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 calclass="underline" 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.