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women she passed and then immediately glancing down, the father patting his pockets and the
underside of his backpack as though checking for tears or leaks, the daughter staring at skydivers who
were hurtling towards a nearby pier and pulling up at the last moment and landing at a sprint, the son
testing the rubberized jogger-friendly surface beneath his feet with each step, and then the minute
ended and they were intercepted and led away, apparently bewildered, or overawed, for they held
hands and did not resist or scatter or run.
• • •
FOR THEIR PART, Saeed and Nadia enjoyed a degree of insulation from remote surveillance when they
were indoors, owing to their lack of electricity, but even so their home could still be searched by
armed men without warning, and of course as soon as they stepped outside they could be seen by the
lenses peering down on their city from the sky and from space, and by the eyes of militants, and of
informers, who might be anyone, everyone.
One previously private function they now had to perform in public was the emptying of their
bowels, for without piped water the toilets in Saeed and Nadia’s building no longer worked.
Residents had dug two deep trenches in the small courtyard in the back, one for men and one for
women, separated by a heavy sheet on a clothesline, and it was there that all had to squat to relieve
themselves, under the clouds, ignoring the stench, face to the ground so that even if the act could be
viewed, the identity of the actor might be kept somewhat to oneself.
Nadia’s lemon tree did not recover, despite repeated watering, and it sat lifeless on their balcony,
clung to by a few desiccated leaves.
It might seem surprising that even in such circumstances Saeed’s and Nadia’s attitudes towards
finding a way out were not entirely straightforward. Saeed desperately wanted to leave his city, in a
sense he always had, but in his imagination he had thought he would leave it only temporarily,
intermittently, never once and for all, and this looming potential departure was altogether different,
for he doubted he would come back, and the scattering of his extended family and his circle of friends
and acquaintances, forever, struck him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of
his home.
Nadia was possibly even more feverishly keen to depart, and her nature was such that the prospect
of something new, of change, was at its most basic level exciting to her. But she was haunted by
worries too, revolving around dependence, worries that in going abroad and leaving their country she
and Saeed and Saeed’s father might be at the mercy of strangers, subsistent on handouts, caged in pens
like vermin.
Nadia had long been, and would afterwards continue to be, more comfortable with all varieties of
movement in her life than was Saeed, in whom the impulse of nostalgia was stronger, perhaps
because his childhood had been more idyllic, or perhaps because this was simply his temperament.
Both of them, though, whatever their misgivings, had no doubt that they would leave if given the
chance. And so neither expected, when a handwritten note from the agent arrived, pushed under their
apartment door one morning and telling them precisely where to be at precisely what time the
following afternoon, that Saeed’s father would say, “You two must go, but I will not come.”
• • •