Текст книги "No One Sleeps in Alexandria"

Автор книги: Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“Nobody got on. Nobody got off,” he said. “The station-master didn’t even leave his room.”

The train moved on.

22

What do the armies of the Earth amount to?

Look at the moon in the sky.

Jalal al-Din Rumi

Magd al-Din had never before seen such an arid expanse before, True, there is open space in the countryside, but it is an expanse of soft green fields teeming with birds flying and humans playing or working peacefully. Next to the water wheels you can see children having fun, animals sleeping, women talking, old men playing tictac-toe, and ducks splashing in the water on which willows cast their shadows, while on the land, camphor, sycamore, and oak trees cast theirs. Now as Magd al-Din stood on the short, low platform of al-Alamein. railway station next to Dimyan, he was seeing nothing but a wilderness, with no birds and no trees. Dimyan likewise was staring incredulously at the awesome, vast expanse. The train had started again slowly, then moved away, looking like a green worm spotted with yellow, wiggling away into the endless beyond. In the distance was military equipment, some scattered, other pieces arrayed close together. Among them were a few wooden kiosks and half-naked soldiers, their bodies above their khaki shorts gleaming in the distance, and other soldiers whose black bodies did not gleam. The train that sped away like a wondrous yellow-spotted worm, the high faraway sky, the mysterious groupings of soldiers, and the all-engulfing wilderness gave both Magd al-Din and Dimyan a sense of being lost. Five or six Bedouin had gotten off the train from the other cars, but they had not paused for a moment. Waiting for them were a few others, who spoke in loud, fast rattling voices, of which Magd al-Din and Dimyan could not understand a word. The two of them watched the Bedouin hurrying away down the narrow road next to the station between two rows of low, limestone houses deserted by their inhabitants. The Bedouin stirred up little eddies of dust, as if they were a herd of goats scurrying around. The stationmaster had gone out of his room to meet the train and spoke briefly with the engineer. As soon as the train began to move and the stationmaster turned around to go back to his room, he saw Magd al-Din and Dimyan and recognized them, for only a railroad worker would be wearing a green suit when he got off the train at the station. He approached them slowly. On the platform were two wooden rooms with pitched roofs also made of wood, painted a dull gray in several thick, clotted layers, betraying the painter’s lack of skill.

“Welcome,” said the stationmaster once he had come very close to Dimyan and Magd al-Din. Either they were still too awed by the expanse to respond or he did not wait for a reply.

“Are you the new workers?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Come on in.”

He walked and they followed him to his room. At that moment, another man appeared at the door of the other room and stood there, staring at them. The stationmaster told him that they were the new crossing workers. The man welcomed them. Before they got into the stationmaster’s room, Dimyan said, “Our stuff’s on the platform.”

The stationmaster smiled and said calmly, “Don’t worry. Nothing gets lost here.”

In the stationmaster’s room they all sat, Dimyan and Magd al-Din on a small wooden bench and the stationmaster and his colleague on another one facing them.

“My name is Hilal,” said the stationmaster. “My colleague here is Amer – he’s the telegraph operator. His work is extremely important. Being late sending or receiving a telegram can have serious consequences.” He paused for a moment and looked at Amer as if he needed confirmation for what he had said, then continued, “There may come a time when neither he nor I will be needed. Perhaps only the two of you will remain to handle the army traffic at the crossing. Military trains will not stop, which means your work is very important. Here we are working directly under the British command, supervised by a young English officer who knows a little Arabic. He’s a little arrogant but quite sympathetic. There’s an old housing compound, which is vacant now. Amer and I live in one of the houses. You can take the one next to it. The water train comes only once a week, and if it’s late we get some water from the soldiers. There’s no one in town except a few Bedouin in a settlement to the south. Some of their men sometimes show up when the water train arrives. They fill their jerry cans, but they don’t mix with anyone. They walk fast and they look like camels. Every one of them is so tall you’d expect them to keel over any minute.” He laughed by himself and continued, “They never feel hungry. They live on the fat of their bodies, exactly like camels. And they guard their dignity fiercely. Sometimes a young shepherdess comes with her sheep and her little brother. I hope no one will give her any trouble – but I haven’t had the honor of your names.”

