Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  Eventually I texted Bengt to ask if he wanted to come.

  Sounds great, but I’m on my way to Copenhagen for the night! Have fun!

  I was happy to not have to worry anymore about whether to invite Bengt. For a moment, I wished that my old neighbor Laurent was still in Sweden instead of back in Paris. Even if he and I didn’t have a lot in common, this was the kind of situation where we could laugh and drink and meet all these new people together. There was also a part of me that wanted to show off to him that a pretty girl liked me. But I told myself to stop worrying about what wasn’t happening and look forward to what was. I still had time to kill, so I opened my email, then Facebook, and then the Times, where I clicked on an article about unaccompanied-minor refugees living in Germany. The article described the journey of a boy from Afghanistan who’d been separated from his family in a forest near the Macedonian-Serbian border. On his journey, the boy had been robbed and chased by police, but he had still made it to Germany on his own. He was seven.

  Tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors had come to Germany in 2015 alone, the article said. Some of their parents had been killed in Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq, or in the waters between Turkey and Greece. Some parents had been separated from their children on the journey to Europe. Some had sent their children away to continue their schooling after ISIS or the Taliban had closed their schools. Some had sent their children away to save them from forced conscription into ISIS.

  The boys were making progress, one of the social workers at a home for unaccompanied minors said. They were learning German. They screamed less at night.

  Few girls made the journey alone, apparently. The ones who did arrived with terrible stories. One girl had been raped so many times that the doctors in Germany found injuries weeks later. She was—

  Just then, something shot up my stomach, up my throat. I ran to the bathroom and vomited. Hunched over the toilet, gasping for breath, I retched again. My stomach kept contracting until there was nothing left. When it finally stopped, I caught my breath, rubbed the water from my eyes, and stared down at the toilet. It was mostly orange bile. I hadn’t eaten anything unusual. I hadn’t even started drinking yet. I washed out my mouth in the sink, took a few deep breaths, and returned to my room. I didn’t feel nauseous or dizzy. It was strange.

  I sat down in front of the computer again and read of the young boy who’d lost his parents on the Macedonian border. He’d been in Germany for almost a year. He was now fluent in German.

  The boy had been waiting for his mother, who the article said hadn’t been heard from in a month. But the boy told the interviewer that his mother would come get him.

  “She said she would come,” he said. “She promised.”

  I ran to the bathroom and threw up again.

  * * *

  I took my second shower of the evening and tried to wash away whatever had just happened. I toweled myself off and stared at the mirror, my eyes still red from vomiting. I read about terrible things every day. Every time I opened the news it was a smorgasbord of suffering: another far right party’s triumph, another study on the rapid decay of the planet, another UN report on rape as a weapon of war, another breaking-news bulletin of a terrorist attack. When I read the news of another mass shooting in America, I didn’t even wonder anymore about the people who had been killed. I wondered about who had done the killing and what conversation would dominate the following week. Had it been a white man with a grudge (gun control) or a killer with Muslim roots (immigration)? Once, on the bus from Lund to Malmö, I’d read about the kidnapping and presumed murder of forty-three Mexican student protesters, while, in another window on my phone, I discussed with Bengt where we should meet for beers that night. Then I had climbed off the bus, put in my headphones, and not given another thought to the Mexican students. The outside world could sting for a second, but it couldn’t hurt me. Only things that happened to me or to the people I cared about really hurt.

  This didn’t make any sense.

  * * *

  I put on my coat, put my beers in a cloth tote bag, walked to the bus stop, and tried to return to the good feelings of earlier in the day. I boarded the last commuter bus of the evening, the one that went straight to Lund without passing through Malmö Central, sat down in the back, pulled a tall can of Carlsberg from my bag, and drank it quickly. I still felt bad, so I drank another tall can. It wasn’t working. I longed for pills.

