was unmistakably Lula’s voice. They went toward the taxi after looking around. What made them respond to her call in spite of their fear of being seen?

“Come on in. Don’t be afraid.”

She was sitting in the back seat and they sat next to her.

“Drive on,” she said.

“Where to?”

“Home.”

“The house is right there.”

“Drive to the door, buster. These are respectable women – do you want them to be seen in public with me?”

The driver fell silent, as did everyone. Zahra crept closer to Sitt Maryam and clung to her.

Sitt Maryam regretted getting into the taxi. Zahra must have gotten in because of her. “Here we are,” said the driver, as he entered a side alley and stopped.

They got out. Lula looked at him and laughed as Sitt Maryam smiled, but Zahra looked frightened. They heard the driver say, “Sitt Lula, are we not respectable folk, too?”

“Get a move on, you son of a club-footed woman,” Lula shouted, and the driver drove away laughing.

“Please pardon me, I would like to invite you to a cup of coffee at my place to see my apartment. Please, Sitt Maryam, Sitt Zahra. Sure, I may be bad, but I’m married. I’d even say I am good.”

As if hypnotized, they went in with her through the dark entrance of the house. They went up the stairs to the first floor, hardly able to see in the dark. Lula placed the key into the keyhole of the wooden door and opened it, then went ahead to open the windows, through which a little light entered, just enough to see one another and talk. Sitt Maryam and Zahra sat on the first two chairs they came across in the living room. Lula came back after a little while with a small spirit stove, a coffeepot, three cups, and a pitcher of water and sat in front of them on the floor. Lula looked prettier than she had in Dimitri’s house. “It feels like I kidnapped you from the street, right?”

Zahra did not answer, and Sitt Maryam told herself that silence was better.

“How are Sheikh Magd al-Din and Khawaga Dimitri?” asked Lula. “I used to hear Sheikh Magd’s voice as he recited the Quran at night – his voice went through the walls and came to me, a beautiful and soothing voice. Two days before my husband found me, I had intended to repent and go back to him because of Sheikh Magd al-Din’s voice, even though I didn’t understand anything from the Quran, but every time he said, ‘Which of the favors of your Lord will you deny?’ I would cry – really cry.”

Zahra said to herself, “I ask God Almighty for forgiveness.” She felt that it was not proper for the word of God ever to be uttered by that woman. They sat for a long time as Lula told them about the fight over her by the women’s troupes and how it was settled by the men: “The men can handle anything; you get nothing from women except lies and deceit.” She told them about the nights of the pashas, which rivaled those described in One Thousand and One Nights.

“Like who, Lula? Of course Abbud Pasha was one of them,” asked Sitt Maryam.

“All of them – Abbud, Farghali, Spahi, and Tawil. I once danced at Tawil Pasha’s mansion in the presence of Nahhas Pasha himself. Yes, he had just had an abscess removed and had come to Alexandria to recuperate. But, to tell you the truth, he was always looking at the floor. Maybe once or twice he raised his eyes to me. I felt he was afraid of me, not of the other political parties. How many parties are there in Egypt, anyway? At any rate, all pashas are generous, even Salvatorc Cicurel and Salvago, who own the streetcar lines. He bought me a streetcar.”

They all laughed for the first time. Caution and regret were now gone.

“The only one left is His Majesty the King,” Lula went on. “I danced for the princes. He’s the only one left. If I danced for him I’d work in films with Abd al-Wahhab and go to Cairo, and leave behind Alexandria and all these air raids. There’s hope next summer I’ll dance at Muntaza. The war would surely be over by then – it must! I’ve asked Sitt Didi, who lives here on Sultan Street. She’s the best designer of dance outfits. I told her to cut an outfit for me, open on all sides, from behind, front, and at the waist and along with the spangles and the beads and the rhinestones, to add some genuine diamonds. You know, Sitt Maryam, sometimes I miss you all very much.”

They drank the coffee. Zahra noticed that the living room was clean and the seats comfortable, not new but shiny. She also noticed some musical instruments – a lute, a tabla, a tambourine, cymbals, an accordion – scattered all over, some shiny, some old and dusty, but on the whole it was a comfortable place and appealing to the eye.

After they drank the coffee, Sitt Lula got up to bring some dance outfits to show them. Zahra looked at Sitt Maryam in dismay, but the latter calmly said, “Let’s see the outfits and leave without looking at anything else. We’ll never come to the piazza again.”

As they were hurrying down the stairs, Lula shouted, “Please send my greetings to Khawaga Dimitri and Sheikh Magd al-Din and to Camilla and Yvonne. I promise you I’ll dance at their weddings – I surely will!”

She had also told them about the foreign impresario who had promised her a trip to Europe, adding that there she would make good ubbayyig, and when she saw that they were puzzled, she said it meant she would make good money.

