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.