Authors: Basma Abdel Aziz
Yehya and Nagy wandered through the near-empty streets. No one knew when rush hour was anymore; there were no set working hours, no schedules or routines. Students left school at all sorts of times, daily rumors determined when employees headed home, and many people had chosen to abandon their work completely and camp out at the Gate, hoping they might
be able to take care of their paperwork that had been delayed there. The new decrees and regulations spared no one.
Yehya shook his head in silence. Since the Gate had materialized and insinuated itself into everything, people didn’t know where its affairs ended and their own began. The Gate had appeared rather suddenly as the First Storm died down, long before the Disgraceful Events occurred. The ruler at the time had been an unjust one, and popular resistance gathered to oppose him. The ensuing uprising wracked his reputation and jeopardized his properties and those of his cronies. It threatened to sweep away the system he and his inner circle found so agreeable and desperately wanted to preserve. One night, as tensions were building, the ruler broadcast a short speech on television, in which he spoke of “the necessity of reining in the situation.” There was no other harbinger of the Gate’s appearance: the next day, people awoke and it was simply there.
At first no one knew what this immense and awe-inspiring structure was that simply offered its name—the Main Gate of the Northern Building—as the pretext for its existence. Yet it was not long before people realized the importance that it now played in their lives. As the ruler faded from the public eye, it was the Gate that increasingly began to regulate procedures, imposing rules and regulations necessary to set various affairs in motion. Then one day the Gate issued an official statement detailing its jurisdiction, which extended over just about everything anyone could think of. This was the last document to bear the ruler’s seal and signature. As time passed, the Gate began to introduce a few new policies, and soon it was the singular source of all regulations and decrees. Before long, it controlled absolutely everything, and made all procedures,
paperwork, authorizations, and permits—even those for eating and drinking—subject to its control. It imposed costly fees on everything; even window-shopping was now subject to a charge, to be paid for by people out doing errands as well as those simply strolling down the sidewalk. To pay for the cost of printing all the documents it needed, the Gate deducted a portion of everyone’s salary. This way it could ensure a system of the utmost efficiency, capable of implementing its philosophy in full.
A full range of security units soon appeared, too: the Deterrence Force existed to guard the Gate, and appeared only when something signaled danger near the building itself. The Concealment Force was tasked with protecting Zephyr Hospital and other facilities whose documents, files, and information were highly secret. Finally, the Quell Force handled direct confrontation and random skirmishes with protesters during times of unrest and chaos. It was well known that these guards were the least disciplined of all, yet also the fiercest in combat.
Yehya was no stranger to the string of disasters that the Gate’s appearance had unleashed on the people. The company he worked for had nearly gone bankrupt after it was forced to pay new mandatory fees. Then a leaflet arrived, notifying the company that they’d been assigned with supplying equipment to the Alimentary Force. The task was prohibitively expensive and impossible to carry out without sustaining significant financial losses, and the company didn’t even work in food services to begin with. But their appeals were returned to them stamped
REJECTED
. They were forced to lay off a number of employees to fulfill the assignment, and though Yehya survived the first round, he didn’t expect to outlast the next. Murmurs of discontent circulated among the staff, but no one had
the courage to speak up. It soon became clear that the Gate and its security units had tightened their grip throughout the region. The Gate’s influence had begun to seep into businesses and organizations, onto the streets and into people’s homes.
Then one day, Yehya heard about people who could no longer stand what was happening. Word spread that a small group of people, who had recently joined together, were going to organize a protest. He was skeptical that an uprising would be possible under the Gate’s reign, but all the same he excused himself from work and left at the agreed-upon time, having decided to watch from afar. He had taken just a few steps in the direction of the square when he suddenly lost all sense of things—he realized he’d fallen to the ground, although he didn’t feel any pain, and then he lost consciousness. He didn’t wake up until he arrived at the hospital. Later, he learned that the Gate had closed that day in response to what became known as the Disgraceful Events. It hadn’t opened since, nor had it attended to a single citizen’s needs, yet it also hadn’t stopped issuing laws and decrees. It had to open, Yehya figured. What reason did it have to remain closed? The Disgraceful Events had ended by affirming the Gate’s hold on power and its growing omnipotence. Closing indefinitely made no sense, unless it was simply dealing out another form of punishment.
When they arrived at Amani’s building, Nagy made his excuses and left so that Yehya could be alone with Amani. Yehya rang the bell a couple of times before Amani opened the door. Despite how deeply she had longed to see him, she looked into his eyes for just a fleeting moment before her gaze instinctively traveled downward. She scrutinized his clothes, and he quickly realized she was searching for any sign of bandages.
