No One Sleeps in Alexandria

by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

  They kept on running, never feeling hunger or pain from wounds or bruises they had suffered when the explosions threw them to the ground. And what a beautiful new day! This river of milk that was beginning to light up the dark and wash away the night. This world that God has created was so beautiful, why was it that people were destroying it? The planes kept on coming from the east and from the west, engaging in short dogfights, then disappearing only to appear again and again. The German planes bombed everything in sight until a new dogfight started. In the meantime Magd al-Din and Dimyan kept on running, sweat pouring out of every pore of their bodies and their skin and chests burning, their feet almost giving way, but who could stop in the midst of all those fires?

  “I am flying, Dimyan!”

  Dimyan heard and saw Magd al-Din next to him.

  “And I am flying too, Magd al-Din!”

  “My God, I am not running—I am flying, Dimyan!”

  “And so am I, Magd al-Din!”

  What bird was now carrying them on its wings! It must be the angel Gabriel, the very one who brought the good tidings to the Messenger of God. It was he who also brought the Virgin Mary tidings of her immaculate conception. Their breathing was now inaudible, they were almost anesthetized, asleep on calm waves. The bird was carrying them gently into space, their sweat was drying, and they were drinking a magic potion that imbued their veins with a secret delight. Was Gabriel taking them to Alexandria or to God in the high heavens? They were both certain of a safe end.

  The distance from al-Alamein to al-Hammam is forty kilometers. Throughout that distance a god-like strength possessed Magd al-Din and Dimyan. The bombing and shelling behind them would stop, only to resume again. The battle for the hills of Alam al-Halfa was not over yet. Rommel knew that Monty’s headquarters was in Burg al-Arab and that his strategic cache of vehicles and equipment had to be attacked.

  The sun had ascended the sky and gone past Magd al-Din and Dimyan and now to the German Front. All the time they felt nothing other than being carried on the wings of Gabriel. They even fell asleep while running. Had there been no train waiting at al-Hammam they would have kept on running all the way to Alexandria. How was it that they felt no hunger and no thirst? The bombing and shelling had subsided as evening settled on the second day. The civilian train stood empty at the station, which also was empty of people. The last car of the train was the one closest to them, and they got on and sat down on the first seat. The sounds of the guns roared again, and the train got ready to depart as they heaved a long and deep sigh of relief. What a good omen! They looked at each other in contentment and fell into a deep sleep.

  Was it one moment? An hour? A whole lifetime that they slept? Whatever it was it was long enough for them to feel somewhat rested. It was impossible for them to remain asleep in the midst of the roar of the guns that were let loose with the new evening. Dimyan was thirsty, so he went through the other cars to look for water. In a corner he found a tap and turned it on. The water was yellowish and rusty, but he drank it anyway and went back. The train was completely empty and dark except for the moonlight coming through the broken windows.

  “We’ve won, Sheikh Magd. I now realize that the nightmare in which I saw Mari Girgis engulfed by flames was nothing but the devil’s work.”

  “The Lord be praised for everything, Dimyan.”

  The train began to rattle, and the sounds of explosions drew nearer and fear returned to their eyes, but then the train started to run smoothly, and the sounds of explosions grew distant as the train’s speed increased.

  “The train engineer must be Indian!”

  “The Indians don’t operate civilian trains.”

  “But he’s going at a crazy speed.”

  “If only he’d go faster, Dimyan. Where did you find the drinking water?”

  “In the fifth car. It’s been standing for a long time, but I drank it.”

  “I’m going to get a drink of water and I’m coming right back. Wait for me.”

  Dimyan smiled in surprise. Where could he go?

