“It’s my turn to fast with you, Sheikh Magd,” Dimyan told his friend.

Magd al-Din was too surprised to reply.

“Don’t you believe me? I’ll fast the whole month with you.”

“Our fast is a difficult one. We have to abstain from food and drink all day long.”

“That’s better than each of us eating alone in the desert,” Dimyan replied immediately. He had made up his mind beforehand and made a strong case. Magd al-Din was touched. The two friends were silent for a long time.

“When do we go back to Alexandria, Dimyan?” Magd al-Din finally asked.

“You mean, to the village. I know that Ramadan is a month that loves company. If only some Indians would join us, then we’d be an international family.”

“I miss them so much, Dimyan,” Magd al-Din blurted out despite himself.

“Why don’t you go then?” Dimyan caught him off guard.

Magd al-Din had no choice but to tell him the whole story of his banishment. He felt the need to tell someone. It is a strange moment that comes over someone when he feels the need to disclose that which he has taken such pains to conceal. One can never really escape that moment when it does come over him. His chest is filled with a heavy sadness that rises to his eyes as he begins to tell the story and let out the heavy secret.

His story took up most of the night. Dimyan listened, spellbound. While eating the pre-dawn meal with Magd al-Din, he asked him, “And you’ve put up with all of that alone?”

“It’s God’s will, Dimyan.”

“But God cannot be pleased with all that injustice.” “God forgive us, Dimyan.”

“The best thing you can do, Sheikh Magd, is to take a rifle from one of the Indians, go to the village, kill the mayor, and come back. Nobody will think of you and nobody will know the source of the Indian bullets!”

“If only I had wanted,” Magd al-Din finally said, “I would have killed him a long time ago. I left to prevent bloodshed and also because I wanted to leave. Yes, I wanted to leave — I don’t know why.”

“You must return, Sheikh Magd.”

“I will return, Dimyan. I will. I must.”

During Ramadan, Brika stopped coming for days on end. Until the feast, she only appeared five quick times. She told Dimyan that she was getting ready for the jlasa, but he did not understand or pay mention.

On the day of the feast the Indian Muslims and al-Safi al-Naim performed the feast prayer behind Magd al-Din. They wished him a happy feast and he wished them a happy feast as well. There was nothing for Magd al-Din to do except to send a telegram to Zahra and his sisters wishing them a happy feast. Amer was very happy with the telegram, and as soon as Magd al-Din left the room he heard Amer crying. That was Amer’s last day on the job. He left on the evening train, just like that, without telling anyone, leaving his room open to the wind.

“What could he do? He was about to go crazy,” Dimyan said, laughing, to Magd al-Din and Hilal, who was silent.

“We should do like him, escape,” added Magd al-Din. “What harm would it do the Allies if three wretched Egyptians disappeared?”

The feast passed in silence, no trains of any kind. After the feast Brika appeared. It was an unusually sunny day.

“Why have you stopped coming as often as you used to?” Dimyan asked her in pain.

“Because of the rain,” she answered with a laugh.

“But you came some days.”

“On days when there’s no rain,” she replied in her Bedouin

dialect.

“You can tell such days?”

“We Bedouin know which way the wind blows.”

They fell silent.

“What do you do here, Dimyan?” she finally asked with a smile.

The question surprised him. How come she doesn’t know what he does? He realized that he had not told her about his job.

“I work at the crossing,” he answered.

“I know that. What do you do?”

“Nothing. When the train comes, I stop cars and pedestrians. When it leaves, I let the cars and pedestrians cross.”

“That’s amazing!”

“My job?”

“I don’t see any cars or people. I don’t see any trains.”

Dimyan felt perturbed. What’s this girl doing to him today? This girl for whom his heart beats faster whenever he sees her, like an orphan when out of the blue, two parents appear. This girl whom he loves, but doesn not know how to tell her of his love for her.

“Where do you come from, Brika?” he found himself asking.

“From the south,” she said pointing to the south.

“And where do you go after you’re done tending the sheep?”

“To the south. Haven’t you seen me?”

“I saw you,” he answered her in her dialect, realizing how silly his question, which he had asked before, must be. But he asked another question anyway.

“What’s the jlasa that you told me about before?”

“Would you like to take part in it?” she asked, laughing.

“I don’t know it.”

“Listen, play with me,” she kept laughing. “I ask and you answer, and you ask and I answer.”

He gave up. “What’s sweeter than honey and what’s more bitter than colocynth?” she asked.

He had no answer.

“Nothing is sweeter than honey except a child playing in the sand," and she pointed to her little brother, "and nothing is more bitter than colocynth but carrying a man on a bier," and pointed at an Indian soldier who was passing before her by chance, smiling.

Dimyan thought that he should break his silence and play with her. Does he not love her? His body shook as he thought what to ask her.

“Okay, I’ll ask you — what beats fire?”

“Water beats it,” she answered, nudging him in the chest.

“Okay. You win.”

“No. I don’t win yet. It’s my turn to ask you — what beats

water?”

He thought for a little while and almost said the wall, but he realized that water could go around the wall or through it, in time. His silence and thinking lasted for some time.

“The hot wind beats it,” she finally told him, laughing.

Dimyan realized that she was incredibly intelligent, and he really wanted to beat her at the game. He nudged her gently on the shoulder and asked her, “And what beats the hot wind?”

“The horses beat it,” she answered quickly, still laughing, “and the horsemen beat the horses, and the women beat the horsemen. Do you know what beats the women?”

“Men.”

“No,” she laughed and laughed. “Death beats women, Dimyan.”

She stood up to call her brother to gather the sheep. She pointed to the sky, which had begun to fill with clouds. Dimyan figured that she wanted to beat the rain.

“But you haven’t told me what a jlasa is,” he said.

“Today we did a jlasa, didn’t you know? And you didn’t beat me. We do the jlasa in the village. The young man who beats me marries me. Herr, herr herr,” she shouted to help her brother control the sheep, then walked away laughing. Dimyan stayed in his place, motionless, looking at the black clouds gathering and realizing there was no way that Brika could be his, ever.

It was raining hard on the Maryut coast and inside Libya when the Allied forces surprised the Axis forces in Sidi Rizq, but the Germans won after a vicious battle in the airfield area and they regained Sidi Rizq. The Allied forces lost many of their armored vehicles. The day after the German victory, at the end of November, Cunningham ordered the Eleventh Brigade to march on Sidi Rizq anew, and that brigade almost regained it. But Rommel, now well-versed in desert warfare, left the battle and took his armored force eastward, to the Egyptian borders. He went twenty miles inside Egypt and wreaked havoc in the rear of the English forces and their allies. He took many of their soldiers prisoner until the Royal Air Force stepped in with fierce raids that forced Rommel to go back to Sidi Rizq, chased by the Fourth Indian Brigade. No sooner had November ended than General Auchinleck dismissed Cunningham, replacing him with Major General Ritchie. Rommel laid siege to Tobruk, which was a stronghold, the strongest in North Africa, with a brave and obstinate British garrison thirty thousand strong. It is surrounded from the east and the west by rugged rocky terrain and to the south by a level plain. Before 1940, it had been an Italian stronghold, but the English seized it and made use of the defense lines established by the Italians around it: deep trenches in the ground, housing guns, and machine gun batteries that could pour fire on the attackers to the last moments of their attack, decimating them. There were also several barbed wire barriers that slowed down infantry attacks and a deep trench surrounding the whole area to prevent the advance of tanks. Behind all these defenses were massive British artillery units and dense mine fields. The fighting was over by the end of November, and even though Rommel did not succeed in capturing Tobruk, he inflicted very heavy losses on the Allied forces, exceeding eight hundred armored vehicles, one hundred planes, and countless small arms and ammunition, in addition to more than nine thousand prisoners of war. Rommel suffered heavy losses and a great number of his soldiers were taken prisoner. The Allied forces began to transport them to Alexandria with shaven heads, without helmets or head cover of any kind in the bitter cold, but they had long, heavy coats. When the British Command decided to engage Rommel in a decisive battle code-named Crusader, one hundred thousand soldiers from the Eighth Army charged forward. Rommel left the road open for them and did not mount a counterattack, withdrawing quietly westward until they fell into the trap. Thereupon he let loose with his artillery from all sides, destroying almost all the British tanks. The valley south of Sidi Rizq became a sea of dust, fire, and smoke.