No One Sleeps in Alexandria (8 page)

They bought the land and built palaces and magnificent mansions. On the small lakes to the south and east of the city, villages sprang up in Raml, Siyuf, Mandara, and Hadra. Eventually they eroded, becoming urban neighborhoods crowded with the poor who arrived from north and south.

The city kept expanding; the foreign strangers occupied the north, and the poor occupied the south. When the Raml streetcar line was established, development continued to the east and north. The railroad between Raml and Cairo became an easy route for the lost and the fortune seekers from the Delta and Upper Egypt.

Among the foreigners were hundreds and thousands of adventurers, who came to the cosmopolitan city and made it a virtual tower of Babel. Among the Egyptians were thousands of castaways, like Magd al-Din, who preceded and would follow him.

The north of the city was no longer enough for the foreigners, so the poorest of them—Greeks, Jews, Italians, and Cypriots— moved to some of the poorer neighborhoods, such as Attarin and Labban. They moved closer to and mixed with the Egyptians, who lived in the south of the city. Magd al-Din had arrived in an Alexandria that was on top of the world. In addition to the European residents, there were soldiers from Europe and all the Commonwealth—and he, the expelled peasant.

Magd al-Din was still going out every day to look for work in a world that was boiling on top of a volcano. Two days after the German invasion of Poland, Britain declared war on Germany, and a war cabinet was formed. Churchill became first lord of the admiralty. France also declared war on Germany. Young King Farouk, not yet twenty, was still moving between the Ras al-Tin and Muntaza palaces. The ministers were still in their summer headquarters in Bulkely. A reader of the newspaper al-Ahram sent
an appeal to the king and the ministers to go to Cairo, because state officials, from undersecretaries to the lowliest employees in government departments, could not make any decisions. As a result, business had come to a standstill at “a difficult time,” as he put it.

In Alexandria, the German ambassador presented the prime minister, Ali Mahir Pasha, with a letter declaring that Germany wished Egypt well. A state of emergency was declared throughout Egypt. Police and security forces were deployed all over Alexandria, perhaps also because Queen Farida celebrated her birthday on 5 September at the Ras al-Tin palace, at which high-ranking statesmen converged. Leaflets and posters in French and Arabic declaring a state of emergency were distributed everywhere. News came of continued tensions and skirmishes between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, after the police were able to arrest a thousand of the twelve hundred Jews who had arrived secretly on the coast by ship. The prime minister of Egypt announced that Italy’s neutrality kept the danger away from Egypt, whereupon the Italian minister plenipotentiary affirmed his government’s friendship with Egypt and its people. People were divided: some supported Egypt’s entering the war on the side of England, and others opposed that; some supported England and its ally, France; and others supported Germany and its sly fox, Hitler. The Egyptian government declared that Egypt would fulfill its obligations to England under the 1936 treaty, but that its army would not take pan in the war. That did not prevent the king from issuing a royal decree to form the new Territorial Army, commanded by Abd al-Rahman Bey Azzam, minister of religious endowments. That army was charged with safeguarding public establishments in peacetime and in war, supplying the regular army with provisions and equipment in war, and joining it in battle if the need arose. The decree establishing that army, the commander in chief of which was the king, stipulated that it would be composed of those who had reached conscription age but had not been accepted because of a physical defect or illness. That an army of invalids had been established—and that it was run by a ministry whose purview was charity—mystified the people. And even though people were certain that Egypt would stay out of the war, talk of inflation began, and prices on the stock exchange declined. An era of prosperous trade with British army camps began.

Life went on as usual; the king and the ministers soon went back to Cairo. In Alexandria, the Muwasa hospital lottery was as popular as ever. People crowded in front of Cinema Cosmo to watch Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Orphanages were placed under the supervision of the ministry of social affairs, in agreement with the Alexandria city council. Biba Izz al-Din announced that she would be back at the Diana Theater in Alexandria performing the following summer. Al-Shatbi Casino hosted a group of Lebanese young ladies who performed the dabke dance at the annual party of the Maronite Charitable Society.

The east harbor filled with military and merchant marine ships. Camps were set up along the beach in Mustafa Kamil and Sidi Bishr, and late afternoons saw a promenade of horse-drawn carriages carrying soldiers and Alexandrian prostitutes—native as well as Greek, Jewish, Armenian—on the corniche. The soldiers of the Empire did not go far into the city; the women came to them. There were taverns everywhere, big and small, rich ones on the corniche and poor in the alleys of Bahari and Manshiya. They were filled with Australian, New Zealander, and Indian soldiers, who mixed with ship captains, sailors, stokers, and pimps who knew the dark, decaying, narrow ways to the crumbling houses with dislodged tiles and wooden roofs where rats lived. In the entrances of those houses, old, red-haired women sat smoking narghiles. They permitted the customers to enter after they had inspected the young Jewish, Armenian, and native girls, whose white flesh gleamed through their short, flimsy nightgowns. The scene, with variations, could be observed in many quarters: in the houses of Bahari, open to the harbor, or in those behind Tatwig Street, or in the houses of Attarin, hidden behind the stores and shops, or in the houses of Farahda and Bab al-Karasta or Kom al-Nadur—the hill built at one time by Cafirelli, Napoleon’s engineer, as a strong point in the city’s defenses.

Every morning, very early, Magd al-Din would see more than one streetcar stopping at Sidi Karim Square. People would get on the
streetcars and sit in silence, looking out the windows fogged with the dawn’s dew. Every morning, Magd al-Din could not help turning and looking at the police station at the end of the square and reading the sign over it: “Ghayt al-Aynab Police Precinct.” Why could he not stop doing that? He did not know.