  I started imagining that I was working in the refugee home in Germany. I imagined that I gave up everything, learned German, and traveled to the border to help. I imagined that I would sit with the boy who was waiting for his mother, read him stories, play chess with him, and sing him back to sleep when he woke up screaming. I couldn’t stop global warming or prevent mass shootings, and even when I fantasized about them, I didn’t imagine fixing a problem so much as winning an argument. But I wasn’t imagining an argument now. I imagined that I was the social worker the Times had interviewed. I pictured this life in Germany—playing soccer with the kids in the yard, teaching them English, making them laugh—all the way to Lund. When the bus stopped, I found that I was happy again.

  * * *

  I followed the map on my phone to a little yellow house on an old cobblestone street in the city center of Lund. Party voices hummed inside. I walked up five steps to the stoop and knocked on the door, but no one answered. I rang the doorbell and knocked again. Finally I tried the handle and, when it gave, pushed open the door. There, behind a row of coats branching out from their hooks, stood Ulrika in a blue cotton dress, barefoot, talking to a handsome Swedish man in a dress shirt and suspenders. When she saw me, she ran up and wrapped me in a hug.

  “I’m so glad you came!” she said in English.

  “You look very nice,” I said in Swedish.

  “Tack!” Continuing in Swedish, she said, “Jonas, this is Anders.”

  I shook hands with the man in suspenders, who had a sharp part in his hair and a canary watchband that matched his canary socks. I was feeling so good that I didn’t even hate him for the shameless intentionality of his outfit. Anders introduced himself in English, then put an arm around Ulrika’s waist, kissed her, and disappeared into the house. All the excitement fell out of me. I would have to drink a lot that night.

  Ulrika led me to the fridge to store my beers and then into the living room, where poppy hip-hop was playing. Half a dozen broad-shouldered men who were far too tanned for early October were chatting with half a dozen long-legged women. Another man was hanging upside down from a stripper pole in the middle of the room, his shirt drooped over his head to reveal a six-pack. Ulrika was about to introduce me around, but then the front door opened and she ran over to hug the next party guest. I introduced myself, in Swedish, and the men small-talked with me until they had filled their politeness quota. I sought out Ulrika to ask where I could go smoke. Another girl saw the cigarette pack in my hand and said that she would show me—she was going out to smoke anyway. This girl, Eva, wore tight black pants with tall high heels that emphasized her muscular calves. As we walked down to the patio, I told Eva in Swedish that I was impressed to see her navigating rickety stairs in such heels.

  “This is nothing—normally I dance in seven-inch heels.”

  “You’re a dancer?”

  She said that she had met Ulrika in pole-dancing classes. “As in competitive pole dancing, not stripping.”

  We sat down at a circular iron table on a narrow plot of fenced-in dirt, the chair cold from the cold. Eva rifled through her purse and loudly cursed the absence of cigarettes that had presumably never been there. “Do you think I could bum one off you?”

  “Of course.”

  This rarely occurred in Sweden. Swedes didn’t bum smokes like Americans. I’d had fewer requests for smokes since moving to Sweden than I’d get on a single Friday night walking down Front Street in Wilmington. Once Eva asked for the cigarette and I knew that her interest in me had been transactional, I relaxed and listen
ed to her talk instead of trying to appear attentive while searching for hints about her feelings toward me.

  “I did an exchange semester in Florida a few years ago,” Eva said. “My roommate was this American girl who believed in creationism. Which was so crazy to me! That someone like that existed in the real world, today, you know?”

  “I guess it is surprising.”

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to say ‘crazy.’ It was just unexpected, as a Swedish person. If you believe in creationism here, people think you’re an idiot. But the funny thing was that this American girl was intelligent. She believed in microevolution but not macroevolution—which I thought was like believing in rain but not clouds. But still. She was very smart.”

  Eva flicked the ash from her cigarette.

  “Sometimes you meet people and they’re very different from what you expected. They’re actually people.” She laughed. “Not the deepest insight! The cigarette must have gone to my head.”

  I liked what she was saying. And more than that, I liked how she showed awareness of the problems with what she was saying. It saved me the trouble of finding the problems with what she was saying and left me more space to just enjoy her company.

