Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

  It was here that Saeed and Nadia found themselves in those warmer months, in one of the worker camps, laboring away. In exchange for their labor in clearing terrain and building infrastructure and assembling dwellings from prefabricated blocks, migrants were promised forty meters and a pipe: a home on forty square meters of land and a connection to all the utilities of modernity.

  A mutually agreed time tax had been enacted, such that a portion of the income and toil of those who had recently arrived on the island would go to those who had been there for decades, and this time tax was tapered in both directions, becoming a smaller and smaller sliver as one continued to reside, and then a larger and larger subsidy thereafter. Disruptions were enormous, and conflict did not vanish overnight, it persisted and simmered, but reports of its persistence and simmering seemed less than apocalyptic, and while some migrants continued to cling to properties they did not own under the law, and some migrants and some nativists too continued to detonate bombs and carry out knifings and shootings, Saeed and Nadia had the sense that overall, for most people, in Britain at least, existence went on in tolerable safety.

  Saeed and Nadia’s worker camp was bounded by a perimeter fence. Inside this were large pavilions of a grayish fabric that looked like plastic, supported by metal trusses in such a way that each reared up, and was airy within, and was resistant to the wind and rain. The two of them occupied a small curtained-off space in one of these dormitories, the curtains suspended from cables that ran almost as high as Saeed could reach, above which was empty space, as though the lower part of the pavilion was an open-topped maze, or the operating rooms of a huge field hospital.

  They ate modestly, meals composed of grains and vegetables and some dairy, and when they were lucky, juiced fruit or a little meat. They were slightly hungry, yes, but slept well because the labor was lengthy and rigorous. The first dwellings that the workers of their camp had built were almost ready to be occupied, and Saeed and Nadia were not too far down the list, and so by the end of autumn they could look forward to moving into a home of their own. Their blisters had given way to calluses, and the rain did not much bother them anymore.

  One night as Nadia slept on their cot beside Saeed she had a dream, a dream of the girl from Mykonos, and she dreamt that she had returned to the house they had first arrived at in London and had gone upstairs and passed back through the door to the Greek isle, and when Nadia woke she was almost panting, and felt her body alive, or alarmed, regardless changed, for the dream had seemed so real, and after that she found herself thinking of Mykonos from time to time.

  • • •

  FOR HIS PART Saeed often had dreams of his father, whose death had been reported to Saeed by a cousin who had recently managed to escape from their city, and with whom Saeed had connected by social media, the cousin having settled near Buenos Aires. This cousin told Saeed that Saeed’s father had passed away from pneumonia, a lingering infection he had fought for months, initially just a cold but then much worse, and in the absence of antibiotics he had succumbed, but he had not been alone, his siblings were with him, and he had been buried next to his wife, as he had wished.

  Saeed did not know how to mourn, how to express his remorse, from so great a distance. So he redoubled his work, and took on extra shifts even when he barely had the strength, and the wait for Nadia and him to receive their dwelling did not shorten, but it likewise did not increase, for other husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and men and women were working extra shifts as well, and Saeed’s additional efforts served to maintain his and Nadia’s ranking on the list.

  Nadia was deeply affected by the news of the old man’s passing, more even than she had expected. She tried to speak to Saeed about his father, but she stumbled over what to say, and on his side Saeed was quiet, unforthcoming. She felt herself touched by guilt from time to time, although she was unsure what precisely was making her guilty. All she knew was that when the feeling came it was a relief for her to be away from Saeed, at work on their separate work sites, a relief unless she thought about it, thought about being relieved not to be with him, because when she thought about this the guilt was usually not too far behind.

  Saeed did not ask Nadia to pray with him for his father, and she did not offer, but when he was gathering a circle of acquaintances to pray in the long evening shadow cast by their dormitory, she said she would like to join the circle, to sit with Saeed and the others, even if not engaged in supplication herself, and he smiled and said there was no need. And she had no answer to this. But she stayed anyway, next to Saeed on the naked earth that had been stripped of plants by hundreds of thousands of footsteps and rutted by the tires of ponderously heavy vehicles, feeling for the first time unwelcome. Or perhaps unengaged. Or perhaps both.

  • • •

  FOR MANY, adjustment to this new world was difficult indeed, but for some it was also unexpectedly pleasant.

  On Prinsengracht in the center of Amsterdam an elderly man stepped out onto the balcony of his little flat, one of the dozens into which what had been a pair of centuries-old canal houses and former warehouses had been converted, these flats looking out into a courtyard that was as lush with foliage as a tropical jungle, wet with greenness, in this city of water, and moss grew on the wooden edges of his balcony, and ferns also, and tendrils climbed up its sides, and there he had two chairs, two chairs from ages ago when there were two people living in his flat, though now there was one, his last lover having left him bitterly, and he sat down on one of these chairs and delicately rolled himself a cigarette, his fingers trembling, the paper crisp but with a hint of softness, from the damp, and the tobacco smell reminded him as it always did of his departed father, who would listen with him on his record player to audio recordings of science fiction adventures, and would pack and puff on his pipe, as sea creatures attacked a great submarine, the sounds of the wind and waves in the recording mixing with the sounds of the rain on their window, and the elderly man who was then a boy had thought, when I grow up I too will smoke, and here he was, a smoker for the better part of a century, about to light a cigarette, when he saw emerging from the common shed in the courtyard, where garden tools and the like were stored, and from which a steady stream of foreigners now came and went, a wrinkled man with a squint and a cane and a Panama hat, dressed as though for the tropics.

