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FUNERALS WERE SMALLER and more rushed affairs in those days, because of the fighting. Some
families had no choice but to bury their dead in a courtyard or at the sheltered margin of a road, it
being impossible to reach a proper graveyard, and so impromptu burial grounds grew up, one
extinguished body attracting others, in much the same way that the arrival of one squatter on a disused
patch of government land can give rise to an entire slum.
It was customary for a home that had suffered a bereavement to be filled with relatives and wellwishers
for many days, but this practice was presently circumscribed by the dangers involved in
making a journey in the city, and while people did come to see Saeed’s father and Saeed, most came
furtively, and could not stay long. It was not the sort of occasion to ask what precisely Nadia’s
relationship was to the husband and son of the deceased, so no one did, but some did inquire with
their glances, and their eyes followed Nadia as she moved around the apartment in her black robe,
serving tea and biscuits and water, and not praying, though not ostentatiously not praying, more as if
she were busy looking after people’s earthly needs and might do so later.
Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept,
but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother’s corpse and screamed, and Saeed’s
father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by
a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the
benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.
Nadia called Saeed’s father “father” and he called her “daughter.” This began when they first met,
the terms seeming appropriate both to her and to him, and being acceptable forms of address between
the young and the old, even when not related, and in any case Nadia had taken one look at Saeed’s
father and felt him like a father, for he was so gentle, and evoked in her a protective caring, as if for
one’s own child, or for a puppy, or for a beautiful memory one knows has already commenced to
fade.
• • •
NADIA SLEPT in what had been Saeed’s room, on a pile of carpets and blankets on the floor, having
refused Saeed’s father’s offer to give up his bed, and Saeed slept on a similar though thinner pile in
the sitting room, and Saeed’s father slept by himself in his bedroom, a room where he had slept for
most of his life but where he could not recall the last instance he had slept alone and which for this
reason was no longer completely familiar to him.
Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his
consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a
particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her
into Saeed’s past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked