“I am so sorry, Mr. Hashem, but because your security card has expired, I can’t do anything for you and your children. You will have to renew your security card before we can assist you,” she says, fingering the paper in front of her.
“What did you say?” And so she says it again, only this time leaving out the renewal part.
“Impossible.”
“No, I am afraid it is very possible. So very sorry.” And with that she hands the paper back to him while motioning to the man behind him. “Next.”
Because Ms. Hatem had been with the ministry of education for almost seven years, she has seen her fair share of disgruntled students, rabid parents, weepy grandparents and wasta-minded cousins declaring, “You will be hearing from my lawyer,” and so on. And so when Mr. Hashem said “Impossible,” she thinks nothing of it – a minor unhappiness in the grand scale of MOE things.
Mr. Hashem is not tall, some would even call him short, but he has five children, and four of the five are in desperate need of schooling, and lots of it, so even though the man behind him shoulders his way pass, Mr. Hashem continues to blink, thinking he has misheard, or an easily explained misunderstanding, for sure. Meanwhile, as others flow around him, like water around a rock, he slowly steps out of line and moves to the biggest window in the room, the sunlight a huge yellow splash across the floor, almost to the wall.
Once at the window, he turns, counts to five and then says, “I will jump.” But because he doesn’t say it loud enough, with conviction, only one man standing next to him, near the window, hears, and so seeing what is what, Mr. Hashem says it again, only louder, “I will jump.” A big silence immediately fills the room, as all heads turn as one to look. And he says it yet again, louder still, never mind that he is not very big. “If I don’t get what I want, what I need for my kids, what they deserve, I will jump. I will kill myself. I’ll jump. Wallah. If you don’t overlook this… this silly rule, regulation, I will jump and you and your office will have to answer for what comes next. Do you understand? Do you?”
A couple of newly-interested men move closer to the window, peering through the glass, at the parking lot across the street. More silence until someone somewhere says, “But we are on the ground floor.”
Mr. Hashem squints through the sunlight to see who said that, but there are too many faces, a riot of dishashas, hijabs and assorted abayas, to choose from. The best he can do is search for a smirk, a grin, something like a smart-alecky grimace, but nothing. All of this pushes him from angry to furious, and he reaches into his pocket, pulls out his cigarette lighter and flings it against the ministry wall. It shatters, leaving a white scar on the wall. “Fine, then I’ll take the elevator to the top floor, to the very top, I’ll show you, I’ll show all of you,” he yells. “You don’t think I know what I am talking about? You don’t think I know how to kill myself? Is that what you’re saying?”
The silence holds, until the invisible voice answers, “Just saying that there is not much of a jump here, from the ground floor. A little rolling in the dirt is not the stuff of suicide, sah?”
This is when Ms. Hatem, finally, steps away from her desk to, first, take a closer look at the scar he has created in the wall, running her fingertips over it, nodding, and second, saying, ”Sorry to say, the elevator is out of order, Mr. Hashem, but they say it will be fixed by the end of the day, so maybe if you can return later, say around 3:30, or better yet, we open tomorrow at 9:00 sharp, I am sure the elevator will be functioning then, and you can go higher, say, the sixth floor, that should do it.” Stepping back to her desk, sitting in her chair that makes a leathery groan, she turns to the man patiently waiting in front of her desk with a handful papers, saying, “Now, where were we?”
Photo by Matheus Vinicius on Unsplash.
