“But I didn’t talk to anyone on the phone today, or yesterday,” she said suddenly, shocked. “I was talking to Shalaby, who was standing behind me.” Holding the page tightly, she looked back at the others. “Shalaby, excuse me, do you have a minute?”
At first, Shalaby didn’t understand what they were saying. Ines accused him of passing on what she’d said, but took it back when Ehab explained the situation. Shalaby hadn’t listened to Ehab’s phone calls and couldn’t have passed them on, too, Ehab reasoned. Shalaby himself confirmed what Ines said — she hadn’t spoken on the phone at all, nor left his sight since their conversation. He was telling the truth, he added, and this had nothing to do with how wrong she was about him or his cousin the martyr. Um Mabrouk interjected, too, swearing that Ines was a highly respected teacher. She had morals, her students learned a good deal from her, and she definitely hadn’t said anything behind Shalaby’s back.
THE SECOND DISGRACEFUL EVENTS
Hammoud locked and bolted the door to the coffee shop and shouted into his cell phone, which hadn’t stopped ringing since he’d refused to serve the queue again. He wasn’t coming back to work, he insisted, until the clashes around the coffee shop were dispersed and everything calmed down. The news spread through the queue within hours, and soon everyone knew that the Events had flared up again. It was the microbus drivers who began to keep people in the queue updated on the latest developments, although it wasn’t easy for them to deliver news. According to new regulations, vehicles weren’t allowed to drive alongside the queue anymore. The drivers had to leave their buses at the corner where a soldier stood, and then walk the rest of the way to the queue itself to pass on what they heard on their daily routes.
Most drivers continued to share updates that way, free of charge, for as long as the Events lasted, simply out of a sense of community. A deep-rooted friendship had grown between the drivers and the people waiting in the queue, and now it bore fruits of solidarity. No one expected the fighting to continue like this, and they wagered that life would soon return to how it had been before. Eventually, they told each other, the soldier would get used to them and allow microbuses to drive on the sidewalk again, as they’d been doing since the street had filled with people waiting in the queue. But their bets were lost in the blink of an eye. A big sheet-metal hut with two square windows appeared in the middle of the intersection one day, blocking the road, and not even the smallest cars could pass around it. The soldier was stationed inside it now, behind a sign with the phrase NO ENTRY FOR VEHICLES and the same signature, Abbas.
People who witnessed the Second Events described a battle that raged at the edge of the main square, but no one could tell exactly who the people involved were. There seemed to be different factions, but just like during the First Events, the combatants wore no uniforms and bore no symbols. No one involved would answer questions, and they ignored everyone else. Eyewitnesses disagreed over how many were injured and killed, and though the wails of ambulances were heard, no one saw anyone being transported away. Here and there, people noticed deep, wide puddles of blood, but only rarely did they see someone bleeding. A grizzled, stubble-chinned driver swore to a group of people in the queue that with his own eyes he’d seen a barefoot young man so wounded that his leg was about to fall off, his hand fiercely clasped around a clear plastic bag. Inside, the driver said he could make out small silver pellets, covered in a dark red liquid. The driver said that a plainclothes officer had offered to buy the bag and everything in it, but the young man had grimly refused. A violent struggle had ensued, which ended with the officer stealing the bag and sprinting away with it before he could be stopped. The young man tried to chase after him, but his leg failed him, and he sat down on the ground and wept.
The Youth Channel presenter cried too, deeply affected by the events in the square. Her voice blared out of a radio inside a parked microbus, around which people from the queue had gathered. A well-known and respected psychologist was invited onto various news programs to explain and analyze the situation. He assured listeners that there was a very rational explanation for what was happening: the hot weather, which naturally leads to excitability, anger, and uncontrollable behavior. During one of these interviews, his explanation was interrupted by a news brief, which stated that officials were investigating the possibility of placing parasols near places of heavy traffic, to calm citizens’ nerves and reduce their irritability.
No one knew what had started the Second Events, but on the first day of the fighting, Amani, who crossed the square nearly every day on her way to work, had seen people trying to sneak through the Restricted Zone. They were trying to reach a street that had long been closed off with iron barricades and was now a desolate stretch of land leading to the back of the Northern Building. No one was allowed there, and not even stray animals dared wander close. No signs or warnings were posted, but they wouldn’t have been necessary. The street was surrounded by a colossal stone wall with no windows, impenetrable and impossible to scale, and which concealed the street and everything on it from passersby.
No one had been permitted to walk through the Restricted Zone for a long time, except for those carrying the Gate’s violet ID card. Even so, people knew what was there, particularly the elderly, who’d known it before these changes. They said that the crimson Northern Building had been built over the street itself, or at least over half of it. The barricaded street led to a short tunnel, which passed under the Northern Building and came out the other side, somewhere near the Booth. One day, as she was about to leave the square, Amani heard things falling behind her, and the muffled sounds they made as their weight hit the ground, but she didn’t turn around to see what they were. Suddenly, she sensed that the situation was more perilous than she had imagined, that things were about to explode, and she began to run to get away from the square, wanting to run away from everything, all of it.
The Events didn’t deter Um Mabrouk from starting a little venture to help herself bear the cost of waiting in the queue, or at least offset the income she lost by no longer working in people’s homes. Before, not a day would go by without one of the women she worked for giving her secondhand things for free; she came first in their eyes and was more deserving than strangers. She accepted them all, fixing things up into something she needed, but here in the queue, no one gave anything away. With her wide body and broad shoulders, she took up more space than most people in the queue, and she used this advantage as a starting point for her venture. She befriended a few drivers and asked them to bring her packages of tea, coffee, sugar, and powdered milk, which they delivered periodically and she paid for at the end of the week. She brought an old gas burner from home and bought cheap white plastic cups from a big chain store, which had opened several branches in her district overnight, and never seemed to close, not even during the Events.
When she returned from her work at Amani’s office in the mornings, she would assume her position in front of the gas burner and provide drinks for the people around her. Her circle of customers quickly expanded. The coffee shop was closed and Hammoud had vanished, so she began to serve many people, veterans of the queue and newcomers alike. She considered Ehab one of her most important customers, because every day he invited someone around for a cup of tea. The same went for Ines, who — since she was very methodical when it came to work — was used to drinking three cups of tea during the day: one during the first lesson, another during her break, and a last cup at night. They were soon joined by the man in the galabeya, who was constantly ordering new types of drinks, like anise tea, or cinnamon tea with ginger. Then Um Mabrouk added another service to the list. She let people use her phone at a discount price: they could call their loved ones for just half of what they would pay on their own phones or outside the queue. Before long, she was able to buy Mabrouk a new backpack for school, and then she gave him a bit of money to give to his sister. Her daughter still hadn’t been able to find a job, even after she’d diligently attached her heath certificates and all other necessary supporting documents to her applications.