No One Sleeps in Alexandria (36 page)

The night was long. His life passed in front of his mind’s eye. He felt as if a whole lifetime had passed since Zahra left. Had Dimitri not come to visit him and sat with him a long time, the night would not have passed. Dimitri asked him if he would come to Alexandria during vacations, and Magd al-Din said that he would not, that if he got a vacation he would go to the village.
He said that with great emphasis, which baffled Dimitri. Then Magd al-Din told him that he would give him three months rent, and would send him the rent every month after that with Dimyan, who would surely come to Alexandria to see his family. Dimitri asked him who Dimyan was. Magd al-Din was surprised, and after a pause started to remind Dimitri of him but the man, who could not remember, said, “Oh yes, I remember him,” but he was not telling the truth. This perplexed Magd al-Din, who began to wonder what might have happened to his landlord’s mind. They spoke a lot about people, the country, and the war. Dimitri suddenly asked him if he had found out anything new about Rushdi, and Magd al-Din told him the truth, namely that his father no longer spoke about his son in front of him. Dimitri said with regret that he hoped the young man realized the gravity of the situation and would let it pass peacefully, that he personally would not have liked to stand in the way of his daughter’s wish but that it was a difficult wish. He was sure time would heal all wounds. Magd al-Din thanked Dimitri for the time he had spent in his house and told him that both he and Dimyan had applied to the railroad authority for housing if a vacancy should occur, and that he was hopeful. Dimitri reassured him about his furniture in the room-—”exactly as if you are here, Sheikh Magd”—and shook his hand warmly, then went upstairs and left Magd al-Din, who wished to get some sleep that night. He began to recite silently some of the short chapters of the Quran to calm his nerves.

The previous day’s newspapers had announced that the country was ready for Hollywood’s new masterpiece, produced by David Selznick, starring the famous actors Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, and Leslie Howard, as well as more than thirty-five hundred new actors and actresses. That masterpiece was based on the famous novel by Margaret Mitchell,
Gone with the Wind.
The papers also published the name of the German officer commanding the Axis forces in Libya. It was Erwin Rommel, who came from the French front and who had shown great skill in desert warfare. The public health office in the governorate also announced that births in Alexandria that week numbered four hundred locals and twenty
foreigners. As for deaths, they numbered 120 locals. The causes of death given were old age, a variety of fevers, malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, whooping cough, tetanus, and air raids. Deaths among foreigners numbered ten. Causes given were drunkenness, insanity, and suicide.

The time that my journey takes is long and

the way of it long.

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light and

pursued my voyage through the wilderness of worlds . . .

Rabindranath Tagore

21

The Maryut coast—or the Libyan coast, as the ancient Carthaginians called it—extending from Alexandria to Sallum, before it enters Libya, is the forgotten coast in Egypt. It is where Magd al-Din and Dimyan were going this morning. Off the coast lies the Mediterranean, bluer than in Alexandria, with clear water that reveals rocks and sand, enticing you to hold out your hands and scoop up water to drink, and forget that the water is salty. The coast, for whoever hears of or sees it, is the desert itself. It is a barren coast, beyond which the desert extends endlessly, with a horizon in every direction and a mirage on every horizon. On this deserted coast many large armies have marched. The Libyan Shishak I was the first to use it to invade Egypt in 945 B.C. At that time, pharaonic glories had reached the high heavens: the pharaohs sat on the gods’ throne, and one dynasty followed another, twenty-one of them, until the inevitable decline set in. Eventually, though, it was the Egyptians’ turn to march on the coast, this time to Libya. That was in the reign of Aprieus, the fourth king of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. He set out to Cyrene to rid it of Greek rule, but failed to do so. Ptolemy I, however, was able to reach Cyrene and annex Libya, from which the worship of Isis spread west. The Libyans built a temple for her. It is still standing today in Cyrenaica, as is the bath of Cleopatra VIII (Selene)—daughter
of Cleopatra VII, who ruled Egypt—just like her mother’s bath in Marsa Matruh. Both baths are carved out of the rocks in the sea. Were the two of them daughters of Poseidon, god of the sea, or were they both goddesses of the sea?

The road was not completely deserted then. Alexander took it to Marsa Matruh before turning into the desert to head for the temple of Amun in Siwa. The Arab tribes of Bani Salim and Bani Hílal took the same road a thousand years later, migrating from Najd to Morocco, then came back bearing the name “the Fatimids.” The Fatimids were the last to take that road before troops from England and the Commonwealth, from India, Australia, Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand, and Cape Town marched on it, as did troops from southern Italy and Germany, in the opposite direction. The northern coast has been a road of war and death. In times of peace, the Christians took it to escape Roman persecution, and they built small monasteries in the farthest depressions in the desert. They reached all the way to al-Wadi al-Jadid and built churches and monasteries in Bagawat and near Alexandria in Bahig, Ikingi Maryut, and Burg al-Arab. During times of peace, the road was taken by the Bedouin tribes of Ali al-Abyad and Ah al-Ahmar of the Awlad Ali of the Saadi Arabs, and the sedentary Murabitin tribes of Jamayat, Qawabis, and Samalush, who were usually charged with guard duties and took up their positions among the settlements of the different tribes to provide them protection when the Saadi Arabs were busy fighting.

Amiriya is the closest city to Alexandria on that road, thirty kilometers to the west, and southwest of Lake Maryut, which bounds Alexandria and keeps it pressed to the sea. In the days of Muhammad Ali it was know as Ikingi Uthman, named after the ruler’s majordomo. During Abbas Pasha’s reign it came to be known as Biringi Maryut, that is, “First Maryut,” thus Ikingi Maryut was the second city. Amiriya is a hodgepodge of a market town where the Bedouin of the Bihayra governorate meet with the Bedouin of Maryut and some merchants of Alexandria once a week. Beyond that, nothing much: a few scattered houses, an old railroad station, and a train that carries water once a week to the desert, where the few inhabitants go out to meet it and fill their jerry cans and load them on their donkeys’ backs.

Ikingi Maryut is the more famous of the two. It is dry year-round, both a summer and a winter resort. It seems that God has given it the gift of wondrous, enchanting air. Beautiful windmills can be seen pumping pure water that has stayed underground for millions of years, in order to water fig, almond, and pomegranate trees, grapevines, and the memories of visitors. When you enter Ikingi Maryut, you forget all other towns and you feel your life simplified to serenity. Time and space cease to exist.

Amiriya is different. It seems at all times to be a town without an identity, choked by the dust that gathers from all directions, because it has no gardens and because the sun seems to linger above it always, day and night. This is one of the curious things about Amiriya, for despite being close to Alexandria and the lakes, it is always hot. It is said that it got its name from the ancient Greek city of Marea, which is buried near the sea and which used to be a great spot for wine-making, dance, and love. “Alexandria is Marca, a happy city, and its earth is saffron,” as the saying goes. It is also said that the tribes of Rabia and Hilal ibn Amr settled here for some time before moving westward, thus the town got its name from these tribes. This is more plausible, as you could smell the hair of the Bedouin tents in the air; the few scattered dusty houses in Amiriya look from a distance like tent pegs, sometimes screaming with the desire to move in search of water and grass.

Not far from Amiriya is Burg al-Arab, which used to be no more than a guard post. In 1918, Major Bramly, police inspector in the Western Desert governorate, chose a high hill where he built a big palace in which he collected all kinds of artifacts and surrounded with a beautiful garden and fitted with windmills to raise fresh water. At the foot of the hill, several houses were built to serve the alabaster palace, whose Greek and Roman pillars Bramly had moved from the nearby area of Abu Mina. Abu Mina was a site that held scattered Greek and Roman relics as well as the church of Abumna, built by the emperor Arcadius in 405 C.E. on top of the tomb of Saint Menas, who had fled the persecution of Diocletian. But the latter sent troops that captured and killed the saint. Diocletian did not know that the Lord’s children or disciples would not die; none ever truly died. As always happened, Diocletian died and Saint Menas lived on. Bramly died and his
palace was taken over by the overseer of royal possessions. The soldiers who guarded it told the few inhabitants of the area stories about the luminescent alabaster walls, about beautiful singing sounds that filled the palace at night together with the sea wind. They spoke of a state of ecstasy that came over the soldiers every night, making them laugh for no reason, inebriated on a wine they had not drunk. They turned at night into happy children and spent the day surprised at what happened during the night.

