Saeed’s father felt as he walked back to campus and his son drove back to work that he had made a mistake with his career, that he should have done something else with his life, because then he might have had the money to send Saeed abroad. Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping the youth and the country through teaching and research merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.
Saeed’s mother prayed at home, newly particular about not missing a single one of her devotions, but she insisted on claiming that nothing had changed, that the city had seen similar crises before, though she could not say when, and that the local press and foreign media were exaggerating the danger. She did, however, develop difficulties sleeping, and obtained from her pharmacist, a woman she trusted not to gossip, a sedative to take secretly before bed.
At Saeed’s office work was slow even though three of his fellow employees had stopped showing up and there ought to have been more to do for those who were still present. Conversations focused mainly on conspiracy theories, the status of the fighting, and how to get out of the country—and since visas, which had long been near-impossible, were now truly impossible for non-wealthy people to secure, and journeys on passenger planes and ships were therefore out of the question, the relative merits, or rather risks, of the various overland routes were guessed at, and picked apart, again and again.
At Nadia’s workplace it was much the same, with the added intrigue that came from her boss and her boss’s boss being among those rumored to have fled abroad, since neither had returned as scheduled from their holidays. Their offices sat empty behind glass partitions at the prow and stern of the oblong floor—an abandoned suit hanging in its dust cover on a hat rack in one—while the rows of open-plan desks between them remained largely occupied, including Nadia’s, at which she was often to be seen on her phone.
• • •
NADIA AND SAEED BEGAN to meet during the day, typically for lunch at a cheap burger joint equidistant from their workplaces, with deep booths at the back that were somewhat private, and there they held hands beneath the table, and sometimes he stroked the inside of her thigh and she placed her palm on the zipper of his trousers, but only briefly, and rarely, in the gaps when it appeared waiters and fellow diners were not looking, and they tormented each other in this way, since travel between dusk and dawn was forbidden, and so they could not be alone without Saeed spending the entire night, which seemed to her a step well worth taking, but to him something they should delay, in part, he said, because he did not know what to tell his parents and in part because he feared leaving them alone.
Mostly they communicated by phone, a message here, a link to an article there, a shared image of one or the other of them at work, or at home, before a window as the sun set or a breeze blew or a funny expression came and went.
Saeed was certain he was in love. Nadia was not certain what exactly she was feeling, but she was certain it had force. Dramatic circumstances, such as those in which they and other new lovers in the city now found themselves, have a habit of creating dramatic emotions, and furthermore the curfew served to conjure up an effect similar to that of a long-distance relationship, and long-distance relationships are well known for their potential to heighten passion, at least for a while, just as fasting is well known to heighten one’s appreciation for food.
• • •
THE FIRST TWO WEEKENDS of the curfew came and went without them meeting, outbursts of fighting making travel first in Saeed’s neighborhood and then in Nadia’s impossible, and Saeed forwarded to Nadia a popular joke about the militants politely wishing to ensure that the city’s population was well rested on their days off. Air strikes were called in by the army on both occasions, shattering Saeed’s bathroom window while he was in the shower, and shaking like an earthquake Nadia and her lemon tree as she sat on her terrace smoking a joint. Fighter-bombers grated hoarsely through the sky.
But on the third weekend there was a lull and Saeed went to Nadia’s and she met him in a nearby café since it was too risky for her to drop a robe into the street by day, or for him to change outdoors, and so he pulled it on in the café’s bathroom while she paid the bill and then with his head covered and eyes on the ground, followed her into her building, and once upstairs and inside they soon slipped into her bed and were nearly naked together and after much pleasure but also what she considered a bit excessive a delay on his part she asked if he had brought a condom and he held her face in his hands and said, “I don’t think we should have sex until we’re married.”
And she laughed and pressed close.
And he shook his head.
And she stopped and stared at him and said, “Are you fucking joking?”
• • •
FOR A SECOND Nadia was seized by a wild fury but then as she looked at Saeed he appeared almost lethally mortified and a coil loosened in her and she smiled a little and she held him tight, to torture him and to test him, and she said, surprising herself, “It’s okay. We can see.”
• • •
LATER AS THEY LAY in bed listening to an old and slightly scratched bossa nova LP, Saeed showed her on his phone images by a French photographer of famous cities at night, lit only by the glow of the stars.
“But how did he get everyone to turn their lights off?” Nadia asked.
“He didn’t,” Saeed said. “He just removed the lighting. By computer, I think.”
“And he left the stars bright.”
“No, above these cities you can barely see the stars. Just like here. He had to go to deserted places. Places with no human lights. For each city’s sky he went to a deserted place that was just as far north, or south, at the same latitude basically, the same place that the city would be in a few hours, with the Earth’s spin, and once he got there he pointed his camera in the same direction.”
“So he got the same sky the city would have had if it was completely dark?”
“The same sky, but at a different time.”
