The folder contains dozens of videos and PDFs. He clicks on the first, which is a scanned article from Beirut’s English-language newspaper, The Daily Star. The headline reads: Sunni Mediator Killed in Bombing.
He skims the article, dated 15 July 2012. It’s about a Sheikh Yussuf, described as a possible unifying force for the Syrian rebels. According to the article, he and many of his family members died in a gas explosion at a wedding the day before.
He clicks one of the video files. He recognizes the setting from somewhere, but can’t quite place where he’s seen it before. It’s an inner courtyard, decorated for a wedding. People in fancy clothes are greeting an older man, a sort of patriarch. Sheikh Yussuf himself? Jacob freezes the video and leans forward. Next to Yussuf stands a person that Jacob recognizes.
Yassim.
He’s younger, of course. He has longer hair, traditional clothes. But that’s Yassim, no doubt about it. And he doesn’t seem to be there as a photographer. He looks like he’s part of the celebration. Part of the wedding party.
Part of the family.
Then Jacob hears a voice in the room behind him, and it’s as if the whole world stops.
‘You won’t find what you’re looking for on that computer.’
Jacob raises his eyes.
Yassim is standing in the corridor that leads to the bedroom. Behind him is the big photograph leaning against the wall, and Jacob remembers where he saw that inner courtyard. It’s the same place. The video from before the explosion. The photo from afterwards. Yassim didn’t photograph the party; he was one of the guests.
Yassim has lied to him, he isn’t who he claims to be at all and Jacob doesn’t know how it happens but suddenly he’s pushing his hand up under the table, grabbing onto the black gun and pulling it free. The tape comes loose, and he almost falls backwards under the table, but regains his balance.
Yassim is coming towards him. His eyes are black now. Completely black, only anger and destruction inside. Everything he keeps hidden.
‘Who are you?’ Jacob hisses, scrambling backwards over the concrete floor.
Without even knowing how, he suddenly raises the gun with both hands; his finger is on the trigger, his fear is almost blinding.
Yassim stops in the middle of the floor, holds up his hands.
‘Who are you?!’ Jacob screams as loudly as he can. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
22 November
Stockholm
Klara takes an even bigger gulp of wine and lifts the envelope.
‘What is this?’ she asks. ‘Why do you have an envelope that’s addressed to me?’
Maria sits down next to her on the sofa again. ‘Gabriella gave it to me last week. She asked me to keep it hidden and only mail it if something happened to her.’
Klara looks up and meets Maria’s eyes. ‘So she thought something might happen to her?’ she asks.
‘Recently she believed she was being followed. When she told me that, I didn’t know what to think. We didn’t know each other that well before, mostly just short chats in the stairwell. I recognized her, of course, from the news. She’s hard to miss with all that fabulous red hair.’
Klara nods.
‘But to believe you’re being followed,’ Maria continues. ‘Alf was…’ She pauses, takes a sip of wine to gather her strength. ‘My husband was manic depressive. Sometimes his manias led to paranoia. When Gabi talked about being followed, I’ll admit I was mostly worried about her mental health.’
‘I understand,’ Klara says. ‘It must have been terribly hard. With your husband, I mean.’
Maria nods slowly, staring out the window at the snow and the water. Then she shakes it off and turns to Klara again. ‘But Gabriella wasn’t paranoid. I quickly understood that, though she didn’t want to tell me what she was involved with.’
‘But why did she tell you she felt she was being followed?’ Klara asks.
Why didn’t Gabriella tell her anything this autumn? After everything they’d been through in the past few years? Didn’t Gabi trust her any more? She can’t make sense of it.
Klara takes another gulp of wine and leans back on the couch with the still-unopened envelope on her knee.
‘She probably wasn’t sure,’ Maria says. ‘And maybe she didn’t want to worry you? But she came up here and rang my door about a week ago. She pulled me to the kitchen window, which looks out onto the street, and pointed to one of the stairwells on the other side. A man stood there, talking on a phone. She asked me to check again the next night. And I did, and sure enough there he was again. And the night after that.
