by Rania Mamoun
She goes back inside and asks herself: what can I do?
She sees that he’s given up on the bed and thrown himself on the floor; she tries to lift him up and can’t, tries again and still can’t. She cries and runs outside again, goes to the clay urn, pours him some water, asks him to drink a cup to ease his pain, but he refuses. She begs, he takes a sip and looks at her, he’s silent and feels bad, then steels himself, and with her help, lifts himself back into bed to let the torture begin all over again.
Night shot
‘Where are you going, ma’am?’
‘I…’
‘It looks to me like you might need a ride.’
‘Thank you... I can’t tell you what a help that would be.’
Long shot
Men huddle on the pavement in front of the charity office. Some have wrapped themselves in blankets, turbans and rags, and are lying down. Others are sitting, discussing their woes. A few are nervous and remain standing, moving around, coming and going, maybe trying to keep warm.
Medium shot
Two women with an infant spread out several pieces of cardboard along an open-air corridor, and lay down opposite a little wooden service window that is closed. They are bundled up, and one young woman tries to use a piece of cardboard to cover her bare feet.
‘Good evening.’
‘Good evening to you,’ responds the young woman. The older woman rubs her forehead, rearranges her things, and goes back to sleep.
‘I thought I’d be the first one here!’
‘We’ve been here since ten this morning,’ the young woman says, and hands her a piece of paper. ‘You’ll need to fill out your name, here,’ she adds.
‘I don’t know how to write… can you write it for me?’
‘You’re number fifteen.’
‘When did the others sign up?’
‘Some folks write their names and leave, and then come back early in the morning. But it’s best if you’re sitting here when they call you.’
For a moment the woman stands there in silence. There’s a large rock nearby, and she thinks about sitting against it, until she hears the young woman speak to her again.
‘Go over to that officer there, and he’ll give you some cardboard to spread out like this. He’s the one who gave this to us.’
The woman goes to get some cardboard, she has no other choice. She can’t sit on the rock until morning; she has cystitis, and the cardboard will be more comfortable.
Flashback
‘One kidney has permanently failed, and the other is on its way. He needs a transplant.’
‘You mean there’s no cure?’
‘There is a cure – he needs a new kidney.’
‘This operation, how much does it cost?’
‘A lot.’
45-degree angled shot
A hospital bed. The woman sits next to it, nearby is a desk.
A faint voice: ‘Mum, let me die.’
‘And what’ll happen to me, then?’
‘The operation’s expensive. Where will we get that kind of money?’
‘God is generous, my son, he’ll provide for us.’
Dialogue
‘Do the operation, out of the goodness of your heart, and I’ll pay you when he recovers.’
‘An operation out of the goodness of my heart, ma’am? The hospital runs on money not goodwill.’
‘You mean you’re going to let him die?’ Her accusation steals his breath.
‘I have a solution for you, but there’s no guarantee. Write to the charity office and ask them to cover part of the cost.’
‘And the rest of it?’
‘I’ll pay for it. May God grant you easier times.’
‘Thank God for you, Doctor. God bless you.’
A smile spreads across her face.
Medium shot
An office with three desks. A man rests his feet on a desk, solving a crossword, with a half-empty cup of tea beside him.
Outside, the woman knocks on the door, receives no response, knocks again, and begins to doubt whether anyone is there. She peers inside, glimpses a shoe, cranes her neck to see more, and spots the employee.
Camera tracks the woman’s movement
She steps inside and greets him, still to no response. He seems irritated to see her. She gives up on hoping he’ll respond with a hello… and starts explaining what she needs.
‘I have the papers for my sick son.’
‘What’s he got?’ He says without raising his head from the newspaper.
‘It’s his kidneys.’
‘We only take serious diseases like that two days a week, Saturday and Wednesday. Get here early ‘cause it’s always busy, and make sure you bring all the paperwork.’
Medium shot
Same location as before. Open-air corridor in front of the wooden service window, thirty women sit on dirt and cardboard, two sharing the rock. Time: 4:30am.
The woman listens to the others nearby.
‘When will the window open?’
‘In half an hour.’
‘We’ll meet the committee exhausted like this?’
‘Of course. They might give you money or they might not.’
‘How many people does the committee see?’
‘Fifty, but that’s both men and women.’
‘I’ve come three times now, and every time they only let in a certain number of people. I told myself this time I have to spend the night.’
‘I’ve been coming for three months; every Saturday and Wednesday I’m here, and every time they tell me some form is missing; every time I bring them new forms they tell me another one’s missing.’
‘This is the first time I’ve been here,’ says another woman. ‘We sold the house for Mother’s treatment, but the money still wasn’t enough, so we were forced to come here. Me and my brothers decided that charity was our only hope.’
‘The money they give out isn’t enough, but it’s better than nothing.’
Close-up
The woman’s face: slender, brown, exhausted, sad. Wrinkles have settled on her face, especially around her mouth and eyes. Hollow eyes, somewhat prominent cheeks. Under her headscarf, wisps of white carve through the black. Her gaze is steady, but her mind wanders.
‘I don’t have a house to sell, or brothers to make the decision with… It’s just me and him,’ she says to no one in particular.
The shot zooms in, focuses on her eyes, luminous eyes filled with pain, fixed on a point in the distance. After an age she blinks, a sign that the scene in her mind has changed.
Tears tumble from her eyes. The camera pans down to a fallen tear, the focus sharpens and it fills the screen.
The tear is a great, transparent orb of water, an ocean in which her late husband appears, lying on a low, woven cot, an anqareeb. In real time, their son, a boy once more, plays with his father’s moustache, plucking at it and then jumping about rambunctiously, and she sits there laughing happily, beside three cups and a pot of tea with milk.
Cut
Doors
He woke up early, unusual for him, and got out of bed with cheerful enthusiasm.
He headed to the tap to wash his face and freshen his breath with minty toothpaste, but discovered the water had been shut off. God! When had they come? Did they never sleep!
Then he remembered that he hadn’t paid the utility bill this month. But how could he, if paying for water meant not paying for something else?
He could do without electricity for a month, without water for a month, without a phone for a month. He could stand the shopkeeper’s frustrations and the landlord’s provocations, and he swore, if the government allowed people to sleep on the streets, he could do without a house for a month, too. With that, he put ‘house’ on his ‘marginal list’, the list of things he could do without.
He tried not to give this trivial, inconsequential thing the pleasure of spoiling his good mood; he overcame it. He and his family always kept extra water just i
n case, and when that ran out, probably about two days into the shutoff, he could run a hose from his neighbour’s house.
‘Fill up a bucket and fast,’ he shouted to his son. ‘I need to shower and get out of here.’
He shut the bathroom door behind him, even though it was ridden with holes.
Cold water cascaded over his body and he felt invigorated. He wished the day would skip over the next two hours, cast them aside or return to them later. Either would be fine; what he wanted was to shut his eyes, open them, and find that it was nine o’clock, time to start his new job.
From that day forward he wouldn’t have to wait for his brothers to send money sporadically from abroad; he wouldn’t change his route to avoid the shopkeeper, or the butcher, or the neighbour who lent them part of his pension.
Their meals wouldn’t follow the rule of ‘here one day, gone the next, the third day only crumbs’; his children wouldn’t go to bed without dinner, without even a little glass of milk.
‘No no no… get out of here, boy… Mohammed, c’mere c’mere, your brother shoved the door. Ali grab that boy there, the door’ll fall on his foot…’
The bathroom door was nothing more than a sheet of zinc with partially patched holes, but it mostly concealed whoever was behind it.
He got dressed without rinsing all the soap off his body, and swore that he would replace this corroded piece of zinc they generously called a door.
He made some tea, adding just a small pinch of sugar as usual. He put his faith in God, praised His name, and went to leave, but…
The front door! What was with the door? He tried to open it, pushed harder and harder, but it wouldn’t budge. It was a double door, and one side was shorter than the other.
‘Damn this warped door!’ he said scornfully. ‘Mohammed, I’ve told you a hundred times not to shut this blasted door so hard… when you slam it, it sticks like this.’
After a torrent of angry words he finally managed to open the door, with a screech heard by half of the neighbourhood. He looked down, and saw that the right sleeve of his freshly pressed shirt was now completely wrinkled.
But… no matter. He didn’t want anything to spoil his mood. He tried to smooth the fabric with his other hand and kept walking. A bus was waiting and he quickly stepped aboard; he didn’t want to be late for his first day.
‘Get everyone in the doorway to move back into the bus, boy,’ shouted the driver. ‘Good lord, getting fined is the last thing we need this morning.’
As soon as the driver stopped speaking, the man felt himself being pushed by many hands and a struggle began.
‘Brothers, please, move all the way in, God bless…’
One man punched his neighbour, the person next to him stamped on another one’s foot, and a tall man was hunkered down so much it looked as if he were praying.
‘Guys, open the window… it’s hot, and meningitis is going around!’ someone yelled.
Finally the bus arrived at the station. He pried himself from the crowd and sped off towards the office. Only when he arrived did he realise that the bus door had snagged his shirt. He tore off the flap of fabric and kept walking in his ripped shirt.
He went over it in his mind. No one will notice the tear, he convinced himself. He would try to stand so that no one could see it, and would buy a new shirt in a few days. He was a different man than he’d been yesterday when he was unemployed.
He entered the office owned by a certain businessman. (He was one of those men who appeared on the scene quite suddenly: rich, with an unknown past. All anyone knew was that he was a businessman. Since when, how? No one knew).
But… why should he care? It was none of his business, what mattered to him was this job, everything else was unimportant. He would work hard, prove his skills, and move up in life. Maybe this job would even open up other doors among the business elite.