“Magd al-Din.”

Dimyan was a little hesitant to say his name. He had had it with the man’s chatter, but politeness, especially because this was the first meeting, compelled him to listen on. “Dimyan,” he finally said.

Resentment showed on the face of Amer the telegraph operator. Hilal was silent for a few moments, then said as if to rebuke Amer, whose resentment was visible, “In any case, Jesus is a prophet and Muhammad is a prophet, too.”

But Dimyan was still thinking about what the man said in his long talk and was amused by the thought that the stationmaster’s name meant ‘crescent,’ while his face was as round as the full moon.

It was noon. There was a big clock in the stationmaster’s room, and Magd al-Din thanked God for that, otherwise how would he know prayer times when there was no mosque calling the faithful to prayer, for neither he nor Dimyan had a watch. He did not know that he would soon meet Muslim soldiers of the empire on which the sun never set.

The stationmaster got up to show them the house where they would stay. No sooner had they made it to the platform than they saw in front of them the young English officer wearing khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. His knees were dark, which meant that he had spent a long time in the desert unlike new soldiers whose knees looked white and red, with the exception of the Africans, naturally. The officer wore a green cap.

“Hello Mr. Spike,” the stationmaster called out. The officer pretended not to hear him and asked Magd al-Din and Dimyan in English, “Do you speak English?”

They understood the question but did not answer. Magd al-Din was at a loss for words; he thought immediately of Hamza, who knew a little English, actually a lot of English compared to the two of them. Hamza was lost.

Magd al-Din felt his face cloud over and sadness came over him as if ants were crawling all over his hot cheeks. He bowed his head and looked at the floor and almost asked the officer if he knew anything about Hamza. He heard the officer ask the stationmaster in annoyance, “What happened, Hilal?”

Dimyan blurted out, “Yes, sir, afandim?”

The officer stared at him in confusion. Now everyone was confused. Magd al-Din realized the mess that Dimyan’s comment had created. The officer was now muttering audibly, “A pair of stupid Egyptians!”

Then he said to the stationmaster in a mixture of Arabic and English, “What a bunch of jackasses!”

“You know Arabic wonderful, General!” Dimyan said to the officer, smiling and blushing.

The officer, still staring, could not help smiling himself. Hilal, Amer, and Magd al-Din were visibly relieved.

“Give them some blankets, tins of food, and anything else they need,” the officer told Hilal.

Hilal accompanied them to the housing compound, then left them after opening the door of the house where they would live. Magd al-Din had been inside a railroad-authority house the night that Shahin had invited him to see his son Rushdi. Magd al-Din and Dimyan had both applied to get homes in that compound at the earliest opportunity – and now they were getting a house not much different from the ones in Alexandria. But here there were no tiles, and the walls were not painted. The big white stones were now dirty and no longer white. Spiders and little insects were in the cracks. The wooden roof here was old and unpaintcd. Magd al-Din knew that when a human arrived in a place, he became the master of all beings in that place. So he would have to clean the walls and get rid of all the insects, even if he had to apply the flames of the kerosene stove to them. From the soldiers, he could probably get some substance that would get rid of the insects for good. Perhaps Dimyan was having the same thoughts: neither of them would spend the rest of his life here. This was a land of war, a land of death. This horrendous wilderness would swallow everything. Magd al-Din opened the little window of the inner room and saw the stark desert looking him in the face. Dimyan was in the outer hall looking closely at the filthy walls and wondering at the smell rising out of the dry bathroom that had no faucets and no pipes. He went into the room and found Magd al-Din standing, transfixed, in front of the window looking at the endless emptiness.

