No One Sleeps in Alexandria (43 page)

In France, seventy-two French hostages were shot, execution-style, by the Germans in Nantes in retaliation for their participation in the Resistance. That prompted de Gaulle to declare mourning and called on all the people to demonstrate. The whole of France expressed anger. In India, Mahatma Gandhi’s seventy-third birthday was celebrated in his quiet village where he spent most of his time with his spindle and yarn. Gifts of spindles and yarn poured in from all over the country. In the Pacific, Japanese planes and battleships launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, destroying three hundred American planes and thirty battleships and killing seven thousand. For the United States, it was a day of infamy, and it was the day that the States officially entered the war. Japanese forces spread in East Asia and fighting extended throughout the eastern parts of Malaya and Singapore and to Hong Kong. Russia’s winter began to take its toll on the German troops, whose vehicles stalled and they were unable to enter Moscow even though they had reached its outskirts. The Germans began to retreat. The Slavic nation had awakened. Marshal Voroshilov, commander in chief of the Partisan movement, made a moving appeal to the inhabitants of Leningrad. He said that the enemy was trying to enter the city and destroy its houses and factories and the freedom of the motherland, that
Leningrad was the industrial and cultural capital of Russia and it would not fall, and that “the enemies would not set foot in our beautiful gardens.”

Since December the Germans had suffered many defeats. Sixty thousand were killed in twenty days at the outskirts of Moscow, a fact that forced the Germans to relieve Field Marshal von Bock of his command of the Rusisian front. A rumor spread in Egypt that Marshal Timoshenko, one of the most prominent commanders in Russia, was a Muslim and therefore never lost any battle.

In Egypt, the writer May Ziyada had died weeks earlier, as had Talat Harb Pasha, father of Egypt’s national economy. His Majesty King Farouk and the royal family paid a visit to the Farafra oasis, thus completing visits to all of Egypt’s oases, to make sure that his subjects there were all right. There was a big air raid on Alexandria that left a lot of destruction and dozens of casualties as always happened since Rommel appeared in Africa. Clothing was distributed to refugees in the countryside. The Egyptian film
Schoolgirl
and the American film
The Thief of Baghdad
were screened. The Shah of Iran abdicated the throne in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, so Princess Fawziya, King Farouk’s sister, was the first Egyptian princess to sit on the throne of Iran. The vice department celebrated the success of its call for the marriage of single refugee women by having a wedding ceremony for twenty couples on the same night. Two hundred thousand pounds worth of narcotics were seized in the coastal area. There was a surge of interest on the part of Hijazis in the Egyptian
takiya,
or Sufi lodge, in the Hijaz, and the newspapers called for increasing the budget of the
takiya
to be able to perform its charitable work. The Feast of the Sacrifice coincided with Christmas, and Dimyan went to Alexandria for two days and returned quickly to keep Magd al-Din company. Measures were taken to protect the bronze statues in Ras al-Tin palace from the air raids. And Rushdi walked along Mahmudiya Canal.

He had decided to make it to the Nile then go south until he arrived at Asyut, and on his way would examine all the corpses that he came across. He was certain that Camilla had been killed and that her body was dumped in the Nile. He was determined either to find her dead or alive. A rumor had spread in the country
about a young nun with an aura around her head and face who was healing the sick in Asyut, and people started converging on her place from the surrounding villages. A butcher was arrested and faced a military tribunal for refusing to sell meat. There was meat hanging in his store, and a customer came to buy a kilo, but the butcher refused, saying the meat was not for sale, that it was for display only. The customer felt that he was mocking him so he went to the police station and lodged his complaint. Prices for birds rose: a nightingale was priced at twelve piasters, a canary at thirty-five piasters, and likewise for a parrot. The fighting powers pledged to observe a ceasefire on the last night of the year to celebrate the new year, but most houses in Alexandria were closed, destroyed, or deserted.

Traveler, must you go? . . .