Figs in the palace garden had the sweet taste of honey, almonds gave off the scent of apples, and the pomegranates were as cool as ice. Beyond this small settlement of Burg al-Arab, to reach al-Alamein one had to pass by the town of al-Hammam, established on the ruins of the Greek town of Kaminos, famous for its natural baths. It was built around an old market frequented by merchants of the west who went there to meet with merchants of the Delta. Al-Hammam was settled by Moroccans a long time ago and contained the Mosque of Ziyad ibn al-Aghlab, which he built while on his way to conquer North Africa. It is a desert town smelling of camels, goats, and sheep, where people moved fast whether going to it, leaving from it, or staying in it, as if everything suddenly has turned into a mirage. It is difficult to retain the memory of a face you come across in that town, where you pause only to push on, a town created for quick commerce. Leaving it and going west means going to al-Alamein, that deserted spot, a small railroad station with a mere half-meter-high platform topped by two wooden rooms for the stationmaster and the telegraph operator. The platform ends at a primitive barricade consisting of a wooden pole with a rope attached to one end and a weight of stone at the other end. When the operator pulls the rope, the pole is lowered, blocking the way. After the train goes through, he lets go of the rope, and the counterbalance causes the pole to be raised so that nonexistent cars and the few people may cross the tracks. That was before the war; now there were many cars and soldiers. That road across the tracks is the only road in al-Alamein. It starts at the sea and goes through the village, which is no more than two rows of houses built of limestone cut from the mountain of al-Hammam.

The houses stood empty. The same Bedouin who had left their encampments built them, but when the war broke out, they
moved away again, leaving behind the limestone houses and going back to their tents and encampments on the edge of the Qattara depression. The distance between Alexandria and al-Alamein is one hundred kilometers, and between the sea and the Qattara depression is twenty-five kilometers, thus making it a bottleneck unsuitable for military maneuvers, but a good last line of defense if the armies had to retreat before the Axis. That area was now a repository for weapons, ammunition, and supplies and a training ground for troops. Al-Alamein is six hundred feet above sea level, and the land slopes southwards to the Qattara depression across an area of sand dunes and perilous salty swamps. On the edges of these dunes and swamps live a few Bedouin, Bani Ahmar and Bani Abyad, Saadis and Murabitin who have been at peace for such a long time that their dialect no longer has words for “war” and “fighting.”

Beyond al-Alamein there were no other inhabited towns worth stopping at except Sidi Abd al-Rahman and Marsa Matruh. The dunes of al-Alamein are characterized by their off-white limestone color that continues to Sidi Abd al-Rahman, a little-noticed summer resort next to a small village that is nothing more than a mosque the Bedouin built to honor Abd al-Rahman, of watermelon fame, who had become a saint.

Abd al-Rahman was a handsome young man who was walking with his ugly friend, a barber who had evil designs on him. They had gone far into the desert when the barber took out a razor he had been hiding in his vest and severed Abd al-Rahman’s head, then left him buried in the sand. A year later the barber took the same route, which he had forgotten. In the desert, the land and the dunes looked alike. He saw a watermelon patch bearing a big ripe watermelon lying on the ground, He could not resist; who could resist a watermelon in the desert? He picked up the watermelon, and on his way back, he thought of giving it as a gift to the chief of the tribe. That was more beneficial than eating it, he thought.

The chief of the tribe was happy with the gift. But as soon as he plunged the knife into it, blood gushed forth. He plunged the knife again, and again the blood gushed forth. The wise old chief looked at the barber, who by now was terrified in front of all those
present. He had remembered everything. He asked the chief for an assurance of protection, and the chief gave him that assurance. So he started telling everyone how he had killed his friend on that very spot. The Bedouin built a tomb for Abd al-Rahman on top of the watermelon patch, and they buried the watermelon, which they realized contained Abd al-Rahman’s head. The tomb became a shrine around which the little village came into being.

There are no more stories until you get to Marsa Matruh. Daba is a small village deserted by the Bedouin who moved to Sidi Abd al-Rahman and al-Alamein. Fuka is a strategic depression where forces and vehicles gathered to be deployed later on at the Libyan borders. Marsa Matruh, Cleopatra and Antony’s historical city, was now the headquarters of the Eighth Army command through which military vehicles careened all day long. Marsa Matruh was the city of love and death where Cleopatra betrayed Antony by fleeing from Actium and where Antony worshipped at the altar of Cleopatra’s body. It was in Marsa Matruh that both committed suicide. It used to be the capital of the Western Desert governorate; now it was the headquarters for General Wavell, who had defeated Graziani a few weeks earlier. Now the German Rommel came to command the Afrika Korps, now mostly German. What was that new commander who came triumphant from the French front going to do? He had an easy name, apparently destined for fame, like the names of the famous, be they good or evil; Napoleon is just as easy a name as Robin Hood, and Judas as Jesus, and Yazid as Husayn, and Umm Kulthum and Asmahan’s names are just as easy as the serial-killing sisters, Raya and Sakina.