  Magd al-Din hurried to get a drink. Why was he hurrying? He was being rattled hard between the empty seats as the train kept swaying unevenly. He reached the tap, turned it on, and filled his cupped hand with its yellow rusty water and drank it. The sound of explosions drew near, the train shook so violently that Magd al-Din lost his balance and fell on a nearby seat, his head hitting the back of the seat so hard it almost split open. He could not keep his balance seated either. He got up and the train was swaying violently from side to side, so he kept tumbling down and hitting the seats on either side. He shouted, “Dimyan,” and from the open windows he saw shells landing not far from the train and stirring the dust and stones, which hit the sides of the train. He fell down between the two rows of seats. The aisle was narrow, so he stayed down, stretched out and holding on to the underside of the seats so the rattling of the train did not hurt him. He realized that assuming a crucified posture was the best option for someone in his situation. Dimyan had also come to the same conclusion, but the car he was in shook more violently since it was the tail end of the train. At the same time that Dimyan was saying, “Merciful Lord and Savior of all who was made flesh for us here for our salvation, who lit the way for us, sinners, who fasted for us forty days and forty nights, who saved us from death,” Magd al-Din was reciting from the Quran, “. . . that man can only attain that for which he strives; that his striving will he noted; that it will he fully rewarded; that your Lord is the ultimate goal; that it is He who grants laughter and tears; that it is He who gives death and life; that it is He who has created in pairs, male and female; from a seed when it is poured forth; that it is up to Him to ordain the second coming to life.” The train swayed violently, shaking, its wheels thundering, as the shells kept coming, landing not far from it now. “This one of the early warning signs; the threatened hour is near; no one hut God can disclose it.” The light of the bombs entered the train car, which was already lit by a faint moonlight. The train swayed more violently than ever. A crash was heard, then something heavy being dragged on the ground and hitting against the crossties and the tracks. The train jumped up several times and swayed to right and left. One of the cars that had received a direct hit, and resisted being separated from the rest of the train, was being dragged along the ground. “Dimyan! Dimyan!” Magd al-Din could not stand up. The train could overturn if the car did not separate or if the train did not stop. But it did not stop, and the car did not separate.

  Did that take a long time? Probably a fraction of a minute, but it felt to Magd al-Din as long as a whole lifetime. The train was now steady, and the terrible noise was over. Everything was smooth and calm after the heavy, turbulent movements. The rattle was over, and it was possible to breathe again. Even the lights of the bombs had now moved away in the distance, and once again the moonlight entered the car, and the winds, which a few moments ago had been buffetting the train, subsided into a breeze. The train was now balanced again, and the sounds of its wheels were once again monotonous. Magd al-Din could stand up again without fear, and so could Dimyan. Dimyan? If it was the last car that was hit, then Dimyan was lost. If it was the one before the last car, then he was also lost. Quickly Magd al-Din left the car, oblivious to whatever harm might come his way. Then he left the next car, then the third and the fourth, and the last car did not seem to be there, just a mass of red flames in the middle of the black night and the silence that now enveloped the world. Nothing else was there but the fire. “Dimyan!” he shouted, but then he saw him rising through the fire with a golden body and a golden face, holding in his golden hand a long golden lance, riding a golden horse and transfixing the heads of the fire-spewing dragons, and he heard the neighing of the golden horse. “Dimyan!” The lance was planted into the head of the dragon, which spewed forth more fire, then into the other head as the fire kept coming. The besieged knight fearlessly pulled his lance from one head after another, striking again as the fire rose and surrounded Dimy
an’s pale face and the neighing of the horse continued. “Dimyan!” He saw him rising on horseback to the highest heavens, pursued by the fire, which was rising behind him, almost singeing his feet. Then the neighing stopped, and Dimyan carried on rising radiantly into the vastness. “Dimyan!” The golden flame now diminished into a dot, which finally vanished, then the dark prevailed. The train had gone quite a distance without Magd al-Din noticing it. He sat down on the nearest seat, sweat pouring from his skin as if a fire were burning in his chest. He stretched out on the seat and took off his shoes, leaning against the wall of the train car, realizing for the first time that he had become an orphan. Did he have to come to Alexandria and meet Dimyan? “Dimyan!, Dimyan!” He began to shiver. It must be the desert cold coming early, otherwise why was he shivering? But his sweat was still pouring forth. It must be a fever. “Dimyan! Dimyan! Dimyan! The Most Gracious. He has taught the Quran. He has created man. Dimyan! Dimyan! He has taught him speech. The sun and the moon follow their courses punctually. The stars and the trees how in adoration. Dimyan! Dimyan! And the sky He had raised high and He has set the measure. Dimyan! Dimyan!” Magd al-Din’s voice rose suddenly, then subsided, and trembling he said to himself, still reciting from the Quran, “Which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? Everyone on earth will perish and the countenance of your Lord, Almighty and Glorious, shall abide. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? Dimyan! Dimyan! All who are in the heavens and the earth entreat Him. Every day He exercises power. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? Dimyan! Dimyan! We shall dispose of you, both worlds. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? Dimyan! Dimyan!” His tears poured down his cheeks. “Dimyan! Dimyan!” The train came close to Alexandria but did not enter it; it cleared through on its way to Cairo, as heavy raids were still bombarding Alexandria and the battle for Alam al-Halfa was still going on. The train went past Kafr al-Dawwar, leaving Alexandria behind. Magd al-Din sensed that they were in the country again from the total darkness surrounding the villages, the different breeze, and the tall white dovecotes, and he sighed, unable to believe that it was God returning him to his village. Did he have to lose Dimyan to go home again? “Dimyan! Dimyan! When the sky is rent asunder, becoming red like ointment; so which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? But those who fear the time they will stand before their Lord will he granted two gardens. Dimyan! Dimyan! So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? Of spreading branches; so which of the favors of your Lord will you deny? Dimyan! Dimyan! In them two fountains flow.” His tears continued to flow. “Blessed he the name of your Lord, Almighty and Glorious. Dimyan! Dimyan!” Dimyan did not die; he was not burned. God had lifted him up to heaven, and he had seen him, otherwise who was ascending on the golden horse, moving away into space from the fire of the dragon? “Dimyan! Dimyan!” And he kept reciting that beautiful chapter from the Quran, the only chapter he could still remember, punctuated by the name of his friend, until he was overcome with sleep.

