The policeman’s voice: “What did she say?”
Her: “What did he say?”
Me: “He’s a fucking idiot.”
Her: “I know.”
Me. “Is there anyone else you can talk to?”
Her: “I don’t know, I’m so, I’m so, I don’t know what to do.”
Him: “What did she say? Can you try to get her to calm down? I know it’s hard, but it’s no help to anyone for her to act like this.”
Me: “Say you want to speak to a female police officer.”
Her: [moaning, crying, snuffling]
Him: “What did she say?”
Me: “That she would like to speak with a female police officer.”
Him: “She said that?”
Me: “Yes. She wants to speak with a female police officer.”
Him: “Are you aware that this conversation is being recorded?”
Me. “She wants to talk to someone else.”
The policeman sighs, a chair is pushed back, a door opens.
Her: “What did you say to him?”
Me: “That you want to talk to a female police officer.”
Her: “What will happen to me if I file a report?”
Me: “We’ll have to ask her. You have to talk to someone else, someone who is on your side.”
Her: “Thanks.”
Me: “No problem.”
Her: “What do we do now?”
Me: “We wait.”
*
Later that same night we were sitting in our shared kitchen, talking through what had happened. Samuel described (for the fourth time) what she had said and what he had said and what she had been wearing and how beautiful she was.
“The energy in that parking lot was extremely special. I swear, man, it wasn’t just in my head. She must have felt it, I swear she felt it.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Don’t know. What do you think?”
“No idea. But I would lie low if I were you.”
“Why?”
“I think it would be best that way.”
That was the best answer I could come up with, and I don’t know why I said it. I just answered with what I felt there and then. It isn’t the right time for Samuel to meet someone, I thought. Not now. Not her.
*
While we waited, Nihad said that her husband had accepted her decision to divorce him. He had never hit her. He was a good man who was being trained as a cook in a lunch restaurant in Nacka. But she would never be able to tell him about this. She had left him to be free and she had been allowed to borrow the apartment temporarily because she was desperate and now the sofa was ruined and the man who called himself Bill knew where she lived and . . . She started crying again. I explained to her that since she was here on her husband’s permit there was a risk that she would be taken to a detention facility and be sent back now that she had confessed that her relationship with her husband was over.
“But what am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. But if I were you I would get out of there. Fast.”
*
But was Samuel listening? Did he trust his best friend’s gut feeling? No, a few days later I came out of the shower and found Samuel at the kitchen table.
“Okay. Okay okay okay,” he called, half happy, half panicked. “I just did it. I pressed ‘send.’ I texted her!”
“Who?”
“Her. The contact person. The interpreter. I went the work route. I said thanks for last time and asked her to contact me if her client needed any more assistance. Best, Samuel, Migration Board.”
“You said thanks for last time?”
“Yeah, was that weird or something?”
“That’s what you say after you’ve been to a party. Not when you’ve had a random encounter in a parking lot.”
“Oh, but . . . It felt like the right thing to . . . I don’t know.”
I poured a cup of coffee, I looked out at the courtyard. An empty playground, the swings were moving gently in the wind like absent-minded leaves.
“So has she responded?”
“Not yet. But it was a good text. I wrote lots of drafts. Want me to read it to you?”
“No thanks,” I said.
But I didn’t say it in a mean way, I just informed him that I wasn’t all that curious to learn the exact contents of his text. Then I went to my room to get ready for the workday. Samuel was still sitting at the kitchen table when I came back out. He was still bare-chested, his twig-like arms held the phone, his eyes were focused on the screen.
“But of course it could be taken ironically as well.”
“What can?”
“Thanks for last time. Maybe she’ll see it and think it was a joke. Was it stupid to sign off with ‘best’? Is that too impersonal? I should have written out a whole greeting—‘best wishes, Samuel, Migration Board.’ Or maybe I should have ended with ‘all my best.’ Or ‘xoxo’? What do you think? Would it have been too much to—”
I closed the front door and pressed the elevator button. If I had been able to put a stop to it all there and then, I would have. I had a bad feeling about it. But the pinball of fate was rolling and nothing could stop it.
*
Of course it was unusual. I had no right to give Nihad legal advice. I had only heard what had happened to other women in similar situations. Maybe it was different for Nihad. I don’t know. But I asked for her number and called her right away from my personal phone and we talked as she stood up and left the room. I heard the sound of doors and running steps, elevator dings and two voices talking about a soccer match (“it was like total fucking pyrotechnics!”). Then the rubber-squeaking sound of her shoes against the hallway floor as she ran for the exit, her breathing, the scraping sound of her jacket collar, someone (a taxi driver?) calling out a last name, he said it slowly and tiredly, as if he had been standing there in the hospital entryway calling the same last name since the dawn of time. Then birds chirping and car engines and wind and creaking brakes and the hissing sound of opening bus doors.
“I’m out.”
Before we hung up, I promised to help her apply for a work permit.
*
Three days went by. Three days in which Laide didn’t respond to Samuel’s text. A normal person would have realized that it was time to let go and move on. But not Samuel. To him, the fact that he didn’t receive an answer was a sign that it was really her, she was the one. Four days after Samuel’s first text he asked if he could come with me to the gym.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Yes. I need to get some exercise. It’s been a long time.”
