No One Sleeps in Alexandria

by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

  At night in front of the house as they lay stretched out on the ground smoking, their eyes gleaming in the dark, Dimyan asked Magd al-Din, “Tell me, Sheikh Magd—can someone like me fall in love?”

  A soft breeze was blowing slowly in the desert, softening the intense heat of the day. There were not many trains at night, just one that usually came at dawn, so they always had the chance to spend most of the night together. In fact they had not been able to divide the day into shifts except for a few days at the beginning. After that they sat together at the crossing rather than spending the time alone in the house. And so they became inseparable at work and at home.

  Amer had passed by them a short while earlier, leaving the telegraph office to sleep early as usual since no one sent any telegrams at night. No one sent any telegrams during the day either any more. The Bedouin were not in the habit of sending telegrams, and the soldiers coming from overseas had their own military ways of sending telegrams.

  Amer stopped after they exchanged greetings, then asked them, “Do you know who sent the last telegram from the office today?”

  They looked at him for a while in confusion, then Dimyan laughed and said, “Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab, the singer!”

  “No.”

  “Then it must be King Farouk!”

  Magd al-Din smiled, but Amer did not. Scorn appeared in his eyes at what Dimyan had said, and he said calmly, “It was me who sent it.”

  Dimyan looked at Magd al-Din, who had a pitying look in his eyes and said, “Sit down with us for a while, Amer. You must be upset about something. Sit down and talk.”

  They were surprised to see Amer sit down in front of them. Magd al-Din offered him a cigarette, and he took it with trembling fingers. Dimyan lit it for him. He began puffing the smoke calmly and talking as if to himself, “Yes, I was the sender. I sent it to my wife. I asked her to talk to me about the children.”

  “Do you have children, Amer?” Magd al-Din said after a silence.

  “I don’t have any children, Sheikh Magd,” was Amer’s reply, after another long silence.

  A more profound silence fell. Magd al-Din had received an actual telegram announcing that Zahra had given birth to a boy, whom she named Shawqi, as Magd al-Din had wanted. Magd al-Din had told Dimyan, proudly, “Exactly as I saw in the dream!” And much as he felt regret that he could not go back to the village, he felt content that God had granted him his wish for a son. He thought about all that as Amer got up and left in the dark. As they watched him go, Dimyan said suddenly, “You haven’t answered my question, Sheikh Magd.”

  “What question, Dimyan?”

  “My question about love.”

  “What’re you saying, friend? Put some sense in your head. We’re poor, Dimyan. Besides, you’re married with children.”

  They both fell silent. Dimyan seemed unconvinced by what his friend had said. He thought, why should poverty prevent love? Why must a man love only his wife and his family? His heart has stirred toward Brika, and he could not stop his heart.

  “What happens when a Christian man falls in love with a Muslim woman?” Dimyan asked.

  Magd al-Din did not reply. He instantly recalled the story of Rushdi and Camilla, the story that Dimyan knew was coming back, in reverse, but the same story, no question about it. So why was Dimyan going to hell with his own two feet? He heard Dimyan exclaim, “Life is a bitch and time a traitor.”

  “Life isn’t a bitch, and time is no traitor, Dimyan,” Magd al-Din replied. “We bring trouble on ourselves. How can you be so weak in controlling you heart?”

  “My heart defeated me, Sheikh Magd. My heart has grown attached to torture, and I can’t stop it. I didn’t do it deliberately. I never did anything intentionally in my life. Did you or I intentionally get transferred to work here in al-Alamein, in the middle of the desert? Did we intentionally meet in the first place?”

  Magd al-Din did not have an answer, and he tried to think of some way to say, “A man over forty craves young girls—if one-was a little patient, the crisis would pass in peace.”

  But Dimyan was thinking of another reason for his love of Brika. Perhaps because she comes from a vast expanse. Where does she come from? He did not know. He would ask her and she would say, “From Ghadi” and point south. Where does she go with her sheep and brother? She doesn’t seem to go to a specific place, a tent or a house or a village. She always seems to have ascended to the sky or descended to the bottom of the earth. She comes from God and goes back to Him. She always comes from the vast expanse, and when she does, his chest grows bigger and fills with air from an unknown source in such heat.

