Authors: Basma Abdel Aziz
Her train of thought was broken by a large, dirty-looking man who got into the metro car as the woman across from her rose from her seat. He rushed over in his tattered rags, rubbing up against Um Mabrouk’s knees as he slumped into the vacant seat. He stuck his head out the window and suddenly began singing gruffly and sucking at his long dusty hair. Um Mabrouk silently promised herself that despite how bad he smelled she wouldn’t get up until her stop; she could so rarely relax, and he was the least of her troubles. She watched him cautiously and edged her legs away, but that didn’t stop the
man, who seemed half-crazed, from curiously reaching out to grab at her breasts. Um Mabrouk jumped up, screaming and cursing at him, and hit him with her bag, which opened up, and the broken old rotary phone she’d taken from the office to repair fell onto the floor. The man panicked at the clatter, leapt toward the metro door in fright, and jumped out before the train stopped at the next station.
Shouts of fear and confusion rose up from the women around her. She heard mutters of shame from a few passengers, and a tall man whispered that a woman’s place was in the house, his gaze fixed on the ground. Someone else quoted a passage from the Greater Book, and although she couldn’t make out what he said, she sensed from his tone that it was directed at her. A young boy came up to her and asked if she was hurt; he was no more than twelve and wearing a school uniform that was clearly old but well kept. “Bless you, darling,” she said, as she patted him on his shaved head. She continued the string of insults she’d begun, and then bent over to pick up the telephone and reattach the handset, and sat down again. The man had really scared her, but she blamed herself. After all, she’d decided not to give up her seat across from him, and she had sat there while the rest of the passengers had given him space as soon as they’d seen him.
She was forever cursed with bad luck, and there was no end to her problems, no matter how much she tried to set things right. Her eight-year-old son was sick with a bad kidney and was always in and out of the hospital for more treatments. She’d taken him in several times in just the past month, and watched as his slender body was pumped with what seemed like gallons of medicine. Her two older daughters couldn’t help with the bills because they were both weak with rheumatic
heart disease. By the time the doctor had read her the results of the X-rays and medical tests that had diagnosed their condition, they had already fallen far behind in school.
All she had was two rooms in a damp ramshackle apartment, buried deep in an alleyway in the old District 3 where the sewers bubbled over, and a husband who never left the coffee shop, who’d quit his job and wandered around idly in search of hash and pills. She saw him only when he ran out of the money he took from her small salary, sometimes by pleading with her and sometimes by force. Every so often at night he would leave the coffee shop and come begging, demanding more money, and when she scolded him he berated her and sometimes even beat her. On top of all that, two months ago she’d fallen and broken her hand while cleaning the ceiling in the office, and then she broke her left foot when she’d jumped off a microbus. The pain hadn’t let up since then. As if everything else wasn’t enough.
Neighbors who noticed her never-ending woes advised her to find out why she suffered such misfortune, and so she did. She visited the High Sheikh, before that too was forbidden—forbidden, at least, without a permit from the Gate—and he told her bad luck followed her because she’d neglected her prayers. The remedy to poverty was to bow down and pray and to stop her grousing and complaining. Her head filled with so many words, and a way out of this suffering seemed to open up before her. Tears of humble remorse flowed down her cheeks, and she swore she would uphold her religious duties and never miss a prayer. She even bought a white scarf to keep at Amani’s mother’s house so she would be sure to have one for praying there, but she stuck to her new commitment for fewer than two weeks and her bad luck never left her. Some days she
forgot, and on others she put off her ablution until she finished work. At the end of the day she would discover she had all her prayers left to do, and, exhausted, she’d vow to start anew the next day at dawn. But then she’d wake up late and run straight out the door, intending to make it up throughout the day, and on it would go. She had so much trouble sticking to what she set out to do, sometimes she wondered if she might even be possessed by an evil spirit.
