That day he read to her some of the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Éluard, of whom she was hearing for the first time.

He said to her, “My beautiful one, we must see the rose of your white milk bloom. My beautiful one, hurry, be a mother and give me a child in my image.” When he saw that she was embarrassed, he said, “All the flowers of the fruits light up my garden, the trees of beauty and the trees of fruits. I work alone in my garden as the sun burns, a dark fire on my hand.” He told her that what he had just said were verses from a poem entitled “Poems for Peace” that Éluard had written after the Great War and in which he was celebrating the soldiers’ return home. That they were not love poems. She was surprised at herself: how could she be listening to this sad lover of poetry when she herself was a merry free spirit, he the Muslim and she the Christian? But she knew that the end was near at hand and that she herself had better end it.

She gave in more. They went together to the gardens of Nuzha and Antoniadis in the midst of the winter flowers. Yvonne now knew the story and begged her sister to spare her and to spare herself. Camilla would hide for a while, then find herself looking for him when she got out of school. As they were walking among the camphor, oak, towering Indian palms, and the bare acacias that would come into full bloom with the advent of spring, he asked her, “How old are you?” “Sixteen,” she said. He told her that he was seventeen, that his life’s dream was to finish secondary school and university, then go to the Sorbonne. Taha Husayn’s educational journey was what he wanted to model his life on. It was not particularly important that he get a doctorate — what he most cared for was to walk in the Latin Quarter, visit the Louvre, Orsay, the Pantheon, the Eiffel Tower, and Montmartre, and on the banks of the Seine, to read poems that soared in the air. In the gardens that day, she let him give her a quick kiss, after which she asked that they go back without delay. The naive lover did not realize that her body almost burst free and held on to him, almost betrayed her and defeated her ability to control it.

For a week after, she did not go to school. She fell ill and had no will to move or eat. In the few moments that they were alone, Yvonne cried and told Camilla that she had pleaded with him to put an end to the relationship, to disappear from Camilla’s life. She told him, “You’re from northern Egypt, Rushdi — you don’t know what southern Egyptians are like. Besides, in this case it’s a compounded problem, a difference in religion, and violation of southern Egyptian customary behavior.” She asked Camilla to forgive her for her desperate action. Rushdi disappeared. He no longer stood in front of the school to wait for Camilla, who now started going more frequently to the school library to borrow the books of French poetry translated into English. She read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables three times and memorized the streets of Paris, forgetting that that was a century and a half ago.

She soon recovered and laughed as she remembered how madly she had gone along with Rushdi. She also found that as soon as he disappeared, she was rid of any feeling of closeness with him. Was it the difference in religion that helped her to forget? He reappeared during exam period. She saw him waiting for her, holding a red carnation. He told her that after the exams he was going to his village, that his family was originally from the countryside. He also told her that he was sad that the Germans were attacking France viciously, that he was afraid that Paris might fall and Hitler would destroy it as he had destroyed Warsaw. Then he said, as if to himself, that Hitler could not destroy Paris; no one in the world could do that, even if they occupied it. Paris possessed a spiritual force that would stop the worst possible evil in the world; Paris had the power of beauty. He said he had come to say good-bye, to shake her hand quickly, as Yvonne was standing, tensely, at a distance. He apologized for any unease he had caused.

Camilla shook his hand. She remembered him only when Paris fell. She cried because she imagined him in his village, crying over the city that he loved. She had said she wished to visit Pans only because he had said that himself. Then she soon forgot everything. But she asked her mother to give her permission to learn French at the Berlitz School on Saad Zaghloul Street. The mother said she did not mind, on the condition that she went in the mornings, accompanied by Yvonne, who also wanted to learn the language.

When the foreign teacher was explaining the French verbs, she wrote ‘aimer’ on the board and, addressing one of the girls, she said, “Je t’aime.” Camilla found herself involuntarily repeating to herself, “Je l’aime.”

12

Magd al-Din came back from work, as he did every day since he had started the new job, his hands stained with fuel oil, his back, arms, and legs exhausted, and aching all over. As usual he sat down on the bed, his feet dangling, as Zahra sat on the floor and pulled off his shoes and placed his feet in a small washbasin filled with hot water and salt.

“Are you going to bathe now?”

“Yes. Give me some kerosene, too, to clean my hands.”

She poured some kerosene from a can into a small jug and gave it to him. She also handed him a bar of soap and put the towel on his shoulder and his slippers outside the door of the room. The bathroom was in the hallway for common use. When the water from the shower hit the floor tiles, it was audible to all, but there was no way around it; he had to bathe, since he came back so dirty he could not stand his own skin. He could neither eat nor sleep until he had washed away all the day’s fatigue and dirt.

That day, like all other days, he had to dig into the hard earth under the old crossties, remove the old tracks and ties and, with his co-workers, install new ones — all for for more than one railroad line that needed maintenance or replace-ment. The many trains coming to the harbor left loaded with equipment and troops. The trains coming from Suez carried the African, Australian, and Indian soldiers of the empire all the way to the desert. The trains stopped in front of the pipe with the hose attached, next to which sat the silent man that he had seen the first day. There was an underground water reservoir to supply the steam locomotive; the pipe and the hose were connected to the reservoir, separated by a huge round knob that when turned would release water to the pipe and hose and ultimately to the locomotive. This whole apparatus was called ‘the Raven,’ no one knew why. As for the man sitting there, Hamza, Magd al-Din’s co-worker said he was an insane man who had planted the mulberry tree a long time ago and sat waiting for little birds that never came.

Magd al-Din and Dimyan saw their co-workers leave their jobs and approach every train as it stopped to get fuel and come back carrying little cardboard boxes filled with chocolates, tea, and cookies. The Indian soldiers, with big turbans and long rifles, were more generous than the others. Hamza said of them, “Even though the Indian soldier is Indian, he is smart. I tell him ‘English is good,’ and he says ‘Indian is very good’ and gives me more cookies.”

The workers would laugh at the way Hamza pronounced the English language and wondered where he had learned the many words he used with the soldiers. As soon as they moved away on the trains, Hamza would stand in the middle of the tracks and speak in verse:

The punishment meted out

To humans, big and small,