Exit West: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Saeed and Nadia suddenly have no way to connect, since their evening class has ended. Saeed calls all the insurance companies in the city but has no luck finding Nadia’s. He also goes to the burger restaurant where they usually meet, but Nadia isn’t there. Meanwhile, Nadia rushes home during her lunches to build up a store of supplies from the grocery store. When the weekend comes, she goes to the bank to withdraw her funds and discovers a giant crowd made up of people who all want to do the same thing. Trying to push through, she gets trapped in the middle of the group, unable to move as a man’s hand pushes “down her buttocks and between her legs,” where he tries to “penetrate her with his finger, failing because he [is] outside the multiple fabrics of her robe and her jeans and her underclothes.”

Unable to move her arms, Nadia can only squeeze her legs shut, “her body sealing itself off” as the crowd lurches and the man’s hand disappears from between her thighs. Shaken, she withdraws as much money as possible from the bank and hides it in her shoes and bag before going to a currency converter and a jeweler, divvying her savings into different kinds of value. Feeling followed, she rushes home “only to find a man waiting at the entrance, looking for her, and when she [sees] him she steel[s] herself and refuse[s] to cry, even though she [is] bruised and frightened and furious, and the man, who ha[s] been waiting all day, [is] Saeed.” 

Upstairs, Nadia tries again to convince Saeed to have sex with her, “not because she [feels] particularly sexy but because she [wants] to cauterize the incident from outside the bank in her memory.” Once again, Saeed refuses her advances, reminding her of his desire to wait. “Are you saying you want to get married?” she asks, and when he confirms this, she says, “To me?” Once it’s clear this is the case, she feels a “great tenderness well up in her for him,” but she merely says, “I don’t know.” He accepts this, kissing her before he leaves. Stopping him on his way out, she gives him a black robe so he can come over whenever he wants. After he’s gone, though, her happiness fades as she listens to “the demolition blows of distant artillery, the unmaking of buildings, large-scale fighting having resumed somewhere.”

As Saeed ventures home, a “brave man” not far from Nadia’s neighborhood stands in the light of his phone’s flashlight listening to the same gunshots as Nadia. He’s in front of a door, “a door black even in the dimness,” a door from which another man is slowly emerging. The brave man waits and listens for sounds coming from the stairwell, touching a pistol in his pocket. He is, Hamid notes, excited and “ready to die,” though he doesn’t “plan on dying” but instead plans on living and “doing great things.” The man before him—now fully in the room—quivers on the floor while regaining his strength, “a knockoff Russian assault rifle by his side.” When he stands up, the brave man brings him into the stairwell. As the brave man returns to his post by the black door, the second man joins the fighting outside “within the hour.”

Radical militants continue to ravage Saeed and Nadia’s city. One day when Nadia passes her family’s house, she sees that it looks deserted and wonders if her parents and sister have perhaps fled. The next time she walks by, the house has been “crushed by the force of a bomb that weighed as much as a compact automobile,” and for the rest of her life, she wonders in vain what happened to her family. During this time, Saeed’s boss is forced to go out of business, tearfully promising his employees that they’ll have jobs if the agency ever reopens. Likewise, Nadia’s office stops giving out paychecks, and so the workers slowly trickle out. 

The city’s inhabitants begin to look at windows differently. “A window was a border through which death was possibly most likely to come,” Hamid writes. As such, people put couches and other furniture against the windows. Saeed’s family does just this, rearranging the furniture so that Saeed’s bed blocks the tallest windows in the sitting room. Meanwhile, rumors circulate throughout the city about doors that can take people “elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country.” “A normal door,” some people say, can become a “special door” without warning. As such, the city’s residents also begin to look at their doors differently, seeing them as potential portals that might someday whisk them away.

Each morning, Saeed and Nadia wake up in their separate apartments and peer at the nearest doors. Unfortunately, these doors don’t turn into the mysterious portals, instead remaining “on/off switches in the flow between two adjacent places, binarily either open or closed.” Still, though, looking at their doors in this way changes their perceptions, making the doors themselves “partially animate” like “objects with a subtle power to mock, to mock the desires of those who desire to go far away.” 

Nadia and Saeed spend more time together now that they don’t have jobs, and Saeed suggests that Nadia move in with him and his family, telling her they don’t have to get married to live in the same apartment. The only thing is that they’d need to remain chaste under his parents’ roof. Although hesitant at first, Nadia finally decides to move in with Saeed when Saeed’s mother is killed by a “stray heavy-caliber round passing through the windshield of her family’s car.” When Nadia sees how distraught Saeed and his father are at the funeral, she determines to stay with them for the night “to offer what comfort and help she [can].” From then on, she never spends another night in her own apartment.