Summary

In “The Gate of Maladies,” the cell phone network is restored. Against that backdrop, Amani goes to offer condolences for the loss of Um Mabrouk’s daughter. She weeps heavily not only for the girl, but because she cannot stop imagining Yehya dying and thrown in a mass grave for all of the bullet victims. Um Mabrouk, meanwhile, tries to use her elder daughter’s death of heart failure—untreated because they could not afford the surgery—as “leverage to save the younger one” (65). A hospital director sends her to the Gate of Maladies, which much predates the other Gate, and which had been inept and failed to help Um Mabrouk in her own childhood. The official there tells her that her eldest daughter died according to God’s will, and that no medicine could have...