“The women who run the dance troupes have their own lingo,” she explained, laughing. “You say, for instance, today it is megamema, which means you’re out of work, and abriz means going to the bathroom, arkbi means food, and ayma means a big profit. There are many harder words that no one except these women can understand, because it’s all inspired by hashish.”

That strange meeting remained engraved in Zahra’s mind for several days. She looked at Sitt Maryam in confusion and fear; she had committed a sin against Magd al-Din.

One day Sitt Maryam surprised her by telling her in front of her daughters, “Why are you tormenting yourself, Zahra? You can go ahead and tell Sheikh Magd about our meeting with Lula. There’s no problem. I told Dimitri about it, and he laughed. But he said we shouldn’t go to the piazza, exactly as I had told you, and to buy our things here from Sidi Karim or from far away, from Bahari.”

So, it was not very serious; she could tell Magd al-Din. But she never did, Magd al-Din appeared to be in a state of constant silence. She wondered what he was so preoccupied with.

In that regard, he was not any different from Camilla, who returned to silence and despondency. She only spoke a very few words to Zahra—”How are you,” “Good morning,” “Good evening,” and nothing else. Zahra now saw her eyes always welling up with tears. The truth was that Camilla had become certain that she had taken a road of no return. She had advanced in her study of French in the Berlitz school in the summer, and when her regular school started she had not stopped her French lessons, changing her schedule from a morning to an afternoon one, as evening classes had been banned since the beginning of the war. There were two days on which she left Nabawiya Musa school, went to Berlitz, and returned home at about four o’clock. Yvonne had stopped taking French, deciding to resume it the following summer. Camilla asked herself many times why she was persevering in her study of the French language and longing to read the great poets – Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Éluard, André Breton, and Aragon – but she had no answer. She once found herself during a lesson repeating to herself the sentence that she had uttered unintentionally during the first lesson, “Je l’aime,” and discovered that she repeated it to herself frequently. Then she added, also without much thinking, “et il m’aime aussi.” Her eyes opened like two flowers and her small, rounded breasts quivered as fire swept through her tender body and she felt her nose catch on fire. Two days later, after she got out of school and had reached Fuad Street and was walking in the cold shadow of the big buildings on that wonderful Alexandrian autumn day, she felt that someone was walking along with her on the other side of the street, neither going ahead nor falling behind her. She felt rays coming from his direction, hitting her right check, waking up her blood. She turned and saw him. Fainting was not a sufficient solution. Her feet almost let her down, and she would have collapsed had she not leaned on a wall for a few moments. Then she saw him in front of her, smiling and happy.

“How is French?”

Strength came back to her. She answered with a question, “How did you know?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that before I left you I had seen in your eyes a desire to do everything that I liked to do.”

They walked. She left her hand in his. He was back, with that strange talk that she did not understand. He seemed to her like a rainbow in the sky. She did not understand what that feeling meant; she did not know if she had thought about it before, but that was how he seemed to her, really: a rainbow crossing the sky in a fire chariot drawn by rainbow horses.

“Woe to you, Camilla, woe to you,” she said to herself after silence had descended for a short while.

“What did you say?”

“Will you wait until I finish my lesson?”

“I will wait for you until the end of time.”

“You talk funny, Rushdi,” she laughed. “I don’t understand you at all.”

“What do you say we change the lesson this time and walk for a little bit?”

They walked to Rami station. They stood on the corniche, invigorated by the cool breeze and the sea spray. He feared the lecherous eyes of the soldiers, white from England and Australia and black from all over the world, so he walked quickly with her to the opposite sidewalk, with its old, typically Alexandrian cafes filled with Greeks, sailors, and soldiers as well. A number of drunken soldiers came out from the Windsor, hurrying together with a number of young women who wore short khaki skirts that reached above their knees despite the cold. Each soldier had his arms around one of the young women as they walked and sang, opera style. He told her, laughing, that students were now saying that after the war the English should leave the country but leave behind the young women of the ATS. Camilla knew that they were conscripts, but he told her that their official jobs were as secretaries and telephone operators in the English camps and establishments, that they had different military ranks exactly like the men, but that their real job was to entertain the soldiers. He said they were not just English but French, Greek, Cypriote, New Zcalanders, Indians, and South Africans and from all over the British Empire. Camilla never thought beyond the literal meaning of these pretty young women in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, abbreviated by the press to ATS and pronounced al-Atsa by the Egyptians. They stopped in front of the statue of Ismail Pasha in Manshiya.

“Let’s stand here like a couple of European tourists,” he said.

“Have you been to Europe before?”

He had put his arm around her and she felt his ribs under his shirt and light pullover, and he felt her fleshy warmth.

