No One Sleeps in Alexandria

by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

  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.”

  The day was when I did not keep myself in readiness for

  thee; and entering my heart unbidden . . .

  unknown to me . . .

  Rabindranath Tagore

  23

  Before the offensive against Russia, the Führer had told his military commanders that Russian soldiers were not to be treated as prisoners of war, but that they were to be killed. After the attack the world heard Churchill’s speech on the BBC, and his words were spread far and wide: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets . . .”

  The massive German armies were sweeping across the vast Russian front that extended from the North Pole to the Black Sea. German planes were destroying the Russian air force on the ground. Five million German soldiers were invading cities and villages. Riga, the capital of Latvia, fell after just one week of fighting. There was a decisive battle in Minsk, and the Russians began to retreat in great numbers before the Germans. Intense British air raids on Germany did little to relieve the Russians. British air raids here in the desert against the Tripoli harbor managed to destroy several German and Italian ships, but that too was of little consequence. German and Italian planes responded by launching a raid on Alexandria, where the only persons you saw were those fleeing the city. Stalin broadcast a message to Hitler warning him that he would be defeated, just as Napoleon Bonaparte had the previous century. But the Russians retreated even further to Stalin’s defense line. An artillery war began on the Egyptian borders between the Afrika Korps and the Eighth Army. King George II came from England to Alexandria, reviewed the Royal Hellenic Army, and decorated some soldiers. Safiya Zaghloul, nicknamed ‘the Mother of Egyptians,’ visited Alexandria. There was a call encouraging men to marry single Alexandrian women before the forces of the vice market got to them. New fire and rescue stations were established. The taste of drinking water in the city changed. It was said that was because of the many bombs that fell in the Mahmudiya canal; it was also said that it was because of considerable growth of moss in the Nile. The country celebrated Queen Nazli’s birthday at the same time that a peasant woman gave birth to a baby that was more like a monkey, but was stillborn. Premier Paderewski, Poland’s first prime minister after World War I and one of the most acclaimed pianists in America after he resigned, died. Sitt Badiya Masabni staged the revue We Must Laugh. The Germans reached the outskirts of Kiev and crossed the
Dnepr river. The number of air raids on Alexandria during the month of June was fourteen, in the course of which 725 were killed, 850 wounded, and more than forty thousand displaced. The number of troops fighting on both sides on the Russian front was nine million, in the most vicious war that humanity had yet seen. The Germans succeeded in occupying Smilensk and Bessarabia and continued moving toward Leningrad, where fierce fighting took place. Two thousand new shelters were built in Alexandria, even though many people had fled. The Japanese intensified their activities in Indochina and occupied new bases to send their armies to the French colonics. Strangely enough, the beaches in Alexandria were crowded this year, and there was a call for government employees who had evacuated Alexandria to return and run government operations. German casualties in one month in Russia reached 1.5 million soldiers, three thousand tanks, and twenty-three hundred planes. Russian resistance guerrilla war operations began. The first air raid on Port Said in Egypt killed seventeen and wounded sixty. Said Ghazi’s height reached two meters and 65 centimeters. The doctors gave up on trying to stop the fast growth of his bones, and he became the talk of the patients in the hospital. Visitors of patients in the hospital took pains to pass by the orthopedics section to catch a glimpse of Said Ghazi, if only from a distance. The hospital gave Said a wheelchair, as he was no longer capable of standing up, let alone walking and hitting door frames.

  The trains carrying soldiers to Alexandria increased; the soldiers were English, Irish, Scottish, South African, and Australian, in addition to Greek, French, and Jewish volunteers. The trains emptied their troops in al-Alamein, from where they were sent on to Marsa Matruh and Sallum, where intermittent fighting was taking place at the borders. When a band of Scottish soldiers, with their distinctive uniforms and bagpipes on their chests, arrived, they lined up on the platform and began to play merry, boisterous music, which Dimyan heard in the house, so he hurried to the station. There he was amazed at the beautiful sight of the happy performing soldiers. The train started to leave the station, and the players proceeded on the narrow asphalt road to the north where the barracks and the headquarters were located, half a kilometer away.

  “What are these musicians doing here?” asked Dimyan, who was now standing between the stationmaster, the telegraph operator, and Magd al-Din.

  “They are Scottish soldiers who play music during the fighting,” Hilal, the stationmaster, replied. Magd al-Din and Dimyan looked at him in astonishment as he continued, “The last Scottish band to come here was last year. They marched with the troops and went into Libya at the time of Graziani. None of them came back.”

  “So they fight with the soldiers?” Magd al-Din asked.

  “They play during the fighting to raise morale,” said the stationmaster.