She walked the rest of the way home from the metro station, and before she crossed the crumbling wooden threshold she took off her shoes and tucked them under her right arm. She climbed the stairs with feet as rough as the slanted steps, which were pocked with knots and holes. She pushed open the flimsy front door, dropped her shoes, and called for her son, Mabrouk. She took out the phone and gave it to him, smiling so wide for him that her eyes scrunched up into two tiny dots. But Mabrouk cried when he lifted the speaker to his ear and didn’t hear the dial tone he remembered from when they’d once had a landline, back when he was a baby. Surrounded by a tangle of wires, she promised him that the dial tone would be there in just a few days. She remembered the notice she’d received from the Gate a year earlier, stating that she wasn’t entitled to a phone line due to misconduct. But that must have been a mistake, she told Mabrouk now; she was sure the Gate would sort it out soon.
Time, Location, and Circumstances of the Injury
The patient, Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed, arrived at the reception desk at 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday, June 18. Those accompanying him stated he was injured at approximately 1:30 p.m. while passing through District 9, where the Events occurred. They stated that he left company headquarters to meet some clients and employees on the other side of the square when clashes between unknown persons began. The unrest escalated and spread to the surrounding streets. Several of them witnessed his attempt to leave the area. He was injured, however, and they were unable to identify his assailant. They carried him to the hospital on their shoulders, and he was conscious upon arrival, despite a significant loss of blood. They stated that his documents were lost en route, and the bag of merchandise he had been carrying was stolen. As such, there is no evidence of the veracity of their account
.
Attached to this file is a detailed list of the names of those accompanying the patient
.
Receptionist’s Signature
Tarek mulled over the words jumbled together on the second document with irritation. Yehya’s blood had drenched the floor and the bedsheets when he arrived at the hospital. If a doctor or nurse had been with him when he’d been injured, she would have made the others carry him more carefully. Doing so would have taken just enough time for them to arrive at the emergency room an hour or so after Tarek’s shift had ended, and the name of another doctor would have been at the end of this file: perhaps Ahmed or Bahaa or even Samah. Or if they’d just waited for one of the ambulances from Zephyr Hospital to arrive at the square, that would have been it; Tarek wouldn’t have run into them in the emergency room at all. But Yehya had come straight to him, the first of the arrivals, his body a map of the battle. Tarek removed the pencil he always kept in his coat pocket and began to doodle on the page, absorbed in the lines and curves he’d begun to create, summoning an artistic side he had long since abandoned, one detached from everything else surrounding him. A couple of minutes passed before he awoke from his reverie. He abandoned his rumination about the Events, tossed the pencil down, and stood up from his leather chair.
On half of the second document, in a space without words, he had drawn a figure resembling Yehya, nearly naked, and a small, solid circle, completely shaded in, occupying a space in the lower left part of his stomach. He opened the door, asked Sabah for another cup of black coffee, and then turned
around, glancing over at his desk. He picked up an eraser and carefully erased what he’d drawn. He lifted the paper up to the light coming in through the window and looked at Yehya’s outline and the shadow of the solid circle, no longer there.
About a week after Um Mabrouk arrived with the letter, two events took place that sparked curiosity and commotion in the queue. First, the elderly woman from the South, who hadn’t sat down to rest for a moment since arriving, suddenly collapsed. Her son appeared instantly, a tan young man who carried her off before anyone could ask how he’d known she’d fainted. Some said she was overcome with fatigue and her spirit had risen to meet its Creator, while others said she had survived and was put in intensive care in the military hospital, where they could monitor how her heart and lungs were functioning. But the man in the
galabeya
, who had appeared in the queue quite suddenly without explanation, proclaimed this a sign that God was angry because she had wronged herself and all other citizens. Despite coming to the Gate and acknowledging what she had done, she did not repent or hide the error of her ways—instead she flaunted it, unabashedly parading it around. Even worse, instead of coming to submit an apology or ask God for forgiveness, she was bent on filing a complaint, as if she were the one who’d been wronged. Silence gathered around him, as he raised his palms to the sky and called out: “Only those who have gone astray picked pyramid candidates!”
