Exit West(30)

Out of a black door in a nearby cantina, admittedly an atypical place for a young woman like herself to be found, a young woman was emerging. The owner made no fuss over it, for the times were such, and once this young woman had emerged she rose and strode to the orphanage. There she located another young woman, or rather a grown girl, and the young woman hugged the girl, whom she recognized only because she had seen her on electronic displays, on the screens of phones and computers, it having been that many years, and the girl hugged her mother and then became shy.

The girl’s mother met the adults who ran the orphanage, and many of the children, who stared at her and chattered as though she was a sign of something, which of course she was, since if she had come then others would come too. Dinner that evening was rice and refried beans served on paper plates, eaten on an unbroken row of tables flanked by benches, and the mother sat at the center, like a dignitary or a holy figure, and told stories that some of the children, being children, imagined happening to their own mothers, now, or before, when their mothers were still alive.

The mother who had returned on this day spent the night at the orphanage so her daughter could say her farewells. And then mother and daughter walked together to the cantina, and the owner allowed them in, shaking his head but smiling as well, the smile bending his mustache, and making his fierce visage somewhat goofy for a moment, and with that the mother and her daughter were gone.

? ? ?

IN LONDON, Saeed and Nadia heard that military and paramilitary formations had fully mobilized and deployed in the city from all over the country. They imagined British regiments with ancient names and modern kit standing ready to cut through any resistance that might be encountered. A great massacre, it seemed, was in the offing. Both of them knew that the battle of London would be hopelessly one-sided, and like many others they no longer ventured far from their home.

The operation to clear the migrant ghetto in which Saeed and Nadia found themselves began badly, with a police officer shot in the leg within seconds as his unit moved into an occupied cinema near Marble Arch, and then the flat sounds of a firefight commenced, coming from there but also from elsewhere, growing and growing, all around, and Saeed, who was caught in the open, ran back to the house, and found the heavy front door locked shut, and he banged on it until it opened, Nadia yanking him in and slamming it behind him.

They went to their room in the back and pushed their mattress up against the window and sat together in one corner and waited. They heard helicopters and more shooting and announcements to peacefully vacate the area made over speakers so powerful that they shook the floor, and they saw through the gap between mattress and window thousands of leaflets dropping from the sky, and after a while they saw smoke and smelled burning, and then it was quiet, but the smoke and the smell lasted a long time, particularly the smell, lingering even when the wind direction changed.

That night a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants had been incinerated when the cinema burned down, children and women and men, but especially children, so many children, and whether or not this was true, or any of the other rumors, of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl’s Court, or near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores, whatever it was that had happened, something seemed to have happened, for there was a pause, and the soldiers and police officers and volunteers who had advanced into the outer edges of the ghetto pulled back, and there was no more shooting that night.

The next day was quiet, and the day after that, and on the second day of quiet Saeed and Nadia removed the mattress from their window and dared to venture outside and forage for food but there was none to be found. The depots and soup kitchens were shut. Some supplies were coming through the doors, but not nearly enough. The council met and requisitioned all provisions in the three houses, and these were rationed, with most going to the children, and Saeed and Nadia getting a handful of almonds each one day, and a tin of herring to share the next.

? ? ?

THEY SAT ON THEIR BED and watched the rain and talked as they often did about the end of the world, and Saeed wondered aloud once again if the natives would really kill them, and Nadia said once again that the natives were so frightened that they could do anything.

“I can understand it,” she said. “Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived.”

“Millions arrived in our country,” Saeed replied. “When there were wars nearby.”

“That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.”

Outside on the balcony the rain clattered in pots and pans, and periodically Saeed or Nadia would get up and open the window and carry two of these to the bathroom and empty them into the stoppered tub, which the council had designated part of the house’s emergency water supply, now that the taps had run dry.

Nadia watched Saeed and not for the first time wondered if she had led him astray. She thought maybe he had in the end been wavering about leaving their city, and she thought maybe she could have tipped him either way, and she thought he was basically a good and decent man, and she was filled with compassion for him in that instant, as she observed his face with its gaze upon the rain, and she realized she had not in her life felt so strongly for anyone in the world as she had for Saeed in the moments of those first months when she had felt most strongly for him.

Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.