There were a few lines written by hand in the margins, as if someone reading it had added a couple of points that might help the comprehension and implementation of the law. “To explain the article and its provisions — this measure has been taken in response to current critical circumstances; as a rule, bullets and projectiles may be the property of security units, and thus cannot be removed from the body without special authorization.”
Sitting in his leather chair now, Tarek smiled. He remembered feeling the tension lift when he’d first absorbed that passage and realized what fate he had narrowly escaped. He had come so close to being investigated and interrogated, and yet had unwittingly avoided it. Any shame he’d felt because of Yehya had vanished; he had clearly taken the right course of action. He had concealed his relief at the time, saying he was deeply sorry and advising Yehya to wait his turn at Zephyr Hospital, then had jumped up and handed him some strong antibiotics and a few boxes of painkillers. He had walked Yehya to the door, promising to perform the surgery if Zephyr Hospital was still too crowded, just as soon as Yehya brought him a permit from the Gate. Yehya should come see him anytime, he said, any day of the week, there was no need to make an appointment.
Tarek would later learn that Yehya had indeed gone to the Gate. It was recorded in Document No. 5 in the file lying before him on the desk, which stated that Yehya had arrived at the queue with a friend in early July, and while the date was not specified, the time was printed clearly at the top of the page: 9:25 a.m.
THE CELL NETWORK DROPS
A middle-aged man gathered his nerves and decided to leave the queue without a word, just as Yehya and Nagy had done. He slipped away without making a fuss, but accidently left his newspaper and bag behind. He had already walked quite far and was about to get into a microbus when a stranger behind him in the queue noticed and called out to him, but with no luck. The stranger picked up the bag and rushed after the man, shouting, but the microbus sped away with the man inside, oblivious to the shouts and unaware that he had left his things behind. At a loss, the stranger returned to the queue and found that a group of people had gathered to watch the situation unfold. He opened the bag in front of them, but there was nothing in it that revealed the owner’s identity. A ring of people formed around him. One onlooker said that the bag now belonged to the person who found it, but the man was too shy to agree with this suggestion and insisted that he wouldn’t take it for himself.
The man in the galabeya intervened, assuring him there was nothing wrong with taking the bag, so long as he’d tried in good faith to return it to its owner. It was manna from heaven, he said, and what could be wrong with that? Things would have ended there were it not for a woman with short hair and a black skirt who had just arrived, looking for an empty place closer to the Gate. She joined the little gathering and proposed that they keep the bag for a day or two, and if its owner — who would likely come back looking for it — hadn’t returned by then, it would be best to hand it over to the official sitting in a nearby booth, or to the guard posted nearby. That way no one could say they’d done anything wrong or taken something that didn’t belong to them. Her presence among them irritated the man in the galabeya. He turned away from her sanctimoniously, and she heard him mutter a prayer for busybodies to be led toward the right path, and the same for fools and the ignorant, who know not the difference between righteousness and sin. A few people sided with him, disgruntled that she’d interjected, and a clean-shaven man, averting his gaze, asked whether it was right to listen to the opinion of a woman standing so immodestly among a group of men. He didn’t wait for a response, and placing his hand on the shoulder of the man with the bag — who was becoming increasingly distressed at the center of a rapidly growing audience — he told him to empty it out so everyone else could divide its contents among themselves, and thus keep any one of them from falling into sin.
Ines found herself standing at the edge of a crisis erupting just a few feet away from her. While it troubled her to see the woman being attacked, she remained where she was, trying to stay out of the argument. But as insult after insult was hurled upon the woman, who stood her ground and tried to protect the bag, Ines couldn’t take it anymore, and moving closer to the circle, she shouted: “She’s right.” Her voice emerged feeble and faint, yet loud enough that they all turned around. The man in the galabeya stared at her for a long time without responding. However brief, her words had unambiguously allied her with the other woman. It was clear that an opposing side was forming.
Ines felt her face grow red as a wave of embarrassment passed over her; her interjection had halted the discussion, and curious faces began to inspect her as if waiting for her to utter something further. Finally Ehab, that journalist who often hung around, intervened. He offered to take the bag to the newspaper headquarters where he worked, make an inventory of what was in it, and publish a small notice with a description. Maybe the owner would recognize the bag, and he would probably rather pick it up from the newspaper office than go to the Booth near the Gate. A few people opposed Ehab’s suggestion, but the rest agreed with him, and so Ines returned to her place in one piece, while the woman with the short hair continued her search for somewhere to stand.
The queue grew calm as the disc of sun slipped down behind the Gate. The period of rest had begun, the hour when Hammoud always arrived with drinks. A few people performed their evening prayers, while others sat cross-legged on the ground, waiting for tea and yensoon, the hot anise drink. But the boys from the coffee shop didn’t arrive. Time dragged on. After a whole hour went by from the time they usually came, people began to fidget and grumble, and finally someone called out to the microbus driver, asking if he knew where the boys were. The driver told him there was construction going on near the coffee shop, and all the boys were busy serving the workers. Ehab tried calling Hammoud on the phone (he was keen to discuss the day’s updates and stories from the queue, and record their conversation), but without success. Then he tried to call a colleague at the newspaper, but his phone couldn’t get any signal. He took the battery out, put it back in, and tried again: no luck. He started to walk around, and soon discovered that he was not the only one having problems.
It began gradually, affecting just a few others, then dozens, then hundreds, and the numbers kept rising, until people finally realized it was a system-wide outage. Amid the confusion, the man in the galabeya strolled toward Ines, fiddling with his prayer beads and pretending not to be heading straight for her. She was startled when he stopped just a couple of steps away, his wide eyes staring right at her. He bade her the full, formal religious greeting with a reedy voice that was so incongruous with his sullen visage that she just barely stopped herself from laughing out loud. She returned the greeting hesitantly, consciously lowering her gaze, as was proper. He offered to let her use his cell phone, which still worked despite the outage, in case her family was worried or would want to know where she was. She thanked him, surprised, but there was no one she needed to call — her parents wouldn’t be back from the Gulf for another two months, and her sister, who was married, would still be working at the preschool at this hour. She didn’t know what made her open up to him and share such personal information, but he stroked his beard contentedly and told her she could use his phone whenever she wanted. He went back to his place in the queue but not before casting a fleeting glance at her hands; he was pleased with her tender skin and the absence of a ring.