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When they reached home Saeed’s father saw the lemon tree and smiled for what seemed like the
first time in days. Together the three of them placed it on their balcony, but quickly, because a band of
armed men who looked like foreigners had begun to gather on the street below, arguing in a language
they could not understand.
• • •
NADIA KEPT HER RECORD PLAYER and records out of sight in Saeed’s room, even after the customary
mourning period for Saeed’s mother was over, because music was forbidden by the militants, and
their apartment could be searched without warning, indeed it had been once already, militants banging
on the door in the middle of the night, and in any case even if she had wanted to play a record there
was no electricity, not even enough to charge the apartment’s backup batteries.
The night the militants came they were looking for people of a particular sect, and demanded to
see ID cards, to check what sort of names everyone had, but fortunately for Saeed’s father and Saeed
and Nadia their names were not associated with the denomination being hunted. The neighbors
upstairs were not so lucky: the husband was held down while his throat was cut, the wife and
daughter were hauled out and away.
The dead neighbor bled through a crack in the floor, his blood appearing as a stain in the high
corner of Saeed’s sitting room, and Saeed and Nadia, who had heard the family’s screams, went up to
collect and bury him, as soon as they dared, but his body was gone, presumably taken by his
executioners, and his blood was already fairly dry, a patch like a painted puddle in his apartment, an
uneven trail on the stairs.
The following night, or perhaps the night after that, Saeed entered Nadia’s room and they were
unchaste there for the first time. A combination of horror and desire subsequently impelled him back
each evening, despite his earlier resolution that they do nothing that was disrespectful to his parents,
and they would touch and stroke and taste, always stopping short of sex, upon which she no longer
insisted, and which they had by now found ample means to circumvent. His mother was no more, and
his father seemed not to concern himself with these romantic matters, and so they proceeded in secret,
and the fact that unmarried lovers such as they were now being made examples of and punished by
death created a semi-terrified urgency and edge to each coupling that sometimes bordered on a
strange sort of ecstasy.
• • •
AS THE MILITANTS secured the city, extinguishing the last large salients of resistance, a partial calm
descended, broken by the activities of drones and aircraft that bombed from the heavens, these
networked machines for the most part invisible, and by the public and private executions that now
took place almost continuously, bodies hanging from streetlamps and billboards like a form of festive
seasonal decoration. The executions moved in waves, and once a neighborhood had been purged it
could then expect a measure of respite, until someone committed an infraction of some kind, because
infractions, although often alleged with a degree of randomness, were invariably punished without
mercy.
Saeed’s father went each day to the home of a cousin who was like an elder brother to Saeed’s
father and his surviving siblings, and there he sat with the old men and old women and drank tea and
coffee and discussed the past, and they all knew Saeed’s mother well and had stories to relate in