Story Of Windows and Doors

  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 but he did not turn and shoot her, 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 some people on their side.

Neighborhoods fell to the militants in startlingly quick succession, so that Saeed’s mother’s mental map of the city 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, to be avoided at all costs. Her butcher and the man who dyed the fabrics from which she had once made her festive clothes disappeared into such gaps, their places of business reduced to rubble and glass.
People vanished in those days, and for the most part one did not know, at least not for a while, if they were alive or dead. Nadia had been estranged from her family since she had completed university and announced, to their anger and fear and dismay, that she would henceforth live on her own. She passed their house one afternoon 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 her family, but she always hoped that 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.
Nadia resided alone, and Saeed with his parents, but both were fortunate that their homes remained for a while in government-controlled neighborhoods, and so were spared much of the worst fighting and also the retaliatory air strikes that the Army was calling in on localities thought not merely to be occupied but disloyal.
They had met three months earlier, when the city was not yet openly at war. It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life. One moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.
Their class had not resumed after the recent assault on the city’s stock exchange. Now Saeed’s boss had tears in his eyes as he told his employees that he had to shutter his business, apologizing for letting them down and promising that there would be jobs for them all when things improved and the agency was able to reopen. He was so distraught that it seemed to those collecting their final salaries that they were in fact consoling him. All agreed that he was a fine and delicate man, worryingly so, for these were not times for such men.
At Nadia’s office, the payroll department ceased giving out checks, and within days everyone stopped coming to work. There were no real goodbyes, or at least none that she was part of, and since the security guards were the first to melt away, a sort of calm looting, or remuneration in hardware, began, and people left with what they could carry.

      One’s relationship to windows changed in the city. A window was the border through which death was possibly likeliest to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire. Moreover, a windowpane itself could so easily become shrapnel, shattered by a nearby blast, and everyone had heard of someone or other who had bled out after being lacerated by shards of flying glass.

Many windows were broken already, and the prudent thing would have been to remove those which remained, but it was winter and the nights were cold, and without gas and electricity, both of which were in increasingly short supply, windows served to take some of the edge off the chill, and so people left them in place.
Saeed and his family rearranged their furniture instead. They placed bookshelves full of books against the windows in their bedrooms, blocking the glass from sight but allowing light to creep in around the edges, and they leaned Saeed’s bed over the tall windows in their sitting room, mattress and all, upright, at an angle, so that the bed’s feet rested on the lintel. Saeed slept on three rugs layered on the floor, which he told his parents suited his back.
Nadia taped the inside of her windows with beige packing tape, the sort normally used to seal cardboard boxes, and hammered heavy-duty rubbish bags into place over them, pounding nails into the window frames. When she’d had enough electricity to charge her backup battery, she would lounge around and listen to her records in the light of a single bare bulb, the harsh sounds of the fighting muffled somewhat by the music, and she would then glance at her windows and think that they looked a bit like amorphous black works of contemporary art.
The effect doors had on people altered as well. Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen, without warning, to any door at all. Most people thought these rumors to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless.
Nadia and Saeed, too, discussed these rumors and dismissed them. But every morning, when she woke, Nadia looked over at her front door, and at the doors to her bathroom, her closet, her terrace. Every morning, in his room, Saeed did much the same. All their doors remained simple doors, on-off switches in the flow between two adjacent places, binarily either open or closed, but each door, regarded thus with a twinge of irrational possibility, became partially animate as well, an object with a subtle power to mock—to mock the desires of those who desired to go far away, whispering silently from its doorframe that such dreams were the dreams of fools.

    Without work, there was no impediment to Saeed and Nadia meeting during the day except for the fighting, but that impediment was a serious one. The few local television channels still on the air were saying that the war was going well, but the international ones were saying that it was going badly indeed, adding to an unprecedented flow of migrants hitting the rich countries, which were building walls and fences and strengthening their borders, but seemingly to unsatisfactory effect. The militants had their own pirate radio station, featuring an announcer with a deep and unnervingly sexy voice, who spoke slowly and deliberately, and claimed in a decelerated but almost raplike cadence that the fall of the city was imminent. Whatever the truth, being out and about was risky, so Saeed and Nadia typically met at Nadia’s place.

