Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  “Don’t apply to Nairobi.”

  “Why not?”

  “They can never get people for the embassies in Africa. If you write down Nairobi, they’ll see nothing but that and just go on and on about Africa.” Johan leaned against the bar. “Apply for Shanghai and Bangkok. If the job in Nairobi is still available at Christmas, you can fire off an application for that too.”

  “To Shanghai then.”

  She raised her glass. Johan was probably right; he was good at these kinds of tactics. She would talk to Jamal about it this evening. He was probably still at work, she thought, with a pang of guilty conscience. He worked too much. He seemed to never say no—perhaps that was the problem. He was so thorough, in a way that surprised her and would probably irritate her someday. He never let anything go until he was completely satisfied. “It’s just work, Jamal,” she had said to him. “You’re wearing yourself out.” “Working at the Ministry of Justice isn’t just a job,” he had said. “It’s a responsibility.” She had laughed, until she realized that he meant it. He was a part of the legislative process. He created laws, and he was one of the people who had to ensure that laws were balanced and proportional—that they led to a better society. For him, it was personal. In Egypt, there hadn’t been any proper laws—just a state of emergency and a corrupt judiciary—just power. There, the law was just a text—nothing but empty words. There, all that existed was Mubarak and the army. But in Sweden the system worked, he had said. There was a law and it applied to everyone, no matter who they were.

  “Jesus, there’re a lot of people,” Johan exclaimed contentedly, as if it was he who had invited everyone. “Look, there she is, the new junior minister.” He pointed at a group of people with his glass. “I don’t understand how politicians work,” said Johan and shook his head as if it was a concern he had borne for a long time. The stupidity of politicians and their lack of basic competence was a subject Johan would return to, without fail, after a few beers. “Do you want another?” he asked.

  Carina shook her head. She was already fairly tipsy; if she drank any more she would only get sleepy. Some colleagues from the Security Policy Department streamed in through the door, spotted her and Johan, and pushed their way toward them. People from the department filled the bar. One of the newly arrived colleagues offered to buy a round for everyone. “Okay,” she said, “one more drink.” They toasted the end of the week. She and her colleagues were currently dealing with the most important issues of foreign policy, and they knew it. Everyone talked at one another about everything they had heard in the last twenty-four hours from Brussels. The noise enveloped her.

  These were her colleagues. Safe, intelligent, professional people who really cared about international policy and worked fifty hours a week to make sure that Sweden continued to be a player in the game of foreign policy. For eight years she had struggled to get here, to stand here and belong to this small group of people who had the opportunity to work at the MFA, brokering war and peace, dealing with security issues that everyone else only ever read about in the papers. And she had done it: she was one of them.

  5

  Stockholm, Friday, September 23

  The first bars of Stabat Mater floated out of the speakers: soft strings and then the song flowing out in dark tones. Pergolesi. Beautiful music.

  “Is the volume okay?”

  She nodded. No one she knew listened to classical music as much as Jamal did. In the beginning, she had thought that he was trying to impress her, but it wasn’t like that. Each time she came to his house, he would play classical music or Arab folk music. He thought that pop music was too loud, which she had tried to disprove by playing Depeche Mode, but he hadn’t been convinced. They would probably quarrel about it in the future, she thought with a smile.

  Finally she was here, at Jamal’s. The week lay behind her. Friday evenings always had something glimmering and beautiful about them. It was the part of the weekend furthest away from the next working week, the time when everything was still possible. The weekend felt at its most free on that evening, when she could finally be with Jamal. She could barely remember everything she had done during the week. She had managed—by the finest margin—to finish putting together the travel folder for the foreign minister’s visit to Ukraine and, practically at the end of the long Friday, she had—just before the deadline—managed to finish joint preparation with an agreement from all ministries. Like this, looking back, the hundreds of e-mails, hours of phone calls, meetings, and hasty lunches all formed a flickering haze. Somehow, she had crossed off every item on her Post-it note.

  She had left Johan at Pickwick’s with the others and come straight to Jamal’s when he called to say he had finished work. Their Friday nights together had become a comfortable routine that they had established carefully between themselves. She loved it. They hadn’t been together more than a few months and already they had a joint life with small moments of beauty, like this Friday evening.

  During the last month they had started to see each other more often. She had taken a few changes of clothes and makeup to his place and been given her own shelf in his medicine chest. These were the small steps toward moving in together. She noticed that he liked this, and that made her so happy. At the same time, there was something reserved about him—a kind of withdrawal, an inward movement, away from her. In many ways, he was more secretive than she had first believed, she thought, contemplating him as he went into the kitchen to check the food on the stove.

  She took a sip of the wine. It was good. Cold and dry.