Is the time for your parting come? . . .

Traveler, we are helpless to keep you.

We have only our tears. . .

Rabindranath Tagore

25

The new year started with a big commotion in al-Alamein. German and Italian planes conducted raids on the desert all the way to Alexandria. Anti-aircraft artillery scattered all over the desert kept firing, but no planes were hit.

The number of German and Italian prisoners of war being captured dwindled. It was Rommel now who was trans-porting more prisoners to Germany via Italy and the Mediterranean. Rommel’s name now struck fear in the Allied troops. In the middle of January, in the early hours of the morning, Rommel turned off the little reading light and lay down on the bed in his command post, asking his private secretary, Staff Sergeant Boettichcr, to wake him up in an hour. When he got up he held his morning briefing with his officers and told them, “We will attack at once.” Then he explained to them that the British would exploit any relaxation to make use of the huge supplies that they had started to receive. That would give them vast superiority over the Axis forces, hence their lines and their plans should be penetrated to make it all the way to the Delta.

A major operation to deceive British intelligence from Rome to Libya began. Strong rumors were spread that the Germans were withdrawing. Rommel began to blow up mock ships and mock camps. The rumors were so strong in Alexandria that the Allied
soldiers started drinking roasts to the withdrawal of Rommel, who was now reduced to blowing up his own ships. But only the belly dancer Hikmat Fahmi in Cairo knew that this was just a ruse. She lured high-ranking English officers to her houseboat, and gathered information and secrets and conveyed them to the Germans by a secret transmitter with the help of the two spies, Johannes Eppler and Hans Gerd Sandstetter.

After pretending to withdraw, Rommel began his daring and sudden offensive by dividing his armored force into two divisions, one for the coast and the other for the desert. He seized Ajdabiya, then Antalat and Sawinnu. British armed forces retreated in a state of great disarray toward the Egyptian borders. The road to Benghazi on the one hand, and to al-Makili on the other, was now open to Rommel. Toward the end of January he pretended to launch an offensive against al-Makili, so Auchinleck moved his armored force and his infantry there, but, making a tiger-like leap, Rommel changed direction to the coast, cutting off the Indian Fourth Division and taking Benghazi. The Führer promoted him to general. The British had lost their morale and ran away as if bitten by a snake. Rommel had unleashed his eighty-eight-millimeter anti-tank guns on their armored vehicles, then overran them with his heavy Panzer tanks.

At that time the Russian forces had smashed six German divisions and a big Russian offensive extending from Sevastopol in the south to Finland in the north. Hitler admitted for the first time that the Russians were advancing. Germany prepared by deploying five million soldiers, Russia by deploying ten million. The United Sates allocated the largest budget for the war, fifty billion dollars for military industries and operations. The French ship
Normandie
caught fire as it was anchored at the harbor of the Houston Ship Channel in the United States, resulting in forty dead and 165 injured. The Japanese landed in Java, and the Kingdom of Siam declared war on Britain after it was captured by Japan. Indian leaders Nehru and Gandhi rejected anything less than total independence from England. The city of Alexandria established fifteen new shelters. The Coptic Church celebrated Christmas in the first week of January amid prevalent sadness because of the raids. A woman died in Karmuz, leaving behind three children. As
the people carried her bier, they were forced back to where the children stood in front of their house, crying. That happened three times, and every time the bier would turn and take the men carrying it back to the house. Men, young and old, cried out “God is great!” and women and girls cried. The world was bathed in a brilliant light as the heavy clouds lifted over the city and a gloriously beautiful sun shone. People knelt down and kissed the ground and prayed and cried. The mother could only be buried after the children were carried away. Alexandria spent the night in a state of amazed wonderment. Stones surrounded the statues of Muhammad Ali Pasha and Ismail Pasha to protect them from the heavy raids. The cabinet ministers began to prepare headquarters in Luxor and Aswan, away from Cairo, because of winter, it was said. In reality they wanted to get as far from Rommel as they could. His Majesty the King went on a trip to the Eastern Desert, in which he visited the mines and the Bishariya, the inhabitants of Halayib. Epiphany coincided with the Islamic New Year; a newspaper reader observed that Christian and Islamic feasts were coinciding with, or occurring closer to each other these days. Another reader said in reply to it that that happened only every few generations and that this generation was luckier than others because of this divine blessing. Nahhas Pasha became prime minister after great pressure on the king from the English. Husayn Sirry Pasha resigned, or was forced to resign by the king. Demonstrators chanted, “Forward, Rommel.” The people expressed their love for their young king. A poet poked fun at the English by writing,

