Exit West(23)

Saeed and Nadia picked a small bedroom in the back, one floor up from the ground, with a balcony from which they could jump to the rear garden, if necessary, and from there with luck make an escape.

? ? ?

TO HAVE A ROOM to themselves—four walls, a window, a door with a lock—seemed incredible good fortune, and Nadia was tempted to unpack, but she knew they needed to be ready to leave at any moment, and so she took out of their backpack only items that were absolutely required. For his part Saeed removed the photo of his parents that he kept hidden in his clothing and placed it on a bookshelf, where it stood, creased, gazing upon them and transforming this narrow bedroom, at least partially, temporarily, into a home.

In the hall nearby was a bathroom, and Nadia wanted to take a shower more than anything, more even than she wanted food. Saeed stood watch outside, while she went in and stripped, and observed her own body, leaner than she had ever seen it, and streaked with a grime mostly of her own biological creation, dried sweat and dead skin, and with hair in places from which she had always banished hair, and she thought her body looked like the body of an animal, a savage. The water pressure in the shower was magnificent, striking her flesh with real force, and scouring her clean. The heat was superb too, and she turned it up as high as she could stand, the heat going all the way into her bones, chilled from months of outdoor cold, and the bathroom filled up with steam like a forest in the mountains, scented with pine and lavender from the soaps she had found, a kind of heaven, with towels so plush and fine that when she at last emerged she felt like a princess using them, or at least like the daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy in order for his children to pamper themselves with cotton such as this, to feel this exquisite sensation on their naked stomachs and thighs, towels that felt as if they had never been used before and might never be used again. Nadia began to put her folded clothes back on but all of a sudden could not bear to, the stench from them was overpowering, and so she was about to wash them in the tub when she heard a banging on the door and realized she must have locked it. Opening up, she saw a nervous and annoyed and dirty-looking Saeed.

He said, “What the hell are you doing?”

She smiled and moved to kiss him, and while her lips did touch his, his did not much respond.

“It’s been forever,” he said. “This isn’t our house.”

“I need five more minutes. I have to wash my clothes.”

He stared but did not disagree, and even if he had disagreed, she felt a steel in herself which she knew meant she would have washed them anyway. What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.

But the extraordinary satisfactions of the steamy bathroom seemed to have evaporated as she shut the door, and the washing of her clothes, watching the turbid water flow from them down the drain of the bathtub, was disappointingly utilitarian. She tried to recover her former good mood, and not be angry with Saeed, who she told herself was not wrong in his own way, just out of rhythm with her in this moment, and when she emerged from the bathroom wrapped in her towel, her towels, for she had one around her body and another around her hair, and with her dripping but clean clothes in her hands, she was prepared to let the little confrontation between them go.

But he said, looking at her, “You can’t stand here like that.”

“Don’t tell me what I can do.”

He looked stung by this comment, and also angry, and she was angry as well, and after he had bathed, and washed his clothes, which he did perhaps as a conciliatory gesture or perhaps because once he was cleansed of his own grime he too realized something of what she had realized, they slept on the slender single bed together without speaking, without touching, or without touching more than the cramped space demanded, for this one night not unlike a couple that was long and unhappily married, a couple that made out of opportunities for joy, misery.

? ? ?

NADIA AND SAEED had crossed over on the morning of a Saturday and by Monday morning when the housekeeper came to work the house was already quite full, home perhaps to fifty squatters, from infants to the elderly, hailing from as far west as Guatemala and as far east as Indonesia. The housekeeper screamed as she unlocked the front door, and the police arrived quickly after, two men in old-fashioned black hats, but they only looked in from outside, and did not enter. Soon there was a vanload more of them, in full riot gear, and then a car with two more who wore white shirts and black vests and were armed with what appeared to be submachine guns, and on their black vests was the word POLICE in white letters but these two looked to Saeed and Nadia like soldiers.

The residents of the house were terrified, most had seen firsthand what the police and soldiers could do, and in their terror they spoke more to one another than they otherwise might, strangers speaking to strangers. A sort of camaraderie evolved, as it might not have had they been on the street, in the open, for then they would likely have scattered, and the devil take the hindmost, but here they were penned in together, and being penned in made them into a grouping, a group.

When the police called over their bullhorns for everyone to exit the house, most agreed among themselves that they would not do so, and so while a few left, the vast majority stayed, Nadia and Saeed among them. The deadline for their departure drew nearer, then nearer still, and then came and went, and they were still there, and the police had not charged, and they felt they had won some kind of a respite, and then something they could never have expected happened: other people gathered on the street, other dark-and medium-and even light-skinned people, bedraggled, like the people of the camps on Mykonos, and these people formed a crowd. They banged cooking pots with spoons and chanted in various languages and soon the police decided to withdraw.