  Jamal lived on the top floor of one of the apartment blocks in the Sjöstad district. The open-plan apartment was expansive, with panoramic windows offering a striking view of Stockholm’s southern suburbs, above which the dark night sky was filled with towering rain clouds. It was a quiet place. A lookout. The vaguely minimalist style reminded her of a business hotel. Jamal liked hotels, he had said. He liked it when things left little trace after themselves. The feeling of anonymity made him calm. It said BADAWI on his front door. His family came from Cairo. You couldn’t get further from Cairo than this peaceful suburb in south Stockholm.

  “You never need as many trinkets as you think,” he said once, when she’d asked why he had so little furniture. Half joking, half serious, he added that you should never own more than you could pack and carry away in three hours.

  Jamal’s cell rang. He disappeared into the bedroom and pulled the door shut behind him. She stayed sitting in the living room and looked out of the windows. He sounded agitated. She could hear him speaking low and fast, as if he feared being overheard. Sometimes he raised his voice in small outbursts that she didn’t understand a word of. He sounded different when he spoke Arabic, or perhaps it was just the person he was speaking to who made him sound like that—angry and sharp in a way she had never heard before. The conversation dragged on and eventually she became restless and got up. She heard his terse answers and then what sounded like an attempt at reassurance. Jamal didn’t normally leave the room when talking on the phone. But this didn’t seem to be any ordinary phone call. At the other end was someone who belonged in the other part of his life, the part he never mentioned and that they never talked about.

  Shamefully aware that she was eavesdropping, she moved toward the windows. Jamal never talked about Egypt. It was as if it was a dark secret within him, so hidden away that she almost forgot it existed. It struck her how little she actually knew about this part of his life. He had only mentioned his parents once. His father had had a legal practice in Cairo, he had said. But the father didn’t seem to be alive any longer, because Jamal had talked about him in the past tense. He never mentioned his mother; he said little about growing up in Cairo. Normally, she liked people to have a secret, something of their own. But, right now, all she felt was vague unease.

  She dropped into the sofa again and waited. The morning paper was lying on the coffee table. She leafed through the first part distractedly but nothing caught he
r interest and she put it down. It was then she caught sight of the small book: a thin volume with a yellow cover—worn and well used, as if it had been in someone’s coat pocket for many years.

  She picked it up, opening it carefully. A collection of poems, she thought with a smile. How lovely to think of Jamal sitting and reading Arabic poetry. What a shame that she didn’t understand what they said. All she could do was look at the rows of ornate characters that flowed into each other in beautiful, yet incomprehensible patterns. Perhaps they were religious texts. The thought that Jamal might be religious had never occurred to her. Perhaps he was a Muslim. To her, religion was something so alien that she hadn’t even considered the possibility. Although, presumably, he wasn’t all that religious, she reflected immediately, because he drank wine. Then she felt ashamed of her anxious train of thought—as if it was a problem if he were a Muslim. The small, prejudiced worry that had pushed its way forward irritated her. She didn’t want to feel like that, didn’t want to be someone who thought like that.

  One section, in particular, was heavily read. The book opened by itself at a certain point. It was a long poem that stretched across several pages. The paper was well thumbed, discolored and a little glossy from the hands that had turned the pages so many times. Jamal’s hands had turned the pages specifically to this poem. She looked at the rows of foreign characters and a strong affection for the fragile pages grew within her. Her beloved Jamal, who read poetry.

  Two of the final verses in the poem were marked with a blurred, vertical line in pencil. She had done just the same when she was younger and wanted to remember beautiful passages in books by Camus or Mayakovsky, or other authors that she worshipped at the time. One particular line was also underlined. She looked hard at its wavy ornamented characters and small dots, as if the meaning would become apparent if she stared at the Arabic for long enough.

  The door opened.

  Jamal sank down beside her on the sofa. He looked tense, rubbing his face without saying anything. He barely seemed to acknowledge that she was sitting next to him.

  “Sorry,” he said finally. “I had to take that.”

  “Who was it?”

  “No one in particular.”

  He shook his head and immediately looked more resolute. No one in particular. It was obvious that he didn’t want her to ask more questions. He was sitting next to her but looked like he was far away in his thoughts. She could only guess. She stretched out her hand to gently touch his, as if bringing him back to life.

  “How are you?”

  “Okay.” He looked at her. His gaze was completely empty for an entire second. Then he gathered himself and focused. “I’m fine.”

  Seeing the book that she was still holding in her hand, he said, “Where did you find that?”

  “It was lying here.”

  He took the book from her. “Where?”

  “On the table.” She waited and watched. What was up with him?

  As if he understood her thoughts, he said in entirely different tone of voice, “I was just wondering. Sorry, I’m tired. Stressed.” He took a deep breath and sighed. Now he had his ordinary smile back. “Sorry, darling.”

  They kissed. It felt good when he held her; to be close to him again subdued the unpleasant feeling she had just had. She noticed how he relaxed.

  “How was Brussels?”

  “Hard work.”

  He looked at her in surprise.

