The French left Bir Hakim after twenty-six days of fighting, their morale still high. The troops of the Eighth Army withdrew from Adm and Sidi Rizq. The fighting moved to the south and west of Tobruk. Rommel bypassed Tobruk, leaving it behind, and made a dash for the Egyptian border.
By June first, the British Grant, Crusader, and Stuart tanks stood here and there on the hot sand. General Ritchie also stood, powerless, not knowing where Rommel would strike. Rommel’s winning card was the eighty-eight-millimeter anti-tank guns, which he used by baiting the British tanks to a killing field, then letting those mighty guns loose on them from every direction, blowing them up. Then the Panzer tanks finished off the rest.
At dawn on the twentieth of June, the German bombers attacked Tobruk so intensely that the barbed wire was blown to smithereens and the Indian division’s post was leveled. Waves of planes bombed the defensive posts continuously. Then the German armored offensive began, with the Twenty-First Panzer Division preceded by the artillery. Another division overran the harbor, and a third one crushed the British naval forces there.
Forty thousand men stayed in the garrison to fight. German engineers built a bridge over the deep anti-tank trenches, and after the bombers had softened up the defenses, Panzer convoys headed for the garrison, supported by mechanized infantry units.
It was 8:30 in the morning as Rommel followed the battle, taking delighted pride in his men. The German engineers opened several breaches in the minefields. Another wave of German planes came, and British resistance in the front lines was crushed. The big surrender had begun, and the world shook, and Alexandria shook even more. Everyone realized that Rommel was coming to the Delta. At the end of the battle Rommel himself led a light mobile armored group. He personally took part in removing ‘Satan’s eggs,’ or landmines, from the anti-tank trenches.
The British head of the garrison sent a cable to Cairo that it was no use, then he and thirty-three thousand soldiers surrendered and were shipped to Italy. A thousand armored vehicles, four hundred guns, and other British equipment were added to Rommel’s arsenal. Rommel gave a speech thanking his men and asking them to move toward the ultimate goal, Egypt. Hikmat Fahmi performed the Tobruk dance at the Kit Kat nightclub, where the patrons were singing a song popular in Europe at the time, “The sun had a date with the moon, but the moon hasn’t shown up.” To the delight of Johannes Eppler and his colleague Sandy, news of the fall of Tobruk broke. The Egyptians requested that Hikmat Fahmi do the Tobruk dance, not knowing that she was a spy for the Germans.
Thus Rommel reached the peak of his glory. He wrote to his wife, “Dear Lu, it was a magnificent battle. Tobruk! I must sleep after all this effort. I think about you a lot. The fall of Tobruk is the crowning point of our victories in the desert.” At the same time the reputation of the British army was greatly diminished, since Singapore also fell to the Japanese, and a force, eighty thousand strong, also surrendered. Churchill was in America visiting Roosevelt, who showed tactfulness by asking Churchill what the United States could do. So he requested large numbers of the new Sherman tanks. Immediately ships carrying three hundred tanks were dispatched to the Suez canal.
Dimyan stayed a long time in Alexandria. He loved to serve the church and those who had taken refuge from the raids and the difficulties of life in it. Stories were told about the young saint performing miracles in Asyut, how a girl who had entered the convent only a few months earlier was now healing people of all satanic diseases by a touch of the cross or her hand on the head. She was often seen in the convent talking to herself or to beings that no one could see and always praying and fasting, but the light never left her face. People began to come from the neighboring villages to see her, bringing their children who suffered from smallpox or intestinal or chest problems. They themselves would also come, and she would cure them of asthma, fever, heart disease, and epilepsy. Barren village wives also went to her. There were lines around the convent. The young saint went out two hours in mid-morning and two hours in the afternoon, and people fought each other to get near her. Rushdi was still walking against the current of the river, eating whatever vegetable he came across in the fields — eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers or whatever people who had pity on him would give him. It became known that there was a crazy young man walking against the current and whenever he saw a corpse in the water he screamed to summon the people of the village, not stopping until they had taken the body out of the water. Every time that happened, his eyes would grow wider and he could not stay still until he had found out all he could about the dead person’s particulars of age, sex, and shape. He never came across Camilla, so he continued his journey to the south. His journey had started four months earlier, and he was getting very close to Asyut. He was starting to hear about the young woman who had entered the convent a year earlier, and had already become a saint, performing miracles that surpassed those of Saint Theresa. His eyes grew wider and his tears flowed when he heard the name Camilla. That also happened to Dimyan when news of the saint reached Alexandria. He kept looking for Khawaga Dimitri but could not find him at the church and learned that he too had fled with his family to Asyut. Dimyan thought to himself, could he have become a saint? His love story with Brika had ended in failure, and Mari Girgis had saved him from certain death more than once. He was loving the church and working in it, and serving its people and visitors, and choosing the most menial jobs and doing them with joy. But his love story with Brika was nothing but the whim of a man over forty, as Magd al-Din said. Why did that whim not happen with a Christian woman? Why was the woman in question a Muslim? It must be that Mari Girgis did not want him to commit any sin. A Muslim woman meant that it was a hopeless case. That protected him from sinning, but it also meant that he had to crush his heart, his mind, and all his senses. What injustice!
