Exit West(14)

Saeed had once more asked her to move in with him and his family, telling her that he could explain things to his parents, and she could have his room, and he would sleep in the sitting room, and they would not have to marry, they would only, out of respect for his parents, have to remain chaste in the house, and it would be safer for her, for this was no time for anyone to be alone. He had not added that it was especially unsafe for a woman to be alone, but she knew both that he thought it and that it was true, even as she parried his suggestion. He could see that the matter unsettled her, so he did not say it again, but the offer stood, and she considered it.

Nadia was herself coming to acknowledge that this was no longer a city where the risks facing a young woman living independently could be thought of as manageable, and equally importantly she worried for Saeed each time he drove over to see her and back again. But part of her still resisted the idea of moving in with him, with anyone for that matter, having at such great difficulty moved out in the first place, and become quite attached to her small flat, to the life, albeit often lonely, that she had built there, and also finding the idea of living as a chaste half lover, half sister to Saeed in close proximity to his parents rather bizarre, and she might have waited much longer had Saeed’s mother not been killed, a stray heavy-caliber round passing through the windshield of her family’s car and taking with it a quarter of Saeed’s mother’s head, not while she was driving, for she had not driven in months, but while she was checking inside for an earring she thought she had misplaced, and Nadia, seeing the state Saeed and Saeed’s father were in when Nadia came to their apartment for the first time, on the day of the funeral, stayed with them that night to offer what comfort and help she could and did not spend another night in her own apartment again.





FIVE





FUNERALS WERE SMALLER and more rushed affairs in those days, because of the fighting. Some families had no choice but to bury their dead in a courtyard or at the sheltered margin of a road, it being impossible to reach a proper graveyard, and so impromptu burial grounds grew up, one extinguished body attracting others, in much the same way that the arrival of one squatter on a disused patch of government land can give rise to an entire slum.

It was customary for a home that had suffered a bereavement to be filled with relatives and well-wishers for many days, but this practice was presently circumscribed by the dangers involved in making a journey in the city, and while people did come to see Saeed’s father and Saeed, most came furtively, and could not stay long. It was not the sort of occasion to ask what precisely Nadia’s relationship was to the husband and son of the deceased, so no one did, but some did inquire with their glances, and their eyes followed Nadia as she moved around the apartment in her black robe, serving tea and biscuits and water, and not praying, though not ostentatiously not praying, more as if she were busy looking after people’s earthly needs and might do so later.

Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother’s corpse and screamed, and Saeed’s father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.

Nadia called Saeed’s father “father” and he called her “daughter.” This began when they first met, the terms seeming appropriate both to her and to him, and being acceptable forms of address between the young and the old, even when not related, and in any case Nadia had taken one look at Saeed’s father and felt him like a father, for he was so gentle, and evoked in her a protective caring, as if for one’s own child, or for a puppy, or for a beautiful memory one knows has already commenced to fade.

? ? ?

NADIA SLEPT in what had been Saeed’s room, on a pile of carpets and blankets on the floor, having refused Saeed’s father’s offer to give up his bed, and Saeed slept on a similar though thinner pile in the sitting room, and Saeed’s father slept by himself in his bedroom, a room where he had slept for most of his life but where he could not recall the last instance he had slept alone and which for this reason was no longer completely familiar to him.

Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed’s past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of a better era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time.

Saeed’s neighborhood had fallen to the militants, and small-scale fighting had diminished nearby, but large bombs still dropped from the sky and exploded with an awesome power that brought to mind the might of nature itself. Saeed was grateful for Nadia’s presence, for the way in which she altered the silences that descended on the apartment, not necessarily filling them with words, but making them less bleak in their muteness. And he was grateful too for her effect on his father, whose politeness, when he recalled he was in the company of a young woman, would jar him from what otherwise were interminable reveries and would bring his attention back for a while to the here and now. Saeed wished Nadia had been able to meet his mother, and his mother able to meet her.