On the road Dimyan ran alongside the cart driven by Ghaffara, who had the fez on his face. On the cart sat Dimyan’s mother, his wife, and his two daughters. Ghaffara had once again removed the walls of the cart so people could easily sit on the long migration route. He no longer transported the dead. He could not stand it. Now he was moving the living to Kafr al-Dawwar, outpaced by the taxis and the horse-drawn carriages and the long carts drawn by healthy mules. But it was all right. The two sickly donkeys did the job, and people were poor, having left their houses with nothing. So he did not charge much. He asked Dimyan to climb up next to him, but Dimyan, who saw how slowly the cart was moving, and how poorly the donkeys were, was content to walk or run alongside the cart. Why did he not see the scene around him as well? That misshapen line of people fleeing in different garb, nakedness, loud voices, crying, too much baggage, too little baggage, clean, dirty, the sun above exposing them, the trains dashing past them, near them and more crowded, everyone looking at everyone else, moments without meaning. Dimyan thought of Brika. Rommel has made it to al-Alamein, and she and all the Bedouin must be gone by now, having fled before the stupid armies. God Almighty! Would Brika appear in the shelter camps? He did not think so. If that happened, he would marry her. She is married. He is married. He would kidnap her. He could not see her again, just let her go. The mere memory of her almost lifted him from the ground. His service at the church and his undertaking the most menial of jobs was not enough to make him forget, even cleaning the toilets and taking a long time doing it was not enough. But the vast, wide open space in which people and vehicles ran said there was no way that Brika would come back to the vast expanse. The Lord had sent her and the Lord had taken her back. Bedouin did not sleep in government houses. Brika was a grain of sand carried by the wind. He must go back to Magd al-Din.

In Kafr al-Dawwar, Queen Nazli’s tents provided temporary shelters for the refugees until real houses were built. Nothing was more beautiful than living in houses built by royalty, even if they were mere tents! He had to convince himself also that nothing was fancier than being transported by Ghaffara on whose cart he had loaded some belongings and the whole family and which moved ever so slowly on the main road, so crowded with refugees that you could not see ahead or back, and Dimyan was in the middle of it all.

The strange story that surprised the people of Alexandria was the story of the Jewish lady Miss Samhun, who lived in a small villa on Manasha Street with dozens of cats. She came from the famous Samhun family, which was among the first to live on that street in the time of Ismail Pasha. No one knew her name, so they used her family name. No one knew when she was born or the day she had first appeared on the street, but she became well known during the previous world war. She had been in love with a young Jewish man who went to the Eastern front with Lord Allenby and entered Palestine with him and did not come back. He had promised to write her to join him after victory, but he did not. He was killed in the fighting against the Ottoman Turks and their allies. In turn she chose not to go to the land where her beloved was killed. She discovered that she could never leave Egypt. She stayed home alone after the death of her mother and father and after her brothers and sisters married and moved to Saba Pasha. No one remembered her except on Saturdays, when she would go to the synagogue on Nabi Danyal Street. Since the temple was destroyed, she no longer went out on Saturdays. No one knew how she lived. It was said that she had a maid who came from Hadra every day. But the servant was seldom seen, and unlike most servants, she did not speak with anyone. She bought everything from the bazaar in Hadra and brought it in the morning. She rarely bought anything from Manasha Street or from Paulino or Muharram Bey. During an air raid, the Samhun villa received a direct hit, and it fell into rubble like the other houses on the street. Rescue teams came, and crowds gathered around the remnants of the villa. Where had Miss Samhun, the most famous resident on the street, gone? The rescue teams worked, and as they made some progress, small and big cats ran out meowing from the rubble, not believing what had happened to them. Miss Samhun was found on her side in a corner surrounded by strong walls and covered with some pieces of wood from the ceiling. She was dusty and her eyes were closed and she did not move. There is no power or strength save in God! What an end for a true lover! She was the most beautiful woman, but loneliness brought her an early old age. She must have had heaps of money. People talked and waited for the money to appear. It took three days to remove the rubble, and jobless and poor people from all over Alexandria pitched in. They had come to look for the buried treasure of the Samhun family. No one asked why no one from the family had appeared, except for a few moments, to take the body of their sister, then disappeared. In the end they found a few old utensils and some decayed pieces of furniture and some incense sticks, many colorful bundles of incense sticks, that the beautiful Miss Samhun had kept.

27

Magd al-Din’s heart beat fast as the train approached. “Until when will you lie to me, my feeble heart?” he said to himself. This was happening every day and still no Dimyan, still nothing filled the wilderness around him. Even the great commotion of the armies around him did not fill that emptiness, not the retreat and panic before Rommel, not the long queues of the wounded, transported by trains, not the sorrow in the different-colored eyes of the soldiers, the occasional crying, the silence of the bagpipes, not the dust that filled the air, the planes that came and went, went and did not come back, then returned, nor the devilish bombs. He stayed home for days on end, suffering pangs of hunger since the Indians and al-Safi al-Naim had stopped coming. Hilal the stationmaster fled to join Amer, who had left the telegraph room open, ravaged by the wind. All of that did not succeed in making him forget Dimyan. Was Dimyan the reason he stayed? He would never again find events more compelling than those he had just witnessed to cause him to leave the place. It must be Dimyan. He was waiting for him to return, and he would return. And there he was. He saw him getting off the last car of the train, which was carrying military equipment.

He saw him standing there in the middle of the platform, looking exactly as he had when they first came to that place together. Dimyan seemed not to believe that he had come back to his friend, and Magd al-Din also looked incredulous. They rushed to embrace each other.

In the stationmaster’s room they talked and talked. Magd al-Din described the soldiers’ miserable retreat before Rommel, and Dimyan talked about Alexandria’s misery, no one staying, no one sleeping. Magd al-Din could not take his eyes off the aura surrounding Dimyan’s face. This was something that Dimyan did not have before.

“Why are you staring at me so much, Sheikh Magd?”

“Nothing, Dimyan. I just missed you. I didn’t believe we’d meet again.”

Dimyan became lost in thought. The priest, Father Ibshawi, had stared at him a lot. He had taken him to the confession booth and sat him down and stared at him. “What’s the matter, Father?” “Don’t leave the church, Dimyan. Don’t stray far.” The deacons and the other priests also stared at him long, then met and talked. Something, he was not sure what, was happening to his face. But why was his family not staring at him? Or those that sought refuge in the church? What made Magd al-Din like Father Ibshawi and the priests and deacons?