Ahead of me in line a man starts to cough and the hacking splutters out of control until there is blood on the floor and the guards lead the sick man away. Edward might have been able to tell them whether it was a tubercular cough or a cancerous one. Either way, I suspect the coughing man doesn’t have long. Have you eaten? Edward texts. Have the guards given you anything to drink?
Yes, a little something, I reply, knowing he’ll see through the lie.
Is the line at least moving quickly?
Super long, but moving pretty quick, I reply, and this is only half a lie. The line is long, but it’s not moving quickly.
Most of those waiting are people like us, each hoping for an apartment in a leafy neighborhood. Others are without families—men (usually men) who might be lucky to be assigned a private room in a shared apartment in one of the tower-block circuses ringing the outer suburbs we passed on our way from the airport.
The line is quiet, as if we’re all too exhausted to speak, except I know it’s no longer about exhaustion. Even small talk with a stranger feels like a risk. I imagine exploding in existential despair and being answered by others shouting their own grievances, some in English, some in languages I don’t know, but the guard nearest me, a blonde giant, muscled and tanned, scowls every time one of us makes a noise. When my phone pinged this morning he flinched and reached for his gun. The first time we were here, more than a decade ago, just after Edward and I got together, this city made us feel like we could finally breathe and hold hands in public without worrying. As if we had ever dared to be affectionate with each other in public at home.
We left in late spring but there are days when I’m uncertain if that’s a memory from this year or the year before. There are nights, awake in the shared dormitory room, when I think we might have spent many months in transit. I used to believe the kind of future we find ourselves in did not happen to people like us. Now that it’s the future we inhabit, I feel ashamed by my failure of imagination.
At noon the guards distribute sandwiches and bottles of water, boxes of juice, paper cups of coffee, like a squad of heavily armed flight attendants. Do they think we might be violent? Edward says no one trusts anyone now, even in a country like this. When we visited all those years ago, we indulged in a fantasy of quitting our jobs and moving here to live without having to worry about guns or lockdowns or the random violence that had already by then become such an unremarkable facet of daily life in the place we used to call home without thinking that home would ever decide to refuse us.
An hour after the sandwiches I arrive at the head of the line to find a room full of young men and women sitting at desks with computers. Around the perimeter guards patrol, glowering as if expecting one of us to do something insupportable. To cough blood on the uncovered face of a healthy citizen. To be histrionic or make too much noise, demand more than our due. Our countries have told us we are due nothing, not even air to breathe or ground to stand on, not even the dignity of being left alone.
The woman at the desk where I sit does not make eye contact. Because I don’t speak her language, we proceed in English.
Hello, she says.
Hi, hello.
What is your name, sir?
Sam.
Hello, Sam. You are a single man or a family?
I have a family. Me, my husband, Edward, and our three children.
She doesn’t blink. She smiles.
You have passports for everyone? Can I see them?
I pull all our documents from the breast pockets of my jacket. The woman places each passport on a scanner and stares at her computer screen.
You are lucky to have these. No passports these days, no luck.
We got a flight out before people like us stopped being able to move freely. Our accounts were frozen just a few hours after my husband bought the plane tickets.
The woman does not look at me, stares at her screen, her mouth pursing in sympathy.
What is your profession?
I’m a lawyer.
And your husband?
A doctor.
That’s a shame. I mean, if it were not so skilled, so specialized, you might find jobs sooner. But now you’ll need to retrain. There will have to be some examinations, equivalencies and so on. I assume you will need language classes?
Unless Britain will take us.
The woman laughs.
Yeah, I know how unlikely that is. But I can’t bring myself to laugh.
So you find no work yet? You understand you may work now. There is no waiting period.
I’ve tried to find a job, but no one seems to want a guy who can’t speak the language.
And your husband?
No.
Your children, they are in school?
They’re in the school here at the center, but it’s super crowded.
And I see the smallest is too young. Which of you is looking after her?
My husband. But he also wants to work.
Of course, I didn’t mean— The young woman keeps her eyes fixed on the computer.
What’s your name by the way?
She looks surprised, as if no one has asked her this question in a long time.
Adela. She says her name without looking away from the screen. Ah, just a moment...
Then she blushes, as if she thinks I might be flirting. Perhaps in this country it’s inappropriate to ask such a personal question on first meeting, or maybe she’s blushing
because she feels uncomfortable around men like me, or even because she finds me attractive. Self-flattery. How shameful. Who could find me attractive in my current state? I look fifty rather than forty. Not even my husband finds me attractive any more.
After a minute Adela looks up. This is the first moment we make eye contact, and I can see that she’s trying to be helpful, but is also very tired. It’s almost five o’clock. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s probably dehydrated, not sleeping well. She was born with a cleft lip. If the fluorescent light hadn’t caught the scar at just the right angle I might not have noticed it. The word cicatrix comes into my head, flying from the same sector of memory as cockatrice. In the state that I’m in, I don’t know which of the words is the right one.
There is now a new scheme, Adela says, lisping, as if the cleft lip might have been accompanied by a cleft palate, also corrected early in childhood. Just today it becomes available. I’m not sure this is something you want, but one of our national companies, Tekla, it sells furniture and homewares, also electronics, they have very large stores, like some giant warehouses, and there are, um, I try to think how to describe this. There are like little apartments made up for people to see how things could be arranged in their own homes. The government makes a public-private partnership with Tekla to resettle some families on a temporary basis in their stores. We put no more than five families in each one, and the stores are so big you will not be on top of each other. There is a cafeteria and a laundry center for employees. Also a creche. For older children, there is a school they can walk to. I have a vacancy in a store not so far from here. Near a good school.
This sounds like madness, but Adela seems completely sincere.
I don’t understand, forgive me. I’m really tired. Can you explain how this would work? What are the terms?
Your family would be able to live there until you find jobs. In exchange, you would be asked to work some number of hours each week. The store would train you and your husband, if you wanted to split the hours, or just one of you could work if you or your husband wanted to do fulltime language courses or whatever training you might need to get jobs here as a doctor or lawyer. Food is provided and you would have your own space at night, in one of these model apartments, but during the day you have to put everything away, you know, because shoppers will come in.
I think of the center, of continuing to live here indefinitely, sharing a room with another family, a room smaller than the bedroom Edward and I left behind. Perhaps Tekla would not be such a bad alternative.
Would there be somewhere to lock our things during the day?
Adela hesitates. She scrolls down, reads aloud in her own language, under her breath, finds the phrase she wants, and nods. Yes, secure storage area.
I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I know what my husband would ask. There’s no other alternative?
Adela inhales and holds her breath. She looks again at her computer. She types. She clicks and exhales. Again her eyes scroll down the screen. She draws her upper lip between her teeth, worrying the place where the two lobes of flesh were stitched together. No, she sighs, no, you see, because you are five, there are fewer choices. There are the tent camps, but me, I would not want myself...I mean it might be okay now, in summer, but in winter? Even with the stoves I think it is hard.
She looks again at the screen. I do have a one-bedroom apartment ten kilometers from the city center. On a bus route. But this is not so nice a neighborhood, too much crime.
I didn’t think there was any crime in this country.
I would not want to live in that neighborhood myself if I had children, but it would
be your own space. Not very nice, but your own.
What would you do in my position?
The store is not a bad option. Hot food three times a day, guaranteed work. Very clean. Safe neighborhood. Great school.
And we’d get paid?
Yes, although Tekla deducts some of the cost of feeding you and your family from
whatever wages you receive. The government covers the other accommodation costs while your case is processed. It’s still something, and you could try to save. This is not a terrible option. She blushes again, as if remembering an aspect of the situation she had momentarily forgotten, and then adds, almost under her breath, and you realize of course can’t stay here any longer. Your time in the center is up.
I vacillate between the two options. This or that. Left or right. I should phone Edward, but I don’t know how to explain it to him, or perhaps I can’t face the argument I suspect we’ll have if I try. Adela checks her watch.
Okay, let’s do it.
While the kids play with our roommates’ children, Edward pulls me into the hallway.
His lower lip is jutting out. It’s the same expression I saw when I told him I thought
there was no reason to leave our home, as if he cannot believe my stupidity.
A department store? What were you thinking?
It’s a furniture store. And it was the best of three pretty bad choices.
I’d rather take the studio in the slum!
A woman who lives in the room next to ours passes and rolls her eyes. Check your privilege, she says. Entitled prick.
What? Why don’t you say that again? Edward calls after her. He’s so angry now that his left eyebrow is twitching.
The woman shouts over shoulder, I called you a fucking prick!
Edward turns to me, his eyes bugging out. Did you hear that? Why didn’t you say anything? How about a little backup, Sam?
You need to calm down. This country already had a housing shortage before we all arrived. We’re not unique.
Maybe I should have asked Edward to do the negotiations. Maybe he would have pushed and shouted until Adela gave us a house in the suburbs. He’s proved himself capable of looking after our wellbeing in ways that have failed me. If it had been left to me, we would still be at home. By now, the kids would have been placed in foster care and Edward and I – I don’t even want to imagine. It was Edward who understood the urgency of the situation and insisted we leave, Edward who negotiated with the traffickers, Edward who held us all together. What good is a lawyer in the midst of such a crisis? No good at all, is what I’m starting to think. Go with the doctor every time. I am grateful to have one of my own. At least we have no medical problems despite the trauma we each now carry, which marks the body as much as any other wound.
I try to explain to Edward that we’ve had the maximum number of days in the transfer center. While our claim is being processed, we have to work, whatever jobs we can find. This Tekla option is both a home and a job, with some flexibility built in. I don’t see a better choice.
Two women trailing three kids trudge down the hall having a version of the same argument. David and Tony, the guys we’ve been living with for the last several weeks, are probably planning for their own day in the accommodation line and the choice they’ll have to make for themselves and their two boys.
Edward turns away from me, hands crossed over his chest. He used to be big, muscular but in three months it seems as though a full third of his mass has evaporated.
When do we go to this fucking Kmart?
Tekla, not Kmart. We go now. Another family’s waiting downstairs to take our half of the room.
Will is slumped against my arm. Farah pouts as she stares out the taxi window. Marlene is asleep in Edward’s arms. All our belongings, stuffed into six plastic bags, fit in the rear of the minivan taxi. Between a concrete high-rise and a grocery store I spot a swatch of farmland. Imagine walking through clover and wildflowers, try to get lost for a moment in a hike through the country on this late summer evening, a stroll without bags, without having to worry about carrying all your remaining possessions.
Our taxi driver glances at the five of us in his rearview mirror and grumbles to himself. Were we wrong to believe we would be welcome here?
The Tekla store is wedged into a peri-urban arc of land between streets of boxy houses, high-rises, and wheat fields that give way to woods in the distance. Open country is within walking distance. My fantasy of an evening ramble might actually be possible.
The exterior of the store is green and ivory, as are the ranks of plastic shopping carts. At the store’s entrance a woman with pink hair and pink lacquered fingernails in a green and ivory uniform waves.
Welcome to Tekla. I am Eva. Please take a shopping cart for your bags.
After we introduce ourselves and present our passports to confirm our identities, Eva leads us through the sliding front doors and locks them behind her. We won’t be going out in the evenings, not as long as we live at Tekla. Edward stares at me. What? What do you want me to do?
Ahead on the left is the creche, now closed for the night. A moving walkway leads to
the upper floor.
Please push your cart onto the travellator, Eva says.
Edward and the children scuttle ahead while I roll the green and ivory cart onto the moving walkway. The five of us look around as if the idea of retail is as foreign as this country itself, as if we have already forgotten everything that came before the ever-advancing now.
The upper floor is arranged around a pathway that twists and turns, offering only limited vantages. Living rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms appear around corners, but are never completely visible.
Eva reassures us that in time we’ll find the shortcuts. They go from one side of the path to another, through the model homes and employee areas. Very tricky! I’ll give you a map.
We pass apartments made up in styles suggesting different kinds of families: minimalist young professionals without children; a family with one small child and limited means; a petit-bourgeois family with two kids; a retired couple who seem to be millionaires living in a penthouse. Every apartment has shelves of real books to make the rooms look cozy, as if actual people were living there.
One of the model apartments, the one that looks petit bourgeois, is already occupied by two men who appear to be our age, more or less. Their two children sit on a couch watching a television whose volume is turned low. An old American movie with subtitles is playing, but it doesn’t look like family fare. A dark-haired couple are alone on a balcony in what might be the south of France. The woman, wearing a white gown with a garland of ivy, kisses the gray-suited man, who resists her at first but gradually submits to her charms. There is a window on one side of the living room, but after a moment I realize it’s just an illusion, the world visible through its glass nothing but a photograph pasted to a wall. Some of the apartments give an illusion of daylight, others of night. The fantasy retired millionaire couple live out the balance of their lives in a land of chrome surfaces and cocktail parties unfolding in a time of permanent night. Two women with a baby seem to be living there now.
Eva comes to a stop at a cluster of rooms I might describe as haute bourgeois.
Because there are five of you, you have our largest model.
If Adela was responsible for the choice, she’s done well. Everything is decorated in muted grays and blues, although the rooms open off one another without hallways or corridors. Edward pushes down the handle on one of the bedroom doors.
Aren’t there any locks?
No, because you see, this is a model. Eva says this as if she suspects Edward might be a little slow. He starts to turn red.
But what about security? What about privacy?
I am sure the other families will respect your privacy. Also, did they tell you at the center that during the day, the model must be open for customers. You can put your things in the employee lockers downstairs. Spend time in the apartment if you like, sit on the couches, watch the television, but people will be shopping, and I have to ask you not to get in their way during store hours. If someone wants to look at the bed or the couch, then maybe you need to get up and let them look. The store gets very, very busy.
And the bathroom? Only for demonstration. Plumbing’s not attached. For a real bathroom, follow signs on the path to toilets.
Eva points up to the ceiling where a hanging sign with an outline of a man and a woman points off to the right. Also, there are showers in the employee area. The kitchen also is just for display. Nothing works. To eat you use our store cafeteria during opening hours. I put some sandwiches and drinks in the kitchen for you tonight.
I can sense Edward about to blow, and then he does.
I can’t do this. There are security cameras everywhere. Even behind these doors that don’t lock, there are cameras watching us day and night so we don’t steal their fucking furniture and knickknacks and remaindered books.
Eva blushes and frowns. Is there a problem?
No problem, I say. It’s just an adjustment. My husband wasn’t expecting—
Don’t make this only about me, Sam!
Eva shifts her weight and consults her watch, its plastic pink strap cutting into her flesh. Her mouth twists back into a smile that unnerves me.
Sam and Edward, you see, I think it is too late now to go anywhere else. You have to stay here tonight, or it is out on the street with you and the kids. From the fine print on the forms I signed, I remember that we can stay here for a maximum of six months. Six months to return to our former professions or at least become employable enough to find a place of our own.
As Will sits on the toilet, I splash water on my face, apply a skim of cherry-scented soap, lather, rinse, and dry myself with a face cloth that has been washed and rewashed in countless sinks over the past months. A jigsaw of lines around my eyes, tumbleweed hair at the temples. At least the bathroom is clean and smells of cinnamon, just as every other public space in this country does. Whatever their occasional brusqueness, these people know how to fragrance. Nothing smells artificial.
The toilet flushes and Will comes to stand next to me. The line of sinks is too high for him to reach but when I lift him from behind, angling his body over the counter, he whimpers, his ribs crushed. I adjust my grip and hold him almost fully aloft while he washes his hands. What if I bruised a rib? What if I fractured one? Will he hold it against me? Will he ever be happy again? He hasn’t smiled in weeks, not even when playing with David and Tony’s boys.
The automatic dryer is one of those superfast models that roars like a jet engine. When the motor starts, Will shrieks and backs into a corner of the bathroom.
It’s okay, I tell him. It’s just a dryer. You remember dryers like this.
Will shakes his head and waits until the dryer stops automatically before coming back to stand next to me.
Let’s wash your face then.
I moisten the cloth, add a dollop of soap, then gently scrub Will’s cheeks and brow, drawing the cloth over his skin as lightly as I can. He starts to squirm when soap gets in his eyes, but he doesn’t cry. I rinse the cloth and wipe his face once more, then finger-comb his hair so that he almost looks like he once did.
As we are leaving the bathroom, another boy and another man enter, as if they were copies of us. Or as if Will and I were copies of them.
In bed next to Edward, I page through one of the books, but I can’t read the language yet. If I look at it long enough, maybe it will start to make sense. Although Eva turned off the main lights when she left the building, the emergency lighting means it is never completely dark. In the distance I can hear a night watchman talking on his phone.
My own phone pings with a message.
did you get settled? i hope everything is okay for you and your family. affectionately, adela
Edward turns over and glares at me. Can’t you turn that off?
It’s the person who helped me earlier, in the transfer center. She wanted to see if we were okay.
You gave her your number?
It must have been in our case file.
What does she say?
I hold up the phone for Edward to read.
Affectionately?
I’m sure she only means ‘sincerely’.
Flirt.
I compose a reply:
Yes, thank you. We are here. I’m in bed. With my husband.
I delete With my husband.
I hope you are well.
I delete I hope you are well.
Goodnight. --Sam
From the adjoining rooms, I can hear Farah’s breathing and Will mumbling in his sleep. He has started this lately, talking through the night. Marlene is in a crib next to our bed, lungs pumping. I think I should get up and hold each of them through the night, but I have no more energy. The day has left me with nothing.
Edward roughs up his pillows then throws his head down against them.
I can’t sleep. We have to get out of here.
Where do you suggest we go?
Home.
You know that’s impossible.
Somewhere else, then. Britain.
They don’t want us. Even doctors and lawyers.
Ireland? New Zealand? South Africa?
Maybe New Zealand. They might let us in. But it would be a long trip. We don’t have that kind of money anymore. Let’s try to accommodate ourselves to being here.
Try to imagine yourself in a little red house on a lake, just outside the city. Think how nice that would be.
Why red?
I saw one in the distance. A little red house surrounded by pine trees at the edge of the water. That’s what I’d like.
I have a different dream, Sam.
What, then?
To go home and find everything the way it used to be. Before all this.
That’s an impossible dream.
In one of the other model apartments, a baby begins to cry. Closer to hand, in the model nearest ours, separated by displays of pillows and bedding, I can hear two men stifling the sounds of sex. A low moan escapes through clenched teeth. Despite myself, the sounds make me hard. I reach out to Edward in the dark, but he turns his back to me.
Okay, hi, hello, I’m Pete, your Tekla store manager, and I’ll be in charge of training you, says the young man with dark hair.
After dropping Marlene at the creche, Edward has taken Farah and Will to school, where all three of them will spend the day in language classes. There is no question of me returning to legal practice until I am sufficiently fluent to begin retraining in this completely foreign system, whereas Edward might, if we’re lucky, find a much shorter route to qualifying to practice medicine. It will probably still take years. He has no natural gift for languages. In the meantime, I will work fulltime in the store, with daily language classes as part of my training.
