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emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and
Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives
from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of
a better era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and
intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time.
Saeed’s neighborhood had fallen to the militants, and small-scale fighting had diminished nearby,
but large bombs still dropped from the sky and exploded with an awesome power that brought to
mind the might of nature itself. Saeed was grateful for Nadia’s presence, for the way in which she
altered the silences that descended on the apartment, not necessarily filling them with words, but
making them less bleak in their muteness. And he was grateful too for her effect on his father, whose
politeness, when he recalled he was in the company of a young woman, would jar him from what
otherwise were interminable reveries and would bring his attention back for a while to the here and
now. Saeed wished Nadia had been able to meet his mother, and his mother able to meet her.
Sometimes when Saeed’s father had gone to sleep Saeed and Nadia sat together in the sitting
room, their sides pressed close for connection and warmth, perhaps holding hands, at most
exchanging a kiss on the cheek as a farewell before bed, and often they were silent, but often they
spoke in low voices, about how to escape from the city, or about the endless rumors of the doors, or
about nothings: the precise color of the refrigerator, the increasingly sorry state of Saeed’s toothbrush,
the loudness of Nadia’s snore when she had a cold.
One evening they were huddled together in this way, under a blanket, in the flickering light of a
paraffin lamp, for there was no grid electricity in their part of the city anymore, and no piped gas or
water, municipal services having entirely broken down, and Saeed said, “It feels natural to have you
here.”
“For me too,” Nadia replied, resting her head on his shoulder.
“The end of the world can be cozy at times.”
She laughed. “Yes. Like a cave.”
“You smell a bit like a caveman,” she added later.
“And you smell like a wood fire.”
She looked at him and felt her body tighten, but she resisted the urge to caress.
When they heard that Nadia’s neighborhood had fallen to the militants as well, and that the roads
between the two were mostly clear, Saeed and Nadia returned to her flat so she could collect some
things. Nadia’s building had been damaged, and parts of the wall that faced the street were gone. The
backup-battery shop on the ground floor had been looted, but the metal door to the stairway had not
been forced, and the overall structure looked more or less sound—in need of substantial repair,
certainly, but not on the verge of collapse.
The plastic rubbish bags that covered Nadia’s windows were still in place, except for one, which,
along with the window itself, had been destroyed, and where the window had formerly been a gash of
blue sky was now visible, unusually clear and lovely, except for a thin column of smoke rising
somewhere in the distance. Nadia took her record player and records and clothes and food, and her
parched but possibly revivable lemon tree, and also some money and gold coins, which she had left
hidden in the tree’s clay plot, buried within the soil. These items she and Saeed loaded onto the
backseat of his family’s car, the top of the lemon tree sticking out of a lowered window. She did not
remove the money and coins from the pot in case they were searched at a militant checkpoint on the
way, which they were, but the fighters who stopped them appeared exhausted and wired and accepted
canned supplies as payment to pass.