*
We were still sitting at the outdoor cafe. The sun had vanished. When I asked Samuel about his political engagement, he went quiet and gazed over at the tray cart.
“I mean, I don’t know. I’m not a conservative or anything, but . . . I’ve always been skeptical of political movements.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“My dad always warned me about politics. I’ve sure seen how much his friends sacrificed for their struggles and how it always ended with disappointment and broken friendships and . . . I don’t know . . . I’ve only demonstrated once in my entire life.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. Against the Iraq war. Two thousand three. But then the war started anyway and it all felt pointless.”
“But what about the Gaza bombings? When the Sweden Democrats won seats in parliament? REVA? Don’t any of those things make you react strongly enough to take your body and walk a few hundred meters?”
“No, but I don’t know why . . . It’s like it’s . . . Every time I think of joining a demonstration I see the signs and I wonder if I really agree one hundred percent. Then everyone starts shouting their slogans and I don’t know what to do.”
“But what do you do on May Day? If you don’t demonstrate?”
“Chill out. Hang with Vandad. Fill up the Experience Bank.”
He tried to smile his way out of the situation but I could tell he felt uncomfortable.
“Speaking of,” he said. “I’m going to Berlin soon. We’re planning to visit Panther.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me and Vandad.”
“Are you paying for it?”
“No, actually, I’m not. Not this time.”
We finished our food in silence.
*
A few weeks later we went to Berlin. It felt major, it was major, it was the first time we were traveling abroad together. When we met at Central Station, Samuel walked up to me with a smile as radiant as a nuclear power plant and a hug as big as a sumo wrestler.
“This is going to be so fucking fun!” he said, hugging me.
“Totally,” I said, giving him a friendly punch on the shoulder.
“Ow, dammit. Take it easy. We’re taking the bus, right? It’s cheaper.”
*
The next weekend, the Sweden Democrats were having a rally in Farsta. The whole gang was going down there to protest, except for Santiago, who was away on a work trip. But Ylva and Shahin and Tamara and her new girlfriend Charlie were there. Charlie who had a narrow mouth and taught special needs kids in Södertälje. We realized right away that she was used to demonstrations, when we met at the barricade she handed out various instruments she’d borrowed from her school, maracas and whistles, and she herself had a big drum hanging from her shoulders by polka-dotted suspenders. We walked onto the square and stood there in the sunshine. There must have been two hundred of us, although the local paper believed the police, as usual, and wrote that there were “around seventy” of us. The usual mix of people. The antifascist action kids, old hippies, multi-colored families, hand-holding queers.
*
The plane took off and Samuel sat next to me, in high spirits.
“Holy shit, it’s crazy how much we have to catch up on,” he said.
And we did. As the flight attendants passed out menus he told me that Laide had worked at McDonald’s after upper secondary school and the rumor that they wash the toilet seats in the same dishwasher as they wash the fry cages—it’s true.
“Okay,” I said.
We ordered wine and nuts.
“Laide is allergic to nuts. But not all nuts, peanuts are worst. She has to make sure they know every time she flies.”
We received our little bottles of wine, I paid for both of them.
“Thanks. I’ll get it next time.”
“Cheers! To the Experience Bank! To immortality!”
“To love!”
We toasted with our fridge-chilled red wine and at last I felt like our trip could start.
“You know what Laide’s doing this weekend? She’s going to a demonstration and then she’s going to grab dinner with two friends.”
*
When the Sweden Democrat cars approached, the police stood between us and them, the police horses whinnied, the police dogs seemed unfazed by our instruments and roars. Charlie started chanting slogans, at first the classic ones (“No racists on our streets,” “What are we gonna do? Stamp out racism! When are we gonna do it? NOW!”) and soon enough slightly more specific ones to fit that day in particular (“Farsta says: FUCK SD, Farsta says: FUCK RACISM!”). Tamara was standing next to her and smiling, and even though she wasn’t singing along it was obvious that she was proud. I felt young that day on the square, I felt like I had in the past, it wasn’t until the SD representative had given his barely audible talk about the importance of closed borders and a return to the classic values that made this country what it is that Ylva looked at me and asked where Samuel was.
“Samuel?” I said.
“Yeah. Isn’t he coming?”
“He’s in Berlin.”
But once I’d said it, I realized that he wouldn’t have been there even if he had been in Stockholm.
*
It was like that all the way down to Berlin. He described (and imitated!) how cute she sounded when she snored. He told me that she had an older sister who worked at the Museum of Natural History. He said that what made Laide’s particular version of Arabic so special was that it was pretty similar to that dialect in all the Egyptian soaps. When the flight attendant approached to collect money for the next round of wine bottles he let me pay again.
“Sorry, my wallet is up in my bag. I’ll get the next one—I swear.”
I picked up the seat-back magazine as the plane descended to land in Berlin. I read an article about Venice. Samuel leaned over my shoulder, pointing at the black-haired model who was on a boat with an umbrella.
“Foxy,” he said. “But not as foxy as . . .”
