IN TIMES OF VIOLENCE, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real. For Nadia this person was her cousin, a man of considerable determination and intellect, who even when he was young had never cared much for play, who seemed to laugh only rarely, who had won medals in school and decided to become a doctor, who had successfully emigrated abroad, who returned once a year to visit his parents, and who, along with eighty-five others, was blown by a truck bomb to bits, literally to bits, the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were a head and two-thirds of an arm.
Nadia did not hear of her cousin’s death in time to attend the funeral, and she did not visit her relatives, not for lack of emotion but because she wanted to avoid being the cause of unpleasantness. She had planned to go to the graveyard alone, but Saeed had called her and asked through her silences what was the matter, and she had somehow told him, and he had offered to join her, insisted without insisting, which strangely came as a kind of relief. So they went together, very early the following morning, and saw the rounded mound of fresh earth, garlanded with flowers, above her cousin’s partial remains. Saeed stood and prayed. Nadia did not offer a prayer, or scatter rose petals, but knelt down and put her hand on the mound, damp from the recent visit of a grave-tender with a watering can, and shut her eyes for a long while, as the sound of a jetliner descending to the nearby airport came and went.
They had breakfast at a café, coffee and some bread with butter and jam, and she spoke, but not of her cousin, and Saeed seemed very present, comfortable being there on that unusual morning, with her not talking of what was most of consequence, and she felt things change between them, become more solid, in a way. Then Nadia went to the insurance company that employed her, handled fleet policies until lunch. Her tone was steady and businesslike. The callers she dealt with only rarely said words that were inappropriate. Or asked her for her personal number. Which, when they did, she would not give.
? ? ?
NADIA HAD BEEN SEEING a musician for some time. They had met at an underground concert, more a jam session really, with perhaps fifty or sixty people crammed into the soundproofed premises of a recording studio that specialized increasingly in audio work for television—the local music business being, for reasons of both security and piracy, in rather difficult straits. She had, as was by then usual for her, been wearing her black robe, closed to her neck, and he had, as was by then usual for him, been wearing a size-too-small white T-shirt, pinned to his lean chest and stomach, and she had watched him and he had circled her, and they had gone to his place that night, and she had shuffled off the weight of her virginity with some perplexity but not excessive fuss.
They rarely spoke on the telephone and met only sporadically, and she suspected he had many other women. She did not want to inquire. She appreciated his comfort with his own body, and his wanton attitude to hers, and the rhythm and strum of his touch, and his beauty, his animal beauty, and the pleasure he evoked in her. She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style, kept him from asking more of her than she offered up. He berated himself for this subsequently, but not too much, even though after their last meeting he would not stop thinking of her until his death, which was, though neither of them then knew it, only a few short months away.
Nadia at first thought there was no need to say goodbye, that saying goodbye involved a kind of presumption, but then she felt a small sadness, and knew she needed to say goodbye, not for him, for she doubted he would care, but for her. And since they had little to say to one another by phone and instant message seemed too impersonal, she decided to say it in person, outdoors, in a public place, not at his messy, musky apartment, where she trusted herself less, but when she said it, he invited her up, “for one last time,” and she intended to say no but actually said yes, and the sex they had was passionate farewell sex, and it was, not unsurprisingly, surprisingly good.
Later in life she would sometimes wonder what became of him, and she would never know.
? ? ?
THE FOLLOWING EVENING helicopters filled the sky like birds startled by a gunshot, or by the blow of an axe at the base of their tree. They rose, singly and in pairs, and fanned out above the city in the reddening dusk, as the sun slipped below the horizon, and the whir of their rotors echoed through windows and down alleys, seemingly compressing the air beneath them, as though each were mounted atop an invisible column, an invisible breathable cylinder, these odd, hawkish, mobile sculptures, some thin, with tandem canopies, pilot and gunner at different heights, and some fat, full of personnel, chopping, chopping through the heavens.
Saeed watched them with his parents from their balcony. Nadia watched them from her rooftop, alone.
Through an open door, a young soldier looked down upon their city, a city not overly familiar to him, for he had grown up in the countryside, and was struck by how big it was, how grand its towers and lush its parks. The din around him was incredible, and his belly lurched as he swerved.
THREE
NADIA AND SAEED WERE, back then, always in possession of their phones. In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be. For many decades after independence a telephone line in their city had remained a rare thing, the waiting list for a connection long, the teams that installed the copper wires and delivered the heavy handsets greeted and revered and bribed like heroes. But now wands waved in the city’s air, untethered and free, phones in the millions, and a number could be obtained in minutes, for a pittance.
Saeed partly resisted the pull of his phone. He found the antenna too powerful, the magic it summoned too mesmerizing, as though he were eating a banquet of limitless food, stuffing himself, stuffing himself, until he felt dazed and sick, and so he had removed or hidden or restricted all but a few applications. His phone could make calls. His phone could send messages. His phone could take pictures, identify celestial bodies, transform the city into a map while he drove. But that was it. Mostly. Except for the hour each evening that he enabled the browser on his phone and disappeared down the byways of the internet. But this hour was tightly regulated, and when it ended, a timer would set off an alarm, a gentle, windy chime, as though from the breezy planet of some blue-shimmering science fiction priestess, and he would electronically lock away his browser and not browse again on his phone until the following day.
Yet even this pared-back phone, this phone stripped of so much of its potential, allowed him to access Nadia’s separate existence, at first hesitantly, and then more frequently, at any time of day or night, allowed him to start to enter into her thoughts, as she toweled herself after a shower, as she ate a light dinner alone, as she sat at her desk hard at work, as she reclined on her toilet after emptying her bladder. He made her laugh, once, then again, and again, he made her skin burn and her breath shorten with the surprised beginnings of arousal, he became present without presence, and she did much the same to him. Soon a rhythm was established, and it was thereafter rare that more than a few waking hours would pass without contact between them, and they found themselves in those early days of their romance growing hungry, touching each other, but without bodily adjacency, without release. They had begun, each of them, to be penetrated, but they had not yet kissed.