The world was shaken, and Italian mothers sobbed as they saw their sons called up for active military duty. The American secretary of state announced that Italy’s entry into the war was a major catastrophe for humanity. Egypt immediately severed its relations with Italy. Real evacuation of many Alexandrian families to the countryside began. Thousands of gas masks were distributed and were used by falafel makers to protect against the vapors of frying oil and by the bakers in front of the big ovens. Ghaffara refused to change the mask he made himself out of the fez, as he did not trust anything that the government distributed. Dimyan said to Magd al-Din as he received the letter of appointment, “Georgius the Martyr has sent us this job as a gift, Sheikh Magd. I implored him for it.”
“I also spent long nights reciting the names of God, until the Prophet came to me in a dream and my heart was reassured,” Magd al-Din said in agreement.
At night, as Magd al-Din lay awake next to Zahra as she slept, he thought of his new job. He thought that no one in the world knew anything about him. What if he were to die? Would anyone care? Italy entered the war, and people began to flee Alexandria, but he had to stay. It had been an involuntary trip decreed by God, and now he had to sleep in the city whose eyes were now looking upwards, to the sky.
11
The cruel and ravishing bears
Born on the very day of war
Utter innocent wishes.
This day has a different flavor, and it is whiter than any other day before it. This is what Magd al-Din felt, the light pouring down on his face as he left the house in the morning.
He paused for a little while on the threshold and looked right and left. The street was deserted except for three persons, one at the end of the street to the right and the other two heading for Sidi Karim. People were still asleep or were awake but had not left their houses yet. Every day the summer sun brought the morning in surprisingly early. Yesterday at the headquarters of the engineering section of the railroad, they were given directions to their job location. They were to leave Ghayt al-Aynab and walk along the bank of Mahmudiya Canal to a point midway between Karmuz Bridge and Kafr Ashri bridge. There they would find a big housing compound for railroad workers, next to which they would find a smaller housing compound for traffic workers who also worked for the railroad. Between the two compounds they would find a small road ending at a gate to the railroad tracks, the vast, complex network of the “Zaytun” area, as they were told. After passing through the gate they were to go back left for a distance of two kilometers to reach their job location, Post Number Three. They did not understand why it was called a “post,” since the postal authority was not hiring them. Neither of them bothered to ask about that. On their way back Dimyan said, “These are crazy people. They want us to walk all the way from Ghayt al-Aynab to the railroad housing compound along the Mahmudiya canal, then go back the same distance through the railroad?”
“What can we do?” Magd al-Din asked him.
“The job location is just in front of Ghayt al-Aynab and Ban Street. Two alleys away we’ll find the fence separating Ghayt al-Aynab from the railroad. We’ll find an opening in the fence, or we can make one ourselves, or jump over the fence.”
Today they would do that and they would do it every morning, for this was a permanent job, a government job. Magd al-Din stood in front of Dimyan’s house and called out his name. The whole house, even the walls, seemed asleep. The door was low and dark and out of it came a draught of warm air laden with the breath of the crowded dwellers. The morning air was truly refreshing, and the dew that had gathered on the streets and the houses at dawn was still sending forth a cool breeze, if one kept away from the doors of the houses. The smell of soap rose from the streetcorners, bath water poured out on the street by fulfilled, satisfied women at dawn before anyone could see them. Only the houses looked tired and drab, their main entryways without wooden or metal doors, the narrow staircases emitting the smell of fatigue. But Magd al-Din was happy, feeling the cool of a winter morning even though it was summer. Dimyan emerged out of the dark door into the light of the new day.
“Look at you in that khaki suit!”
Magd al-Din smiled without comment, looking at Dimyan’s head now covered with a blue beret that looked like a train engineer’s hat. The two proceeded like two merry children toward the fence in the south.
They stopped in front of the stone wall, which was about two and a half meters high. Magd al-Din thought that jumping over the wall might be forbidden. He was confused for a moment, then heard Dimyan say, “It’s not that high, as you can see. I’ll clasp my hands together, and you can climb on them, then you get to the top and sit down, then give me a hand up to join you — then we’ll get down on the other side.”
Dimyan clasped his hands together, but Magd al-Din hesitated. He lifted his foot from the ground then put it down again.
“It’s hard for me to step with my shoes on the hands of one of God’s noble creatures.”
“What?”
“How could I step with my shoes on a creature that God has exalted?”
Dimyan looked at him incredulously then saw Magd al-Din actually take off his shoes and throw them over the wall. Dimyan smiled and shook his head at his friend’s meekness. He clasped his hands, and Magd al-Din stepped on them with his right foot then jumped up and grasped the top of the wall, feeling the hard stones of the wall, which could not have been more than twenty centimeters thick. Dimyan pushed him up, and finally Magd al-Din was able to sit on top of the wall. He suddenly said, “The wall is shaking!”
“Don’t be afraid. It’s very solid.”
Dimyan stood wondering how he was going to climb. It would be hard to grasp Magd al-Din’s hand and jump; that might pull Magd al-Din down. Magd al-Din himself must have thought the same thing. He said, “You can step on my foot. Think of it as a stair and then give me your hand.”
Dimyan took off his shoes and threw them over the wall and jumped up until he held on to the top of the wall, pushing down a little which helped him to get a little higher. That made it possible for him to place his foot on that of Magd al-Din, who held him by the jacket to help him up. Dimyan’s torso was now higher than the top of the wall. God in heaven! What happened? Crash! A big chunk of the wall collapsed with them on top of it; it fell down in one piece, and quietly.
Magd al-Din fell down on his backside, and Dimyan’s chest hit the wall, and both felt great pain where they fell. But a few moments later after they overcame the shock of the fall, they were now facing each other, and they both laughed happily: two solitary men in a huge open space laughing without an echo. They both got up, leaning on their hands, and started looking for their shoes. Neither of them had looked around nor seen anything until now. The first thing they saw was the vast, open space and the sun rising strong to their left and the faraway blue sky. But the land appeared dreary, lime and sand and little rocks, two old and rusty rails, beyond which stretched land covered with thorny plants and short cactus, then a few rails, between which were pebbles and evaporated fuel oil that appeared to have separated from the soil, its black color turned gray by the eddies of dust. At intermittent distances they could see a few small thickets of unkempt thorny plants.
They walked to the right. Dimyan was quite surprised at how vast the land was as it opened up before him. How could he have missed all of this even though he had lived for many years in Ghayt al-Aynab? Why had he never thought of going beyond the wall so close to Ban Street, separated only by two alleys? This vast open space to the south was matched only by the vast sea to the north.