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Many windows were broken already, and the prudent thing would have been to remove those that
remained, but it was winter and the nights were cold, and without gas and electricity, both of which
were in increasingly short supply, windows served to take some of the edge off the chill, and so
people left them in place.
Saeed and his family rearranged their furniture instead. They placed bookshelves full of books
flush against the windows in their bedrooms, blocking the glass from sight but allowing light to creep
in around the edges, and they leaned Saeed’s bed over the tall windows in their sitting room, mattress
and all, upright, at an angle, so that the bed’s feet rested on the lintel. Saeed slept on three rugs
layered on the floor, which he told his parents suited his back.
Nadia taped the inside of her windows with beige packing tape, the sort normally used to seal
cardboard boxes, and hammered heavy-duty rubbish bags into place over them, pounding nails into
the window frames. When she had had enough electricity to charge her backup battery, she would
lounge around and listen to her records in the light of a single bare bulb, the harsh sounds of the
fighting muffled somewhat by her music, and she would then glance at her windows and think that they
looked a bit like amorphous black works of contemporary art.
The effect doors had on people altered as well. Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could
take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country. Some
people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door,
they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all. Most
people thought these rumors to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people
began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless.
Nadia and Saeed, too, discussed these rumors and dismissed them. But every morning, when she
woke, Nadia looked over at her front door, and at the doors to her bathroom, her closet, her terrace.
Every morning, in his room, Saeed did much the same. All their doors remained simple doors, on/off
switches in the flow between two adjacent places, binarily either open or closed, but each of their
doors, regarded thus with a twinge of irrational possibility, became partially animate as well, an
object with a subtle power to mock, to mock the desires of those who desired to go far away,
whispering silently from its door frame that such dreams were the dreams of fools.
• • •
WITHOUT WORK there was no impediment to Saeed and Nadia meeting during the day except for the
fighting, but that impediment was a serious one. The few remaining local channels still on the air
were saying that the war was going well but the international ones were saying that it was going badly
indeed, adding to an unprecedented flow of migrants that was hitting the rich countries, who were
building walls and fences and strengthening their borders, but seemingly to unsatisfactory effect. The
militants had their own pirate radio station, featuring a smooth-voiced announcer with a deep and
unnervingly sexy voice, who spoke slowly and deliberately, and claimed in a decelerated but almost
rap-like cadence that the fall of the city was imminent. Whatever the truth, being out and about was
risky, so Saeed and Nadia typically met at Nadia’s place.
Saeed had once more asked her to move in with him and his family, telling her that he could
explain things to his parents, and she could have his room, and he would sleep in the sitting room, and
they would not have to marry, they would only, out of respect for his parents, have to remain chaste in
the house, and it would be safer for her, for this was no time for anyone to be alone. He had not added
that it was especially unsafe for a woman to be alone, but she knew both that he thought it and that it