  The cold air coming lightly through the windows awakened him. From the window he saw the darkness, deep in a long gap, and realized that the train was crossing the Nile and that the lights were coming from the little houses of Kafr al-Zayyat. He could not mistake the smell of the trees along the river bank, near the villas and small houses. He was now very close to his village, and he had to get up and focus his eyes to jump when he reached the platform. He had no other choice. The train had not stopped in the city of Kafr al-Zayvat—was it going to stop at a small village? The engineer undoubtedly had some contraption giving him orders to proceed fast, to Cairo. The train had moved away beyond the range of the air raids, yet the engineer was still speeding along. Magd al-Din stood near the open door of the car, the cold air drying his sweat. He realized that he was standing barefoot. He had left his shoes near the scat. He did not think of putting them on. He had left the village barefoot, and here was the white platform, approaching fast. Blessed be the name of your Lord, Almighty and Glorious. He stepped forward to get off the train as if he were under the influence of some narcotic drug, and he flew into the air. “Ah!” It came out deep, slow, and faint.

  The stationmaster stayed late at his post because of the continuous evacuation of refugees from Alexandria. He heard a hard, heavy thudding sound, a deep, muffled sound. He even saw something hurtling over the platform and landing on the dusty soil a short distance from the platform. It was not the sound of a bomb exploding, anyway. It must be a ghost that he had seen. The groan reverberated. The human sound encouraged the stationmaster to approach, gingerly. The sounds of grasshoppers and frogs came from the canal along the tracks. The stationmaster approached, carrying a lamp shielded with blue, held back by all the rural legacy of fear of ghosts and demons. But the green eyes glowed in the dark. Most merciful God! This is a real human being! He went closer and shone the lamp on the human’s face and exclaimed, “Sheikh Magd al-Din?!”

  It was the same old stationmaster, Abd al-Hamid, his classmate in Quran memorization class a quarter century earlier, the very man who stood bidding him farewell when he left the village. Magd al-Din heard his voice and closed his eyes in relief. He was now certain he was not going to die.