“What’s the matter, Sheikh Magd? Do you miss Umm Shawqiya?” Dimyan asked.

Magd al-Din took a long, deep breath. “I am a peasant, Dimyan. I’ve never seen the desert before.”

“And I’ve never seen the desert before cither, even though I’m from the city.”

He was silent for a few moments during which Magd al-Din thought about the work arrangement. They would have to split the day at the crossing: if he worked days, Dimyan would work nights and vice versa.

“You think the time can pass here, Dimyan? It seems like the world has come to a standstill.”

Dimyan looked at him in surprise while Magd al-Din was overcome with shame, as he appeared, for the first time, awkward and impatient.

“Leave creation to the Creator, Sheikh Magd,” Dimyan said sheepishly. “God has the power to make a whole lifetime pass in the twinkling of an eye,” Then he laughed boisterously and said, “Do you know what I was thinking just now, Sheikh Magd? I was thinking of the abonne Radwan Express. He doesn’t seem normal.”

“Just because he never leaves the train?”

Dimyan did not answer. He fell silent and so did Magd al-Din. It looked like Dimyan was about to cry.

“I feel like I’m going to die here, Sheikh Magd,” he said suddenly, tears welling up in his eyes.

Quickly Sheikh Magd al-Din assumed his old confident posture and patted his friend on the shoulder.

“People like you don’t die so fast, Dimyan. Yes, it’s only right that the world keep the few good folks it has.”

Time waits for no one. There was a light air raid on Alexandria, where many Libyan refugees from Cyrenaica had arrived. They were placed under quarantine then moved to the Maks and Wardian neighborhoods. Dimyan and Magd al-Din had seen them on the train coming from Marsa Matruh, which stopped for a long time at al-Alamein. Magd al-Din got on the train and went through the cars but did not see anyone he knew except Radwan Express, who was sitting with a group of refugees, talking to them enthusiastically while they listened, enthralled by what he was saying. Why did he get on the train that day? He did not know. Perhaps he was hoping to come across Hamza. He still felt that his insult to Hamza was behind his getting lost. Hamza’s forgiving nature was not enough for Magd al-Din to forget. Five years had passed since the coronation of King Farouk, so the country celebrated for a week beginning on the sixth of May. A gala event was held at Cinema Metro in Cairo for Gone with the Wind to raise funds for the war victims. The papers were filled with pictures of Vivien Leigh under which were ads for all kinds of Egyptian and foreign products: perfumes, furniture, clothes, shoes, food, cars, cigarettes, matches, aspirin, and sports and health goods. A new airport was inaugurated at Nuzha in Alexandria to receive civil aviation at a time when all civilian flights from Europe and America had stopped. The Greeks celebrated over a bottle that a Greek soldier had filled with dust from Athens. The celebration was held at the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Saba, close to Cavafy’s deserted home. The Greeks wrote on the outside of the bottle, “Free dust for a free people.” An elementary school teacher won the Muwasa hospital lottery grand prize, a twenty-five-thousand pound apartment building. But a colleague of his named Muhammad Ismail claimed that he had paid half of the fifty-piaster price of the ticket and therefore he was entitled to half of the prize, but that the teacher who had possession of the ticket refused to give him his share. Thereupon he sued the teacher to force him to give him his due. The story spread throughout Alexandria and all over Egypt. So Umm Hamidu clicked her tongue and said, “Now that somebody with an un-aristocratic name wins, they make trouble for him.” Rudolph Hess flew a plane to Scotland, where he landed and was found by a Scottish farmer who recognized him from his pictures in the papers.