Her face fell when she didn’t see any, and she was filled again with a sense of anxiety. Though she hadn’t believed in miracles since she was young, she kept wishing for one. She held fast to her hope that Yehya would undergo the operation: that it would succeed, he would recover, and this ridiculous nightmare they had been thrust into would end.
No matter what happened, Amani never changed. Yehya knew she was guided by her emotions and never considered things rationally. He knew she waited for her dreams to magically come true and never took obstacles into account, even if she was aware of them and how difficult they would be to overcome. He dealt with her optimism by trying to make reality match it as best he could, but this time was different. She’d been drawn into the incident herself. He pulled her close to him, putting an end to her inspection and wishful thinking. He kissed the top of her head and then her lips, but he couldn’t hold her as he wanted to—the pain shot through his left side mercilessly, and he sat down, telling himself that there had to be better days ahead. She sat with him for a few minutes in the living room, then went to the kitchen and returned carrying two teacups and the cake she’d baked to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday. He reflected with wry humor on the fact that it was the first birthday he’d celebrated with a bullet lodged in his guts.
She didn’t have any candles in the apartment, and neither of them felt like acting out the usual celebrations anyway—it was enough just to be together. She poured them tea and cut the cake into generous helpings, wishing all the while that the bullet would simply disappear. She kissed him on the forehead and handed him his plate, but he couldn’t eat with her; the stabbing pain had spread into his whole stomach and down
his thighs. He lay down on the sofa and closed his eyes, and she brought him a glass of water and sat in a chair next to him, not daring to touch him. She was distraught. It tormented her to see him sprawled out like this, weak and defeated, and she felt so stupid and powerless. She knew that a glass of water wouldn’t do anything to help. Yehya fell asleep and Amani wandered through her memories, pausing in front of the Northern Building where Yehya stood impatiently every day, waiting to enter. She’d seen the Northern Building often, but only ever from a distance: a strange crimson octagonal structure, slightly higher than the concrete walls that extended from it on either side. The main entrance to the building was the Gate itself, built into one of its eight sides. It had no visible windows or balconies, only barren walls of cast iron. If it weren’t for the people who’d once entered it and told of all the rooms and offices inside, anyone gazing up at it would have imagined it to be a massive block, solid and impenetrable.
Yehya didn’t sleep long. He was concerned when Amani fell silent and began to watch him attentively; she was counting his exhalations and synchronizing her breathing with his, so she would notice if anything changed. He gathered some strength and shifted on the sofa, and his face regained some life. It saddened him that they couldn’t find anything else to talk about, just this bewildering mess that had become their sole subject of conversation from dawn until the ominous hours of the afternoon. He woke up and fell asleep and walked and ate and drank, and deep inside his body was a bullet that refused to leave him.
Yehya sat up, and when Amani saw this, some of the concern lifted from her face. She suggested they visit Tarek if there was still time; she was sure she could appeal to his sense
of duty as a doctor and win him over, especially since things had changed since their last visit. Yehya had begun the necessary procedures: he had a place in the queue and would stay there until he received the permit. It was simply a matter of time now, nothing more, so maybe Tarek would show a little compassion and agree to help Yehya before all the paperwork was finished. There was no time for delay, or for adherence to arbitrary rules that weren’t helping anyone. Yehya nodded, took a small bite of cake, and slowly stood up, clutching his side.
They were nearly out the door when the telephone rang, and Amani hesitated a moment before returning and picking it up. Nagy’s baritone sprang out of the receiver, and he was pleased to hear her voice—it had been a long time since he’d seen her, maybe not since Yehya had been injured. He’d just finished his errands and was returning to the queue, and offered to walk Yehya back, but Amani asked him to meet them at the hospital instead. It was a chance to meet up after not having seen each other for a while, even if the place itself held bad memories for all three of them. Yehya took the phone from her to remind Nagy to be on his guard and watch his words if he arrived before them, to say nothing to Tarek about the other people waiting in the queue or why they were there. As Amani and Yehya walked down the stairs, she reminded him about the letter she’d sent him through Um Mabrouk; Yehya hadn’t told her what he was going to do about the suspicious doctor who’d dropped by the office where they worked. Yehya realized with surprise that he’d completely forgotten about it. Her vague letter had confused and worried him when he received it, and he’d meant to ask her to explain what had happened. It held only one real piece of information: Zephyr Hospital, the
place the man worked. Nothing aside from that, no name or rank or even his job title. The doctor hadn’t asked her to do anything, not even to inform Yehya that he had come—he’d just asked Amani a brief question and then left. Although this enigmatic message was the reason Yehya had left the queue to visit Amani, it had evaporated from his memory, its place filled with pain. But again they put the discussion aside: it was getting late, and they hurried to catch Tarek.
