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A third layer of nativeness was composed of those who others thought directly descended, even in
the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa to this
continent centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion to the rest,
it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it, and unspeakable violence had
occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile, a stratum of soil that perhaps made possible all
future transplanted soils, and to which Saeed in particular was attracted, since at a place of worship
where he had gone one Friday the communal prayer was led by a man who came from this tradition
and spoke of this tradition, and Saeed had found, in the weeks he and Nadia had been in Marin, this
man’s words to be full of soul-soothing wisdom.
The preacher was a widower, and his wife had come from the same country as Saeed, and so the
preacher knew some of Saeed’s language, and his approach to religion was partly familiar to Saeed,
while at the same time partly novel, too. The preacher did not solely preach. Mainly he worked to
feed and shelter his congregants, and teach them English. He ran a small but efficient organization
staffed with volunteers, young men and women, all Saeed’s color or darker, which Saeed too had
soon joined, and among these young men and women that Saeed now labored alongside was one
woman in particular, the preacher’s daughter, with curly hair she wore tied up high on her head with a
cloth, this one woman the one woman in particular that Saeed avoided speaking to, because whenever
he looked at her he felt his breath tighten within him, and he thought guiltily of Nadia, and he thought
further that here, for him, lay something best not explored at all.
• • •
NADIA PERCEIVED the presence of this woman not in the form of a distancing by Saeed, as might have
been expected, but rather as a warming up and reaching out. Saeed seemed happier, and keen to
smoke joints with Nadia at the end of the day, or at least share a couple of puffs, for they had adjusted
their consumption in recognition of the local weed’s potency, and they began to speak of nothings
once again, of travel and the stars and the clouds and the music they heard all around them from the
other shanties. She felt bits of the old Saeed returning.
She wished, therefore, that she could be the old Nadia. But much as she enjoyed their chats and the
improved mood between them, they rarely touched, and her desire to be touched by him, long
subsided, did not flicker back into flame. It seemed to Nadia that something had gone quiet inside her.
She spoke to him, but her words were muffled to her own ears. She lay beside Saeed, falling asleep,
but not craving his hands or his mouth on her body—stifled, as if Saeed were becoming her brother,
though never having had a brother she was unsure what that term meant.
It was not that her sensuality, her sense of the erotic, had died. She found herself aroused readily,
by a beautiful man she passed as she walked down to work, by memories of the musician who had
been her first lover, by thoughts of the girl from Mykonos. And sometimes when Saeed was out or
asleep she pleasured herself, and when she pleasured herself she thought increasingly of that girl, the
girl from Mykonos, and the strength of her response no longer surprised her.
• • •
WHEN SAEED WAS a child he had first prayed out of curiosity. He had seen his mother and father
praying, and the act held a certain mystery for him. His mother used to pray in her bedroom, perhaps
once a day, unless it was a particularly holy time, or there had been a death in the family, or an