Ibrahim Meguid - No One Sleeps in Alexandria

The Dutch steamer Simon Bolivar was sunk, and war with Germany loomed on the horizon. The appeal for peace made by the king of Belgium and the queen of the Netherlands failed. It was announced that Britain was now spending six million pounds a day on the war. Poland was now in total ruin, and Jews there were gathered in one neighborhood surrounded by barbed wire. No sooner had December dawned than news came of the Russian attack on Finland. German mines were sinking more and more of the Allies’ ships. The world was taken aback by the viciousness of the Russian attack and the aerial bombing of Helsinki. English cruisers had laid out a plan to sink the fearsome German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. The cruisers Achilles and Exeter baited it in a battle that people followed every day. It was a bloody match between wolves that went on for a few days, after which the Graf Spee entered the port of Montevideo in neutral Uruguay. The two cruisers lay in wait for it just outside the territorial waters. What was Graf Spee going to do, and how would it break out of this blockade? There were casualties on the pocket battleship, as well as British prisoners of war that the Graf Spee had picked up after their ships had sunk, but now it could not make it to the Atlantic. Its captain was ordered to scuttle his ship outside the territorial waters. The captain and his crew sank the ship in front of spectators who had come from all over to Montevideo to watch the deadly battle and record it. Laurel and Hardy got back together, and their many fans were happy. A British army car struck an Egyptian citizen on Maks Street, killing him instantly. No next of kin was found. A certain Muhammad Musa threw himself out of a window in the government hospital and died. No one knew whether he had been killed, committed suicide, or was overcome with hysteria. Fighting between Russia and Finland continued, and the Finnish army stood its ground and scored surprising victories. The Graf Spee captain Hans Langsdorff committed suicide. He had held a press conference in which he told the journalists that he had nothing to offer them, but that on the following day he was going to give them something big; he kept his word and gave them his suicide. Hitler threatened that he would wipe out England by sending out a thousand planes every day. In the Far East, the war between China and Japan flared up, and the whole planet appeared to be one big fireball, on an unknown part of which Magd al-Din, Dimyan, and dozens like them were looking desperately for work. Magd al-Din was puzzled by that half-crazy young man whom he always saw appear out of nowhere near him at the doors of companies, or hurrying alongside him from place to place. No one ever gave him any work. Magd al-Din got used to his twang, and always took pity on him and more than once gave him a five-piaster piece. Occasionally, Magd al-Din would see the young man following him, until he would enter a café and sit down, whereupon the young man would go into the café too and sit at a distance, looking at Magd al-Din with his mouth open. Magd al-Din would then order him a glass of hot tea. Dimyan would say, “This is your jinn brother, Magd al-Din, who came out from underground.” Magd al-Din would look at the idiot boy and see him as one of God’s little children, lost but also blessed. Who could know?

The year was nearing its end. Zahra was very afraid of the thunder and the torrential rain. Sometimes it would be dark all day long. But her visits with Sitt Maryam and her two daughters, who frequently stayed home from school because of the rain, made her feel an intimate warmth, especially when Lula joined them with her jokes about vendors, merchants, and other people in the street. Lula’s husband was now beating her more frequently. They would hear her screams coming from downstairs, but that usually subsided after a while and calm returned, only to be broken by her laughter. It was now a nightly occurrence. No one asked her anything about it.

Umm Hamidu’s latest story to Zahra was about Count Zizinya, who was suing the city of Alexandria because it had seized his property in Raml. There was actually a lawsuit filed by Count Zizinya in which he accused the city of Alexandria of seizing land belonging to him along the coast from Glymenopoulo to Saba Pasha. She told Zahra that as a young girl she had worked as a maid in the count’s palace in Raml, that she knew he was in the right, as the whole coastal area of Raml belonged to him, but he was a miser, so God sent someone to take everything away from him.

Unexpectedly, Umm Hamidu asked Zahra if she knew the poor woman that used to follow Bahi around in the street. Zahra said she did not know her. Umm Hamidu smiled and said that in Ghayt al-Aynab many people from Zahra’s village knew her, that in her youth she had been in love with Bahi and that it was he who had caused her to lose her mind. Zahra fell silent, but Umm Hamidu kept on about how she had known many women who were madly in love with Bahi. that his face fatally attractive to women, and that she believed that woman was one of his victims. Zahra said quietly, “This is old history, Umm Hamidu.”

In the meantime the undertaker had found the body of Bahiya near Bahi’s grave, stretched out in the mud, drenched by the rain and clasping her cane tightly with both hands. He had seen her a few days earlier sitting motionless in front of Bahi’s grave, paying no heed to the rain and the cold. He tried many times to send her on her way, but she would give him a frightening glance and he would go away. That night he went to the graveyard to steal the shroud of a wealthy woman who had been buried that morning. On his return he saw Bahiya’s dead body. He thought a little about what he could do and felt pity for the bereaved woman. He thought that if he notified the police, she would end up in a pauper’s grave, since she did not seem to have any family; besides, the police were sure to make a big fuss about stolen shrouds and corpses in the rain. So he asked God for forgiveness, wrapped her in the rich woman’s shroud, and buried her in the same grave as Bahi.

The year ended without a truce between the combatants. There were visits to the fronts by the various commanders, kings, and presidents, a message from King George V to the people and the army at Christmas, a message from General Gamelin to the people of France. Hitler himself went to spend Christmas with his troops on the western front. Everyone wished victory for their peoples and their armies. The Finns were still scoring surprising victories. The League of Nations expelled Russia from its membership. Yusuf Wahbi screened his film Street Children in Cairo, where there was an increase in cases of typhoid fever. Many bottles of cognac, champagne, and whisky were sold in Alexandria, where nightclubs stayed open by candlelight to bid farewell to the old year. Soldiers of the world danced with women of the world, and some cried, hoping for a better new year. Two days before the end of the year, a devastating earthquake reduced many villages in Turkey to rubble and obliterated the town of Erzincan. Zahra was hoping that the cold month of Kiyahk would soon come to an end. Magd al-Din and Dimyan would find work for a day and sit at the café for a week. On the morning of the last day of the year, the idiot boy sat in front of Magd al-Din, who ordered a glass of tea for him. But the boy suddenly burst into tears. Magd al-Din got up and sat next to him and asked him why he was crying. He said in that twang of his, his tears mixing with his snot, “My father killed my mother last night.”

The bells of the church of Mari Girgis on Rand Street rang for the Christmas Eve mass. On the following day, Copts began celebrating Christmas. Young people went out dressed in their best, and so did the adults. The air was filled with the smell of cheap perfume, worn by people on their way to church or looking out of the windows of many houses. The joyous mood spread to young Muslim men and women, and many Muslim families went out to visit their Coptic neighbors to wish them a merry Christmas. Zahra saw Camilla, Yvonne, and their mother — three angelic roses whose faces were filled with a joy that she had never seen before. She wished them happy returns of the day, as Magd al-Din had instructed her the day before. He had heard about it from Dimyan, who told him, “Tomorrow our fast ends — forty-three days without meat, except fish. And we cook all our food using vegetable oil, Sheikh Magd. Our stomachs have had it, and they let us know it.”