Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  The opening speaker was a Chilean Swedish politician from the Communist Party. She told the story of when her family had escaped Chile to the suburbs of Gothenburg in the seventies. She said that her neighbors had all bought Spanish-Swedish dictionaries in hopes of making the newcomers feel more welcome. She got choked up when she said that her young son now wanted to go to the Central Station to give his toys to refugee children. Everyone cheered. I raised my eyebrows at Bengt as if to say, That was actually good. Bengt nodded in approval.

  Next, an extremely Swedish-looking young professional wearing a blazer and jeans got onstage to talk about travel. He explained how the EU’s laws stated that if an airline flew a passenger to an EU country and that person was denied entry into the country, the airline was responsible for paying for the passenger’s return trip. So airlines wouldn’t fly Syrians to Sweden, even if the refugees had the money, because the airline didn’t want to risk paying for the return ticket if the asylum petition was denied. The guy in the blazer said that he’d talked to a refugee who had bought passage from Turkey to Greece for a thousand euros. On the night the refugee was to leave, the smuggler had left him and twenty others with just an inflatable raft—no navigational equipment or anyone to steer it—and told them to set out for Kos in the dark of night.

  “Alan Kurdi’s father,” the speaker said, “paid over thirty thousand kronor for his family of four to board a raft that capsized five minutes after it left the shore. That’s more than the price of four plane tickets from Damascus to Stockholm.”

  Murmurs ran through the crowd.

  The solution, the man explained, was a venture to charter airline jets not currently in use to fly from Syria to Stockholm.

  “If we can fly people to the moon,” he said, “we can fly refugees to Europe.”

  The crowd cheered wildly. The idea of a business plan to combat the problem, complete with a pretty good tagline, was appealing. But I didn’t like the guy. I couldn’t put my finger on why. He wasn’t naively sentimental. He was trying to implement a workable solution to a concrete problem. His solution, if successful, would not solve the refugee crisis. But it could make one terrible element of the terrible predicament less terrible. I applauded; but I was torn.

  Next to the stage was an Iranian Swedish rapper and social activist who, I learned from Bengt, was a minor celebrity. The rapper was good-looking, dressed in a hoodie and backward baseball cap, probably in his early thirties. He said that he had come to Sweden with his family as a child. He talked about the museum in Småland dedicated to the emigrants who had left Sweden for the American Midwest by the hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth century.

  “But where’s the museum for the immigrants who came to Sweden?” he said. “Where’s the museum for those who stayed to make this country a better place? Where’s our museum?”

  Then he performed an a cappella rap in Swedish about his family’s journey to Sweden. I always tensed up at these public shows of sincerity and cries for approval—the slam poetry performance about a past trauma, the embarrassingly emotional acceptance speech at the Oscars. But the rapper’s verses were, to my surprise, moving. I got chills.

  Finally, a Syrian man who had come to Sweden two years earlier spoke, in halting but good Swedish, of his experiences.

  He had been a lawyer in Syria; here he was a cook.

  “The hardest part is forgetting.” He paused. “But you have to forget the past so that you can live the future. And it is thanks to Sweden that I have a future.”

  He said that if you google asylum in Syria, the browser auto-fills in Sweden.

  In front of me, a thin black man held up a sheet of paper that said Thank you Sweden.

  I didn’t know if I was feeling pride at living in a country that welcomed those in need, gratitude to the speakers for allowing me to share in their experiences, or warmth that came from real empathy—but whatever it was, I felt good. The speakers demanding crowd participation didn’t bother me as they usually would. By the end of the rally, even the Communist boy in all black, his fist in the air every time the crowd cheered, didn’t bother me.

  * * *

  One evening later that week, after a run along the canals, I was catching my breath on the couch, watching Swedish national television’s weekly literature program. I had been thinking all day that if I finished six hours of research for school, did my grocery shopping, and ran three miles, I would reward myself with two beers. But now that I’d checked everything off my to-do list, I was no longer in the mood. I was already tired—the good kind of tired that didn’t send you burrowing into your brain to investigate why you were tired—and had no need for the beers.

  I thought about my run: my lungs pumping air, my heart beating blood, my feet crunching the gravel, my legs working the way they were supposed to. I’d watched the streetlights flickering on the canals and entertained the thought that 2015 was turning out to be the happiest year of my life. I couldn’t say why. I was alone most of the time. I was going on thirty years old with no book publication in sight. On the rare occasions when I talked with friends back home, I didn’t have any stories to tell. I suspected I was getting more boring by the day. I had little to show for my time on earth. But my days were full. Who knew that such happiness could come from the dumb filling of hours.

  SOON AFTERWARD, I WENT OUT with a Swedish girl, Lovisa, I’d met on a dating app. I had written Lovisa my usual opener: Hey there! Is English okay? Swedish is fine, too, but I’m 30% more charming in English.

  English is fine, she’d answered. But Americans are usually only 20% more charming in English.

