Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  Given that the Language Café was designed to provide a warm welcome to Muslim refugees driven from their countries by war and fundamentalist terror, it wouldn’t have been strange to ask the American volunteer what he thought about the xenophobic American presidential candidate who appeared to suspect Muslims were terrorists until they were proven otherwise. But Katja and Ali never brought it up. For this, I was grateful. My hope was that newspapers and news sites and TV stations would just stop talking about Trump, and then people would stop talking about Trump on social media, and then everyone would stop talking about Trump altogether, and then he would just disappear, and the Republicans would nominate the more quietly toxic candidate, who’d lose to Hillary Clinton without embarrassing the nation too much in the process.

  * * *

  In the morning, I took the bus back down Drottninggatan to get a haircut. My barber, Mahmoud, like every barber I’d visited in Sweden, was from Iraq. I sat down in the chair. Mahmoud, clad in an Easter-green polo and white chinos, asked me in Swedish what I wanted today. I held up about two inches and said, in Swedish, “Make me look pretty.”

  He gave me a thumbs-up in the mirror. “The prettiest.”

  I felt the triumph of successful Swedish banter.

  Mahmoud started snipping at my hair, which reached nearly down to my shoulders. He said that he was taking a trip to New York with his family in the spring, and knowing that I was American, he wanted some tips.

  “The hotel rooms in Manhattan are so expensive. Is there anywhere else you can stay without being too far away from everything?”

  “All my friends in New York live in Brooklyn. You can take the train to Manhattan from there in half an hour or so.”

  “Isn’t Brooklyn dangerous? That’s where all the black people live, no?”

  “Brooklyn isn’t . . .” I stopped. “There are . . .” I stopped again. “Brooklyn has changed a lot over the last ten or twenty years. It’s a sought-after place to live. It’s diverse and not dangerous.”

  The bell on the door rang, and a girl in her early teens walked in.

  Mahmoud said something to her in what I assumed was Arabic, and she answered, then walked through the curtain separating the shop from the back rooms. The girl emerged again with a can of soda.

  Mahmoud told her something, and she said, “Okej, Pappa,” in annoyed teenage Swedish.

  “What language were you speaking?” I asked after she left.

  “Arabic.”

  “Your daughter speaks it fluently?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s proud because her older brother isn’t so good at it. But I speak it with her so that she’ll remember. She doesn’t resist like my son always has.”

  “My mother did that for me with Swedish in the US. I didn’t appreciate it then, but I appreciate it now.”

  I asked Mahmoud if it had been hard for him to learn Swedish when he came over.

  “No, because I already spoke English, so I knew most of the alphabet.” He said he had met his wife at the adult-learning center, and that she had helped him a lot with the language.

  “Love is the best way to learn a language,” I said, slightly editing the cliché the bedroom is the best place to learn a language.

  “It is!” He laughed and measured out my hair by lifting a handful of it straight out, then dropping it to the side. He unsheathed a second pair of scissors. “There was a woman in my Swedish class from China. She knew English, so she learned Swedish quickly. But there was another woman from China who didn’t know the alphabet, and she had to learn it from scratch. It took her a very long time. Actually, I’m not sure that she ever learned Swedish.”

  “I imagine it’s difficult when you don’t know the alphabet. I’m working with refugees from Afghanistan, and I can’t imagine how difficult it is for them to pick up on the sounds and appearance of all the new characters. They seem to be good at it, though.”

  “You work with refugees?” Mahmoud stopped snipping and looked at me in the mirror.

  “I don’t ‘work’ with them, exactly.” I felt my face heat up. I hadn’t meant to say it. Only a few weeks in and I was already using it as capital. “I only volunteer a little bit. And I just started. I don’t know anything about it. I was just thinking about how, when I hear you speak to your daughter, I can’t hear where one word ends and the next one begins. It must be hard to learn a language when you can’t see the boundaries between the words.”

  “My son is also working with refugees.”

  “Is he? And he’s only a teenager? You must be proud.”

  “Yes, he’s a good boy. He’s working with refugees from Afghanistan in Rosengård,” Mahmoud said. “These boys, they come here and they have nothing. It really makes you appreciate what you have.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it worries me, too. After you have everything taken from you, it does something to a person. I don’t know if it can be healed. When I go back to Iraq, the young people there—they’re frightening. They think that you want to take something from them. You have to convince them otherwise before you start a conversation.” I watched Mahmoud shake his head in the mirror. “It’s good that my son is working with the refugees. But when he comes home, he doesn’t feel good.”

  “You’re exhausted afterward.”

  “No, not because of that. It’s something else.”

  “I mean emotionally exhausted. It’s emotionally painful.”

  “Yes, exactly. Emotionally painful.” Mahmoud pulled the cape off and shook my hair onto the floor.