And I thought: Is he messing with me? I’ve seen Laide. I know how old she is, how worn out she looks, I’ve seen her bitten nails, her hunted expression, that is not a person at peace, that is a person who is always prepared to be left and always has to keep her hand on the emergency brake so she can leave first. But did I say that? No. I kept it to myself, like an idiot.
*
I came home from the demonstration. I stood in my empty hallway. I want to say I enjoyed my time alone. That Samuel’s absence meant I could completely be myself. That I could let my body relax and pick my nose and masturbate and fart and burp and definitely not feel any sort of emptiness. Because that’s the way it always had been before. But I missed him. And that annoyed me.
*
We landed at the airport and it was like traveling back in time. It was still 1995 there, everyone who worked there looked like pale bartenders in old music videos, their hair was moussed and their faces were either heavily made up or well-mustached and their jeans were so unmodern that they were either seriously unmodern or extremely modern. Samuel looked around and exclaimed:
“Berlin here we come!”
Then he stopped and turned on his phone.
“I’m just going to say we landed.”
*
Then the texts started coming. He sent one when he landed, and the next fifteen minutes later: “Now we’re getting in ein taxi bitte!” He sent a picture of a trampoline in a park, he took a photo of a table full of drinks and wrote: “Aufwiedersehn.” But not once did he write that he missed me. Instead my phone filled up with proof that he seemed to be doing at least as well without me. I took a bath, I read a book, I sat quietly and listened to the murmur of my neighbors’ TV, they were watching Let’s Dance. I tried to convince myself that I was happy. Serene. Free. But in my mind I could see a car crashing into Samuel’s taxi. He got out of the taxi and was kicked down by a Nazi. He was at a club and someone offered him candy that wasn’t candy. He
got drunk and fell into the river. He was at a roof party and climbed over the parapet.
The final text came at 11.30, he asked how I was, he said that he was about to go to bed but that he’d had an epic night and signed off by sending “ein godenachte kiss.” I didn’t know how to respond. His text felt like an attempt to reassure me, and a person who has no intention of betraying someone doesn’t need to reassure said someone. I lay awake until it started to get light out.
*
The line for taxis was long but the creamy white taxicabs were standing at the ready and everything went smoothly, we jumped into the backseat and gave the address and the guy behind the wheel was a Turk and laughed at Samuel’s terrible German. Samuel tried to give the address again, the driver corrected him. We headed into the city, Samuel tried to make small talk, it didn’t go very well, the Turk’s English was German, Samuel’s school German was Swedish. The roads were narrow, the neighborhood looked Polish, we drove through a forest, past a few brick buildings, the taxi driver pointed proudly at a few blocks and said:
“All this new, before: nothing!”
And we gave impressed nods at the new buildings, which already looked shabby. We passed a train station, we turned right and nearly collided with a yellow streetcar. We were getting closer to Panther’s neighborhood, it wasn’t too far, the driver slowed down, he looked at the street names.
“It should be here.”
We turned right, onto a street as wide as a soccer field and perfectly empty, no trees, no stores, just long rows of cars parked at an angle and buildings that looked like forgotten embassies. We stopped outside the door to Panther’s building.
“Can you . . .” I said, pointing at the horn.
He looked at me like I was nuts.
“This is Berlin.”
I’m not quite sure if he understood that I meant the horn or thought it was something else, but we thanked him for the ride and I paid because Samuel was already at the door, using the intercom. It cost twenty-three forty and I gave him twenty-five euros and he thanked me for the tip, surprised. At first I thought he was being sarcastic, but he seemed truly happy as he zoomed off over the cobblestones.
*
The day after Samuel left, Maysa contacted me to ask if it was okay for her sister to move into the house for a little bit, because she needed refuge as well.
“Of course,” I said. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Will she be by herself?”
“Mmhmm. With her daughter.”
*
The street was quiet again, I looked up at the building. It was the only one on the whole street that was flaking, it looked like a fire had damaged it, the plaster had fallen off long ago, the door was darkened by decades of dirt, two large parts of the façade had come loose and were lying on the sidewalk. On the first floor I saw a big red flower and a few pieces of paper with words I couldn’t make out. On the second floor the white curtains were drawn. On the third: Panther’s happy face.
“I’ll come down,” she signaled, and soon the door was open.
We hugged each other in the darkness under the broken porch lamp. She looked just as I remembered, except that her skin was paler.
“Sweet glasses,” Samuel said. “Are they real?”
“Of course,” Panther said, sticking her finger through the empty frame. “When in Rome.”
*
Later that same evening, Nihad called. She said she’d met an older, female Persian poet whose application for a residence permit had just been denied.
“Is it okay if she stays here for a few nights? Just until she finds somewhere else?”
“Of course,” I answered.
It didn’t cross my mind to check with Samuel. What would he say? “No, sorry. This house is just standing here empty but I really must okay everyone who moves in?” In fact, I thought the more women who lived there, the better. I thought it made the place safer. My only worry was that one of the neighbors might become suspicious.
