luxurious red carpet, the huge spacious room with its lofty ceiling, the large desk raised enough above floor level to make it seem like the dais in a courtroom, the low leather seat on which he sat, the three generals with their huge flabby bodies, white suits, shiny brass buttons, signs of rank, and glittering decorations on their chests and shoulders, and the presiding general, who welcomed him with a precisely measured, disciplined smile and then nodded to the committee member on his right. The latter propped his arms on the desk, stuck his bald head forward, and started asking him questions, the other two watching him closely as though weighing every word he spoke and observing every expression that appeared on his face. The questions were what he’d expected, his officer friends having assured him that the character interview questions were always the same and well known, the whole test being no more than a formality carried out for appearance’s sake, either to exclude radical elements (based on the National Security Service reports) or to confirm the acceptance of those blessed with influential friends. Taha had memorized the expected questions and their model answers and proceeded steadily and confidently to give his answers before the committee. He said that he had obtained high enough marks to qualify for one of the good colleges but preferred the Police Academy so that he could serve his country from his position as a police officer. He stressed that the job of the police was not simply to maintain order, as many thought, but social and humanitarian (giving examples of what he meant). Next he spoke about preventive security, in terms of definition and methods, approval appearing clearly on the examiners’ faces and the presiding general even nodding his head twice in confirmation of Taha’s answer. The former then spoke for the first time and asked Taha what he would do if he went to arrest a criminal and found him to be one of his childhood friends. Taha was expecting the question and had prepared the reply, but he made a show of thinking a bit to increase the impact of his answer on the examiners. Then he said, “Sir, duty knows nothing of friends or relatives. A policeman is like a soldier in battle — he must carry out his duty irrespective of all other considerations, for the sake of God and his country.”
The presiding general smiled and nodded with frank admiration and the silence that comes before the end reigned. Taha expected that the order to dismiss would be given, but the presiding general suddenly looked hard at the papers as though he had just discovered something. He raised the sheet of paper a little to make sure of what he had read, then asked Taha, avoiding his eyes, “Your father — what’s his profession, Taha?”
“Civil servant, sir.”
(This is what he had written on the application form, after paying the Community Liaison Officer a bribe of a hundred pounds to sign off on it.) The general searched through the papers again and said, “Civil servant or property guard?”
Taha said nothing for a moment. Then he said in a low voice, “My father is a property guard, sir.”
The presiding general smiled and looked embarrassed. Then he bent over the papers, carefully wrote something on them, raised his head with the same smile, and said, “Thanks, son. Dismissed.”
His mother sighed and quoted the Qur’anic verse, “
Busayna cried out vehemently, “What’s so special about being a police officer? Police officers are as common as dirt. How happy I would have been to see your officer’s uniform, when you were earning pennies!”
Taha had spent the day roaming the streets till he was exhausted and then come home to the roof and sat with his head bowed on the bench, the suit that he had put on that morning stripped of its glamour, baggy now and looking cheap and wretched. His mother tried to cheer him up.
“Son, you’re making things too complicated. There are lots of other good colleges apart from the police.”
Taha remained bowed and silent. It seemed it was beyond his mother’s words to deal with the matter and she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving him with Busayna, who moved over to sit next to him on the bench. She drew close to him and whispered, “Please don’t upset yourself, Taha.”
Her voice set him off and he cried out bitterly, “I’m upset because of all my wasted effort. If they’d set a particular profession for the father from the start, I would have known. They should have said ‘No children of doorkeepers.’ And what they did is against the law, too. I asked a lawyer and he told me that if I brought a case against them, I’d win.”
“We don’t want a court case or anything of that sort. Know what I think? With the grades you’ve got, you should enter the best college in the university, graduate with top marks, go off to an Arab country and earn some money, then come back here and live like a king.”
Taha looked at her for a while, then hung his head again. She went on, “Look, Taha. I know I’m a year younger than you, but I’ve worked and work has taught me a few things. This country doesn’t belong to us, Taha. It belongs to the people who have money. If you’d had twenty thousand pounds and used them to bribe someone, do you think any one would have asked about your father’s job? Make money, Taha, and you’ll get everything, but if you stay poor they’ll walk all over you.”
“I can’t let them get away with it. I must make a complaint.”
Busayna laughed bitterly. “Complain about who and to who? Do as I say and no more useless ideas. Work hard, get your degree, and don’t come back here till you’re rich. And if you never come back, better still.”
“So you think I should go to one of the Arab countries?”
“Certainly.”
“Will you come with me?”
The question took her by surprise and she mumbled, avoiding his eyes, “God willing.” But he said sadly, “You’ve changed toward me, Busayna. I know it.”
Busayna could see another quarrel coming, so she said with a sigh, “You’re tired out now. Go get some sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow.”
She left but he didn’t sleep. He stayed awake for a long while thinking, recalling a hundred times the face of the presiding general as he asked him slowly, as though reveling in his humiliation, “Your father’s a property guard, son?” “Property guard?” — an unfamiliar expression, one that he’d given no thought to and that he’d never expected. An expression that was his whole life. He had lived it for long years, suffered its oppression, resisted it with all his might, and tried to rid himself of it. He had struggled so that he might escape through the opening provided by the Police Academy into a respectable, decent life, but that expression — “property guard” — was waiting for him at the end of the exhausting race, to ruin everything at the final moment. Why hadn’t they told him at the beginning? Why had the general left it to the end and shown how pleased he was with his answers to the questions, then directed his final thrust at him, as much as to say to him, “Get out of my sight, you son of a doorkeeper! You want to get into the police, you son of a doorkeeper? The son of the doorkeeper wants to be an officer? That’s a good one, I swear!”
Taha started to pace the room for he had made up his mind that he had to do something. He told himself that he could not remain silent while they humiliated him in this way. Slowly, he started to imagine fantastic scenes of revenge: he saw himself, for example, delivering the generals on the committee a speech about equal opportunity, rights, and the justice that God and his Prophet — God bless him and grant him peace — had bidden us to. He went on rebuking them until they melted in shame for what they had done and apologized to him and announced his acceptance into the academy. In the final scene, he saw himself grasping the presiding general’s collar and shouting in his face, “What business is it of yours what my father’s job is, you cheating bribe-taker!” Then he directed at it a number of violent blows, in response to which the general fell to the ground, drowning in his own blood. It was his habit to imagine scenes like these whenever he found himself in difficult situations that he could not control. This time, however, the scenes of revenge, for all their power, could not assuage his thirst. Feelings of humiliation continued to bear down on him, until an idea occurred to him that he could not get out of his head. Sitting down at the small desk and taking out a piece of paper and a pen, he wrote in large letters at the top of the page, “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Complaint presented to His Excellency the President of the Republic.” He stopped for a moment and tipped his head back, feeling some comfort at the grandiloquence of the words and their solemnity. Then he applied himself diligently to writing.
