The Queue

by Basma Abdel Aziz

  Shalaby left the queue for a couple of hours and then returned without his leather bag or wristwatch, empty-handed except for a shiny golden medal on a dark-blue ribbon. He told everyone that he’d gotten it from the Booth in honor of his cousin Mahfouz. He’d shown the officials their mistake and they’d found his name on their lists, and he would be given a Certificate of Appreciation, just as soon as it was stamped by the Gate. Nagy recognized the medal, but he didn’t want to expose Shalaby’s fabrication and didn’t say a word. He only laughed and laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks.

  THE VISIT

  In a surprising development, Amani called Nagy. For several weeks she hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone but Yehya, who hobbled to the office when he was feeling well enough to spend an hour or two with her. At first Nagy didn’t realize it was her; the number that appeared on his phone wasn’t the one he had saved for her, and without giving him a chance to ask questions or even to say hello, she asked him to meet her immediately. At the corner by the coffee shop, across from the restaurant, she walked in circles on trembling legs, waiting for Nagy to appear. The doctor in uniform had visited her again.

  He had come to her office a few days before and threatened her in front of her boss and colleagues. It hadn’t been an explicit threat, but he’d said he was waiting for Yehya to pay him a visit at Zephyr Hospital. He’d said that Yehya had to have an operation, to avoid complications that could cause his health to rapidly decline, more rapidly than she could imagine … complications that could even be life-threatening. Before leaving her office, he’d turned and told her that he knew exactly where Yehya was. And if Yehya didn’t show up at his office within the next few days, the man said, it might save him time to pay Yehya a visit himself.

  When Nagy arrived she looked around wildly and pleaded with him to keep Yehya from visiting her, to keep him from coming to the office at all, or anywhere else, even to her apartment. The queue was safer, she thought; at least no one had disappeared there without returning, eventually. She still hadn’t uttered a word about those terrible days, which had come rushing back to her at the sight of the doctor alone. Things had happened to her that no one else knew, things she couldn’t speak of, things she still hadn’t admitted even to herself.

  She spoke so hurriedly that Nagy wasn’t able to get a word in at first. He was shocked to see her so disturbed, and so he agreed to her request without question, and assured her that it would all work out and Yehya would be fine. Gripped with anxiety, she begged them to be careful, and he tried to calm her down. Maybe the doctor’s words were just an empty threat; these people often relied on fear, scaring others to stop them from thinking straight or acting rationally. He kept talking to her in an attempt to reassure her, but she didn’t hear a word he was saying. She just repeated herself in confusion, and then rushed away so quickly that she staggered and nearly fell several times, as Nagy watched her go.

  He wandered around, thinking about what he should do now. His attempts to comfort Amani were just the first words that had come into his head and then out of his mouth, and he couldn’t even believe them himself. Yehya wasn’t well enough to run away, and he was too stubborn to consider it, much less be bullied into it. In the queue he was constantly surrounded by other people, and he seemed safe enough for now. But once or twice a week he went home to rest and regain some energy, energy he was losing day by day with the grueling effort of staying alive. Winter was looming and soon he wouldn’t be able to stay in the queue day and night as people did now. Yehya’s apartment was no secret, and neither was Nagy’s. The neighbors knew them; neither place would be safe for him. Nagy lost himself in all the complications, his head a torrent of disparate thoughts, and he realized that he’d arrived at the microbus stop without realizing it. He felt fatigue bearing down on him, so he squeezed himself into the first bus that arrived and decided to let himself be taken to wherever the line ended.

  He yawned and rested his temple against the window, making circles of condensation with his dewy breath and doodling in them, an old favorite pastime. The streets were empty at this hour. Even all the cats and dogs had vanished, except for a single plump cat, also yawning, on top of a white car covered with a considerable layer of dirt. The sky was faintly lit; thick clouds veiled the rays of the sun, tempering the air, while dusk lay heavy on the horizon. It was the hour when particles of dust and debris seemed suspended in the emptiness, neither falling to earth nor disappearing into space.

  The bus passed an arrow-shaped sign with PUBLIC ROAD written across it in thick letters. It pointed toward a steep ramp veering off to the right of the highway, and, unperturbed, Nagy realized that he was heading up a hill. They were going in the direction of the newspaper headquarters, and it occurred to him that he could try to catch Ehab, who’d raced off to the office with a new investigative report. But for now Nagy savored the sensation of letting his mind drift, and put his thoughts aside. Signs rolled by, one after another, until finally the driver announced the end of the line. He stopped the microbus beneath a giant sign with the phrase REMEMBER GOD written in thick white letters, above a cell number and signature: Abbas.

  He wasn’t far from the newspaper headquarters; he could see it just down the road, and he got off the bus leisurely and headed toward the unassuming building. He figured he should tell Ehab what he’d learned from Amani, but he wasn’t convinced that it was worth seeking him out. Even with this information, what could either of them do? Inside, he inquired about Ehab, and another employee told him he was in a meeting with the editor in chief. Nagy left his name with her and went to wait outside. He sat down on the sidewalk across the street and leaned his head against an old tree trunk, feeling the branches drape themselves around him and the ancient scent of pine fall over him. Maybe it was time for Yehya to stop being so obstinate, even if he felt it was an insult to back down. The situation was dire, and he was no longer the only one implicated; Amani had been drawn into the game as well, which meant it would be hard for things between them to go back to how they were before.

