The Queue (5 page)

A middle-aged man gathered his nerves and decided to leave the queue without a word, just as Yehya and Nagy had done. He slipped away without making a fuss, but accidently left his newspaper and bag behind. He had already walked quite far and was about to get into a microbus when a stranger behind him in the queue noticed and called out to him, but with no luck. The stranger picked up the bag and rushed after the man, shouting, but the microbus sped away with the man inside, oblivious to the shouts and unaware that he had left his things behind. At a loss, the stranger returned to the queue and found that a group of people had gathered to watch the situation unfold. He opened the bag in front of them, but there was nothing in it that revealed the owner’s identity. A ring of people formed around him. One onlooker said that the bag now belonged to the person who found it, but the man was too shy to agree with this suggestion and insisted that he wouldn’t take it for himself.

The man in the
galabeya
intervened, assuring him there was nothing wrong with taking the bag, so long as he’d tried in good faith to return it to its owner. It was manna from heaven, he said, and what could be wrong with that? Things would have ended there were it not for a woman with short hair and a black skirt who had just arrived, looking for an empty place closer to the Gate. She joined the little gathering and proposed
that they keep the bag for a day or two, and if its owner—who would likely come back looking for it—hadn’t returned by then, it would be best to hand it over to the official sitting in a nearby booth, or to the guard posted nearby. That way no one could say they’d done anything wrong or taken something that didn’t belong to them. Her presence among them irritated the man in the
galabeya
. He turned away from her sanctimoniously, and she heard him mutter a prayer for busybodies to be led toward the right path, and the same for fools and the ignorant, who know not the difference between righteousness and sin. A few people sided with him, disgruntled that she’d interjected, and a clean-shaven man, averting his gaze, asked whether it was right to listen to the opinion of a woman standing so immodestly among a group of men. He didn’t wait for a response, and placing his hand on the shoulder of the man with the bag—who was becoming increasingly distressed at the center of a rapidly growing audience—he told him to empty it out so everyone else could divide its contents among themselves, and thus keep any one of them from falling into sin.

Ines found herself standing at the edge of a crisis erupting just a few feet away from her. While it troubled her to see the woman being attacked, she remained where she was, trying to stay out of the argument. But as insult after insult was hurled upon the woman, who stood her ground and tried to protect the bag, Ines couldn’t take it anymore, and moving closer to the circle, she shouted: “She’s right.” Her voice emerged feeble and faint, yet loud enough that they all turned around. The man in the
galabeya
stared at her for a long time without responding. However brief, her words had unambiguously allied her with the other woman. It was clear that an opposing side was forming.

Ines felt her face grow red as a wave of embarrassment passed over her; her interjection had halted the discussion, and curious faces began to inspect her as if waiting for her to utter something further. Finally Ehab, that journalist who often hung around, intervened. He offered to take the bag to the newspaper headquarters where he worked, make an inventory of what was in it, and publish a small notice with a description. Maybe the owner would recognize the bag, and he would probably rather pick it up from the newspaper office than go to the Booth near the Gate. A few people opposed Ehab’s suggestion, but the rest agreed with him, and so Ines returned to her place in one piece, while the woman with the short hair continued her search for somewhere to stand.

The queue grew calm as the disc of sun slipped down behind the Gate. The period of rest had begun, the hour when Hammoud always arrived with drinks. A few people performed their evening prayers, while others sat cross-legged on the ground, waiting for tea and
yensoon
, the hot anise drink. But the boys from the coffee shop didn’t arrive. Time dragged on. After a whole hour went by from the time they usually came, people began to fidget and grumble, and finally someone called out to the microbus driver, asking if he knew where the boys were. The driver told him there was construction going on near the coffee shop, and all the boys were busy serving the workers. Ehab tried calling Hammoud on the phone (he was keen to discuss the day’s updates and stories from the queue, and record their conversation), but without success. Then he tried to call a colleague at the newspaper, but his phone couldn’t get any signal. He took the battery out, put it back in, and tried again: no luck. He started to walk around, and soon discovered that he was not the only one having problems.

