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Nadia and Saeed, who had run from war already, and did not know where next to run, and so were
waiting, waiting, like so many others.
• • •
AND YET while all this occurred there were volunteers delivering food and medicine to the area, and
aid agencies at work, and the government had not banned them from operating, as some of the
governments the migrants were fleeing from had, and in this there was hope. Saeed in particular was
touched by a native boy, just out of school, or perhaps in his final year, who came to their house and
administered polio drops, to the children but also to the adults, and while many were suspicious of
vaccinations, and many more, including Saeed and Nadia, had already been vaccinated, there was
such earnestness in the boy, such empathy and good intent, that though some argued, none had the heart
to refuse him.
Saeed and Nadia knew what the buildup to conflict felt like, and so the feeling that hung over
London in those days was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with
panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with
tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the
calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the
steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.
The cherry trees exploded on Palace Gardens Terrace at that time, bursting into white blossoms,
the closest thing many of the street’s new residents had ever seen to snow, and reminding others of
ripe cotton in the fields, waiting to be picked, waiting for labor, for the efforts of dark bodies from the
villages, and in these trees there were now dark bodies too, children who climbed and played among
the boughs, like little monkeys, not because to be dark is to be monkey-like, though that has been and
was being and will long be slurred, but because people are monkeys who have forgotten that they are
monkeys, and so have lost respect for what they are born of, for the natural world around them, but
not, just then, these children, who were thrilled in nature, playing imaginary games, lost in the clouds
of white like balloonists or pilots or phoenixes or dragons, and as bloodshed loomed they made of
these trees that were perhaps not intended to be climbed the stuff of a thousand fantasies.
One night a fox appeared in the garden of the house where Saeed and Nadia were staying. Saeed
pointed it out to Nadia through the window of their little back bedroom, and they were both amazed to
see it, and wondered how such a creature could survive in London, and where it had come from.
When they asked around if anyone else had seen a fox, all said no, and some people told them it might
have come through the doors, and others said it might have wandered in from the countryside, and still
others claimed foxes were known to live in this part of London, and an old woman told them they had
not seen a fox but rather themselves, their love. They wondered if she meant the fox was a living
symbol or the fox was unreal and just a feeling and when others looked they would see no fox at all.
Mention of their love had made Saeed and Nadia a bit uncomfortable, for they had not been very
romantic of late, each still perceiving the grating of their presence on the other, and they put this down
to being too long in too close proximity, a state of unnatural nearness in which any relationship would
suffer. They began to wander separately during the day, and this separation came as a relief to them,
though Saeed worried what would happen if the fighting to clear their area began so suddenly that
they would not both be able to return home in time, knowing from experience that a mobile phone
could be a fickle connection, its signal thought in normal circumstances to be like the sunlight or the
moonlight, but in actuality capable of an instant and endless eclipse, and Nadia worried about the