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Nadia, who watched and smiled and usually said little in these gatherings, thought the couple a bit
like the queen and king of a domain populated otherwise solely by women, a transient domain that
would last only a few short seasons, and she wondered if perhaps they thought the same and had
decided, nonetheless, to savor it.
• • •
IT WAS SAID that with every month there were more worker camps around London, but even if this
were true Saeed and Nadia noticed an almost daily swelling of their own camp with new arrivals.
Some came on foot, others in buses or vans. On their days off workers were encouraged to help out
around the camp, and Saeed often volunteered to help process and settle the camp’s latest additions.
Once he handled a small family, a mother, father, and daughter, three people whose skin was so
fair that it seemed they had never seen the sun. He was struck by their eyelashes, which held the light
improbably, and by their hands and cheeks, in which networks of tiny veins could be seen. He
wondered where they came from, but he did not speak their language and they did not speak English,
and he did not want to pry.
The mother was tall and narrow-shouldered, as tall as the father, and the daughter was a slightly
smaller version of her mother, nearly equal to Saeed in height, though he suspected she was still very
young, likely just thirteen or fourteen. They watched him with suspicion and in desperation, and
Saeed was careful to speak softly and move slowly, as one does when meeting a nervous horse or
puppy for the first time.
During the course of the afternoon he spent with them, Saeed only rarely heard them speak to one
another in what he thought of as their odd language. Mostly they communicated by gesture, or with
their eyes. Maybe, Saeed thought initially, they feared he might be able to understand them. Later he
suspected something else. That they were ashamed, and that they did not yet know that shame, for the
displaced, was a common feeling, and that there was, therefore, no particular shame in being
ashamed.
He took them to their designated space in one of the new pavilions, unoccupied and basic, with a
cot, and some fabric shelving hanging from one of the cables, and he left them there to settle in, left
the three of them staring and motionless. But when he returned an hour later to bring them to the mess
tent for lunch, and called out, and the mother pushed aside the flap that served as their front door, and
he glimpsed inside, what he glimpsed was a home, with the shelves all full, and neat bundles of
belongings on the ground, and a throw on the cot, and also on the cot the daughter, her back
unsupported but erect, her legs crossed at the shins, so that her thighs rested on her feet, and in her lap
a little notebook or diary, in which she was writing furiously until the last moment, until the mother
called out her name, and which she then locked, with a key that she wore on a string around her neck,
and placed in one of the piles of belongings that must have been hers, thrust the diary into the middle
of the pile so that it was hidden.
She fell in behind her parents, who nodded at Saeed in recognition, and he turned and led them all
from that place, a place that was already beginning to be theirs, to another where going forward they
could reliably find a meal.
• • •