Saeed had once more asked her to move in with him and his family, telling her that he could explain things to his parents, and she could have his room, and he would sleep in the sitting room, and they would not have to marry, they would only, out of respect for his parents, have to remain chaste in the house, and it would be safer for her, for this was no time for anyone to be alone. He had not added that it was especially unsafe for a woman to be alone, but she knew both that he thought it and that it was true, even as she parried his suggestion. He could see that the subject unsettled her, so he did not raise it again, but the offer stood, and she considered it.
Nadia was herself coming to acknowledge that this was no longer a city where the risks facing a young woman living independently could be thought of as manageable, and, equally important, she worried for Saeed each time he drove over to see her and then again when he returned home. But she might have waited much longer had Saeed’s mother not been killed, a stray heavy-calibre round passing through the windshield of her car and taking with it a quarter of her head, not while she was driving, for she had not driven in months, but while she was checking inside for an earring she thought she had misplaced, and Nadia, seeing the state that Saeed and Saeed’s father were in when she came to their apartment for the first time, on the day of the funeral, stayed with them that night to offer what comfort and help she could, and did not spend another night in her own apartment.
Nadia slept in what had been Saeed’s room, on a pile of carpets and blankets on the floor, having refused Saeed’s father’s offer to give up his bed, and Saeed slept on a similar, though thinner, pile in the sitting room, and Saeed’s father slept by himself in his bedroom, a room where he had slept for most of his life, though he could not recall the last instance he had slept alone, and for this reason the room was no longer completely familiar to him.
Saeed’s neighborhood had fallen to the militants and small-scale fighting had diminished in the area, but large bombs still dropped from the sky and exploded with an awesome power that brought to mind the might of nature itself. Saeed was grateful for Nadia’s presence, for the way in which she altered the silences that descended on the apartment, not necessarily filling them with words but making them less bleak in their muteness. And he was grateful, too, for her effect on his father, whose politeness, when he recalled that he was in the company of a young woman, would jar him from what otherwise were interminable reveries and would bring his attention back for a while to the here and now. Saeed wished that Nadia had been able to meet his mother, and his mother able to meet her.
Sometimes, when Saeed’s father had gone to sleep, Saeed and Nadia sat together in the sitting room, their sides pressed close for connection and warmth, perhaps holding hands, at most exchanging a kiss on the cheek as a farewell before bed, and often they were silent, but often they spoke in low voices, about how to escape from the city, or about the endless rumors of the doors.
On one occasion, the militants came, banging on the front door in the middle of the night. They were looking for people of a particular sect, and demanded to see I.D. cards, to check what sort of name everyone had, but, fortunately for Saeed’s father and Saeed and Nadia, their names were not associated with the denomination being hunted. The neighbors upstairs were not so lucky: the husband was held down while his throat was cut, the wife and daughter were hauled out and away.

The dead neighbor bled through a crack in the floor, his blood appearing as a stain in the corner of Saeed’s sitting-room ceiling, and Saeed and Nadia, who had heard the family’s screams, went up to collect and bury him, as soon as they dared, but his body was gone, presumably taken by his executioners, and his blood was already fairly dry, a patch like a painted puddle in his apartment, an uneven trail on the stairs.
The following night, or perhaps the night after that, Saeed entered Nadia’s room and they were unchaste there for the first time. A combination of horror and desire subsequently impelled him back each evening, despite his earlier resolution that they do nothing that was disrespectful to his parents, and they would touch and stroke and taste, always stopping short of sex, to which he remained as ever morally opposed—and which they had by now found ample means to circumvent. His mother was no more, and his father seemed not to concern himself with these romantic matters, and so they proceeded in secret, and the fact that unmarried lovers such as they were now being made examples of and punished by death created a semi-terrified urgency and edge to each coupling that sometimes bordered on a strange sort of ecstasy.

