238693456934

THE NORTHERN SUMMER EVENINGS were endless. Saeed and Nadia often fell asleep before it was fully
dark, and before they fell asleep they often sat outside on the ground with their backs to the dormitory,
on their phones, wandering far and wide but not together, even though they appeared to be together,
and sometimes he or she would look up and feel on their face the wind blowing through the shattered
fields all about them.
They put their lack of conversation down to exhaustion, for by the end of the day they were usually
so tired they could barely speak, and phones themselves have the innate power of distancing one from
one’s physical surroundings, which accounted for part of it, but Saeed and Nadia no longer touched
each other when they lay in bed, not in that way, and not because their curtained-off space in the
pavilion seemed less than entirely private, or not only because of that, and when they did speak at
length, they, a pair once not used to arguing, tended to argue, as though their nerves were so raw that
extended encounters evoked a sensation of pain.
Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each
other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather
illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us. So it was with
Saeed and Nadia, who found themselves changed in each other’s eyes in this new place.
To Nadia, Saeed was if anything more handsome than he had been before, his hard work and his
gauntness suiting him, giving him a contemplative air, making out of his boyishness a man of
substance. She noticed other women looking at him from time to time, and yet she herself felt
strangely unmoved by his handsomeness, as though he were a rock or a house, something she might
admire but without any real desire.
He had two or three white hairs in the stubble of his beard now, new arrivals this summer, and he
prayed more regularly, every morning and evening, and perhaps on his lunch breaks too. When he
spoke he spoke of paving and positions on waiting lists and politics, but not of his parents, and not
anymore of travel, of all the places they might one day see together, or of the stars.
He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia
that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he
sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was
unambiguously gone.
To Saeed, Nadia looked much the same as she did when they first met, which is to say strikingly
fetching, if vastly more tired. But it was inexplicable that she continued to wear her black robes, and
it grated on him a bit, for she did not pray, and she avoided speaking their language, and she avoided
their people, and sometimes he wanted to shout, well take it off then, and then he would wince
inwardly, since he believed he loved her, and his resentment, when it bubbled up like this, made him
angry with himself, with the man he seemed to be becoming, a less than romantic man, which was not
the sort of man he believed a man should aspire to be.
Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this
feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing. He
was certain that he cared for her and wished good for her and wanted to protect her. She was the
entirety of his close family now, and he valued family above all, and when the warmth between them
seemed lacking his sorrow was immense, so immense that he was uncertain whether all his losses had
not combined into a core of loss, and in this core, this center, the death of his mother and the death of
his father and the possible death of his ideal self who had loved his woman so well were like a single
death that only hard work and prayer might allow him to withstand.