On one particular night, though, in fact the night after he had struggled to prepare his firm’s pitch to the soap company, Saeed was absentmindedly scanning along a trajectory that ran below the horizon. In his eyepiece were windows and walls and rooftops, sometimes stationary, sometimes whizzing by at incredible speed.
“I think he’s looking at young ladies,” Saeed’s father said to his mother.
“Behave yourself, Saeed,” said his mother.
“Well, he is your son.”
“I never needed a telescope.”
“Yes, you preferred to operate short-range.”
Saeed shook his head and tacked upward.
“I see Mars,” he said. And indeed he did. The second-nearest planet, its features indistinct, the color of a sunset after a dust storm.
Saeed straightened and held up his phone, directing its camera at the heavens, consulting an application that indicated the names of celestial bodies he did not know. The Mars it showed was more detailed as well, though it was of course a Mars from another moment, a bygone Mars, fixed in memory by the application’s creator.
In the distance Saeed’s family heard the sound of automatic gunfire, flat cracks that were not loud and yet carried to them cleanly. They sat a little longer. Then Saeed’s mother suggested they return inside.
? ? ?
WHEN SAEED AND NADIA finally had coffee together in the cafeteria, which happened the following week, after the very next session of their class, Saeed asked her about her conservative and virtually all-concealing black robe.
“If you don’t pray,” he said, lowering his voice, “why do you wear it?”
They were sitting at a table for two by a window, overlooking snarled traffic on the street below. Their phones rested screens-down between them, like the weapons of desperadoes at a parley.
She smiled. Took a sip. And spoke, the lower half of her face obscured by her cup.
“So men don’t fuck with me,” she said.
TWO
WHEN NADIA WAS A CHILD, her favorite subject was art, even though art was taught only once a week and she did not consider herself particularly talented as an artist. She had gone to a school that emphasized rote memorization, for which she was by temperament particularly ill-suited, and so she spent a great deal of time doodling in the margins of her textbooks and notebooks, hunched over to hide curlicues and miniature woodland universes from the eyes of her teachers. If they caught her, she would get a scolding, or occasionally a slap on the back of the head.
The art in Nadia’s childhood home consisted of religious verses and photos of holy sites, framed and mounted on walls. Nadia’s mother and sister were quiet women and her father a man who tried to be quiet, thinking this a virtue, but who nonetheless came to a boil easily and often where Nadia was concerned. Her constant questioning and growing irreverence in matters of faith upset and frightened him. There was no physical violence in Nadia’s home, and much giving to charity, but when after finishing university Nadia announced, to her family’s utter horror, and to her own surprise for she had not planned to say it, that she was moving out on her own, an unmarried woman, the break involved hard words on all sides, from her father, from her mother, even more so from her sister, and perhaps most of all from Nadia herself, such that Nadia and her family both considered her thereafter to be without a family, something all of them, all four, for the rest of their lives, regretted, but which none of them would ever act to repair, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of bafflement at how to go about doing so, and partly because the impending descent of their city into the abyss would come before they realized that they had lost the chance.
Nadia’s experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did. She secured a room of her own atop the house of a widow, a record player and small collection of vinyl, a circle of acquaintances among the city’s free spirits, and a connection to a discreet and nonjudgmental female gynecologist. She learned how to dress for self-protection, how best to deal with aggressive men and with the police, and with aggressive men who were the police, and always to trust her instincts about situations to avoid or to exit immediately.
But sitting at her desk at the insurance company, on an afternoon of handling executive auto policy renewals by phone, when she received an instant message from Saeed asking if she would like to meet, her work posture was still hunched over, as it had been when she was a schoolgirl, and she was still doodling, as always, in the margins of the printouts before her.
? ? ?
THEY MET at a Chinese restaurant of Nadia’s choosing, this not being a class night. The family that used to run the place, after arriving in the city following the Second World War, and flourishing there for three generations, had recently sold up and emigrated to Canada. But prices remained reasonable, and the standard of food had not yet fallen. The dining area had a darkened, opium-den ambience, in contrast to other Chinese restaurants in the city. It was distinctively lit by what looked like candle-filled paper lanterns, but were in fact plastic, illuminated by flame-shaped, electronically flickering bulbs.
Nadia arrived first and watched Saeed enter and walk to her table. He had, as he often did, an amused expression in his bright eyes, not mocking, but as though he saw the humor in things, and this in turn amused her and made her warm to him. She resisted smiling, knowing it would not be long for him to smile, and indeed he smiled before reaching the table, and his smile was then returned.
“I like it,” he said, indicating their surroundings. “Sort of mysterious. Like we could be anywhere. Well, not anywhere, but not here.”
“Have you ever traveled abroad?”
He shook his head. “I want to.”
“Me too.”
“Where would you go?”
She considered him for a while. “Cuba.”
“Cuba! Why?”
“I don’t know. It makes me think of music and beautiful old buildings and the sea.”
“Sounds perfect.”
“And you? Where would you pick? One place.”
“Chile.”
“So we both want to go to Latin America.”
He grinned. “The Atacama Desert. The air is so dry, so clear, and there’s so few people, almost no lights. And you can lie on your back and look up and see the Milky Way. All the stars like a splash of milk in the sky. And you see them slowly move. Because the Earth is moving. And you feel like you’re lying on a giant spinning ball in space.”
Nadia watched Saeed’s features. In that moment they were tinged with wonder, and he looked, despite his stubble, boy-like. He struck her as a strange sort of man. A strange and attractive sort of man.
Their waiter came to take their order. Neither Nadia nor Saeed chose a soft drink, preferring tea and water, and when their food arrived neither used chopsticks, both being, at least while under observation, more confident of their skills with a fork instead. Despite initial instances of awkwardness, or rather of disguised shyness, they found it mostly easy to talk to one another, which always comes as something of a relief on a first proper date. They spoke quietly, cautious not to attract the attention of nearby diners. Their meal was finished too soon.
They next faced the problem that confronted all young people in the city who wanted to continue in one another’s company past a certain hour. During the day there were parks, and campuses, and restaurants, cafés. But at night, after dinner, unless one had access to a home where such things were safe and permitted, or had a car, there were few places to be alone. Saeed’s family had a car, but it was being repaired, and so he had come by scooter. And Nadia had a home, but it was tricky, in more ways than one, to have a man over.
Still, she decided to invite him.
Saeed seemed surprised and extremely excited when she suggested he come.
“Nothing is going to happen,” she explained. “I want to make that clear. When I say you should come over, I’m not saying I want your hands on me.”
“No. Of course.”