Magd al-Din could see the question in Zahra’s eyes, but he never gave her the chance to ask it. He avoided the fear in her amber-colored eyes, and whenever he turned his face away, she was somewhat relieved. What would really happen if she asked, and he said yes? If she asked to go back, he would go back with her, and the mayor would kill him. He would be leaving war for death. Alexandria was now a safe haven, despite the heavy raids and the long darkness. The desire to leave that was gently waking in her must be suppressed, and she must remain as she had been, a woman who would never leave her husband.
But one night, a particularly cold night at the end of the year, she clung to his chest more than ever before, and he felt her smaller than ever before, despite her rising belly; she was now a child clinging to his chest. She said, having forgotten everything, “I’m afraid, Magd al-Din.”
“Don’t be afraid. The air raids are far away now — most of them are in Dikhayla, the harbor, and the English army camps in the suburbs.”
“I don’t mean the raids. I’m afraid to give birth alone, and I’m afraid to go back to the village.”
“If we must go back, I’ll go with you.”
Zahra was silent.
“Is Sitt Maryam still keeping to herself?”
“Very much so, and she looks worried all the time. The priest is always there, and Camilla is withering away.”
“Keep Sitt Maryam company — don’t let her be by herself. You can make up reasons to go with her to the markets.”
But Zahra, who had been in Alexandria more than a year and now knew how to go to the markets by herself, did not find the prospect of going out to market as appealing as it used to be. Goods were in short supply, and fewer people, vendors or buyers, could be seen in the streets. Only Umm Hamidu relieved her loneliness now. She was still setting up her produce stall at the entrance of the house across the street. Zahra liked to sit with her for a while every time she bought something from her. Umm Hamidu also liked the clever young peasant woman who was always full of questions, so she often asked her to stay, sometimes offering her a small bath stool to sit on. But Zahra sat on the floor most of the time. Umm Hamidu would ask her how her husband Magd al-Din, whom the people of the neighborhood hardly knew, was and why he was always seen in the company of Dimyan, the Christian. Why, really, was he friends with a Christian? Umm Hamidu would ask, then she would remember that Zahra and her husband lived in Khawaga Dimitri’s house and would say “Ah-ha!” Zahra always said, “We were all born after nine months.” Or she said, “The One who created the Muslims also created the Copts,” and Umm Hamidu, seeming to be convinced would say, “You’re right,” but would ask the same questions another day, then would go on and talk about things in Alexandria that Zahra did not know much about. She asked Zahra if she had seen the statue of Muhammad Ali Pasha, and Zahra said she had. So she asked her if she had seen the statue of Ismail Pasha by the sea, or that of Saad Zaghloul at Raml Station, or the English women soldiers, riding colorful bicycles on the corniche or the drunken English soldiers harassing girls on the corniche and in Bahari and Attarin, and sometimes even kidnapping them. She told her amazing stories about families that had lost their fortunes in the Cotton Exchange, about the people of lowly origins who had made great fortunes in no time at all by doing business with the English camps, or those who had won the Muwasa Hospital lottery, which at that time had just been won by one of the notables, a certain Effat, who won a whole ten thousand pounds.
“Ten thousand pounds went to someone who didn’t need it,” Umm Hamidu commented. “And they’re always fancy names— Effat or Hemmat, or Tal’at or Dawlat or Bahgat. Never real Egyptian names like Bahlul or Shahhat, or even Mustafa or Ali. It doesn’t have to be Hamidu.”
She also told her a lot about King Farouk, who loved to pray in the mosque of Mursi Abu al-Abbas during the day, but at night people could hear the dancing and carousing in the gardens of Muntaza Palace all summer long. She told Zahra that if she had seen the Ras al-Tin Palace in Bahari, then the Muntaza Palace was at the other end of Alexandria, on the last, farthest east beach, a palace surrounded by five hundred feddans, which had beautiful trees from all over. She told her that Ismail Pasha, the grandfather of young King Farouk, had built it. “Everything beautiful in Alexandria was built by Ismail Pasha. They say that he was a spendthrift, that he loved life and built the Suez canal so that a queen from France named Eugénie would come and open it. He made the canal so he could see the queen. He was in love with her, and he gave her the canal.” Zahra’s eyes and mouth opened wide when she heard those stories, and Umm Hamidu would continue, “He built the opera in Cairo for her, a big theater so she could hear the singing of Si Abdu and Sitt Almaz. Ismail Pasha was a really generous man.”
