“Daesh closed my school.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, it was bad. Then I couldn’t go to school in Iran.” Aziz paused. “Do you think I can start school sooner if I learn Swedish?”
“You’re doing very well with the Swedish—that’s not why you have to wait.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Then why?”
“They have to find you a home.”
“But I could go to school while they look for a home.”
“They don’t want you to start a school and then have to start a different school two months later.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll be hard for you to leave.”
“But that’s stupid. I have already left.”
“I know.” I sighed. “I don’t make the rules.”
“No, of course. That was rude of me.”
“It wasn’t rude at all. It’s very difficult to wait.” I tried to think of something to say. “The thing to remember is that once you start school here, you can go for as long as you want. You can go to university for free.”
“Yes, that will be very nice.” Aziz forced a smile.
I thought of Dagerman showing up at the refugee train outside Essen, empty-handed except for his notebook and his consolation.
“What do you want to study?”
“I would like to study medicine. I want to be a doctor.” Aziz looked at me. “But what is needed here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do they have enough doctors in Sweden? Or do they need barristers? Or architects? What is needed?”
“Doctors are always needed here. I can never get an appointment. You’ll make a great doctor.”
Ali whistled for class to start and Aziz pulled my hand into a shake, then a fist, then a bump, which, by now, we performed in rhythm.
* * *
Besides a brief mention I’d let slip to Bengt after the first meeting, I’d managed to keep my volunteering to myself. It was all I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t want to sound like a Habitat for Humanity spring-breaker just returned from the Ninth Ward to explain poverty, and I had to keep reminding myself that I couldn’t preach about the boys since I knew nothing about them. But I still wanted to show Aziz around. Take him by Universitetssjukhuset in Lund so he could see Swedish doctors in action and understand that it wasn’t that hard to become one. Give him a tour of Malmö. Maybe bring him to the grocery store and go over which milk was the regular milk and which was the filmjölk—the sour, watery yogurt that needed to be covered in müsli and sugar before it was edible. At least take him out to lunch.
Between the second and third Language Cafés, having spent much of the night before thinking about what I could do for the boys, I started writing a message to Torsten to ask if I could meet up with Aziz outside of class. But I couldn’t figure out the right phrasing in Swedish. How could I write the message with the right amount of humility and respect, but also enthusiasm? Then I thought about how the other boys would react if I came by and took only Aziz to lunch. Osman might think he had answered some question wrong or not learned Swedish quickly enough. I could take them both out. But what about Arash? What about all the other boys? Torsten had said there were 250 boys at the home. My savings were drying up and I calculated that I could spend at most three hundred kronor on extra expenditures that week. I couldn’t take 250 boys to lunch.
Maybe I could bring them books in Dari? Or books that taught Swedish with Dari translations? I got on the computer and checked the websites of local libraries, Swedish booksellers, and the resources offered by Migrationsverket, but I found no books that taught Swedish from Dari. Even the Farsi offerings were scant and expensive.
Then it hit me: notebooks. I had seen Osman and other boys taking notes on torn sheets of paper they carried in their jacket pockets. I could give them notebooks and pens to write phonetic spellings of Swedish words. Torsten had said the boys were mainly waiting around most of the time.
“It’s hard to have too much time to sit and think about things,” Torsten had said. “Especially considering that they have so many unhappy things to think about.”
I went down to the grocery store, IKEA bag in hand. I bought forty notebooks and forty pens for eight hundred kronor, which was more than I had planned on spending, but I wasn’t going to give notebooks to only half the boys. I carried the heavy IKEA bag home and thought of how these would be their notebooks to keep. Maybe we could encourage the boys to write about their memories, their experiences, in Dari or Arabic, to have an outlet. With a journal, they could write whatever they wanted, and no one would read it. They wouldn’t have to impress the Europeans with the tragedy of their pasts in hopes of being granted permanent residence. They could write their impressions of this new country. We could emphasize the importance of what the boys were doing—highlight that their experiences were worth recording. We could emphasize that, even if they didn’t have a museum, they were a part of history.
When I got back home, I sat down at my desk and began making a four-column worksheet. The boys had made it clear that they wanted to learn Swedish, not play games, and the worksheets that Katja and Ali had brought to the second meeting were ancient photocopies that taught phrases like I am a stonemason. I wrote Swedish phrases on the left: Hej! Jag heter _____. Vad heter du? Jag kommer från Afghanistan, varifrån kommer du? Jag har gått vilse, kan du hjälpa mig? I translated the phrases into English in the second column: Hi! My name is _____ What’s your name? I am from Afghanistan. Where are you from? I am lost, can you help me? I left a third column blank for Dari and the fourth blank for Arabic.
I tried to translate the Swedish into Dari online, but I was met with the left-to-right problems. Dari script was read from right to left, but my word processor flipped the Dari phrases as soon as I pasted them from the translation engine. Even though I couldn’t read any of the Dari characters, I could see that they didn’t look the same in the word processor as in the translation box. I downloaded a Dari keyboard for the word processor, which fixed the right-to-left problem, but since I didn’t know what any of the characters meant, I couldn’t check if my question read, Where are you from? or Where you from are? The translator copied the question mark from my Swedish into Dari. Were there question marks in Dari? Or was the translator just copying an untranslatable character?
