On the clear days when he did not work, Magd al-Din was now spending most of his time at the café by the bridge. Dimyan, who kept him company most of the time, would ask him to read the paper out loud, even though he frequently expressed surprise that Magd al-Din kept buying the paper whenever he was not working. “How can you pay five pennies for useless words and lies?” he would ask. Magd al-Din had grown fond of knowing what was going on in the world. He only read the big headlines about the state of war in the world, then the crime section and the obituaries. Why? He did not know.
Hitler had liquidated his enemies in the German aristocracy and the remnants of the empire, as well as all who opposed him after the incident in Munich. The Italian legation celebrated the birthday of King Victor Emanuel III. The Egyptian government banned trade in cigarette butts, which was common among street children, who collected the butts in cafés and clubs, and on public transport vehicles and in the stations. They collected them as quickly as sparrows collected grain and then sold them to poor peoples’ smoke shops. The sly fox Mr. Churchill, first lord of the admiralty, gave a speech in which he talked of the Allies’ losses at sea over the ten weeks since the outbreak of the war and how England would not be intimidated by threats. The Wafd party leaders visited the tomb of Saad Zaghloul on National Struggle Day, which the government did not observe. Al-Ahli Cinema screened Ali al-Kassar’s film Lend Me Three Pounds. New camps were established to train the Territorial Army, which paraded before the minister of religious endowments at camps in Sidi Bishr and Damanhur. Despite the cold weather, the troops paraded in khaki shorts secured by wide suspenders and short-sleeved khaki pullovers over long-sleeved khaki shirts, with caps on their heads, and long Enfield rifles on their shoulders. The Monsignor nightclub opened the winter season by playing Argentinean music and Spanish songs. Forms were distributed to inhabitants of Karmuz, Mina al-Basal, and Gumruk to determine whether or not they wanted to be evacuated from Alexandria if the war reached it and where they would like to be evacuated to. No such forms were distributed in the poorer Ghayt al-Aynab neighborhood, which was part of Karmuz, even though it was separated from it by the Mahmudiya canal. The king inaugurated the new session of Parliament. A bullet discharged by a soldier’s gun killed an officer on guard duty in front of the governorate building. The officer’s funeral was marked by an official procession, then he was sent to his village of Quwaysna, where he received another official funeral procession. The soldier was executed. The lawyer in Alexandria had appealed the sentence, since the court had not given the soldier sufficient opportunity to defend himself, even though he had insisted that his rifle discharged accidentally. The black flag flew over Hadra prison for the second time in less than a month.
The Dutch steamer Simon Bolivar was sunk, and war with Germany loomed on the horizon. The appeal for peace made by the king of Belgium and the queen of the Netherlands failed. It was announced that Britain was now spending six million pounds a day on the war. Poland was now in total ruin, and Jews there were gathered in one neighborhood surrounded by barbed wire. No sooner had December dawned than news came of the Russian attack on Finland. German mines were sinking more and more of the Allies’ ships. The world was taken aback by the viciousness of the Russian attack and the aerial bombing of Helsinki. English cruisers had laid out a plan to sink the fearsome German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. The cruisers Achilles and Exeter baited it in a battle that people followed every day. It was a bloody match between wolves that went on for a few days, after which the Graf Spee entered the port of Montevideo in neutral Uruguay. The two cruisers lay in wait for it just outside the territorial waters. What was Graf Spee going to do, and how would it break out of this blockade? There were casualties on the pocket battleship, as well as British prisoners of war that the Graf Spee had picked up after their ships had sunk, but now it could not make it to the Atlantic. Its captain was ordered to scuttle his ship outside the territorial waters. The captain and his crew sank the ship in front of spectators who had come from all over to Montevideo to watch the deadly battle and record it. Laurel and Hardy got back together, and their many fans were happy. A British army car struck an Egyptian citizen on Maks Street, killing him instantly. No next of kin was found. A certain Muhammad Musa threw himself out of a window in the government hospital and died. No one knew whether he had been killed, committed suicide, or was overcome with hysteria. Fighting between Russia and Finland continued, and the Finnish army stood its ground and scored surprising victories. The Graf Spee captain Hans Langsdorff committed suicide. He had held a press conference in which he told the journalists that he had nothing to offer them, but that on the following day he was going to give them something big; he kept his word and gave them his suicide. Hitler threatened that he would wipe out England by sending out a thousand planes every day. In the Far East, the war between China and Japan flared up, and the whole planet appeared to be one big fireball, on an unknown part of which Magd al-Din, Dimyan, and dozens like them were looking desperately for work. Magd al-Din was puzzled by that half-crazy young man whom he always saw appear out of nowhere near him at the doors of companies, or hurrying alongside him from place to place. No one ever gave him any work. Magd al-Din got used to his twang, and always took pity on him and more than once gave him a five-piaster piece. Occasionally, Magd al-Din would see the young man following him, until he would enter a café and sit down, whereupon the young man would go into the café too and sit at a distance, looking at Magd al-Din with his mouth open. Magd al-Din would then order him a glass of hot tea. Dimyan would say, “This is your jinn brother, Magd al-Din, who came out from underground.” Magd al-Din would look at the idiot boy and see him as one of God’s little children, lost but also blessed. Who could know?
The year was nearing its end. Zahra was very afraid of the thunder and the torrential rain. Sometimes it would be dark all day long. But her visits with Sitt Maryam and her two daughters, who frequently stayed home from school because of the rain, made her feel an intimate warmth, especially when Lula joined them with her jokes about vendors, merchants, and other people in the street. Lula’s husband was now beating her more frequently. They would hear her screams coming from downstairs, but that usually subsided after a while and calm returned, only to be broken by her laughter. It was now a nightly occurrence. No one asked her anything about it.
Umm Hamidu’s latest story to Zahra was about Count Zizinya, who was suing the city of Alexandria because it had seized his property in Raml. There was actually a lawsuit filed by Count Zizinya in which he accused the city of Alexandria of seizing land belonging to him along the coast from Glymenopoulo to Saba Pasha. She told Zahra that as a young girl she had worked as a maid in the count’s palace in Raml, that she knew he was in the right, as the whole coastal area of Raml belonged to him, but he was a miser, so God sent someone to take everything away from him.
Unexpectedly, Umm Hamidu asked Zahra if she knew the poor woman that used to follow Bahi around in the street. Zahra said she did not know her. Umm Hamidu smiled and said that in Ghayt al-Aynab many people from Zahra’s village knew her, that in her youth she had been in love with Bahi and that it was he who had caused her to lose her mind. Zahra fell silent, but Umm Hamidu kept on about how she had known many women who were madly in love with Bahi. that his face fatally attractive to women, and that she believed that woman was one of his victims. Zahra said quietly, “This is old history, Umm Hamidu.”