The Queue

by Basma Abdel Aziz

  NOTHING

  The man questioned her about her name, age, marital status, education, profession, and place of residence, but it was clear that he already knew all the answers. Then he leaned back from the desk and asked what Amani was doing on the fifth floor when she knew it was a restricted area. She tried to remain as calm and polite as possible, and apologized. She wasn’t familiar with the place, she said, she just wanted to pick up her cousin’s X-ray, and was running late for their meeting with the doctor. He was bound to come looking for her, and would tell her family, she added, who no doubt were worried sick because she hadn’t called. Amani was standing in the middle of the room with the pink sign, where they’d brought her once they’d found her. The room was filled with files stacked so high that she couldn’t see the walls. She had a vague sense of fear and the feeling that she was somewhere she shouldn’t be, but she trusted that she could talk her way out, and her thoughts remained firmly on Yehya and helping him. The man said nothing. Someone she couldn’t see came up from behind her and stopped in front of him, addressing him with effusive respect.

  “Safwat basha, there aren’t any files under the name Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed here, sir.”

  “That should be sufficient for you,” he said to Amani. “We have no files under that name here, so don’t go troubling yourself and troubling me, too.”

  “But I know he was transferred here to Zephyr Hospital, and left two days later.”

  “Excellent. Then clearly he had no reason to stick around, and no need for treatment.”

  She raised her voice in response; his comment had provoked her, and she grew angry when she realized he was enjoying toying with her.

  “No, there was a lot he needed—there was a bullet in his pelvis, a bullet from when he was shot during the Disgraceful Events.”

  The stony-faced man rose from his seat, tall and broad, and then slammed his fist down on the desk with a loud crack. The files shook on their shelves and some fell to the floor.

  “No one was injured by any bullet that day or the day after or on any other day, do you understand?”

  She took a step back, but she’d lost her temper. Her self-control crumbled, and she shouted back at him.

  “Lies! He’s wounded, and the bullet is still in his body, and as soon as they do the operation and he has the bullet in his hand he’ll tell everyone who shot him, and then you’ll have your proof!”

  Silence hung in the air, she heard only the pounding of her heart, while the veins on both sides of her forehead swelled and shivers ran up and down her arms. She was breathing hard, as if poised to defend herself from an impending attack.

  Nothingness. She wasn’t blindfolded, but all she could see was black. She moved her palms away from her face … nothing. She heard no voices, her hands felt no walls, no columns, no bars. She saw and felt nothing, only the solid earth underneath her, where she stood or sat or slept. Perhaps she was only earth, too. She walked in every direction but met nothing but a void. She tried to scream, to be silent and listen out for other voices, to swear and curse every person who deserved to be punished for wronging her. Or even just name them. The Gate and the people who ran it. Violet Telecom. The High Sheikh. And then she took it all back and asked for forgiveness, rebelling then pleading, filled with courage then wracked with tears. But everything remained as it was: nothingness.

  She didn’t know how she’d arrived in this emptiness, how time was passing, or whether it was passing at all. Again and again, she tried to let sleep wash over her, so that she would wake from this nothingness. She wanted to wake up to something else, anything else but this. She wanted to see color or just a single point of light, even if it were only in her dreams, but her dreams failed her, even her daydreams. First the color drained from her imagination, then so did the light, so that her mind too became black. Gradually, she began to forget faces: her mother’s, Yehya’s, her boss’s. The familiar details of their faces became blurry until they were featureless. Was it possible that her own memory was being stolen from her? That she would lose forever the images that had lived in her mind for so long? She had nothing to touch but her own body, could hear nothing but her own voice when she let out a sound. All she had was this strange ground. It didn’t have the coldness of stone, or the feel of wood when she walked on it, or the texture of carpet or any other material. She bent down and brought her nose close to it, but it had no scent either; she realized she couldn’t smell it, couldn’t smell anything, not even her sweat, or her clothes. What had happened to her clothes? She was no longer wearing her jeans or her jacket, didn’t have her purse. Was it possible that they’d taken her off the face of the earth, out into space, and had left her naked on a dark, uninhabited planet? What had happened to her before she’d woken up and found herself here? She opened her eyes, first one then the other, prying them open with her fingers, then she touched her thighs and her breasts and in between her legs, checking they hadn’t … She shouted and shouted, she swore she would never oppose them again, she pleaded for forgiveness, and then out of desperation she promised she wouldn’t see Yehya again. She felt her body trembling and the muscles of her face contract. Things would never go back to how they were. She tried to open her mouth, struggling, and then said that she’d lied. She admitted that he wasn’t her cousin, he wasn’t waiting for her, wasn’t going to tell her family, she didn’t even have a family. But still nothing. With every moment that passed she was drawing closer to the edge of collapse. She couldn’t put together a rational thought anymore, or come up with possibilities, not the way she’d always been able to. It felt as though time had paused, and dropped her into a well of madness.