The other people present this morning are like me: four men and four women, all more or less my age. Although we passed one another going to the restrooms and shower rooms, and in the cafeteria at breakfast surrounded by other store employees, we have not introduced ourselves. We each move as if afraid of being attacked, wary of those, like Pete, who are too friendly.
With the help of a training video, Pete walks us through the history of Tekla, its philosophy and ethos, the benefits and responsibilities we will have during our six months as resident-employees. We will each be assigned a full-time mentor of several years’ experience. I am paired with Pete, who spends the day explaining the store’s various sections. Training will last a week before I begin working without supervision, and only then if my language has progressed beyond the basics. The afternoon we spend in a training room at the back of the warehouse being taught by a young woman who speaks no English. Their language seems logical, I can see the grammatical structure, and a few phrases start to stick. At the end of the day, Pete claps me on the back.
You have done very well, Sam. I feel optimistic about you. What did you do before you came here?
I was a corporate lawyer.
Pete’s face falls. Then probably I have nothing to teach! You should teach me!
I feel less suspicious of Pete after spending the day with him. Together we go to the creche, since Pete also has a young child, a little boy with dark red hair called Marcus, who is about Marlene’s age. When I pick up my daughter, she yanks at my hair, twisting, as if to punish me.
Does your wife work? I ask.
Pete hesitates, blushing. As with Adela, I fear I must have failed to understand the protocols of curiosity in this country.
I don’t have a wife, Sam. I have a husband. Like you.
Nothing about Pete led me to believe this might be the case. Am I so bad at reading the cues? Or are the cues here completely different than at home? I apologize, and as the words come out, I feel tears rising and hastily wipe them away.
Edward and Will and Farah come home from school shuffling their feet, moping. The teachers snapped at Will and a group of girls told Farah she smelled like rotten peaches. What the hell does a rotting peach smell like? Why peaches? Edward asks as we eat dinner in the store cafeteria: meatballs for Edward, fried fish for me, hamburgers for the children, even Marlene. We were all vegetarian at home. Such things no longer seem to matter.
You just have to ignore them. I smooth down Farah’s hair and hug her. You’re clean. Your clothes are new. Nobody smells. The girls at school are afraid of what they don’t know. Maybe the teachers can’t cope with so many new students. It has to be difficult, even for people who mean well.
Edward drops his fork, his eyes flashing across the cafeteria. I thought this country was supposed to be welcoming. And look, it’s already six-thirty in the evening and the place that’s now our home is full of people pawing over our couches and sprawling on our bed. How can I sleep under a duvet that strangers have been touching? All I can think of are germs.
I reach to touch Edward’s arm but he flinches. The store closes at eight. We have to be
patient. We can take a walk outside. We just have to be back before closing.
You think I don’t know that? Ten hours each day, every day of the week when our ‘home’ is not our home and at night we’re locked in like prisoners. If you don’t find another option, I’ll take the children and go somewhere myself.
Will looks from Edward to me and back to Edward. His face scrunches up and he starts to cry.
What are you saying?
Ask your affectionate friend. Maybe she can get us out.
As our drama unfolds, I become conscious of someone across the cafeteria staring. A man with steel gray hair in a white button-down shirt and dark tie, sitting next to a sharp-faced woman in tight jeans and a black t-shirt. When I catch his eye, the man grimaces and leans over to speak to the woman. She looks disgusted, frowns at me, and draws her index finger across her neck. Slit your throats, she seems to be saying, I would like to slit the throats of you and your children, all of you, everyone like you.
Let’s go home.
For an instant Edward looks hopeful until he understands what I actually mean. The man and woman across the cafeteria begin talking loudly in their own language but I hear a word that sounds familiar: pervers!
In our haute-bourgeois model apartment, five teenagers loll on the sofas braying at one another as they stare at their phones. One of them is reading a book pulled from the shelf, a translation of Brecht’s play Arturo Ui.
Can’t we make them leave? Farah asks.
Not until eight o’clock. Only half an hour before closing.
We go into the master bedroom, which is empty of shoppers, and turn on the television. There are American films every night on one of the channels but this early in the evening the programming is all local. As we watch a drama about a suburban family, the boy who was reading Brecht opens our bedroom door. When he spots us piled on the bed, he looks embarrassed.
Sorry. I want to say—welcome.
He speaks in English, and unlike with Pete, I have no trouble picking up the cues. The boy looks at us and sees himself as I look at him and see myself at his age. He is not much older than Farah. Perhaps his parents are somewhere in the store shopping. Perhaps, in this strange country, teenage boys come to furniture stores to hang out in the evenings and read allegorical plays about fascism in mock-bourgeois living rooms. Perhaps the boy is an employee of the store I haven’t yet met. Perhaps all five of the teenagers are employees, waiting for some other teenage employees, friends of theirs, to clock off so they can gambol home together through this late summer night.