  “Our life in Ghayt al-Aynab is too tight, Sheikh Magd,” said Dimyan, as if to himself. “We hardly have enough air to breathe on the banks of Mahmudiya—it’s heavy air, most of the time made rotten by a corpse floating in the water. This girl is an enigma, Sheikh Magd. As she comes, so she goes. God has sent her to me to preoccupy me. I cannot refuse what the Lord sends, can I?”

  They both fell silent. Magd al-Din saw Dimyan wiping a tear away with his fingers.

  And make us all, O Lord, deserving of exchanging

  a pure kiss with one another.

  Coptic prayer

  24

  Dimyan announced that as of tomorrow he would not eat corned beef, meat, eggs, cheese, or anything of animal origin except fish. As of tomorrow the fast of the Virgin, which lasts two weeks, would begin.

  The morrow was the seventh of August and the first day of the Coptic month of Misra. Dimyan noticed that Magd al-Din was a little lost in thought so he added, “Remember what I told you about the big fast, our holiest one that ends with Easter? This one about to start is the fast of the Virgin. There’s also the Nativity fast, which lasts forty-three days, and ends with Christmas on January seventh. Then there is the fast of Jonah, three days. Do you know Jonah? He is mentioned in the Quran. He stayed for three days in the belly of the big fish and came out to preach to the people of Nineveh and guide them to faith.”

  Magd al-Din was thinking that he had forgotten the Coptic months, which he thought he would never forget. All peasants know the Coptic calendar because it is timed with the seasons, and keep up with it. And there he was hearing from Dimyan that tomorrow would be the first of Misra. “He is the Prophet Yunus, peace be upon him,” he said to Dimyan, as he finally paid attention to his words.

  “Well, do you know Nineveh? A beautiful name, but its people were evil,” Dimyan said.

  “I think Nineveh is in Iraq. I also think it is the city of the prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon him.”

  “You know many things, Magd al-Din, many, many things. In the Jonah fast, we completely abstain from eating for three days. Some of us fast it one day at a time. We also fast Wednesday and Friday of every week of our life, with the exception of the fifty days immediately following Easter, the time of khamsin sandstorms in Egypt, which is the period that Jesus Christ spent on earth after His rising. We fast Wednesday because that was the day the Jews agreed to crucify Christ, and we fast Friday because that was the day He was crucified. They are days of holy fasting on which we only eat fish, exactly like the big fast.”

  Magd al-Din was lost in thought again. Where does his friend get this religious information, when he had led a vagabond’s life until just a year ago, when he first started going to church? “But you don’t fast on Wednesdays or Fridays,” he said with a smile.

  “It’s difficult for me, Sheikh Magd. I don’t observe the Jonah fast either. It’s not intentional—I’m just not used to it. I’ve also told you that all our days are not much different from fasting days. I fast more than I’m supposed to.”

  Dimyan fell silent for a short while, then asked suddenly, “Are all the stories of the prophets in the Quran?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re also in the Old Testament. Praise the Lord. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know about my fast so you wouldn’t be restricted to my food.”

  “I’ll fast with you, Dimyan. I
’ll eat what you cat and abstain from what you abstain from.”

  As usual, time passed. Magd al-Din wrote a letter to Zahra and sent it with the abonne Radwan Express. He asked him to put it in the nearest mailbox in Alexandria. Dimyan asked him to pass by his family in Ghayt al-Aynab to see if they were all right after the heavy raids of the last few days. Dimyan laughed as he told Radwan, “Finally you’re getting a job and customers.” He gave him a box filled with tea, cookies, cheddar cheese, corned beef, and chocolate to deliver to his family. He and Magd al-Din also gave Radwan some tea, corned beef, and cheese, and he was very pleased. True, they would not be able to send things with him every day or even every week, but at least it was something to do instead of this abject idleness. He did not meet any passengers after Magd al-Din and Dimyan, only a few Bedouin. If a Bedouin saw him sitting in the car, he looked at him suspiciously, then left the car for another one. If a group of them came into the car, they sat together and spoke so fast that he could not follow or understand their conversation, even though, before the war, when the trains were crowded, he could understand and speak the Bedouin dialect. So what had happened to him? Since the beginning of the war he had begun to succumb to idleness and fell asleep on his seat alone in the big car.