  * * *

  I went to the kitchen to get another beer. At the fridge, I was greeted by a girl with white-blond hair.

  “I heard you were American,” she said in English.

  “You heard right.”

  “I was in Texas as an exchange student!”

  Then she began telling stories, which weren’t exactly interesting, but weren’t insulting or confrontational either. She wasn’t that type of party guest who, upon hearing that someone was American, liked to pepper the American with questions about the recent news that Donald Trump was running for president or say something like “Did you know that sixty percent of Americans think the Earth is the center of the universe?”

  I smiled and asked questions. She touched my arm three times during the conversation.

  As I was talking to her, a drunk boy came in and said in heavily Swedish-accented English that the girl and I were an “adorable couple” and asked us how long we had been together.

  “No, she and I are together,” said a blond Swedish guy. He was short and muscular, and he put his arm around the girl. She leaned into his embrace. “But we’re very liberal.” He looked at me and winked.

  I assumed the Swedish boy was trying to assert himself. I wasn’t trying to get in between a couple, so I went to the fridge, grabbed another beer, and asked Eva to tell me more about her time with the creationist roommate. But throughout the night, the blond boyfriend kept looking at me. One time he stared right at me, then said something to his friend, then laughed. I wasn’t angry enough to do anything about it; but I didn’t like it.

  Later, the boy leaned against the counter I was leaning against and said, in Swedish, “Do you think my girlfriend is cute?”

  “I’m sorry?” I said in English. “I didn’t understand you.”

  The boy repeated his question in English.

  “Jag fattar inte vad du säger,” I said.

  The boy tried again in both languages. He didn’t get that I was joking.

  Finally, after a third or fourth “Do you think my girlfriend is cute?,” I answered, in English, “That’s a trap.”

  The boy turned to his girlfriend and said, in English, “He thinks you’re a tramp.”

  “No, ‘a trap,’ ” I said.

  “En fälla,” Ulrika clarified, popping into the conversation.

  “He thinks you’re a trap,” the boyfriend said in English.

  “No, I think the question is a trap.”

  The girl blushed.

  I escaped to the living room, where the girls had taken over the pole. They wore weight-lifting gloves, and the ones in dresses had put on bicycle shorts underneath. I watched as Eva climbed to the top of the pole, wrapped her legs around it, and slid down in a hands-free twirl.

  “That’s impressive,” I said to the girl standing next to me, mainly so it didn’t look like I was staring at Eva’s ass. And I wasn’t staring at her ass; I was looking at the space in front of me so I’d appear to be engaged in something without having to talk to another person. After the exchange in the kitchen, I was convinced that I was lost in a foreign place, and that if I kept talking, I would fall further and further away from the core of the party, with everybody making fun of me in whispered tones once I was out of earshot.

  I wanted to return to the fantasy world in Germany in which I helped people.

  But it was only midnight! How stupid did you have to be to leave a Swedish pole-dancing party so you could fantasize about saving refugees?

  * * *

  I stayed for another few hours, drank a few more beers, smoked a few more cigarettes, and had a few more conversations, which were mostly showcases for my conversational partners to demonstrate their mastery of English. Around 2:00 a.m., my drunk began to swell. When I was on drugs, the minute I felt the alcohol begin to overtake my behavior in a way that might embarrass me, I took more drugs. With another pill or another bump, my brain would either wake up or I would forget that I was terrified of embarrassing myself. But now, whenever that drunk siren went off, I would exit as quickly as possible, getting out before I said anything that would bring me shame in the morning. I finished the last of what I calculated to be my eighth beer, put on a sober face, thanked Ulrika with carefully articulated politeness, and headed for the door.

  As I was putting on my shoes and jacket, the girl with white-blond hair and the passive-aggressive boyfriend came over to say goodbye. She gave me a hug and told me that it had been nice talking to me.

  “Do you want to get a beer sometime?” she said.

  “What about your boyfriend?”