  Everyone fell silent and dispersed to tend to their business, while Dimyan stood alone in the glare of the brilliant daylight reflecting on the Scottish soldier-players who had disappeared among the barracks, the sound of their instruments lost in the great glare of silence. For the first time, Dimyan could see clearly, the vast arrays of military equipment scattered as far as the eye could see. There were hundreds of ocher tanks covered with greenish-yellow netting amid artificial cactus and thorn trees for camouflage, hundreds of vehicles in ceaseless motion, the roar of their engines muffled by the distance, rows of giant guns not yet in use, similarly covered with netting and branches. There were also little scattered kiosks and incessant movement of soldiers going in or out of them or the trenches. Suddenly Dimyan felt his sense of smell aroused. It did not take him long to figure that it was Brika on her way with the sheep and her brother and her desert sweat. Out of nowhere there appeared three jeeps driven by bare-chested soldiers; the jeeps were speeding jerkily along the bumpy road from the north. Brika’s little brother could be seen scampering among the sheep, saying, “Herr, herr” to guide their movement on the asphalt road, anticipating mistakes on the part of the jeeps, which were coming toward him as he and the sheep came from the south, and skillfully evading them. Brika meanwhile was standing following the movement of the speeding cars and hurling unintelligible words at them. Dimyan knew that she tended her sheep behind the station so he went there ahead of her and saw her tender little frame approaching, her clothes glittering under the sun. It was the first time he had seen Bedouin costumes, He later found out from her that the top part was a bawli made of silk spun on a manual loom with gold brocade. Under it one could see a cotton maryul covering the whole body. On top of the bawli was a leather wrap covering the chest down to the waist, which she would soon take off when it got too hot. On her head was a silk burnoose covering the whole head and ending with flowers made of colorful threads and gold and silver spangles that shone in the light, leaving only a soft round wisp of hair on the forehead, which drew attention to the smoothness of her brow and to her delicate eyebrows, her big dark eyes and her long, killing, eyelashes. He could see at her feet, above her little shoes also embroidered with golden and silver threads, the ends of pants with tiny crinkles.

  He wished what happened the first time they met would happen again today. For some reason, a little ewe had stopped next to his foot and stuck to his leg and when Brika came close and began to prod it with a long, thin stick, the little ewe stuck even closer and did not budge. Dimyan laughed and so did Brika and he smelled musk wafting through the smell of sheep wool of her clothes. It did not occur to him that such a young woman wore musk or some other perfume, He thought it was the smell of her sweat. And on that day he first met her, it also did not occur to him that ten days had passed since he had arrived here, and that his desire for a woman was becoming aroused. He found himself staring at her big, dark eyes and her slightly pale brown face and the two beautiful dimples on her cheeks. He saw her lips tremble when she did not speak but also when she spoke. Above the upper lips was fine fuzz that was truly exciting. He saw her hands under the sleeves of her gallabiya, small and delicate, their bones almost visible under the skin.

  “Herr, herr,” she said, trying to dislodge the little ewe that had attached itself so closely to Dimyan’s leg that he had to spread his legs to give a chance to the ewe, which was enjoying their proximity, to pass through them.

  When the situation became awkward, Dimyan said, “Leave her be. Don’t break her heart.”

  But Brika bent down and picked up the ewe and raised it to her chest, and it rested there meekly, turning her muzzle toward Dimyan and bleating thinly. Dimyan laughed and so did Brika, who said, “She knows you.”

  She kept laughing as she hurried to the sheep and left the ewe with them, saying, “Herr, herr,” as did her brother. They all left Dimyan, who found himself the following day waiting for Brika with cookies and chocolate. They kept meeting like that every day for a short while.

  Today he found himself saying to her, “Brika, I know your name from Hilal, the stationmaster, but you haven’t asked me my name.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked with a smile.

  “Dimyan.”

  After a pause, she repeated the name, “Dimyan, Dimyan, Dimyan” and said, “Nice.”

  Dimyan left her for a little while, went home, then returned carrying more chocolate. She was waiting for him behind the station, and a short distance away her brother was keeping an eye on the sheep. Brika ate a piece of chocolate with obvious relish and gave her brother two pieces.

  “You like chocolate?” Dimyan asked.

  “Yes. My father buys me some when he goes to Amiriva. This is better.”

  “What does your father do in Amiriya?”

  “He sells and buys.”

  “Is he a merchant?”

  “No. He just sells and buys.”

  There was an awkard silence, then she added, “He sells the sheep and buys what we want. Nothing more. He doesn’t make a big profit.”

  Dimyan understood; it all made sense. He found himself saying without thinking, “And the little one?”

  “What about him?”

  “Would h
e tell your father that you sat with me?”

  She laughed and said, “I’ll tell my father.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?” he asked, surprised at her courage.

  “Afraid of what? We are Arabs, Bedouin. We are not afraid.” After another pause, she said, “Your name is Dimyan?”

  “Yes.”

  “It would be a good name for a girl.”

  He figured that that meant she liked the name. It surprised him that she did not realize that he was Christian. Perhaps she did not dwell on it. Perhaps she herself was Christian. Yes. Some Christians had fled here as they had fled to southern Egypt. But what good would all these illusions, or even facts do him?

  They met many times. Dimyan found himself holding her palms and turning them over as she laughed gleefully. Her hands were not warm, but little by little warmth came into them and to his own hands. But was it not possible that this young Bedouin woman was simply treating him like a father, nothing else? Could he not think about that? But the look of profound happiness in her eyes betrayed something else, and he was not going to let anything rob him of his happiness, which the good desert had given him unexpectedly.