Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  He looked down at the bowl, concentrating hard, kneading the egg and the cream into the meat.

  “You’re a natural, Aziz.”

  We were quiet for a while. He kneaded, and I peeked over to see the yellow egg disappearing into the red of the meat, the onions dimpling the beef.

  “Swedish cooking is hard work, isn’t it?” I smiled.

  Aziz didn’t answer. His fist hit the bottom of the metal bowl and it clinked against the counter.

  “Whoops, careful there. Let me know when you get tired and I can take over.”

  But the bowl clinked again, and then he pounded both his fists against the bottom, clanging it hard against the counter.

  “Hey, take it easy there. Don’t want to hurt yourself.”

  But he hit the bowl harder, and then the whole big glob of meat stuck to his hands, and he lifted the bowl up and slammed it down again and again.

  “Hey!” I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Stop!”

  Aziz threw the bowl down into the sink. The meat splattered. “I don’t want to do this!”

  “We don’t have to do this.”

  “I don’t want to do this!” His face was red.

  “It’s okay! We don’t have to do anything—”

  Aziz ran out of the kitchen and tried to open the front door. But the door automatically locked when you closed it. You had to pull up a little silver lid from the lock to open it, which Aziz didn’t know, so he just pulled the handle down again and again, jerking more and more desperately.

  “Stop it! Aziz, it’s okay—”

  He turned and rushed into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

  I waited for a minute. I listened for sounds but didn’t hear any.

  “Are you okay in there?”

  No answer.

  “I’ll be here, whenever you’re ready.”

  I looked at the bits of raw beef and onions covering the door handle and wondered how I had so thoroughly fucked everything up.

  * * *

  I waited on a chair outside the bathroom. I had decided to give Aziz fifteen minutes alone before I called Torsten. I looked at my phone. Thirteen minutes had passed. It had been too much. I had pushed too much on him—the Swedish words, the dishes, the apartment, the cooking. I should have just taken him to Burger King or something. I let my face fall into my hands. I heard the faucet in the bathroom turn on. Then off. The door opened and Aziz came out.

  He didn’t look like he’d been crying—more like he hadn’t slept in days.

  “Hey, buddy.” I rose to my feet. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course.” He looked down.

  “We don’t have to make meatballs. We can go out to dinner. Or we can just hang out. We can do whatever you want.”

  “Of course we should make meatballs.” He was speaking with measured concentration, looking down. “I behaved like a child.”

  I stood up. “You didn’t behave like a child. You’re—”

  “I behaved like a child. I ruined everything.”

  “You didn’t ruin anything. It was my fault. It was too much.”

  Aziz looked up at me, quickly, then looked back down again. He looked scared.

  “Why don’t you sit down in the kitchen and keep me company while I make dinner?” I put my hand on his shoulder, lightly. When he didn’t shake it off, I led him to one of the seats at the two-person table in the kitchen.

  “Have some more Fanta.” I poured more soda into his giant cup.

  We were quiet.

  “This is such a big glass,” Aziz said.

  “You know, it’s the biggest glass I’ve ever seen.” I smiled at him.

  Aziz smiled back. It was a forced smile, the kind that made your cheeks ache—but it was something.

  I pulled the bowl out of the sink. I put the meat that wasn’t ruined on the cutting board and rolled it into little balls. I poured oil in the frying pan, then dumped the meatballs in. The kitchen filled with smoke and onion smell. We didn’t say anything. The quiet was covered by the sound of popping grease.

  Finally Aziz said, “How many meatballs are you making?”

  I counted the raw ones on the cutting board where I’d stacked them and those in the frying pan where the meat was sizzling. “About twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five.” He nodded.

  We were quiet again.

  Once the food was ready, I served us both plates of meatballs and potatoes and set the jar of lingonberries on the table. “Swedish people like to eat their meatballs with these berries.”

  Aziz nodded.

  I opened the fridge. “But you can eat yours with ketchup, if you prefer.”

  Aziz smiled and took the ketchup, popped the cap off, and squeezed a gob onto his plate.

