At night in front of the house as they lay stretched out on the ground smoking, their eyes gleaming in the dark, Dimyan asked Magd al-Din, “Tell me, Sheikh Magd — can someone like me fall in love?”

A soft breeze was blowing slowly in the desert, softening the intense heat of the day. There were not many trains at night, just one that usually came at dawn, so they always had the chance to spend most of the night together. In fact they had not been able to divide the day into shifts except for a few days at the beginning. After that they sat together at the crossing rather than spending the time alone in the house. And so they became inseparable at work and at home.

Amer had passed by them a short while earlier, leaving the telegraph office to sleep early as usual since no one sent any telegrams at night. No one sent any telegrams during the day either any more. The Bedouin were not in the habit of sending telegrams, and the soldiers coming from overseas had their own military ways of sending telegrams.

Amer stopped after they exchanged greetings, then asked them, “Do you know who sent the last telegram from the office today?”

They looked at him for a while in confusion, then Dimyan laughed and said, “Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab, the singer!”

“No.”

“Then it must be King Farouk!”

Magd al-Din smiled, but Amer did not. Scorn appeared in his eyes at what Dimyan had said, and he said calmly, “It was me who sent it.”

Dimyan looked at Magd al-Din, who had a pitying look in his eyes and said, “Sit down with us for a while, Amer. You must be upset about something. Sit down and talk.”

They were surprised to see Amer sit down in front of them. Magd al-Din offered him a cigarette, and he took it with trembling fingers. Dimyan lit it for him. He began puffing the smoke calmly and talking as if to himself, “Yes, I was the sender. I sent it to my wife. I asked her to talk to me about the children.”

“Do you have children, Amer?” Magd al-Din said after a silence.

“I don’t have any children, Sheikh Magd,” was Amer’s reply, after another long silence.

A more profound silence fell. Magd al-Din had received an actual telegram announcing that Zahra had given birth to a boy, whom she named Shawqi, as Magd al-Din had wanted. Magd al-Din had told Dimyan, proudly, “Exactly as I saw in the dream!” And much as he felt regret that he could not go back to the village, he felt content that God had granted him his wish for a son. He thought about all that as Amer got up and left in the dark. As they watched him go, Dimyan said suddenly, “You haven’t answered my question, Sheikh Magd.”

“What question, Dimyan?”

“My question about love.”

“What’re you saying, friend? Put some sense in your head. We’re poor, Dimyan. Besides, you’re married with children.”

They both fell silent. Dimyan seemed unconvinced by what his friend had said. He thought, why should poverty prevent love? Why must a man love only his wife and his family? His heart has stirred toward Brika, and he could not stop his heart.

“What happens when a Christian man falls in love with a Muslim woman?” Dimyan asked.

Magd al-Din did not reply. He instantly recalled the story of Rushdi and Camilla, the story that Dimyan knew was coming back, in reverse, but the same story, no question about it. So why was Dimyan going to hell with his own two feet? He heard Dimyan exclaim, “Life is a bitch and time a traitor.”

“Life isn’t a bitch, and time is no traitor, Dimyan,” Magd al-Din replied. “We bring trouble on ourselves. How can you be so weak in controlling you heart?”

“My heart defeated me, Sheikh Magd. My heart has grown attached to torture, and I can’t stop it. I didn’t do it deliberately. I never did anything intentionally in my life. Did you or I intentionally get transferred to work here in al-Alamein, in the middle of the desert? Did we intentionally meet in the first place?”

Magd al-Din did not have an answer, and he tried to think of some way to say, “A man over forty craves young girls — if one-was a little patient, the crisis would pass in peace.”

But Dimyan was thinking of another reason for his love of Brika. Perhaps because she comes from a vast expanse. Where does she come from? He did not know. He would ask her and she would say, “From Ghadi” and point south. Where does she go with her sheep and brother? She doesn’t seem to go to a specific place, a tent or a house or a village. She always seems to have ascended to the sky or descended to the bottom of the earth. She comes from God and goes back to Him. She always comes from the vast expanse, and when she does, his chest grows bigger and fills with air from an unknown source in such heat.

“Our life in Ghayt al-Aynab is too tight, Sheikh Magd,” said Dimyan, as if to himself. “We hardly have enough air to breathe on the banks of Mahmudiya — it’s heavy air, most of the time made rotten by a corpse floating in the water. This girl is an enigma, Sheikh Magd. As she comes, so she goes. God has sent her to me to preoccupy me. I cannot refuse what the Lord sends, can I?”

They both fell silent. Magd al-Din saw Dimyan wiping a tear away with his fingers.

24

Dimyan announced that as of tomorrow he would not eat corned beef, meat, eggs, cheese, or anything of animal origin except fish. As of tomorrow the fast of the Virgin, which lasts two weeks, would begin.

The morrow was the seventh of August and the first day of the Coptic month of Misra. Dimyan noticed that Magd al-Din was a little lost in thought so he added, “Remember what I told you about the big fast, our holiest one that ends with Easter? This one about to start is the fast of the Virgin. There’s also the Nativity fast, which lasts forty-three days, and ends with Christmas on January seventh. Then there is the fast of Jonah, three days. Do you know Jonah? He is mentioned in the Quran. He stayed for three days in the belly of the big fish and came out to preach to the people of Nineveh and guide them to faith.”

Magd al-Din was thinking that he had forgotten the Coptic months, which he thought he would never forget. All peasants know the Coptic calendar because it is timed with the seasons, and keep up with it. And there he was hearing from Dimyan that tomorrow would be the first of Misra. “He is the Prophet Yunus, peace be upon him,” he said to Dimyan, as he finally paid attention to his words.

“Well, do you know Nineveh? A beautiful name, but its people were evil,” Dimyan said.

“I think Nineveh is in Iraq. I also think it is the city of the prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon him.”

“You know many things, Magd al-Din, many, many things. In the Jonah fast, we completely abstain from eating for three days. Some of us fast it one day at a time. We also fast Wednesday and Friday of every week of our life, with the exception of the fifty days immediately following Easter, the time of khamsin sandstorms in Egypt, which is the period that Jesus Christ spent on earth after His rising. We fast Wednesday because that was the day the Jews agreed to crucify Christ, and we fast Friday because that was the day He was crucified. They are days of holy fasting on which we only eat fish, exactly like the big fast.”

Magd al-Din was lost in thought again. Where does his friend get this religious information, when he had led a vagabond’s life until just a year ago, when he first started going to church? “But you don’t fast on Wednesdays or Fridays,” he said with a smile.

“It’s difficult for me, Sheikh Magd. I don’t observe the Jonah fast either. It’s not intentional — I’m just not used to it. I’ve also told you that all our days are not much different from fasting days. I fast more than I’m supposed to.”