There were so many little obstacles—so many fences between Dari/Farsi and English/Swedish. Verb construction was completely different. Prefixes were suffixes. Left was right and right was left. And then there was an entirely new alphabet. I imagined trying to learn Swedish and being told that the k, which was a symbol you may never before have seen, sounded like a hard kah, unless it was followed by a y, in which case it was a shushing sh. But now, as I thought about the sound of Swedish words, I realized I was using English sounds as a frame of reference. Describing the ky sound to a Swedish child learning to read, I would compare it to the sj sound in Swedish—but I couldn’t explain the sj sound in English because it had no English equivalent. I couldn’t imagine what the Dari equivalent to any of this was.
Once I finished the worksheet, I posted it to the group page for the volunteers, along with a note asking Ali if he could proofread it since, if Farsi was mutually intelligible in speech to Dari, I assumed it had to be even more so in text. Ali had said Farsi and Dari were like Swedish and Norwegian, and I could read Norwegian much better than I could understand spoken Norwegian.
I stared at the screen and waited. Nobody responded to my post. Five minutes. Ten minutes. I saw that Katja had seen the post, but she left no reply. Regret spread like a rash. I had overdone it. Nobody had asked me to make a worksheet. It was presumptuous. I wasn’t one of the organizing members of the group like Ali and Katja—I was just a volunteer. I had probably mangled the Dari. The arrogance! To think I could just google-translate my way into a language that, up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t even known existed. The jitters were like caffeine shakes. I thought about deleting the post. But Katja h
ad already seen it. If I deleted it, she would know that I cared whether she liked it or not. With pills, I could stop worrying about this nonsense. All it would take would be two or three white ovals of oxy to send me on an ecstatic walk to nowhere in particular. I could just walk until I found someone to talk to—a bus driver, a bartender, or anyone else with two ears who couldn’t leave.
Then a blipping sound from the computer brought me back. A little text window informed me that Ali had liked my post. A comment appeared.
Great, Jonas! I’ll get right on it!
A wave of relief washed over me. I reread my original message with pride. I had taken the initiative to do something good.
Five minutes later, Ali posted a revised doc.
Very few errors. Good job. I’ll get Muhammad to do the Arabic column. We will use it next week. Meet tomorrow to discuss exercises?
I wrote back, Sounds good!
What’s a good bar to meet? Katja asked.
How about Balthazar? I wrote.
See you there! Katja wrote.
Everything was better. I lay down and thought of Katja lying next to me, her cheeks happy and red as she laughed at my jokes.
* * *
The following evening I took the bus to Balthazar, a small bar in Möllevången, in central Malmö. To Swedes outside Malmö, Möllevången was a lawless ghetto. The Swedes I knew who were born in Malmö said that, when they were teenagers, whites didn’t go to Möllevången. But postgentrification, it had become the heart of the city’s nightlife.
Balthazar was just off the main square, behind a row of potted bushes that blocked off the bar’s patio from the sidewalk. Inside, a single candle sat on every table, without which you wouldn’t have been able to see the person sitting across from you. Bengt had brought me there for a beer shortly after I moved to Malmö, and as I’d sat drinking with him, I’d imagined future evenings when I would show the bar to visitors as if it were my own spot.
Katja and Ali were waiting by the door when I walked in.
“This is a cool place,” Ali said, shaking my hand.
“I’ve walked by it many times, but I never saw it before,” Katja said after giving me a hug.
I ordered the cheapest tap beer, in Swedish, and Katja and Ali followed my lead. Occasionally I found myself in one of these situations where I was the most Swedish person in the group. I would know which beer was on tap so you got forty centiliters in a glass instead of thirty-three centiliters in a bottle. I would know where to buy your train ticket or which bus to take. I would feel good and valued, until the moment I talked to another Swedish person and found myself using the wrong phrase or struggling through a punch line that lost its punch in the five extra words it took me to get there.
“Good job on the worksheet,” Katja said, as soon as we sat down. “I can print out copies in the student union for the boys.”
“I didn’t mean to overdo it with that. I’m sure you have lots of worksheets to use. I just thought the boys might want something more current.”
“Don’t worry,” Ali said. “We’re not Swedish!”
We all laughed. Swedes had an old saying: Tro inte att du är nåt—“Don’t think you’re anything special.” It was more common in the previous generation than in mine, but you could still see remnants of it in Swedish group dynamics, which, on the one hand, were governed by respectful communal decision-making and, on the other hand, took forever. In a skit by a Swedish comedy troupe, a group of Swedish soldiers under machine-gun siege try to schedule a meeting to get everybody’s input before they decide on a course of action.
“I was telling some people about the Language Café,” I said, “and I was offered a donation of journals. I thought that might be good? For the boys to have something to write in?”
“That’s fantastic!” Katja said.
“Very good,” Ali agreed.
“I was thinking that maybe they can write down the phonetic spellings of Swedish words and copy the alphabet in there?”
