Exit West(15)

Sometimes when Saeed’s father had gone to sleep Saeed and Nadia sat together in the sitting room, their sides pressed close for connection and warmth, perhaps holding hands, at most exchanging a kiss on the cheek as a farewell before bed, and often they were silent, but often they spoke in low voices, about how to escape from the city, or about the endless rumors of the doors, or about nothings: the precise color of the refrigerator, the increasingly sorry state of Saeed’s toothbrush, the loudness of Nadia’s snore when she had a cold.

One evening they were huddled together in this way, under a blanket, in the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, for there was no grid electricity in their part of the city anymore, and no piped gas or water, municipal services having entirely broken down, and Saeed said, “It feels natural to have you here.”

“For me too,” Nadia replied, resting her head on his shoulder.

“The end of the world can be cozy at times.”

She laughed. “Yes. Like a cave.”

“You smell a bit like a caveman,” she added later.

“And you smell like a wood fire.”

She looked at him and felt her body tighten, but she resisted the urge to caress.

When they heard that Nadia’s neighborhood had fallen to the militants as well, and that the roads between the two were mostly clear, Saeed and Nadia returned to her flat so she could collect some things. Nadia’s building had been damaged, and parts of the wall that faced the street were gone. The backup-battery shop on the ground floor had been looted, but the metal door to the stairway had not been forced, and the overall structure looked more or less sound—in need of substantial repair, certainly, but not on the verge of collapse.

The plastic rubbish bags that covered Nadia’s windows were still in place, except for one, which, along with the window itself, had been destroyed, and where the window had formerly been a gash of blue sky was now visible, unusually clear and lovely, except for a thin column of smoke rising somewhere in the distance. Nadia took her record player and records and clothes and food, and her parched but possibly revivable lemon tree, and also some money and gold coins, which she had left hidden in the tree’s clay plot, buried within the soil. These items she and Saeed loaded onto the backseat of his family’s car, the top of the lemon tree sticking out of a lowered window. She did not remove the money and coins from the pot in case they were searched at a militant checkpoint on the way, which they were, but the fighters who stopped them appeared exhausted and wired and accepted canned supplies as payment to pass.

When they reached home Saeed’s father saw the lemon tree and smiled for what seemed like the first time in days. Together the three of them placed it on their balcony, but quickly, because a band of armed men who looked like foreigners had begun to gather on the street below, arguing in a language they could not understand.

? ? ?

NADIA KEPT HER RECORD PLAYER and records out of sight in Saeed’s room, even after the customary mourning period for Saeed’s mother was over, because music was forbidden by the militants, and their apartment could be searched without warning, indeed it had been once already, militants banging on the door in the middle of the night, and in any case even if she had wanted to play a record there was no electricity, not even enough to charge the apartment’s backup batteries.

The night the militants came they were looking for people of a particular sect, and demanded to see ID cards, to check what sort of names everyone had, but fortunately for Saeed’s father and Saeed and Nadia their names were not associated with the denomination being hunted. The neighbors upstairs were not so lucky: the husband was held down while his throat was cut, the wife and daughter were hauled out and away.

The dead neighbor bled through a crack in the floor, his blood appearing as a stain in the high corner of Saeed’s sitting room, and Saeed and Nadia, who had heard the family’s screams, went up to collect and bury him, as soon as they dared, but his body was gone, presumably taken by his executioners, and his blood was already fairly dry, a patch like a painted puddle in his apartment, an uneven trail on the stairs.

The following night, or perhaps the night after that, Saeed entered Nadia’s room and they were unchaste there for the first time. A combination of horror and desire subsequently impelled him back each evening, despite his earlier resolution that they do nothing that was disrespectful to his parents, and they would touch and stroke and taste, always stopping short of sex, upon which she no longer insisted, and which they had by now found ample means to circumvent. His mother was no more, and his father seemed not to concern himself with these romantic matters, and so they proceeded in secret, and the fact that unmarried lovers such as they were now being made examples of and punished by death created a semi-terrified urgency and edge to each coupling that sometimes bordered on a strange sort of ecstasy.

? ? ?

AS THE MILITANTS secured the city, extinguishing the last large salients of resistance, a partial calm descended, broken by the activities of drones and aircraft that bombed from the heavens, these networked machines for the most part invisible, and by the public and private executions that now took place almost continuously, bodies hanging from streetlamps and billboards like a form of festive seasonal decoration. The executions moved in waves, and once a neighborhood had been purged it could then expect a measure of respite, until someone committed an infraction of some kind, because infractions, although often alleged with a degree of randomness, were invariably punished without mercy.