      As the militants secured the city, extinguishing the last large salients of resistance, a partial calm descended, broken by the activities of drones and aircraft that bombed from the heavens, and by the public and private executions that now took place almost continuously, bodies hanging from street lamps and billboards like a form of festive seasonal decoration. The executions moved in waves, and once a neighborhood had been purged it could then expect a measure of respite, until someone committed an infraction of some kind, because infractions, although often alleged with a degree of randomness, were invariably punished without mercy.

Saeed’s father went each day to the home of a cousin who was like an elder brother to him and his surviving siblings, and there he sat, with the old men and old women, and drank tea and coffee and discussed the past, and they all knew Saeed’s mother well and had stories to relate in which she featured prominently, and while Saeed’s father was with them he felt not that his wife was alive, for the magnitude of her death impressed itself upon him again with every morning, but, rather, that he could share some small portion of her company.
Saeed’s father tarried at her grave each evening on the way home. Once, he saw some young boys playing football and this cheered him, and reminded him of his own skill at the game when he was their age. Then he realized that they were not young boys but teen-agers, young men, and they were playing not with a ball but with the severed head of a goat, and he thought, Barbarians, but then it dawned on him that this was the head not of a goat but of a human being, with hair and a beard, and he wanted to believe that he was mistaken, that the light was failing and his eyes were playing tricks on him, and that was what he told himself, as he tried not to look again, but something about the young men’s expressions left him in little doubt of the truth.

Saeed and Nadia, meanwhile, had dedicated themselves single-mindedly to finding a way out of the city, and, as the overland routes were widely deemed too perilous to attempt, this meant investigating the possibility of securing passage through the doors, in which most people seemed now to believe, especially since any attempt to use one or keep one secret had been declared by the militants to be punishable, as usual, by death, and also because those with shortwave radios claimed that even the most reputable international broadcasters had acknowledged the doors’ existence, and indeed they were being discussed by world leaders as a major global crisis.
Following a tip from a friend, Saeed and Nadia headed out on foot one evening at dusk. They were dressed in accordance with the rules on dress and he was bearded in accordance with the rules on beards and her hair was hidden in accordance with the rules on hair, but nonetheless they stayed in the margins of the roads, in the shadows as much as possible, trying not to be seen while trying not to look like they were trying not to be seen. They passed a body dangling from a signpost and could barely smell it until they were downwind, when the odor became almost unbearable.
Because of the flying robots high above in the darkening sky, unseen but never far from people’s minds, Saeed walked with a slight hunch, as though cringing at the thought of the bomb or missile that one of them might at any moment dispatch. By contrast, because she wanted not to appear guilty, Nadia walked tall, so that if they were stopped and their I.D. cards were checked and it was pointed out that her card did not list him as her husband, she would be more believable when she led the questioners home and presented their forged marriage certificate.
The man they were looking for called himself an agent, though it was unclear if this was owing to his specializing in travel or to his operating in secret or to some other reason, and they were to meet him in the labyrinthine gloom of a burned-out shopping center, a ruin with innumerable exits and hiding places, which made Saeed wish he had insisted that Nadia not come and made Nadia wish that they had brought a flashlight or, failing that, a knife. They stood, barely able to see, and waited with mounting unease.
They did not hear the agent approaching—or perhaps he had been there all along—and they were startled by his voice just behind them. The agent spoke softly, almost sweetly, his whisper bringing to mind that of a poet or a psychopath. He instructed them to stand still and not to turn around. He told Nadia to uncover her head, and when she asked why he said it was not a request.
Nadia had the sense that he was extremely close to her, as if he were about to touch her neck, but she could not hear his breathing. There was a faint sound in the distance, and she and Saeed realized that the agent might not be alone. Saeed asked where the door was and where it led to, and the agent replied that the doors were everywhere, but finding one the militants had not yet found, a door not yet guarded, that was the trick, and might take a while. The agent demanded their money and Saeed gave it to him, uncertain whether they were making a down payment or being robbed.
As they hurried home, Saeed and Nadia looked at the night sky, at the forcefulness of the stars and the moon’s pockmarked brightness in the absence of electric lighting and in the reduced pollution from fuel-starved and hence sparse traffic. They wondered where the door to which they had purchased access might take them, someplace in the mountains or on the plains or by the seaside. In their apartment, they told Saeed’s father the potential good news, but he was oddly silent in response. They waited for him to say something, and in the end all he said was “Let us hope.”