  “I’m going to eat mine with ketchup too.” I took the bottle once he was done.

  We ate without talking.

  “Thank you,” Aziz said, when I cleared the plates and put them in the sink. “I must get back to the home.”

  “Of course. Thank you for coming. It was nice having you over.”

  I walked him to the door and watched him put his jacket on.

  “We could do this again. Or not exactly this. We could go to Burger King and have lunch one day. Would you like that?”

  “Yes.” Aziz pulled his shoes on.

  When he finished knotting the laces, I lifted the silver lid off the lock and quickly put my hand on the door handle, so Aziz wouldn’t see the raw meat still stuck to it.

  “Do you know which bus to take back to the home? Do you want me to walk you to the stop? Do you want me to ride the elevator down with you?”

  “No, it’s okay,” Aziz said. “I won’t bring any garbage cans in with me.”

  * * *

  I sat on my bed with the blinds open, staring out at the apartment building on the opposite side of the street. On the third floor of that building was a rooftop garden where tenants would have barbecues in the summer. Despite that each family spoke a different language and had different skin tones—one family being from Somalia and another from Palestine, one family from Kosovo and another from Kurdistan—they managed to laugh and talk and grill and have fun for hours at a time, without silence, without awkwardness, without hurting anyone. I lay down and replayed every one of the night’s mistakes in my head, as if I could change the past by thinking about it.

  THE NEXT DAY, I OPENED my computer to email Stella. I wanted to tell someone about what had happened—to relieve the burden of carrying knowledge alone—but when I pulled up my email, I found that I didn’t even know where to start. Instead I checked the American papers, where I read an editorial about Sweden’s migrant catastrophe. The author, an American expert on Scandinavia, wrote about Sweden as if the country were in a state of lawless emergency after being overrun by refugees. He quoted the Danish foreign minister as saying that Sweden’s disaster was a result of its irresponsible immigration policy. The author didn’t mention that this was the same foreign minister who had, the week Alan Kurdi died, rolled out the Middle Eastern newspaper-ad campaign to keep refugees out of Denmark.

  I was furious. The US was already quibbling over whether to accept just ten thousand Syrian refugees, and this was the type of bullshit that made Americans think it was okay not to care. I decided to write a rebuttal. All day, I researched numbers and read news stories about refugees. I forgot about my schoolwork, forgot about the Aziz disaster. Then I sat down to write. It was such a rush, such stress, almost like a race. Nothing mattered except getting the thoughts on the page before they disappeared, then wrestling them into coherence before I forgot what I’d wanted to say in the first place. By 10:00 p.m., I’d cut a rambling five thousand words into a lean six hundred. I logged on to the newspaper’s website to find the email address for op-ed submissions.

  The front page popped up. My stomach dropped.

  DOZENS DEAD IN PARIS TERRORIST ATTACK

  * * *

  Loud days followed. The European far right
screaming we told you so. American governors racing to be the first to say they would not allow Syrian refugees into their states. Presidential candidates suggesting America only grant asylum to Christian refugees. Donald Trump proclaiming that if elected he would deport all Syrian refugees.

  I thought about the boys at the transit home—how much harder life would be for them now. I thought about Aziz sitting on a bench by the Burger King in the Central Station, scrolling through news sites on his phone, reading all the terrible things people were saying about him in comments sections.

  I tried to imagine the innocent French civilians who had been killed. But I kept accidentally imagining myself in their place. Except in the fantasy I wouldn’t die but would survive to write a moving piece of journalism on the attacks. Or would heroically kill the gunmen and save dozens. Or I would imagine that I’d lost someone in the attacks—that my old dorm neighbor Laurent had died—so that I could feel something. The way I saw it, there was self-serving empathy (I am you when it suits me), arrogant empathy (I know how you feel), and lazy empathy (I can’t even imagine how you must feel). I wanted to feel the right kind of empathy, but it seemed like every kind of empathy was problematic.

  I wrote Laurent a message asking if he was okay.

