Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  I tried to stop, but I couldn’t—I was weeping now.

  I got out of bed and found the old book of literary theory with my reminder cards.

  This feeling will not last forever.

  One day you will be nostalgic for this day.

  God will take away your pain if you let him/her.

  Stupid cards for stupid nonproblems. I ripped them up and threw them on the floor. I cocked my fist back; I remembered that the walls were concrete; I pulled up; I did not pull up soon enough.

  “Fuck!” I shook my hand and tried to shake the throbbing out. The pain pulsated up my wrist into my forearm. I had punched more walls than people; I wasn’t good at punching either.

  * * *

  After a few minutes, the throbbing settled. The hand wasn’t broken—I’d been able to stop that much at least.

  * * *

  I sat at my desk in front of the congealing meat sauce. I thought about the Refugees Welcome rally. One of the speakers was a spokeswoman from UNHCR. She had described a raft capsizing in the waters between Turkey and Greece. Refugees were swallowed up by the violent waves. A mother scooped up each of her four young children and clung to them in the raging water. But the waves struck harder and harder, until the sea ripped one of her sons from her arms. She screamed. Then it took one of her daughters. Then another. Then another. By the time the coast guard saved her, she was alone, wailing at the sea.

  Malmö Central was filled with people who’d made it across the water, who’d made it to Sweden, and were now sleeping in a train station waiting for—for what? A lifetime stay in the guesthouse, if they were lucky. If they were allowed to stay, they’d be moved to housing projects separate from the cities. They would never learn to speak Swedish like a Swede, never get eye contact from a Swede unless they were breaking the rules. They would be safe, maybe, but never at home.

  And this was the best possible outcome for those who made it out: Sweden or Germany. Britain barely wanted to let in five thousand. Americans had deigned to admit ten thousand Syrians after a two-year vetting period. In Hungary, police officers were teargassing refugees to stop them from passing through the country on their way to Germany and Sweden. Walls were going up all around Eastern Europe.

  Just then, for some reason, my mom’s former neighbor appeared in my head: a smiley, divorced, middle-aged Republican named Jim. He had started vulturing around Mom’s apartment in the Valley after I left for college. Jim would stop by on occasion when I was home for break, hoping to show off his dad chops to my mom. He would shake my hand heartily and ask me about school and make jokes that only he laughed at. He would smile condescendingly when my mother said something he deemed liberal—like that a country as rich as America shouldn’t have homelessness.

  “Wouldn’t that be nice?” he’d say. “But we have to live in the real world.”

  “We create the real world, you condescending fuck,” I said out loud.

  And then, instead of explaining economics to my mom back in 2005, Jim was right there in my bedroom in Malmö explaining why America shouldn’t admit Syrian refugees. “Look, I sympathize with the plight of these poor people, but we have to consider American safety first.”

  “Safety from who?” I said. “These people aren’t terrorists—they’re fleeing terrorism.”

  “I’m not saying they’re all terrorists.” Jim took a sip of Diet Coke. “But there’s no denying the increased risk factor there. And it’s not just safety that has to be considered. Immigration is an immense strain on the economy.”

  “If immigration is such a strain on the economy, then why is it that the countries with the most open borders are the ones with the strongest economies?”

  “Well, now—”

  “Why is it that the xenophobes are the ones mired in economic depression? Why is it that America, the richest country on earth, is the one founded on immigration?”

  “America’s success is based on the free market, which—”

  “You have more money than you’ll ever need! You own an apartment and a car and have enough money in the bank to live on until you die of old age. You think people risk their lives and leave everything they know to come to a country that doesn’t want them because they want to? Imagine what the alternative must be when that’s the best option.”

  “Now look, Jonas, nobody gave me anything, I earned every cent—”

  “Where’s your empathy? Where’s your decency? Where’s your fucking humanity!”

  I was punching the air, punching the world, about to punch Jim, when I saw myself in the mirror: eyes red, spit hanging from my lip, shirt stained with meat sauce, nothing but a weeping drunk in pajamas.

  Malmö, Sweden

  Fall 2015

  IT WAS AT THE MALMÖ University Library the following day, hungover, looking up every minute at the processing center out the window, that I saw the flyer. A little red square of paper under some brochures on a table: Do you want to help a newly arrived refugee practice Swedish and English? Join the Malmö University Language Café! The flyer said that speakers of Arabic, Dari, Pashto, and Kurdish were especially needed.

  I typed out an email to the listed address, in English, saying that I was a former professor, proficient in English and Swedish. I admitted that I did not speak Arabic, Dari, Pashto, or Kurdish. I now wished that I spoke all these languages, even if this was the first I was hearing of two of them. I wrote that I’d be happy to help if they still needed volunteers.

  I returned to the paper I was trying to build into my master’s thesis. I was looking at Sara Ahmed’s “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” which was about how whiteness enables bodies to move unnoticed, while dark skin attracts attention. I hoped to combine Ahmed’s ideas with—something. I wasn’t yet sure what. The week before, I had turned in a draft of a chapter to my thesis adviser, and reading back over what I’d written, I hated it. I hated that despite my efforts to sound academic (but still readable), my professor had scribbled in the margins, Maintain academic tone. I hated how going to class to study my favorite topic was starting to feel like a waste of time, since even if the books mattered, our conversations about them usually didn’t, and I hated that I had nothing to add to the one conversation I’d encountered that did matter.

  Ahmed ended “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” by relating an anecdote: She said that when she gave talks at universities, the first question was usually from a white professor raising their hand to ask what white people could do. The sheer solipsism of this response must be challenged, Ahmed wrote. The purpose of the white professor’s question is to re-position the white subject as somewhere other than implicated in the critique. The white academics wanted to move from the uncomfortable position of being noticed (as a part of an inherently racist system), to their more normal state as the ones who noticed things (the people who diagnosed and described the problem). Everybody liked to conduct the experiment; few people liked being the subject of the experiment. I knew that moving from noticed to noticer was exactly what I was trying to do by writing this paper. I knew that listening was the most important thing for someone in my position. But I couldn’t just listen—not if I wanted to get my degree.

  I checked my email every five minutes.

  * * *

  Not half an hour later, I found that someone had responded to my message.

  Thank you for your interest, wrote someone named Ali. He said they certainly needed more Swedish speakers. We have many volunteers, but they are mostly exchange students from Germany or people from the Middle East (like myself) who are not very good at Swedish.

  The first meeting, Ali wrote, was tomorrow evening. He would be happy if I could join them.

  * * *

  At home, I googled the address Ali had sent. I looked at the street view of the map to make sure I knew exactly where it was: behind Malmö University, across the water from the windmill factory where giant sealed tubes were lined up like mega-blueprints. I wrote Ali to ask what I could bring—coffee, bread, c
ookies? He responded that they had all the food they needed. Just bring yourself.

  I didn’t want to show up empty-handed. I wanted a purpose to serve. But I didn’t know how to teach Swedish. I imagined walking through the doors and finding more volunteers than refugees. I imagined pacing the edge of the room with nowhere to go, like a short boy at a high school dance. I imagined sitting face-to-face with a serious man from Syria who would, within two seconds of looking at me, realize that I didn’t know what I was doing.

  I wanted drugs. I could tackle any social situation when I was high. I checked my personal email, my school email, all my social media accounts, the Times, and Dagens Nyheter. I had no more internet errands to run, but I found that I couldn’t close my computer. I googled Syrian civil war. I googled Syrian refugees. I googled teaching Swedish as a second language. With every search, I had to open more windows to accommodate the hits I wanted to investigate, so I clicked back and forth, feeling not an accumulation of knowledge but a terrible anxiety at how much I didn’t know. The unknowing grew and grew, until I shut all the windows and fell into bed.

  * * *

  The introductory meeting for volunteers would be followed by the first Language Café. The weather that day was angry and wet, and by the time I left the apartment, night was settling in to a sixteen-hour shift. I got off the bus at Anna Lindhs Plats and walked into a frightening headwind the two blocks to the student union. An umbrella tumbleweeded toward me; I moved aside to avoid it. I leaned into the wind like it was a couch I was pushing across the floor. Finally I made it inside, where about a dozen college students and one older woman were scattered across several four-chaired round tables.

  I had barely sat down when, at 4:30 on the dot, a young woman stood up. Her blond hair reached down past her shoulders. She wore a thick winter sweater and jeans tucked into the type of knit socks that Anja wore. She reminded me of skiing.

  “Welcome to the Malmö University Language Café,” she said in English. “Thank you all for coming. My name is Katja, and I am an international relations student here at Malmö University. I’m from Germany but I have been living in Malmö for over a year.”

  She went on: “It’s okay if you’re not fluent in Swedish! I’m not fluent either. But we’re going to be doing Hej, hur mår du? and Jag mår bra, and so on. The kinds of things you learn in a Swedish-for-exchange-students class.”

  She said that the idea of the Language Café was partly to provide the students with a comfort level with the Swedish alphabet before they started school, but also to provide them with a comfort level with Swedish people. “Of course, many of us are not Swedish people. But we’ll do our best.”

  Katja told us that we’d be working with thirteen- to seventeen-year-old unaccompanied boys from Afghanistan, who were living in the transit home closest to the university until they were assigned more permanent homes.

  I was excited. Teenagers were the exact age group I wanted to work with. But I had assumed the refugees would be from Syria.

  “Will there be boys from Syria as well?” one of the volunteers asked.

  “Ali, do you want to answer that?” Katja said.

  A guy who appeared to be in his late twenties, with a neat dark beard, light brown skin, gray jeans, and a blue sweater, stood up.

  “Hello, I’m Ali. I’m one of the organizers. While many of the refugees coming to Sweden are Syrian, most of the unaccompanied refugees are Hazara boys from Afghanistan. ISIS is a big problem in Afghanistan, and they still have al-Qaeda and the Taliban there. Many Hazara refugees escaped to Iran, but I’m from Tehran and I can tell you that it’s not a good situation for the Hazara there.”

  The lone older woman in the room raised her hand. “Why is it only boys we’re working with?”

  “Because it’s only boys that are living at this transit home,” Katja said. “Families usually don’t send girls unaccompanied.”

  “Because they don’t want them to come here and be educated?” the woman said.

  “Because they don’t want them to be raped along the way,” Katja said.

  It was quiet.

  “So now we’re going to teach you some games that you can teach to the boys!” Katja said.

  * * *

  After Katja put us in a circle and taught us a meet-and-greet game, we sat back down and drank coffee from paper cups, made small talk, fidgeted, and waited for the boys to arrive. A little after five, they poured in with a roar. Smiling, laughing, joking boys—maybe forty of them, many with heads shaved on the sides and hair combed over the top, a few with hair that looked like it hadn’t seen scissors in months. Their clothes had no unifying theme. Jeans of different colors, rips, and fades. Sweatpants and corduroys. Knit sweaters, hoodies, and long-sleeved thermals. Fake-leather jackets and puffer jackets. Infinity scarves like those the Germans wore and homemade scarves with maroon patterns. Some of the boys laughed with each other, pretending we weren’t there. Some made direct eye contact, smiled, and waved. Most looked healthy, but none were fat. Behind the boys, clad in tight black jeans and a thick cardigan, I saw Torsten, the Marxist from class.

  “Tjena, grabben!” I said, walking up to him.

  “Tjena, Jonas! What are you doing here?” he said in Swedish.

  “I’m volunteering. Do you work with the boys?”

  “I just started. I have a bachelor’s in social work, and they needed help at the transit home. There are supposed to be forty boys living there but they have two hundred and fifty. They’re supposed to be there for a week, but they’re staying for four to eight weeks.”

