1
With a single eye, he spied morning’s acidic light seep onto the collar of his jacket; a moment this way, then he shut this single eye once more for a final and restful blink.
The day was already like the other three that came before.
2
From somewhere that was neither a dream nor the room he was actually in, he heard his name being called, and with both eyes open, he ignored it––just as he had during the three days that came before this one.
A moment like this, then once more his name was called, and again he failed to respond; instead, he stared with white sheet eyes at the neighbouring buildings. Then again his name came, this time while a pigeon glided past, and he allowed it to pass away once more.
Finally it came more loudly and with force: “Anis.”
This time, just as he had for the last three days when the voice came in that particular way, he stood up from his resting place on the floor.
“Coming.”
And the voice did not call his name again after this announcement.
3
Anis walked slowly toward the bare concrete steps that led down to the second floor.
Cold wind swept in from the open side of the building, and he avoided the puddles that were formed by the persistent drippings of the ceiling.
Arriving at the top of the steps, Anis saw a brownish head appear at its bottom.
It moved fitfully and said: “Hurry up.”
That was Tarek and toward him Anis descended.
4
Anis and Tarek stood beside each other surrounded by all the others that slept on the second floor; they were all on the road waiting for the van that goes to the city.
“Why do you keep sleeping up there? ––By yourself.” Anis remained silent as Tarek had more to say: “There aren’t even any mattresses up there.”
For a moment there was silence, which Anis eventually dared to break: “I don’t want to accidentally sleep in someone’s place.”
Tarek carried on with his train of thought: “––and you don’t even have a blanket! … Anyway, it’s stupid, you know that right? Insisting to sleep up there.”
Anis stayed quiet while Tarek shook out a few more drops: “Tonight sleep downstairs.”
“Okay,” said Anis.
“With us,” Tarek added.
Anis nodded and looked at the others; no one was looking at him or Tarek, who continued: “Otherwise they will start thinking that you are up to something. It’s still your first week.”
Was he done? ––Yes: “Okay.”
5
Anis chewed cold bread in the back of the van between Tarek and the man that was distributing food. No one talked while each person in the van received their portion of the dispensation; one by one, they each took what was offered to them and chewed.
The sun was already up. Anis wanted to say to Tarek that “it must be 8 o’clock.”
But in the end he resisted the urge.
The driver weaved his van masterfully through traffic––traffic that was gradually thickening and slowing, transforming into a clot of steel. The driver drove quietly to the sound of the radio. He sat old and crooked at the wheel, a master of speed.
When they reached the main street at which they were all to be deposited, everyone in the van disembarked chaotically––everyone except for the driver and the man that was passing out food.
The boys poured out onto the street through the van’s sliding door, each holding a shoeshine box by a strap on a shoulder, and each holding a Nido can under the other.
The bread giver slid the door shut after them and moved swiftly to the front of the van.
The shoeshine boys had arrived.
6
As the van sped off, leaving behind a dissolving jet of exhaust, the boys scattered like dice.
Anis made his way toward the road he was accustomed to starting his day on; but as he took his first step in that direction, he heard Tarek calling him.
Turning, he saw that he was standing near a kiosk, waving impatiently.
Anis hesitated momentarily before finally slinging his box onto the other shoulder and crossing the road.
“What the matter?” he called over the passing cars.
Tarek waved him in and turned his back saying:
“Nothing’s the matter, just come here.”
7
When Anis arrived at Tarek’s side, he realised that he was chatting with an old man, not the owner of the kiosk, but someone that seemed at home there in its shade.
The old man was asking Tarek for a shine, but told him to wait as the boy who worked at the kiosk was sent to bring the shoes that needed shining from “his store.”
Anis was irritated.
After a moment, he thought about asking Tarek what this was all about, but he did not. Instead, he started fingering the links of a chain used to block entrance to the adjacent alley. He ran his fingers into the grimy opening of each link before then grabbing the whole rusty thing and clenching it so that it would emerge from his sweaty palm, polished and glistening slightly. He did this, link after link, without looking at his hands once.
Meanwhile, Tarek was tapping his knuckles on a garbage bin––rhythmically, while his eyes shifted up and down the street, glancing at shoes that flopped by like freshwater trout.
He didn’t say anything.
When the kiosk boy returned, he placed the desired shoes on the floor in front of the old man and backed away to stand between Anis and Tarek.
Then, when the old man shifted massively in his seat, the boy hurled himself onto his knees and began helping the man take off his shoes off so as to replace them with the newly brought ones.
The two of them, like a mountain and its reluctant climber, laboured at this task for a minute while Tarek and Anis persisted.
When the shoes were finally worn, Tarek stopped tapping on the garbage bin and threw a glance to the end of the street.
He then took a step back.
This retreat led the old man, who was now prepared for his shine, to naturally set his eyes on Anis’ face. Anis had been standing there with his box, fiddling with the chain.
Anis understood what happened, but he didn’t have a response to this changed circumstance; so he stayed silent and did and not move. The old man swallowed deeply and adjusted his posture before extending his feet.
