No One Sleeps in Alexandria (28 page)

She talked to Zahra about the world of the
awalim,
the singing and dancing women. She told her that the piazza where Lula died
was their headquarters in Alexandria. There were the artists’ cafés, the houses of impresarios and leaders of the troupes, and the ‘workshops for teaching singing and dancing girls. Any girl who in away went to the piazza, for dancing was more honorable than prostitution, and, “as the proverb says, ‘Every bean finds her measurer.’ But the awalim say, ‘Every dancer finds her drummer. The dancer always marries a drummer or a tambourine player, seldom an accordionist or some other instrument—those love the singers. Each leader of a troupe has her own girls and her turf. So Naima al-Saghir, for instance, cannot enter Karmuz—Bata al-Salamuni would kill her—and so on. And now, after the movies, each dancer wants to be another Hikmat Fahmi, and every dancer who used to dream to dance in the corniche nightclubs is now dreaming to dance in front of the king. King Farouk is a handsome man whose face is as beautiful as the full moon; all the dancers are in love with him and women hunger for him! “

Then Umm Hamidu takes her spiel in a different direction. “Alexandria is a happy city, and its earth is saffron, as people say. They say that Alexandria was built by a crazy man named Alexander who filled it with wineries, and people danced and sang all day and night and cavorted with women. To this day they still find relics of Alexander and ancient Alexandria, just like they find treasures under collapsed houses after the air raids. After every raid the rescue workers find a lot of money and gold and jewelry under the rubble. They once found a clay vessel filled with gold coins stamped with the name of the Greek queen Naisa, who ruled Alexandria a long time ago. Yes, that’s why they call the area Mount Naisa, because the queen lived there. They say she was a mighty queen, so the folks who live in Mount Naisa are mighty drug dealers and robbers that the government can’t do anything about. In front of Mount Naisa on one side is the piazza, and on the other side Pompey’s Pillar. The piazza is a very old neighborhood, and Pompey’s Pillar is even older. It’s surrounded by Kom al-Shuqafa, which has catacombs underground where the Nubians and Sudanese live. These Nubians and Sudanese spend their days selling seeds and peanuts, and at night they sleep in the caves like bats. The caves are full of relics known only to those blacks and to the gypsies. The gypsies also live there, but since the
war started, nobody sees them on the streets any more. Where did they go? God only knows!”

Thus, after having seen the sea and the big squares with Sitt Maryam, Zahra entered Alexandria’s magic world. Umm Hamidu’s stories have given the city, whose inhabitants were leaving, a warm soul in a winter that now appeared truly frosty. But after the rain fell, warmth prevailed, spaces grew wider, and the sky moved higher, bluer, happier. Alexandria has always been a happy city, despite the apparent malaise because of the migration. Umm Hamidu’s stories made it twice as happy. The rain, which had not stopped in days, would surely let up with the beginning of the new year, when the Christian and Muslim holidays would coincide for the first time in many years: the Orthodox Christmas would be on the same day as the Feast of the Sacrifice. If the rain did not stop, however, it would fall on Muslims and Christians alike, and there would be joy for all and rain for all, and even Epiphany, which Yvonne had said the previous year was an ancient Egyptian feast, would be for all.

Orders were given throughout the country that the new year be celebrated, but without lighting up the streets, and people were warned about the possibility of surprise air raids. For even though the combatants in Europe had announced a cease-fire on the last day of the year, no one could guarantee the actions of Hitler and Mussolini, especially since “our country has no interest in the European celebrations of the birth of Christ, it being an innovation that came with the occupation.” At any rate, the raids had stopped in Europe on the penultimate day of December, in view of bad weather conditions, so people in Europe enjoyed two days in a row without raids. That was a particularly welcome respite for the British, whose cities Hitler had vowed to wipe out. The night of the thirtieth of December, however, witnessed intensive British air raids on the Gazala and Tobruk airports in Libya. Italian airplanes in turn attacked the British bases in Malta.

The world was still following the surprising advances of the Greeks in Albania, at the Italians’ expense and amid the confusion
of the Albanians themselves, who had not yet settled on one occupier of their land. The Führer addressed a message to the German army in which he enumerated Germany’s triumphs during the past year and promised final victory in the new year. “The German Army of National Socialism has achieved brilliant victories in the year 1940. This army, on the threshold of a new year, has prepared itself with armaments hitherto unknown to humanity.”

