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“No. Of course.”
Saeed’s expression had grown traumatized.
But Nadia nodded. And while her eyes were warm, she did not smile.
• • •
REFUGEES HAD OCCUPIED many of the open places in the city, pitching tents in the greenbelts between
roads, erecting lean-tos next to the boundary walls of houses, sleeping rough on sidewalks and in the
margins of streets. Some seemed to be trying to re-create the rhythms of a normal life, as though it
were completely natural to be residing, a family of four, under a sheet of plastic propped up with
branches and a few chipped bricks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or
surprise, or supplication, or envy. Others didn’t move at all: stunned, maybe, or resting. Possibly
dying. Saeed and Nadia had to be careful when making turns not to run over an outstretched arm or
leg.
As she nosed her motorcycle home, followed by Saeed on his scooter, Nadia did have several
moments of questioning whether she had done the right thing. But she didn’t change her mind.
There were two checkpoints on their way, one manned by police and another, newer one, manned
by soldiers. The police didn’t bother with them. The soldiers stopped everyone. They made Nadia
remove her helmet, perhaps thinking she might be a man disguised as a woman, but when they saw
this was not the case, they waved her through.
Nadia rented the top portion of a narrow building belonging to a widow whose children and
grandchildren all lived abroad. This building had once been a single house, but it was constructed
adjacent to a market that had subsequently grown past and around it. The widow had kept the middle
floor for herself, converted the bottom floor into a shop that she let out to a seller of car-battery-based
residential-power-backup systems, and given the uppermost floor to Nadia, who had overcome the
widow’s initial suspicions by claiming that she too was a widow, her husband a young infantry
officer killed in battle, which, admittedly, was less than entirely true.
Nadia’s flat comprised a studio room with an alcove kitchenette and a bathroom so small that
showering without drenching the commode was impossible. But it opened onto a roof terrace that
looked out over the market and was, when the electricity had not gone out, bathed in the soft and
shimmying glow of a large, animated neon sign that towered nearby in the service of a zero-calorie
carbonated beverage.
Nadia told Saeed to wait at a short distance, in a darkened alley around the corner, while she
unlocked a metal grill door and entered the building alone. Once upstairs she threw a quilt over her
bed and pushed her dirty clothes into the closet. She filled a small shopping bag, paused another
minute, and dropped it out a window.
The bag landed beside Saeed with a muffled thump. He opened it, found her spare downstairs key,
and also one of her black robes, which he furtively pulled on over his own outfit, covering his head
with its hood, and then, with a mincing gait that reminded her of a stage-play robber, he approached
the front door, unlocked it, and a minute later appeared at her apartment, where she motioned him to
sit.
Nadia selected a record, an album sung by a long-dead woman who was once an icon of a style
that in her American homeland was quite justifiably called soul, her so-alive but no longer living
voice conjuring up from the past a third presence in a room that presently contained only two, and
asked Saeed if he would like a joint, to which he fortunately said yes, and which he offered to roll.