“On days when there’s no rain,” she replied in her Bedouin
dialect.
“You can tell such days?”
“We Bedouin know which way the wind blows.”
They fell silent.
“What do you do here, Dimyan?” she finally asked with a smile.
The question surprised him. How come she doesn’t know what he does? He realized that he had not told her about his job.
“I work at the crossing,” he answered.
“I know that. What do you do?”
“Nothing. When the train comes, I stop cars and pedestrians. When it leaves, I let the cars and pedestrians cross.”
“That’s amazing!”
“My job?”
“I don’t see any cars or people. I don’t see any trains.”
Dimyan felt perturbed. What’s this girl doing to him today? This girl for whom his heart beats faster whenever he sees her, like an orphan when out of the blue, two parents appear. This girl whom he loves, but doesn not know how to tell her of his love for her.
“Where do you come from, Brika?” he found himself asking.
“From the south,” she said pointing to the south.
“And where do you go after you’re done tending the sheep?”
“To the south. Haven’t you seen me?”
“I saw you,” he answered her in her dialect, realizing how silly his question, which he had asked before, must be. But he asked another question anyway.
“What’s the jlasa that you told me about before?”
“Would you like to take part in it?” she asked, laughing.
“I don’t know it.”
“Listen, play with me,” she kept laughing. “I ask and you answer, and you ask and I answer.”
He gave up. “What’s sweeter than honey and what’s more bitter than colocynth?” she asked.
He had no answer.
“Nothing is sweeter than honey except a child playing in the sand," and she pointed to her little brother, "and nothing is more bitter than colocynth but carrying a man on a bier," and pointed at an Indian soldier who was passing before her by chance, smiling.
Dimyan thought that he should break his silence and play with her. Does he not love her? His body shook as he thought what to ask her.
“Okay, I’ll ask you — what beats fire?”
“Water beats it,” she answered, nudging him in the chest.
“Okay. You win.”
“No. I don’t win yet. It’s my turn to ask you — what beats
water?”
He thought for a little while and almost said the wall, but he realized that water could go around the wall or through it, in time. His silence and thinking lasted for some time.
“The hot wind beats it,” she finally told him, laughing.
Dimyan realized that she was incredibly intelligent, and he really wanted to beat her at the game. He nudged her gently on the shoulder and asked her, “And what beats the hot wind?”
“The horses beat it,” she answered quickly, still laughing, “and the horsemen beat the horses, and the women beat the horsemen. Do you know what beats the women?”
“Men.”
“No,” she laughed and laughed. “Death beats women, Dimyan.”
She stood up to call her brother to gather the sheep. She pointed to the sky, which had begun to fill with clouds. Dimyan figured that she wanted to beat the rain.
“But you haven’t told me what a jlasa is,” he said.
“Today we did a jlasa, didn’t you know? And you didn’t beat me. We do the jlasa in the village. The young man who beats me marries me. Herr, herr herr,” she shouted to help her brother control the sheep, then walked away laughing. Dimyan stayed in his place, motionless, looking at the black clouds gathering and realizing there was no way that Brika could be his, ever.
It was raining hard on the Maryut coast and inside Libya when the Allied forces surprised the Axis forces in Sidi Rizq, but the Germans won after a vicious battle in the airfield area and they regained Sidi Rizq. The Allied forces lost many of their armored vehicles. The day after the German victory, at the end of November, Cunningham ordered the Eleventh Brigade to march on Sidi Rizq anew, and that brigade almost regained it. But Rommel, now well-versed in desert warfare, left the battle and took his armored force eastward, to the Egyptian borders. He went twenty miles inside Egypt and wreaked havoc in the rear of the English forces and their allies. He took many of their soldiers prisoner until the Royal Air Force stepped in with fierce raids that forced Rommel to go back to Sidi Rizq, chased by the Fourth Indian Brigade. No sooner had November ended than General Auchinleck dismissed Cunningham, replacing him with Major General Ritchie. Rommel laid siege to Tobruk, which was a stronghold, the strongest in North Africa, with a brave and obstinate British garrison thirty thousand strong. It is surrounded from the east and the west by rugged rocky terrain and to the south by a level plain. Before 1940, it had been an Italian stronghold, but the English seized it and made use of the defense lines established by the Italians around it: deep trenches in the ground, housing guns, and machine gun batteries that could pour fire on the attackers to the last moments of their attack, decimating them. There were also several barbed wire barriers that slowed down infantry attacks and a deep trench surrounding the whole area to prevent the advance of tanks. Behind all these defenses were massive British artillery units and dense mine fields. The fighting was over by the end of November, and even though Rommel did not succeed in capturing Tobruk, he inflicted very heavy losses on the Allied forces, exceeding eight hundred armored vehicles, one hundred planes, and countless small arms and ammunition, in addition to more than nine thousand prisoners of war. Rommel suffered heavy losses and a great number of his soldiers were taken prisoner. The Allied forces began to transport them to Alexandria with shaven heads, without helmets or head cover of any kind in the bitter cold, but they had long, heavy coats. When the British Command decided to engage Rommel in a decisive battle code-named Crusader, one hundred thousand soldiers from the Eighth Army charged forward. Rommel left the road open for them and did not mount a counterattack, withdrawing quietly westward until they fell into the trap. Thereupon he let loose with his artillery from all sides, destroying almost all the British tanks. The valley south of Sidi Rizq became a sea of dust, fire, and smoke.
The Russians had retreated behind the Dnepr river and fighting intensified in front of Leningrad. The raids on London ceased and the Battle of Britain ended because the Germans were busy on the eastern front. The American navy declared that it was determined to rid the Atlantic Ocean of Nazi ships after Churchill met with Roosevelt on an American cruiser in the Atlantic Ocean. Roosevelt announced the United States’ resolve to defend the freedom to sail the seas and warned that Axis ships would face destruction if they entered US territorial waters. A German U-boat torpedoed the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal and sank it. Afterward, German U-boats also sank the British battleship Barham; all seamen on board were killed. An Italian submarine came close to Alexandria and torpedoed the British battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, crippling them. When the British command tried to take its revenge against an Axis ship convoy going from Italy to Tripoli, it assigned the task to a British force comprised of three cruisers and four destroyers. But it was the British force that was ambushed at sea; two cruisers were hit, and the third was sunk with all seven hundred seamen on board, with the exception of one, who was taken prisoner. It was a truly painful end to the English fleet in the eastern Mediterranean.
In France, seventy-two French hostages were shot, execution-style, by the Germans in Nantes in retaliation for their participation in the Resistance. That prompted de Gaulle to declare mourning and called on all the people to demonstrate. The whole of France expressed anger. In India, Mahatma Gandhi’s seventy-third birthday was celebrated in his quiet village where he spent most of his time with his spindle and yarn. Gifts of spindles and yarn poured in from all over the country. In the Pacific, Japanese planes and battleships launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, destroying three hundred American planes and thirty battleships and killing seven thousand. For the United States, it was a day of infamy, and it was the day that the States officially entered the war. Japanese forces spread in East Asia and fighting extended throughout the eastern parts of Malaya and Singapore and to Hong Kong. Russia’s winter began to take its toll on the German troops, whose vehicles stalled and they were unable to enter Moscow even though they had reached its outskirts. The Germans began to retreat. The Slavic nation had awakened. Marshal Voroshilov, commander in chief of the Partisan movement, made a moving appeal to the inhabitants of Leningrad. He said that the enemy was trying to enter the city and destroy its houses and factories and the freedom of the motherland, that Leningrad was the industrial and cultural capital of Russia and it would not fall, and that “the enemies would not set foot in our beautiful gardens.”