  * * *

  As I was coming back from Lund after a three-hour lecture on Derrida, which I had struggled to understand or care about, my bus passed the farm country between Lund and Malmö, where the rapeseed flowers would burst the now-icy fields yellow in the spring. I began to think about how I used to get high before the lectures I attended in grad school back home. How I used to drink liquor from a travel coffee mug and pop pills in bathroom stalls. I would talk and talk in class and no one would stop me. Sitting on the bus, I didn’t feel the desire I normally felt whenever I thought of drugs—the desire for drugs I’d feel even when I read of an aid worker caught stealing morphine from an understocked civil war hospital in Sudan. Instead I felt shame. But I didn’t long for pills to hide the shame, as I always had when ambushed by the shame of last night, last week, last year. It was comforting: to feel pain, knowing it would pass.

  THE NOTEBOOKS WERE A HIT. When we passed them out, the boys called out a happy clamor of “Thank you,” Tack, and what sounded like Shook ran. During the lesson, I looked over their shoulders as they wrote out the phrases in their notebooks in Dari or Arabic. I listened as they voiced my Swedish words sharper and throatier than I had, sounding like a tape recording of a tape recording. When they finally got the phrases right enough to be understood, I patted them on the back and said, “Bra!,” and they smiled.

  “Jonas, my friend!” Aziz called out, walking toward me from his group.

  We performed our elaborate handshake.

  “How’s your week going?” I said.

  “It’s going very well. We went to Rosengård to see Zlatan!”

  Malmö’s favorite son, Zlatan Ibrahimović, had just led his current team, French giants Paris Saint-Germain, to play against his boyhood club, Malmö FF, in the Champions League. It was a big deal. The Malmö city government paid for the match to be shown on a big screen in Rosengård, the projects where Zlatan was born and where football fields were named after him. I had gone with Bengt and stood watching with thousands of fans, mostly young boys speaking immigrant Swedish, the crowd divided on whom to root for, Malmö or Zlatan.

  “I was there!” I said. “But I didn’t see you.”

  “How is this possible?” Aziz said.

  I laughed. “I guess there were a few other people there, too.”

  “Yes.” He laughed. “But Zlatan did not play well.”

  “That header went right over the bar! I think he was nervous.”
/>
  “Nervous? But he’s Zlatan.”

  Zlatan was known among soccer fans worldwide for his self-confidence. As a young man, the son of Bosnian and Croatian immigrants, coming up through the ranks at Malmö FF and in the Swedish national team, his bravado had made him hated by white Swedes and beloved by immigrants. You weren’t supposed to dance around with the ball like that. You weren’t supposed to say that you were the best. One Swedish player had said that he always felt as if Zlatan got more joy from humiliating defenders than he did from scoring. But then Zlatan started really scoring. He became the star of the national team and was now Sweden’s all-time leading scorer. When old white Swedish men talked about the national team now, they said, “They aren’t giving Zlatan any help! How’s he supposed to do it all by himself?”

  “Zlatan gets nervous too,” I said. “He’s playing against his boyhood club. Everybody’s watching. Can you imagine the pressure?”

  “Yes, I see that. Do you think they will show the return match on the big screen?”

  “I’m not sure.” I wanted to add, If they do, we should go watch it together. But Ali whistled to signal we were starting up again. Aziz and I shook hands once more and returned to work.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, I went to an informational meeting that Katja had organized about becoming a mentor or foster parent for a refugee. When I first received the invite, I hadn’t planned on attending, but then I’d read an article about how many refugees were stuck waiting for work permits that wouldn’t arrive until their asylum request was approved, unable to start working or studying or building their new lives without the permit. These asylum requests took a long time to process, and many refugees would be sent back if Sweden deemed that their lives would not be in danger upon return. When Aziz had asked me about Swedish universities, I had assured him that he could attend for free, thinking that all the boys would receive the benefits of temporary citizenship. Now it turned out that he couldn’t attend university without a permit, which he might never receive. At each of the last couple Language Cafés, I had found a reason not to invite him out, and with every passing week, I could see him getting antsier at his situation. At the last meeting, he had snapped at a new German volunteer—who had incorrectly explained a Swedish phrase—that if she didn’t speak the language, she shouldn’t teach it.

  I wondered if I couldn’t at least provide him with a place to stay, a place where he could have a little breathing room, until he learned what would happen next. It was a ridiculous thought. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt reasonable. It would have been ridiculous for me to offer a home to one of the other boys with whom I couldn’t converse for more than a minute or two. But Aziz and I got along easily. Even on the day he’d snapped at the German girl, after he’d told her how sorry he was and how much he appreciated her volunteering, he had asked me if there was something he could do to show her how sorry he really was. After my assuring and reassuring him that the volunteer had already accepted his apology, he finally believed me, and we had filled the rest of our conversation effortlessly talking about movies. I imagined having him stay with me would be like having a roommate who didn’t pay rent.

  I took the bus down to Anna Lindhs Plats and walked to the student union, hood pulled up against the rain that fell unpleasantly in the thirty-five-degree November gray. Inside the student union, the same place where we held the Language Café, about a dozen people were gathered around tables facing the front of the room—mostly women but a few gentle-looking husbands. I was the only single male I could see. Katja was in conversation with a young woman; Ali wasn’t there; I sat down at an empty table. A few minutes later, another unaccompanied white man plopped down at my table. He was fortysomething and heavyset, but confidently so, like he owned a boat. He removed his leather gloves but kept on his designer peacoat and leaned back with an air of authority.