  Dimyan’s appearance had changed considerably. His face had a dark tan from the heat and the sun. He took off the railroad uniform and replaced it with a soldier’s summer uniform: khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. His legs looked very thin above his heavy black military shoes. Dimyan asked the stationmaster to do the same, and the following day Hilal was in a military uniform and so was Amer.

  Magd al-Din, however, did not change. What astonished Dimyan was that Magd al-Din, who had a fair complexion just like him, did not tan, but his face grew ruddier. And if it had not been for the fact that the two of them lived in the same house, he might have said that he used a magical lotion on his face or that he drank a lot of alcohol. Yes, drinkers always have ruddy faces, like most Greeks and Italians in Alexandria, although it was also true that sometimes they lost their luster, as happened to many Cypriots. But the latter drank too much and did not eat well. They were the poorest foreigners in Alexandria, surpassed in poverty only by the Jews. But the Jewish girls were always beautiful, said Dimyan to himself, proud of all this knowledge rushing in his head. He felt a strong longing for his wife.

  “Sheikh Magd, are we going to stay like this without women?” he asked suddenly.

  Magd al-Din was truly taken aback by the question, but he said calmly, “It’s God’s will. Besides, at least you can go to your wife.”

  “And leave you here?”

  “I can do your work until you come back. As you can see, we almost always work together. You can go to Alexandria and spend as much time as you like there. Nobody comes to check on us.”

  “How about Officer Spike?”

  “He’s an Englishman, after all. He’s not going to address the Egyptian government about two workers. Besides, as I told you, I’ll do your work.”

  “But I was thinking about something else. They gave the soldiers recreational parties. The ATS women come once a month to give them recreation. What do you say we ask Spike to provide us with two Jewish women for recreation?”

  Magd al-Din laughed hard and said that if he made such a request, Spike might kill him. They both laughed. Dimyan thought how easy it would be for him to go to Alexandria, and that way he would not have any sexual problems. That Magd al-Din is a marvelous sheikh—he offers solutions to the toughest problems so easily. How was it that Dimyan himself had not figured this solution out when it was so obvious?

  This was the difference between him and Magd al-Din. If Magd al-Din were not a peasant railroad worker, he would have been a politician, perhaps a military commander. But Dimyan realized that he would not be able to go. It was not easy for him just to leave Magd al-Din alone in this wilderness. What a beautiful feeling he had for his friend. He realized that every time he went to Alexandria to get their salary every month. He could stay only for one night despite his longing for his wife. But he also could not stop seeing Brika. Perhaps she was the real reason for his staying put. But his love for Magd al-Din was a strong reason, there were no two ways about it.

  At night, on the eve of the Feast of the Virgin, after the last day of the fast, Dimyan awoke from his sleep to a soft sound echoing in the room. Magd al-Din had put out the kerosene lamp and it was pitch dark, but Magd al-Din’s eyes were gleaming in the dark and the sound of his breathing was getting louder. He heard Dimyan’s voice from the other side, “What’s wrong, Sheikh Magd?”

  “Nothing, Dimyan.”

  “But you’re crying. Are you thinking of Zahra and the kids?”

  Magd al-Din did not reply. That night he felt the terrible injustice visited upon him. How could he bear not to see Zahra after the delivery of his baby son? Why could he not travel? How did he allow himself to be a victim of all this injustice without fighting back? What in his chest was attracting him away from the village and accepting it, as if leaving the village was his own desire? In truth he had done himself an injustice as grave as the mayor’s.

  “Yes, Dimyan. I remembered Zahra and the kids, but I thanked God. I cried for a few moments, then I praised and thanked God for his grace.”

