THE WAY TO THE COFFEE SHOP
Ehab shook Yehya’s hand encouragingly, welcoming him into a relationship of friendship and solidarity, where he would be at Yehya’s disposal. He told Yehya that he was ready to help him any way he could, with anything and at any time. Whether he was in the queue or at the newspaper headquarters, all Yehya had to do was call him. He gave him his phone number and left him with Nagy; he didn’t want to waste time talking when he was sure he could find this Mrs. Alfat, wherever she was. If Yehya was ready to go public with his story, which was sure to spark an uproar, he would be by far the most important person Ehab had met in the queue; he and his bullet were pieces of solid evidence that hadn’t yet been covered up. If Yehya was able to get his permit, it would set a significant precedent; the Gate had never issued anything like it before. But if he failed, he would pay with his life, and no bargaining or compromises would save him. Ehab meant it: he was ready to do anything to help Yehya stay strong until the Gate opened. He and Nagy could take care of anything Yehya couldn’t do himself — any difficult tasks that could cause Yehya’s health to take a turn for the worse. There was no question that the two of them were faster than he was, but he refused to stop coming and going. He kept fighting against it all, even though it was exhausting his ailing body and he desperately needed to rest. Ehab had been interested in Yehya since he first laid eyes on him and his perpetual frown. It didn’t seem to match Yehya’s admirable fighting spirit, but from the time they’d first met in the queue, Ehab didn’t remember ever having seen Yehya smile.
A few days after the Gate released its announcement, Amani called Nagy from the office. She’d been debating what to do, and trying in vain to reach Yehya, and she was so anxious by the time she phoned Nagy that she didn’t even wait for an answer when she asked how he was, and leapt right into her next question:
“Did you hear the message?”
“I heard it.”
“What about Yehya?”
“Yehya heard it, too. We’re looking for the head nurse.”
“I think we really screwed up. We got off to a late start; Yehya should’ve requested the X-ray sooner.”
“We would have run into the same problems either way. That or other problems. Now’s not the time for blame, Amani.”
“Tayyeb, all right. Listen, I took two days off work, and I’m going to Zephyr Hospital tomorrow or the day after.”
“Call me before you go, Amani, please … or better still, let’s meet up beforehand. We can meet you anywhere near the queue.”
“Fine. Tomorrow at three at the restaurant across from the coffee shop?”
“We’ll see you there.”
“Tell Yehya I say hi. And can you convince him to get a new cell phone? I can’t stand not knowing how to get hold of him.”
Yehya, meanwhile, was rather pleased to be working with Ehab, who wasn’t nearly as nosy as he’d feared. Perhaps he’d been mistaken about him; maybe he’d been overly annoyed by his loud personality, or maybe he’d just lost patience with Ehab’s constant buzzing beside him, the pecking that threatened to bore holes straight through him. Yehya wasn’t sure when Ehab would be back, but he wasn’t worried. A strange mood had taken hold of him recently: the significance of life’s minutiae waned and dwindled before his eyes, and suddenly everything seemed inconsequential.
Standing there in the queue, he toyed with the possibility of freedom; he wanted, even if only in the smallest way, to cast off what he was used to doing so mechanically and to break the tedium of these countless weeks of waiting. He marked his place on the ground, told people nearby that he was leaving, as was customary in the queue, and then decided that for the rest of the day he would no longer do what was expected of him. He woke Nagy up from his nap and told him he wanted to wander through the downtown area of the city for a while. Nagy stood up, wiped his face with his shirtsleeve, passed his fingers through his hair, and looked ready for action. He hadn’t expected Yehya to leave the queue again, not after their last and only excursion, to see Tarek, which had ended in disappointment. They walked side by side, occasionally linking arms, and without a word they headed toward the old coffee shop. It was where they’d often met up in their student days, and they hadn’t been there for years, although they’d heard recent reports that it was almost in ruins after surviving numerous attacks.
A warm breeze blew on their faces from the direction of the coffee shop, but it carried the pungent gas that still lingered in the streets, making their noses run and their eyes sting. The world looked like it had the day they went to see Amani: the ground was crushed, and deep fissures ran through the asphalt, as if creating new streets. Their eyes fell on a scattering of strange, large, multicolored munitions. They didn’t look like anything Yehya and Nagy had ever seen before, and offered no trace of where they might have been manufactured.
There were empty tear-gas canisters strewn in the stretches between the munitions all the way to the coffee shop. Nothing they remembered was as it had been, except for the beggar lady, whom they knew well from their university days. As they drew closer, they caught sight of her sitting in her usual place under the violet sign, but her things, which had long been the same, were slightly altered. A gold medallion on a dark-blue ribbon now hung in front of her, next to an old kerosene stove, a cup of tea, and her usual packets of tissues for sale.
In Nagy’s eyes, she’d earned that medallion as a badge of honor for refusing to leave her place during the times when the street had been filled with tear gas. She’d sat cross-legged in her usual place, not moving an inch, not trying to hide, a helmet on her head, a black gas mask hung around her neck, while everyone else was running all around her. She’d reached the pinnacle of valor, her hand always extended in front of her, clearly signaling she was begging for change. After all, one must not stop working, no matter what the circumstances were. Yes, he thought, clearly she’d realized that the economy was lifeblood itself! That the wheel of production and construction must not stop spinning, not even for a moment, not even in the darkest of times. He smiled cynically at his own thoughts. If he hadn’t made that valiant decision — a valiant stupidity, he admitted at times — to resign from his position at the university, where students often missed classes and didn’t ask much of the lecturers, he would have presented her to his advanced students. He would have asked them to conduct a study on the philosophy of time, space, and physical existence, and then write a short paper inspired by her: the Lady with the Mask.
THE GATE’S ANNOUNCEMENT
For as long as they could remember, the television had been sitting on a thick wooden shelf high up on a wall in the coffee shop, stuck on one channel. It couldn’t get any other signal, the boy who worked there often announced. Or maybe it was Hammoud who constantly claimed that the thing was broken, just stuck on the same channel, and never gave customers the chance to ask to change it. With practiced care, Yehya slowly bent his right knee, leaned his torso to the right, too, and then lowered one side of his skinny bottom onto the edge of the wooden chair. He let the pain swell to its full magnitude for a moment, until he knew he could bear it without groaning or crying out, and then slid his whole rear end onto the rough-edged wooden seat, stretching his left leg out a bit. From their table on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop, they could see that the damage hadn’t been serious. Some glass cups had cracked, a few chairs had lost a leg or two, and an antique painting had fallen from the wall where it had hung. Nagy poked his head inside the coffee shop but didn’t see Hammoud, just a few customers staring at the television while the backgammon sets and domino pieces sat untouched. He turned his gaze toward the television, watching it carefully, and then placed a cautionary hand on Yehya’s shoulder. The Gate rose up on the screen in its full splendor as the announcer’s voice proclaimed with zealous delight: