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the bathtub, was disappointingly utilitarian. She tried to recover her former good mood, and not be
angry with Saeed, who she told herself was not wrong in his own way, just out of rhythm with her in
this moment, and when she emerged from the bathroom wrapped in her towel, her towels, for she had
one around her body and another around her hair, and with her dripping but clean clothes in her hands,
she was prepared to let the little confrontation between them go.
But he said, looking at her, “You can’t stand here like that.”
“Don’t tell me what I can do.”
He looked stung by this comment, and also angry, and she was angry as well, and after he had
bathed, and washed his clothes, which he did perhaps as a conciliatory gesture or perhaps because
once he was cleansed of his own grime he too realized something of what she had realized, they slept
on the slender single bed together without speaking, without touching, or without touching more than
the cramped space demanded, for this one night not unlike a couple that was long and unhappily
married, a couple that made out of opportunities for joy, misery.
• • •
NADIA AND SAEED had crossed over on the morning of a Saturday and by Monday morning when the
housekeeper came to work the house was already quite full, home perhaps to fifty squatters, from
infants to the elderly, hailing from as far west as Guatemala and as far east as Indonesia. The
housekeeper screamed as she unlocked the front door, and the police arrived quickly after, two men in
old-fashioned black hats, but they only looked in from outside, and did not enter. Soon there was a
vanload more of them, in full riot gear, and then a car with two more who wore white shirts and black
vests and were armed with what appeared to be submachine guns, and on their black vests was the
word POLICE in white letters but these two looked to Saeed and Nadia like soldiers.
The residents of the house were terrified, most had seen firsthand what the police and soldiers
could do, and in their terror they spoke more to one another than they otherwise might, strangers
speaking to strangers. A sort of camaraderie evolved, as it might not have had they been on the street,
in the open, for then they would likely have scattered, and the devil take the hindmost, but here they
were penned in together, and being penned in made them into a grouping, a group.
When the police called over their bullhorns for everyone to exit the house, most agreed among
themselves that they would not do so, and so while a few left, the vast majority stayed, Nadia and
Saeed among them. The deadline for their departure drew nearer, then nearer still, and then came and
went, and they were still there, and the police had not charged, and they felt they had won some kind
of a respite, and then something they could never have expected happened: other people gathered on
the street, other dark- and medium- and even light-skinned people, bedraggled, like the people of the
camps on Mykonos, and these people formed a crowd. They banged cooking pots with spoons and
chanted in various languages and soon the police decided to withdraw.
That night it was calm and quiet in the house, though there were sometimes snatches of beautiful
singing that could be heard, in Igbo, until quite late, and Saeed and Nadia lay together and held hands
on the soft bed in their little back bedroom and were comforted by this, as if by a lullaby, comforted
even though they kept their bedroom door locked. In the morning they heard in the distance someone
making a call to prayer, at dawn, perhaps over a commandeered karaoke machine, and Nadia was
alarmed, waking from a dream and thinking for a second that she was back home in their own city,
with the militants, before recalling where she really was, and then she watched, a bit surprised, as
Saeed got out of bed and prayed.