The world was all abuzz with Hess’s flight. He was said to be mentally unbalanced. He was also said to be the third man in the Nazi party after Hitler and Goering. It turned out that Hess had spent his childhood in Egypt and had studied at one of the English schools there. His father had lived in Alexandria before World War I and had a big office on the street later named Saad Zaghloul Street. He was an agent for German marine, pharmaceutical, pen and pencil, and chemical equipment companies. He had lived for some time in Zifta before settling down in Alexandria. From Zifta, Rufail Masiha, B.A., sent a letter to the editor of al-Ahram in which he said that of all Egyptian villages, Zifta was the most closely related to Hess, that he had spent his childhood there with his father, who had owned a mechanic’s shop and flour mills and whose farm was still referred to as the Hess Estate. He added that some inhabitants of Zifta still remembered the fifteen-year-old Hess boy walking in the streets of the village. The author of the letter concluded by wondering whether that humble village on the bank of the Nile knew that it had been home to a personality who would one day be talked about by the whole world as it was living the most colossal war that humanity had ever known.

The newspapers outdid each other trying to prove that Hess was born in Alexandria in 1886, then met with Hitler in 1914 at the western front. The two young men, weary of life and the war, were united by a feeling of injustice done to Germany and became comrades in arms. The problem, though, was that the Germans were now saying that he was crazy. Drunkards in Alexandria bars agreed that he was crazy, not because they believed Nazi propaganda, but because he had spent his childhood in Zifta, and they laughed. A poet even wrote a short poem about Hess’s flight:

Was it flight, a ruse, or insanity

That enabled Hess to evade mortality?

If flight, then flight is bad—

There are so many ways to be mad!

Aziz al-Masri, together with the pilots Abd al-Munim Abd al-Rauf and Husayn Dhu al-Fiqar Sabri, flew a plane to meet Rommel in the desert, but the plane crashed near Qalyub, and they hid in the countryside. The government announced a one-thousand pound prize to whoever led to their capture.

German airborne troops landed on Crete in huge numbers, in a unique assault hitherto unknown in the world. The landing was preceded by intense aerial bombardment for hours, and Goering said that the assault on Crete was the greatest that paratroopers anywhere in the world could accomplish. Faced with this massive attack, the English had to evacuate the island and save as many of their troops as they could by transporting them to Alexandria. The Greek king and his ministers left the island for England. At the end, there were thirteen thousand dead, wounded, and prisoners of war, in addition to two thousand Royal Navy troops. Sixteen thousand troops made it to Alexandria. Crete was only one of the marvels of German victories that seemed as if they would continue forever.

Dimyan went to Alexandria at the end of the month and returned the following day after receiving his and Magd al-Din’s salaries and spending a night with his family. He told Magd al-Din that he could not stay away from him, then he laughed and said, “Maybe I’m also attached to Brika.” Brika was the young Bedouin girl that the stationmaster had told them not to give any trouble. Dimyan had seen her every day late in the morning with her sheep and her little brother and could not help starting a conversation with her. She spoke with him with spontaneity and sweetness, and he gave her some goodies, especially cookies and chocolate, that the Indian soldiers, whose acquaintance he had made, had given him. When Brika left, she left behind a smell of sheep and their wool that never left his nose until the evening when to his astonishment he carried the smell home with him. He realized that something was going to happen between him and the little girl, and he felt fear mixed with a strange kind of joy.

A girl in southern Egypt had died and been buried, then six days later came back to life. It was a miracle that people kept talking about. One poet urged her to go back to the grave where everything was quiet, instead of this deadly world. Cairo was divided into a number of wards, each of which was to be serviced exclusively by a certain number of undertakers who were not to operate outside the borders of their wards. This led to a widespread protest on the part of the undertakers, who submitted a petition to the Department of Internal Lawsuits in which they claimed that there were too many of them to be restricted to specific wards. Besides, the petition said, the dead in Heliopolis were not like the dead in Sayyida Zaynab. “Such a division would place the dead in each ward at the mercy of that ward’s undertakers, who would exercise a monopoly of burials and shrouds and would charge exorbitant fees due to the absence of unrestricted competition.” A number of detainees were released form the Tur detention camp in Sinai. Among them were twenty persons from Alexandria, including Hamidu, whose mother strung decorations at the entrance of the house on the now almost-deserted street. Very few people came to congratulate him upon his return, once they found out that he had been detained for his acts against the British and not for being a menace to security, as the government had said. Magd al-Din and Dimyan heard the German planes as they flew over at night, and they saw their red lights. There were shots from anti-aircraft batteries from several spots in the desert, but the planes were flying too high and none was hit. Neither Magd al-Din nor Dimyan slept that night. They sat for a while in front of the house. The moon was almost full.

