The Queue Read online

  She’d only made a mistake once, a few days ago. A student in the Arabic class she taught handed in an essay she’d written, just an ordinary homework assignment, the kind all students did. The girl had written a long, brilliant paper about the conditions in the district where she lived, and then went on to speak more broadly about the state of the country and developments in the region. The girl’s words echoed what Ines herself might say if no one were listening. She was so impressed that she began to doubt the student, suspecting that one of the girl’s older sisters, or perhaps a parent, had written the essay. The students usually did better on homework than exams, but perhaps someone else had written at least the outline for her. The girl swore she hadn’t had help from anyone in her family, that every thought and sentence was hers alone. Ines was inclined to believe her, so she gave the student a nearly perfect grade, had the class applaud her, and asked the girl to read her essay in front of the other students, as an example of outstanding work.

  The next day, the girl was absent from school. A soft-spoken inspector arrived at the principal’s office, asking to see Ines’s Personnel File and inquiring as to how she’d been hired. He informed the principal that Ines was missing certain forms and that she needed to go to the Gate to obtain a Certificate of True Citizenship. He told him that if she didn’t, he would be forced to refer her to the Administrative Office, where she would be retested and reevaluated, and they would determine whether it was truly in everyone’s best interest for her to continue as a teacher. Before leaving the school, he left a cassette tape with the principal. Ines later learned that it was a recording of the girl reading her assignment.

  Unlike other children, who flit from one idea to the next, Ines had always wanted to be a teacher. As a child she often lined up her dolls in a long row on the bed, taking a ruler in hand and explaining a lesson. She would ask them questions, one doll after the next, and imagined their answers. When she grew a bit older, she continued her favorite game by seating the neighbors’ children in a row on the stairs of their building. Holding a branch she’d snapped off a tree, she gave her students colored stones as rewards or smacked their shoulders with the stick to reprimand them for their ignorance. But now, she was the one standing there like a student who had committed the gravest mistake, waiting to be disciplined. Maybe this one slip-up would prevent her from pursuing the only thing she knew how to do. She glanced at the others standing in the queue before pausing to contemplate Yehya’s gaunt face. He was staring off into the distance.

  Yehya hadn’t interrupted the old woman since she’d begun to talk. He was oblivious to her, immersed in his own thoughts. He didn’t hear a word of her story, or of the other conversations around him, but she hadn’t stopped chattering away, nor had she given up her stubborn efforts to win his attention, as if it were a personal challenge. Ines watched the scene unfold. “Everyone’s got enough of their own problems,” she whispered under her breath.

  Weariness crept across Yehya’s face, and deep furrows formed between his eyebrows. Nagy, who was squatting on the ground beside his friend, had become restless and wanted to leave. Yehya bent over slightly and groaned softly, and Nagy stood up and grabbed Yehya’s arm, telling him to sit in his place for a little while. He’d been reclining under the shade of a yellow cloth banner whose colors had faded in the weeks since the election but still showed the candidate’s face, his big red heart logo, and the familiar violet party symbol. Yehya turned down Nagy’s offer, not out of pride, but because the pain was so bad he couldn’t bend his knees to lower his body that short distance to the ground. He searched in his pocket for a strip of the painkillers he always carried with him but found just an empty packet. A handsome young man in front of them had been eavesdropping over Nagy’s shoulder, and he offered a couple of pills of an over-the-counter medicine, the kind for headaches. He also offered to save Yehya’s place in the queue, if he wanted to lie down at the man’s place for a bit, but Nagy thanked him on Yehya’s behalf, saying he’d heard that the Gate would open today. It seemed certain this time, he said, and they couldn’t miss a chance that might not come again soon.

  The young man took a step closer and, whispering, asked them what they needed from the Gate. Yehya gave Nagy a soft jab in the side, so slight that no one else noticed, and quickly replied, “Oh nothing, just permission for medical treatment. I’ve got this silly little stomach pain. It keeps me up at night, and I need some special medicine for it—the doctor gave me a prescription when I went to the hospital, and I asked around at several pharmacies, but no one’s got it. People who take it say it’s available in public clinics, but you know how it is—they need permission from the Gate to fill your prescription.”