  “We’re very liberal.”

  I paused. “It’s okay for you to go out with other men?”

  “I’m not looking for another boyfriend. But we’re very liberal.”

  “Okay.” I handed her my phone and she typed in her number. We hugged again, said bye, and I walked to the train station, as it was too late for the commuter bus.

  * * *

  On the train back to Malmö, I wondered if I should have tried to sleep with the girl. Or with Eva. Or with any of the other girls at the party. I didn’t want to sleep with any of the girls besides Ulrika. But I wanted to have done it. I mostly wanted to wake up next to Ulrika. I wanted a new memory. Maybe. I wasn’t sure; I was drunk.

  The train car smelled like McDonald’s fries; I was overcome by a desire for fries; I thought about how much I wanted fries. I felt sad, like something terrible had happened but I couldn’t remember what. I thought of the leftover spaghetti and meat sauce sitting in a bowl in my fridge. What a nice thought. At home, I could take off my jeans and jacket. I could put on warm fleece pajama pants, heat up a bowl of spaghetti, eat it in bed, and stream the Clippers preseason game that had just tipped off in LA. How nice.

  * * *

  I got off the train at Malmö Central. I checked the departures sign on the platform. The bus back to Värnhem left in four minutes. How perfect! If I ran, I would get outside to the bus depot just as the bus was pulling up; I wouldn’t have to wait even a single minute. Everything was waiting for me at home: the fleece pajama pants, the spaghetti and meat sauce, the basketball game. I charged up the stairs; they offered no resistance; the air felt cool on my face; I reached the top; I stepped in—

  I was hit by silence. A complete wall of silence, completely out of place in a train station. I heard it before I saw it. Then: rows and rows and rows of sleeping bags. Against every wall, tucked under every bench, squeezed next to every sign. Sneakered feet sticking out, white socks sticking out, blue tarps draped over duffel bags. Total silence. The drunk passengers who’d been yelling on the train were tiptoeing like teenagers who didn’t want to wake their parents. Nobody spoke. I started to walk but measured every step to muffle the sound. I didn’t want to kick a
foot; I didn’t want to look up. I’d been to the station in the days since refugees had started arriving. I’d seen a few families waiting on benches in the afternoon, children sleeping under blankets, fathers sitting anxiously next to backpacks covered in tarps. But I hadn’t been this late at night. I hadn’t been to the station in the time between the arrival of the night trains and the opening of the processing center in the morning.

  A group of teenage boys were gathered in front of the Burger King. They were whispering to each other at the tables. One boy was staring down at his phone. Another was pacing little laps around the table. In the middle of their group sat an older man. He wore a green jacket and had thinning hair. He was staring at me. I smiled at him; he didn’t smile back. He wasn’t staring at me; he was just staring at the space that I happened to be walking through.

  A boy came in through the doors that led to the bus stops; he smelled like cigarettes. His hair was cropped on the sides, but long on the top, combed over from left to right like a young Swede. He wore light jeans and a hoodie that was too thin for the cold.

  I wanted to say something—to welcome him in some way.

  I opened my mouth and whispered, “Hej.”

  The boy startled; he hurried past me back to the Burger King tables.

  Of course he did—what kind of man whispers hello to a teenage boy in the middle of the night?

  * * *

  I missed my bus. I walked home along the canals and the thousand lights of the rail yards on the other side of the water. I tried to think about what I’d seen, but I couldn’t focus my brain—or my eyes—on anything. I walked in a blur of sidewalk, streetlight, and water. At my apartment, I put on fleece pants, heated my spaghetti, and lay down in bed to watch the Clippers game. But when I turned it on, I began to cry; I couldn’t stop crying.

  I was so angry with myself. What had I seen that I hadn’t already known? Why was I crying about a few hundred refugees who’d made it to Sweden—who were now safe—when there were millions in Jordan and Lebanon and Turkey and Greece who might be sent back, die waiting, or spend a lifetime in limbo, hoping to hear their number called?