No One Sleeps in Alexandria

by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

  Today al-Safi al-Naim joined the Indian soldiers. He came on his own; no one had invited him. He said he heard the call to prayer coming from the direction of the station and was surprised by it. Then he saw the Indians around prayer times sneaking toward the station. So he decided to follow them. It had taken him a long time, but he finally did it.

  “You look as though you might be from Sudan,” Dimyan said, laughing.

  Magd al-Din smiled in surprise as al-Safi al-Naim said politely, “I am from Omdurman.”

  “The kindest people,” said Dimyan. Magd al-Din was still surprised. He was preparing tea on a fire behind the kiosk, which they had left to sit outside near the crossing. He offered a cup of tea to al-Safi, who took one sip and said, “Strong sweet tea!”

  “English tea,” said Dimyan.

  “No, it’s from Ceylon. The English only package it. But more importantly, it’s made by Arab hands,” said al-Safi al-Naim.

  “You are indeed pure bliss,” Dimyan exclaimed like a child, and Magd al-Din laughed happily. Then after some silence al-Safi asked Dimyan his name.

  “Dimyan.”

  They were silent again as a soft breeze blew. The sun was about to set, letting the dark take charge. The horizon was lit up by the red flames of the twilight. It was the tenth of August, the fifteenth of Rajab, and so the full moon started ascending early. There is nothing more beautiful than the desert in full moonlight.

  “Dimyan is a beautiful name, the name of a saint,” al-Safi said.

  Dimyan had fallen silent, thinking that his name had shocked al-Safi or rather his religion, but it turned out that he was wrong.

  “Thank you, brother,” he said.

  A while later Magd al-Din asked him, “Is there a Sudanese group here?”

  “A very large group. Can you guess how many?”

  “A thousand.”

  “No.”

  “Five hundred.”

  “No. You’ll never guess. I’ll tell you—it’s only two of us, me and Siraj Khalifa. Siraj is in Marsa Matruh, now working in the service of the commander in chief, Mr. Cunningham. I was wondering why the British Empire needed two Sudanese, but now they’ve separated us and I guess now the empire needs each of us far from the other. But wondering doesn’t do me any good. It must be that I’m worth a battalion from New Zealand or India, otherwise they would not have kept each of us away from the other. You’re here alone too. What do you do? Nothing that the army can’t do, but you’re here like us.”

  After a long silence during which they finished drinking the tea, Magd al-Din said, “Perhaps we’re here to meet you and get to know you, and that alone gives us happiness and more.”

  The desert cold curie with black clouds racing like raging bulls to the cast on the sea and on the land. “So this is where the rain, which comes to Alexandria like the raids, starts,” thought Dimyan to himself, then suddenly asked Magd al-Din, “Who put Alexandria where it is?” Magd al-Din did not reply but looked surprised by his friend’s random question. The soldiers’ uniforms had changed. They now wore long pants and woolen jackets over long-sleeved shirts and thick, knee-high socks and suede boots. They placed rags into the muzzles of their rifles to prevent moisture from the damp desert air getting into them. Tongues of flame shot up here and there in the vast, dark expanse where clouds blocked the moon and the stars. These were fires that soldiers, especially Indians, made from scrap wood and cardboard boxes to keep themselves warm. There seemed to be a state of relaxation on the military front; the trains no longer brought equipment or soldiers from the east, or prisoners of war from the west. Magd al-Din and Dimyan did not see anything new for some time except for a huge Indian, over forty years of age, who walked as haughtily as an elephant and who wore a huge turban. He came several times with the young Indians but did not take part in the prayers, instead sitting at a distance with the few Sikh Indians who had come to the station with their Muslim compatriots. His name was Corporal Bahadur Shand, and he was from Kashmir, where Muslims and Sikhs lived in a state of discord instigated by the English. When Magd al-Din saw Corporal Bahadur he marveled at God’s ability to create all these different nations and peoples. He was reminded of the Quranic verse, And we have made you nations and tribes that you may know one another. He wished he knew enough English and Hindi to understand what was happening in this wide world. How great the Creator who controls all of this and who had sent Dimyan his way to make his days easy, even though he was in a place that even monkeys would flee out of boredom. Dimyan came back every day after Brika’s departure in a state of childlike happiness. With Dimyan it was possible for days to pass; without him, total silence. A month had passed since the Feast of the Virgin, and Ramadan would begin the following day.

