No One Sleeps in Alexandria (52 page)

The cold air coming lightly through the windows awakened him. From the window he saw the darkness, deep in a long gap, and realized that the train was crossing the Nile and that the lights were coming from the little houses of Kafr al-Zayyat. He could not mistake the smell of the trees along the river bank, near the villas and small houses. He was now very close to his village, and he had to get up and focus his eyes to jump when he reached the
platform. He had no other choice. The train had not stopped in the city of Kafr al-Zayvat—was it going to stop at a small village? The engineer undoubtedly had some contraption giving him orders to proceed fast, to Cairo. The train had moved away beyond the range of the air raids, yet the engineer was still speeding along. Magd al-Din stood near the open door of the car, the cold air drying his sweat. He realized that he was standing barefoot. He had left his shoes near the scat. He did not think of putting them on. He had left the village barefoot, and here was the white platform, approaching fast. Blessed be the name of your Lord, Almighty and Glorious. He stepped forward to get off the train as if he were under the influence of some narcotic drug, and he flew into the air. “Ah!” It came out deep, slow, and faint.

The stationmaster stayed late at his post because of the continuous evacuation of refugees from Alexandria. He heard a hard, heavy thudding sound, a deep, muffled sound. He even saw something hurtling over the platform and landing on the dusty soil a short distance from the platform. It was not the sound of a bomb exploding, anyway. It must be a ghost that he had seen. The groan reverberated. The human sound encouraged the stationmaster to approach, gingerly. The sounds of grasshoppers and frogs came from the canal along the tracks. The stationmaster approached, carrying a lamp shielded with blue, held back by all the rural legacy of fear of ghosts and demons. But the green eyes glowed in the dark. Most merciful God! This is a real human being! He went closer and shone the lamp on the human’s face and exclaimed, “Sheikh Magd al-Din?!”

It was the same old stationmaster, Abd al-Hamid, his classmate in Quran memorization class a quarter century earlier, the very man who stood bidding him farewell when he left the village. Magd al-Din heard his voice and closed his eyes in relief. He was now certain he was not going to die.

And be said to me:

What kind of life will you have in this world

After I appear?

al-Niffari

29

Rommel did not succeed in breaking through the front in al-Alamein. For six days he tried, to no avail. He lost three thousand officers and soldiers, either killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, and seven hundred armored vehicles, including fifty tanks. The Allies lost sixteen hundred officers and soldiers, and seventy tanks. Air superiority and short supply lines ensured victory for the Allies. That was Rommel’s first defeat in the desert. Soldiers in the Eighth Army now realized that Rommel was not a legend, but a military commander who could win or lose.

Montgomery took advantage of the situation and continued to train the soldiers and conduct huge maneuvers in the desert from Alexandria to al-Alamein. The raids on Alexandria stopped for some time. Panic continued to prevail in the foreign consulates. Jews carried on lining up at the British consulate to get entry visas for Palestine and South Africa. Magd al-Din, who had been moved by the stationmaster to Tanta hospital on the first car that had arrived on the scene, was still in a cast. His legs and several ribs and other bones had been broken, but he had miraculously survived. The stationmaster brought word back to the village, and Zahra, his sisters and their husbands, and his mother, whose days were numbered, visited Magd al-Din. He was told he had to stay in the cast at the hospital for three months. Meanwhile in Cairo the
belly-dancer Hikmat Fahmi and the two spies Eppler and Sandstetter were arrested on charges of spying for Germany. The German armies entered the outskirts of Stalingrad, and cold steel massacres took place. They surrounded the city, which they were determined to capture because it was the military industrial city named after Stalin. The Soviets were very determined to stand their ground because the city was named after Stalin. The Muslim general Timoshenko advanced to the river Don in an attempt to cut off German supply and communication lines. Egypt silently celebrated Queen Farida’s twenty-second birthday, but there were no public decorations or lights marking the occasion in Alexandria, her birthplace. Montgomery was busy establishing a new corps, the Tenth Corps, to counter the German Afrika Korps. American Sherman and Grant tanks and self-propelled 105-millimeter guns poured into the front. British and American bombers continued to pursue German army supplies on land and on sea. Rommel’s blood pressure shot up, and pain in his liver forced him to go back to Germany to seek treatment. General Stumme, who had arrived from the Russian front, replaced him. The month of Ramadan had begun, and the sorrows of Magd al-Din, who lay helpless in bed, increased. True, he had his family around him now, but he could not forget the previous Ramadan in the vast desert with its awesome sunsets, and breaking the fast with Dimyan. Dimyan! Dimyan! How could life go on without Dimyan! Magd al-Din had found out that his sisters had sold his land to themselves in his absence, but he did not even comment on the matter. The mayor sent the village chief to visit Magd al-Din and let him know that the mayor himself was going to visit him soon and that he, the mayor, was sorry for what had happened in the past, but Magd al-Din did not comment on that either. He considered everything preordained by God.

