Exit West(34)

And so they walked instead, Saeed taking the first step, and Nadia following, and then both striding abreast each other, at a good clip, so that those who saw them saw what looked like a brace of workers marching, and not a couple out on a stroll. The camp was desolate at this hour, but there were birds out and about, a great many birds, flying or perched upon the pavilions and the perimeter fence, and Nadia and Saeed looked at these birds who had lost or would soon lose their trees to construction, and Saeed sometimes called out to them with a faint, sibilant, unpuckered whistle, like a balloon slowly deflating.

Nadia watched to see if any bird noticed his call, and did not on their walk see even one.

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NADIA WORKED on a mostly female crew that laid pipe, colossal spools and pallets of it in different colors, orange and yellow and black and green. Through these pipes soon would run the lifeblood and thoughts of the new city, all those things that connect people without requiring them to move. Ahead of the pipe-layers was a digging machine, like a wolf spider or praying mantis, with a wide stance but a pair of dangerous-looking appendages at its front, coming together in a crenellated scraper near where its mouth would have been. This digging machine carved the trenches in the earth into which the pipe-layers would unfurl and unstack and lower and connect the pipes.

The driver of the digging machine was a portly native man with a non-native wife, a woman who looked native to Nadia but had apparently arrived from a nearby country two decades ago, and who quite possibly had retained a trace of her ancestral accent, but then again the natives had so many different accents that it was impossible for Nadia to say. This woman worked nearby as a supervisor in one of the food preparation units, and she would come to Nadia’s work site on her lunch break when her husband was there, which was not always, because he dug trenches for multiple pipe-laying crews, and then the woman and her husband would unwrap sandwiches and unscrew thermoses and eat and chat and laugh.

As time passed, Nadia and some of the other women on her crew began to join them, for they were welcoming of company. The driver revealed himself to be a chatterbox and jokester, and relished the attention, and his wife seemed to relish it equally, though she spoke less, but she appeared to enjoy all these women listening enrapt to her husband. Perhaps this made him grow in stature in her own eyes. Nadia, who watched and smiled and usually said little in these gatherings, thought the couple a bit like the queen and king of a domain populated otherwise solely by women, a transient domain that would last only a few short seasons, and she wondered if perhaps they thought the same and had decided, nonetheless, to savor it.

? ? ?

IT WAS SAID that with every month there were more worker camps around London, but even if this were true Saeed and Nadia noticed an almost daily swelling of their own camp with new arrivals. Some came on foot, others in buses or vans. On their days off workers were encouraged to help out around the camp, and Saeed often volunteered to help process and settle the camp’s latest additions.

Once he handled a small family, a mother, father, and daughter, three people whose skin was so fair that it seemed they had never seen the sun. He was struck by their eyelashes, which held the light improbably, and by their hands and cheeks, in which networks of tiny veins could be seen. He wondered where they came from, but he did not speak their language and they did not speak English, and he did not want to pry.

The mother was tall and narrow-shouldered, as tall as the father, and the daughter was a slightly smaller version of her mother, nearly equal to Saeed in height, though he suspected she was still very young, likely just thirteen or fourteen. They watched him with suspicion and in desperation, and Saeed was careful to speak softly and move slowly, as one does when meeting a nervous horse or puppy for the first time.

During the course of the afternoon he spent with them, Saeed only rarely heard them speak to one another in what he thought of as their odd language. Mostly they communicated by gesture, or with their eyes. Maybe, Saeed thought initially, they feared he might be able to understand them. Later he suspected something else. That they were ashamed, and that they did not yet know that shame, for the displaced, was a common feeling, and that there was, therefore, no particular shame in being ashamed.

He took them to their designated space in one of the new pavilions, unoccupied and basic, with a cot, and some fabric shelving hanging from one of the cables, and he left them there to settle in, left the three of them staring and motionless. But when he returned an hour later to bring them to the mess tent for lunch, and called out, and the mother pushed aside the flap that served as their front door, and he glimpsed inside, what he glimpsed was a home, with the shelves all full, and neat bundles of belongings on the ground, and a throw on the cot, and also on the cot the daughter, her back unsupported but erect, her legs crossed at the shins, so that her thighs rested on her feet, and in her lap a little notebook or diary, in which she was writing furiously until the last moment, until the mother called out her name, and which she then locked, with a key that she wore on a string around her neck, and placed in one of the piles of belongings that must have been hers, thrust the diary into the middle of the pile so that it was hidden.

She fell in behind her parents, who nodded at Saeed in recognition, and he turned and led them all from that place, a place that was already beginning to be theirs, to another where going forward they could reliably find a meal.

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THE NORTHERN SUMMER EVENINGS were endless. Saeed and Nadia often fell asleep before it was fully dark, and before they fell asleep they often sat outside on the ground with their backs to the dormitory, on their phones, wandering far and wide but not together, even though they appeared to be together, and sometimes he or she would look up and feel on their face the wind blowing through the shattered fields all about them.