“I must go one day.”

“You’ll take me with you?” She clung to him even more closely.

“We may very well find that to be the only option available to us,” he said, reminding her of what she had managed to forget in the summer. If only she had never studied French!

They kept on walking. Many fezzes appeared in the square, with its cafés that attracted brokers; merchants; stock-exchange experts; seekers of fame, fortune, glory, and happiness; would-be pashas and beys coming from the countryside to do business; and sailors who had gotten tired of the cheap bars of Bahari and the cheaper women of Haggari and who came here in search of better bars and prettier women. The square was also filled with horse-drawn carriages that raced along with their human cargo. And above it all was the statue of Muhammad Ali Pasha, ready to take off as the wind mirthfully played in the wide open space and on the ground where it kicked up the little leaves that had fallen indolently from the tree in the middle of the road.

“Where do you live?” she asked him.

“Not far from you. You live in Ghayt al-Aynab. I followed behind you once all the way to your door.”

She looked very surprised as he continued, “I live halfway between Karmuz and Kafr Ashri bridges. There’s housing for railroad workers there. It’s an isolated, quiet place in front of Mahmudiya Canal and a big, empty stretch of land – completely safe.”

“I know the place well,” she said. “It’s a really beautiful place, and the most beautiful thing about it is that no one can spot it or get to it easily.”

He stopped and looked at her very closely, holding her shoulders without fear or shame. “Listen to you, you’re saying beautiful things.”

She laughed and started to walk again after gently removing his hands from her shoulders. “I’ve gone there with mother many times to buy fish from the salt works,” she said. “There’s a long, dark tunnel you go through, and then you find yourself right smack at the salt works.”

“Exactly.”

She did not want to tell him that she had gone several times to that very housing compound with her father, mother, and Yvonne to visit their relative Usta Ghibriyal, whom Rushdi surely knew and who surely was his father’s boss.

“A man who lives in our house works for the railroad,” she said.

“I don’t know him. He doesn’t live in our house,” he said, and they laughed. She felt regret for her indiscretion but soon overcame it, for she had not mentioned the name of their tenant or that of Ghibriyal in any case.

Camilla went home that day like a free sparrow flying in a magnificent space. But as soon as she sat down, a gloom that she could not shake descended upon her. Her mother could not figure it out, nor could anyone else except Yvonne, who realized that her sister was at it again. Every night now Camilla would decide to break it off with Rushdi for good, and in the morning would wait for the afternoon when he came. He was very considerate. He asked her to let him follow her four days a week, and two days a week go out with him to some place far from home.

The priest, with his ruddy complexion, black beard, and black cassock, appeared at the house, and Zahra saw him for the first time, even though he had been to the house many times before. Zahra started hearing long speeches that she did not understand, and prayers and chants that she did not understand either. Every time the priest came, silence descended on the house, and Sitt Maryam closed the door of their room without looking at anyone who might be there, even when Khawaga Dimitri was present. An hour or more later the priest would come out, and Zahra would hear loud voices bidding him farewell, “Good-bye, father, may the Virgin protect you!” She also heard sobbing, but she could not tell whether it came from Camilla or Yvonne. She also rarely saw Camilla and Yvonne now, as they no longer sat out with their mother but stayed in the inner rooms after returning from school.

That continued to be the case until one day the air-raid siren sounded ominously, heralding imminent danger. True, the siren sounded intermittently with every raid, every day, and it sounded the same, whether the raid was big or small, but somehow, people had developed a sense, a sort of intuitive feeling about particularly bad raids by hearing the sound of the siren. Did that sound actually change, or did the war unite people and sensitize them in such a way that they were able to prophesy, like prophets or mystics? The feast at the end of Ramadan had ended ten days earlier with a big raid that lasted from six o’clock in the evening to ten, but it was scattered over various neighborhoods, so it did not leave a large number of casualties concentrated in one place. Today, however, people in Karmuz, Ghayt al-Aynab, Raghib, Masr Station, and Attarin felt that they, the very heart and pulse of Alexandria, were the targets.

That day Zahra had asked Magd al-Din several times about the priest and his visits, which occurred sometimes more than twice in one week and about the silence, the crying, and the mumbling, but Magd al-Din told her, “Leave creation to the Creator, and take care of what’s in your womb.”

When the siren sounded, she clung to him, and her daughter Shawqiya cried, as she sensed that the intermittent siren was bad from the way people around her panicked. She had also figured out that the long, uninterrupted all-clear was good and would clap her little hands when she heard it. Zahra hurriedly put a shawl around her shoulders, for the shelter was cold and humid, and went downstairs, followed by Magd al-Din, who carried Shawqiya. Zahra saw Sitt Maryam, the two girls, and Khawaga Dimitri going downstairs in silence. Zahra’s fear did not prevent her from seeing how Camilla was withering away like an ear of grain left in the sun too long. They all went into Bahi’s room, which was always open since no one had rented it, or Lula’s room, which was also open since the migration of people from Alexandria left behind many vacant apartments and rooms. As soon as they got into the room Sitt Maryam said, “Turn off the light, Dimitri.”