‘Before she left that night, she gave me this envelope and asked me to send it to you if anything happened. I thought it all seemed a bit dramatic. But, well, I’m drawn to such things, too. We have too little excitement in our lives, Klara. Well, not you and Gabriella. But I do. ’
Maria leans back on the sofa, staring thoughtfully down at her glass again. ‘But I didn’t think it would turn out like this. As I said, at first I thought she was a bit paranoid, that what she’d been through with Säpo had left its mark. But now I understand that she knew what was going on. Or what was about to happen.’
‘Gabi is many things,’ Klara says. ‘But paranoid is not one of them.’
‘You’re only paranoid if it never happens,’ Maria says.
‘Did she tell you anything else?’ Klara says. ‘Anything about why she was being followed, or why someone would follow her?’
‘No, she just gave me the envelope. I’m not one to snoop.’
Klara takes a drink and turns the envelope, hoping that the contents will in some way explain what happened to Gabriella this afternoon.
‘I told her she should go to the police if she was worried,’ Maria says, ‘but she didn’t want to.’
Klara nods, and without putting it off any more she slides her finger in under the flap and rips open the envelope. She puts in two fingers and grabs onto a folded piece of paper and pulls it out.
Maria rises from the sofa with the wine glass in her hand and walks over to the window. She stands with her back to Klara, looking out over the darkness and the rain and the lights from Kungsholmen on the other side of the water.
Eagerly, Klara unfolds the paper.
There’s a short handwritten message.
Klara,
I guess if you’re reading this something has happened to me. You know I hate melodrama, but I guess you’ll never see this if I’m wrong. And after everything we’ve seen and gone through, it feels like we can only really trust each other.
Anyway: I’m pretty sure someone is following me. Several different men, who don’t seem like cops – maybe Eastern Europeans. I’ve seen them outside my door and outside work. I don’t know what they want, but I noticed them after I received a few phone calls on 15 November from a Swedish guy calling himself Karl. He’s quite young and seems totally in over his head. He claims he’s come into possession of some important information, and he believes he’s being followed. It’s possible that he has some Snowden complex, but the more we talk, the more I trust him. And he’s very scared.
I set up a meeting with him in Brussels on 24 November at 4 p.m. at the glass elevator outside the Palais de Justice, but he’s incredibly nervous so I’m not quite sure how it will turn out.
As of now, this is all I know. But if something happens to me, it’s good to start there, maybe you could meet Karl if I don’t manage it?
But I hope you never have to read this.
Love, Gabi
PS. I’m leaving you one of my credit cards. Not sure how much cash you have, and I don’t want you to have to abandon your best friend for financial reasons.
14 November
Beirut
The gun is heavy – Jacob can barely hold it, his hands are trembling, and it’s a surprise he’s even holding it at all.
Yassim stands in the middle of the floor. He has his hands at his side now, and slowly he raises an arm towards him. He
says something, but Jacob doesn’t hear him, there’s a roar in his ears.
‘Who are you?’ he screams again.
Then Yassim is in front of him. The gun is ripped out of his hands and thrown onto the floor. Through the roar in his ears he can just make out the sound of it clattering onto the hard floor. Yassim is on top of him now, and Jacob holds up his hands to defend himself, but Yassim is too strong and Jacob falls back onto the floor, as if in slow motion, with his friend above him.
Yassim’s thin body feels heavy as he presses Jacob onto the cold floor; his hands are strong, relentless around his wrists. That is how he holds them when they fuck. But their sex is a game, or that’s how Jacob thought of it. Yassim’s domination, his own submission, each to stimulate the other. He’s thought of his submission as a choice, as roles they assumed and could break out of at any time. But this is serious, and it scares him for real.