  As the conversation progressed, she seemed not only funny, but also warm and smart, and I thought that this could be more than another encounter that ended with morning awkwardness. I didn’t want a relationship—something that could trap me in a place I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay. But I thought that Lovisa might be the type I could share inside jokes with on lazy Saturday mornings.

  I met her at Far i Hatten, an old pub in the park next to Moriskan, where she was already seated when I arrived. She was cuter in real life than in her pictures, with short brown hair, green eyes, and sharp cheekbones and a small chin.

  “Oh, good,” she said in English when I sat down. “You don’t look at all like a murderer.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “So it’s already going better than most of these!”

  Everything clicked. Her English was excellent, and even if she sometimes couldn’t find the right word or if it took her a second to understand the subtext of what I’d just said, she knew when I was joking and either laughed or added another bit to the joke. She told good stories. She asked good questions. She didn’t check her phone too often. I found myself not hating the sound of my voice, which was usually what happened half an hour into a date.

  When I returned from the bar with our second beers, I said, in Swedish, “It’s unfair that we’re just speaking my language. We should switch over to Swedish so you get a chance.”

  Lovisa smiled and started speaking more effortlessly than before. But slowly, yet undeniably, the spark of the conversation disappeared. With either language, one of us was at a disadvantage, like a correspondent with finger pressed to earpiece, waiting through a few seconds of satellite delay for the delivery of the anchor’s message. When she fumbled in English, it didn’t halt the conversation. Yet when I searched for the word in Swedish and lost the momentum of the story, or when it took me a second to understand the subtext beneath what she had just said, she seemed disappointed.

  I excused myself to the bathroom, and when I returned, she started speaking English again.

  * * *

  After four beers, Lovisa asked if I wanted to go somewhere else. I thought she meant her place, but instead she took me to Babel, a nightclub a few blocks away that was housed in a converted church. The rooms of Babel were packed with Swedes dancing to the type of looping electronic music that I could never understand. Lovisa boug
ht us beers and we danced sort of together but sort of apart. I would dance close and she would dance away. I’d check my phone and she’d pull me close. But every time I made the pre-kiss eye contact, she’d look away. I was okay holding off on sex. I actually preferred it. I had never liked sleeping with someone the first time I met her. I wouldn’t have minded ending the night after Far i Hatten and enjoying the possibility of seeing Lovisa again later in the week. But now that we were drunk together in a club where it was too loud to talk, I didn’t know what to do except start moving toward sex.

  Eventually, needing air, I said that I was going to smoke and asked if Lovisa wanted to come. She shook her head. I walked out and found a spot in the crowded fenced-off area that separated the club from the sidewalk. I lit a cigarette and looked out at the wild night traffic on Bergsgatan. As I was watching a yellow commuter bus recklessly changing lanes, I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned and saw Ulrika, a girl I’d had a class with during the previous year. She had since transferred to the History of Ideas program at Lund. She was blond and beautiful in a way that felt more appropriate to TV than real life.

  “How have you been!” she said in English, though she was Swedish, giving me a big hug.

  “I’m good. How are you? How is the History of Ideas?”

  “It’s really easy compared to literature. Can I have a drag off your cigarette?”

  “Of course.” I offered it to her, but she leaned in and took a drag from it out of my fingers.

  She was drunk and would have flirted as much with a large chair as she was flirting with me. But it was still nice to be standing outside, talking to a beautiful girl without having to guess at what she wanted, since I knew that she wanted nothing.

  “We should hang out sometime!” she said, after I put out my smoke.

  I gave her my number, comfortable in the knowledge that I’d never hear from her again.

  When I went back inside, Lovisa was gone. I looked through all the rooms for her, circled back, and repeated this three times, then messaged her through the dating app. No answer.

  I waited thirty minutes, but finally I gave up and walked out past the line of falafel joints on Bergsgatan toward my bus stop. I wondered why she’d left. Had she seen me talking to Ulrika? Had she gotten fed up with the ten minutes I spent outside? Had she found someone better? Had she been looking for an excuse to leave all along and simply found it when I went to smoke? I had a headache. I was irritated that I had spent over four hundred kronor on the night out. I missed Anja. I knew that if the date had ended better, I would not have missed Anja, and I knew that missing someone only when you were sad or lonely was not really missing them at all. But still, I missed her.

  * * *

  The following evening, lying on the couch reading, my brain staticky from the night before, I got a text from an unfamiliar number. It was Ulrika inviting me to a party she was having the following weekend at her house in Lund. I felt a smile spread across my face. How happy an unexpected text from a girl could make you.

  * * *

  Later, I lay awake thinking of Ulrika. About how sex with her would look. How talking with her after sex would go. I wondered if the conversation would take place in English or Swedish. I thought about the speed bumps that would come from either. In either language, she would get tired of me, but how quickly would this happen? Or how quickly would I get tired of her? What if she didn’t think I was funny? What if she turned out to be dumb? What if I blurted out something personal on the first night and she was turned off by my neediness? Or what if I blurted out something personal on the first night and then found that I didn’t have any intimate life details to share—that I’d used all my currency and had no way to pull her closer to me?