  In the years stretching between his studious university days and that afternoon, the two of them were all he knew, his closest friends, despite how different they all were. Amani and Yehya hadn’t been drawn to each other out of an effortless, natural compatibility; they were both strong-willed and stubborn. Amani was headstrong, a trait he hadn’t often seen in women, while Yehya’s tenacity never abandoned him, and he never lost his faith in his ability to turn a situation to his favor. Yehya would never admit that he was just a single, powerless man in a society where rules and restrictions were stronger than everything else, stronger than the ruler himself, stronger than the Booth and even the Gate.

  Nagy had failed to convince them that everything in the world was interconnected, and that their lives were ruled by a network of intricate and powerful relations. Even things that seemed random operated according to this invisible system, even if the connections couldn’t be seen. Yehya laughed whenever they discussed it seriously, teasing him that the philosophy department had corrupted his mind and destroyed his faith in human nature. Amani would laugh, too—she could never be convinced that the independence she believed she possessed was in truth no more than an accepted illusion, part of a web of relations and contradictions. The Gate itself was an integral part of the system, too, even if from the outside it appeared to pull all the strings.

  One day long ago, he’d told Amani that everything she did, even if seemingly trivial and irrelevant, had reverberations in the grand scheme of things. Even something apparently insignificant—like the amount of air she breathed—could have consequences. He had smiled to himself while assuming an outward solemnity, and added that, for example, the meager rent she paid her landlord could have contributed to the Gate’s sudden appearance in the heart of the city. And conversely, he told her, she was affected by everything that happened, too, even if she didn’t admit it; if the Gate announced a ban on kites with colored streamers, it could indirectly
influence her daily life or work. This interrelation was real, even if there were no explicit connections. At the time, she’d laughed and told him he was completely mad.

  For as long as he’d known her, she’d never cared for politics or philosophy. No matter what happened, she focused only on the concrete details of everyday life. Yehya was just like her: he would rather deal with tangible reality and the things he knew firsthand. And so Nagy was always the odd one out, the one who paid little attention to life’s minor details and often appeared lost amid it all. He saw only the wider context, the systems that everything was governed by. He wasn’t interested in the little pieces; he wanted to understand the broader picture, how it worked and what it meant. At first he’d envied their safe, secure lives, while he had been battered by the Gate’s tempestuous wrath; but now he was going to lose Yehya, and Amani, too. He would be left alone, powerless and bound to life as it had become, no longer capable of the liberty he’d once enjoyed. If he were still a student, or even a hopeful young lecturer, he would change everything about the queue, defend his friends fearlessly, and persist until he’d brought down the Gate and the whole system with it.

  He was roused from his reveries by a friendly smack on the shoulder from Ehab.

  “Hey, Nagy, I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “I just happened to stop by—you won’t believe what happened this morning.”

  “Let’s talk on the way. You’re going to the queue, too, right? Listen, my boss doesn’t want to publish any more reports about the queue. He refused the article I wrote a week ago, and today he turned down another one, and before these two he took everything important out of an article I’d written about my trip to Zephyr Hospital with Amani. Can you believe it, he cut three whole paragraphs down to two and a half lines; it looked like a greeting card when he was done with it! And he even rejected my piece on the Violet Telecom boycott. He threw it down on his desk when he saw the headline, and then refused to give it back to me when I asked him for it. I’m telling you, that man is suspicious, acting all high and mighty—how can he ban an article on the phone-company scandal while allowing an article that attacked Zephyr Hospital, even if it was short and more vague?”

  THE NEWSPAPER

  The Truth increased its distribution and ran an intriguing interview with the High Sheikh. A bold subtitle hinted that the interview occurred partly in response to rumors that innocent citizens had been shot down by gunfire during the first and second Disgraceful Events, the very notion of which was questionable at best. The rumors were outrageous, it said; unconscionable accusations. In a special column outlined with a thick border, it noted that the Gate had denied these fabrications repeatedly, but to no avail, as they had only spread further.

  The editor in chief wrote a brief introduction, in which he explained that His Eminence the High Sheikh, who headed the Fatwa and Rationalizations Committee, had recently received questions from believers about the amendment to Article 4 (A) and related rumors. He had issued a fatwa in response, which, the editor said, was met with overwhelming gratitude from the general public. He also emphasized that His Eminence was the sole person able to illuminate the way forward in these trying times, in which the wise and ignorant alike weighed in with their own opinions. The Sheikh’s explanation in the interview was so comforting that, as was noted in the article, the interviewer had to stop the recording several times to express his deep gratitude and admiration.