  Katja stood up and introduced the woman she’d been talking to, who was a social worker with the city. The social worker looked to be in her midtwenties, dark haired and sweet looking with big silver hoop earrings. She introduced herself in Swedish, pulled down a screen, and brought a PowerPoint to life with a click of a button. It was the first time that I’d seen a public PowerPoint presentation begin without any group brainstorming on how to get it to work. The first slide read, What does it mean to be a foster parent?

  “To be a foster parent, we don’t have any requirements as to marital status or sexual orientation or gender,” the social worker said. “We are only assessing your suitability as a parent and your ability to provide a safe and nurturing home for a child in need.”

  I was unequipped to care for a child. I didn’t even really know him. But it wasn’t like I was asking to adopt him—he could just stay with me for a few weeks.

  “The first question is,” the social worker said, “have you had any major life changes in the previous year? A major life change means that you, for example, recently ended a serious relationship, got married, had a biological child, suffered the death of a parent, lost your job, and so on. We find that people who have made major life changes recently are much less able to make decisions far into the future. So maybe you think you want a foster child now, but in three months, you realize that’s not what you want at all. And then the child is the one who gets hurt.”

  I hadn’t had any major life changes in the past year. It had been more than a year since I’d moved to Sweden. It had been more than a year since I’d quit drugs. In the past, I would have had to load up on oxy, or at least tramadol, just to be able to attend this meeting—just to be around people. Now I was here, sober, doing no harm. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing for Aziz to live with me.

  “The second question is: Do you have a stable living situation, with at least two bedrooms in your house or apartment? Unfortunately, if you don’t have a separate room for the child, you will not be considered at this time.”

  I did not have an extra bedroom. I could have slept on the couch. But the social worker said two bedrooms. The answer was no before I’d even asked. The social worker clicked the next slide. I was disappointed. But then a feeling of lightness came over me—a stupid feeling of lightness, since I’d been relieved of asking to take on a burden that no one in their right mind would want me to take on in the first place.

  The social worker explained that if you were interested in foster care, you filled out an application and met with a caseworker. Then, if you were a suitable candidate, you had to undergo an interview with a psychologist.

  The confidently fat man next to me raised his hand. “What is it they’re looking for in this psychological examination?” He spoke in a posh Stockholm accent.

  “That’s a good question. The psychologist will want to gather information about how suitable you are to care for children. They will want to make sure, for example, that you haven’t been victim to a serious trauma that would impair your ability to raise a child.”

  “But we’re all victims of trauma.” The man leaned forward.

  The social worker smiled. “Of course, in a way.”

  “No, really, that’s how it is,” the man insisted, motioning to the room for their support.

  The social worker nodded politely.

  “And why all the bureaucracy? Shouldn’t you lower the requirements when there are so many of them?”

  “That’s a good question. But even with so many unaccompanied children coming to Sweden, we’d rather the children live in group homes with trained professionals where we can make sure they’re cared for than have them placed in unsuitable homes.”

  “So it’s better for them to have no homes?”

  The social worker waited a moment, maybe trying to find the right words. “It’s not uncommon for a person to see a report on the news or read a story in the paper and feel intense sympathy, and feel the need to do something, and want to adopt a child from a conflict zone. But the problem is that this feeling doesn’t always last long. It often wears off once the child
turns out to be a real person with real tantrums, real demands, and real problems. And, again, in that situation, it’s the child who gets hurt. It’s difficult for someone who’s already been through so much and lost so much to be placed in a home and then be rejected by their host.”

  The man shook his head. I knew that it was difficult for the boys to stay in transition homes. But the difficulty of the transition homes came from boredom, overcrowding, and understimulation, which was nothing compared to the damage that self-righteousness could do.

  The next speaker was a middle-aged white woman from the Association for the Unaccompanied, a group that was started by unaccompanied minors arriving in Malmö. The association had an office three blocks from my house, and I had seen a flyer on their window advertising a talk by the actor who had played the Hazara lead in the movie adaptation of The Kite Runner—the book that was, for many Americans and Europeans, the source of all our knowledge about Afghanistan. The young actor, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, had become a refugee after the movie’s portrayal of his character’s rape by a Pashtun boy had made him a target in Afghanistan. After years in limbo, he had finally settled in Dalarna, the mountain province north of Stockholm. He had recently appeared in his first TV commercial in Sweden.

  The woman from the Association for the Unaccompanied said that she was here to talk about their mentoring program. They wanted to get Swedish people to mentor young refugees because, without fail, she said, when you asked the children who arrived here what they most wanted, they had two answers. The first was a family to live with. The second was to know a young Swedish person.

  “We have young people in our organization who have lived in Sweden for five years and have never been in the home of a Swedish person.”

  A murmur ran through the room. Someone said, “Herregud.”

  The man next to me raised his hand again. “I’d like to start a group for unaccompanied refugees.”

  “How do you mean?” the woman said.

  “I already lead a theater group, and I could lead a group for them to talk.”