Many did not take the streetcar, but walked up the little slope and across the bridge. A number of them stopped at the flour mill there, as some had stopped earlier in front of the flour mill on Ban street. Others continued on their way, a path now familiar to Magd al-Din, splitting along the banks of Mahmudiya Canal. From the south they went east to the Muharram Bey textile mill. From the north they went east and west to the ice or oil plants or the Ahliya textile mill in Karmuz. Later, Magd al-Din would often go west, and would work at the oil, soap, or fodder plants, or at the warehouses. He would even make it all the way to Mina al-Basal to work in the cotton ginneries. All of that would be later on. For now he knew nothing about the establishments in Kafr Ashri and Mina al-Basal. For now he was stuck between Raghib and Karmuz.

He did not like to stop at the two flour mills. What could he, a peasant, do in a flour mill? And what could he do anywhere? It must be that he just wanted to work somewhere away from home. He still insisted on going out wearing a new, clean gallabiya and the black patent-leather shoes that he always saved for special trips.

On the Mahmudiya canal he saw ships sailing slowly into the harbor or going back south. Several tugboats stopped in the distance, especially in front of the companies. Anchored on the shore close to the bridge there was always a ferry, which ran back and forth when the bridge was raised for ships to go through. He rarely saw women in the early morning. Every morning he would be certain that he would meet someone he knew, but he never did. The truth was he wished for something like that to happen; he needed someone to take him by the hand in the city.

Bahi was no longer good for anything—he spent all day at the café. How he lived and where he got the money, Magd al-Din did not know. Bahi said that in Ghayt al-Aynab there were more than a hundred men from their village, and he knew each and every one. He knew why they had left the village for Alexandria and what
scandals they had been involved in before they left, and he had imposed a five-piaster monthly tax on each of them, thus making five pounds per month. Two months earlier they had rebelled against him. They went to the police precinct and complained to the prefect, who looked at Bahi and could not believe that a hundred people feared the man standing before him. The prefect kicked them out. Once outside, Bahi raised the tax to ten piasters a month. Now they were his fighting force, and he wanted to lead them in battle against the southerners. Magd al-Din remembered but did not believe Bahi’s words.

He kept listening for someone who knew him to call out his name, but that did not happen. One morning followed another, and the search for work never stopped. Every day he saw men with bare feet and bare heads walking or hurrying along with him to look for work. He noticed that one young man in particular, who looked lost and whose eyes rolled in a way that Magd al-Din had never seen before, had tried deliberately to stay close to him. When the young man spoke, saying “Every day it’s like this,” Magd al-Din realized that he had a nasal twang. He always looked angry when he did not get work, but would soon smile and hurry along with the others, following close to Magd al-Din who, for a moment, thought the reason he was not picked for work was because that half-idiot stood next to him. But he knew that these were the blessed children of God, so he asked Him for forgiveness. He was turning left now because most of the men seeking work were turning left after crossing the bridge. He stopped with the others in front of one plant’s big metal gate.

“What kind of work do they do here?”

“Ice.”

“What do we do with the ice?”

“We stack it or carry it to the delivery carts. This plant will close next month—it doesn’t work in the winter.”

A worker at the plant went out and looked at the crowd of job seekers. He picked a few among them, but not Magd al-Din, who noticed that most of those seeking temporary work wore tattered clothes and were barefoot, and so deduced that work was in very short supply. He decided he would not change his new gallabiya or shiny shoes; he was never going to appear shabby, and when he
found work he would buy suitable new clothes. Zahra had already taken thirty pounds that he had saved over the last few years and spent twenty pounds to buy all the necessary furniture. Magd al-Din felt sad every time the job seekers jostled each other rudely and cruelly when a company representative would ask for five or less. He would choose a spot in the back of the crowd. In front of the Ahliya textile mill with the big green metal gate, he stood with the others. The black man who came out every day to pick the workers pointed to him and said in a confident voice, “You there—come here.”

Magd al-Din approached.

“Tomorrow I will give you a job,” the man said with a smile. “You have to come in pants and a jacket.”

He got a job at the mill rolling the bales of cotton from the cars that carried them from the ginneries up close to the spinning machines. The job lasted three days, then he went back to job hunting with the others. Their rounds would begin at six o’clock and end at eight. By that time they would have passed all the companies on the north bank of Mahmudiya Canal, the oil, soap, ice, and textile companies. They would have demonstrated their strength for the tugs and ships anchored at close intervals, which came from Upper Egypt to unload their cargo of sugarcane, fava beans, cotton, grains, and earthenware jars and pitchers. Usually a contractor with his own crew of workers would get the job to unload the ships, and if Magd al-Din or any of his colleagues was hired, he would receive ten piasters for the day’s work.

At eight o’clock in the morning, just getting over his disappointment at not finding work, he would sit down in the café next to the bridge and order a glass of tea. Moments later he would feel heartened and get up to buy al-Ahram from the little boy who sold newspapers from a small wooden stand in front of the café. He was always the only one in the café, but he would hear a voice calling out his name and imagine meeting someone he knew. One day he got the newspaper and gave the little boy a whole pound. The boy said he did not have any change. Magd al-Din did not know what to do and returned the newspaper, but the boy, who recognized him by now, told him he could read the paper in the café and return it when he was done. Magd al-Din sat down to read
and realized that the world was a great big mess: sandbags distributed by the civil defense department to hospitals and public establishments; advertisements for Longines, Zenith, and Vulcan watches; this evening, on the radio, Fathiya Ahmad and her band; before that at eight-thirty, comic monologues by Husayn al-Maligi and Nimat al-Maligi, and before that a selection from the Sura of al-Hajj, recited by Taha al-Fashni; Queen Elizabeth arrives at Easton station from Balmoral on her way to Buckingham Palace; Warsaw wiped out; at least five million Poles perish in the war in one month; giant cannons, bigger than the world has ever seen, reduce Warsaw to rubble.