  The young man nodded solemnly and looked like he was about to say something else, but then changed his mind and returned to where he’d been standing. The old woman interjected, saying that medicine only made you sicker, while a cup of warm mint tea would bring back his health and get rid of his pain too. She tutted disapprovingly, leaned over to Ines, and pushed some dried mint stalks into her hand. “Tomorrow I’ll get some hot water from the coffee shop around the corner and make you tea with this,” she said. Nagy leaned over and whispered in Yehya’s ear that if he had half the faith she did, it would do him a lot of good. With a grin, Yehya shot back, “If you had half her faith, we wouldn’t have to listen to you ramble on all the time.”

  UM MABROUK

  Um Mabrouk had just finished tidying up the last room when it was time for her to leave. She went into the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and changed out of her wet clothes, washed her face, and put on a clean galabeya and low heels. She made sure she had everything in her handbag, felt around for the envelope inside it for the third time, and then said goodbye to the employees who were still in the office and rushed off, just managing to squeeze herself into a microbus before it pulled away from the sidewalk. When she arrived at the Gate there was a river of people flooding the street, and as she got off at the corner, she snagged her stocking on a bit of metal jutting out from the bottom of the microbus door that never closed. She hitched up the hem of her galabeya and saw a wide hole quickly unraveling upward. Her last bottle of nail polish had just run out, but she kept smiling all the same. She walked alongside the queue, assuring people she wasn’t skipping ahead of them but had just come searching for a relative, and passed dozens of people before she arrived at Yehya. She recognized him by the back of his head before seeing his face, and reached out to shake his hand.

  “Hello, Yehya. I’ve got a letter for you from the office.”

  Yehya seemed concerned by her sudden arrival, but he tried to appear welcoming, as if he’d been expecting her.

  “Ahlan, ahlan … how’re you doing, Um Mabrouk? I’m so glad you managed to make it.” She handed him the envelope, a smile still on her lips.

  “I don’t know what’s inside—good news, I hope. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Thanks, you really shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.”

  Um Mabrouk rushed off, and Yehya’s heart trembled, sending convulsions down his left side and bringing him a new wave of pain. A faint shudder shook his hand as he held the envelope, which Nagy urged him to open. The only thing inside was an unlined white page with a few handwritten sentences.

  Dear Yehya, I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to tell you that a doctor came to the office yesterday looking for you, he was wearing a military uniform and said he works at Zephyr Hospital, but he didn’t ask about anything else. Let’s meet soon. Amani.

  After reading the letter, Yehya fell into deep and troubled thought. He didn’t want anything to do with the hospital or anyone in it. He hadn’t seen Amani for a whole week; they’d agreed on a time to meet and talk about what was happening, but he was stuck here in the queue. He passed most of the day there and sometimes even spent the night, as many others did. Nagy had offered to bring him a tent to sleep in, but he’d turned it down. He would rather be like everyone else,
chatting until the early hours of the morning and then nodding off for an hour or two in his place. People around him stood there so resolutely, he hadn’t seen many sleeping or even sitting down in recent days. Everyone expected the queue to move at any minute, and they wanted to be ready. He found himself doing the same, even though he didn’t believe what they told him about the Gate—that it might open at dawn, or even deep in the middle of the night.

  On her way back home, Um Mabrouk sank into a seat on the old metro, enjoying a moment of rest after a long, tiring day. In her heart, she knew she couldn’t work this hard anymore, not like she had when she was young and in full health. Um Mabrouk had first worked for Amani’s mother. Then Amani had introduced her to the owner of the company she worked for, and he’d hired her to clean, work in the kitchen, and lend a hand around the office three days a week. When Amani’s mother passed away, followed soon after by her father, Um Mabrouk started to work at Amani’s office full-time: five days a week, morning to afternoon, with only a few minutes for a lunch break. When the expenses for her apartment and children rose like floodwaters and she could barely stay afloat, she took on two more small houses for her days off. Um Mabrouk’s face was lined with sorrow. If fate hadn’t been so hard on her, she wouldn’t have been tossed from cleaning one house to another, working so many jobs.

  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.

  TWO

  Document No. 2

  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.