Basma Aziz - The Queue

After two sleepless nights he made his decision, and resolved to gamble everything to fulfill his promise. He called Nagy to confirm the time, and then requested a whole week of vacation, something he’d never done during his whole time at the hospital. Sabah spread a web of rumors around him; she said he was going to marry another doctor from his clinic, and that he was preparing to travel abroad, and when he stopped signing in or out, without confirming or denying any of the rumors, she said that perhaps he’d followed in the steps of the head nurse, whose whereabouts still no one knew.

He returned home on foot after finishing his first task at Nagy’s; the room was ready for them, and for the bullet. He got into bed, drew the sheets over him, and slept more deeply than he had for a long time. He dressed as soon as he awoke and headed straight to his office. He walked into the hospital without seeing anyone, pulled out the file, and opened it to the final page to read what had been written about the hours he’d spent at Nagy’s. But there was no record of his visit at all, not a single line or the slightest indication that he’d been there. It was strange. This was the first time nothing new had been recorded about Yehya. He scoured the pages again, looking for his name, or anything that had been added, and then saw something that he hadn’t initially noticed. On the bottom of the page there was a line he’d somehow missed: Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed spent one hundred and forty nights of his life in the queue .

The previous page covered the day before yesterday, and then the updates stopped. Tarek sank into thought, confused, his chest tightening. Everything that had happened swirled in his mind as if it were one long, uninterrupted scene. He sat there in silence, calm, his gaze fixed on the opposite wall. There was no need to read the pages of the file another time. He automatically reached into his pocket, but he’d left his favorite pencil in the pocket of his coat, which was at home. He took a blue pen from his desk drawer instead, and as he hesitated for a moment on the paper it left a small dot of ink on the page. Then quickly, he added a sentence by hand to the bottom of the fifth document. He closed the file, left it on his desk, and rose.