  She wished they would beat her, she said she was ready to be tortured, she slapped her face with her hands until her cheekbones went numb, and bit her lips to feel her own blood inside her mouth but she tasted nothing. Nothing, again. Maybe she really was nothing, had never existed. Or maybe she would disintegrate here, slowly dissolving until she became nothingness … became nothing. She was already beginning to disappear: her tears were the first part of her to vanish. She tried to resist it; she squeezed her eyes shut, she thought about dying there to make herself cry, but the tears didn’t come. They had disappeared. Evaporated. The first part of her had vanished; the rest would follow. She sat and wrapped her arms around herself, waiting to disappear completely.

  Yehya was distraught for days. Every morning and evening he left the queue and walked to Amani’s apartment, and despite the aching pain in his side, he spent hours searching the nearby streets and looking for her in the crowds. Nagy forbade him from going to Zephyr Hospital, convincing him there was nothing to be gained. If he went, he too would disappear, the bullet inside him would be lost, and everything that he’d endured in those past months would’ve been for nothing. Yehya knew that Amani was strong and would hold her ground, but he also knew her courage gave way to recklessness when she was angry, which inevitably got her into more trouble. Ehab’s newspaper printed a notice, but it was brief and vague; Um Mabrouk ran out of flyers within hours, and though Shalaby volunteered to ask his fellow guards in his old Servant Force unit about the fate of people who’d disappeared recently, none of their answers made sense to him, and none of them could help.

  She left in the early morning, or rather, she didn’t leave but found herself in a tunnel. She followed the tunnel all the way until it let out, not far from the Booth. From there she walked to the main road, and then she took a microbus. She got off far from home and walked the rest of the way, climbing the steps to her building in silence so that the doorman wouldn’t notice her. Nothing had changed. Her clothes were still there, her shoes strewn on the floor where she’d left them, the pan in the sink, the half-eaten egg sandwich on the table going stale. Her senses seemed to be working again, but she needed to be sure. She opened the freezer and was hit with a mix of smells, she peeled garlic, turned on every light in the apartment and examined the wool carpet on the floor, allowing her eyes to a
bsorb all its colors. Finally she tentatively approached the big mirror in her bathroom. She held back, scared of looking into it and finding just a dark shadow of herself. She looked down at her palms, flipped her hands over, spread her fingers and her toes. Then suddenly she leapt forward toward the mirror, as if diving into the sea. She saw her face: haggard and gray but whole, her eyes and nose and mouth, her hair; it was her.

  In her purse she found a stack of photographs. There was a photo of her rushing toward Yehya as he was shot down, and a photo of her in the second round of clashes, the ones that the Gate had denied had ever happened. In that photo she was running through the Restricted Zone, and they had captured her face so clearly that there could be no doubt that it was her. In another photo she was with Yehya and Nagy in the cafeteria, the dish of fuul beans in front of her. There were so many photos of her every movement and she had no idea who had taken them. But nothing surprised her anymore. The last picture was completely black, as if exposed while being developed, and she mused that despite such sophisticated surveillance they were still using film cameras.

  Amani didn’t leave the house for a week after she returned; she didn’t go to work and she didn’t pick up the phone. It was the bawab who called Um Mabrouk, and after asking how her children were doing, he told her that Amani had returned. The lights from her living room shone down into the light well where he slept, and they’d been on since the day before yesterday. A garbage bin had appeared outside her apartment door, too. At first he’d doubted it was her, but then she gave him his monthly payment herself. Before she had even hung up the phone, Um Mabrouk let out a zaghrouta of joy, the first the queue had ever heard.

  They all came to visit, but Amani was tired and didn’t sit with them for long. She didn’t say much, and spoke without emotion or enthusiasm. When they asked her what had happened, she told them that the guards from the Concealment Force had grown suspicious when they found her looking for the X-ray, so they’d stopped her and detained her for a while. They confiscated her cell phone, examined her ID card, and questioned her about why she was there, but then let her go. She said she’d come home on the verge of a bad cold, something she’d most likely caught at the hospital, and had been in bed with a fever and sore throat. That was why she hadn’t answered the phone. She pointed to a pile of boxes of medicine and pills on the coffee table. She hadn’t found the X-ray in Zephyr, she added, and was now convinced it had never been sent there in the first place. Tarek must have lost it, and misled them to avoid responsibility. Nagy nodded without a word, while Yehya fell still. Ehab stood up from his chair, saying that they should go and give her a chance to rest. They would come back when she was feeling better, and for now they needed to figure out what to do next.

  She closed the door behind them and went back to the living room, wishing that her headache would leave, too. She carried the cups to the kitchen and washed them slowly, letting the minutes go by, her mind elsewhere. The sound of the cups and the feel of the water had a calming effect that she had never appreciated before. She dried the cups and put them on the shelf, and left the room without turning off the lights.