It began gradually, affecting just a few others, then dozens, then hundreds, and the numbers kept rising, until people finally realized it was a system-wide outage. Amid the confusion, the man in the
galabeya
strolled toward Ines, fiddling with his prayer beads and pretending not to be heading straight for her. She was startled when he stopped just a couple of steps away, his wide eyes staring right at her. He bade her the full, formal religious greeting with a reedy voice that was so incongruous with his sullen visage that she just barely stopped herself from laughing out loud. She returned the greeting hesitantly, consciously lowering her gaze, as was proper. He offered to let her use his cell phone, which still worked despite the outage, in case her family was worried or would want to know where she was. She thanked him, surprised, but there was no one she needed to call—her parents wouldn’t be back from the Gulf for another two months, and her sister, who was married, would still be working at the preschool at this hour. She didn’t know what made her open up to him and share such personal information, but he stroked his beard contentedly and told her she could use his phone whenever she wanted. He went back to his place in the queue but not before casting a fleeting glance at her hands; he was pleased with her tender skin and the absence of a ring.

The hospital where Tarek worked wasn’t far, but Amani insisted that Yehya shouldn’t walk there when he was so tired. They flagged down a taxi, each thinking about what the meeting might bring.

Yehya went over the events in his mind, so that he wouldn’t slip up when talking to Tarek. When he had arrived at Zephyr Hospital on the night of June 18, there had been dozens of people like him, maybe even hundreds. There were some with three or four bullets lodged in their bodies and others with less-serious injuries. When they postponed his operation, Yehya complained to the nurses for two whole days, but he quickly changed his tune on the third, when a medical report was released about the other patient in his room. The man lay there in a coma with a bullet in his head; Yehya had actually seen him get shot. But the report claimed that the man had suffered an epileptic fit and somehow fallen from a great height onto a solid metal object, injuring his head and thus passing into a coma. Furthermore, the report emphasized that no bullets had been visible on the man’s X-ray. Around noon, Yehya heard the same thing reported about two other patients who had just left the operating room. Later that day, he borrowed a phone from the father of the patient in the room with him, called Amani, and asked her to come and visit him sooner than they’d arranged. In clipped words, he conveyed
that strange things were happening and that he no longer felt comfortable staying there. He wasn’t sure whether they would operate on him to remove his bullet, which perhaps had also inexplicably disappeared.

On the fourth day after he was injured, he called Amani again and learned that she hadn’t been able to enter the hospital because of its complex security procedures. These were imposed to “ensure patient comfort,” she had been informed. She also told him that the Gate had released a statement claiming that no bullets had been fired at the place and time at which he had been injured. Several prominent journalists published full-page articles concurring that no bullets had been found, neither in the bodies of the dead nor of the injured. Eyewitnesses they quoted insisted that the people who caused the Disgraceful Events were just rioters who had suddenly “lost all moral inhibitions” and flown into a frenzy: first they insulted one another, then they threw stones, and finally they seized iron bars from an old, vacant building belonging to the Gate. Any injuries they sustained were simply puncture wounds they suffered while struggling over the bars they’d wrenched off.

On the phone, Amani read him a statement in
The Truth
newspaper made by an anonymous doctor supervising the treatment of the wounded at Zephyr Hospital. The doctor asserted that the high mortality rate was due to the fact that these rioters were simply too sensitive. Upon hearing one another’s harsh words, they’d succumbed automatically, their hearts having stopped before the ambulances even arrived. Others had stumbled upon the grisly scene and were so traumatized by it that they froze, and then they collapsed, too, falling one after another like dominoes. Some journalists went even further and published unconfirmed reports that the people
who died were not in fact killed but had committed suicide when they saw what had happened. They even claimed that one of them had stabbed several others with an iron stake before turning it upon himself, Japanese seppuku-style. At this point, Yehya made a decision. He slipped away from his bed unnoticed and returned alone to the hospital where Tarek worked. When he arrived, he caught a glimpse of the doctor in the lobby, but was suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue and forgot the doctor’s name. He gestured toward him inquiringly, and a nurse responded automatically, without even glancing at the rotations sheet: Dr. Tarek Fahmy.