“Who’s the new German commander here?” Dimyan asked.

“Rommel.”

“A frightening name.”

They could hear some noises, some movement of troops far off or some shots fired in the air or the sounds of crawling, invisible night insects. After a considerable interval they saw the planes returning and the anti-aircraft artillery chasing them in the sky in vain. The planes went back and forth more than once that night.

They flew high over the desert, but as soon as they entered the air above the city they fearlessly went close to land, as if they knew their targets precisely. The most important target that night was the huge gun at Bab Sidra, which previous raids had not been successful in silencing. It was an anti-aircraft gun with three strong searchlights that lit up the sky. The planes kept firing throughout the raid, during which the gun was silenced and dozens of homes were destroyed in Bab Sidra and Karmuz. Two days later an even more intense raid was launched and lasted all night long against the Egyptian and well as the European quarters. That raid targeted Greek and English ships and frigates anchored in the harbor. The bombs fell in the sea, causing huge columns of water to break the darkness of the night. The raid did little damage to the ships, compared to the havoc it wreaked on the poorer quarter of the city. People left in panic with only the clothes on their backs, leaving everything behind. They arrived in Cairo in their gallabiyas, pajamas, even in their underwear. Many women arrived in their nightgowns. Alexandria became an inferno that consumed its people. Many families died, and in some of them there remained only a child or a girl or a mother – all alone. For the first time, the problem of single women and girls and homeless children arose. Tent shelters were hastily set up in Abu Hummus, Kafr al-Dawwar, Damanhur, and the villages of Gharbiya and Manufiya for those without family in the countryside. As for those that had family, their families stood waiting for them at the railway stations all the way to Aswan, welcoming them as they arrived without food or money or clothes, the men looking pale, the children with panic on their faces, and the women with tragedy and profound grief in their eyes. It seemed like Germany had decided to destroy the city. Rescue workers worked hard in the disaster areas. Fruits and vegetables stopped coming, and the slaughterhouse stopped slaughtering after a short raid during which the slaughterhouses received a direct hit, as they were close to the ammunition depot. The flesh of the vendors and buyers mixed with the meat of animals – a lot of blood flowed that day. It was said that Germany was trying to empty the city of all inhabitants so it could enter without resistance. The English launched an offensive against Rommel but two days later, on the seventeenth of June, everything turned topsy-turvy and the Allies started to retreat under air cover, pursued by Rommel. Churchill removed General Wavell, transferring him to India, where he became commander in chief of India and replaced him with Auchinleck, the former C-in-C India, who now became C-in-C Middle East command. Four major incidents took place on one night, the twenty-second of June. A woman, Badriya by name, was arrested on charges of having multiple husbands. At midnight two violent air raids were unleashed against Alexandria, which led to a mass exodus at dawn. At dawn also, Germany’s foreign minister Rippentrop was presenting an official declaration of war on the Soviet Union to the Soviet Ambassador in Berlin. At the end of the night Magd al-Din had gotten up, performed the dawn prayers, and sat jubilantly reciting the Quran. He noticed that Dimyan’s eyes were gleaming in the dark so he told him, “Tonight my wife gave birth, Dimyan.”

Dimyan made no answer. “I saw her, Zahra, waking me up and offering me a glass of warm milk. Do you know what she had?”

Again Dimyan did not reply.

“A boy. I told her if that happened to name him Shawqi. She must have done that.”