T
HE COMPLEXITIES of London’s electricity network were such that a few motes of nighttime brightness remained in Saeed and Nadia’s locality, at
properties on the edges, near where barricades and checkpoints were manned by armed government forces, and in scattered pockets that were for some reason difficult to disconnect, and in the odd building here and there where an enterprising migrant had rigged together a connection to a still-active high- voltage line, risking and in some cases succumbing to electrocution.
Overwhelmingly, though, around Saeed and Nadia it was dark.
Mykonos had not been well lit, but electricity had reached everywhere there were wires. In their own fled city, when the electricity had gone, it had gone for all. But in London there were parts as bright as ever, brighter than anyplace Saeed or Nadia had seen before, glowing up into the sky and reflecting down again from the clouds, and in contrast the city’s dark swaths seemed darker, more significant, the way that blackness in the ocean suggests not less light from above, but a sudden drop-off in the depths below.
From dark London, Saeed and Nadia wondered what life must be like in light London, where they imagined people dined in elegant restaurants and rode in shiny black cabs, or at least went to work in offices and shops and were free to journey about as they pleased. In dark London, rubbish accrued, uncollected, and underground stations were sealed. The trains kept running, skipping stops near Saeed and Nadia but felt as a rumble beneath their feet and heard at a low, powerful frequency, almost subsonic, like thunder or the detonation of a massive, distant bomb.
At night, in the darkness, as drones and helicopters and surveillance balloons prowled intermittently overhead, fights would sometimes break out, and there were murders and rapes and assaults as well. Some in dark London blamed these incidents on nativist provocateurs. Others blamed other migrants, and began to move, in the manner of cards dealt from a shuffled deck during the course of a game, reassembling themselves in suits and runs of their own kind, like with like, or rather superficially like with superficially like, all the hearts together, all the clubs together, all the Sudanese, all the Hondurans.
Saeed and Nadia did not move, but their house began to change nonetheless. Nigerians were initially the largest among many groups of residents, but every so often a non-Nigerian family would relocate out of the
house, and their place would almost always be taken by more Nigerians, and so the house began to be known as a Nigerian house, like the two on either side. The elder Nigerians of these three houses would meet in the garden of the property to the right of Saeed and Nadia’s, and this meeting they called the council. Women and men both attended, but the only obvious non- Nigerian who attended was Nadia.
The first time Nadia went the others seemed surprised to see her, not merely because of her ethnicity but because of her relatively young age. Momentarily there was a silence, but then an old woman with a turban who lived with her daughter and grandsons in the bedroom above Saeed and Nadia’s, and whom Nadia had helped on more than one occasion to ascend the stairs, the old woman being regal in posture but also quite large, this old woman motioned to Nadia, beckoned Nadia to come stand at her side, to stand beside the garden chair on which she was sitting. This seemed to settle the matter, and Nadia was not questioned or asked to leave.
Initially Nadia did not follow much of what was being said, just snippets here and there, but over time she understood more and more, and she understood also that the Nigerians were in fact not all Nigerians, some were half Nigerians, or from places that bordered Nigeria, from families that spanned both sides of a border, and further that there was perhaps no such thing as a Nigerian, or certainly no one common thing, for different Nigerians spoke different tongues among themselves, and belonged to different religions. Together in this group they conversed in a language that was built in large part from English, but not solely from English, and some of them were in any case more familiar with English than were others. Also they spoke different variations of English, different Englishes, and so when Nadia gave voice to an idea or opinion among them, she did not need to fear that her views could not be comprehended, for her English was like theirs, one among many.
The activities of the council were mundane, making decisions on room disputes or claims of theft or unneighborly behavior, and also on relations with other houses on the street. Deliberations were often slow and cumbersome, so these gatherings were not particularly thrilling. And yet Nadia looked forward to them. They represented something new in her mind, the birth of something new, and she found these people who were both like and unlike those she had known in her city, familiar and unfamiliar, she found them interesting, and she found their seeming acceptance of her, or at least tolerance of her, rewarding, an achievement in a way.
Among the younger Nigerians Nadia acquired a bit of a special status, perhaps because they saw her with their elders, or perhaps because of her black robe, and so the younger Nigerian men and women and the older Nigerian boys and girls, the ones who often had quick jibes to make about
many of the others in the house, rarely said anything of that nature to her, or about her, at least in her presence. She came and went unruffled through the crowded rooms and passages, unruffled except by a fast-talking Nigerian woman her own age, a woman with a leather jacket and a chipped tooth, who stood like a gunslinger, with hips open and belt loose and hands at her sides, and spared no one from her verbal lashings, from her comments that would follow you even as you passed her and left her behind.
Saeed, though, was less comfortable. As he was a young man the other young men would size him up from time to time, as young men do, and Saeed found this disconcerting. Not because he had not encountered anything similar in his own country, he had, but because here in this house he was the only man from his country, and those sizing him up were from another country, and there were far more of them, and he was alone. This touched upon something basic, something tribal, and evoked tension and a sort of suppressed fear. He was uncertain when he could relax, if he could relax, and so when he was outside his bedroom but inside the house he seldom felt fully at ease.
