“Who’s the new German commander here?” Dimyan asked.

“Rommel.”

“A frightening name.”

They could hear some noises, some movement of troops far off or some shots fired in the air or the sounds of crawling, invisible night insects. After a considerable interval they saw the planes returning and the anti-aircraft artillery chasing them in the sky in vain. The planes went back and forth more than once that night.

They flew high over the desert, but as soon as they entered the air above the city they fearlessly went close to land, as if they knew their targets precisely. The most important target that night was the huge gun at Bab Sidra, which previous raids had not been successful in silencing. It was an anti-aircraft gun with three strong searchlights that lit up the sky. The planes kept firing throughout the raid, during which the gun was silenced and dozens of homes were destroyed in Bab Sidra and Karmuz. Two days later an even more intense raid was launched and lasted all night long against the Egyptian and well as the European quarters. That raid targeted Greek and English ships and frigates anchored in the harbor. The bombs fell in the sea, causing huge columns of water to break the darkness of the night. The raid did little damage to the ships, compared to the havoc it wreaked on the poorer quarter of the city. People left in panic with only the clothes on their backs, leaving everything behind. They arrived in Cairo in their gallabiyas, pajamas, even in their underwear. Many women arrived in their nightgowns. Alexandria became an inferno that consumed its people. Many families died, and in some of them there remained only a child or a girl or a mother — all alone. For the first time, the problem of single women and girls and homeless children arose. Tent shelters were hastily set up in Abu Hummus, Kafr al-Dawwar, Damanhur, and the villages of Gharbiya and Manufiya for those without family in the countryside. As for those that had family, their families stood waiting for them at the railway stations all the way to Aswan, welcoming them as they arrived without food or money or clothes, the men looking pale, the children with panic on their faces, and the women with tragedy and profound grief in their eyes. It seemed like Germany had decided to destroy the city. Rescue workers worked hard in the disaster areas. Fruits and vegetables stopped coming, and the slaughterhouse stopped slaughtering after a short raid during which the slaughterhouses received a direct hit, as they were close to the ammunition depot. The flesh of the vendors and buyers mixed with the meat of animals — a lot of blood flowed that day. It was said that Germany was trying to empty the city of all inhabitants so it could enter without resistance. The English launched an offensive against Rommel but two days later, on the seventeenth of June, everything turned topsy-turvy and the Allies started to retreat under air cover, pursued by Rommel. Churchill removed General Wavell, transferring him to India, where he became commander in chief of India and replaced him with Auchinleck, the former C-in-C India, who now became C-in-C Middle East command. Four major incidents took place on one night, the twenty-second of June. A woman, Badriya by name, was arrested on charges of having multiple husbands. At midnight two violent air raids were unleashed against Alexandria, which led to a mass exodus at dawn. At dawn also, Germany’s foreign minister Rippentrop was presenting an official declaration of war on the Soviet Union to the Soviet Ambassador in Berlin. At the end of the night Magd al-Din had gotten up, performed the dawn prayers, and sat jubilantly reciting the Quran. He noticed that Dimyan’s eyes were gleaming in the dark so he told him, “Tonight my wife gave birth, Dimyan.”

Dimyan made no answer. “I saw her, Zahra, waking me up and offering me a glass of warm milk. Do you know what she had?”

Again Dimyan did not reply.

“A boy. I told her if that happened to name him Shawqi. She must have done that.”

23

Before the offensive against Russia, the Führer had told his military commanders that Russian soldiers were not to be treated as prisoners of war, but that they were to be killed. After the attack the world heard Churchill’s speech on the BBC, and his words were spread far and wide: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. ”

The massive German armies were sweeping across the vast Russian front that extended from the North Pole to the Black Sea. German planes were destroying the Russian air force on the ground. Five million German soldiers were invading cities and villages. Riga, the capital of Latvia, fell after just one week of fighting. There was a decisive battle in Minsk, and the Russians began to retreat in great numbers before the Germans. Intense British air raids on Germany did little to relieve the Russians. British air raids here in the desert against the Tripoli harbor managed to destroy several German and Italian ships, but that too was of little consequence. German and Italian planes responded by launching a raid on Alexandria, where the only persons you saw were those fleeing the city. Stalin broadcast a message to Hitler warning him that he would be defeated, just as Napoleon Bonaparte had the previous century. But the Russians retreated even further to Stalin’s defense line. An artillery war began on the Egyptian borders between the Afrika Korps and the Eighth Army. King George II came from England to Alexandria, reviewed the Royal Hellenic Army, and decorated some soldiers. Safiya Zaghloul, nicknamed ‘the Mother of Egyptians,’ visited Alexandria. There was a call encouraging men to marry single Alexandrian women before the forces of the vice market got to them. New fire and rescue stations were established. The taste of drinking water in the city changed. It was said that was because of the many bombs that fell in the Mahmudiya canal; it was also said that it was because of considerable growth of moss in the Nile. The country celebrated Queen Nazli’s birthday at the same time that a peasant woman gave birth to a baby that was more like a monkey, but was stillborn. Premier Paderewski, Poland’s first prime minister after World War I and one of the most acclaimed pianists in America after he resigned, died. Sitt Badiya Masabni staged the revue We Must Laugh. The Germans reached the outskirts of Kiev and crossed the Dnepr river. The number of air raids on Alexandria during the month of June was fourteen, in the course of which 725 were killed, 850 wounded, and more than forty thousand displaced. The number of troops fighting on both sides on the Russian front was nine million, in the most vicious war that humanity had yet seen. The Germans succeeded in occupying Smilensk and Bessarabia and continued moving toward Leningrad, where fierce fighting took place. Two thousand new shelters were built in Alexandria, even though many people had fled. The Japanese intensified their activities in Indochina and occupied new bases to send their armies to the French colonics. Strangely enough, the beaches in Alexandria were crowded this year, and there was a call for government employees who had evacuated Alexandria to return and run government operations. German casualties in one month in Russia reached 1.5 million soldiers, three thousand tanks, and twenty-three hundred planes. Russian resistance guerrilla war operations began. The first air raid on Port Said in Egypt killed seventeen and wounded sixty. Said Ghazi’s height reached two meters and 65 centimeters. The doctors gave up on trying to stop the fast growth of his bones, and he became the talk of the patients in the hospital. Visitors of patients in the hospital took pains to pass by the orthopedics section to catch a glimpse of Said Ghazi, if only from a distance. The hospital gave Said a wheelchair, as he was no longer capable of standing up, let alone walking and hitting door frames.