Stumme was six years older than Rommel and, like him, had high blood pressure, which usually afflicted commanders. Egypt had great strategic importance in creating a huge pincer movement from which the German forces, if successful in occupying it,
would advance eastwards to meet the forces coming from Europe and the Caucasus. Hitler had promised Rommel to send him the dreaded new Tiger tanks and multi-barrel mortars, but he did not keep his promise. Rommel had felt disappointment after his failure at Alam al-Halfa and decided not to be on the offensive again, but to resort to defensive military tactics for the first time since he took command in the desert. So he set up dense minefields, huge devil’s fields, between his position and those of the Eighth Army. Churchill was under great pressure to open a second front. If Stalin and Roosevelt were convinced that that second front would be the African desert, he had to start. The normal English plan would be to take out the German armored vehicles, then deal with the infantry, but Montgomery suggested the opposite. He had greater confidence in the infantry, especially the Australians and New Zealanders, and expected them to acquit themselves valiantly. The same was true of the Fifty-first Highland battalion, which had been recently re-formed to replace the First Highland battalion, which had been decimated in France in 1940. The Fifty-first was intent on vengeance.

The Eighth Army had to advance through half a million German mines. That required a new high morale among the soldiers, and that was one of Montgomery’s top priorities for the two months between the battle of Alam al-Halfa, which was over, and al-Alamein, which was about to begin.

There were 230,000 Allied troops versus 77,000 Axis troops; 1,400 Allied tanks, including 400 Sherman and Grant tanks, versus 600 Axis; 1,500 Allied anti-aircraft guns versus 1,000 Axis; 900 Allied aircraft versus 400 Axis. More important than that, the Allies had short supply lines, one hundred kilometers from Alexandria, versus long Axis supply lines, one thousand kilometers from Tobruk.

The foreign consulates had finished burning their papers in Alexandria. Emigration from the city slowed, as only a few of its original inhabitants or those who had fled to it from their villages were left. Sometimes it made sense for some to take refuge in fire if it meant a chance to escape death!

The month of Ramadan had come and gone and so had the days of the feast. On the eve of the middle of Shawwal and October 24, with a full moon and a refreshing breeze, everything was portending an imminent explosion. It was inconceivable that the desert could witness such a majestic night at a time full of loathing and madness. At exactly 9:40 p.m., all at once a barrage of shells and missiles was let loose from one thousand guns at the faraway enemy and at the minefields in front of them. At the same time, planes came from Alexandria and the Delta, dropping gigantic bombs on the well-fortified Axis defenses. The Thirtieth and Thirteenth Battalions advanced, followed by two armored brigades from the mighty Tenth Corps. The soldiers marched at a hysterical pace brought about by the sound of bombs and shells exploding in the midst of the minefields, destroying the mines and sending off dazzling flashes of light that danced in the middle of the no man’s land—flashes descending from the sky, and flashes ascending from the earth, flashes coming from the east and flashes coming from the west—a carnival of fire diabolically, unimaginably beautiful. Twenty minutes later, at exactly 10 p.m., was Montgomery’s bedtime. He serenely went to bed, and fell asleep as the whole world staved up waiting for the outcome of the decisive battle. People in Alexandria could hear the guns and see the planes. Cairo shook, and the rest of the country stayed up and watched.

Dressed in their shorts and woolen shirts, infantrymen advanced through the dust and the fire. The cold of the desert night was gone in the midst of the fire. The men carried on their shoulders their rifles with bayonets at the ready and all their possessions: cookies, canned corned beef, and cigarettes. Some carried a light mortar or a submachine gun. They all had hand grenades and empty sacks that they would fill with sand to fortify their positions when they gained ground. Each attack group was commanded by a navigating officer, who carried a small compass and a roll of tape, which he uncoiled behind him to guide those coming after him to the right path through the mines and the dust. Many navigation officers died that night and the following nights. As for the Scottish bagpipers who played on in the midst of those volcanoes, their music was considerably subdued as the landmines
blew them away, or the dust choked them, or the guns destroyed them, or the bombs and airplanes drowned out their valiant efforts. Teams of engineers went ahead of everyone, trying to detect anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. They lost many of their men. The Australians were to the right, the New Zealanders to the left, and the bagpipes in the middle, falling. Soldiers were jabbering, their nervous laughter mixed with crying. The offensive turned into near-chaos. Everyone was oblivious to everyone else. The Axis firepower unleashed flames from hell on the Allies. By morning the bagpipe music had been totally silenced. The Thirteenth Battalion had made a large breach in the Axis front. General Stumme had died of a heart attack, an Australian squad having managed to break through the German lines and attack his car.

Montgomery woke up early the following morning. Air Force sorties were still flying. The RAF had flown a thousand sorties during the night in addition to a hundred and fifty sorties flown by the USAF. The Luftwaffe disappeared from the sky, and the Allies had total control of the air. Monty was pleased.