Magd al-Din was surprised at the idea, and Dimyan asked him if the cinema was proscribed in Islam, and Magd al-Din said he didn’t mean it like that, but that he thought if he ever got into a movie theater he wouldn’t be able to get out of it. Dimyan, who had become like a meek little child since going to church and confessing and praying to Mari Girgis, laughed.

The raids of Paris had begun to intensify and the world waited with bated breath. Was Hitler going to enter Paris? Was the most beautiful city in the world about to fall? The newspapers published the poem written by the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi after the end of the Great War:

You are the beauty and majesty of this epoch

The very cornerstone of its solid edifice

The people of the epoch have taken up the banner of right from you

Its civilization marched on in the light of your sons.

The situation in France appeared quite bleak. A German armored division captured eight thousand British and four thousand French soldiers. That armored division was under the command of an intelligent German soldier whose name, Erwin Rommel, would become very familiar to Egyptians later on. His panzer division was nicknamed “the phantom division” and was the spearhead that penetrated the Somme, advancing toward the Seine, capturing all the French and English troops in its way until Rommel occupied Cherbourg which, together with its troops numbering thirty thousand, surrendered to him. The roads in France were filled with refugees chased by the machine guns of German planes. The French army collapsed and De Gaulle was appointed undersecretary for national defense. The Soviet Union seized the Baltic republics. But who had the time to think about that? Paris fell, and the people’s hearts were wrenched by the horrors of war. Camilla wept, and when Zahra saw her she figured that Paris must be something so big as to cause Camilla to cry. Camilla said her life’s dream was to travel to Paris one day and that she could not believe that the capital of beauty could fall.

General Pétain formed a new government, which laid down its arms and signed an armistice agreement with Germany. De Gaulle suddenly fled from Bordeaux to Britain, carrying the honor of the French nation with him. In the evening Khawaga Dimitri came into Magd al-Din’s room. He told him that he had learned from a relative of his who worked as a supervisor at the Railroad Authority that the Authority needed some new permanent employees. They were needed to face the pressure of work these days, when dozens of cars loaded with provisions, weapons, and soldiers were arriving every day. Magd al-Din could go the following day to the administrative building of the Railroad Authority in Qabbari to submit an application.

The first person Magd al-Din thought of was Dimyan. He did not ask Khawaga Dimitri about that. He figured that they probably needed more than one worker. Quickly he made his way to Dimyan’s house. In the morning, both of them applied for jobs and were accepted right away. They only had to have the usual medical check-up. This was the government job that would guarantee them a decent life.

Around them a state of the highest emergency had been announced. A few days earlier, on the tenth of June at 4:45 p.m. to be exact, Italy had declared war on England and France.

The world was shaken, and Italian mothers sobbed as they saw their sons called up for active military duty. The American secretary of state announced that Italy’s entry into the war was a major catastrophe for humanity. Egypt immediately severed its relations with Italy. Real evacuation of many Alexandrian families to the countryside began. Thousands of gas masks were distributed and were used by falafel makers to protect against the vapors of frying oil and by the bakers in front of the big ovens. Ghaffara refused to change the mask he made himself out of the fez, as he did not trust anything that the government distributed. Dimyan said to Magd al-Din as he received the letter of appointment, “Georgius the Martyr has sent us this job as a gift, Sheikh Magd. I implored him for it.”

“I also spent long nights reciting the names of God, until the Prophet came to me in a dream and my heart was reassured,” Magd al-Din said in agreement.

At night, as Magd al-Din lay awake next to Zahra as she slept, he thought of his new job. He thought that no one in the world knew anything about him. What if he were to die? Would anyone care? Italy entered the war, and people began to flee Alexandria, but he had to stay. It had been an involuntary trip decreed by God, and now he had to sleep in the city whose eyes were now looking upwards, to the sky.

This day has a different flavor, and it is whiter than any other day before it. This is what Magd al-Din felt, the light pouring down on his face as he left the house in the morning.

He paused for a little while on the threshold and looked right and left. The street was deserted except for three persons, one at the end of the street to the right and the other two heading for Sidi Karim. People were still asleep or were awake but had not left their houses yet. Every day the summer sun brought the morning in surprisingly early. Yesterday at the headquarters of the engineering section of the railroad, they were given directions to their job location. They were to leave Ghayt al-Aynab and walk along the bank of Mahmudiya Canal to a point midway between Karmuz Bridge and Kafr Ashri bridge. There they would find a big housing compound for railroad workers, next to which they would find a smaller housing compound for traffic workers who also worked for the railroad. Between the two compounds they would find a small road ending at a gate to the railroad tracks, the vast, complex network of the “Zaytun” area, as they were told. After passing through the gate they were to go back left for a distance of two kilometers to reach their job location, Post Number Three. They did not understand why it was called a “post,” since the postal authority was not hiring them. Neither of them bothered to ask about that. On their way back Dimyan said, “These are crazy people. They want us to walk all the way from Ghayt al-Aynab to the railroad housing compound along the Mahmudiya canal, then go back the same distance through the railroad?”

“What can we do?” Magd al-Din asked him.

“The job location is just in front of Ghayt al-Aynab and Ban Street. Two alleys away we’ll find the fence separating Ghayt al-Aynab from the railroad. We’ll find an opening in the fence, or we can make one ourselves, or jump over the fence.”

Today they would do that and they would do it every morning, for this was a permanent job, a government job. Magd al-Din stood in front of Dimyan’s house and called out his name. The whole house, even the walls, seemed asleep. The door was low and dark and out of it came a draught of warm air laden with the breath of the crowded dwellers. The morning air was truly refreshing, and the dew that had gathered on the streets and the houses at dawn was still sending forth a cool breeze, if one kept away from the doors of the houses. The smell of soap rose from the streetcorners, bath water poured out on the street by fulfilled, satisfied women at dawn before anyone could see them. Only the houses looked tired and drab, their main entryways without wooden or metal doors, the narrow staircases emitting the smell of fatigue. But Magd al-Din was happy, feeling the cool of a winter morning even though it was summer. Dimyan emerged out of the dark door into the light of the new day.

“Look at you in that khaki suit!”

Magd al-Din smiled without comment, looking at Dimyan’s head now covered with a blue beret that looked like a train engineer’s hat. The two proceeded like two merry children toward the fence in the south.