  Yes, thank you, Jonas, Laurent wrote back. I am okay. But I am tired of this shit.

  Laurent and I had sat in my dorm room the previous winter and watched coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attacks on my laptop.

  I’m glad you’re okay, I wrote back. I miss you.

  * * *

  The news announced that one of the terrorists in Paris had come through Greece posing as a Syrian refugee. Now anyone who needed an excuse to close their borders had it. The comments I read on social media asked if the bleeding hearts were happy now, inviting terrorists into their countries to kill them. Then someone would point out that the other terrorists, including the ringleader, had been French and Belgian nationals. Someone else would write that it was undeniable that Islam was a violent religion and that to say otherwise was naive political correctness. The boys driven from their countries, often by terrorists, would again be accused of terrorism. The onus was on them to prove they weren’t terrorists.

  In Sweden, a group on one side shouted that if they wanted to be here, they had to not just learn Swedish, but become Swedish, since Islam was a sexist, anti-Swedish religion. On the other side, a group shouted that no crime had ever been committed by an immigrant and that anyone who said otherwise was a racist. The center, where most of the country actually existed, appeared empty, and anyone who dared tread there would be shot down by both sides.

  Masochistically, I logged on to Fox News and watched segment after segment in which the anchors and pundits took it as an accepted fact that most Muslims were terrorists. The opinions didn’t have to be directly racist if the rules of the debate were. While the pundits felt sympathy for the suffering of those people, they had to consider the safety of American lives and couldn’t support inviting in the ten thousand refugees who’d been granted asylum.

  “It’s ten thousand out of four million,” said one pundit. “So it’s a silly number, and it’s all designed to make the Europeans take in more refugees, which we now know is probably a bad idea.”

  We now knew, from the action of one person who may have posed as a refugee, that 4 million people were probably a bad idea.

  “The president’s responsibility is to American safety first,” the other pundit said. “You have to realize that now’s not the time. You can’t take in one hundred and seventy thousand from radicalized Syria.”

  That number, 170,000, was about how many refugees Sweden, not the US, was taking in from the Middle East and North Africa—but nobody corrected him.

  “Why are no politicians talking about this?” said the pundit, though all the politicians were talking about this.

  “Exactly! And where are they going to be settled? People should be asking their local leaders, ‘Are you going to let Syrian refugees settle in my town?’ ”

  “Let’s hope the public doesn’t remain passive.”

  I paced around my apartment, conducting arguments in my head, knowing I couldn’t change anyone’s mind, not only because I wasn’t talking to another person, but because the time for changing minds was past. You believed what you believed. You googled the facts to support that belief. You surrounded yourself with people who echoed your belief.

  I wanted to correct the world. But I was angry with myself for feeling the need to be right more strongly than I felt empathy for the victims of the attacks. I longed for drugs.

  * * *

  The next day, Torsten wrote to inform Katja, Ali, and me that the next Language Café would have to be canceled. The security concerns are too great right now. There were worries about retaliation. Facebook pages had sprung up offering instructions in Swedish on how to firebomb refugee homes.

  I was sleepless and a little manic. Without my normal filter working, I wrote back, Is Aziz okay?

  Torsten didn’t respond for a full day. I felt idiotic for writing about Aziz as if I had some special connection to him when we barely knew each other.

  All the boys are fine, Torsten finally wrote. It’s just a little tense.

  Can I come by and see him? I wrote, though I knew that Torsten wasn’t even allowed to tell me the address of the home.

  Torsten didn’t reply.

  * * *

  I would lie in bed for hours, refreshing newspaper sites and social media and email over and over, looking for I didn’t even know what. When I saw the idiotic comments about how it would help if Muslims denounced terrorism and differentiated themselves from terrorists by fighting ISIS, oblivious of how the Kurdish and Iraqi armies had hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground fighting against ISIS, I’d get angry. But when I saw friends reposting articles about how Steve Jobs’s father had been a Syrian immigrant or how the US had denied Anne Frank’s request for asylum—posts that argued for my worldview—I’d also get angry, without even knowing why. Whatever I found angered me. So why, I wondered, did I keep looking?