  “So you volunteered?”

  “Well, not exactly.” Torsten seemed ashamed. “I’m an employee. I get paid.”

  “That’s great!”

  “But you volunteered.”

  “Only for a few hours a week.”

  Ali called for everyone’s attention in what I assumed was Farsi. “Dari?” he asked the class.

  Most of the boys raised their hands. The ones who didn’t raise their hands were elbowed by the boys standing next to them until they, too, raised their hands.

  “Okay,” Ali said to Katja. “They all speak Dari, so they can understand Farsi. I can translate.” I had learned from a quick google that Dari and Farsi were both forms of Persian, and that the shared cultural roots were one of the reasons why the Hazaras were allowed temporary stays in Iran—even if it was, as Ali had said, “not a good situation there.”

  Katja introduced herself in English, and Ali translated into Farsi. She said that we were going to get into groups and play a game, then have some fika. “Which is a Swedish word you will need to know!”

  Ali translated.

  “Fika,” several of the boys repeated.

  “It means coffee and tea and sweets—Swedes have it several times a day!” Ali translated, and the boys laughed.

  Then Ali went around the room assigning each boy a number, like a PE teacher.

  “Two over here,” Katja said, holding two fingers in the air. “Come on, Jonas, you’re with me too.”

  I felt a little rush of warmth at being picked by Katja. I realized it was inappropriate—I should be focused on helping, not on a girl. But if I could use my wanting-to-impress-Katja energy on helping the boys, then I’d be a better teacher too. Everyone would win.

  We organized seven boys into a circle and Katja explained the rules. You would say your name, then make a gesture—kick an imaginary soccer ball, do a spin, clap your hands, etc. The next person would say your name, do your gesture, and then say his name, do his gesture, and so on, until the last person was tasked with nine names and gestures. A few of the boys spoke English and helped communicate to the others.

  After Katja finished explaining the rules, one of the boys raised his hand. He was almost six feet tall, with dark hair combed across his forehead, in the style that was fashionable in the Valley in the early aughts when emo was the rage. “When will we learn Swedish?”

  “Soon!” Katja said. “But we
thought maybe you wanted to have some fun first.”

  “Yes, this is fun, thank you.”

  “Thank you,” several of the boys repeated.

  “But we can begin the Swedish now. We are ready.”

  I looked to Katja. She wasn’t prepared for students impatient to work. I tried to appease the boys with additions to the circle game, naming gestures and body parts in Swedish for them to repeat as they went along. If a boy used his leg for his gesture, I would point to my leg and say, “ben,” and they would all repeat the word. I applied this unpedagogical technique to every turn, pleased that I could contribute something and that I was impressing Katja. This feeling of pleasure grew and grew until I realized that it was about to be my turn and I had not processed a single name. I tried to concentrate. Then I began to sweat.

  When it came to me, I said, “Hon heter Katja,” and high-fived the air. “Han heter Sala . . . ,” I stammered.

  “Salahuddin!” the boys yelled, and laughed.

  “Salahuddin.” I made a peace sign. “Han heter Osman.”

  “No, I am Osman!” the tall boy with the emo hair corrected. More laughter.

  My incompetence brought much joy to everyone, to the point where I even started enjoying it. I struggled through five names, with much help from the boys, one of whom patted me on the back in consolation.

  After I finished, the next boy—a short kid with a guilty grin who was wearing a Russian fur hat—pointed to me and said, “Han heter Salahuddin.”

  The boys laughed thunderously.

  I saw Katja shake her head and smile.

  * * *

  After the game, it was fika time. The boys lined up along the snack table, but when Katja got into the back of the line, a murmur of Dari ran through them. The boys punched each other in the arm and pointed at Katja. Then they began to step aside and motioned to her to go to the front of the line. One of them said something to the tall boy with the emo hair, Osman, who looked to be a group spokesperson—either due to his height or his English.