         As the days passed, and Saeed and Nadia did not hear from the agent again, they increasingly questioned whether they would hear from him at all. It might seem surprising that even in such circumstances Saeed’s and Nadia’s attitudes toward finding a way out were not entirely straightforward. Saeed desperately wanted to leave his city, in a sense he always had, but in his imagination he had thought he would leave it only temporarily, intermittently, never once and for all, and this looming potential departure was altogether different, for he doubted he would come back, and the scattering of his extended family and his circle of friends and acquaintances, forever, struck him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss of a home, no less—of his home.

Nadia was possibly even more feverishly keen to depart, and her nature was such that the prospect of something new, of change, was at its most basic level exciting to her. But she was haunted by worries, too, revolving around dependence, worries that in going abroad and leaving their country she and Saeed and Saeed’s father might be at the mercy of strangers, subsisting on handouts, caged in pens like vermin.
Whatever their misgivings, neither of them had any doubt that they would leave if given the chance. And so neither expected, when a handwritten note from the agent arrived, pushed under the apartment door one morning and telling them precisely where to be at precisely what time the following afternoon, that Saeed’s father would say, “You two must go, but I will not come.”
Saeed and Nadia said this was impossible, and explained, in case he had misunderstood, that there was no problem, that they had paid the agent for three passages and would all be leaving together, and Saeed’s father heard them out but would not be budged: they, he repeated, had to go, and he had to stay. Saeed threatened to carry his father over his shoulder if he needed to. He had never spoken to his father in this way, and his father took him aside, for he could see the pain he was causing his son, and when Saeed asked why his father was doing this, what could possibly make him want to stay, Saeed’s father said, “Your mother is here.”
Saeed said, “Mother is gone.”
His father said, “Not for me.”
And this was true, in a way. He preferred to abide in the past, for the past offered more to him. But Saeed’s father was thinking also of the future, even though he did not say this to Saeed, for he feared if he said this to his son that his son might not go, and he knew above all else that his son must go, and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down and threaten him with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost strength is required, and the arc of a child’s life appears only for a while to match the arc of a parent’s, in reality, one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve, and Saeed’s father’s arc now needed to curve lower, while his son’s still curved higher, for with an old man hampering them these two young people were simply less likely to survive.
Saeed’s father told his son he loved him and said that Saeed must not disobey him in this, that he had never believed in commanding his son but in this moment was doing so, that only death awaited Saeed and Nadia in this city, and that one day, when things were better, Saeed would come back to him, and both men knew as this was said that it would not happen, that Saeed would not be able to return while his father still lived.
Saeed’s father then summoned Nadia into his room and spoke to her without Saeed and said that he was entrusting her with his son’s life, and she, whom he called daughter, must, like a daughter, not fail him, whom she called father, and she must see Saeed through to safety, and he hoped she would one day marry his son and be called mother by his grandchildren, but this was up to them to decide, and all he asked was that she remain by Saeed’s side until Saeed was out of danger, and he asked her to promise this to him. He said it softly, like a prayer, and she sat there with him in silence and the minutes passed, and in the end she promised, and it was an easy promise to make, because she had at that time no thoughts of leaving Saeed, but it was also a difficult one, because in making it she felt she was abandoning the old man, and so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

