The cold air coming lightly through the windows awakened him. From the window he saw the darkness, deep in a long gap, and realized that the train was crossing the Nile and that the lights were coming from the little houses of Kafr al-Zayyat. He could not mistake the smell of the trees along the river bank, near the villas and small houses. He was now very close to his village, and he had to get up and focus his eyes to jump when he reached the platform. He had no other choice. The train had not stopped in the city of Kafr al-Zayvat — was it going to stop at a small village? The engineer undoubtedly had some contraption giving him orders to proceed fast, to Cairo. The train had moved away beyond the range of the air raids, yet the engineer was still speeding along. Magd al-Din stood near the open door of the car, the cold air drying his sweat. He realized that he was standing barefoot. He had left his shoes near the scat. He did not think of putting them on. He had left the village barefoot, and here was the white platform, approaching fast. Blessed be the name of your Lord, Almighty and Glorious. He stepped forward to get off the train as if he were under the influence of some narcotic drug, and he flew into the air. “Ah!” It came out deep, slow, and faint.
The stationmaster stayed late at his post because of the continuous evacuation of refugees from Alexandria. He heard a hard, heavy thudding sound, a deep, muffled sound. He even saw something hurtling over the platform and landing on the dusty soil a short distance from the platform. It was not the sound of a bomb exploding, anyway. It must be a ghost that he had seen. The groan reverberated. The human sound encouraged the stationmaster to approach, gingerly. The sounds of grasshoppers and frogs came from the canal along the tracks. The stationmaster approached, carrying a lamp shielded with blue, held back by all the rural legacy of fear of ghosts and demons. But the green eyes glowed in the dark. Most merciful God! This is a real human being! He went closer and shone the lamp on the human’s face and exclaimed, “Sheikh Magd al-Din?!”
It was the same old stationmaster, Abd al-Hamid, his classmate in Quran memorization class a quarter century earlier, the very man who stood bidding him farewell when he left the village. Magd al-Din heard his voice and closed his eyes in relief. He was now certain he was not going to die.
29
And be said to me:
What kind of life will you have in this world
After I appear?
Rommel did not succeed in breaking through the front in al-Alamein. For six days he tried, to no avail. He lost three thousand officers and soldiers, either killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, and seven hundred armored vehicles, including fifty tanks. The Allies lost sixteen hundred officers and soldiers, and seventy tanks. Air superiority and short supply lines ensured victory for the Allies. That was Rommel’s first defeat in the desert. Soldiers in the Eighth Army now realized that Rommel was not a legend, but a military commander who could win or lose.
Montgomery took advantage of the situation and continued to train the soldiers and conduct huge maneuvers in the desert from Alexandria to al-Alamein. The raids on Alexandria stopped for some time. Panic continued to prevail in the foreign consulates. Jews carried on lining up at the British consulate to get entry visas for Palestine and South Africa. Magd al-Din, who had been moved by the stationmaster to Tanta hospital on the first car that had arrived on the scene, was still in a cast. His legs and several ribs and other bones had been broken, but he had miraculously survived. The stationmaster brought word back to the village, and Zahra, his sisters and their husbands, and his mother, whose days were numbered, visited Magd al-Din. He was told he had to stay in the cast at the hospital for three months. Meanwhile in Cairo the belly-dancer Hikmat Fahmi and the two spies Eppler and Sandstetter were arrested on charges of spying for Germany. The German armies entered the outskirts of Stalingrad, and cold steel massacres took place. They surrounded the city, which they were determined to capture because it was the military industrial city named after Stalin. The Soviets were very determined to stand their ground because the city was named after Stalin. The Muslim general Timoshenko advanced to the river Don in an attempt to cut off German supply and communication lines. Egypt silently celebrated Queen Farida’s twenty-second birthday, but there were no public decorations or lights marking the occasion in Alexandria, her birthplace. Montgomery was busy establishing a new corps, the Tenth Corps, to counter the German Afrika Korps. American Sherman and Grant tanks and self-propelled 105-millimeter guns poured into the front. British and American bombers continued to pursue German army supplies on land and on sea. Rommel’s blood pressure shot up, and pain in his liver forced him to go back to Germany to seek treatment. General Stumme, who had arrived from the Russian front, replaced him. The month of Ramadan had begun, and the sorrows of Magd al-Din, who lay helpless in bed, increased. True, he had his family around him now, but he could not forget the previous Ramadan in the vast desert with its awesome sunsets, and breaking the fast with Dimyan. Dimyan! Dimyan! How could life go on without Dimyan! Magd al-Din had found out that his sisters had sold his land to themselves in his absence, but he did not even comment on the matter. The mayor sent the village chief to visit Magd al-Din and let him know that the mayor himself was going to visit him soon and that he, the mayor, was sorry for what had happened in the past, but Magd al-Din did not comment on that either. He considered everything preordained by God.
Stumme was six years older than Rommel and, like him, had high blood pressure, which usually afflicted commanders. Egypt had great strategic importance in creating a huge pincer movement from which the German forces, if successful in occupying it, would advance eastwards to meet the forces coming from Europe and the Caucasus. Hitler had promised Rommel to send him the dreaded new Tiger tanks and multi-barrel mortars, but he did not keep his promise. Rommel had felt disappointment after his failure at Alam al-Halfa and decided not to be on the offensive again, but to resort to defensive military tactics for the first time since he took command in the desert. So he set up dense minefields, huge devil’s fields, between his position and those of the Eighth Army. Churchill was under great pressure to open a second front. If Stalin and Roosevelt were convinced that that second front would be the African desert, he had to start. The normal English plan would be to take out the German armored vehicles, then deal with the infantry, but Montgomery suggested the opposite. He had greater confidence in the infantry, especially the Australians and New Zealanders, and expected them to acquit themselves valiantly. The same was true of the Fifty-first Highland battalion, which had been recently re-formed to replace the First Highland battalion, which had been decimated in France in 1940. The Fifty-first was intent on vengeance.
The Eighth Army had to advance through half a million German mines. That required a new high morale among the soldiers, and that was one of Montgomery’s top priorities for the two months between the battle of Alam al-Halfa, which was over, and al-Alamein, which was about to begin.