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HE EVENING CLASS Saeed and Nadia had been taking was finished, having concluded with the
arrival of the first dense smogs of winter, and in any case the curfew meant courses such as theirs
could not have continued. Neither of them had been to the other’s office, so they didn’t know where to
reach one another during the day, and without their mobile phones and access to the internet there was
no ready way for them to reestablish contact. It was as if they were bats that had lost the use of their
ears, and hence their ability to find things as they flew in the dark. The day after their phone signals
died Saeed went to their usual burger joint at lunchtime, but Nadia did not show, and the day after
that, when he went again, the restaurant was shuttered, its owner perhaps having fled, or simply
disappeared.
Saeed was aware that Nadia worked at an insurance company, and from his office he called the
operator and asked for the names and numbers of insurance companies, and tried phoning them all,
one by one, inquiring for her at each. This took time: the telephone company was struggling under the
sudden load and also to repair infrastructure destroyed in the fighting, and so Saeed’s office landline
worked at best intermittently, and when it did, an operator could be swatted out of the swarm of busy
tones only rarely, and that operator was—despite Saeed’s desperate entreaties, desperate entreaties
being common in those days—limited to giving out a maximum of two numbers per call, and when
Saeed finally did obtain a new pair of numbers to try, more often than not one or both proved to be
nonfunctional on any given day, and he had to ring and ring and ring again.
Nadia spent her lunch hours racing home to stock up on supplies. She bought bags of flour and rice
and nuts and dried fruit, and bottles of oil, and cans of powdered milk and cured meat and fish in
brine, all at exorbitant prices, her forearms aching from the strain of carrying them up to her
apartment, one load after another. She was fond of eating vegetables but people said the key was to
have as many calories stashed away as possible, and so foods like vegetables, which were bulky for
the amount of energy they could provide, and also prone to spoilage, were less useful. But soon the
shelves of shops near her were close to bare, even of vegetables, and when the government instituted
a policy that no one person could buy more than a certain amount per day, Nadia, like many others,
was both panicked and relieved.
On the weekend she went at dawn to her bank and stood in a line that was already quite long,
waiting for the bank to open, but when it opened the line became a throng and she had no choice but to
surge forward like everyone else, and there in the unruly crowd she was groped from behind,
someone pushing his hand down her buttocks and between her legs, and trying to penetrate her with
his finger, failing because he was outside the multiple fabrics of her robe and her jeans and her
underclothes, but coming as close to succeeding as possible under the circumstances, applying
incredible force, as she was pinned by the bodies around her, unable to move or even raise her hands,
and so stunned she could not shout, or speak, reduced to clamping her thighs together and her jaws
together, her mouth shutting automatically, almost physiologically, instinctively, her body sealing itself