They came into the lion’s den

Armed to the teeth.

Losing their way to Benghazi,

They arrived at Ahdin.

Blood and Sand,
starring Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth, was screened in Cairo. Taha Husayn published his beautiful novel,
The Call of the Curlew,
and kosher meats were included in the official price lists in Alexandria, a move Jewish butchers resented. The sisters of Abd al-Fattah Inayat, who had been convicted of killing
Sirdar Sir Lee Stack in the twenties, petitioned Nahhas Pasha to pardon their patriot brother, who had served three-quarters of his sentence. The parliament session opened with the speech from the throne delivered by Nahhas Pasha before the king. A thaw began in Moscow. The population increase in Egypt for the whole of the previous year was calculated to be forty thousand. Dimyan and Magd al-Din began to see soldiers coming back from the front, tired, dirty, and in a state of shock and fatigue, to be replaced with fresh, rested troops from Alexandria. The soldiers whose eyebrows and eyelashes were burned by the sun and the cold looked no different from the prisoners of war, so much so that Dimyan mistook them. Every time he saw them he would tell Magd al-Din, “Look! Here’s another batch of prisoners!” Magd al-Din would assume they were Allied soldiers, since prisoners of war did not carry rifles. Dimyan would laugh, but he would make the same mistake again and again.

Rumors increased about Rommel’s advance on the Egyptian borders. Rommel by now had become the unrivaled champion of the desert wars, the “Desert Fox” whose blows no one could anticipate. For the first time, English soldiers began to see their comrades coming back from the battlefield with eyes that had lost all hope. But in the evening the music played from the battery-operated radios in the trenches and the rooms:
Bolero, The Wizard of
Oz, Beethoven, Strauss.. And there was laughter.

“I wish we had a radio here,” Dimyan said to Magd al-Din.

Magd al-Din liked the idea, but said nothing.

‘I’m fed up with sitting with the Indians and al-Safi al-Naim,” added Dimyan.

Actually, it was Brika’s absence that bothered him and gave him the crazy idea to go to the village and ask about her. Al-Safi al-Naim’s English was quite good, and he conveyed to Dimyan and Magd al-Din the heated discussions that the Indians were having about independence. The Muslims from Peshawar and Lahore supported Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who called for Pakistan’s secession from India. The Sikh, on the other hand,
considered Jinnah a traitor and did not believe the Muslims should establish a separate state. The arguments raged back and forth, but eventually subsided. Dimyan kept wondering, “Shouldn’t they get independence first, and then argue?” Magd al-Din did not comment. Once al-Safi al-Naim, who was siting alone with Magd al-Din and Dimyan, told them, “India will gain its independence before Egypt and Sudan.”

“Why?” asked Dimyan.

“India is a large country,” al-Safi al-Naim said in a confident tone. “It has about three hundred million people. True, they have many religions, but they also have Gandhi.”

“The guy with the goat and the spindle?” exclaimed Dimyan.

“Exactly. He’s the one who’s fighting the English. He’s fighting them without weapons. He tells the Indians to fast, and they all fast, to stop dealing with the English, and they all stop, not to trade with them, and they all refrain, to stand on one foot for a whole month, and they do. They are like one strong man. Gandhi doesn’t have any army, but he has a whole people.”