Yassim turns him so that Jacob is lying with his stomach on the floor. And Jacob can feel Yassim’s weight, his breath, his hips, his cock. It’s humiliating. Not just getting caught snooping on the computer, but also that he is unable to defend himself physically. But the most humiliating thing of all is how horny this makes him. That he can’t resist this or defend himself against Yassim on any level. This is neither fucking nor a game. This is being steamrolled.
‘Fuck me,’ Jacob hisses against the cold floor. ‘Fuck me as hard as you fucking can.’
Yassim tears off his underwear, and then he’s moving inside him. The world explodes in pain and a raw, terrible pleasure, and for a moment Jacob thinks he’s going to die, that the world is ending.
*
Afterwards, Yassim pulls out and collapses with his back against one of the table legs. Jacob is still lying with his face against the floor, eyes closed. It’s too much. This is just way too much.
‘It was a Saturday,’ Yassim begins quietly. ‘My sister’s wedding was on a Saturday.’
Jacob lies completely still.
‘My whole family was there, of course. Everyone. My father was an important man. Influential. Powerful in his way. But most of all, he was very good at keeping everyone happy, understanding what people needed the most. That’s why they listened to him. That’s why the Americans listened to him, too. Everyone was there for the wedding. Secular rebels, al-Nusra representatives, al-Qaeda. Even Abu Bakr was on his way, but he was late. He wasn’t the caliph yet – just Ibrahim, an ambitious nobody.’
Yassim falls silent. It’s hard for him to tell this story, but Jacob knows that all he can do is lie still, act like he’s not even here.
‘It was a mistake, they said afterwards. The drone attack. An order that went awry. A drone pilot in fucking Virginia, or where ever they are, received the wrong coordinates. Who the hell knows? But instead of a wedding there were twelve funerals. My father. My mother. My cousins. My sister…’
Yassim pauses.
‘On her wedding day. She didn’t even have time to get married before they killed her.’
Jacob’s mouth is dry; he has the floor against his lips as he moves them. ‘But why did you lie?’ he whispers. ‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth from the beginning?’
He turns over so he can look at Yassim, leaning against the leg of the table with his eyes closed. ‘I couldn’t put that on you,’ Yassim says. ‘I don’t know you. Or… didn’t know you.’
Jacob rolls over on his side, leaning on an elbow. ‘I’m so sorry. If I’d known…’
Yassim waves his hand, embarrassed, self-deprecating. ‘Stop. How could you have known?’
They stay on the concrete floor for a while without speaking.
‘Where do you go when you disappear?’ Jacob finally asks.
Yassim doesn’t answer, but he opens his eyes and looks at him. He puts a finger to his lips to hush him. Then he stands up and stretches out a hand.
‘Come,’ he says. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
*
The city is quiet as they exit the parking garage in the middle of the night. A bass line is thumping from some roof terrace where the party hasn’t stopped despite the drizzle. A few cars roll by over the wet, bumpy asphalt. They don’t speak and Yassim leads him across a makeshift parking lot, into a late-night cafe which consists of just a few tarps over the ruins of a building that no one has bothered to tear down or rebuild. They buy Sprites and a bag of chips and sit beneath the tarp on dirty plastic chairs, sheltered from the rain. Yassim leans over towards Jacob and looks him in his eyes. The threat is gone now – there’s only warmth and sincerity.
‘Has anybody contacted you?’ he asks calmly. ‘Has anyone asked you to keep an eye on me?’
Jacob drinks the soda and looks into the parking lot and the rain through the dirty, transparent plastic. It’s cold and he pulls Yassim’s cardigan tighter around him. He nods slowly.
‘I thought we’d been careful,’ Yassim says. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drag you into this. I swear.’
‘They say you’re a terrorist,’ Jacob says. ‘That you’re planning an attack.’
His mouth is very dry. Saying it out loud makes it feel real. But Yassim just nods calmly.
‘Do you believe them?’ he asks.
Jacob turns and looks straight into his eyes for the first time since they left the apartment.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘You disappear to Syria. You lie. You tell me you’re a photographer and show me pictures I don’t think you’ve taken. You have a gun under the table in an apartment that’s far too big and expensive.’
He looks out into the rain again.
‘What the hell am I supposed to think?’
Yassim just nods gently and looks at him steadily. ‘Who’s contacted you? The Americans?’
Jacob looks back at him, ignoring the question. ‘Are you a terrorist?’ he asks. ‘Are you, Yassim?’
22 November
Stockholm
Klara shakes the envelope, and a gold American Express card falls out onto Maria’s coffee table. She can’t help but smile. Gabi thought of everything.
Maria is still standing with her back to Klara, staring out the window, and Klara downs the last of the wine in her glass before standing up. ‘Thank you so much. You’ve been incredibly helpful.’
Maria turns around and smiles at her. ‘Where are you off to now?’
‘Thought I’d go get myself a hotel room. I can’t exactly stay in Gabi’s taped-off apartment.’
‘That’s out of the question,’ Maria says in a voice that leaves no room for any protest. ‘I live alone and have two guest rooms. You’ll stay here, end of discussion.’
Then she goes and grabs sheets and towels out of a linen closet. Puts the small stack in Klara’s arms and points to the end of the corridor where the guest rooms are located. As she does it she looks deep into Klara’s eyes.
‘How are you doing?’ she says. ‘Have you sought out any help? Gabi’s told me how rough you’ve had it.’
Maria’s warm eyes and pressed, fragrant sheets. Her thoughtfulness and steadiness. Klara feels her eyes fill with tears. She’s been feeling better this autumn, but she still wakes up in the night. Can’t remember when it hasn’t been a struggle to get out of bed in the morning.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, surprised by how thin and small her voice sounds. ‘I’m not drinking as much as I did any more.’
Why did she say that? She knows she drank too much last year, until what happened in the summer. She knows she craves wine too much right now. But she never talked to anyone about it, hardly even admitted it to herself.
‘That’s good,’ Maria says quietly. ‘But maybe you need some real help? We can’t handle everything on our own, no matter how strong we think we are.’
Klara shrugs and turns around. She doesn’t have the energy to think about it more now. Doesn’t have room to care about herself. Gabriella is the one who needs help now. Besides, she is feeling better.
‘Should I take the room on the right?’ sh
e asks as she heads towards the guest rooms.
*
Maria finds some fish fillets in the freezer and throws together a béchamel sauce, which she pours over the fish and some spinach and puts it all in the oven and then, much to Klara’s hidden delight, opens another bottle of wine.
Klara knows the wine calms her and makes the struggle a little easier, keeps her from falling back into that dark hole again. For a moment, she succeeds in pushing away her thoughts about Grandpa and what happened to Gabriella, and instead can focus on just sitting in this beautiful kitchen with Maria, while the smell of fish in the oven starts to fill the air.
‘Sogliole alla Casanova,’ Maria says finally, as she serves up fish to Klara. ‘A good recipe for when you receive an unexpected guest.’
It’s not until they’ve cleared the table, Maria has headed for her bed, and Klara is smoking a cigarette on the balcony outside the guest room that those thoughts wash over her again. She feels snow swirling in the darkness, melting against her skin. Sees Grandpa’s face in his casket and can almost feel Grandma’s dry hand in her own.
She hasn’t called her yet. She was supposed to call as soon as she got to Stockholm. But then all of this happened. Gabriella pushed onto the ground outside her office. Her own escape from the police. Maria’s kindness. Gabi’s letter.
Klara sneaks back into the kitchen. Just one more glass of wine. Tomorrow she won’t drink at all.
She opens the fridge door and helps herself to the already open bottle. Tomorrow she’ll book tickets to Brussels.
It’s been a long time since she was there. She shivers at the thought of what happened before she left the city that she called home for many years, at the thought of what happened to her father and Mahmoud.
Her pulse starts to race; her chest tightens. She swallows half the glass in one gulp. Brussels. It’s as if she feels a purely physical resistance to returning to the city which she’d once been so fond of.
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