Nadia thought about this. They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities—New York, Rio, Shanghai, Paris—under their stains of stars, images as though from an epoch before electricity, but with the buildings of today. Whether they looked like the past, or the present, or the future, she couldn’t decide.
• • •
THE FOLLOWING WEEK it appeared that the government’s massive show of force was succeeding. There were no major new attacks in the city. There were even rumors that the curfew might be relaxed.
But one day the signal to every mobile phone in the city simply vanished, turned off as if by flipping a switch. An announcement of the government’s decision was made over television and radio, a temporary antiterrorism measure, it was said, but with no end date given. Internet connectivity was suspended as well.
Nadia did not have a landline at home. Saeed’s landline had not worked in months. Deprived of the portals to each other and to the world provided by their mobile phones, and confined to their apartments by the nighttime curfew, Nadia and Saeed, and countless others, felt marooned and alone and much more afraid.
FOUR
THE EVENING CLASS Saeed and Nadia had been taking was finished, having concluded with the arrival of the first dense smogs of winter, and in any case the curfew meant courses such as theirs could not have continued. Neither of them had been to the other’s office, so they didn’t know where to reach one another during the day, and without their mobile phones and access to the internet there was no ready way for them to reestablish contact. It was as if they were bats that had lost the use of their ears, and hence their ability to find things as they flew in the dark. The day after their phone signals died Saeed went to their usual burger joint at lunchtime, but Nadia did not show, and the day after that, when he went again, the restaurant was shuttered, its owner perhaps having fled, or simply disappeared.
&n
bsp; Saeed was aware that Nadia worked at an insurance company, and from his office he called the operator and asked for the names and numbers of insurance companies, and tried phoning them all, one by one, inquiring for her at each. This took time: the telephone company was struggling under the sudden load and also to repair infrastructure destroyed in the fighting, and so Saeed’s office landline worked at best intermittently, and when it did, an operator could be swatted out of the swarm of busy tones only rarely, and that operator was—despite Saeed’s desperate entreaties, desperate entreaties being common in those days—limited to giving out a maximum of two numbers per call, and when Saeed finally did obtain a new pair of numbers to try, more often than not one or both proved to be nonfunctional on any given day, and he had to ring and ring and ring again.
Nadia spent her lunch hours racing home to stock up on supplies. She bought bags of flour and rice and nuts and dried fruit, and bottles of oil, and cans of powdered milk and cured meat and fish in brine, all at exorbitant prices, her forearms aching from the strain of carrying them up to her apartment, one load after another. She was fond of eating vegetables but people said the key was to have as many calories stashed away as possible, and so foods like vegetables, which were bulky for the amount of energy they could provide, and also prone to spoilage, were less useful. But soon the shelves of shops near her were close to bare, even of vegetables, and when the government instituted a policy that no one person could buy more than a certain amount per day, Nadia, like many others, was both panicked and relieved.
On the weekend she went at dawn to her bank and stood in a line that was already quite long, waiting for the bank to open, but when it opened the line became a throng and she had no choice but to surge forward like everyone else, and there in the unruly crowd she was groped from behind, someone pushing his hand down her buttocks and between her legs, and trying to penetrate her with his finger, failing because he was outside the multiple fabrics of her robe and her jeans and her underclothes, but coming as close to succeeding as possible under the circumstances, applying incredible force, as she was pinned by the bodies around her, unable to move or even raise her hands, and so stunned she could not shout, or speak, reduced to clamping her thighs together and her jaws together, her mouth shutting automatically, almost physiologically, instinctively, her body sealing itself off, and then the crowd moved and the finger was gone and not long afterwards some bearded men separated the mob into two halves, male and female, and she stayed inside the female zone, and her turn at the teller did not come until after lunch, whereupon she took as much cash as was permitted, hiding it on her person and in her boots and putting only a little in her bag, and she went to a money changer to convert some of it into dollars and euros and to a jeweler to convert the remainder to a few very small coins of gold, glancing over her shoulder constantly to make sure she wasn’t being followed, and then headed home, only to find a man waiting at the entrance, looking for her, and when she saw him she steeled herself and refused to cry, even though she was bruised and frightened and furious, and the man, who had been waiting all day, was Saeed.
She led him upstairs, forgetting that they might be seen, or not caring, and so not bothering this once with a robe for him, and upstairs she made them both tea, her hands trembling, finding it difficult to speak. She was embarrassed and angry that she was this glad to see him, and felt she might start yelling at him at any moment, and he could see how upset she was and so he silently opened the bags he had brought and gave her a kerosene camping stove, some extra fuel, a large box of matches, fifty candles, and a packet of chlorine tablets for disinfecting water.
“I couldn’t find flowers,” he said.
She smiled at last, a half-smile, and asked, “Do you have a gun?”
• • •
THEY SMOKED A JOINT and listened to music and after a while Nadia tried again to make Saeed have sex with her, not because she felt particularly sexy but because she wanted to cauterize the incident from outside the bank in her memory, and Saeed succeeded again in holding back, even as they pleasured each other, and he told her again that they should not have sex before they were married, that doing otherwise was against his beliefs, but it was not until he suggested she move in with his parents and him that she understood his words had been a kind of proposal.