  “It’s my turn to fast with you, Sheikh Magd,” Dimyan told his friend.

  Magd al-Din was too surprised to reply.

  “Don’t you believe me? I’ll fast the whole month with you.”

  “Our fast is a difficult one. We have to abstain from food and drink all day long.”

  “That’s better than each of us eating alone in the desert,” Dimyan replied immediately. He had made up his mind beforehand and made a strong case. Magd al-Din was touched. The two friends were silent for a long time.

  “When do we go back to Alexandria, Dimyan?” Magd al-Din finally asked.

  “You mean, to the village. I know that Ramadan is a month that loves company. If only some Indians would join us, then we’d be an international family.”

  “I miss them so much, Dimyan,” Magd al-Din blurted out despite himself.

  “Why don’t you go then?” Dimyan caught him off guard.

  Magd al-Din had no choice but to tell him the whole story of his banishment. He felt the need to tell someone. It is a strange moment that comes over someone when he feels the need to disclose that which he has taken such pains to conceal. One can never really escape that moment when it does come over him. His chest is filled with a heavy sadness that rises to his eyes as he begins to tell the story and let out the heavy secret.

  His story took up most of the night. Dimyan listened, spellbound. While eating the pre-dawn meal with Magd al-Din, he asked him, “And you’ve put up with all of that alone?”

  “It’s God’s will, Dimyan.”

  “But God cannot be pleased with all that injustice.” “God forgive us, Dimyan.”

  “The best thing you can do, Sheikh Magd, is to take a rifle from one of the Indians, go to the village, kill the mayor, and come back. Nobody will think of you and nobody will know the source of the Indian bullets!”

  “If only I had wanted,” Magd al-Din finally said, “I would have killed him a long time ago. I left to prevent bloodshed and also because I wanted to leave. Yes, I wanted to leave—I don’t know why.”

  “You must return, Sheikh Magd.”

  “I will return, Dimyan. I will. I must.”

  During Ramadan, Brika stopped coming for days on end. Until the feast, she only appeared five quick times. She told Dimyan that she was getting ready for the jlasa, but he did not understand or pay mention.

  On the day of the feast the Indian Muslims and al-Safi al-Naim performed the feast prayer behind Magd al-Din. They wished him a happy feast and he wished them a happy feast as well. There was nothing for Magd al-Din to do except to send a telegram to Zahra and his sisters wishing them a happy feast. Amer was very happy with the telegram, and as soon as Magd al-Din left the room he heard Amer crying. That was Amer’s last day on the job. He left on the evening train, just like that, without telling anyone, leaving his room open to the wind.

  “What could he do? He was about to go crazy,” Dimyan said, laughing, to Magd al-Din and Hilal, who was silent.

  “We should do like him, escape,” added Magd al-Din. “What harm would it do the Allies if three wretched Egyptians disappeared?”

  The feast passed in silence, no trains of any kind. After the feast Brika appeared. It was an unusually sunny day.

  �
��Why have you stopped coming as often as you used to?” Dimyan asked her in pain.

  “Because of the rain,” she answered with a laugh.

  “But you came some days.”

  “On days when there’s no rain,” she replied in her Bedouin

  dialect.

  “You can tell such days?”

  “We Bedouin know which way the wind blows.”

  They fell silent.

  “What do you do here, Dimyan?” she finally asked with a smile.

  The question surprised him. How come she doesn’t know what he does? He realized that he had not told her about his job.

  “I work at the crossing,” he answered.

  “I know that. What do you do?”

  “Nothing. When the train comes, I stop cars and pedestrians. When it leaves, I let the cars and pedestrians cross.”

  “That’s amazing!”

  “My job?”

  “I don’t see any cars or people. I don’t see any trains.”

  Dimyan felt perturbed. What’s this girl doing to him today? This girl for whom his heart beats faster whenever he sees her, like an orphan when out of the blue, two parents appear. This girl whom he loves, but doesn not know how to tell her of his love for her.

  “Where do you come from, Brika?” he found himself asking.

  “From the south,” she said pointing to the south.

  “And where do you go after you’re done tending the sheep?”

