Time waits for no one. There was a light air raid on Alexandria, where many Libyan refugees from Cyrenaica had arrived. They were placed under quarantine then moved to the Maks and Wardian neighborhoods. Dimyan and Magd al-Din had seen them on the train coming from Marsa Matruh, which stopped for a long time at al-Alamein. Magd al-Din got on the train and went through the cars but did not see anyone he knew except Radwan Express, who was sitting with a group of refugees, talking to them enthusiastically while they listened, enthralled by what he was saying. Why did he get on the train that day? He did not know. Perhaps he was hoping to come across Hamza. He still felt that his insult to Hamza was behind his getting lost. Hamza’s forgiving nature was not enough for Magd al-Din to forget. Five years had passed since the coronation of King Farouk, so the country celebrated for a week beginning on the sixth of May. A gala event was held at Cinema Metro in Cairo for Gone with the Wind to raise funds for the war victims. The papers were filled with pictures of Vivien Leigh under which were ads for all kinds of Egyptian and foreign products: perfumes, furniture, clothes, shoes, food, cars, cigarettes, matches, aspirin, and sports and health goods. A new airport was inaugurated at Nuzha in Alexandria to receive civil aviation at a time when all civilian flights from Europe and America had stopped. The Greeks celebrated over a bottle that a Greek soldier had filled with dust from Athens. The celebration was held at the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Saba, close to Cavafy’s deserted home. The Greeks wrote on the outside of the bottle, “Free dust for a free people.” An elementary school teacher won the Muwasa hospital lottery grand prize, a twenty-five-thousand pound apartment building. But a colleague of his named Muhammad Ismail claimed that he had paid half of the fifty-piaster price of the ticket and therefore he was entitled to half of the prize, but that the teacher who had possession of the ticket refused to give him his share. Thereupon he sued the teacher to force him to give him his due. The story spread throughout Alexandria and all over Egypt. So Umm Hamidu clicked her tongue and said, “Now that somebody with an un-aristocratic name wins, they make trouble for him.” Rudolph Hess flew a plane to Scotland, where he landed and was found by a Scottish farmer who recognized him from his pictures in the papers.

The world was all abuzz with Hess’s flight. He was said to be mentally unbalanced. He was also said to be the third man in the Nazi party after Hitler and Goering. It turned out that Hess had spent his childhood in Egypt and had studied at one of the English schools there. His father had lived in Alexandria before World War I and had a big office on the street later named Saad Zaghloul Street. He was an agent for German marine, pharmaceutical, pen and pencil, and chemical equipment companies. He had lived for some time in Zifta before settling down in Alexandria. From Zifta, Rufail Masiha, B.A., sent a letter to the editor of al-Ahram in which he said that of all Egyptian villages, Zifta was the most closely related to Hess, that he had spent his childhood there with his father, who had owned a mechanic’s shop and flour mills and whose farm was still referred to as the Hess Estate. He added that some inhabitants of Zifta still remembered the fifteen-year-old Hess boy walking in the streets of the village. The author of the letter concluded by wondering whether that humble village on the bank of the Nile knew that it had been home to a personality who would one day be talked about by the whole world as it was living the most colossal war that humanity had ever known.

The newspapers outdid each other trying to prove that Hess was born in Alexandria in 1886, then met with Hitler in 1914 at the western front. The two young men, weary of life and the war, were united by a feeling of injustice done to Germany and became comrades in arms. The problem, though, was that the Germans were now saying that he was crazy. Drunkards in Alexandria bars agreed that he was crazy, not because they believed Nazi propaganda, but because he had spent his childhood in Zifta, and they laughed. A poet even wrote a short poem about Hess’s flight:

Was it flight, a ruse, or insanity

That enabled Hess to evade mortality?

If flight, then flight is bad—

There are so many ways to be mad!

Aziz al-Masri, together with the pilots Abd al-Munim Abd al-Rauf and Husayn Dhu al-Fiqar Sabri, flew a plane to meet Rommel in the desert, but the plane crashed near Qalyub, and they hid in the countryside. The government announced a one-thousand pound prize to whoever led to their capture.

German airborne troops landed on Crete in huge numbers, in a unique assault hitherto unknown in the world. The landing was preceded by intense aerial bombardment for hours, and Goering said that the assault on Crete was the greatest that paratroopers anywhere in the world could accomplish. Faced with this massive attack, the English had to evacuate the island and save as many of their troops as they could by transporting them to Alexandria. The Greek king and his ministers left the island for England. At the end, there were thirteen thousand dead, wounded, and prisoners of war, in addition to two thousand Royal Navy troops. Sixteen thousand troops made it to Alexandria. Crete was only one of the marvels of German victories that seemed as if they would continue forever.

Dimyan went to Alexandria at the end of the month and returned the following day after receiving his and Magd al-Din’s salaries and spending a night with his family. He told Magd al-Din that he could not stay away from him, then he laughed and said, “Maybe I’m also attached to Brika.” Brika was the young Bedouin girl that the stationmaster had told them not to give any trouble. Dimyan had seen her every day late in the morning with her sheep and her little brother and could not help starting a conversation with her. She spoke with him with spontaneity and sweetness, and he gave her some goodies, especially cookies and chocolate, that the Indian soldiers, whose acquaintance he had made, had given him. When Brika left, she left behind a smell of sheep and their wool that never left his nose until the evening when to his astonishment he carried the smell home with him. He realized that something was going to happen between him and the little girl, and he felt fear mixed with a strange kind of joy.

A girl in southern Egypt had died and been buried, then six days later came back to life. It was a miracle that people kept talking about. One poet urged her to go back to the grave where everything was quiet, instead of this deadly world. Cairo was divided into a number of wards, each of which was to be serviced exclusively by a certain number of undertakers who were not to operate outside the borders of their wards. This led to a widespread protest on the part of the undertakers, who submitted a petition to the Department of Internal Lawsuits in which they claimed that there were too many of them to be restricted to specific wards. Besides, the petition said, the dead in Heliopolis were not like the dead in Sayyida Zaynab. “Such a division would place the dead in each ward at the mercy of that ward’s undertakers, who would exercise a monopoly of burials and shrouds and would charge exorbitant fees due to the absence of unrestricted competition.” A number of detainees were released form the Tur detention camp in Sinai. Among them were twenty persons from Alexandria, including Hamidu, whose mother strung decorations at the entrance of the house on the now almost-deserted street. Very few people came to congratulate him upon his return, once they found out that he had been detained for his acts against the British and not for being a menace to security, as the government had said. Magd al-Din and Dimyan heard the German planes as they flew over at night, and they saw their red lights. There were shots from anti-aircraft batteries from several spots in the desert, but the planes were flying too high and none was hit. Neither Magd al-Din nor Dimyan slept that night. They sat for a while in front of the house. The moon was almost full.