I want locks, Edward says.
The boy reddens and backs out the door, shutting it as he goes.
That was mean. He was trying to be friendly.
Do I go to his house and open his bedroom door without knocking?
At dinner the next day, Marlene refuses to eat. When she starts to cry, Farah offers to take her back ‘home’ (air quotes have become de rigueur around this word whenever Farah and Edward say it, as if irony cannot be implied by the situation alone), put Marlene to bed, and sit with her until the store closes, but Will is still eating and Edward decides Farah should not go on her own.
The negotiations take ten minutes, and by the time we have settled these plans people are staring, Marlene is wailing, and a woman passes, muttering what sounds like ‘pack’ in English. Perhaps the word is an imperative, and this woman wants us to pack up and go, or maybe it is a descriptive noun, a dismissal of us as nothing more than a pack of dogs. Either way, I decide the only thing to be done is to smile and prove we are different than what such people suppose.
As Will eats, worry devours what little remains of my energy. Today’s training went well, Pete is a good mentor, and once I get my first paycheck the anxiety may begin to subside. Will is nearly finished with his food when Adela from the transit center appears.
I came to check on you, she says, and this must be your little boy.
Is that required?
No, but this store is close to my apartment, so I stop by just to see how you are. Where is your husband? And the daughters? I hoped to meet them.
In the apartment. You chose well for us.
Your husband likes it?
I don’t want to lie, but I also hate to disappoint her. She looks so eager to be helpful.
Edward’s having a hard time.
Is there something you need? Maybe I can help.
A home with doors that lock?
Adela nods. I am not supposed to, but I will keep looking. If I find something else, better maybe, then I tell you, but we might have to move quickly, you understand? She tucks her hair behind her ears and looks down at the floor, as if shy of her helpfulness.
Will has pushed his plate away from the edge of the table and asks for dessert. Adela offers to sit with him while I hurry to the buffet, choose slices of cake, and swipe my employee card at the checkout where the cashier refuses to make eye contact with me.
As I return to the table, three electronic notes ping from the public-address system, and a recorded voice announces the store will close in ten minutes. Adela extends her hand to say goodbye and I find myself almost bowing. It’s impossible to say why she inspires such devotion. Perhaps because she is friendly in a way that seems to expect nothing in return.
Once Will has finished his cake I carry the tray with its dirty dishes to the rack near the kitchen. The cashier who refused to meet my gaze earlier brushes past, knocking me off balance.
You should kill yourselves, you people, the young man says in English more heavily accented than Adela’s or Pete’s. We don’t wants you here. We don’t needs you.
The next day, in the middle of my shift, Adela texts me.
i think i find a place for you – you can come later to see?
She gives me an address. We agree to meet at five fifteen. It means leaving the language class early, but Pete says it won’t be a problem this once. I text Edward to explain I may be late for dinner.
Edward replies.
What does it matter? Menu’s the same every night. You’re there or you’re not.
Adela’s directions lead me along a busy street that divides the Tekla store from a residential area. After passing a supermarket and fast food restaurants, I turn into a neighborhood of white suburban villas and apartment blocks. Although the properties are clean and well maintained, even a year ago I would have dismissed such an area as lower middle class. Now I would leap at any chance to stand in place of the people who must live here.
Adela is waiting outside a four-story apartment block that curves in an arc around a communal garden. The apartments look recently built, each with a miniature balcony. There are satellite dishes, trellises, plastic patio furniture, clothes drying in the afternoon sun. At the sight of her, something flips inside me. Not arousal but happiness.
The apartment she shows me is on the top floor. It’s a tenth the size of the house we left behind. There are only two bedrooms, but the doors lock. The space is furnished with the basics, all of it from Tekla. Everything is clean, well designed, but also replaceable and provisional. As I walk around I realize that it’s almost an exact duplicate of the model apartment in the Tekla store that I imagined was intended for a young professional couple of limited means with one child. If I could only keep one, which one? I try to push the thought away, imagining Marlene sleeping in a crib with Edward and me in one bedroom, Farah and Will on bunkbeds in the other. In time, if our application is successful, some years in the future, we will be able to afford a home that fits us.
Is this through the Migration Agency?
Adela blushes, as if every question I ask touches a zone of embarrassment.
In fact, it belongs to my parents. They have some properties they rent. After I saw you yesterday I spoke to them, and this one is free. I mean, not free, but they will let you have it for a rent you can afford. I speak with the manager at Tekla and he says you can stay in the job, even if you and your family move out. He needs good workers, and Pete says you’re a good one.
She tucks a ringlet behind her ear. The scar from the cleft is inflamed, as if she has been worrying it between her teeth.
I don’t know what to say, although the problem really is that something about this offer feels wrong, or precarious, in the way that our place at Tekla, whatever its time limits and privations, does not.