  “Difficult discussion about cooperation on north Africa. Security in the region. Mediterranean cooperation. You know. It was so . . . racist.” She sighed. She really shouldn’t have gone at them so hard at the meeting the day before, even if, at the same time, she was rather satisfied that she hadn’t let all those distasteful statements from the French and the others go unopposed. “They talked about refugees from north Africa as if they were all criminals. Terrorists.” She sighed. “So I talked about human rights. I gave them all a telling off.”

  He laughed.

  “I was so angry. I’ve never been so angry before.”

  “I know how it is,” he said. “Just ignore them. There’s no point trying to change them.” He shook his head slowly.

  She put her arms around him and kissed him.

  “You know the report I sent to you? There was a man from the Commission who asked me to leak it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He popped up like some jack-in-the-box and gave me a draft directive about intelligence cooperation in the EU. Some secret organization. He said it had to be stopped. It was strange.” It occurred to her that Jamal could pull the report up on his e-mail so that they could look at it together. “Get your laptop; I’ll show you.”

  Jamal fetched his computer and plugged it in. He found the e-mail from Carina and opened the attachment. It was a scanned copy of the EU report. Security Across Borders—A New European Intelligence Service.

  “Have you read it?”

  “Not all of it. I haven’t had time.”

  Jamal scrolled down through a few pages of the document. “Looks genuine. European Intelligence Service. Never heard of them.”

  “He said that it would launch next year. They’re going to take the decision at the next council meeting.”

  “What was this man called?”

  “Jean.”

  “Jean?”

  “That’s what he called himself.”

  They read together in silence. Jamal examined a few pages a little longer, then scrolled to the end. “Typical Brussels prose,” he noted. “Why did he give this to you?”

  “Because I’m Swedish, I think.”

  Presumably Jean had given her the proposal because he thought that Sweden should get in on it early and exert an influence. He was probably just a normal civil servant at the Commission who wanted Swedish points of view on a coming proposal. He had expressed himself rather dramatically, but that was probably what he had meant. Sweden was notoriously bad at entering EU processes early. The Swedish foreign policy machine rarely managed to find things out in time to contribute with ideas and form legislative work in the EU before all the texts were locked and ready. The EU’s back-door diplomacy was entirely dominated by Britain, Spain, France, and Italy. They reigned in the corridors of Brussels. The man probably wanted to give Sweden the chance to react, pull the emergency brake before this new security cooperation was fact.

  But he had also given the report to her, personally. He had talked about conscience, whatever he meant by that. In hindsight, it all seemed a bit daft.

  “I sent the report to Justice, L3. This is their headache.”

  They refilled their wine glasses and went out on to the balcony to smoke. Carina only smoked occasionally, preferably with Jamal. She inhaled deeply and a cold gust made her shudder. He was standing close to her, with his arm around her waist and looking out into the darkness. They said nothing. It was a beautiful silence, an affinity. She could talk with Jamal like she could with no one else, but the last few times they had also been silent together. It felt good, to be silent with someone. It had been years since she’d been able to do that without feeling lonely.

  “Where should we go on vacation then?” she said lightly.

  “I don’t know,” he said in the same tone, playfully. “Any suggestions?”

  “Somewhere warm, I think. Maybe Egypt?”

  She glanced at him. She paused. Perhaps she was going too quickly. She should be more careful, but she couldn’t help herself. The silence surrounding his Egyptian background was like an annoying scab that she couldn’t help but pick. “I mean, especially now,” she added quickly. “It would be interesting—after the Arab Spring.”

  Jamal snorted. “Arab Spring.”

  She paused.

  “Nothing has happened!” he burst out in the same loud voice. “People thought they would get freedom but it’s just the same shit as before. Same damn military hanging on to power, like the fucking parasites they are.” He angrily blew cigarette sm
oke into the darkness. “Mubarak’s old friends. Same gang. You have to burn them off, like leeches. It’s the only way.”

  She remained silent.

  “And the EU, with its promises of support. Where is that support? They don’t want to provide support; they just want to buy up all of Egypt. They don’t care. They don’t give a damn about the Egyptians.”

  “But surely the EU is supporting development . . .” she began, carefully.

  He looked hard at her. She had been going to say something about Egypt, its colonial history that certainly cast a shadow over relations in the Mediterranean, but that there was also an honest will to ensure Egypt became democratic, but she said nothing. This wasn’t just about international policy for Jamal. Her bird’s-eye perspective was too distant from the events. She was looking at it like an analyst, but for him it was his other home country at stake. She had never before seen him so upset. Maybe he knew people who had taken part in the demonstrations—friends and family who had been badly treated.

  “I don’t trust them one bit,” he said angrily. “The EU doesn’t want democracy. The EU wants stable, calm regional neighbors. They don’t care about people, or about Egypt. Not really. For the EU, it would almost be better if the military regime came back. More stable. And the Americans are even worse. They bought Mubarak to protect Israel. They’re scared to death of Arabs. It’s not surprising that people turn to terrorism, because they’re all Arabs already.”