  * * *

  The Swedish government finally capitulated. At a press conference on November 24, the prime minister announced that the rules had to change. The deputy prime minister stood to his side. When she spoke, her voice broke; she fought back tears. This was not an easy decision, she said. But she had become convinced that it was the right thing to do. The border would no longer be open.

  * * *

  When Bengt texted to invite me to Möllevången that night, I realized I hadn’t left the apartment in three days. I was determined to get drunk and have fun and forget everything. I played loud music while I dressed and drank two tall cans of Carlsberg, trying to conjure some enthusiasm for the night ahead. Maybe I would meet a girl.

  But as soon as I got on the bus to Möllevången, I wanted to go home. I took a seat near the back of the bus and watched the video of that day’s press conference again on my phone. I wondered whether the deputy prime minister’s voice break had been spontaneous or planned. If it had been planned, I wondered if it had been planned to give the illusion that the deputy prime minister was torn up about closing the border, or if it had been planned to communicate the real pain she was feeling about the decision, since that pain might not spontaneously manifest itself at the exact moment the camera panned over to her. But it didn’t matter how the deputy prime minister, prime minister, or anyone else felt about it. I got off at Möllevångstorget and walked into a cramped and brightly lit curry place that sold cheap beers. I sat down with Bengt and a few of his friends, who were talking about a friend of theirs and his escapades during a study-abroad in Florence. Their conversation exhausted me. I didn’t want to talk and wasn’t interested in anything anyone had to say, regardless of what they had to say. I wanted to be alone to think, but there was nothing to think that I hadn’t already thought.

  One of Bengt’s friends, a guy with round glasses and calculate
dly messy blond hair, introduced himself to me, though we’d already met at a party where he was drunk and monologue-y. He said, “You’re the American, right?”

  “I am.”

  “What do you think about Donald Trump?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not a fan.”

  “Your country is about to elect a fascist.”

  “He won’t win.”

  “He might. Aren’t you frightened?”

  “I’m frightened of lots of things.”

  Bengt, sensing that I was in a conversation I wanted to escape, asked me about the Language Café. The guy with the round glasses started talking to someone else, so Bengt was the only one listening. I tried to talk about the Language Café with the remove of a person who realizes he’s doing little and isn’t actually involved in the lives of the suffering. I tried to clinically describe what we were doing, while admitting that it obviously wasn’t making a real difference. But soon I heard the born-again cadence in my voice.

  “I don’t understand why people think these boys are dangerous. All they want to do is learn! They line up with cell phones to take pictures of the Swedish alphabet we’ve hung on the wall so they can practice it at home! They don’t want to break for fika because they want to keep studying!”

  Bengt sighed and shook his head. “You’re doing such good work.”

  “Do you want to come?” I leaned in. “We always need more Swedish speakers.”

  “Oh, yeah—okay,” he said, suddenly shifty. “What day is it?”

  “Wednesdays.”

  “Cool.” He nodded. “Let me check my schedule.”

  I was surprised that he wasn’t more excited. I drank quickly and tried to listen to everyone’s stories and ask questions, but I was overwhelmed by headache, neckache, bodyache. I wanted drugs. I wanted to want to talk. I drank more. Eventually, we all walked over to Moriskan, and Bengt danced his way onto the stage. I tried to dance, but no matter how much I drank, my brain wouldn’t submit. I left before midnight.

  * * *

  Lying in bed that night, I thought of my ex, Alexandra, back in Wilmington. Despite the mess we’d left each other, she had been a great listener. I’d never known somebody who so desperately wanted to know me. As it became clear that our relationship was collapsing and I began to worry that no one would ever want to know me like that again, I’d booked a romantic trip to Nashville. When I surprised her with the tickets, she was so happy, since my unwillingness to travel or try anything new had been a point of contention. But three days before the trip, she broke up with me, crying so hard that I felt worse for her than I did for myself.