In Cairo, Biba Izz al-Din announced that she would open her new program at the Majestic Theater with the play
Who Are You Kidding?,
which would include singing monologues by Muhammad Abd al-Muttalib, Fathiya Mahmud, Thurayya Hilmi, and Sayyid Fawzi. The Shatbi Casino announced it would open its doors for new year’s celebrations. Celebrants, mostly Commonwealth soldiers, danced to love serenades at the Monsignor in dim lights that did not show outside because of the tinted glass and heavy curtains. Neither Magd al-Din nor Zahra understood, for the second time, why people threw their old things from the windows at year’s end, even though it was a small number of people who did, as most had left in the great emigration.

In Cairo, King Farouk attended a new year’s party at the opera house for the entertainment of the English soldiers in the Middle East. The Wafd Party submitted to him a statement of opinion on internal and external affairs in Egypt, criticizing both. The Royal Air Force in the Middle East resumed its bombing of Gazala and Bardiya in Libya. The month of December had witnessed a ferocious surprise attack by the suntanned British and Allied armored forces on Sidi Barrani, where they captured “Italian officers who filled five feddans and soldiers who filled two hundred feddans.” People once again wondered, as they saw the prisoner-of-war trains coming from the desert, whether the Italians were really fighting, or whether II Duce and Graziani were doing the fighting alone. By the middle of the month, the Italians had been thrown out of Egypt, and the Allied forces chased them to Bardiya, which had been penetrated by the Australian soldiers in their long heavy coats. They captured five thousand Italians. Air raids started again with the new year in Europe. The Germans used a new type of incendiary bomb on London that started
infernal fires everywhere and left behind, after each raid, three to four thousand casualties or more. One bomb fell on the House of Commons and caused serious damage, though there were no politicians in it. The German city of Bremen was totally destroyed by British air raids. In Libya, the Australians, together with the English, had invaded and routed Tobruk, and thirty thousand Italians were taken prisoner, bringing the number of Italian prisoners of war to one hundred thousand. Thus the huge army collapsed and became a negligible military force. The Allied forces spread along the coast from Sallum to Buqbuq.

Yusuf Wahbi’s play
The Air Raid Siren
opened. Cinema Olympia screened the film
Dananir,
starring Umm Kulthum; Cinema Misr showed Mary Queenie’s A
Rebellious Girl;
and Cinema Cosmo was playing One
Million Years B.C.,
which starred the new actor Victor Mature and which Camilla saw with Rushdi and saw in Rushdi’s eyes the same sadness as in Victor Mature’s. The Commandant of the Traffic Police, Muhammad Shukri Bey, issued an order requiring all cab drivers to wear a uniform as they did in European countries, a khaki coat over their clothes. In Alexandria the Israelite Sports Union had a gala party to benefit victims of the air raids, which was attended by Salvatore Cicurel and many other notables. Marshal Wavell’s reputation spread. In disbelief, people watched the sweeping British offensive on Libya and the defeats raining down on Italy.

But Magd al-Din believed, for he saw the weapons being shipped by train to the heart of the desert every day, weapons that only red demons could make and only devils and giants could use. Hamza expressed amazement as he saw the young Italian prisoners of war, barefoot and heads shaved, shipped in open and closed freight trains, looking more like homeless children, and sleeping without a care. Some of them even smiled at the workers or waved to them. Commenting on their great numbers, Hamza sang, “If time deals you a bad hand, son of noble ones, bow your head, but follow not the ignoble ones.” His co-workers, who could not see the connection between what he said and what was happening, laughed.

“Aren’t they the ones who were fighting?” Dimyan asked him.

“My heart tells me these are good-hearted men who don’t know how to fight in Egypt or Greece. It’s all the devil Mussolini’s fault,” was Hamza’s reply.