Then Anis automatically perched himself on his Nido can and placed the shoeshine box between himself and the old man.
*
“Boya boya.”
He tried it out countless times over the previous three days.
“Boya boya.”
He said it so many times that it came to him in his sleep on those first three nights, haranguing him like a hundred bats out of some portion of his mind that got caught on the hook of its double iamb.
“Boya boya” unrelenting,“boya boya” through the night, “boya boya” a dissolving knife.
Yet hardly anyone actually heard him say the words; he tried his best but they would stick in his throat, emerging like bubbles, blackening his larynx like a cancer of the vocal chords. Like the shadow of a whisper, or like the corner of a sphere, the words would simply disappear––vanishing, as though they were never uttered at all.
Boya boya.
As a result, he had polished only a single shoe during his first three days on the street.
He had only managed a single shoe because its owner would not let him carry on to the second of the pair.
Even today’s opportunity with the old man, forced on him by Tarek, was a disaster.
Anis knew that his work was sloppy, that in fact, it was worse than that.
But he did not see how he could improve.
And perhaps it was only out of kindness that the old man paid him at all, because he did an equally horrendous job, soiling his socks and caking the shoes with polish.
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No one had bothered to ask him whether he knew how to polish shoes, or if he had ever done it before joining the group four days prior. Whether skilled or not, and regardless of their experience, none bothered to ask even once whether he had the slightest idea what he was doing; not even the man who gave them food in the morning and expected money in the evening.
“How much did you make today?” Anis froze when asked this question. Thankfully Tarek had passed him a couple of bills on their way back.
He handed them over obediently.
“That’s it? You’ll have to do better.” He only said this sternly, whereas he screamed at another boy who had not brought in enough, smacking his head savagely.
“Okay,” he told him and waited to go up to the second floor of the building.
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All he learned from the rest was to repeat the words “boya boya”, and to keep repeating those words until someone, anyone, extended a leg to him.
When that finally happened, when that offering came forth like a divine hand from some place beyond the clouds, some world from which Anis only expected feet and money––he would kneel down and get to work: polishing a shoe howsomever.
8
Anis found Tarek a couple of hours after the incident with the old man. He was eating a sandwich outside the hospital.
“How did it go?” He asked with his mouth full of bread and vegetables, neglecting to offer Anis a bite. The sandwich looked tempting, but Anis felt that there was a line somewhere regarding this sandwich.
Where did he get it from? “He paid me, it was fine,” Anis finally said.
His hand was sweating on the paper money scrunched into his pocket. He was counting the bills with his fingers over and again: one, two, three.
“Good.” He munched like a luxuriating ape. “Today is your first Friday, no?”
“What?” Anis was surprised by this question.
“It’s Friday. We stay late on Friday,” Tarek explained. “We go back all together in a service or two.”
“You polish at night?”
“No, we send our boxes back. They give us roses instead. What’s wrong with you? People polish in the morning, they need roses at night.” He cut off abruptly. After another savage bit of his sandwich, he look at Anis and said with a smile:
“There are also other things to do at night.”
Anis, who didn’t make very much of Tarek’s final statement, was grasping the post of a street sign. He was squeezing it as hard as he possibly could, as though he wanted to pluck it out of the pavement.
Then he started to pick at the grime caked on it.
Picking with his black fingernails: one, two, three.
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Anis spent the rest of the afternoon wandering back and forth on the same long road.
9
The van normally came back at 9 pm, but not at the intersection where they were dropped off; instead they would assemble in the shade of a parallel road and wait there. Tarek explained to Anis that he would have to relinquish his shoeshine box until late that night, along with any money he had made, and in their stead he was to take some roses.
At night he was to sell roses.
As Anis walked over to the meeting point, and having still not fully digested the idea that he would be staying late that night, something caught his attention: someone was calling his name, but it was dark, and he ignored it at first. But as he walked, he heard it again; yet once again something instinctively ignored the call.
Finally, it came more loudly and with force: “Anis.”
He could see some of the boys hanging out on the corner, some seated and others standing, but felt that it was still early; so he decided to see who it was that was calling his name. He turned to face the person that was calling him, but it was dark.
“Anis. You idiot, come here.” It was Tarek.
10
He was sitting behind a dumpster.
Something in his hand reflected the light from the street lamp.
“What are you doing here? The van is coming soon.”
“I told you. It’s Friday.”
The thing in his hands came up to his face and he tilted his head back before throwing it back down quickly; when the thing in his hand moved away, Anis saw Tarek’s other hand come up to his face.
Then he settled down once more, his back against the dumpster.
“What is that?”
“Weesk’ee,” the word came out like a cough and a hiss.
“What? Where did you get it from?”
This was not the first time Anis wondered where Tarek got all his things from––the sandwich, the extra money, now this; and despite how excessive the bottle in his hands seemed, Anis didn’t ask anything more about it. Again it was some line he vaguely felt that he could not cross despite their familiarity.
