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Hamidu sat in front of the man and, placing the officer’s feet on his little stool, began to shine the black boots with white buckles. The officer was busy reading a foreign newspaper.
Magd al-Din did not take his eyes off Hamidu. As he watched him, he finished shining the boots, then started feeling them with his fingers. Magd al-Din did not know what exactly Hamidu was doing. Then Hamidu pulled the little stool from under the man’s feet and lowered them gently onto the floor and stood up. Magd al-Din saw clearly that the officer gave Hamidu a one-pound note. Hamidu took it, then reached out and took the officer’s baton, which the officer had placed on the table. The officer looked very puzzled, and before he could speak or protest, Hamidu had run away with the baton and the pound. The officer tried to overtake him; he got up, but as soon as he tried to move, he came crashing down, almost breaking his head and injuring his face. Luckily for him, there were several chairs in front of his, which helped break his fall, so he did not hit his face. He ended up on his back on the floor, writhing in pain and raising his head trying to see his feet. When Hamidu was feeling his boots, he had been tying the laces together — that was why he had lowered the officer’s feet gently to the floor. There was a commotion in the café. An English officer stood up and took his gun out of its holster. An Indian soldier stood, befuddled, watching Hamidu run away on Tawfiq Street. The café patrons laughed for a moment, then were silent again out of pity for the young officer lying on the floor in pain. The waiter then quickly went over to him, untied his shoelaces, and helped him up to his scat. All the patrons were now looking on in silence, awaiting his reaction. The officer, too, was silent, then in broken Arabic he swore, “Bastard!”
Everyone laughed, and he got up and left the café in embarrassment.
The last few days of the year passed quickly. Rain came down hard, almost flooding the city — which during the winter suffered torrential rain for days and days, then the rain would stop for several days, then it would rain again nonstop, and sometimes the rain changed to hail. Work opportunities were now scarce. The textile mill laid off Magd al-Din and Dimyan, and once again they had to go job hunting every day. The ships arriving in Mahmudiya Canal were few and far between. Sitt Maryam had told Zahra that during the last few weeks of the year, Alexandria suffered successive, almost continuous storms, until Epiphany, and then the storms would increase in frequency and fierceness in the following month, the last of the year. Camilla said, laughing, that the thunder was going to sound like bombs and would shake the houses, and lightning would dazzle the eyes. Zahra looked at her admiringly as she added that the best thing to see in Alexandria was the coastal road, the corniche, in the winter when the waves rushed in and crossed the street, crashing against the apartment buildings. She said the winter weather had prevented her from going to see Abd al-Wahhab’s new film, Long Live Love. The dark, cold, and rain made Amm Mahmud, vendor of the crime sheets, appear only rarely. News of crimes and scandals, however, still circulated among the people, who learned, for instance, about the young man killed by his colleague at night in the Labban neighborhood, and another young man whose body was found in a closed kiosk in the Farahda neighborhood. They found out about the second incident of a woman marrying a man while still married to another, and the man who had killed his own father a long time before, and on the day of whose execution the black flag flew above the Hadra prison.
On the clear days when he did not work, Magd al-Din was now spending most of his time at the café by the bridge. Dimyan, who kept him company most of the time, would ask him to read the paper out loud, even though he frequently expressed surprise that Magd al-Din kept buying the paper whenever he was not working. “How can you pay five pe
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