Why would your parents help us?
Adela’s blush deepens, and then her hand is reaching out to touch my arm.
I want to help you, Sam.
When I feel the cool touch of her fingers, I know I must not accept.
I’m grateful. We’ll take it.
What does she want?
I don’t think she wants anything. I have explained to Edward that nothing would change except having a place with doors that lock where we could make our own food instead of eating, drinking, working, and shitting Tekla.
What did you do to get this? Flirt with her?
She’s a woman. And anyway, I don’t flirt.
You flirt with everyone! Even women! I see you flirt with that boss of yours, what’s his name?
Pete? I don’t flirt with Pete. He has a husband.
Edward snorts. You don’t even know you’re flirting when you’re flirting you’re such a goddamn professional flirt!
Marlene shifts in her sleep, turning her head to the side.
I’m not agreeing to anything without seeing the place first. Tell her that. You can’t be trusted to make these kinds of decisions. Not after Tekla.
The Migration Agency has nothing else. Adela says—
Edward sneers. Adela says, Adela says.
Stop it, please. Adela says that as we get closer to autumn and winter, the housing shortages will grow worse. The government is encouraging property owners to meet the shortfall, and her parents are people with a conscience.
In the lunar dusk of the store’s emergency lighting, I can see Edward’s mouth open and close.
You want to be in her debt. I know you. Maybe she’s doing this because she has an advanced sense of philanthropic duty, or empathy, but maybe—allow yourself to imagine it for a moment—maybe she wishes to have us in her debt. We know nothing about her or her parents. Are they the kind of people to whom we would wish to be indebted? They may be perfectly nice, or they could be criminals, people who seize any opportunity to exploit every last one of us. I’ve seen the television programs. Such people exist. Even in this country.
I need to believe there are still good people who want to help, otherwise I’ll lose my mind. I believe Adela is one of them.
Edward snorts. You know her so well.
Pete and his husband, Theo, a registered nurse, help us move. Pete’s parents are looking after Marcus and their other two children, two girls who are already in school. Ordinary lives, I think, this is what it means to have ordinary lives, as we so recently did. They ferry our bags in the back of their car while Edward and I and the kids walk along the busy street from Tekla to the apartment. What took twenty minutes on my own takes forty as a family. Pete had offered to come back and fetch us but I insisted the walk would do us good. As we pause at a traffic light, I notice drivers staring from their cars and grimacing. Every flick of a hand might be a finger drawn across a throat, every gunning engine or howling car horn a mechanical pervers or pack.
At the apartment, Adela is waiting with a bunch of flowers and a bottle of sparkling wine. Edward gushes about the place but I recognize his compliments as complaints in disguise. It faces north, the layout is awkward, the kitchen and living room are not separate, so if you cook something like fish, the whole apartment will smell. But instead what Edward says is: Oh, what an inventive layout, how clever that you get the benefit of these late northern summer days, how convenient that we’ll be able to cook with the children right in the same room. It’s perfect, he coos, in a tone that makes my stomach ache. When did he become so cruel?
Earlier in the day, unpacking our belongings from the Tekla employee lockers, I entertained a fantasy in which I would offer legal assistance to people like us, but of course, it’s a completely different system to the one I know. Civil law instead of common law. Perhaps what the young cashier in the Tekla cafeteria said is true, that I have come to a place where I have no purpose, where even my skills and knowledge can do nothing to help those in need. Purposelessness, temporary or permanent, might be a price worth paying for life.
One weekend, Pete and Theo ask us over for lunch. After a dry summer during which the government banned backyard barbecues, the rules have now been relaxed. Their modest house, a few streets away from our apartment, has a long backyard where the six kids play, pairing off by age. Marlene and Marcus toddle around on a blanket under Theo and Edward’s supervision, while Will and Charlotta are absorbed by a game of making believe they are stowaways on a colonization mission to a remote planet; this requires that they lie very still on the lawn and roll to stay in the shadows as the sun moves. Farah and Beebe are practicing their hook shots in the front driveway, and Pete and I look after the food.
It’s very nice here, I tell Pete as he turns sausages on the grill.
You sound sad when you say that, Sam.
I guess I don’t believe we’ll ever have something as comfortable as this again. Or as nice as your place.
Try to have a little faith that things will work out. These are ready, he says, lifting the sausages onto a plate.
I’ll just go call the girls and wash my hands if I may.
Of course. The bathroom’s past the kitchen on the left.
Inside their house, which we passed through quickly when we arrived, I have a sudden sense of déjà vu. After using the bathroom, I enter the living room and see five teenagers braying at each other, one of them reading Brecht. Except there are no teenagers, and no Brecht. I open an unlocked door and see Edward and myself lying in bed, backs to each other, with Marlene in a crib next to us, standing up, gripping the bars and burbling. Except Edward is outside, there is no crib, and Marlene is playing with Marcus on the back lawn.