  The elderly man looked at this wrinkled man and did not speak. He merely lit his cigarette and took a puff. The wrinkled man did not speak either: he walked slowly around the courtyard, leaning into his cane, which made scraping noises in the gravel of the footpath. Then the wrinkled man moved to reenter the shed, but before he left he turned to the elderly man, who was looking at him with a degree of disdain, and elegantly doffed his hat.

  The elderly man was taken aback by this gesture, and sat still, as if transfixed, and before he could think of how to respond the wrinkled man stepped forward and was gone.

  The next day the scene repeated itself. The elderly man was sitting on his balcony. The wrinkled man returned. They gazed upon each other. And this time when the wrinkled man doffed his hat, the elderly man raised a glass to him, a glass of fortified wine, which he happened to be drinking, and he did so with a serious but well-mannered nod of his head. Neither man smiled.

  On the third day the elderly man asked the wrinkled man if he would care to join him on his balcony, and though the elderly man could not speak Brazilian Portuguese and the wrinkled man could not speak Dutch, they cobbled together a conversation, a conversation with many long gaps, but these gaps were eminently comfortable, almost unnoticed by the two men, as two ancient trees would not notice a few minutes or hours that passed without a breeze.

  On his next visit the wrinkled man invited the elderly man to come with him through the black door that was inside the shed. The elderly man did so, walking slowly, as the wrinkled man did as well, and at the other side of that door the elderly man found himself being helped
to his feet by the wrinkled man in the hilly neighborhood of Santa Teresa, in Rio de Janeiro, on a day that was noticeably younger and warmer than the day he had left in Amsterdam. There the wrinkled man escorted him over tram tracks to the studio where he worked, and showed him some of his paintings, and the elderly man was too caught up in what was happening to be objective, but he thought these paintings were marked by real talent. He asked if he might buy one, and was instead given his choice as a gift.

  A week later a war photographer who lived in a Prinsengracht flat that overlooked the same courtyard was the first neighbor to note the presence of this aged couple on the balcony opposite and below her. She was also, not long after, and to her considerable surprise, a witness to their very first kiss, which she captured, without expecting to, through the lens of her camera, and then deleted, later that night, in a gesture of uncharacteristic sentimentality and respect.

  • • •

  SOMETIMES SOMEONE from the press would descend on Saeed and Nadia’s camp or work site, but more often denizens would themselves document and post and comment online upon what was going on. As usual, disasters attracted the most outside interest, such as a nativist raid that disabled machinery or destroyed dwelling units nearing completion or resulted in the severe beating of some workers who had strayed too far from camp. Or alternatively the knifing of a native foreman by a migrant or a fight among rival groups of migrants. But mostly there was little to report, just the day-to-day goings-on of countless people working and living and aging and falling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere, and so not deemed worthy of headline billing or thought to be of much interest to anyone but those directly involved.

  No natives lived in the dormitories, for obvious reasons. But natives did labor alongside migrants on the work sites, usually as supervisors or as operators of heavy machinery, giant vehicles that resembled mechanized dinosaurs and would lift vast amounts of earth or roll flat hot strips of paving or churn concrete with the slow serenity of a masticating cow. Saeed had of course seen construction equipment before, but some of what he saw now dwarfed in scale anything he had previously seen, and in any case to work alongside a heaving and snorting building engine is not the same as glimpsing one from a distance, just as for an infantryman it is a markedly different experience to run alongside a tank in battle than it is for a child to watch one on parade.

  Saeed worked on a road crew. His foreman was a knowledgeable and experienced native with a few short tufts of white hair ringing a mostly bald scalp that was covered by his helmet unless he was wiping away his sweat at the end of the day. This foreman was fair and strong and had a stark, afflicted countenance. He did not make small talk but unlike many of the natives he ate his lunch among the migrants who labored under him, and he seemed to like Saeed, or if like was too strong a word, he seemed at least to value Saeed’s dedication, and often he sat next to Saeed as he ate. Saeed also had the added advantage of being among those workers who spoke English and so occupied a status midway between the foreman and the others on the team.

  The team was a very large one, there being a surfeit of able bodies and a shortage of machinery, and the foreman was constantly devising methods of using so many people efficiently. In some ways he felt he was caught between the past and the future, the past because when he had first started his career the balance of tasks had similarly tipped more towards manual labor, and the future because when he looked around him now at the almost unimaginable scale of what they were undertaking he felt they were remodeling the Earth itself.

  Saeed admired his foreman, the foreman having that sort of quiet charisma that young men often gravitate towards, part of which lay in the native man’s not seeming the least interested in being admired. Also, for Saeed and for many others on the team, their contact with the foreman was the closest and most extended of their contacts with any native, and so they looked at him as though he was the key to understanding their new home, its people and manners and ways and habits, which in a sense he was, though of course their very presence here meant that its people and manners and ways and habits were undergoing considerable change.

