The strangest story was the one about the man who went at dawn to the Mahmudiya canal to perform his ablutions there. When he was done and as he stood up, pulled his pants up, and started walking, he felt something moving between his legs and under his buttocks, something giving him a little squeeze. The man pulled up his gallabiya and undid his waistband to see what was here, and found a number of white baby rabbits, dozens of them that looked like little mice playing in his underpants. The man ran home but could not stand still afterwards because of the strange movements of those rabbits. Then he could not sleep; what would he do about those rabbits that had taken up residence in his pants? He had to go down to the street again, and stopped screaming only when he noticed that everything around him was silent. He was so unable to get a grip on himself that finally he fainted and people saw dozens of rabbits running out from between his legs, white rabbits running every which way. The man died of fright. Hamza wore the most solemn oath that that had happened in his village also. Dimyan bent toward Magd al-Din one day and said to him, ‘This Hamza, for sure, is an inveterate liar.”

“Why should that bother you? Leave creation to the Creator, Dimyan.”

Dimyan could not stay quiet. “Nothing annoys me more than four forbearance and patience, Sheikh Magd!”

“You cannot change him,” Magd al-Din said with a smile. ‘He’s used to it, and the men have gotten used to him.”

Today, as Hamza was laughing at Dimyan’s fear, his face looked very red because he had just finished making tea on the wood-burning stove. He almost choked while laughing; blood gathered in his face as a result of the laughing, the fire, and the choking, and he almost ignited. When he was able to speak again, Hamza said, “Me too, the first time I saw an African, I was afraid of his tail. He was handing me a can of choice Australian corned beef, but I was afraid. I moved away and told him to throw it to me, but he didn’t respond, so I said to him in English, “Throw it!” and he did. The strangest thing was, he understood the English and not the Arabic!”

Dimyan looked at him, barely concealing his annoyance, and asked, “Did you see his tail, Hamza?”

“Yes, I did, but I was afraid to grab it, yes, sir.”

The workers burst out laughing and Dimyan remarked, “Maybe you were afraid, when you grabbed it, it would turn out to be something else!”

At that point the laughter was hysterical, and Hamza joined in, once again choking, which only annoyed Dimyan all the more.

Usta Ghibriyal smiled faintly and continued his magical scribbling.

Hamza asked Magd al-Din, “What do you think, Sheikh Magd — is it true that Africans were originally monkeys?”

Magd al-Din thought a little, and the workers waited for him to answer.

“Only God knows,” he finally said. “What I heard was, the monkey was originally a man who wiped his ass with a loaf of bread, so God changed him into a monkey. That’s what we heard as children. But I don’t believe it, because God has ennobled man, so God would not change him into a monkey. Also, it could not be that man was originally a monkey.”

The workers looked relieved, and so did Usta Ghibriyal, who said, “You speak wisely, Sheikh Magd, What do you think, Hamza? Did you see a man turn into a monkey?”

The workers laughed uproariously because this time the speaker was the usually silent Usta Ghibriyal.

Hamza composed himself and replied, “I am afraid that if say I did, nobody would believe me. I’d better keep quiet, Usta.”

Everyone fell silent in the manner familiar to Egyptians after they laugh; a sudden quiet descended on everyone and everything. One of the workers said, “May God make it good.”

“I have a curious story to tell you,” Magd al-Din spoke up.

They looked at him expectantly. Hamza was particularly attentive — he pricked up his cars and was the first to speak, “Go ahead, Sheikh Magd. Perhaps you’ll tell us something new that I don’t know or haven’t seen.”

Magd al-Din smiled and winked to Dimyan to follow the situation. Dimyan was surprised at his friend, who began, “Once when I was a little boy, a young peasant man grabbed me and had his way with me in the field.”

Everyone fell silent in shock. What was Sheikh Magd al-Din saying and why? What exactly did he mean? At that point Hamza got up holding the empty cup of tea and headed for the door as if he was going to make some more tea.

“Why are you silent, Hamza?” Magd al-Din asked. “Why didn’t you say that that happened to you too?”

They heard Usta Ghibriyal laughing loudly for the first time. Dimyan jumped up and exclaimed, “God is great! God is great!”

As for Hamza, his red face turned a yellowish blue. Magd al-Din stood up and went over to Hamza, embraced him, and kissed his head, saying, “I didn’t know it was such a bad joke, my friend.”

When they stopped laughing, Usta Ghibriyal went back to scribbling in his notebook. They noticed that from time to time he was casting furtive, sly glances at Magd al-Din. As for Hamza, he went out to make tea that no one wanted.

A little while later, Magd al-Din went out and saw him sitting away from the wood-burning stove. He had not even put the teapot on. Magd al-Din sat next to him, and Hamza looked at him with a smile and said, “One does not usually make enemies with decent folk. A free man, no matter how poor, never forgets a good deed.”

Magd al-Din felt a great relief. “I don’t know how I got carried away joking like that. When I saw you were embarrassed, I was quite upset with myself.”

“We say more than that everyday, Sheikh Magd.” Hamza answered. “Look at that train!”

It was a freight train. Its flatbed cars were loaded with military equipment and made such a deep grating noise on the tracks that all the workers came out to see it. On every car was a tank or an armored car covered with netting, with one or two soldiers standing next to it. The train was coming from Suez or Cairo and heading for the desert, where there were great concentrations of Allied troops in al-Alamein, Bir Fuka, and Marsa Matruh. The soldiers were not African this time, but English or Australian and wearing khaki shorts in the middle of winter. They were perhaps coming from the south, maybe South Africa. On top of the shorts, they wore khaki short-sleeved shirts and vests without sleeves. The ruddy complexions of the soldiers and their white arms and legs meant that they had not seen the desert before, and since they looked young, perhaps they were new to soldiering.

The train was too fast. The workers saluted the soldiers and shouted, “Hello! Welcome! English is good. German is no good. Churchill is right. Hitler no right,” and other such things that they said on this and other occasions, words that most of them did not understand but which guaranteed good results. The soldiers began throwing packets of Lucky Strike cigarettes, cartons of cookies and chocolate, cans of Australian and New Zealand corned beef and cheddar cheese. Usta Ghibriyal cautioned them to wait until the train cleared the post. They had gotten used to that and also, after the train had left the post, to running and gathering up the goodies on the ground, then bringing them into the post and divvying them up equally, according to who wanted what. Usually the catch was more than enough for all ten of them, and now everyone knew what everyone else wanted or liked. Usta Ghibriyal, for instance, liked Cevlon tea. Hamza, on the other hand, liked cookies and chocolate, which he handed over to his three children and to his co-workers’ children, since they all lived in railroad housing together with workers from posts one through six, whose job sites were not far from them. All the workers would get together for big jobs or when there was an accident. When accidents happened there were no disputes about the goodies. The trains went through more than once every day; the soldiers liberally threw candy, food, and tea. It seemed the war would last for a long time.