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light a cigarette, when he saw emerging from the common shed in the courtyard, where garden tools
and the like were stored, and from which a steady stream of foreigners now came and went, a
wrinkled man with a squint and a cane and a Panama hat, dressed as though for the tropics.
The elderly man looked at this wrinkled man and did not speak. He merely lit his cigarette and
took a puff. The wrinkled man did not speak either: he walked slowly around the courtyard, leaning
into his cane, which made scraping noises in the gravel of the footpath. Then the wrinkled man moved
to reenter the shed, but before he left he turned to the elderly man, who was looking at him with a
degree of disdain, and elegantly doffed his hat.
The elderly man was taken aback by this gesture, and sat still, as if transfixed, and before he could
think of how to respond the wrinkled man stepped forward and was gone.
The next day the scene repeated itself. The elderly man was sitting on his balcony. The wrinkled
man returned. They gazed upon each other. And this time when the wrinkled man doffed his hat, the
elderly man raised a glass to him, a glass of fortified wine, which he happened to be drinking, and he
did so with a serious but well-mannered nod of his head. Neither man smiled.
On the third day the elderly man asked the wrinkled man if he would care to join him on his
balcony, and though the elderly man could not speak Brazilian Portuguese and the wrinkled man could
not speak Dutch, they cobbled together a conversation, a conversation with many long gaps, but these
gaps were eminently comfortable, almost unnoticed by the two men, as two ancient trees would not
notice a few minutes or hours that passed without a breeze.
On his next visit the wrinkled man invited the elderly man to come with him through the black door
that was inside the shed. The elderly man did so, walking slowly, as the wrinkled man did as well,
and at the other side of that door the elderly man found himself being helped to his feet by the
wrinkled man in the hilly neighborhood of Santa Teresa, in Rio de Janeiro, on a day that was
noticeably younger and warmer than the day he had left in Amsterdam. There the wrinkled man
escorted him over tram tracks to the studio where he worked, and showed him some of his paintings,
and the elderly man was too caught up in what was happening to be objective, but he thought these
paintings were marked by real talent. He asked if he might buy one, and was instead given his choice
as a gift.
A week later a war photographer who lived in a Prinsengracht flat that overlooked the same
courtyard was the first neighbor to note the presence of this aged couple on the balcony opposite and
below her. She was also, not long after, and to her considerable surprise, a witness to their very first
kiss, which she captured, without expecting to, through the lens of her camera, and then deleted, later
that night, in a gesture of uncharacteristic sentimentality and respect.
• • •
SOMETIMES SOMEONE from the press would descend on Saeed and Nadia’s camp or work site, but
more often denizens would themselves document and post and comment online upon what was going
on. As usual, disasters attracted the most outside interest, such as a nativist raid that disabled
machinery or destroyed dwelling units nearing completion or resulted in the severe beating of some
workers who had strayed too far from camp. Or alternatively the knifing of a native foreman by a
migrant or a fight among rival groups of migrants. But mostly there was little to report, just the day-today
goings-on of countless people working and living and aging and falling in and out of love, as is
the case everywhere, and so not deemed worthy of headline billing or thought to be of much interest
to anyone but those directly involved.