238693456934

• • •
IN LONDON, Saeed and Nadia heard that military and paramilitary formations had fully mobilized and
deployed in the city from all over the country. They imagined British regiments with ancient names
and modern kit standing ready to cut through any resistance that might be encountered. A great
massacre, it seemed, was in the offing. Both of them knew that the battle of London would be
hopelessly one-sided, and like many others they no longer ventured far from their home.
The operation to clear the migrant ghetto in which Saeed and Nadia found themselves began badly,
with a police officer shot in the leg within seconds as his unit moved into an occupied cinema near
Marble Arch, and then the flat sounds of a firefight commenced, coming from there but also from
elsewhere, growing and growing, all around, and Saeed, who was caught in the open, ran back to the
house, and found the heavy front door locked shut, and he banged on it until it opened, Nadia yanking
him in and slamming it behind him.
They went to their room in the back and pushed their mattress up against the window and sat
together in one corner and waited. They heard helicopters and more shooting and announcements to
peacefully vacate the area made over speakers so powerful that they shook the floor, and they saw
through the gap between mattress and window thousands of leaflets dropping from the sky, and after a
while they saw smoke and smelled burning, and then it was quiet, but the smoke and the smell lasted a
long time, particularly the smell, lingering even when the wind direction changed.
That night a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants had been incinerated when the cinema
burned down, children and women and men, but especially children, so many children, and whether
or not this was true, or any of the other rumors, of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl’s Court, or
near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores, whatever it was that had
happened, something seemed to have happened, for there was a pause, and the soldiers and police
officers and volunteers who had advanced into the outer edges of the ghetto pulled back, and there
was no more shooting that night.
The next day was quiet, and the day after that, and on the second day of quiet Saeed and Nadia
removed the mattress from their window and dared to venture outside and forage for food but there
was none to be found. The depots and soup kitchens were shut. Some supplies were coming through
the doors, but not nearly enough. The council met and requisitioned all provisions in the three houses,
and these were rationed, with most going to the children, and Saeed and Nadia getting a handful of
almonds each one day, and a tin of herring to share the next.
• • •
THEY SAT ON THEIR BED and watched the rain and talked as they often did about the end of the world,
and Saeed wondered aloud once again if the natives would really kill them, and Nadia said once
again that the natives were so frightened that they could do anything.
“I can understand it,” she said. “Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over
the world suddenly arrived.”
“Millions arrived in our country,” Saeed replied. “When there were wars nearby.”
“That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.”
Outside on the balcony the rain clattered in pots and pans, and periodically Saeed or Nadia would
get up and open the window and carry two of these to the bathroom and empty them into the stoppered