“How long?”
“Oh. Eight or nine years.”
Samuel came down the stairs to the gym changed and ready. I understood. I would have done the same thing if I had arms as strong as spider webs and thighs as thick as candles. He was wearing a pair of purple sweatpants with cuffs, a T-shirt from a music festival, and two sweatbands dangling from his wrists like bracelets.
“Wanna get going?” he asked. “I was thinking of starting with the jump rope.”
And there’s nothing wrong with warming up by jumping rope, but it all depends on the way you jump with your jump rope. If you have control of your body and mix single jumps with double jumps while dancing like a boxer, it’s okay. Samuel jumped rope like he was back in the schoolyard. His feet got caught in the rope, he started over, people stared at him, people shook their heads. But the crazy thing was, I wasn’t ashamed. I liked that he was there. And since he was there with me, no one dared to say anything. But Samuel sure was talkative. As I worked through my program, he commented on the brands of kettlebells, he asked if I thought the sounds coming from the stereo were happy or sad, he wondered if I thought Laide would answer his text today or tomorrow or next week. A lot of the time I let his questions hang in the air, I was focused on doing my own thing, it didn’t mean I wasn’t listening to them, but sometimes there were so ma
ny of them that it was enough to respond to every other one.
*
The calls kept coming. I translated for moms who needed help being informed why their applications for housing assistance had been denied. Men who wanted to appeal an assault verdict. Teens who wanted help with an EU application for a cultural grant for a Palestinian music festival in Norsborg. Women who had been abused, raped, burned with cigarettes. Men who complained of discrimination in the housing market and the job market and when they tried to register the discrimination with the Ombudsman for Discrimination they were discriminated against there too. Women whose shins were kicked in half, whose eyes swelled closed. Women who pointed at the scars on their chins to show where the dog had bitten them. Women who said that when he was driving drunk I wasn’t allowed to put on my seatbelt, when I took a second helping he forced me to eat cat food, when my colleagues asked about the bruises he started pulling my hair. Women who said that he had a routine, he locked the security door with a police lock, he put a particular song on the stereo, he whistled along with the melody as he found his gloves. Then he came in and started. The men were lawyers from Jämtland, Finnish-born triathlon medalists, Swedish TV personalities. The men were Syrian fruit sellers, Belgian violinists, Skåne alcoholics. But the men were unimportant. The men were superfluous. It was the women I wanted to help.
*
We kept working out. I went for upper body, Samuel did push-ups, four regular ones, the rest on his knees (!). He looked over toward the treadmills and suddenly stopped talking.
“What is it?” I asked.
“See the guy in the red tank top? Shit, I think that’s Valentin.”
“That’s Valentin?”
I could hardly hold back my laughter. The guy Samuel had described as the terror of the school was as muscular as an earthworm. He had the threatening posture of a croissant. He looked like he might be able to pet a kitten pretty hard.
“Where are you going?” Samuel called.
I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it, but I was, I was heading for the guy in the red tank top. I flexed my neck first to the left and then to the right.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” I said over my shoulder.
I didn’t listen to Samuel’s objections, I blocked out his cries of “come back!” You remember the people who hurt you, they leave traces that never go away and that was what I wanted to teach him, this guy named Valentin.
*
When I met Zainab for the first time she took off her veil and showed me where she’d been whipped. He’d used an old-fashioned TV antenna, the scars crisscrossed her back like veins, like stings from a jellyfish, but she said it hadn’t hurt all that much. It was worse when he degraded her other ways, like when he refused to talk to her because she came home ten minutes late or when he pushed her face into her oatmeal in the morning. The bad part about the TV antenna was that he had waited until the kids came home to do it, it was like he wanted them to watch, her daughters had cried, her son had run out onto the balcony and he just stood there and stared into a corner until it was over. When she found him and carried his stiff body inside, he had round, half-moon fingernail marks in his palms. He was four, almost five.
*
When I came back, Samuel was crouching behind the dumbbell rack.
“What did he say?” Samuel asked.
“He didn’t say much.”
I went back to my routine. Samuel was quiet. Then he said:
“How did he manage to hold his breath for so long?”
“He didn’t have a choice.”
I walked over to the punching bag and slid on my gloves. Samuel followed.
“Did you say hi from me?”
“No, did you want me to?”
“I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me. But now it feels like I want him to know who was behind that treatment.”
“If he comes back I can tell him you say hi. But something tells me this is the last time he’ll show up here.”
Samuel looked at me with glistening eyes. He looked sad, but happy too, and I thought it was strange how little things could mean so much to him and big things so little.
“What’s with you?”
“Nothing, I just . . . It’s such a crazy feeling. To have someone who . . . I don’t know. Is on your side.”
“Aw, it was nothing.”
“I’ve never had that.”
“Now you do.”
A few days later, Laide answered his text. They decided on a time and place for a first date.