Talk would also turn to the new corpses, often of little girls, that began to appear in the Mahmudiya canal, or to the many new foundlings noticed wrapped in old rags and lying on the bank between the Raghib and Karmuz bridges, their cries barely heard by a passer-by or by someone out for a ride in a small rowboat. Usually such foundlings were handed over to the government, which placed them in orphanages. A few of them lived; the others died of neglect.
“But God is capable of protecting them — maybe one of them will grow up to be famous, a singer or a ruler. Men with unknown origins, the ones they called Mamluks, ruled our country. Maybe they found them abandoned near the canals like that.”
Laughing, Umm Hamidu then asked Zahra if she had seen the soldiers of the Territorial Army stationed on guard duty around the mill, the bridge, and the police precinct. “The poor cripples, lepers and one-eyed men — the best among them is no better than a club-foot. They’d come to me and play all kinds of games and maneuvers just to buy a millieme’s worth of tangerine. I take pity on them. One of them is very cute, he comes here and sings to me.” Umm Hamidu’s mounds of flesh shook as she laughed. “He really sings and moves his shoulders like a dancer: Ό tangerine vendor, please tell me how much for ten.’ I look at him and laugh and give him a tangerine for free. The next day and the next he’d come and dance and sing and so on until one day, I shook my shoulder as I told him ‘Ten tangerines, darling, cost ten piasters.’ He laughed and that made me laugh, and now because he’s my friend, he asks me how I am every day. He told me that he didn’t want to go back to his village after the war, that he wanted to live in Alexandria. He asked me to marry him, I swear, I told him, why do you want to marry a woman who can hardly move? Why do you want to bury yourself alive? But he wasn’t convinced. He comes and sings to me everyday and says that he’s patient and will get his heart’s desire.”
Umm Hamidu expressed surprise at the German and Italian raids against Alexandria, guarded as it was by the Territorial Army, which could not fight an ant. “They should have pity on them and send them food,” she reasoned.
Umm Hamidu never missed a chance to talk about the scandalous police behavior in Kom Bakir, Attarin, Mina al-Basal, Mahamil, and Marsilya Street. She noticed that Zahra was not particularly fond of that line of talk, especially after.she heard it the first time. But Umm Hamidu loved to discuss it, if only briefly. She would tell her about the many respectable families whose daughters went to those places during the day, then went back home, chaste and honest for all intents and purposes, and about the many poor women whose men sent them there also, “Filthy men.” There were also widows that sold themselves rather than marry, so they could raise their children alone. That was, of course, in addition to the divorcees and peasant girls who had run away from home. “The whole country is throwing women at Alexandria these dark days, when it’s filled with soldiers from the white world and the black world.” She told her that Hamidu, her son who worked as a shoeshine boy in Rami station, Manshiya, Bahari, and Attarin, came to her with stories that would make one’s hair turn gray, about the women, the soldiers, and all the foreigners. Hamidu was always upset at what he saw, and he did bad things to the English. “He’ll either end up dead or banished to Mount Sinai.” Zahra asked her where Mount Sinai was, and she said it was in the faraway place where they banished criminals. Zahra, who still had not learned where Mount Sinai was, fell silent. Umm Hamidu asked her once if she had noticed how in the Rashidi family, which lived in the house next to Khawaga Dimitri’s, the men were very short and the women very tall. “Each woman needs two men, end to end, one to kiss her and the other to fuck her. Why aren’t you laughing?” she asked Zahra, who was always shocked at the audacity of this fat woman who seemed, as she sat there, as if she had been planted, who seemed not to be able to stand up, as if her waist and huge posterior were part and parcel of the earth.