Rushdi walked fast. He knew that she saw him, whether she was asleep or awake. She liked to clean the room in the convent in which the Virgin Mary had stayed with her child. The ancient Egyptians had hollowed out the cavern, a hundred meters above the fields, to take refuge in at the time of the flood. The Virgin and her son and Joseph the carpenter had stayed there during their flight into Egypt. The cavern became a church of the Virgin and a convent visited by people. Houses for nuns were built around it. Camilla liked to clean the Virgin’s room. One night she saw the light, the light that no one could imagine, a light that had the color of honey, that was as pleasant as a cool breeze on a scorchingly hot day, and had the taste of the purest water. She saw it emanating in the room, small as a candle at first, then growing, its brilliance increasing, lighting the whole room, then spilling out to light the whole cavern, which, despite its thin candles, looked as though it were bathed in sunlight. Then one corner’s gleaming stood out. It was the Virgin Mary appearing in the form of light everywhere. Camilla saw her pass in front of her, smiling her ever-present smile, and felt her anointing her hair with a sweet fragrance. She told Father Mikhail that the Virgin had appeared to her and now she was seeing her all the time. She had received the blessing of eternal holiness. She saw Rushdi walking exactly as magicians used to see what was happening in a magic crystal ball. She was never afraid for him. She was certain that he would reach her safely. She was just waiting for him and praying to the Virgin to preserve him from any harm. It was he who had imparted this tenderness in her, awakened her transparent soul, and brought out this angelic nature in her. He deserved her prayers to the Virgin to preserve him. She knew he would arrive. He kept walking. The young saint was his beloved, his heart told him that with every beat. She had not been killed. She was not dead. His own spirit grew stronger, his languid eyes lit up, and his feet carried him down to the river to bathe more than once. He would not meet Camilla in his present condition, barefoot, with tattered clothes and a dusty face and hair. He realized that he had seen in the countryside a world more brilliant and verdant than the one he had left behind. The land was green, the sun kind, and the people meek and sweet, walking peacefully, the children playing in the streams. True, the peasants looked poor and neglected, with pale faces and emaciated bodies, but they appeared content. People in the fields, next to the waterwheels, under the old acacia, oak, and sycamore trees appeared happy and serene. The birds flew freely in the sky, then calmly came down to feed on grains or insects, then soared back up, unfettered by anything. He tried working in the fields. People knew that he stayed in a village no more than a day or two then disappeared without warning. People were mystified about him but said he was a blessed young man. He worked in silence and ate and drank in silence, but in reality he was in a trance, like that which prophets experience at the time of revelation. The spring of poetry in him had welled up, and he found himself reciting his own poetry mixed with that of French poets and others whose poetry he loved. The joy and élan of creation appeared in his eyes. What beautiful pain had awakened the poet from his deep sleep? He was certain that he had been saved for a mission. He would carry the burden of knowledge off the people’s shoulders and would give them joy with his chants. Those intoxicating pains! But he also saw the peasants humiliated and spurned, beaten by the masters of the land. He saw them sharing the animals’ sleeping quarters, eating the lowliest of food and drinking, like animals, directly from irrigation canals. But they praised the Lord, in any case. He realized the Egyptians’ secret power: they left the unjust ruler to the Just Ruler, who never failed them no matter how long they had to endure. How the Egyptians have survived from the ancient past to this day! What a miracle this people represent, enduring injustice more than rebelling against it. As he walked further he got closer to Asyut, his joy increasing, and he felt his body shaking with a mysterious ecstasy. Was it the poetry or the promised meeting with her? It did not make any difference; both poetry and the meeting represented a new birth of the spirit. He would only see her, then go back, now that she, like him, had penetrated the unseen, had become as tender as he and had not died, just as he was alive. He was a poet and she, a saint. Both had attained prophethood.