*
Zainab didn’t want to get divorced, she was also here on her husband’s visa, her husband had a work permit and she had to hold out until they could apply for permanent residency. When the girl who worked at the women’s shelter asked if she wanted to report him, Zainab explained that her husband was not a monster.
“He has his reasons. He’s under a lot of pressure, his boss doesn’t pay him the salary that they settled on, he says they had a different agreement, and it’s true, my husband didn’t know that there was a minimum payment clause, he did everything he could for us to make it here. I don’t blame him. I understand. I’m not saying it’s okay, but at the same time. Yes. Okay. I love him. But our love is gone. I can’t leave him. I have to leave him. I have nowhere to go, but I’m convinced that Allah, the merciful and compassionate, will find a way.”
The representative for the women’s shelter cleared her throat and explained that unfortunately, their facility was just as full as all the other shelters. They had a long waitlist.
“I would recommend that you apply for your own work permit. That’s the first step toward freedom.”
As we stood out on the street, I promised Zainab I would help her with the application. I had helped Nihad and it went well, and now I would help Zainab too. As soon as that was taken care of, we just had to find somewhere for her and the children to live. Then it would all work out. We handed in an application. We were rejected. Even though we had written exactly the same thing as in Nihad’s application. We went out to the Migration Board in Hallonbergen to try to find out what had happened.
*
HAHAHA, allow me to laugh my ass off! Who said that Samuel and Laide’s first date was “magical”? Who is spreading the rumor that they were “soulmates”? They weren’t exactly breakdancing on air, no no no. Their first date was a catastrophe. I wasn’t there, of course, but I saw how Samuel looked when he came home. He stood in the hallway looking grim.
“What the hell are you wearing?” I asked.
“Her hoodie. She came straight from the gym.”
“Straight from the gym to a date? What did I tell you? This girl is sketchy.”
Samuel sank down onto the stool, took off the hoodie, and sniffed it. He gazed ahead emptily.
“No, it wasn’t her fault, it was the circumstances. Things kept going wrong all night.”
For one thing, it was cold. Unusually cold. Almost below freezing, even though December was still far off. They had decided to meet at the intersection of Vasagatan and Kungsgatan, and he was there on time. He thought it was a poor choice to meet there because cooking smells were pouring from the kebab stand and he didn’t want to go around stinking like falafel on their first date. But it seemed that he didn’t have to worry, because she didn’t show up. It was five past. Ten past. He started to send a text, but just then he saw her coming from up by Hötorget, walking fast. She waved and shouted that she had mixed up Sveavägen and Vasagatan and she had been waiting up there.
“Then she came up to me with her arms sticking out for a hug. But I had already put out my right hand. And by the time I opened my arms for a hug, she had stuck out her right hand. A perfect start.”
*
Our application was denied, the guy at the front desk at the Migration Board didn’t even want to take our case number. He had a Spanish accent and his breath smelled like bananas and he had the nerve to try to explain to me that “here in Sweden we happen to have an excellent
system called ‘waiting your turn.’” I admit it, I was a little annoyed, Zainab tried to calm me down, the guards escorted us out. As we stood there in the parking lot and everything seemed hopeless, I heard a discreet throat-clearing and a voice asking us what had happened.
*
There was a bar at a hotel near Norra Bantorget that Samuel had Googled and walked by and stared into for twenty minutes before they met to double check that it looked good, not too full, not too empty, not too flashy, not too anonymous. They started walking along Vasagatan in the direction of the bar, they tried to talk to each other but the conversation limped along. She had a backpack full of her gym clothes and was wearing a purple hat because her hair was wet and she didn’t look the way Samuel remembered her. But he thought that if they could only find a place to sit they would have the chance to get to know each other. When they arrived at the hotel bar, Laide said she didn’t like the “vibe” there.
“What did she mean by that?” I asked.
“No idea. Instead she suggested that we ‘walk around a little.’”
“‘Walk around a little’?”
“‘Walk around a little’!” Samuel shouted. “Do you know how cold it is out? And how hard it is to keep up a normal conversation when you have to focus on not freezing to death at the same time?”
“Or slipping and falling?”
“Exactly. Thank you.”
*
There stood Samuel. His blue-black hair neatly styled. His nose a little crooked. His sideburns grown out. There were two red chili stains on the collar of his wrinkled shirt. His shoes needed a polish. His eyes were kind. His cheeks were downy. He was wearing the biggest smile I’d ever seen.
*
They started walking. A few times, Samuel suggested that they take a seat in a bar or a cafe. But each time, Laide said that bar felt too flashy and that place looked like it was for winos and that cafe reminded her of an ex and that place was closed. So they walked. They walked and walked and walked and walked.
*
A few weeks later we met up downtown. Samuel had texted me, and we took a walk in Vasastan. It was a brisk autumn evening, I had just been swimming at Eriksdal bathhouse so I was a few minutes late. It never felt like a real date. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was so easy for us to talk to each other. Maybe because I suspected he was gay. He kept coming back to the fact that he lived with a guy named Vandad and that they had a really great relationship and I remember that when he said that I felt a pang of jealousy, which was a little strange, since we had known each other for about fifteen minutes.
Everything I Don't Remember Page 8
