It doesn’t take long to find the pictures. First, the one of the boy on the truck. Then one of the razed house where the table is still set. They’re not iconic images of Aleppo, not images that define the conflict for the general public, but they’ve appeared in articles in a French magazine and also been reprinted on a few blogs and web pages. How did they manage to spread so fast? Yassim said they weren’t ready for publication just a couple of weeks ago.
He clicks on the image and is directed to an article in a French magazine. It’s behind a paywall, but the photo can be glimpsed behind it. He goes back again and clicks on one of the blogs. The blog is also in French, but the photo of the little boy on the truck appears in full. Jacob clicks on it. It’s a good picture, of that there’s no doubt. Yassim has talent. He closes the picture and scrolls through the article even though he’s not very good in French.
But something gnaws at him, something’s not right. Slowly he scrolls up to the top of the post.
The date. The blog post is almost a year old.
He goes back to the French magazine. Despite the paywall, it’s the same there. November 2014. The picture wasn’t taken a month ago. It was taken at least a year ago.
With trembling fingers he returns to the blog and sees that the image is attributed to a large photo agency. And as he scrolls further down the blog, he sees the image of the house with no front wall, and several other pictures he remembers vaguely.
Why did Yassim lie about taking the pictures just a few weeks ago, if he actually took them a year ago?
Jacob suddenly feels very cold. Something’s not right, and despite all his defences, he has to give it up now, admit to himself that what Myriam says is probably true. There’s no longer any way to hide from it.
*
Three weeks go by before Myriam hunts him down again, even though she calls every other day to make sure he hasn’t forgotten about her. He’s close to telling her about the pictures, about Yassim’s lies, but he lets it be. It’s as if Yassim’s betrayal will only become real if he says it out loud, and he’s not sure he can handle that right now.
He sees Myriam everywhere, feels his paranoia growing, thinks he sees cars waiting outside his front door. Thinks he sees men on the street who quickly avert their eyes when he looks at them. He no longer knows what’s real and what’s just in his head. His only wish is that this had never happened, that he never would have met Yassim, never gone to that party on the roof. That Myriam was just a fantasy, just air, nothing more.
At the embassy, Frida asks absentmindedly and without much interest how it’s going with his memo, and he answers evasively that he’s waiting to meet someone for an interview.
‘I can send you what I have,’ he says.
‘Finish writing it first,’ she says. ‘I’ll read it when everything’s done. There’s no hurry.’
Then she’s gone, and Jacob is left alone with the certainty that the work he’s doing will never be finished.
He spends his days at his desk thinking it surely can’t be possible to miss someone you barely know this much. He hardly leaves his phone for a moment for fear of missing a call. He needs to let go. Especially now that everything indicates that Yassim is nothing but trouble and destruction. Now when a happy ending seems impossible.
He should sleep. He should eat. But he tosses and turns, thoughts racing, until he wakes up one morning and autumn is outside his window: grey rain, grey seas, and only sixteen degrees celsius. Now is the moment to finally shake this all off and say: Enough.
And he almost gets there, almost convinces himself he can put his foot down. Then one day he goes to the American University campus to have a cup of coffee with a young professor he’s become friendly with. He turns towards the sea and takes a deep breath. Looking at the trees and grass and water. For the first time in a long time, he feels something close to peace. In the distance he can almost sense something like freedom.
And at that very moment a soft hand closes around his elbow, and he turns and sees who it is and freedom vanishes before his eyes, and he forgets all of his longing, his yearning, and his worries. In the blink of an eye, it all becomes meaningless. And he’s only here, in the present.
‘Come,’ Yassim whispers in his ear. ‘I need you in my arms.’
22 November
Stockholm
She freezes in the doorway – obviously entering a cordoned-off apartment was a bad idea, she should have known – and slowly she turns around.
But behind her is no police officer, as she’d expected, but a stately woman in her sixties, wearing a flowing piece of colourful fabric, a kaftan or some kind of dress. She’s tall, a bit heavy. Her hair is short and blonde, her eyes liberally painted, her cheekbones rouged. She has a kitchen knife in her hand.
Klara holds up her hands. The woman doesn’t seem threatening, more eccentric, but a knife is a knife.
‘Who are you?’ the woman asks.
Klara takes a step back into the apartment to get out of the radius of the knife, and swallows, trying to sound as calm as possible. ‘I’m a friend of Gabriella, the woman who lives here,’ she says. ‘I was supposed to stay with her tonight, but…’
She lets the sentence ebb away, holding up Gabriella’s keychain as if to prove something. The woman’s face changes, her aggression or fear gives way to something softer and more open. She lowers the knife slightly, angling it more towards the floor.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.
‘Klara. Klara Walldéen is my name.’
Now, the last of her suspicion and indignation drains away and is replaced by a crooked and somewhat confused smile. ‘Oh, forgive me. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’ – she looks down at the knife in her hand – ‘I don’t usually run around with knives.’
Klara relaxes and takes a deep breath. The woman takes a step closer to her and into the doorway, glancing back at the staircase. She pulls the door shut behind her again.
‘I know who you are, Klara,’ she whispers. ‘Gabi has told me about you.’ She lowers her voice further. ‘Did something happen to her? Gabriella has seemed to have a lot on her plate lately.’
‘What do you mean?’ Klara says.
‘It doesn’t feel safe here,’ the woman says, shaking her head. ‘Not safe at all. Come with me. We have a lot to talk about, I think.’
*
Klara follows the woman to her apartment, which is twice as big as Gabriella’s and just one floor up. She’s led through a hall with a green marble floor into a large living room that’s dominated by an enormous emerald sofa and a black baby grand piano. Through the windows she can see Gamla Stan and Kungsholmen spread out behind Riddarfjärden in the twilight. The snow is falling more heavily outside, and the snowflakes swirl in front of the French windows. The woman lights a couple of low table lamps before disappearing further inside the apartment. In that warm light, Klara can see the walls are covered with framed posters from the Royal Opera.
Then the woman appears in the doorway with two wine glasses and a bottle of white wine so cold it has condensation on it. Klara has to hide the tiny wave of relief and euphoria that hits her at the sight of it. She’s hardly touched a drop all through the autumn. But now she really wants a glass. No, not wants – she needs a glass.
‘My name’s Maria, by the way,’ the woman says. ‘Maria Wittman. I’d say it’s about time I introduce myself.’
‘Are you an opera singer, ma’am?’ Klara asks, gesturing towards the framed posters.
Why did she say ‘ma’am’? But there’s something about this woman that demands a certain level of respect, so it just popped out.
Maria laughs and invites Klara to sit down on the green couch. ‘You’re not the first to make that assumption,’ she says. ‘I suppose I fit the part. No, my husband played the French horn in the orchestra at the Royal Opera house and liked collecting souvenirs. As for me, I’m afraid I’m quite talentless. I was forced to make do with a job in finance.’
While Klara looks around at the large, tastefully decorated apartment, Maria pours wine into the two glasses.
‘You can’t be completely talentless,’ Klara says. ‘I mean, it’s quite an outstanding apartment.’
Maria shrugs and sits down on the sofa beside her. She takes a little sip of the wine and smiles at her guest. ‘There are various kinds of talents,’ she says. ‘What are yours?’
Klara picks up the glass and has to resist the temptation to down it in one gulp. After all, she’s barely drunk anything for almost four months. But she manages to take a cautious sip instead, feels the warmth and the calm spreading through her body.
‘Always ending up in some kind of trouble,’ she says. ‘I’d say that’s my most outstanding talent.’
‘It’s a talent you certainly shouldn’t take too lightly,’ Maria says. ‘Gabriella seems to share it with you.’
Klara takes another sip, a bit bigger now. The wine is dry and earthy, full of life. It tastes like someone’s glory days.