It seemed to Zahra that the woman said this because she did not wish anyone to see her daughter in her bad condition, rather than because of the raid, even though civil defense instructions clearly specified that all lights be turned off. It was the second half of the lunar month of Shawwal, and the moon had waned almost to a crescent, but its light was enough. Magd al-Din opened the window of the room to hear people’s comments and to see them. Then he suggested to Dimitri that they go out on the street and join the men. Dimitri thought it was a good idea and they went out.

Magd al-Din saw the searchlights from the harbor and Kom al-Shuqafa filling the sky. Then he heard the loud droning noise of approaching planes, and as they flew within range, the anti-aircraft artillery in Alexandria let loose a barrage of red missiles from all the highest points in Alexandria. The sounds of the guns reverberated intensely from all directions. Boys and young men on the streets cheered as they saw some planes catch on fire, but the sounds of explosions were soon heard, and smoke could be seen in various quarters of the city in the west, east, and north. Then the explosions were concentrated in the downtown area. Children could be heard crying loudly in many houses, and various people began to recite loudly verses from the Quran. Ghaffara’s voice boomed from behind his fez-mask, “That son of a bitch Graziani doesn’t like us. What really kills me is, how come the planes come over from Italy to hit us? Why don’t they go to England? Isn’t England closer?”

The voice of a young man was heard to reply, “The planes come from Libya, idiot.”

Suddenly Dimyan appeared. It looked as though he had just come from a strenuous race. His voice shook as he spoke.

“I didn’t come here to hide, Sheikh Magd. The piazza, Karmuz, and Bab Sidra are all on fire, sky-high, worse than the six-hour raid. We’ve got to run and help our brothers.”

Magd al-Din was silent, thinking how he had failed to heed the call before, that it would not be right to do that again. Then he heard Ghaffara say to the youth gathered there, “It’s a black night, young men. Come on – let’s go to Karmuz. Houses have fallen down, and people have died.”

It was a night beyond the limits of the human mind. In the dark, frantic feet trotted like horses, and eyes hung on every explosion that filled the sky with fire and showering missiles. When they approached the Mahmudiya canal, they saw only pitch dark over the water and a few barges on which sailors stood watching the battle raging in the sky. In record time they covered the distance on Karmuz Street and entered the piazza by the clock tower. Magd al-Din saw fires the likes of which he had never seen, a huge mass of red, higher than the tallest buildings and houses. He stood helplessly reflecting, “God, most merciful!”

“Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison,” Dimyan repeated, and Ghaffara exclaimed, “God, have mercy on your servants!”

Magd al-Din had seen many fires before in the countryside in which he could smell burning dung, straw, and firewood. This time however, he was smelling burned flesh, hearing cries from all directions, and watching as women ran through the streets in their nightclothes and men carried children from their homes to stand at a distance. Everyone was crying, the sound of planes droned ceaselessly over the city as the guns chased them and the searchlights raced all over the sky. He could hear the fire trucks coming from Kom al-Dikka and saw some parked in the distance in front of the burning houses, as the fire fighters in their helmets scrambled to the fire hydrants on the sidewalks to which they attached their huge water hose and began to put out the fires.

The bombing had moved to Mina al-Basal, and Magd al-Din could see Dimyan standing helplessly in front of him, and Ghaffara as usual wearing his fez-mask, and Hamidu and the young men running to the collapsed houses to pull out people pinned down or just lying there. There were many musical instruments lying scattered everywhere on the ground – lutes, drums, tambourines, accordions, saxophones, and flutes that looked like snakes and serpents. There were groups of almost-naked women who had been surprised by the raid, the destruction, and the fires. Some women from the houses that were not effected began to hand the others robes and gallabiyas to cover themselves. Curses poured forth against the Germans, the Italians, and the English who were behind it all. The air was filled with the smell of human sweat mixed with dust. They all began to remove the corpses from the debris. Then the all-clear sounded as the planes moved away, but the fires still lit the place, as did the headlights of the fire trucks. There were screams coming from the ruins and sounds of faint moaning as if someone was gasping a last breath. Every time someone alive was brought out, shouts of “God is great!” rang out. Magd al-Din had not expected to meet anyone he knew here, let alone find them in the ruins. He saw three men carrying a women on a stretcher and running; two were carrying it from the front and one from the back, and he heard a voice call out, “Sheikh Magd al-Din.”