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• • •
FOR HIS PART Saeed often had dreams of his father, whose death had been reported to Saeed by a
cousin who had recently managed to escape from their city, and with whom Saeed had connected by
social media, the cousin having settled near Buenos Aires. This cousin told Saeed that Saeed’s father
had passed away from pneumonia, a lingering infection he had fought for months, initially just a cold
but then much worse, and in the absence of antibiotics he had succumbed, but he had not been alone,
his siblings were with him, and he had been buried next to his wife, as he had wished.
Saeed did not know how to mourn, how to express his remorse, from so great a distance. So he
redoubled his work, and took on extra shifts even when he barely had the strength, and the wait for
Nadia and him to receive their dwelling did not shorten, but it likewise did not increase, for other
husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and men and women were working extra shifts as well,
and Saeed’s additional efforts served to maintain his and Nadia’s ranking on the list.
Nadia was deeply affected by the news of the old man’s passing, more even than she had expected.
She tried to speak to Saeed about his father, but she stumbled over what to say, and on his side Saeed
was quiet, unforthcoming. She felt herself touched by guilt from time to time, although she was unsure
what precisely was making her guilty. All she knew was that when the feeling came it was a relief for
her to be away from Saeed, at work on their separate work sites, a relief unless she thought about it,
thought about being relieved not to be with him, because when she thought about this the guilt was
usually not too far behind.
Saeed did not ask Nadia to pray with him for his father, and she did not offer, but when he was
gathering a circle of acquaintances to pray in the long evening shadow cast by their dormitory, she
said she would like to join the circle, to sit with Saeed and the others, even if not engaged in
supplication herself, and he smiled and said there was no need. And she had no answer to this. But
she stayed anyway, next to Saeed on the naked earth that had been stripped of plants by hundreds of
thousands of footsteps and rutted by the tires of ponderously heavy vehicles, feeling for the first time
unwelcome. Or perhaps unengaged. Or perhaps both.
• • •
FOR MANY, adjustment to this new world was difficult indeed, but for some it was also unexpectedly
pleasant.
On Prinsengracht in the center of Amsterdam an elderly man stepped out onto the balcony of his
little flat, one of the dozens into which what had been a pair of centuries-old canal houses and former
warehouses had been converted, these flats looking out into a courtyard that was as lush with foliage
as a tropical jungle, wet with greenness, in this city of water, and moss grew on the wooden edges of
his balcony, and ferns also, and tendrils climbed up its sides, and there he had two chairs, two chairs
from ages ago when there were two people living in his flat, though now there was one, his last lover
having left him bitterly, and he sat down on one of these chairs and delicately rolled himself a
cigarette, his fingers trembling, the paper crisp but with a hint of softness, from the damp, and the
tobacco smell reminded him as it always did of his departed father, who would listen with him on his
record player to audio recordings of science fiction adventures, and would pack and puff on his pipe,
as sea creatures attacked a great submarine, the sounds of the wind and waves in the recording mixing
with the sounds of the rain on their window, and the elderly man who was then a boy had thought,
when I grow up I too will smoke, and here he was, a smoker for the better part of a century, about to