“Absolutely,” Katja said.
“And I was thinking they could use their journals to write about their experiences and their memories.”
“In Swedish?” Katja said. “That might be a little too hard.”
“No, in Dari or Arabic. Not for language practice. Just for an outlet. Torsten said that they have so much time on their hands, thinking about the past and all that. I thought it might be helpful for them to do something else instead.”
It was quiet for a moment.
“But how would writing about the past help them stop thinking about the past?” Katja said.
“It wouldn’t help them stop thinking about it. I just mean that sometimes it helps to put it on paper instead of holding it all in.”
“Sure.” Katja paused, maybe trying to find the right words in English. “My concern is that we are not trained psychologists. What would we do if we tell the boys to start recording their memories and then we don’t know how to help them with that? We don’t know what’s going to come up or what effect it’s going to have. And we also don’t know the pressure they might feel to process things that we cannot support them with, since we only see them for a few hours a week.”
As she was speaking, it dawned on me how naive my idea was. How condescending, too—as if the boys needed an inspirational teacher to tell them that they could write down their thoughts.
“You’re right. That was stupid of me to suggest.”
“Not stupid,” Ali said. “It’s great to have the notebooks. Maybe we just say they’re for Swedish practice?”
“Absolutely. They should use them for Swedish practice.”
“It’s great that you got the donation.” Katja reached over the table and touched my hand. “Really great.”
It was painful to receive consolation for something like this from a girl I liked—not consolation for my tragic past but for the dumb thing I had just said.
“So how long have you guys been living in Sweden?” I asked, trying to sound unfazed.
“This is the second year of my bachelor’s degree,” Katja said.
“That’s right—I remember you said that at the introduction meeting. And you’re studying international relations?”
“Yes, they have a really good program at Malmö.”
“What about you, Ali?”
“I’ve been here about a year and a half.” He took a sip of beer. “I’m finishing my master’s. And then maybe I’ll stay.”
“Stay here permanently?”
“If I can.”
“Did you move directly from Iran?” I said, tiptoeing.
“I left Iran when I was eighteen. Then I moved to Ukraine, and then to Malaysia, and now I’m here.”
“What makes you want to stay here?”
“No one has ever been racist to me here.” Ali laughed. “It sounds stupid, I know. But it’s not good in Iran. And in Ukraine, everyone called me a terrorist. And in Malaysia, everyone really called me a terrorist. And it’s silly, but it still hurts when people call you that all the time. And no one says that to me here.”
I didn’t know whether to chalk up his directness to the difficulty in maneuvering around emotions in a second language, or to the lack of a need to maneuver when you have something substantive to say. Either way, I was impressed and a little intimidated—to say something so personal, so directly.
During my last month in the Lund dormitories, after Anja and I had split, I had spent a lot of time drinking with Laurent. When we were out at the student nations, he was all teenage strut, but when we were alone and he was speaking broken English, he sometimes expressed himself with such tender directness that I didn’t know how to respond. When Laurent was to return to Paris at the end of his exchange program, he’d given me a hug and said, “Man, I will miss you.” Not We’re going to miss you around here, as I had been planning to say, but “I will miss you.”
I was touched but had found myself unable to say, I’ll miss you, too. Instead, I’d said,
“I think you’ll do just fine back in Paris,” and patted him on the back.
I wanted to say something that made Ali feel cared for in the way Laurent had made me feel cared for when he said that he would miss me.
But before I could try, Ali said, “And the girls—the girls are prettier here than anywhere else.”
I laughed.
“You like the Swedish girls?” Katja raised her eyebrows at him.
“I only like you.” Ali reached for her.
“Ja, ja, ja.” Katja fake-pushed him away. Then she relented to his kiss.
* * *
On my ride home, the bus passed the colorful lights of Möllevången’s falafel joints and pizzerias and turned onto Drottninggatan, where the canals separated the street from the gravel jogging path. I thought about what a nice evening it had been. The momentary disappointment over seeing Katja and Ali kiss had soon settled into relief that I wouldn’t have to ask Katja out.
I liked Katja and Ali. They were kind. They were easy to talk to. And it occurred to me, sitting there on the bus, that they had not once asked me about Donald Trump. For the past few months, since Trump had announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination and the Swedish media had discovered that he made for great copy, I could hardly be introduced to someone without being asked about Donald Trump. Classmates. Friends of friends. Any drunk person, once they found out I was American, wanted to know my thoughts on Trump.
I hated having Trump conversations. I could say that Trump was an embarrassment and a joke, but I had trouble talking about it in a way that avoided the anthropologist-studying-the-natives tone you heard in every NPR report on Trump voters. If I talked to a Swede about it, I would have to not only outline my own opinions, but also explain primaries and electoral procedures that I didn’t totally understand (what was a caucus?), then finally deliver a short lecture on why it would be impossible for Trump to win the presidency. I’d almost always find myself defending America against a Swedish jab, despite being so deeply troubled by my country’s direction that every time I closed the news I felt shaky and depressed, like I was coming down from a cocaine high.
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