No One Sleeps in Alexandria (3 page)

“Who, bitch?”

She did not hesitate.

“Bahi,” she said in a faint voice.

“That wanton little boy?” Her husband spat in her face and pressed the knife deep into her neck.

Her laughter rang through the courtyard of the big house. Her husband was thrown down, falling onto his backside, and the knife flew from his hand. He groaned in pain, then his eyes turned away and fixed onto faraway space. He had driven the knife into the neck, he was absolutely certain, but no blood came out—just a beam of light.

She got up, still laughing. His brothers searched frantically for the knife but could not find it anywhere. Later they would find it in the courtyard and wonder how nobody had seen it that day. It was so rusted that as one of them rubbed it, it turned to dust. The brothers carried him to his room; he could not walk on his own. She stood in a far corner, laughing and crying at the same time. She aroused the women’s pity and fear. The same women who had schemed against her took her to the shed and sat around her in a corner on the straw. She did not stop shaking. They said she would die that night. The men forgot about her, worrying instead about their incapacitated older brother. The women gave her a bowl of fresh milk, which she gulped down, letting half of it spill down her chest and never ceasing to laugh and cry. Then she fell asleep on
the straw, and they watched her side move with her breathing, like a tired animal.

At dawn the men came out of their brother’s room dragging their feet. The women wailed, “Is he dead?”

“He was murdered!” shouted the men. “His blood is on the hands of the Khalils! The life of the little dandy boy is not payment enough.”

No one saw the wife sneak out of the shed at first light and disappear. In the morning the Talibs lay in wait for Bahi on the streets. The news had spread. Bahi was returning from a neighboring village. No one had realized that the women and girls washing their pots and pans in the canal had gone far outside the village, so that before Bahi entered the village, the women alerted him, and he turned to the fields, where his brothers were. The women then went back to their usual place along the canal in the middle of the village, where the ducks swam. But the Talibs had planted their own spies, so they knew where the boy was going.

Magd al-Din climbed down from the roof. He opened the wooden gate and went to the house of Khalaf, his one remaining friend from the other family; he too had been ordered by the mayor to leave the village.

“What have you decided to do, Khalaf?”

“Sheikh Magd, there’s nothing left for me here. For a while now my money and my trade have been in Tanta. I know that I am not the the real target of this action—the mayor has just decided to retaliate for what Bahi did to him so long ago, so he dragged up this vendetta business, which has been over between us for years. I’m leaving the village tomorrow. I know I could just come back the next day, but I won’t.” He offered Magd al-Din a Cottarelli cigarette and asked, “I heard that your cousins, your sisters’ husbands, want to fight the mayor. Is that true?”

“There will be no fighting. I forbade them.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll leave the village tomorrow too.”

Magd al-Din left Khalaf’s house realizing for the first time that
he was acquiescing to the mayor’s order, not out of fear or submission, but out of a deep desire to leave the village and join his brother in Alexandria.

Two days before Magd al-Din’s last night, the reply that Hitler had demanded came to him in the form of the announcement of the Polish peoples’ speedy mobilization and the Polish president’s appeal to his people to stand behind their army in defense of freedom and honor.

So the reprieve was over. The machine of evil had been switched on, and there was no escaping it. In the morning following Magd al-Din’s last night in the village, at exactly 4:45 a.m., the full-scale invasion of Poland began.

It was Friday, the first of September, 1939. Magd al-Din did not usually go out to the field on a Friday; he preferred to spend the whole day in the small village mosque. But on this Friday he went out to the field. He did not want to go to the station directly from his house, and he had asked Zahra to go ahead to the station later that evening. The mayor had sent a number of guards to Magd al-Din’s house, where they learned he was in the field and would leave the village from there. In the evening the chief guard and his men stood at the little bridge that connected the village with the road to the fields, in order to prevent Magd al-Din from going back to his house.

The mayor had not believed that he would leave the village so easily, but the guards watched him ride away from the village on a donkey so small that it looked like a she-ass. They fired some shots in the air to scare him. Magd al-Din chose not even to look back. He truly wanted to get out.

Pain is a treasure.

The core grows more radiant when its shell is removed.

Jalal al-Din Rumi

3

The railroad station that evening, like all evenings, was empty except for the poor stationmaster, who could not leave until after the last train, at ten o’clock. And as on other evenings the platform was a structure of wide, lifeless slabs of stone, and the sign bearing the name of the village was off-white, with faint black lines, and mounted on two rusted iron poles. Not a single sparrow perched on the sign or flew near it.

There were no sparrows in the nearby trees either. The four rails between the two platforms were black and shiny, but congealed fuel oil stained the crossties and the ballast beneath. Seen from above on summer days, the rails were always shiny, their surface almost white. The road connecting the station with the village was, as usual, a narrow dirt road, hot, with a few curves and a few eucalyptus trees. At that time of the evening there was usually only one man walking on the road. And at that time of day, it took a while for someone standing at the station to decide whether that man was walking toward him or away and toward the village. The truth was that the man always disappeared, as if he were a trick of the eye, and no one knew where he went. What is it in the summer that makes the eye see no change in the scene from one evening to another, or in the distance from the village to the station? Is it the heat and the refraction of the light on the dust?
The greenery too was the same as it had been every day, stretched out along the dirt road, with very few birds around or on it—a few crows on the fronds of the tall palm trees, the occasional egret in the branches of the ancient sycamores.