The water would be turned back on, he wouldn’t need to do without the things on his ‘marginal list’ – he’d have everything on the list every single month. He would buy a new bathroom door, install it himself, and repair the floor. He would fix the warped front door soon, too. They wouldn’t need to skimp on sugar in their tea any more, even if it was healthier, and he would… he would… he would... He let himself sink into daydreams.
He reached the businessman’s office on the second floor, and gazed at the beautiful door, solid and well-made. It must be from a factory that makes doors and windows and other things, or maybe it’s imported, he thought to himself. At any rate, it definitely hadn’t come from a workshop in the nearby industrial zone.
A sleek, elegant plaque was affixed up high, engraved with the word: DIRECTOR.
He felt the door, how cold it was, and took a deep breath. He grasped the handle, and said to himself: I’ve done it; at last I’ve made it into the world.
But… What was wrong with it?! Why wouldn’t it open? Was it warped like his front door? Or off its hinges like his bathroom door? Did it snatch clothing like the bus door?
He turned the handle a few times, knocked, knocked again, and then again, with no response.
An office boy passed by.
‘Is the director in?’ he asked the boy.
‘You want the boss?’
‘Of course I do, why else d’you think I asked?’ he snapped.
‘Are you Amr Ahmed?’
‘Yes that’s me, in flesh and blood.’
‘Sorry, the boss said that when you arrived, to tell you that the position was offered to someone else, and he’d taken it.’
‘What! What are you talking about?’
‘Honest, that’s what happened.’
Injustice... anger… rebellion. He banged on the door and tried to force it open… and the hole in his shirt ripped further. What would happen to his children? He’d put all his hopes on this job, he deserved it, he was qualified, why had it been given to someone else? Why?!
He wouldn’t leave without getting an answer to his questions, without knowing the reason. He thought about his situation, his house, his ‘marginal list’, his brothers who trickled support to him, his warped front door, the propped up bathroom door.
Exhausted by everything he had been through, and desperately tired of thinking about tomorrow, he threw himself to the ground before the director’s door and cried.
He cried feverishly, in defeat, out of a sense of injustice, and he lay there, intermittently lifting his gaze, wishing for it to open or for someone to look out. His wait stretched on, and the door stayed impassively shut.
A Woman Asleep on Her Bundle
I didn’t think her that tall or slender when I saw her sitting by the mosque wall. At night she was curled up, and in the morning she sat with her skinny legs outstretched.
I saw her carrying an old-fashioned bundle, oil-soaked and dark in hue, as she walked down the street, her legs long like crochet needles, taking lengthy strides. When you saw her, you forgot everything you knew about steady steps and straight lines. She seemed to have her own rhythm, her own sense of harmony: she leant to the right for a moment, then swerved to the left, in syncopated steps. She carried the bundle in her right hand and tucked the corner of her dress under her left arm, which swung freely by her side.
She took up residence by the mosque wall out of the blue, making a home under the neem trees with their dense foliage, trees whose leaves stand up straight and shade the area around them. There was lots of talk about her. Everyone had questions and everyone had answers, and while the answers differed, the stories all started the same way.
People who had lived in the neighbourhood for a long time said that she’d owned a house not far from the mosque, and that she’d once had money. But then ‘Madame Cash’ tricked her and took her house... although some people said she’d bought it. ‘Madame Cash’ earned her nickname because she had lots of money and gold, which her granddaughter once tried to steal to give to her father.
A lady whose name I don’t know told me that the woman by th
e mosque had children, one of whom was a composer. When I asked why they let her live like this, she said the woman runs away from them: every time they take her back home, she refuses to stay.
I often saw her speaking to people that no one else could see, sometimes arguing with them or raising a threatening finger. On rare occasions she laughed and chatted amicably with them, but mostly she scolded them. Perhaps she contained too much anger, and that was the only way she could let it all out.
Many a time I tried to understand what she was saying by neatly sorting her words and storing them in my mind, but I never succeeded. From her expression and intonation you could tell that she was speaking to an apparition, but you could never truly understand what she was saying. She had created her own world with them and immersed herself in it, unable to find her way out of their labyrinths, and uninterested in us curious passersby.
One of my sister’s friends told me that children made fun of her, they cursed and threw stones at her because she often launched stones at people herself, and that one time she chucked rocks at a group of young girls just because they said hello. But since I’d never seen this myself, and since it seemed unlikely, I carried on greeting her every day, and she never threw a stone at me. Even so, that story stayed in the back of my mind, and every time I said good morning I imagined a rock flying at my head instead of a greeting in return.
One time I passed her, I noticed that she had long features, dark and deep-set eyes, face tattoos, and that her hair was thinning, perhaps with age.
She was always clean, never smelled bad and often glistened from the way she oiled her legs and hands. I often saw her moisturise, and sometimes I glimpsed her washing her clothes at the tap in the mosque before hanging them in some good Samaritan’s courtyard, either inside or in the open air. Opposite the mosque’s eastern door, there was a walled-off area covered with hessian and plastic sheeting that was home to two scraggly neem trees that spread scant shade beneath them.