Exit West

Textauszug

In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days. His name was Saeed and her name was Nadia and he had a beard, not a full beard, more a studiously maintained stubble, and she was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a f lowing black robe. Back then people continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain bounds of course, and so these choices meant something.

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, for 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.

Saeed noticed that Nadia had a beauty mark on her neck, a tawny oval that sometimes, rarely but not never, moved with her pulse.

 
Not long after noticing this, Saeed spoke to Nadia for the first time. Their city had yet to experience any major fighting, just some shootings and the odd car bombing, felt in one s chest cavity as a subsonic vibration like those emitted by large loudspeakers at music concerts, and Saeed and Nadia had packed up their books and were leaving class.

In the stairwell he turned to her and said, Listen, would you like to have a coffee, and after a brief pause added, to make it seem less forward, given her conservative attire, in the cafeteria?

Nadia looked him in the eye. You don t say your evening prayers? she asked.

Saeed conjured up his most endearing grin. Not always. Sadly.

Her expression did not change.

So he persevered, clinging to his grin with the mounting desperation of a doomed rock climber: I think it s personal. Each of us has his own way. Or . . . her own way. Nobody s perfect. And, in any case

She interrupted him. I don t pray, she said. She continued to gaze at him steadily.

Then she said, Maybe another time.

He watched as she walked out to the student parking area and there, instead of covering her head with a black cloth, as he expected, she donned a black motorcycle helmet that had been locked to a scuffed-up hundred-ish cc trail bike, snapped down her visor, straddled her ride, and rode off, disappearing with a controlled rumble into the gathering dusk.

 
The next day, at work, Saeed found himself unable to stop thinking of Nadia. Saeed s employer was an agency that specialized in the placement of outdoor advertising. They owned billboards all around the city, rented others, and struck deals for further space with the likes of bus lines, sports stadiums, and proprietors of tall buildings.

The agency occupied both floors of a converted townhouse and had over a dozen employees. Saeed was among the most junior, but his boss liked him and had tasked him with turning around a pitch to a local soap company that had to go out by email before five. Normally Saeed tried to do copious amounts of online research and customize his presentations as much as possible. It s not a story if it doesn t have an audience, his boss was fond of saying, and for Saeed this meant trying to show a client that his firm truly understood their business, could really get under their skin and see things from their point of view.

But today, even though the pitch was important every pitch was important: the economy was sluggish from mounting unrest and one of the first costs clients seeme

Langtext

In einer Welt, die aus den Fugen geraten ist, in einem muslimisch geprägten Land, das am Rande eines Bürgerkriegs steht, in einer Stadt, die namenlos bleibt, lernen sie sich kennen: Nadia und Saeed. Sie hat mit ihrer Familie gebrochen, fährt Motorrad, lebt säkular und trägt ihr dunkles Gewand nur als Schutz vor den Zudringlichkeiten fremder Männer. Er wohnt noch bei seinen Eltern, ist eher schüchtern und nimmt die Ausübung seiner Religion sehr ernst. Doch während die Stadt um sie herum in Flammen aufgeht, sich Anschläge häufen und die Sicherheitslage immer prekärer wird, finden die beiden zusammen. Sie wollen eine gemeinsame Zukunft, in Freiheit. Und da sind diese Gerüchte über Türen, die diejenigen, die sie passieren, an ferne Orte bringen können. Doch den Weg durch diese Türen muss man sich mit viel Geld erkaufen. Als die Gewalt weiter eskaliert, entscheiden sich Nadia und Saeed, diesen Schritt zu gehen. Sie lassen ihr Land und ihr altes Leben zurück ...

'Exit West' ist ein überaus berührender Roman, der sich mit den zentralen Themen unserer Zeit beschäftigt: Flucht und Migration. Mohsin Hamid beweist, dass Literatur poetisch und zugleich politisch sein kann.

Mit diesem "fesselnden Roman" (New York Times) steht Mohsin Hamid auf der Shortlist des diesjährigen Man Booker Preises.

Biografische Anmerkung zu den Verfassern

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the international bestsellers Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both finalists for the Man Booker Prize. His first novel, Moth Smoke, won the Betty Trask Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. His essays, a number of them collected as Discontent and Its Civilizations, have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

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