Nagy took the quickest route he knew to the hospital. The streets practically looked like a carnival these days; ever since the Events had ended, they were overflowing with street vendors selling all kinds of food, drinks, clothes, and an array of everyday items. He enjoyed the lively, bustling atmosphere. Most important for him, it was a gold mine of books and papers. He noticed a wooden birdcage covered in a pile of newspapers and magazines in a dimly lit corner, and a man sitting cross-legged next to it, half asleep, his head drooping onto his shoulder as if he were about to wake at any moment. Nagy scanned the headlines, searching for something in particular. Without waking the man he left money for a copy of
The Truth
and a magazine—in theory a quarterly but now published only as often as its editors could manage. Hunger stirred in the depths of his belly, and he paused in front of a cart where sweet potatoes were roasted and sold. But the smoke rising from it brought back memories of those recent unsettling events. He stood there, frozen for a moment, and then quickly walked on, empty-handed but for the newspaper and magazine.
Examinations Conducted, Visible Symptoms, and Preliminary Diagnosis
The patient is conscious, alert, and aware of his surroundings; blood pressure and pulse are normal; visible symptoms include: signs of choking and disruption of the nervous system, bleeding around entry and exit wounds caused by a [redacted], sign of recent abrasions and bruising on the back, pelvis, and forearm regions, [redacted;
injury
written above it] penetrating the pelvic region along with profuse bleeding, deviation of the wrist. Procedures conducted include [long sentence, redacted]
.
Required follow-up: Complete blood workup; kidney and liver function analysis; ultrasounds of the abdomen, pelvis, and chest; X-ray of the right forearm
.
Tarek read the document again and again. Each time, he flipped the page over to check the other side, and each time he found it blank. He was searching for the detailed description he’d written and signed off himself after seeing the X-ray, but it wasn’t there. There were pages missing; he didn’t know how they had disappeared, but some other hand had clearly been meddling with the file. All the useful information had been crossed out and replaced with a superficial report; not even a fresh graduate would write something this worthless, and he hadn’t any idea who had altered it.
He vividly remembered stopping the bleeding and performing a bit of first aid, and then being forced to close the wound, leaving the bullet where it was, next to Yehya’s bladder. An act like that would never have occurred to him; he was a surgeon with a solid understanding of his work and an awareness of its repercussions. But a younger colleague had informed him that he would need a special permit if he intended to extract the bullet. After a heated debate, the other doctor went to the filing cabinet, took out a stack of papers that had been placed carefully on the top shelf, and pulled out a light-yellow document. He threw it down in front of Tarek, fed up with his naïveté, and told him to read it before making a decision. Tarek picked up the document and was struggling to understand it when a high-pitched whistle shot through their confrontation.
An ambulance had arrived and the injured patients were meticulously divided into groups, Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed
among them. Their injuries were assessed, and then they were taken to the government-run Zephyr Hospital, which, according to announcements on the radio and TV, had gone above and beyond in its preparations for admitting the injured.
In his office now, Tarek left the file and folder on his desk and went to sit in the chair on the other side of the room, taking just the third document with him. This was the page that really bothered him, because every time he took it out of the file, began to read, and reached the end of the first paragraph, he remembered everything that had happened afterward. The morning after the Events, a doctor in military uniform appeared at the hospital and requested to meet him: him, Dr. Tarek Fahmy. The man refused to take a seat and turned down the cordial offers of tea or water while he was waiting. Tarek was summoned minutes later and tentatively approached to find a grave-looking doctor in his fifties pacing the lobby and pondering the imitation oil paintings hanging on the walls. Tarek invited him into his office and extended his hand, which the man shook coldly.
As soon as they shut the door behind them, the doctor produced the type of official ID that one didn’t dare question, inquired about Yehya’s X-ray, and then opened his briefcase and produced an order to confiscate it. Tarek asked if he would like some juice or something hot to drink, but the man firmly declined these, too. He stood up impatiently and asked Tarek for all existing copies of the X-ray. However, looking back, Tarek realized that the man hadn’t actually asked questions. He hadn’t phrased things in a way that left room for his request to be refused. The words that left his lips were direct orders, deftly coated with a sheen of courtesy but implying greater authority than any outpatient doctor possessed.