  One time, as evening approached and the work for the day wound down, Saeed went up to his foreman and thanked him for all he was doing for the migrants. The foreman did not say anything. In that instant Saeed was reminded of those soldiers he had seen in the city of his birth, returning on leave from battle, who, when you pestered them for stories about where they had been and what they had done, looked at you as if you had no idea how much you were asking.

  • • •

  SAEED WOKE BEFORE DAWN the next day, his body tight and stiff. He tried not to move, out of consideration for Nadia, but opened his eyes and realized she was awake. His first instinct was to pretend he was still sleeping—he was exhausted, after all, and could have used more time undisturbed in bed—but the thought of her lying there and feeling alone was not a pleasant one, and besides she might have noticed the subterfuge. So he turned to her and asked, in a whisper, “Do you want to go outside?”

  She nodded without gazing at him, and each of them rose and sat with their back to the other, on opposite sides of the cot, and fumbled in the dimness with their feet for their work boots. Laces rasped as they were cinched and tied. They could hear breathing and coughing and a child crying and the struggling sound of quiet sex. The pavilion’s muted night-lighting was about the intensity of a crescent moon: enough to allow sleep, but also enough to see shapes, though not colors.

  They made their way outside. The sky had begun to change, and was less dark now than indigo, and there were others scattered around, other couples and groups, but mostly solitary figures, unable to sleep, or at least unable to sleep any longer. It was cool but not cold, and Nadia and Saeed stood side by side and did not hold hands but felt the gentle pressure of their arms together, through their sleeves.

  “I’m so tired, this morning,” Nadia said.

  “I know,” said Saeed. “So am I.”

  Nadia wanted to say more to Saeed than that, but just then her throat felt raw, almost painful, and what else she would have liked to say was unable to find a way through to her tongue and her lips.

  Saeed also had things on his mind. He knew he could have spoken to Nadia now. He knew he should have spoken to Nadia now, for they had time and were together and were not distracted. But he likewise could not bring himself to speak.

  And so they walked instead, Saeed taking the first step, and Nadia following, and then both striding abreast each other, at a good clip, so that those who saw them saw what looked like a brace of workers marching, and not a couple out on a stroll. The camp was desolate at this hour, but there were birds out and about, a great many birds, flying or perched upon the pavilions and the perimeter fence, and Nadia and Saeed looked at these birds who had lost or would soon lose their trees to construction, and Saeed sometimes called out to them with a faint, sibilant, unpuckered whistle, like a balloon slowly deflating.

  Nadia watched to see if any bird noticed his call, and did not on their walk see even one.

  • • •

  NADIA WORKED on a mostly female crew that laid pipe, colossal spools and pallets of it in different colors, orange and yellow and black and green. Through these pipes soon would run the lifeblood and thoughts of the new city, all those things that connect people without requiring them to move. Ahead of the pipe-layers was a digging machine, like a wolf spider or praying mantis, with a wide stance but a pair of dangerous-looking appendages at its front, coming together in a crenellated scraper near where its mouth would have been. This digging machine carved the trenches in the earth into which the pipe-layers would unfurl and unstack and lower and connect the pipes.

  The driver of the digging machine was a portly native man with a non-native wife, a woman who looked native to Nadia but had apparently arrived from a nearby country two decades ago, and who quite possibly had retained a trace
of her ancestral accent, but then again the natives had so many different accents that it was impossible for Nadia to say. This woman worked nearby as a supervisor in one of the food preparation units, and she would come to Nadia’s work site on her lunch break when her husband was there, which was not always, because he dug trenches for multiple pipe-laying crews, and then the woman and her husband would unwrap sandwiches and unscrew thermoses and eat and chat and laugh.

  As time passed, Nadia and some of the other women on her crew began to join them, for they were welcoming of company. The driver revealed himself to be a chatterbox and jokester, and relished the attention, and his wife seemed to relish it equally, though she spoke less, but she appeared to enjoy all these women listening enrapt to her husband. Perhaps this made him grow in stature in her own eyes. Nadia, who watched and smiled and usually said little in these gatherings, thought the couple a bit like the queen and king of a domain populated otherwise solely by women, a transient domain that would last only a few short seasons, and she wondered if perhaps they thought the same and had decided, nonetheless, to savor it.

  • • •

  IT WAS SAID that with every month there were more worker camps around London, but even if this were true Saeed and Nadia noticed an almost daily swelling of their own camp with new arrivals. Some came on foot, others in buses or vans. On their days off workers were encouraged to help out around the camp, and Saeed often volunteered to help process and settle the camp’s latest additions.

  Once he handled a small family, a mother, father, and daughter, three people whose skin was so fair that it seemed they had never seen the sun. He was struck by their eyelashes, which held the light improbably, and by their hands and cheeks, in which networks of tiny veins could be seen. He wondered where they came from, but he did not speak their language and they did not speak English, and he did not want to pry.