*
We walked up the stairs together, it smelled like coal and wood, the graffiti made it hard to tell what color the stairwell was supposed to be. The apartment had white walls and an old wooden floor, there was a yellow-tiled igloo in each bedroom, one was warm and the other was cold. One of the walls in the bathroom was covered in a five-meter-long strip of wallpaper with Alps on it, and in the kitchen was a gas stove and a fridge that closed with a rope.
“Cool, huh?” said Panther. “A genuine Berlin apartment.”
“Definitely,” said Samuel.
I nodded because it’s easier to lie with a gesture than with your voice. Sure, I thought the place was cool. But not so cool that I wanted to live there, more like cool as in, okay, places like this exist in the world too, but please keep driving until we get to my hotel with functioning heating, a big-screen TV, a mini-bar, and not two rooms that are heated by coal. Because that was why there were sacks of coal in the bedrooms. The two yellow igloos were coal stoves.
“But I didn’t have to use them all that much this past winter,” said Panther. “And there’s electric heat too.”
“But isn’t that pretty expensive?” Samuel asked, and I looked at him and wondered what was up with him. I’d never heard him talking about money like that. And I thought that it couldn’t be his fault—it had to be someone else’s.
*
On the third day, Nihad called and said that they’d had some problems with the electricity in the house, now and then it would sort of turn off and on. They had tried changing all the fuses, but nothing helped. I said I would come over, and that afternoon I was sitting on the commuter train again. The garden looked like it usually did, the same plastic toys, the same piles of rotting apples, and that was good, I had been careful to tell them that they couldn’t change too many things that were visible from the outside. The inside, on the other hand, was very lively. About ten kids were playing with a Frisbee in the part of the yard that didn’t face the street. Two men were smoking on the terrace, they said hi to me and one asked if I was Rojda’s lawyer.
“No,” I said. “Who’s Rojda?”
“Never mind.”
I walked into the house. The spider webs and urine smell were gone, it smelled like fresh bread, an old lady about Samuel’s grandma’s age was sitting in the living room and watching a children’s show with two toddlers. Zainab was in the kitchen, cooking, she explained that Maysa and her family lived on the bottom floor and that the new arrivals without children took sleeping bags up and slept in the attic.
“But there’s only women living here, right?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Women and children.”
“Who are those people out there?”
“They’re leaving soon.”
Zainab explained that she only cooked for her own family. At first they’d tried making common meals but she ended up buying all the food and after a while she got sick of it.
“It’s nice that you came,” she said. “But the electricity seems to be working now—we found another fuse box in the basement and there haven’t been any problems since we fixed the wires in there.”
I stood there in the kitchen. I wanted someone to say thanks, point out how great it was of us to organize all of this. But people were wrapped up in their own lives, the lady in the TV room waved goodbye as I left, and Nihad wasn’t home, but I assumed her son was the one playing Frisbee, he had her dark curls and beautiful dimples and the same kind of sparkling brown eyes that made it hard to look away.
*
That first evening we hung around the neighborhood, which was totally deserted, hardly a person in sight, even though it was five in the afternoon.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Well, they’re definitely not at work,” Panther said. “There’s, like, no one in Berlin who has a job.”
“So what do people do?”
“In my building there are two Danish designers, an unemployed Portuguese architect, a schizophrenic war
veteran, and a Swedish author. He’s half Tunisian, by the way,” she added.
“Who is?”
“The author.”
This was the first and only time I ever heard Panther mention you. Samuel seemed uninterested. We walked toward a water tower, we passed a restaurant that was closed, a few abandoned ping-pong tables, an empty bar on a corner. Still zero people.
“It’s like Östermalm-empty here,” I said.
“Like a ghost town,” said Samuel.
“Mmhmm. But it’s this part of the city, too, they’ve gentrified the shit out of it. It’s kind of a shame. But this is sick.”
Panther ran over to the playground, she took aim and jumped onto a little mound and suddenly she was bouncing on a trampoline, her black hair became a waterfall in the wind, she bounced higher and higher.
“Whooo! Cool, huh?”
And I twisted toward Samuel to say “What is she doing?” But I didn’t have time to finish my sentence because Samuel was already on his way to the next mound, suddenly both of them were jumping up and down in the playground and shouting “wheee” like two lunatics and I stood there for a few seconds and didn’t know what to do. Then I looked around and thought, Fuck it—Experience Bank, and ran toward the third trampoline mound.
*
Samuel was gone for five days, and every night I imagined he had met someone new. The first night it was a South African circus artist who had recently gone in a new direction and become a union-representative nurse. They talked for hours about the societal consequences of living with memory loss in a post-Apartheid system. Then they went home and fucked. The second night it was an Indonesian political scientist, they talked for hours about how they were so much more than their boring careers. Then they went home and fucked. The third night it was a half-Jordanian performance artist. They talked for hours about the importance of frequently adding to your Experience Bank. Then they went home and fucked. Deep down I knew that Samuel lacked the willpower to resist. An experience like that was impossible to say no to, he turned to Vandad and Panther who locked their lips with invisible keys, and to avoid being eaten up by his guilty conscience he bombarded me with texts in which he wrote everything except that he missed me.
Everything I Don't Remember Page 15
