“My heart defeated me, Sheikh Magd. My heart has grown attached to torture, and I can’t stop it. I didn’t do it deliberately. I never did anything intentionally in my life. Did you or I intentionally get transferred to work here in al-Alamein, in the middle of the desert? Did we intentionally meet in the first place?”
Magd al-Din did not have an answer, and he tried to think of some way to say, “A man over forty craves young girls — if one-was a little patient, the crisis would pass in peace.”
But Dimyan was thinking of another reason for his love of Brika. Perhaps because she comes from a vast expanse. Where does she come from? He did not know. He would ask her and she would say, “From Ghadi” and point south. Where does she go with her sheep and brother? She doesn’t seem to go to a specific place, a tent or a house or a village. She always seems to have ascended to the sky or descended to the bottom of the earth. She comes from God and goes back to Him. She always comes from the vast expanse, and when she does, his chest grows bigger and fills with air from an unknown source in such heat.
“Our life in Ghayt al-Aynab is too tight, Sheikh Magd,” said Dimyan, as if to himself. “We hardly have enough air to breathe on the banks of Mahmudiya — it’s heavy air, most of the time made rotten by a corpse floating in the water. This girl is an enigma, Sheikh Magd. As she comes, so she goes. God has sent her to me to preoccupy me. I cannot refuse what the Lord sends, can I?”
They both fell silent. Magd al-Din saw Dimyan wiping a tear away with his fingers.
24
And make us all, O Lord, deserving of exchanging
a pure kiss with one another.
Dimyan announced that as of tomorrow he would not eat corned beef, meat, eggs, cheese, or anything of animal origin except fish. As of tomorrow the fast of the Virgin, which lasts two weeks, would begin.
The morrow was the seventh of August and the first day of the Coptic month of Misra. Dimyan noticed that Magd al-Din was a little lost in thought so he added, “Remember what I told you about the big fast, our holiest one that ends with Easter? This one about to start is the fast of the Virgin. There’s also the Nativity fast, which lasts forty-three days, and ends with Christmas on January seventh. Then there is the fast of Jonah, three days. Do you know Jonah? He is mentioned in the Quran. He stayed for three days in the belly of the big fish and came out to preach to the people of Nineveh and guide them to faith.”
Magd al-Din was thinking that he had forgotten the Coptic months, which he thought he would never forget. All peasants know the Coptic calendar because it is timed with the seasons, and keep up with it. And there he was hearing from Dimyan that tomorrow would be the first of Misra. “He is the Prophet Yunus, peace be upon him,” he said to Dimyan, as he finally paid attention to his words.
“Well, do you know Nineveh? A beautiful name, but its people were evil,” Dimyan said.
“I think Nineveh is in Iraq. I also think it is the city of the prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon him.”
“You know many things, Magd al-Din, many, many things. In the Jonah fast, we completely abstain from eating for three days. Some of us fast it one day at a time. We also fast Wednesday and Friday of every week of our life, with the exception of the fifty days immediately following Easter, the time of khamsin sandstorms in Egypt, which is the period that Jesus Christ spent on earth after His rising. We fast Wednesday because that was the day the Jews agreed to crucify Christ, and we fast Friday because that was the day He was crucified. They are days of holy fasting on which we only eat fish, exactly like the big fast.”
Magd al-Din was lost in thought again. Where does his friend get this religious information, when he had led a vagabond’s life until just a year ago, when he first started going to church? “But you don’t fast on Wednesdays or Fridays,” he said with a smile.
“It’s difficult for me, Sheikh Magd. I don’t observe the Jonah fast either. It’s not intentional — I’m just not used to it. I’ve also told you that all our days are not much different from fasting days. I fast more than I’m supposed to.”
Dimyan fell silent for a short while, then asked suddenly, “Are all the stories of the prophets in the Quran?”
“Yes.”
“They’re also in the Old Testament. Praise the Lord. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know about my fast so you wouldn’t be restricted to my food.”
“I’ll fast with you, Dimyan. I’ll eat what you cat and abstain from what you abstain from.”
As usual, time passed. Magd al-Din wrote a letter to Zahra and sent it with the abonne Radwan Express. He asked him to put it in the nearest mailbox in Alexandria. Dimyan asked him to pass by his family in Ghayt al-Aynab to see if they were all right after the heavy raids of the last few days. Dimyan laughed as he told Radwan, “Finally you’re getting a job and customers.” He gave him a box filled with tea, cookies, cheddar cheese, corned beef, and chocolate to deliver to his family. He and Magd al-Din also gave Radwan some tea, corned beef, and cheese, and he was very pleased. True, they would not be able to send things with him every day or even every week, but at least it was something to do instead of this abject idleness. He did not meet any passengers after Magd al-Din and Dimyan, only a few Bedouin. If a Bedouin saw him sitting in the car, he looked at him suspiciously, then left the car for another one. If a group of them came into the car, they sat together and spoke so fast that he could not follow or understand their conversation, even though, before the war, when the trains were crowded, he could understand and speak the Bedouin dialect. So what had happened to him? Since the beginning of the war he had begun to succumb to idleness and fell asleep on his seat alone in the big car.
Dimyan’s appearance had changed considerably. His face had a dark tan from the heat and the sun. He took off the railroad uniform and replaced it with a soldier’s summer uniform: khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. His legs looked very thin above his heavy black military shoes. Dimyan asked the stationmaster to do the same, and the following day Hilal was in a military uniform and so was Amer.
Magd al-Din, however, did not change. What astonished Dimyan was that Magd al-Din, who had a fair complexion just like him, did not tan, but his face grew ruddier. And if it had not been for the fact that the two of them lived in the same house, he might have said that he used a magical lotion on his face or that he drank a lot of alcohol. Yes, drinkers always have ruddy faces, like most Greeks and Italians in Alexandria, although it was also true that sometimes they lost their luster, as happened to many Cypriots. But the latter drank too much and did not eat well. They were the poorest foreigners in Alexandria, surpassed in poverty only by the Jews. But the Jewish girls were always beautiful, said Dimyan to himself, proud of all this knowledge rushing in his head. He felt a strong longing for his wife.
“Sheikh Magd, are we going to stay like this without women?” he asked suddenly.
Magd al-Din was truly taken aback by the question, but he said calmly, “It’s God’s will. Besides, at least you can go to your wife.”
“And leave you here?”
“I can do your work until you come back. As you can see, we almost always work together. You can go to Alexandria and spend as much time as you like there. Nobody comes to check on us.”
“How about Officer Spike?”
“He’s an Englishman, after all. He’s not going to address the Egyptian government about two workers. Besides, as I told you, I’ll do your work.”
“But I was thinking about something else. They gave the soldiers recreational parties. The ATS women come once a month to give them recreation. What do you say we ask Spike to provide us with two Jewish women for recreation?”