Tarek called the head nurse and told her to bring Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed’s file at once. The moment she knocked, the doctor grasped the handle, wrenched the door open, and snatched the file from her. Tarek stood there, his empty hand outstretched in her direction, where it remained suspended in the air for several seconds. The doctor told her to leave and not to disturb them, and shut the door again. In a leisurely way, he took a seat in Tarek’s leather chair, engrossed in the X-ray and ignoring Tarek, who remained where he’d been standing in front of the door. The man took everything out of the file and then nodded, satisfied. He carefully removed the X-ray with a single word—“Excellent”—and then left the room.
Despite having suffered a nearly unbearable level of humiliation, Tarek kept silent until the man had left. Even if he’d been given a chance, he wouldn’t have dared to object or question the doctor—he knew full well that the visit had something to do with the Gate of the Northern Building. Tarek would have been a fool to think there wouldn’t be consequences if he crossed a man like that, especially in such difficult and uncertain times. A few hours later, he heard that the new X-ray machine in the basement had severely malfunctioned, and Sabah mentioned that she’d seen a Gate car with tinted windows take it away to be inspected and repaired. Yehya returned to the hospital two or three days later, utterly exhausted. The wound that Tarek had stitched up with his own hands was bleeding, and the man looked like he was about to pass out. Yehya introduced himself, though he didn’t need to, and asked if Tarek could help him start the hospital-admittance procedures. He wanted to proceed with treatment to have the bullet removed, he said, and had left Zephyr Hospital to come here because the doctors there couldn’t conduct the surgery he
needed. After so many other injured people had arrived, they had told him his condition was relatively stable compared to the others, and had postponed the operation.
It made Tarek uneasy to remember how it hadn’t felt like the right time to tell Yehya about the official visit he’d received from the doctor who had been interested specifically in his case, despite all the other injured patients. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hide it forever; he knew Yehya would go looking for the X-ray when he came back, that one way or another he would discover it had been taken to Zephyr Hospital against his will, and that he wasn’t likely to see it again. The scene that followed flashed through his mind: the empty room to which he’d helped Yehya walk, the door he’d made sure to close so no one could eavesdrop, the cabinet from which he’d taken the yellow document, the same one that had stopped him from performing the operation when Yehya had first arrived, injured. He recalled how the papers felt as he flipped through them for the first time so they could read what it said together, and he remembered the look on Yehya’s face as he softly read aloud from the page in front of him:
Terms and Provisions Issued by the Gate on Conducting Work in Medical Facilities
.
Article 4 (A): “Authorization for the Removal of Bullets.” The extraction of a bullet or any other type of firearm projectile, whether in a clinic or a private or government hospital, from a body of a person killed or injured, is a criminal act, except when performed under official authorization issued by the Gate of the Northern Building; parties excluded from the above are limited to Zephyr
Hospital and its auxiliary buildings, which are direct subsidiaries of the Gate
.
Sanctions Imposed on Those in Violation of Article 4 (A): Anyone who violates Article 4 (A), deliberately or inadvertently, shall be penalized as follows: First, s/he shall be banned from practicing their profession; and Second, s/he shall be imprisoned for a period to be determined by a judge. After the period of his/her punishment has ended, s/he shall not be allowed to return to the same position or occupation, except after s/he undergoes a rehabilitation program, the length of which shall be specially determined by the Gate of the Northern Building; and s/he shall be required to undergo a periodic performance review, at a minimum of once every month, or more frequently, as the situation requires
.
There were a few lines written by hand in the margins, as if someone reading it had added a couple of points that might help the comprehension and implementation of the law.
“To explain the article and its provisions—this measure has been taken in response to current critical circumstances; as a rule, bullets and projectiles may be the property of security units, and thus cannot be removed from the body without special authorization.”
Sitting in his leather chair now, Tarek smiled. He remembered feeling the tension lift when he’d first absorbed that passage and realized what fate he had narrowly escaped. He had come so close to being investigated and interrogated, and yet had unwittingly avoided it. Any shame he’d felt because of Yehya had vanished; he had clearly taken the right course of action. He had concealed his relief at the time, saying he was
deeply sorry and advising Yehya to wait his turn at Zephyr Hospital, then had jumped up and handed him some strong antibiotics and a few boxes of painkillers. He had walked Yehya to the door, promising to perform the surgery if Zephyr Hospital was still too crowded, just as soon as Yehya brought him a permit from the Gate. Yehya should come see him anytime, he said, any day of the week, there was no need to make an appointment.
Tarek would later learn that Yehya had indeed gone to the Gate. It was recorded in Document No. 5 in the file lying before him on the desk, which stated that Yehya had arrived at the queue with a friend in early July, and while the date was not specified, the time was printed clearly at the top of the page:
9:25 a.m
.