‘She was arrested this afternoon,’ Klara says. ‘Outside of her office on Skeppsbron, in some sort of terror crackdown. I sat in the car and could only watch while a SWAT team dragged her into a van.’
To Klara’s surprise Maria seems neither shocked nor upset. She just listens quietly, spinning the glass between her fingertips. A single large emerald glitters on one of her ring fingers.
‘She made a lot of people angry this autumn,’ Maria says. ‘A very brave young woman, our Gabi, you have to admit that.’
Our Gabi, Klara thinks. There aren’t many beside Klara who call her Gabi. Why has Gabriella never told her about this Maria if they were so close?
‘I guess you were also mixed up in what happened last summer?’ Maria continues.
Klara nods. ‘You can definitely say that. I’ – she takes another gulp of wine – ‘I wasn’t doing very well.’
Maria just looks at her calmly. ‘A person can’t always be doing well,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you need your friends.’
Klara can feel tears fill her eyes. There’s something so warm and genuinely empathetic about Maria, something that makes her think Maria knows what she’s talking about.
‘Gabi needs me now,’ Klara says quietly. ‘She’s done so much for me. And now she needs me.’
Maria places her wine glass on top of an enormous book about Dutch architecture that lies, along with several other books about design, on the low coffee table. She stands up and walks over to the baby grand. She lifts the lid carefully and sticks her hand inside.
‘Dramatic,’ she says. ‘I know. But I have a gift for drama, as you may have noticed.’
Slowly she pulls out her hand with a small envelope dangling between her fingers.
‘Since Alf passed, nobody plays the piano. A good place to hide mysterious messages, don’t you think?’
Maria puts the envelope on the coffee table. Klara can feel her skin pucker with goosebumps as she takes a deep breath. The envelope is addressed to her.
13–14 November
Beirut
Yassim’s hand on his elbow almost doesn’t feel real, and Jacob keeps glancing over at him to make sure as they walk down the steps and along the footpaths that lead through the campus down to the sea.
‘Where are we going?’ Jacob says.
He realizes it’s the first thing he’s said. Yassim smiles and turns to him, looks into his eyes.
‘A tunnel down to the beach,’ he says. ‘Not so many people there.’
Jacob nods. The American University’s own enclosed beach club, on the other side of Cornichen, the ultimate, exaggerated triumph of the privileged. Nothing summarizes Beirut better than the bullet holes in the locker rooms at the private, insanely expensive beach clubs. Hedonism, privilege and violence locked in an eternal dance along the privatized coastal strip.
He feels relieved that they’re headed in that direction, away from the main gate and Hamra, where there’s a risk that Myriam or one of her companions might be waiting with their threats.
‘You were gone for so long,’ Jacob says.
They’re in the tunnel now and the calm of the campus is replaced by the roar of the cars on Cornichen. Yassim tries to smile, but it’s a half-hearted attempt; there’s no joy there, just the other look, hard and bottomless, which sometimes appears in his eyes.
‘I’m a ghost,’ he says. ‘You know that.’
‘But you could have said something, so I had some idea when you were coming back.’
Jacob’s voice echoes in the tunnel, and Yassim doesn’t answer, just pushes them further through the tunnel, and then out into the drizzle coming down on the concrete and cliffs.
The locker rooms are empty, the showers are turned off. It’s abandoned down here by the water in the autumn. A breeze cools them, and the sea is grey-green and choppy in the twilight. Yassim grabs his shoulders and turns him around, stares deeply into his eyes.
‘This is how it is,’ he says. ‘You knew that from the beginning.’
‘I knew I couldn’t be your boyfriend,’ Jacob says. ‘Not that you’d disappear without telling me whether or not you were coming back.’