  And be said to me:

  What kind of life will you have in this world

  After I appear?

  al-Niffari

  29

  Rommel did not succeed in breaking through the front in al-Alamein. For six days he tried, to no avail. He lost three thousand officers and soldiers, either killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, and seven hundred armored vehicles, including fifty tanks. The Allies lost sixteen hundred officers and soldiers, and seventy tanks. Air superiority and short supply lines ensured victory for the Allies. That was Rommel’s first defeat in the desert. Soldiers in the Eighth Army now realized that Rommel was not a legend, but a military commander who could win or lose.

  Montgomery took advantage of the situation and continued to train the soldiers and conduct huge maneuvers in the desert from Alexandria to al-Alamein. The raids on Alexandria stopped for some time. Panic continued to prevail in the foreign consulates. Jews carried on lining up at the British consulate to get entry visas for Palestine and South Africa. Magd al-Din, who had been moved by the stationmaster to Tanta hospital on the first car that had arrived on the scene, was still in a cast. His legs and several ribs and other bones had been broken, but he had miraculously survived. The stationmaster brought word back to the village, and Zahra, his sisters and their husbands, and his mother, whose days were numbered, visited Magd al-Din. He was told he had to stay in the cast at the hospital for three months. Meanwhile in Cairo the belly-dancer Hikmat Fahmi and the two spies Eppler and Sandstetter were arrested on charges of spying for Germany. The German armies entered the outskirts of Stalingrad, and cold steel massacres took place. They surrounded the city, which they were determined to capture because it was the military industrial city named after Stalin. The Soviets were very determined to stand their ground because the city was named after Stalin. The Muslim general Timoshenko advanced to the river Don in an attempt to cut off German supply and communication lines. Egypt silently celebrated Queen Farida’s twenty-second birthday, but there were no public decorations or lights marking the occasion in Alexandria, her birthplace. Montgomery was busy establishing a new corps, the Tenth Corps, to counter the German Afrika Korps. American Sherman and Grant tanks and self-propelled 105-millimeter guns poured into the front. British and American bombers continued to pursue German army supplies on land and on sea. Rommel’s blood pressure shot up, and pain in his liver forced him to go back to Germany to seek treatment. General Stumme, who had arrived from the Russian front, replaced him. The month of Ramadan had begun, and the sorrows of Magd al-Din, who lay helpless in bed, increased. True, he had his family around him now, but he could not forget the previous Ramadan in the vast desert with its awesome sunsets, and breaking the fast with Dimyan. Dimyan! Dimyan! How could life go on without Dimyan! Magd al-Din had fou
nd out that his sisters had sold his land to themselves in his absence, but he did not even comment on the matter. The mayor sent the village chief to visit Magd al-Din and let him know that the mayor himself was going to visit him soon and that he, the mayor, was sorry for what had happened in the past, but Magd al-Din did not comment on that either. He considered everything preordained by God.

  Stumme was six years older than Rommel and, like him, had high blood pressure, which usually afflicted commanders. Egypt had great strategic importance in creating a huge pincer movement from which the German forces, if successful in occupying it, would advance eastwards to meet the forces coming from Europe and the Caucasus. Hitler had promised Rommel to send him the dreaded new Tiger tanks and multi-barrel mortars, but he did not keep his promise. Rommel had felt disappointment after his failure at Alam al-Halfa and decided not to be on the offensive again, but to resort to defensive military tactics for the first time since he took command in the desert. So he set up dense minefields, huge devil’s fields, between his position and those of the Eighth Army. Churchill was under great pressure to open a second front. If Stalin and Roosevelt were convinced that that second front would be the African desert, he had to start. The normal English plan would be to take out the German armored vehicles, then deal with the infantry, but Montgomery suggested the opposite. He had greater confidence in the infantry, especially the Australians and New Zealanders, and expected them to acquit themselves valiantly. The same was true of the Fifty-first Highland battalion, which had been recently re-formed to replace the First Highland battalion, which had been decimated in France in 1940. The Fifty-first was intent on vengeance.