No One Sleeps in Alexandria (46 page)

A few days after Shamm al-Nasim, a royal decree was issued appointing Abd al-Khaliq Hassuna Bey governor of Alexandria, He succeeded Muhammad Husayn Pasha, who had requested to retire. Another royal decree was issued placing the beautiful Ras al-Tin palace at the disposal of the British embassy to use as a military hospital for the duration of the war. One of the most important initiatives undertaken by the new governor was putting an end to the use of adulterated flour in bread. The archaeological discovery of the temple of the god Apis in Kom al-Shuqafa was deemed auspicious for the new governor. Dimyan was walking in front of Pompey’s Pillar when he saw a crowd of notables and learned the story of the archaeological find and was amazed at the mysteries of this land. The month of April ended with a heavy air raid that killed sixty persons and wounded more than a hundred. Four Axis bombers were shot down. As usual, the wounded were
taken to the area hospitals, and those who had lost their homes were taken to shelters in Damanhur and Kafr al-Dawwan, since Alexandria could not provide shelter any more. In this raid the Jewish synagogue on Nabi Danyal Street was destroyed. It had been built in 1870, and renovated only ten years before to accommodate five hundred people. It was said that the synagogue had cost ten thousand Egyptian pounds, at a time when one Egyptian pound could buy two feddans of land. There was a rumor that the German planes had been looking for the synagogue for quite some time, and when they found it they destroyed it, and that explained why the raids stopped for a week afterwards. But when they resumed after a week, they went even deeper into the Lower Egyptian provinces, a fact that resulted in food supplies, especially wheat, being cut off from Alexandria. But the new governor soon solved the problem. It was said that the people were eating more because of anxiety and fear. An order was issued by the commander in chief of the British army in Cairo, General Sir Claude Auchinleck, to all senior officers in the general Middle East command, that there was a real danger that the name ‘Rommel’ had become a bogeyman dreaded by the forces, that his name had become the subject of many endless discussions, and that no matter how capable and efficient he was, he was not a supernatural man. “Even if that were true, it is not proper for our forces to describe him as such. Therefore,” the commander in chief added, “you should do your utmost to erase this idea of Rommel. He is no more than an ordinary German commander. Therefore his name should not be used when referring to the enemy in the Western Desert. Instead, we should say ‘the Germans’ or ‘the Axis forces’ or ‘the enemy,’ and not ‘Rommel.’ I ask of you that you make sure that this order is carried out and that junior officers are instructed to do the same. The matter is of the utmost psychological importance.”

Charitable donations for Alexandria continued, and several new donors joined the effort. They included Prince Umar Tusun, Prince Yusuf Kamal, Princess Samiha Hasan, and Salim and Samaan Sidnawi. Once again people complained about adulterated flour and were told that solving the problem required more time. Civil defense distributed helmets to volunteers, and Ghaffara got
one since he had joined the volunteers, using his cart to transport the wounded. He was late with some wounded who were bleeding, so they died, and he was relieved of that duty. His cart was now set aside for transporting the dead. So he wrote on one side, ‘The Chariot of Divine Mercy.* On the other side-panel, which he had attached to it, he wrote in a very clear hand verses from the Quran and sayings about death such as, “The living should take precedence over the dead,” and also “God might give you a reprieve, but he never forgets you.”

On the fifth of May, Coronation Day was celebrated, as it was every year throughout the country. Mass was given in the churches and prayers performed in mosques, literary festivals were held, music played in the streets, and free restaurants opened for the people. Cinema Olympia showed
I Love Sin,
starring Tahiya Kariyuka and Husayn Sidqi. Local communities began to combat barefootedness by distributing twenty-five thousand pairs of shoes. The ministry of social affairs distributed eight thousand pairs of shoes to the peasants in the villages, which they sold in the nearest town for twenty-five piasters a pair. The British military governor banned all lights at night, even in celebration of Coronation Day. Army and police bands toured the streets and the parks playing music. Alexandria was appalled by a horrendous murder that took place after a fierce air raid in which thirty persons were killed. Used to air raids by now, people forgot about the raid and talked about the murder: the body of a woman was discovered in a garbage bin next to the fence of Nuzha Gardens. The corpse was identified as that of Fathiya Gab Allah, about twenty years old. People stopped going to Nuzha, especially in the late afternoon and at sunset. The romantic lovers stopped going during the day, as did the pleasure seekers who used to go at night, to take advantage of the pitch dark on the tree-lined road adjacent to the garden. Everyone knew that plainclothes policemen were now all over the place. For some reason, Dimyan got up early in the morning, walked to Ban Street, crossed it and the two streets south of it, and arrived at the railroad wall. From the spot where the wall had given way the first day he went to work, he crossed it, as he always did, and walked over to the post. When he did not find the man who used to sit at the Raven, he felt apprehensive but
kept on walking. As soon as he went into the post, his co-workers, who were drinking tea, leapt to their feet in disbelief, and one after another embraced him. Usta Ghibriyal shook his hand with a broader smile this time. He sat down with them. Not finding Hamza there, he realized that the man had not come back. He did not see Shahin either, so he asked about him and was told that his son Rushdi had left Alexandria to walk all the way to Upper Egypt in search of his beloved, Camilla, and that the man was sick at home, waiting for his son to return. Dimyan went afterwards to Shahin. The man’s eyes were bloodshot from crying. He sat a long time with Dimyan, who told him that he had learned at the church that Camilla had entered the convent—that there she would be all right and would forget. If it did happen that Rushdi met her, he would recover from his love for her, because he would find that she had recovered.

On the twenty-eighth of May, Ibrahim Ata, who had killed the woman found in the garbage bin at Nuzha—who turned out to have been a dancer—was arrested. Romantic and ‘practical’ lovers started going back to Nuzha in the daytime and by night. Ration cards were distributed to the people to counter merchants’ price-gouging. A new offensive by the Axis forces began after Rommel received massive reinforcements. It became clear that a major battle was in the offing. Major General Ritchie sent a message to the Eighth Army to raise its morale, reminding the troops that they were defending freedom and democracy. Auchinleck sent a similar message. A major battle took place in Bir Hakim in which the French acquitted themselves valiantly. German prisoners of war began to arrive in Alexandria. But the Germans were able to capture Bir Hakim, from which the Allies and the Free French, who fought with unparalleled courage, withdrew. Communists in Europe clamored for opening another front against Germany to alleviate the situation in the Soviet Union, and an agreement to that effect was reached by Russia, England, and the United States: it would be a front not in Europe but here in the Western Desert. That was Churchill’s vision: to expel the Axis armies from Africa, then invade Italy from the south and get rid of Mussolini, leaving Hitler isolated. From there, the French front would be breached and the English
Channel crossed. But the Germans were advancing in the desert and deploying millions in Russia.

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!