Once, he was alone, arriving home while Nadia was at a meeting of the council, and the woman in the leather jacket stood in the hall, blocking his way with her narrow, jagged form, her back leaning against one wall, a foot planted on the other. Saeed did not like to admit it but he was intimidated by her, by her intensity and by the speed and unpredictability of her words, words that he often could not understand, but words that made others laugh. He stood there and waited for her to move, to yield space for him to pass. But she did not move, and so he said excuse me, and she said why should I excuse you, she said more than that, but all he could catch was that phrase. Saeed was angry that she was toying with him, and alarmed also, and he considered turning around and coming back later. But he realized at that moment that there was a man behind him, a tough-looking Nigerian man. Saeed had heard that this man had a gun, though he could not see it on him, but many of the migrants in dark London had taken to carrying knives and other weapons, being as they were in a state of siege, and liable to be attacked by government forces at any time, or in some cases being predisposed to carrying weapons, having done it where they came from, and so continuing to do it here, which Saeed suspected was the case with this man.
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.
There were guns in the house of his fellow countryfolk, more arriving each day through the doors. Saeed accepted a pistol but not a rifle, since he could conceal it, and in his heart he would not have been able to say if he took the pistol because it would make him safer from the nativists or from the Nigerians, his own neighbors. As he undressed that night he did not speak of it, but also he did not hide it from Nadia, and upon seeing the pistol he thought she would fight with him, or at least argue, for he knew what the council had decided. But she did not do so.
Instead she watched him, and he looked at her, and he saw her animal form, the strangeness of her face and her body, and she saw the strangeness of his, and when he reached for her she came to him, came to him though she moved slightly away, and there was a mutual violence and excitement to their coupling, a kind of shocked, almost painful surprise.
Only after Nadia had fallen asleep and Saeed lay there in the moonlight that crept between and around the blinds did he consider that he had no idea how to use or maintain a pistol, not the faintest clue, beyond the fact that pulling the trigger should make it fire. He realized he was being ridiculous, and must return it the very next day.
• • •
A THRIVING TRADE in electricity was under way in dark London, run by those who lived in pockets with power, and Saeed and Nadia were able to recharge their phones from time to time, and if they walked at the edges of their locality they could pick up a strong signal, and so like many others they caught up with the world in this way, and once as Nadia sat on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank she thought she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the street from a detachment of troops and a tank, and she was startled, and wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news and be this news, and how the newspaper could have published this image of her instantaneously, and she looked about for a photographer, and she had the bizarre feeling of
time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past, and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into two Nadias, and one would stay on the steps reading and one would walk home, and two different lives would unfold for these two different selves, and she thought she was losing her balance, or possibly her mind, and then she zoomed in on the image and saw that the woman in the black robe reading the news on her phone was actually not her at all.
The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. Many were arguing that smaller units made more sense, but others argued that smaller units could not defend themselves.
Reading the news at that time one was tempted to conclude that the nation was like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some on disintegration, and that this person with multiple personalities was furthermore a person whose skin appeared to be dissolving as they swam in a soup full of other people whose skins were likewise dissolving. Even Britain was not immune from this phenomenon, in fact some said Britain had already split, like a man whose head had been chopped off and yet still stood, and others said Britain was an island, and islands endure, even if the people who come to them change, and so it had been for millennia, and so it would be for millennia more.
The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.
But then around her she saw all these people of all these different colors in all these different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed, and a new time was here, and, fraught or not, she relished this like the wind in her face on a hot day when she rode her motorcycle and lifted the visor of her helmet and embraced the dust and the pollution and the little bugs that sometimes went into your mouth and made you recoil and even spit, but after spitting grin, and grin with a wildness.
• • •
FOR OTHERS TOO the doors came as a release. In the hills above Tijuana was an orphanage called simply the House of the Children, perhaps because it was not precisely an orphanage. Or not only an orphanage, though that is what it was referred to by the college students from across the border who would sometimes come here to do volunteer work: painting, carpentry, the hanging and spackling of drywall. But many of the children in the House of the Children had at least one living parent or sibling or uncle or aunt. Usually these relatives labored on the other side, in the United States, and their absences would last until the child was old enough to attempt the crossing, or until the relative was exhausted enough to return, or on occasion, quite often, forever, because life and its end are unpredictable, especially at a distance, where death seems to operate with such whimsical aim.
The House sat on a ridge at the crest of a hill, fronting a street. Its chain- link-fenced and partly concrete-floored play area was at the back, facing a parched valley, on which the other low dwellings of that street also opened, some of them rising on stilts, as though jutting out to sea, an effect that was incongruous, given the dryness and lack of water all about. But the Pacific Ocean was only a couple hours’ walk to the west, and besides, stilts made sense given the terrain.
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.
“What do you think happens when you die?” Nadia asked him. “You mean the afterlife?”
“No, not after. When. In the moment. Do things just go black, like a phone screen turning off? Or do you slip into something strange in the middle, like when you’re falling asleep, and you’re both here and there?”
Saeed thought that it depended on how you died. But he saw Nadia seeing him, so intent on his answer, and he said, “I think it would be like falling asleep. You’d dream before you were gone.”
It was all the protection he could offer her then. And she smiled at this, a warm, bright smile, and he wondered if she believed him or if she thought, no, dearest, that is not what you think at all.
• • •
BUT A WEEK PASSED. And then another. And then the natives and their forces stepped back from the brink.
Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to be found. Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done. Or perhaps the sheer number of places where there were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one.
And so, regardless of the reason, decency and bravery prevailed this time. For true courage is shown not in attacking when afraid but in standing firm. The electricity and water were restored, negotiations began, and word spread. Amid the cherry trees on Palace Gardens Terrace, Saeed, Nadia, and their neighbors celebrated, reveling long into the night.
