Exit West(28)

Saeed wanted to run but had nowhere to run to, and tried to hide his panic, but then the woman in the leather jacket removed her foot from the wall, and there was space for Saeed to pass, and so he squeezed through, brushing her body with his, and feeling emasculated as he did so, and when he was alone in his and Nadia’s room he sat on the bed and his heart was racing and he wanted to shout and to huddle in a corner but of course he did neither.

? ? ?

AROUND A BEND, on Vicarage Gate, was a house known to be a house of people from his country. Saeed began to spend more time there, drawn by the familiar languages and accents and the familiar smell of the cooking. One afternoon he was there at prayer time, and he joined his fellow countrymen in prayer in the back garden, under a blue sky that seemed shockingly blue, like the sky of another world, absent the airborne dust of the city where he had spent his entire life, and also peering out into space from a higher latitude, a different perch on the spinning Earth, nearer its pole than its equator, and so glimpsing the void from a different angle, a bluer angle, and as he prayed he felt praying was different here, somehow, in the garden of this house, with these men. It made him feel part of something, not just something spiritual, but something human, part of this group, and for a wrenchingly painful second he thought of his father, and then a bearded man with two white marks in the black on either side of his chin, marks like those of a great cat or wolf, put his arm around Saeed and said brother would you like some tea.

That day Saeed felt he was really accepted by this house, and he thought he could ask the man with the white-marked beard if there was space there for him and Nadia, whom he called his wife. The man said there was always space for a brother and sister, though sadly not a room they could share, but Saeed could stay with him and some other men on the floor of the living room, provided that is he did not mind sleeping on the floor, and Nadia could stay upstairs with the women, unfortunately even he and his own wife were split up in this manner, and they were among the first residents, but it was the only civilized way to cram as many people into the house as they had managed to do, as was righteous to do.

When Saeed told Nadia this good news she did not act like it was good news at all.

“Why would we want to move?” she said.

“To be among our own kind,” Saeed answered.

“What makes them our kind?”

“They’re from our country.”

“From the country we used to be from.”

“Yes.” Saeed tried not to sound annoyed.

“We’ve left that place.”

“That doesn’t mean we have no connection.”

“They’re not like me.”

“You haven’t met them.”

“I don’t need to.” She released a long, taut breath. “Here we have our own room,” she said, softening her tone. “Just the two of us. It’s a big luxury. Why would we give that up to sleep apart? Among dozens of strangers?”

Saeed had no answer for this. Considering it later, he thought it was indeed odd that he would want to give up their bedroom for a pair of separated spaces, with a barrier between them, as when they lived in his parents’ home, a time he now thought of fondly in a way, despite the horrors, fondly in terms of how he had felt for Nadia and she had felt for him, how they had felt together. He did not press the point, but when Nadia brought her face close to his in bed that night, close enough to tickle his lips with her breathing, he was unable to muster the enthusiasm to bridge the tiny distance it would have taken to kiss.

? ? ?

EVERY DAY A FLIGHT of fighter aircraft would streak through the sky, screaming a reminder to the people of dark London of the technological superiority of their opponents, of the government and nativist forces. At the borders of their locality Saeed and Nadia could occasionally glimpse tanks and armored vehicles and communication arrays and robots that walked or crawled like animals, bearing loads for soldiers or rehearsing the disarming of explosives or perhaps preparing to do some other unknown task. Even more than the fighter planes and the tanks these robots, few though they were, and the drones overhead, were frightening, because they suggested an unstoppable efficiency, an inhuman power, and evoked the kind of dread that a small mammal feels before a predator of an altogether different order, like a rodent before a snake.

In meetings of the council Nadia listened as the elders discussed what to do when the operation finally came. All agreed that the most important thing was to manage the impetuousness of the youngsters, for armed resistance would likely lead to a slaughter, and nonviolence was surely their most potent response, shaming their attackers into civility. All agreed on this except Nadia, who was unsure what she thought, who had seen what happens to people who surrender, as her former city surrendered to the militants, and who thought that the young people with their guns and their knives and their fists and their teeth were entitled to use these things, and that the ferocity of the little was sometimes all that kept them safe from the predations of the big. But there was wisdom in what the elders said too, and so she was unsure.

Saeed also was unsure. But in the nearby house of his fellow countryfolk the man with the white-marked beard spoke of martyrdom, not as the most desirable outcome but as one possible end of a path the right-minded had no other choice but to follow, and advocated a banding together of migrants along religious principles, cutting across divisions of race or language or nation, for what did those divisions matter now in a world full of doors, the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage, and in such a world the religion of the righteous must defend those who sought passage. Saeed was torn because he was moved by these words, strengthened by them, and they were not the barbarous words of the militants back home, the militants because of whom his mother was dead, and possibly by now his father as well, but at the same time the gathering of men drawn to the words of the man with the white-marked beard sporadically did remind him of the militants, and when he thought this he felt something rancid in himself, like he was rotting from within.