  None of them said a word as they left, because there was no need to say what they were all thinking: Amani was hiding something. It was possible that the guards had humiliated or threatened her, or even beaten her. But she didn’t appear to have been hurt and there were no signs of violence on her body. Something had happened but there was no way of knowing what it was. Maybe they had used their mysterious methods to extract information from her about Yehya and the evidence they were trying so hard to cover up. Or to find out information on Nagy, without whom Yehya would not still be alive, or Ehab, about whom they already knew so much, far more than Amani would have been able to tell them. Or perhaps they hadn’t interrogated her at all; maybe they had just scared her by playing with her emotions and deepest secrets, and that had been enough to strip her of all her natural vitality and determination, leaving her in this dull and lifeless state, not like herself at all.

  As they walked back to the queue, Yehya saw an old building with SPECIAL ANALYSIS AND SCANS written on its side, and left them, slowly crossing the road to examine it. The door was locked and bound with a rusty metal chain. There was no point trying to enter; the new decree was in effect everywhere now, and even small clinics and hospitals couldn’t escape it. He looked around again and then gestured to Nagy and Ehab across the street, pointing to a big pharmacy. He disappeared for a moment and emerged with a box of painkillers. A few blocks later, they passed a small phone shop that Yehya used to stop at, whenever he was thinking of buying a new phone. He asked the shopkeeper about the prices of phone plans and handsets, and the man told him about a couple of offers and then produced an elegant violet box, with the Violet Telecom logo emblazoned on the front. Yehya turned it down, asking for any other brand, but the man apologized, explaining that the entire shop had been sold to the company, and that he would soon be changing the sign in front, too.

  THE OFFICE

  After their surprise visit, Amani answered her phone only once, despite how often they all called her. Her voice had been faint and her words disjointed, and she’d begged Nagy to be patient with her. She’d asked him to stop pestering her until she was better and could go back to work, assuring him she would call him from the office. It was clear that she didn’t want them to visit her at home, and they began to call her less and less frequently. Cell phones weren’t really safe anymore, and people wondered about landlines, too. But she never failed to make one weekly call: to check on Yehya, to make sure his situation hadn’t deteriorated, and to reassure him, however unconvincingly, that she was well. Yehya was dispirited, and worry seemed to have aged him. The patches of blood on his clothes grew steadily larger; he was bleeding all the time now, no longer just when he urinated, and growing weaker from the loss of blood.

  Yehya wanted to give Amani some space and the freedom to come to him when she felt ready to tell him what was haunting her. But when he didn’t hear from her for two weeks, he abandoned his hesitation and decided to limp his way to the office in the hope that she’d returned to work. His old boss greeted him coolly, despite how close they had been when Yehya was an employee. He’d worked there for nearly ten years, and in that time had brought in a significant number of new clients and had been responsible for huge increases in their sales, but his past performance did him no good now. The director spoke to him with a mixture of distrust and annoyance, and grumbled when he asked about Amani. Yehya thought that if his old boss hadn’t felt too guilty to say so, he would have told him not to stay long, or asked him why he was there at all.

  He found Amani in their old office. He was comforted by the fact that it was just as he remembered it, with the broken fan still dangling from the ceiling as it always had. The only change was the absence of the lace curtain, which had fallen to the floor and now lay on the drab, grimy carpet. Amani was distraught and ashen-faced, and on her desk were piles of papers and lists of customer’s names and numbers, as though she’d let them pile up for months. He pulled out a chair, slowly and with difficulty, and reached out to take her hand. It was cold and trembling. When she finally realized that it really was Yehya in front of her, and not just a figment of her troubled imagination, she took his hand between hers and squeezed it hard, as if it might rescue her.

  She asked numerous questions about his health, if he had any updates about his operation, and about the blood that now stained his clothes day and night. She gave him her full attention, listened to him intently, and asked for more news until he had nothing more to tell her and had exhausted the stories circling in his head. He intentionally kept a few details from her; she was worried enough about him as it was. He carried the burden of having exposed her to danger the night he was injured, and the burden of whatever it was that she still did not dare mention.

  When it was her turn to talk, she balked and stalled, offering only muddled words. A desperate look came over her, and
suddenly she looked like she was very far away. He placed his hands on her shoulders, filled with concern, and she turned and looked at him blankly. Only the slightest hint of her spirit was left, and he could tell that she saw the worry on his face.

  “It’s nothing, Yehya. Nothing happened to me. I was just remembering something, something stupid.”

  The director walked past the room and paused in front of the door. Yehya stood up to leave, and tenderly patted the back of her hand before whispering a few words into her ear. She shook her head at him, and smiled faintly.

  INES

  Shalaby asked Hammoud to show him the article in the newspaper. He’d heard the newscaster read it on television while he was sitting in the coffee shop, and felt as if he’d found a light shining out of the gloom. Hammoud picked up the newspaper and opened it to the page with the article, and Shalaby asked him to cut it out for him so that he could keep it. He spread the clipping among his things on the table, careful not to tear or crumple it. Then he took a final gulp of his tea and rushed off back to the queue.