The walk to the rendezvous point was an interminable one, and as they walked Saeed and Nadia did not hold hands, for that was forbidden in public between genders, even for an ostensibly married couple, but from time to time their knuckles would brush at their sides, and this sporadic physical contact was important to them. They knew there was a possibility that the agent had sold them out to the militants, and so they knew there was a possibility that this was the final afternoon of their lives.
The rendezvous point was in a converted house next to a market. On the ground floor was a dentist’s clinic, long lacking medicines and painkillers, and as of yesterday lacking a dentist as well, and in the dentist’s waiting room they had a shock because a man who looked like a militant was standing there, assault rifle slung over his shoulder. But he merely took the balance of their payment and told them to sit, and so they sat in that crowded room with a frightened couple and their two school-age children, and a young man in glasses, and an older woman who was perched erectly on her seat as if she came from money, even though her clothes were dirty, and every few minutes someone was summoned through to the dentist’s office itself, and after Nadia and Saeed were summoned they saw a slender man who also looked like a militant, and was picking at the edge of his nostril with a fingernail, as though toying with a callus, or strumming a musical instrument, and when he spoke they heard his peculiarly soft voice and knew at once that he was the agent they had met before.
The room was gloomy, and the dentist’s chair and tools resembled a torture station. The agent gestured with his head to the blackness of a door that had once led to a supply closet and said to Saeed, “You go first,” but Saeed, who had until then thought he would go first, to make sure it was safe for Nadia to follow, now changed his mind, thinking it possibly more dangerous for her to remain behind while he went through, and said, “No, she will.”
The agent shrugged as if it were of no consequence to him, and Nadia, who had not considered the order of their departure until that moment, and realized that there were risks to each, to going first and to going second, did not argue but approached the door, and drawing close she was struck by its darkness, its opacity, the way that it did not reveal what was on the other side and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end, and she turned to Saeed and found him staring at her, and his face was full of worry and sorrow, and she took his hands in hers and held them tight, and then, releasing them, and without a word, she stepped through.

It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit it, and she felt cold and bruised and damp as she lay on the floor of the room on the other side, trembling and too spent at first to stand, and she thought, while she strained to fill her lungs, that this dampness must be her own sweat.
Saeed was emerging, and Nadia crawled forward to give him room, and as she did so she noticed the sinks and mirrors for the first time, the tiles of the floor, the stalls behind her, all the doors of which save one were normal doors, all but the one through which she had come, and through which Saeed was now coming, which was black, and she understood that she was in the bathroom of some public place, and she listened intently but it was silent, the only noises emanating from her, from her breathing, and from Saeed, his quiet grunts like those of a man exercising, or having sex.
They embraced without getting to their feet, and she cradled him, for he was still weak, and when they were strong enough they rose, and she saw Saeed pivot back to the door, as though he wished maybe to reverse course and return through it, and she stood beside him without speaking, and he was motionless for a while, but then he strode forward and they made their way outside and found themselves between two low buildings, perceiving a sound like a shell held to their ears and feeling a cold breeze on their faces and smelling brine in the air, and they looked and saw a stretch of sand and gray waves coming in, and it seemed miraculous, although it was not a miracle, they were merely on a beach.
The beach was fronted by a beach club, with bars and tables and large outdoor loudspeakers and loungers stacked away for winter. Its signs were written in English and also in other European tongues. It seemed deserted, and Saeed and Nadia went and stood by the sea, the water stopping just short of their feet and sinking into the sand, leaving lines in the smoothness like those of expired soap bubbles blown by a parent for a child. After a while, a pale-skinned man with light-brown hair came out of the club and told them to move along, making shooing gestures with his hands, but without any hostility or particular rudeness, more as though he were conversing in an international pidgin dialect of sign language.
They walked away from the beach club, and in the lee of a hill they saw what looked like a refugee camp, with hundreds of tents and lean-tos and people of many colors and hues—many colors and hues but mostly falling within a band of brown that ranged from dark chocolate to milky tea—and these people were gathered around fires that burned inside upright oil drums and were speaking in a cacophony that was the languages of the world, what one might hear if one were a communications satellite, or a spymaster tapping into a fibre-optic cable under the sea.
In this group, everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was. Nadia and Saeed quickly located a cluster of fellow countrywomen and men and learned that they were on the Greek island of Mykonos, a great draw for tourists in the summer, and, it seemed, a great draw for migrants this winter, and that the doors out, which is to say the doors to richer destinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in, the doors from poorer places, were mostly left unsecured, perhaps in the hope that people would go back to where they came from—although almost no one ever did—or perhaps because there were simply too many doors from too many poorer places.
Too many to guard them all. ♦