Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

Almost Crescendo
After a brisk walk, briefcase thumping against his thigh, the world all looked all right. It
stopped being tinged with red spots, one for every instance that a thief had done him wrong. His
father used to tell his elder brothers, who then told Hamza, that one hand is not enough to
compensate for theft, because the thief still has the other, then they have their teeth, then they
have their tongue. Once a thief, always a thief, Baba said to his grave. But that was enough, he
said whenever Hamza tried to ask for more. Hamza didn’t believe it, anyway. What did that man
know about theft and losing? Enough, the old man said, those were the old days. All Hamza has
left of him are those vague things, those bits of string that are too short and mean nothing.
Perhaps the only thing they could agree on was that only crazy men expect anything.
Hamza held the bridge of his nose until he was breathing at an acceptable volume and
could hear the noises around him again. A woman was calling out to a man across the street, he
could listen in but he had already missed the first half of their interaction, so he would be lost in
any case.
His head felt fuzzy again. He waited to cross the street along the edge of the pavement. A
man in a suit tore past in a clunky bike. Over him, the scaffolding hung low. Every building had
an external skeleton of scaffolding, every one of them was getting a facelift. Although Hamza was
not a very tall man, living in this city placed a pressure on the back of his neck. He thought it was
kind of comforting, in a way. To his right, someone had peeled off a poster from the wooden
scaffolding and underneath it was a commercial for shoes. A woman’s glossy high heels hung
loosely off the corner of an office desk, somehow suspended by the leather straps.
Hamza thought to himself that he should call that woman from the embassy. He did so
as he crossed the street. The other side rang for a while before going silent. The smooth screen
felt warm and so he kept it at his cheek.
In his vapid youth, maybe on a street somewhere not so far away, he talked like this for
hours until the keypad left a scarlet pattern on his cheek. It had seemed dreamy like the girl had
reached out and sketched the small boxes onto his face herself.
He had to put the phone down eventually, to get into his apartment building.
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