Through this lifeless landscape, Magd al-Din made his way to the station. The world appeared to him like something cast aside, something seen from a hilltop at noon on a day in the blazing hot month of Bauna. Was what happened to him a short while ago real? Was it really he who had complied with the mayor’s order so easily, and left the village as easily—more easily, even, than a thorn pulled from dough? From a distance, he saw Zahra standing on the platform, her brother next to her, and their little daughter Shawqiya on her arm. At her feet were two small baskets and one large one. She was waving at him to hurry up. The donkey was slow, and he urged it on as much as he could. Before he reached the crossing, though, he left the donkey behind and continued on foot. The train had nearly reached the station, and Magd al-Din rushed on. He tripped over a wire stretched between the switches, and had to leave behind his shoes, which had slipped off, but he finally crossed the rails and climbed onto the platform. He saw the stationmaster in his official uniform, its brass buttons shining in the distance, and the red fez above his black face seemed to be floating in the twilight. The stationmaster looked to him like one of those fierce-looking border guards. He wished he could take his time greeting the man and shaking his hand, for it was his friend Abd al-Hamid from the next village who, like him, had memorized the entire Quran. They had met twenty years earlier at the governorate headquarters in Tanta when they were taking the Quran memorization test, on the basis of which they would be exempted from military service. Both of them passed the test, and both were exempted. By law, neither of them was supposed to do any work but recite the Quran. They both spent ten years without work, then they had to find other jobs—surely after ten years the government could not still be monitoring them. So Magd al-Din started working the land with his brothers, while Abd al-Hamid worked for the railroad. They became reacquainted, and then met every time Magd al-Din went to visit his brother Bahi in Alexandria. Why had neither of them worked as a Quranic chanter
or a singer of hymns? It could be the voice: Magd al-Din’s was faint and cracking, but Abd al-Hamid’s was loud and strong. Magd al-Din had often thought of bringing it up with Abd al-Hamid, then changed his mind, or rather, forgot.

The train pulled into the station just as Magd al-Din joined Zahra. Magd al-Din saw his old friend coming toward him with one of the small baskets, which he put into the train car, then went back for the other one while Zahra’s brother carried the big basket on board.

“Take your time, Sheikh Magd,” said the stationmaster. “I’ll keep the train waiting for a bit. I want to greet you properly, my friend.”

They rushed to embrace each other. Magd al-Din wondered if his friend knew the reason for his trip today. The train let out white smoke and blew its whistle. The stationmaster also blew his whistle. Magd al-Din leaned out the window to tell Zahra’s brother, “The donkey is just before the crossing.” The train gathered speed, and the sound of the wheels grew louder.

It was only then that Magd al-Din realized that it was over, that he had been kicked out of his village, although he did have a secret desire to leave. This was something that had never happened to anyone before—at least he had never seen it in his lifetime.

The conductor came and Zahra showed him the two tickets she had purchased before Magd al-Din’s arrival. When the conductor left, Magd al-Din noticed the terror in Zahra’s eyes. He turned his eyes away from hers and noticed at the end of the car a woman around whom sat five boys and girls, barefoot and wearing old, tattered gallabiyas. He had seen this very woman and these same children on the train when he went to visit Bahi in the middle of last year. Merciful God! He did not believe it, but it had actually happened; he had seen her before that on yet another trip. It seemed that ever since he had started visiting his brother, he had seen this woman and these nearly naked, barefoot children. Despite the years that had passed, the woman and her children had not grown any older. The silence in the car was profound, with the
exception of the sound of the wheels beneath them. Zahra had moved to the edge of the seat and spread out a gallabiya that she had taken from the large basket. She laid the baby to sleep on it and covered her with a black shawl from the same basket. She asked Magd al-Din to close the window tightly. It was now dark, and cold air was rushing in with the movement of the train.

How could the train ride continue? What could be said now that Zahra had laid the baby down to sleep and sat there looking at her husband who kept looking back at her, though his eyes did not seem as frightened as hers?

Zahra felt pained because she had no brother except the one who came to see her off at the station, and he was only her half-brother. Her sisters and mother could not fight the mayor. Yes, she wished she had many strong men in her family to fight the mayor, since Magd al-Din had forbidden his cousins to fight him. Magd al-Din must have feared that his sisters would become widows if their men died. But someone should have prevented them from leaving, even if he acted against Magd al-Din’s will. Since she could not offer her husband the protection that strong men in her family would have provided, she was leaving with him, broken-hearted. But she had accepted what a faithful wife had to do. The frightened look in her eyes would soon disappear, without a doubt. And it did—it changed into a look of profound compassion. She wished they would let him go back home tonight.

At about this time, he would have come back from the field, washed up and had his supper, fed the animals and rubbed them down, changed their water and put out fodder for them. He would have helped Zahra milk the water buffaloes, then performed his late-night prayers and sat alone near the kerosene lamps in their room, reading the Quran.