She stroked his hair as his head rested on her chest and asked, “Are you saying you want to get married?”
“Yes.”
“To me?”
“To anyone, really.”
She snorted.
“Yes,” he said, rising and looking at her. “To you.”
She didn’t say anything.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She felt great tenderness well up in her for him at that moment, as he waited for her reply, and she felt also a galloping terror, and she felt further something altogether more complicated, something that struck her as akin to resentment.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He kissed her. “Okay,” he replied.
As he was leaving, she saved his office details and he saved hers, and she gave him a black robe to wear, and she told him not to bother stashing it in the crack between her building and the next, where previously he had been hiding the robes he exited in for her to collect, but rather to hold on to it, and she gave him a set of keys too. “So my sister can let herself in next time, if she arrives before me,” she explained.
And both of them grinned.
But when he was gone she heard the demolition blows of distant artillery, the unmaking of buildings, large-scale fighting having resumed somewhere, and she was worried for him on his drive home, and she thought it an absurd situation that she would have to wait until she went to work the following day to discover whether he had traversed the distance to his home safely.
Nadia bolted her door and laboriously pushed her sofa against it, so that it was now barricaded from within.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, in a rooftop flat not unlike Nadia’s, in a neighborhood not far from Nadia’s, a brave man stood in the light of a torch built into his mobile phone and waited. He could hear, from time to time, the same artillery that Nadia could hear, though more loudly. It rattled the windows of his flat, but only in a gentle way, without any risk, at present, of them breaking. The brave man did not have a wristwatch, or a flashlight, so his signal-less phone served both functions, and he wore a heavy winter jacket and inside his jacket were a pistol and a knife with a blade as long as his hand.
Another man had begun to emerge from a black door at the far end of the room, a door black even in the dimness, black despite the beam of the phone-torch, and this second man the brave man watched from his post beside the front door but did nothing visibly to help. The brave man merely listened to the sounds in the stairwell outside, for a lack of sound in the stairwell outside, and stood at his post and held his phone and fingered the pistol inside the pocket of his coat, observing without making any noise.
The brave man was excited, though it would have been difficult to see this in the gloom and in the customary inexpressiveness of his face. He was ready to die, but he did not plan on dying, he planned on living, and he planned on doing great things while he did.
The second man lay on the floor and shaded his eyes from the light and gathered his strength, a knockoff Russian assault rifle by his side. He could not see who was at the front door, just that someone was there.
The brave man stood with his hand on his pistol, listening, listening.
The second man got to his feet.
The brave man motioned with the light of his phone, pulling the second man forward, like a needle-jawed anglerfish might, hunting in the inky depths, and when the second man was close enough to touch, the brave man opened the front door of the flat, and the second man walked through into the quietness of the stairwell. And then the brave man shut the door and stood
still once again, biding his time for another.
• • •
THE SECOND MAN JOINED the fighting within the hour, among many who would do so, and the battles that now commenced and raged without meaningful interruption were far more ferocious, and less unequal, than what had come before.
War in Saeed and Nadia’s city revealed itself to be an intimate experience, combatants pressed close together, front lines defined at the level of the street one took to work, the school one’s sister attended, the house of one’s aunt’s best friend, the shop where one bought cigarettes. Saeed’s mother thought she saw a former student of hers firing with much determination and focus a machine gun mounted on the back of a pickup truck. She looked at him and he looked at her and he did not turn and shoot her, and so she suspected it was him, although Saeed’s father said it meant nothing more than that she had seen a man who wished to fire in another direction. She remembered the boy as shy, with a stutter and a quick mind for mathematics, a good boy, but she could not remember his name. She wondered if it had really been him, and whether she should feel alarmed or relieved if it had. If the militants won, she supposed, it might not be entirely bad to know people on their side.
Neighborhoods fell to the militants in startlingly quick succession, so that Saeed’s mother’s mental map of the place where she had spent her entire life now resembled an old quilt, with patches of government land and patches of militant land. The frayed seams between the patches were the most deadly spaces, and to be avoided at all costs. Her butcher and the man who dyed the fabrics from which she had once had made her festive clothes disappeared into such gaps, their places of business shattered and covered in rubble and glass.
People vanished in those days, and for the most part one never knew, at least not for a while, if they were alive or dead. Nadia passed her family’s home once on purpose, not to speak with them, just to see from the outside if they were there and well, but the home she had forsaken looked deserted, with no sign of inhabitants or life. When she visited again it was gone, unrecognizable, the building crushed by the force of a bomb that weighed as much as a compact automobile. Nadia would never be able to determine what had become of them, but she always hoped they had found a way to depart unharmed, abandoning the city to the predations of warriors on both sides who seemed content to flatten it in order to possess it.