Magd al-Din was surprised at the idea, and Dimyan asked him if the cinema was proscribed in Islam, and Magd al-Din said he didn’t mean it like that, but that he thought if he ever got into a movie theater he wouldn’t be able to get out of it. Dimyan, who had become like a meek little child since going to church and confessing and praying to Mari Girgis, laughed.
The raids of Paris had begun to intensify and the world waited with bated breath. Was Hitler going to enter Paris? Was the most beautiful city in the world about to fall? The newspapers published the poem written by the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi after the end of the Great War:
You are the beauty and majesty of this epoch
The very cornerstone of its solid edifice
The people of the epoch have taken up the banner of right from you
Its civilization marched on in the light of your sons.
The situation in France appeared quite bleak. A German armored division captured eight thousand British and four thousand French soldiers. That armored division was under the command of an intelligent German soldier whose name, Erwin Rommel, would become very familiar to Egyptians later on. His panzer division was nicknamed “the phantom division” and was the spearhead that penetrated the Somme, advancing toward the Seine, capturing all the French and English troops in its way until Rommel occupied Cherbourg which, together with its troops numbering thirty thousand, surrendered to him. The roads in France were filled with refugees chased by the machine guns of German planes. The French army collapsed and De Gaulle was appointed undersecretary for national defense. The Soviet Union seized the Baltic republics. But who had the time to think about that? Paris fell, and the people’s hearts were wrenched by the horrors of war. Camilla wept, and when Zahra saw her she figured that Paris must be something so big as to cause Camilla to cry. Camilla said her life’s dream was to travel to Paris one day and that she could not believe that the capital of beauty could fall.
General Pétain formed a new government, which laid down its arms and signed an armistice agreement with Germany. De Gaulle suddenly fled from Bordeaux to Britain, carrying the honor of the French nation with him. In the evening Khawaga Dimitri came into Magd al-Din’s room. He told him that he had learned from a relative of his who worked as a supervisor at the Railroad Authority that the Authority needed some new permanent employees. They were needed to face the pressure of work these days, when dozens of cars loaded with provisions, weapons, and soldiers were arriving every day. Magd al-Din could go the following day to the administrative building of the Railroad Authority in Qabbari to submit an application.
The first person Magd al-Din thought of was Dimyan. He did not ask Khawaga Dimitri about that. He figured that they probably needed more than one worker. Quickly he made his way to Dimyan’s house. In the morning, both of them applied for jobs and were accepted right away. They only had to have the usual medical check-up. This was the government job that would guarantee them a decent life.
Around them a state of the highest emergency had been announced. A few days earlier, on the tenth of June at 4:45 p.m. to be exact, Italy had declared war on England and France.