Back in the taxi, Yehya remembered the papers that Tarek had shown him in the hospital that day and let out a sigh. At first he couldn’t believe they were real, and looked carefully through the whole pile. But when he saw the Gate’s stamp on the back of every page, he realized that there was nothing he could do. He’d left the hospital and spent the first night lying by the side of the road. He felt hopeless: he couldn’t ask any friend or acquaintance for help. He didn’t have his phone on him, he couldn’t even walk, and no passing car would give him a lift because his injury looked so suspicious that helping him would put them in danger. The next day he begged a sympathetic stranger to let him use his phone, and was able to reach Nagy, who brought him home. Nagy stayed with him for days, how many exactly Yehya didn’t know, until the bleeding had stopped and the wound had closed, trapping the bullet in his pelvis. Then Nagy had gone with him to the Gate for the first time in their lives.

The car stopped on a quiet street, and Yehya snuffed out his memories. He paid the driver and stepped out of the taxi. Yehya walked through the hospital door with Amani by his
side at precisely six in the evening, when Tarek’s shift began. They saw that Nagy had beaten them there, as they’d expected he would, and taken up a prime reconnaissance position that enabled him to see everyone who came in and out of the lobby. Sabah appeared apprehensive when she saw them. She was standing by the information desk, chatting happily with a colleague, and as they walked in, she stopped midsentence, revealing that she knew exactly who he was. He remembered her quite well, too, from his two previous visits to the hospital: her round face lined with care. She tried to act normal, greeting him with her customary phrase for all visitors, and asked him some standard questions as if he were one of the scores of new patients she saw every day. But the expression on her face betrayed her unease, and her words came out shaky and jumbled, her voice wavering. “I’ll look for him,” she said, as she rushed off toward Tarek’s office. “But, of course, Dr. Tarek might have left, he never works nights.”

The first time Sabah had seen Yehya was the night of the Disgraceful Events, as he was carried into the emergency room. She took him in, put an IV in the back of his hand to administer blood and fluids, and then left to help other patients while Tarek dealt with his injuries and observed his general state of health. That same night, at exactly 3:30 a.m., after all the patients had been transferred, Sabah received a personal call from a senior doctor at Zephyr Hospital, an influential man. He told her not to ask questions, but to go to the filing department, remove Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed’s medical file, read it to him, and then alter some of the language to match what he had personally observed in the patient. The doctors and nurses were all overwhelmed with fatigue and the horror of what they had seen that day. Everyone went to lie down the first chance they got, and those who weren’t on the night shift headed home to sleep, as they all expected the events to continue the following day.

Sabah didn’t have much choice; the discussion was over in seconds. She was just a junior nurse there, young and insignificant, while the man on the other end was extremely senior, in age and position. Senior enough, perhaps, to fire her from this job and any other she might find, senior enough to shut down the entire hospital.

After things calmed down somewhat, when the night owls
began to quiet and security measures waned, Sabah was able to sneak off and carry out the orders she had been given, fully and precisely. The second time she saw Yehya was an unlucky coincidence. He ran into her in the lobby, half-conscious and disoriented, asking for Tarek but not by name. Yehya didn’t spend long with him, and he left shortly afterward. She’d forgotten all about him, but now here he was, appearing before her for the third time like a ghost.

Nagy put the newspaper aside and joined his friends. Amani sat across from the corridor to the doctors’ offices, while Yehya leaned back against the wall, trying to stave off the pain by staying still as much as possible. He’d grown used to standing in the queue for hours on end, and now could stay like that for a whole day without his feet tiring or troubling him.