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young had never cared much for play, who seemed to laugh only rarely, who had won medals in
school and decided to become a doctor, who had successfully emigrated abroad, who returned once a
year to visit his parents, and who, along with eighty-five others, was blown by a truck bomb to bits,
literally to bits, the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were a head and two-thirds of an arm.
Nadia did not hear of her cousin’s death in time to attend the funeral, and she did not visit her
relatives, not for lack of emotion but because she wanted to avoid being the cause of unpleasantness.
She had planned to go to the graveyard alone, but Saeed had called her and asked through her silences
what was the matter, and she had somehow told him, and he had offered to join her, insisted without
insisting, which strangely came as a kind of relief. So they went together, very early the following
morning, and saw the rounded mound of fresh earth, garlanded with flowers, above her cousin’s
partial remains. Saeed stood and prayed. Nadia did not offer a prayer, or scatter rose petals, but knelt
down and put her hand on the mound, damp from the recent visit of a grave-tender with a watering
can, and shut her eyes for a long while, as the sound of a jetliner descending to the nearby airport
came and went.
They had breakfast at a café, coffee and some bread with butter and jam, and she spoke, but not of
her cousin, and Saeed seemed very present, comfortable being there on that unusual morning, with her
not talking of what was most of consequence, and she felt things change between them, become more
solid, in a way. Then Nadia went to the insurance company that employed her, handled fleet policies
until lunch. Her tone was steady and businesslike. The callers she dealt with only rarely said words
that were inappropriate. Or asked her for her personal number. Which, when they did, she would not
give.
• • •
NADIA HAD BEEN SEEING a musician for some time. They had met at an underground concert, more a
jam session really, with perhaps fifty or sixty people crammed into the soundproofed premises of a
recording studio that specialized increasingly in audio work for television—the local music business
being, for reasons of both security and piracy, in rather difficult straits. She had, as was by then usual
for her, been wearing her black robe, closed to her neck, and he had, as was by then usual for him,
been wearing a size-too-small white T-shirt, pinned to his lean chest and stomach, and she had
watched him and he had circled her, and they had gone to his place that night, and she had shuffled off
the weight of her virginity with some perplexity but not excessive fuss.
They rarely spoke on the telephone and met only sporadically, and she suspected he had many
other women. She did not want to inquire. She appreciated his comfort with his own body, and his
wanton attitude to hers, and the rhythm and strum of his touch, and his beauty, his animal beauty, and
the pleasure he evoked in her. She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as
the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and
also fear, and also style, kept him from asking more of her than she offered up. He berated himself for
this subsequently, but not too much, even though after their last meeting he would not stop thinking of
her until his death, which was, though neither of them then knew it, only a few short months away.
Nadia at first thought there was no need to say goodbye, that saying goodbye involved a kind of
presumption, but then she felt a small sadness, and knew she needed to say goodbye, not for him, for
she doubted he would care, but for her. And since they had little to say to one another by phone and
instant message seemed too impersonal, she decided to say it in person, outdoors, in a public place,
not at his messy, musky apartment, where she trusted herself less, but when she said it, he invited her