He realizes he’s almost shouting; he must be more upset than he thought. Maybe he’s being dramatic, but it’s bubbled up inside him now. His worry that Yassim might have left him mingles with a vague, now dashed, and completely contradictory hope that he would never come back. Jacob doesn’t want to feel this happiness pulsing inside him now, doesn’t want to be helpless in Yassim’s hands any more. The photographs from Syria, the gun, the lies. But it doesn’t matter, with Yassim he has no defences.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘But I can’t do anything about that. When someone needs my camera, I have to go. It’s not easy to call from the front, darling.’
Jacob looks at him. ‘Aleppo again?’ he asks and receives a calm nod in reply.
‘Where else?’
Jacob wants to grab Yassim’s shoulders and shake him. Were you really there? he wants to scream at the top of his lungs. Or: Who are you? But he says nothing, just nods back calmly.
‘But forget it,’ Yassim says. ‘I’m going to Europe soon. I have to get away. And you are coming with me.’
Jacob’s face is becoming wet in the drizzle, and he turns into the strengthening wind. It won’t be hard to get away; no one will miss him at the embassy. Right now, here at the pier by the sea, he doesn’t care about any of it.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I will come with you.’
*
It’s dark by the time they leave the beach club; the headlights of taxis and SUVs glitter in the rain. Jacob’s shirt is damp, and he’s freezing for the first time since he got to Beirut, but Yassim doesn’t take them directly to the apartment. Instead, he takes them down side streets and winds through packed parking lots. Yassim looks at him, and they chat, but Jacob feels like there’s something off, as if his friend is more cautious than usual.
‘This way,’ he says, leading Jacob past a sleepy security guard, down a ramp into a parking garage. ‘A shortcut.’
It feels as if they walk at least a kilometre underground, but finally they arrive at an elevator which takes them right up to Yassim’s flat.
‘That’s not what I would call a shortcut,’ Jacob says as they step into the empty apartment.
But Yassim doesn’t answer; he just pushes him against the wall and kisses him so hard that Jacob thinks the wall might tumble down, the whole house might fall over, that the world will start collapsing into tiny pieces all around them.
*
Eight numbers keep Jacob awake in the middle of the night in Yassim’s low bed. He’s barely slept, mostly he’s just lain there waiting for his friend’s breathing to turn deep and even. The last two digits. He saw them tonight over Yassim’s shoulder, even though he was trying to protect the keyboard with his body. If Jacob hadn’t caught the first numbers several weeks ago, he never would have got all of it.
20120714.
No
w Yassim is sleeping quietly on his back among the white sheets. Not troubled like last time, but calm. For now.
Jacob sits up carefully, still naked. His heart is pounding in his chest. He finds his underwear and tank top and pulls them on before putting his feet onto the cool concrete floor.
Is he really going to do this? He tiptoes cautiously across the floor. He needs a drink, still can’t sleep. Nothing strange about going to the living room in the middle of the night.
20120714.
The computer stands on the table in the middle of the room, bathed in the artificial light that shines in through the high windows. He walks to the kitchen area and takes a glass from the shelf, fills it with ice-cold water, then takes just one sip before pouring it into the sink as quietly as he can. Slowly he walks over to the computer.
*
He sits down on the chair. The only sounds are the gentle buzz of the air conditioner and a few cars accelerating and honking on the street below. It’s just past two o’clock.
It’s as if he has no control over himself. His hands follow their own logic, pushing down on the spacebar and waking up the computer. The dialogue box asks for a password. He looks down at the softly lit keyboard and pushes the eight numbers. A moment of hesitation before pressing Enter. A moment of anticipation before the computer logs him in.
His first instinct is to shut the computer immediately. To just ignore it all; what will be, will be. But it’s not Myriam and her threats that stop him. It’s himself. It’s that little nudge that won’t leave him alone, no matter how hard he tries to convince himself that Myriam couldn’t possibly be right about Yassim. That nagging uncertainty makes him lean over the computer and see that the desktop now has two folders.
One is called ‘Pictures’. The other is called ‘20120714’. Just like the password. He clicks the latter without hesitation.
The Friend Page 13