  “To the south. Haven’t you seen me?”

  “I saw you,” he answered her in her dialect, realizing how silly his question, which he had asked before, must be. But he asked another question anyway.

  “What’s the jlasa that you told me about before?”

  “Would you like to take part in it?” she asked, laughing.

  “I don’t know it.”

  “Listen, play with me,” she kept laughing. “I ask and you answer, and you ask and I answer.”

  He gave up. “What’s sweeter than honey and what’s more bitter than colocynth?” she asked.

  He had no answer.

  “Nothing is sweeter than honey except a child playing in the sand," and she pointed to her little brother, "and nothing is more bitter than colocynth but carrying a man on a bier," and pointed at an Indian soldier who was passing before her by chance, smiling.

  Dimyan thought that he should break his silence and play with her. Does he not love her? His body shook as he thought what to ask her.

  “Okay, I’ll ask you—what beats fire?”

  “Water beats it,” she answered, nudging him in the chest.

  “Okay. You win.”

  “No. I don’t win yet. It’s my turn to ask you—what beats

  water?”

  He thought for a little while and almost said the wall, but he realized that water could go around the wall or through it, in time. His silence and thinking lasted for some time.

  “The hot wind beats it,” she finally told him, laughing.

  Dimyan realized that she was incredibly intelligent, and he really wanted to beat her at the game. He nudged her gently on the shoulder and asked her, “And what beats the hot wind?”

  “The horses beat it,” she answered quickly, still laughing, “and the horsemen beat the horses, and the women beat the horsemen. Do you know what beats the women?”

  “Men.”

  “No,” she laughed and laughed. “Death beats women, Dimyan.”

  She stood up to call her brother to gather the sheep. She pointed to the sky, which had begun to fill with clouds. Dimyan figured that she wanted to beat the rain.

  “But you haven’t told me what a jlasa is,” he said.

  “Today we did a jlasa, didn’t you know? And you didn’t beat me. We do the jlasa in the village. The young man who beats me marries me. Herr, herr herr,” she shouted to help her brother control the sheep, then walked away laughing. Dimyan stayed in his place, motionless, looking at the black clouds gathering and realizing there was no way that Brika could be his, ever.

  It was raining hard on the Maryut coast and inside Libya when the Allied forces surprised the Axis forces in Sidi Rizq, but the Germans won after a vicious battle in the airfield area and they regained Sidi Rizq. The Allied forces lost many of their armored vehicles. The day after the German victory, at the end of November, Cunningham ordered the Eleventh Brigade to march on Sidi Rizq anew, and that brigade almost regained it. But Rommel, now well-versed in desert warfare, left the battle and took his armored force eastward, to the Egyptian borders. He went twenty miles inside Egypt and wreaked havoc in the rear of the English forces and their allies. He took many of their soldiers prisoner until the Royal Air Force stepped in with fierce raids that forced Rommel to go back to Sidi Rizq, chased by the Fourth Indian Brigade. No sooner had November ended than General Auchinleck dismissed Cunningham, replacing him with Major General Ritchie. Rommel laid siege to Tobruk, which was a stronghold, the strongest in North Africa, with a brave and obstinate British garrison thirty thousand strong. It is surrounded from the east and the west by rugged rocky terrain and to the south by a level plain. Before 1940, it had been an Italian stronghold, but the English seized it and made use of the defense lines established by the Italians around it: deep trenches in the ground, housing guns, and machine gun batteries that could pour fire on the attackers to the last moments of their attack, decimating them. There were also several barbed wire barriers that slowed down infantry attacks and a deep trench surrounding the whole area to prevent the advance of tanks. Behind all these defenses were massive British artillery units and dense mine fields. The fighting was over by the end of November, and even though Rommel did not succeed in capturing Tobruk, he inflicted very heavy losses on the Allied forces, exceeding eight hundred armored vehicles, one hundred planes, and countless small arms and ammunition, in addition to more than nine thousand prisoners of war. Rommel suffered heavy losses and a great number of his soldiers were taken prisoner. The Allied forces began to transport them to Alexandria with shaven heads, without helmets or head cover of any kind in the bitter cold, but they had long, heavy coats. When the British Command decided to engage Rommel in a decisive battle code-named Crusader, one hundred thousand soldiers from the Eighth Army charged forward. Rommel left the road open for them and did not mount a counterattack, withdrawing quietly westward until they fell into the trap. Thereupon he let loose with his artillery from all sides, destroying almost all the British tanks. The valley south of Sidi Rizq became a sea of dust, fire, and smoke.