“You want a taste?”
Anis stayed quiet before shaking his head no.
“Let’s go, the van is almost here.”
“Not until you’ve tasted it!” With that, he stood up abruptly; something about his stature changed: he didn’t look so thin just then.
“Taste it!”
He thrust the bottle into Anis’ hands and watched him with cat eyes.
11
When the van arrived, its horn wedged itself into Tarek and Anis’ conversation.
“Come on,” Tarek said.
Anis was still trying to hold the fluid down in his stomach; a wave of acidity incinerated his insides, but he didn’t say anything other than “Okay.”
Tarek put the bottle inside his jacket, picked up his box – throwing it over his right shoulder – before rolling the Nido can up from his ankle to his armpit. He took off quickly.
Anis, lingered for a moment, still reeling from the two or three sips he had taken. He suddenly felt very light and was unable to take the van’s horn very seriously.
The horn sound leaped up from the street, grazing all the balconies on its way back down, but it was no longer for Anis at that moment; the van horn was just another horn.
To be ignored.
Then the sound came again, and he understood that Tarek was already there, but he ignored it nevertheless.
The horn came again but Anis was staring at the cats that were chewing garbage bags.
He very suddenly became extraordinarily hungry.
The horn came another time, more persistently and with force.
He grabbed his box and can; he ran as fast as he could to the van.
12
The van sped off. Stripped of his box and can, Anis now held a bouquet.
He was suddenly invigorated, energised more than he had been in the last four days. The acidic fluid in his belly and the scent of the roses, damp and frigid, filling his nostrils.
“Do you have more?” he asked Tarek.
“Be quiet.” he said. Anis vaguely registered that Tarek was eyeing the other boys who were watching him in turn. It seemed like they had just ended a brief exchange of words.
“Let’s go.”
Anis became very slow and was suddenly embarrassed, he didn’t say anything as he tailed Tarek around the corner back to where they were standing a moment before.
13
They sipped more from Tarek’s bottle and talked about the old man.
“Why did you make me polish his shoes? He would have paid you more if you did it.”
“I know him, and I don’t like polishing his shoes,” he said this oddly, almost as though he wanted to stop midway through the sentence.
Anis didn’t speak after that remark; instead, the fluid in his belly made him change the conversation. He started asking questions about where they were.
“Hamra. Did you actually not know that yet?”
“No, no one told me.”
“Where did you used to live?”
Anis didn’t want to answer this question. He just smiled at Tarek and told him that he came from far, far away.
He was surprised at how much he was saying, surprised by how much the liquid in his belly was making him talk.
“I never shined shoes before,” he confessed abruptly.
“I know, it’s obvious,” Tarek smiled.
They sipped a little more and Tarek joked about the women inside a small bar across the road. He stood up and started swaying his hips, describing what he wanted to do to them.
Anis laughed loudly at Tarek’s remarks, very loudly.
Tarek kept enacting his fantasy, the bottle in his left hand, his right hand extended as though pulling on a clod of hair. Anis laughed uncontrollably and Tarek took a massive gulp from his bottle and let out an expansive curse. Anis laughed more crazily than he already had been. He laughed and laughed, and his voice rang out onto the street in a way that could only have been understood at that time by anyone out there, and in that place, as a taunt, a threat, a call of some unseemly kind.
Tarek suddenly settled down, something changed in a place he could not see.
In a moment, some of the other boys came into the alley. Tarek concealed his bottle, but Anis was out of control. He continued to laugh.
The boys approached, asking questions, kicking trash in the dark.
Tarek stepped up toward them, trying to break the ice.
But Anis couldn’t stop laughing at the whores he had never seen inside the bar, and Tarek tried to talk over the laughter but the boys didn’t hear him.
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“Where is Adel’s money?” Anis remembers hearing that question, and that’s all. The question struck him like all the money he needed but didn’t have.
Apart from those words there was a lot of pushing and shoving.
The alley lit up with rage and the boys were flinging punches like confetti. It came out of nowhere, as though from an open sewer grate, all this rage flooded out in the pitch black alley.
Of course Anis eventually stopped laughing, but he didn’t do anything else.
He remembers hearing the bottle fall from Tarek, hit the floor, shatter.
He remembers seeing Tarek’s body slip into the crowd of boys. He remembers seeing a broken shard glint in one of their hands. He remembers seeing Tarek cut up, sliding onto the floor. He bled quickly, his blood mingling with the dumpster drippings that zigzagged on the filthy asphalt.
Anis, as always, could not do anything. He stayed quiet, wanting the darkness of the alley to swallow him, drag him away from Tarek’s vital fluid.
Then they came for him.
14
When he woke up a few hours later, he had a nosebleed and a missing tooth.
His face was wet with garbage and his hair greased with blood.
Turning onto his back, the moon, narrow as a blade, pulled far from the Earth and it was darker than any blackness the shoeshine boy had ever seen in his life.
–––––––––––––––––– END OF PART I
[Part II has now been published..]
idiotic investigations 