  I ran through every problem that could arise. Then I ran through a perfect night—perfect conversation, simultaneous orgasms, eight hours of peaceful sleep, waking-morning smile, morning kiss, morning blow job, make her breakfast, sex again, totally in love. Then I found problems with that too. What would we do if we fell in love? Stay home and watch Netflix? What was there left to do if we had already found each other?

  EARLY ONE MORNING, THE POLICE tore down the Rom encampment in Sorgenfri, the industrial neighborhood where I had attended a few raves held in empty factory spaces. Since I’d moved to Malmö, a large vacant lot there had been filled with tents, cars, and motor homes. Sometimes when I’d walk by at night with Bengt, Rom men would be sitting by a tire fire, drinking beers and playing a guitar.

  The police entered the lot at 4:00 a.m. and told the Roma to vacate. Some of the families folded up their tents or drove their cars out of the lot as instructed. Others were dragged out screaming. A few dozen activists stood out front yelling at the police. Nearby, a little cluster of Sweden Democrats, one of them sporting a swastika patch on a denim jacket, held a tailgate, drinking beers and laughing. In the press release that followed, the city government made clear that there would be no deportation of the Roma. But the city had chartered buses that would drive anyone who wanted to go home back to Bucharest for free. I heard all this information secondhand, at school the next day, smoking between classes with classmates who’d witnessed the action.

  “The most disgusting part was the Swedes there, taking pictures for their Facebook pages, but not doing anything to stop it,” said Torsten. He was Swedish, but was currently speaking English for the benefit of a German exchange student who was smoking in the circle. Torsten was short and skinny and wore tight dark jeans and thick wool sweaters. He was a Marxist who could navigate theory better than I could in both Swedish and English. He didn’t run with Bengt, so I had never been out with him, but when he spoke in class, he was calm and attentive to the opinions of others. This was the most animated I’d seen him.

  “How have we gotten to the point where police brutality is the norm in Sweden?” he said.

  I prickled. Hearing the phrase from a Swede, when I came from a country in which police regularly shot people to death for no good reason, was a little irritating.

  “It’s a terrible situation,” I said, opening my mouth though I had not intended to speak. “But was it really police brutality?”

  “Removing people from their homes?”

  “Removing people from private property.”

  “Semantics. It was a forcible removal.”

  “Really? How forcible was it? No one was beaten. No one was hurt. The Swedish police are, as far as I know, the gentlest in the world.”

  “The property that the Roma were living on is owned by a developer who’s just let it sit for years. Do the police have to evict the people living there so it can just sit empty? The developer doesn’t even need it.”

  “Who gets to determine need? Don’t the Syrian refugees whose lives are in danger have greater needs than the Roma?”

  “Are they moving Syrian refugees into the vacant lot?”

  “I’m just saying that if we’re looking at need, people who are escaping war have a greater need than the Roma, who just need money.”

  “But they aren’t evicting the Roma for the Syrians—they’re evicting them for a rich man. And just needing money is never ‘just’ anything when you’re starving.”

  I rolled my eyes. How would Torsten, subsidized for his entire adult life by Swedish student stipends, rent stipends, and unemployment stipends, know anything about starving? “They’re not starving. Nobody is starving in Sweden. The Roma are poor and they have difficult lives, but they aren’t starving. Not here.”

  “How would you know?” Torsten sounded genuinely upset.

  I knew from past arguments with Alexandra that once you had cut through the muscle of someone’s logic into the tender belly of feelings, it was time to back off. “Maybe you’re right. I’m sure you know more about it than I do. I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

  Torsten lit another cigarette, suddenly calm again. “Devil’s advocate—what does that mean?”

  I was surprised that Torsten, whom I’d h
eard use phrases like socioeconomic hegemony, didn’t know what devil’s advocate meant. “It’s when you take a position that you may not necessarily support in hopes of furthering the argument.”

  Torsten thought about it—or pretended to think about it—for a minute. “It sounds like it means ‘coward.’ ”

  I pretended to laugh and asked Torsten if he considered protesting against the tyranny of the majority cowardly. Torsten, maybe sensing that he had cut through the muscle of my logic, said that perhaps I was right and that he was only joking. But we both knew that he had won.

  The position of devil’s advocate did exist to offer a reason to speak without the prerequisite of belief. It was a way to say something without having to face the consequences of having said it. When I thought about it, I had a hard time remembering when I’d heard anyone but a white male use it.

  “The devil doesn’t need a lawyer,” my mom used to say.

  I WOKE ON FRIDAY MORNING with a surge of excitement for Ulrika’s party. I went to the library to work on a paper, but all I thought about was Ulrika. I was too antsy to get anything done. I showered early in the evening and tried on outfits with the blinds closed, not in fear of the across-the-street neighbors seeing me naked, but in fear of them seeing me trying on outfits. I was dressed and ready with an hour to kill. I wondered if I should invite Bengt. It would be comfortable to have a friend with me, and Bengt had brought me so many places that it would be nice to return the favor. But I also worried that Ulrika, upon seeing Bengt, would lose interest in me.