  The Russians had retreated behind the Dnepr river and fighting intensified in front of Leningrad. The raids on London ceased and the Battle of Britain ended because the Germans were busy on the eastern front. The American navy declared that it was determined to rid the Atlantic Ocean of Nazi ships after Churchill met with Roosevelt on an American cruiser in the Atlantic Ocean. Roosevelt announced the United States’ resolve to defend the freedom to sail the seas and warned that Axis ships would face destruction if they entered US territorial waters. A German U-boat torpedoed the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal and sank it. Afterward, German U-boats also sank the British battleship Barham; all seamen on board were killed. An Italian submarine came close to Alexandria and torpedoed the British battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, crippling them. When the British command tried to take its revenge against an Axis ship convoy going from Italy to Tripoli, it assigned the task to a British force comprised of three cruisers and four destroyers. But it was the British force that was ambushed at sea; two cruisers were hit, and the third was sunk with all seven hundred seamen on board, with the exception of one, who was taken prisoner. It was a truly painful end to the English fleet in the eastern Mediterranean.

  In France, seventy-two French hostages were shot, execution-style, by the Germans in Nantes in retaliation for their participation in the Resistance. That prompted de Gaulle to declare mourning and called on all the people to demonstrate. The whole of France expressed anger. In India, Mahatm
a Gandhi’s seventy-third birthday was celebrated in his quiet village where he spent most of his time with his spindle and yarn. Gifts of spindles and yarn poured in from all over the country. In the Pacific, Japanese planes and battleships launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, destroying three hundred American planes and thirty battleships and killing seven thousand. For the United States, it was a day of infamy, and it was the day that the States officially entered the war. Japanese forces spread in East Asia and fighting extended throughout the eastern parts of Malaya and Singapore and to Hong Kong. Russia’s winter began to take its toll on the German troops, whose vehicles stalled and they were unable to enter Moscow even though they had reached its outskirts. The Germans began to retreat. The Slavic nation had awakened. Marshal Voroshilov, commander in chief of the Partisan movement, made a moving appeal to the inhabitants of Leningrad. He said that the enemy was trying to enter the city and destroy its houses and factories and the freedom of the motherland, that Leningrad was the industrial and cultural capital of Russia and it would not fall, and that “the enemies would not set foot in our beautiful gardens.”

  Since December the Germans had suffered many defeats. Sixty thousand were killed in twenty days at the outskirts of Moscow, a fact that forced the Germans to relieve Field Marshal von Bock of his command of the Rusisian front. A rumor spread in Egypt that Marshal Timoshenko, one of the most prominent commanders in Russia, was a Muslim and therefore never lost any battle.

  In Egypt, the writer May Ziyada had died weeks earlier, as had Talat Harb Pasha, father of Egypt’s national economy. His Majesty King Farouk and the royal family paid a visit to the Farafra oasis, thus completing visits to all of Egypt’s oases, to make sure that his subjects there were all right. There was a big air raid on Alexandria that left a lot of destruction and dozens of casualties as always happened since Rommel appeared in Africa. Clothing was distributed to refugees in the countryside. The Egyptian film Schoolgirl and the American film The Thief of Baghdad were screened. The Shah of Iran abdicated the throne in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, so Princess Fawziya, King Farouk’s sister, was the first Egyptian princess to sit on the throne of Iran. The vice department celebrated the success of its call for the marriage of single refugee women by having a wedding ceremony for twenty couples on the same night. Two hundred thousand pounds worth of narcotics were seized in the coastal area. There was a surge of interest on the part of Hijazis in the Egyptian takiya, or Sufi lodge, in the Hijaz, and the newspapers called for increasing the budget of the takiya to be able to perform its charitable work. The Feast of the Sacrifice coincided with Christmas, and Dimyan went to Alexandria for two days and returned quickly to keep Magd al-Din company. Measures were taken to protect the bronze statues in Ras al-Tin palace from the air raids. And Rushdi walked along Mahmudiya Canal.