Roosevelt delivered a speech in which he said that America was going to be “the great arsenal of democracy.” The licensed prostitutes of Alexandria complained about the dwindling number of patrons after the great emigration from the city. They requested that they be used to entertain the English soldiers in their camps in return for a fixed income, since Commonwealth soldiers who went to the brothels went there drunk and did not pay. Besides, the local customers, knowing that they had become a rare commodity, were no longer going to the poor brothels in Farahda and Kom Bakir, but to the posh ones in Hamamil, and were paving there what they used to pay in the poor ones. The newspapers announced that mentally retarded persons in Germany and countries under German occupation would be executed: “In Germany alone, one hundred thousand wretched creatures, idiots, and incurably insane creatures will be executed in the next few days.” The workers laughed when Hamza said that only today he did not wish the Italians to enter Egypt because that meant that “the Germans would enter too, and execute all railroad workers like us.” When he saw Ghibriyal’s fox-like glance, he immediately added,”Except foremen,” and everyone laughed even more. Dimyan began to feel a spiritual affinity with Hamza, and Magd al-Din forgot his previous insult to him,

Churchill gave a speech in which he praised Anglo-American cooperation, saying that they were in the sentinel tower guarding history. The air raids against Alexandria since Italy entered the war numbered one hundred, the most vicious of which was the six-hour raid and the two of the previous November. But the Italians had not come to drink Nile water; rather, they came as prisoners of war, as lost souls walking hundreds of miles on foot from Libya to Marsa Matruh. Many of them died on the road in the sun, the rain, and the desert winds. From Marsa Matruh, they were shipped by train or boat to Alexandria. The newspapers also reported on the trial of those accused in the case of the defective helmets supplied to the Egyptian and the British armies. It was a
cause célèbre,
widely covered in the papers and talked about everywhere,
especially in cafés and bars. The Royal British Army and the Royal Egyptian Army had, at the beginning of the war, announced an invitation to bid on supplying fifty thousand helmets for Commonwealth soldiers and twenty thousand for Egyptian soldiers. The bid was won by a team of Egyptian and Greek contractors, who delivered the helmets on time. It turned out afterwards, however, that the helmets were fake, that they were all made of tin rather than steel, as was customary. In trying to excuse himself, one of the defendants said, “What good would a helmet, tin or steel, do against bombs from the air or against the big guns? Would a helmet protect a soldier or prevent his death if God had already decreed his death?” The case, and news of it, proved to be a welcome diversion for the Egyptians during the war. The trial was continued, as the defendants and the Egyptians had hoped. Kassala fell to the English, and Ethiopian troops and the Italians retreated to Eritrea, and Emperor Haile Selassie prepared to enter Ethiopia at the head of his national army. Al-Azhar celebrated the new year of the Islamic calendar. Ghaffara still put the anti-airraid fez on his face; he no longer traded in sawdust, as most lumber yards had closed down after the cessation of maritime trade with Europe. His customers, mostly shop owners, had also dwindled as a result of the great emigration. So Ghaffara removed the wooden box from his cart, leaving only one side panel, on which he wrote, “Capacity: ten tons. Ready to move migrants to the station with luggage or without.” He started to salute people in the manner of Goebbels, as he said, by raising his arm and saying “Heil Hitler” to everyone. At the end of January, Muhammad Mahmud Pasha, the former prime minister of Egypt known as “the Iron Fist,” died in Cairo. The soulful singer Malak opened in
Butterfly
in Brentania theater on Imad al-Din Street. In Greece, the great Greek leader General Metaxas died, and mourning was declared in the Greek Consulate in Alexandria and all Greek clubs. An order prohibiting bicycle riding in some streets in the capital was issued. Italians retreated to Benghazi and Churchill spoke in the House of Commons, saying that Egypt and Suez were saved. Cinema Misr screened the film
Salarna’s All Right.
The English began advancing on Tripoli. Italian tanks and armored cars were burned, Italian casualties and prisoners of war since the beginning of the British
offensive totaled 150,000. Grief and muffled resentment of its mighty leader gripped Italy. Decorations went up everywhere in Egypt on the occasion of His Majesty’s birthday; music played in public squares, gala parties were held in Zaafarana palace, police-officers’ clubs, and the patriarchate. Restaurants were opened for the poor, and school children sang for our happy king. The dreams of Graziani to rule Egypt as a viceroy were shattered. A sublime royal directive announcing the campaign to combat bare feet was issued: “Barefootcdness is not a cause but a consequence. It is better for the citizen to buy, with his own money, shoes that would protect his feet. Giving him shoes out of charity takes away from his dignity and increases his humiliation.” At the same time the king donated the wild coney that he had caught to the Giza zoo. The newspaper
ai-Ahram
published an article to explain what a “coney” was: