Every country in the world is shaken and attempting to define its position if the war breaks out: to fight, to stay neutral, or to wait. Unrest continues in Palestine. A ship carrying twelve hundred Jews approaches the coast in order to smuggle them into the country. A few people in Germany take to the streets to protest the war; some throw themselves in front of trains rather than witness a new war annihilate the world. This happens in many European cities. The ship Maritt Pasha crosses the Suez canal carrying French and Senegalese troops to Syria and Lebanon to reinforce French defenses. In Cairo the commencement ceremonies for Victoria College are postponed, police patrols increased, anti-espionage measures intensified, and reserve officers mobilized. Mahmud Ghalib Pasha, minister of transportation, orders a number of railroad cars converted into field hospitals. Air raid sirens are tested; seven steamers are stationed in Bulaq to evacuate the inhabitants of Cairo if the need arises. In Alexandria, Admiral Cunningham, commander in chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet, meets Prime Minister Ali Mahir Pasha in the Egyptian government’s summer headquarters in Bulkely to discuss necessary naval procedures if war breaks out. The Committee for Protection against Air Raids, headed by the mayor of Alexandria, meets and decides to increase fire stations to three and to order car owners to paint their headlights dark rather than light blue. The air raid alarm system is also tested there. Metal nets are set up outside the harbor to repel naval attacks. Night tests of searchlights are conducted above the city to prepare against air raids. Mr. Miles Lampson, the British ambassador, arrives from London to meet His Majesty the King at the Muntaza Palace. Hitler proposes to the British government to settle the dispute by having Poland surrender Danzig at once and hold a plebiscite for the inhabitants of the corridor. He sets a deadline of two days and asks that the Polish president himself, or an official emissary authorized to negotiate, give him the answer.
This becomes the only way to prevent matters from deteriorating any further. The world waits with bated breath through the two-day reprieve. The question now: Can any person or any power save the inhabitants of Earth from the coming hell?
Protests and suicides do no good. The wheels of death are turning. It is decided to open the book of hell.
2
And he said to me: if you see the fire, fall into it, for if you
fall into it, it will be put out, and if you flee it,
it will seek you and burn you.
On Magd al-Din’s last night, he sat silently amid his family. They were looking at him, incredulous. But he simply sat there, seeming not to have changed at all. He was forty but looked twenty, with an elongated face, strong features, well-defined cheek bones, green eyes, and the hair blond but always covered by a white skullcap. His body retained the strength of a younger man.
“Why won’t you let us fight?” One of his three sisters’ husbands asked. “We can fight the whole village if we have to. We still have some old weapons, and we are men.”
Magd al-Din told them all to go to bed. “Tomorrow is another day. We’ll leave it all to He who is never overtaken by slumber or sleep”—his favorite words with which they, especially his young wife Zahra, were all familiar in times of crisis. They all went upstairs to their rooms in the big house. His mother, Hadya, who had lost her eyesight, went to her room on the first floor, leaning on the arm of Zahra, who carried her one-year-old daughter, Shawqiya, on her other arm.
From all corners of the house came that smell Magd al-Din liked, the smell of the mud walls baked by the heat of the day, mixed with the smell of dung from the animal shed and the smell of the cheese mats and butter churn hanging on the walls. Magd al-Din went up to the roof out of habit. He looked at the white dovecote, and, listening intently, he heard a faint, almost inaudible cooing. He heard nothing from the rabbit pen. He felt stifled; a heat wave had taken hold for days on end; it was getting more and more humid, as if the summer did not want to end. What had revived this old, dead affair now? Why, really, did he not want to resist?
Like a sudden rain pouring down on the village, people began to talk, publicly and privately, about the old vendetta between the Khalils and the Talibs. The deputy mayor of the village came to ask Magd al-Din to leave the village by week’s end.
The vendetta between the two families had been over for ten years, and none of the Khalils except Magd al-Din was left alive, and none but Khalaf of the Talibs — Magd al-Din, who had been exempted from military service because he had memorized the entire Quran, and Khalaf, his childhood friend. This friendship made each do his best to avoid facing the other in battle. Magd al-Din’s five brothers were killed, and his father died of grief. Only he and his brother Bahí, who was always wandering somewhere or other, remained alive. His cousins, now wedded to his sisters, also remained alive. Khalaf’s six brothers were also killed, and his father likewise died of grief. The whole village learned of the pledge that Magd al-Din and Khalaf had taken. They had decided, more than ten years ago, to stop the river of blood.
Magd al-Din had said to his friend, “And now, Khalaf, only I am left to die. I will not permit myself to fight you.”
“I seek nothing from you, Magd al-Din.”
“Then you will seek out Bahi. If that is the case, kill me instead, Khalaf.”
“I won’t seek anybody out, Magd al-Din. We are all covered in shame, the killer and the killed.”
So the story had ended long ago. And Bahi, who ended up living in Alexandria, never appeared in the village again. Reviving the story of the old vendetta between the Khalils and the Talibs was nothing but a pretext to get rid of Magd al-Din. The mayor had simply succumbed to his weakness and hate. Magd al-Din was doomed, as were all his brothers, to pay for the sins of Bahi. What did Alexandria have for Bahi to love it so much? Would Magd al-Din join him there tomorrow or would he settle some other place on God’s great earth? “Dear God, most merciful,” Magd al-Din whispered as he sat down, his back against the dovecote. He took a tobacco case from his vest and rolled a thin cigarette. He never loved any of his brothers as much as he loved Bahi, and there they were, about to be united again.
“Your father died, Bahi, saying nothing but your name.”
“I can’t live in the village, Sheikh Magd. Prison has destroyed me.”
“Our village is good, Bahi.”
“You’re a good man, Sheikh Magd. You see the world only through the lens of the Quran. Why do you really stay in this stinking village?”
Magd al-Din had no answer. He did not know then, and he still, to this day, docs not know how to answer Bahi’s question. That day Bahi had added, “Your father’s dead, your brothers have been killed. Nobody’s left except the women and me, and I am no good to you.”
After that, Bahi left for Alexandria — ten whole years of separation. Magd al-Din made sure to visit him once or twice every year, quick visits, never more than one night, and on the following morning he would return with a lot of nice things to say to the mother, Hadya. He always found Bahi wearing clean clothes, a shirt and pants, since he had given up his village garb a long time before. He lived in a room that he kept clean and fragrant with frankincense and musk, and always carried in his pocket a little box of ambergris that gave off a captivating fragrance. But he looked pale and exhausted and hid from Magd al-Din the many pains that he suffered in the city. Magd al-Din never told his mother of his worries about his brother’s pain, only gave her good news about her poor son.