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tub, which the council had designated part of the house’s emergency water supply, now that the taps
had run dry.
Nadia watched Saeed and not for the first time wondered if she had led him astray. She thought
maybe he had in the end been wavering about leaving their city, and she thought maybe she could have
tipped him either way, and she thought he was basically a good and decent man, and she was filled
with compassion for him in that instant, as she observed his face with its gaze upon the rain, and she
realized she had not in her life felt so strongly for anyone in the world as she had for Saeed in the
moments of those first months when she had felt most strongly for him.
Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would
come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not
being able to protect what is most valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he
could see no way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure.
To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop,
exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.
“What do you think happens when you die?” Nadia asked him.
“You mean the afterlife?”
“No, not after. When. In the moment. Do things just go black, like a phone screen turning off? Or
do you slip into something strange in the middle, like when you’re falling asleep, and you’re both here
and there?”
Saeed thought that it depended on how you died. But he saw Nadia seeing him, so intent on his
answer, and he said, “I think it would be like falling asleep. You’d dream before you were gone.”
It was all the protection he could offer her then. And she smiled at this, a warm, bright smile, and
he wondered if she believed him or if she thought, no, dearest, that is not what you think at all.
• • •
BUT A WEEK PASSED. And then another. And then the natives and their forces stepped back from the
brink.
Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to
corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other
way would have to be found. Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new
doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have
required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in
the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the
eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done. Or perhaps the sheer number of
places where there were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one.
And so, irrespective of the reason, decency on this occasion won out, and bravery, for courage is
demanded not to attack when afraid, and the electricity and water came on again, and negotiations
ensued, and word spread, and among the cherry trees on Palace Gardens Terrace Saeed and Nadia
and their neighbors celebrated, they celebrated long into the night.