  The Sheikh told the interviewer that the fatwa contained two separate decrees, one for each of two categories of people. The first was for those who had started and spread the rumors: he deemed them liars and hypocrites. But the fatwa was primarily dedicated to the second category: believers who were weak of faith. The matter there, he said, was simple and clear. He began by confirming that piety protects people from misfortune and evil—religious scholars and ordinary citizens all knew this to be true. Therefore, if citizens were pious, God-fearing believers (and not weak of faith), they would not bring destruction upon themselves. On the contrary, he said, they would instinctively avoid suspicious people and questionable or forbidden places.

  Assertions that people had been injured in the Events were clearly no more than lies and fabrications, spread by an antireligious minority who had suffered injuries themselves. Most people in the nation were believers (thank God!) and so he had no reason to fear for them, not even in the face of bullets. Yet even believers should take precautions to ensure that God keeps them from harm, he added—precautions such as dedicating one’s life to reciting prayers, for example.

  The High Sheikh invoked a few passages from the Greater Book, explaining that if a believer were to be struck by a bullet (despite his prayers and supplication), his faith would guide him to the understanding that it was God himself who’d struck him down. A wounded believer should not despair or oppose God’s will. Nor should he question the unquestionable—such an act could lead him down a perilous path toward doubt. Instead, the believer must accept the will of God. He must acknowledge how lucky he was to be struck by a bullet, and exalted to a place in heaven ordinarily reserved only for the most dutiful.

  At the end of the interview, the High Sheikh noted that everything he had said was part of the fatwa. The Fatwa and Rationalizations Committee had ratified it definitively in its last meeting, and it would be announced at a big press conference within days, to help reassure citizens who were suffering from confusion.

  A large photograph of the High Sheikh was printed in the center of the page, him with his solemn smile and the interviewer sitting in front of him. In conclusion, the article stated that the Sheikh commended the newspaper’s efforts to uphold the word of truth, which was why he had given them an exclusive interview.

  Yehya sat in front of Um Mabrouk on a plastic chair, his leg resting on the stone table. He had a cup of tea in one hand and the report that Ehab had written—a different copy of the same report that the editor in chief had ripped up—in the other. Ehab sat beside him, next to him was Nagy, and strewn around them on the ground was a mess of newspapers. Yehya shrugged and said that the editor in chief had made the right call: the report wasn’t fit to print. The story simply made no sense—it contradicted all the other accounts in all the other papers, as well as every statement released by the Gate, and it went against the Committee’s latest fatwas, too. Ehab’s report was just based on rumors: rumors that there were citizens injured by government bullets who hadn’t come forward, and that others were blind to their injuries. Rumors that they had disposed of the bullets removed from people’s bodies, and then denied that the bullets had ever existed. Rumors that a few people had managed to climb over the stone barricades, enter the Restricted Zone, and approach the Northern Building. Rumors that some of them had been killed by birdshot, but that the survivors had rallied and retreated, only to disappear completely. Rumors that they had not been seen since.

  Ehab had also included a short paragraph about the microbus driver who had reported seeing an injured young man carrying a bag of spent birdshot covered in blood, during the second Disgraceful Events. Ehab noted that after this testimony was made public, the driver had disappeared. Then the Gate had announced that the driver was a well-known, longterm drug user, addicted to hallucinogens. The young man he spoke of didn’t exist, the Gate’s statement said, and neither did his injured leg, as no trace had been found of either. Ehab quoted an article stating that the driver had been admitted to a government clinic to treat his addiction, but that no one knew where he was being treated or whether he’d been released. Yehya handed the papers back to Ehab with a snort of derisive laughter, while Nagy shifted in his seat and told him that he should make copies to distribute in the queue.

  People passed hearsay, a growing number of leaflets, and newspaper articles along the queue; they feverishly searched for fresh information anywhere and any way they could, while time passed and no one moved an inch forward. Most recently, a postal worker joined the queue, carrying an official petition addre
ssed to the Gate from a group of people called the “Disgraceful Events Victims Association.” It openly accused the High Sheikh of causing distress across the nation because he had questioned the faith of the injured in his interview in The Truth.

  The petition’s signatories said that the interview had damaged their reputations among their families, acquaintances, and colleagues, and they attached certified documents proving that they were devout believers. Many held Certificates of True Citizenship, and moreover, they really were injured. Their petition included legal grounds, prepared by a lawyer who was also gravely wounded. It proved that the fatwa was riddled with errors, and they demanded that it be repealed and reviewed before being made public.

  In response, the Center for Freedom and Righteousness delivered its own urgent petition to the Booth. Based on the High Sheikh’s interview, it accused the injured of failing to perform their obligatory religious duties, and stated that this negligence had directly caused their injuries. The Center demanded that these people’s files be handed over to the Fatwa and Rationalizations Committee in full, so that it could rule on their cases and take appropriate measures against them. Yet despite the general outrage, the fatwa wasn’t revoked or even amended. It had already been announced in a press conference, and a series of supporting statements was released in the days that followed, while the latest message from the Gate denied that anything called the Restricted Zone had ever existed.