The second event was the appearance of Ehab, who announced straightaway that he was a journalist. He didn’t try to hide it, as reporters who’d arrived before him often had. He considered himself above reserving a place in the queue and instead began to work his way up and down past the people waiting, asking questions and recording everything in a little notebook. He’d started out as a rioter, an activist flush with enthusiasm, and the vast distances he traversed throughout the day still never seemed to tire him.
Meanwhile, the people standing at the threshold of the Gate estimated that there were three whole kilometers between them and the end of the queue—much to the chagrin of those near the end, who insisted they weren’t nearly that far away. At the queue’s midpoint, the two sides were about to erupt into a brawl over their varying estimations of the distance when a well-known surveyor standing in the middle of the queue intervened and volunteered to settle the matter. Asking for a bit of quiet, he ran some quick calculations, using his geographical knowledge of the area, information provided to him by both parties (representatives from the beginning and the end of the queue), and a detailed description of the area’s various landmarks and general terrain. He made sure to include land now occupied by the queue’s most recent additions, those who had joined throughout the night. Finally, with pen and paper in hand, the man announced that the distance was in fact approximately two kilometers. Those who had been at each other’s throats just a moment before were satisfied and stopped shouting, and everyone returned to their places, pleased with the results.
Yehya felt that the day had already been plenty eventful, in contrast to the endless empty days that had come before
it. People in the queue had enough to debate and discuss until nightfall, and Yehya thought it unlikely that yet another big event—like the opening of the Gate—would happen as well. Besides, the Gate wouldn’t reopen without releasing some kind of announcement beforehand. He was becoming annoyed with Ehab and his questions, the outrage he could conjure out of thin air, his insistence on launching into ridiculous subjects and extracting answers to questions that were of no consequence to anyone else. His thoughts returned to Amani, and he realized he should hurry to visit her. It didn’t look like anything else was going to happen at the Gate today. Although momentum seemed to be building, things happened slowly here, and leaving for a little while wouldn’t do any harm.
As soon as the old Southern woman was taken away, Ines—that foolish young teacher he considered a bit strange—had appeared in front of him. Everyone had something to say to her, and she tirelessly listened to their trifling concerns and endless stories, but no one had ever heard her utter anything important or useful. Yehya wasn’t at all inclined to speak to her. He didn’t want to tell her he would be leaving for a couple of hours, despite the conventions of the queue, which had developed over the passing days and were now practically set in stone. If he told the people around him a bit about himself and where he was going, he would be allowed to keep his place in the queue—even if he left for a long time—but Yehya decided to shirk tradition and take the risk. He left without a word and calmly slipped away. Nagy caught up with him, instinctively falling into step without knowing where they were headed.
The weather was hot and humid, and as the sun climbed upward, it appeared to dissolve the sky behind it. In front of them, the street looked like it had just emerged from an invisible
war: papers strewn everywhere, broken bottles scattered on the ground, boxes of garbage plucked out of the bins, piles of burning rubber tires still spouting smoke and occasionally flames. Nagy realized that it had been a while since he’d heard any news from Tarek. He asked Yehya, who waved the question away. He hadn’t seen or called Tarek since that dismal night in his office, when the doctor had shown him those documents. They left the main road and headed toward Amani’s building, Yehya instinctively taking the side streets. They passed several sleepy cafés and a few small shops lining the road, most closed for the day behind heavy metal grates, even though it was barely four o’clock in the afternoon.
Nagy said he’d heard many shops had closed for good. So many shopkeepers spent so long in the queue that they couldn’t buy or sell anything or supervise their employees, and so they decided to get rid of their merchandise. He heard that even people who didn’t need to join the queue did the same when the Disgraceful Events began; they closed their businesses one after another, fearing the losses that loomed on the horizon. A relative of his, a man in the know, told him that sometimes other people didn’t believe that the shops were vacant and broke in. When they didn’t find what they’d come for, they took everything they could carry: computers and chairs, cheese cutters and deli-meat slicers. Even metal padlocks disappeared off doors in those parts of town.