Everything is decorated in muted grays and blues. Not as haute bourgeois as I might recently have thought it.
A month later, as I’m stacking boxes in the Tekla warehouse, Adela approaches down the aisle. Thank goodness she has not come to the apartment. Thank goodness her parents have not yet turned up to check on us. Edward has almost let the matter drop, referring only now and then to Adela’s parents as our gangster landlords.
This weekend I go to my parents’ summer house, on a lake. I wonder if you and your family want to come? You can get there by train. Since it’s still so warm, I thought we could swim and make a picnic.
I smile apologetically, knowing what Edward will say.
I’ll have to ask my husband. Can I text you?
Of course, even at the last minute. I’ll send the address and directions. When was the last time you had fun, Sam?
Later, in bed, I tell Edward about the invitation. The sounds of the neighbors’ music pulses from the other side of the wall.
So her lowlife gangster parents can rob us and sell our children to people traffickers?
We could swim—
We don’t have swimming suits. Who’s going to buy us swimming suits?
There’s a discount store near the supermarket.
You’ve got it all figured out, Mr. Flirty. I’m not going. Neither are the kids.
Why are you behaving like this? You’re imagining things.
Stop constructing me as the unreasonable one, Sam. I’m the only person in this family who sees risk. If you want to go, then go on your own, but don’t expect me to like the idea of you two malingering in some pond.
From her crib, Marlene stares at us through the bars.
Edward turns over. That’s the thirty-seventh night in a row he has turned over to sleep without kissing me. Before that, I remember counting forty-five nights. Before that, seventy-seven. Before that, everything becomes fuzzy.
On the Saturday morning Marlene wakes with a cough and Edward says it’s impossible for her to go. Farah insists she needs to study if she has any hope of catching up in school. At least Will whines that he wants to swim and for the first time in months he has a tantrum when it appears for a moment that Edward might deny him a chance for fun.
After stopping to buy swimming suits at the discount store, Will and I ride a bus twenty minutes to the central station where we catch a train to a stop forty minutes outside the city, disembarking at a railway siding that is little more than a platform and a shed surrounded by deciduous forest. The birch leaves are just beginning to yellow. The air is warm, an Indian summer, as my parents might say if they were still speaking to me. A few other people get off the train as well, setting out on foot, or met by friends with cars.
Adela’s directions take us down a country lane and then along a path that cuts through trees until we arrive at a red frame house at the edge of a lake surrounded by forest. Around the shore other small houses bulge like red and white beads on a bracelet. Adela answers the door in a swimming suit with a towel cinched around her waist.
Excuse me, I lost track of the hour. I’ve just been in the lake.
Although traditional on the outside, the interior of the house is modern, wooden floors stained almost black. Pieces of minimalist furniture jostle alongside antique chairs and dressers. Since leaving our own house, this is the first space I’ve entered that feels even vaguely like the home we abandoned.
When I explain why Edward and the girls could not come, Adela smiles. She almost
looks triumphant.
What a pity, as the English say. Next time.
I know there will never be a future occasion when Edward and Adela meet as they might have met again today, when one timeline would have unrolled before us instead of the one now in train. You didn’t have to bring anything, but these are lovely, she says, taking the bunch of flowers and bag of apples I have brought.
Are your parents here?
Like your wife and daughters, they could not come, at the last minute. My aunt is not well, so they go to visit her instead. Next time, I hope you meet. You want to swim before lunch?
After our swim, we eat the picnic Adela has prepared. Cheese and bread, smoked fish, salads. When Will has finished, he falls into a deep sleep that allows the silence of the afternoon to anchor us to the dock. The water is still, light slanting through birch leaves and striking my sleeping son’s face.
When it is nearly six, I suggest we should be going.
Let him sleep. It’s okay. You don’t have to rush. The trains are frequent. Adela blushes each time she smiles and I feel myself blush in response. Have we engineered this isolation without actually planning it? Is it possible to plot without scheming?
Did you put some sunscreen on him?
I forgot. Don’t tell Edward.
My father would not approve. He’s a dermatologist. I think we should take him inside.
Adela leads us to a bedroom at the back of the house, where I lay Will in one of the twin beds. He does not stir, sleeping as if drugged, or as if, I think, he has finally found a place where worry does not make him restless.
In the kitchen, Adela has opened a bottle of white wine and filled two glasses. When she sips, the scar on her lip catches a drop. I notice that the tissue looks inflamed, as if she has been chewing it in my absence.
I’m still hungry. Are you hungry, Sam? I think I make some eggs.
He that eateth of their eggs dieth, I think, unsure where the line comes from, or why it should occur to me now. The wine is the first alcohol I have drunk in months and I feel its effects almost instantly. Perhaps Edward was right to be so untrusting.
Sam? Do you want some eggs?
Yes, thank you. I’m feeling hungry.
2025