  “You know Sheikh Magd,” said Dimyan, breaking the silence. “I sometimes think that we’ll go crazy here. I’m in love with a young woman, I don’t know where she comes from or where she goes, and I forget my family, and you remember your family but don’t think of going to them. Was Qays, the man who went crazy over Layla, living in a desert like this one? If that were the case then he was right to go crazy.” Magd al-Din found himself laughing as Dimyan continued, as if to himself, “Yes. If it happened that one of us went crazy, he must be right, and soon people will find excuses for you and me, Magd al-Din.”

  Magd al-Din smiled at Dimyan’s quirky effusions, so clearly the thoughts of one who had just awakened.

  “You mean it’s the desert that will make us go crazy?”

  “No, it’s the dark around us. Nobody else in the whole world is talking in the dark except the two of us. Go to sleep, Sheikh Magd. I’m going to sleep myself. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Virgin. There must be some foreign soldiers celebrating it. In the morning I’ll walk toward the barracks for the first time. Maybe I’ll find a mass to take part in. Listen, Sheikh Magd, recite some verses from the Quran to help you sleep calmly.”

  They both were silent for a while, then Magd al-Din asked, “What do you say in the mass about our Lady Maryam?”

  “We say many things, but I remember only a few lines.”

  Then he began to chant in a deep voice:

  Mary’s glory is growing

  East and west.

  Exalt her, glorify her,

  Enthrone her in your hearts.

  She shines on high.

  Her light never sets..

  “Al-Safi al-Naim, a man whose name means ‘Pure Bliss,’ cannot but be a reminder of heaven,” said Magd al-Din, addressing a Sudanese soldier as Dimyan stood there, puzzled.

  “I thought you were saying that someone had died and moved to the abode of pure bliss,” said Dimyan, and the tall, huge Sudanese soldier laughed, his white teeth sparkling in the light.

  A friendship had developed between Magd al-Din and Dimyan and a number of Indian soldiers since the early days of their arrival. When Magd al-Din saw the wall clock in the stationmaster’s room, he had felt confident that he would be able to tell the time of the prayers. But then that same afternoon he had heard the call to the mid-afternoon prayers reverberating in the desert, thin, plaintive, and noble, but he did not know where it had come from. He learned that among the Indian troops were many Muslims and that groups of them frequently came to the station to unload the military equipment from the trains. Magd al-Din found himself standing on the platform at sunset making the call to prayer. He knew that the wind would carry the call to the south, so he into
ned in a very loud voice and stood to pray, with Hilal and Amer behind him. The following day an Indian soldier, young with a dark-complexioned, yellowish, square-shaped face and small, gleaming, intelligent eyes, with the traditional Indian turban on his head, came to ask who had made the call to the sunset prayers the previous day. He said that Magd al-Din had a beautiful voice and promised to come at noon to pray behind him. At noon he came accompanied by a number of his merry friends. It was they who were giving large quantities of cookies, chocolate, tea, cheese, corned beef, lentils, and rice to Magd al-Din, Dimyan, Hilal, and Amer. Magd al-Din heard names he had not heard before and stories about a country that he had not believed existed. Everyone knew there is a country called India, but to actually see someone from that country was a real miracle. He came to meet men with names like Muhammad Zamana, Muhammad Siddiqi, Wilayat Khan, Karam Singh, Chuhry Ram, Raj Bahadur, Ghulam Sarwar, Irshad, Jinnah, and Iqbal. They were Muslims and Hindus who could not be more than eighteen, most of them sixteen, mere children, transported by the British Empire to lands other than their own from Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi, Bombay, and Kashmir. No one thought the day they were born that they would be in the Egyptian desert, fighting armies from Europe, and that they would most likely die there.

  Amer had entered a state of profound depression, spending the day in the telegraph office tapping his fingers on the table, no one bringing him telegrams to send, receiving telegrams from no one. As for Hilal, he slept most of the time, waiting for passengers, of whom only one or two Bedouin traveled on any given day. But in addition to his work was traffic control and making the ground switches, for there was an old rail line that ended in front of the station, the line on which the military equipment trains spent the night before going back empty the following day. He also had to operate the semaphore, towering its black and white arms as soon as the train moved. He did that from a switch adjacent to the platform. He also had to change the oil in the lamps attached to the rear of the arm of the semaphore once a week and light it every evening. There was a reason for his being there.