Freeman's

by John Freeman

  ‘Where are they?’ Gurdev asked. Twenty minutes had passed.

  ‘Women’s problems,’ Jagroop said, as if to elucidate.

  Ten more minutes and Gurdev got up onto his big flat feet and located the toilets. He waited until the door opened and a middle-aged blonde woman came out, bent under a huge backpack.

  ‘Is my wife in there?’

  ‘I don’t know. What she look like?’

  ‘Indian.’

  ‘Then no.’

  He tried Balbir’s phone, Kulwant’s—voicemails both. ‘Where the hell are they?’ he said, back at the table. ‘The fair starts in forty-five minutes.’

  ‘Lost your wives?’ Mum said. ‘What kind of men are you?’

  ‘Hang on,’ Jagroop said, going to his phone. He had an app, in a cloud, he added, confusingly, and Kulwant’s phone was synced up. ‘Give me a minute. They’re probably shopping.’ He used his fingers to zoom in. ‘The harbour? The port?’ He looked to his brother. ‘Maybe their phone was stolen? Do you think they’ve been kidnapped? Shall we call the police?’

  Then Gurdev’s phone rang. It was the sarpanch—the leader—of Jandiala calling to congratulate him on the amazing sale of his land.

  They made it to the port, wheeling their mother, but the ferry had already detached from the harbour and a volume of scummy greenish water was widening between them.

  ‘Is that them?’ Jagroop said, pointing to the rear of the deck.

  ‘BALBIR!’ Gurdev called.

  ‘Clever little bitches,’ Mum said in what sounded almost like admiration.

  On board, Balbir and Kulwant huddled together against the railing, the wind flapping their chunnis across their faces. Tears stung. Behind them, in her ‘Frozen’ Elsa dress, Zubaidah spun the wheels of her red tractor and Jaswinder watched, chin and mouth tucked into the upturned collar of her coat.

  ‘They’ve seen us,’ Balbir said, shivering.

  ‘It’s too late. It doesn’t matter.’ Then: ‘Where’s your bag?’

  Balbir opened it and Kulwant removed the van keys and overarmed them into the water. Gurdev and Jagroop were shouting, gesticulating, their words swirling in the wind.

  ‘What are they saying?’ Balbir asked.

  ‘I don’t know but’—Kulwant held Balbir’s hand—‘ready?’

  And together: ‘PUCK CHOO!’

  Athena Farrokhzad was born in 1983 and lives in Stockholm. She is a poet, literary critic, translator, playwright, and teacher of creative writing. Her first volume of poetry, Vitsvit, was published in 2013 by Albert Bonniers Förlag (translated by Jennifer Hayashida and published as White Blight by Argos Books). In 2016, her second volume of poetry, Trado, which was written together with the Romanian poet Svetlana Cârstean and from which these poems are excerpted, was published.

  Jennifer Hayashida is a writer, translator, and visual artist. Her most recent projects include translation from the Swedish of Athena Farrokhzad’s White Blight (Argos Books, 2015) and Karl Larsson’s Form/Force (Black Square Editions, 2015), named one of the ten best books of 2015 by Partisan. She is director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, CUNY, and serves on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

  (15)

  ATHENA FARROKHZAD

  TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY JENNIFER HAYASHIDA

  Svetlana said: If you want to write about loss someone you love must leave so you understand the meaning of the word.

  Svetlana said: When someone leaves she has already ceased being the one you love.

  Svetlana said: The one you love will stay with you, regardless of the havoc you wreak.

  (16)

  ATHENA FARROKHZAD

  TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY JENNIFER HAYASHIDA

  I said: The more important it is to me that what you say is true, the more I doubt it. Once I was as certain as a returning bird of passage. I never wavered in my goal, never confused a rest stop with a destination, never turned around for a forgotten bundle, did not allow myself visions when, parched, I hovered above the desert. I was the master of a vast horizon, a clear, cloudless longing. Now I understand how dangerous it is to not prepare for the loss.

  (33)

  ATHENA FARROKHZAD

  TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY JENNIFER HAYASHIDA

  I said: Where I come from we die for foreign enemies and domestic traitors during days history does not bother making note of.

  Svetlana said: Where I come from our inherited talent for dying has made us survivors.

  I said: Where I come from a hostage drama is played out between us and history, where no ransom can alter the outcome.

  Svetlana said: Where I come from we reach our expiration date before we get to the refrigerator case.

  I said: Where I come from our tongues are greased and our elbows sharp, or if it is the other way around, or if the wind which blows away history’s injuries has passed, without us noticing any difference.

  Svetlana said: Where you come from you struggle for what became our ruin with a fire only those whose struggles have not yet fallen into ruin can struggle.

  Samanta Schweblin was born in Buenos Aires in 1978. Her collection of short stories Pájaros en la boca won the Premio Literario Casa de las Américas. In 2010 she was named a Granta Best Young Spanish-Language Novelist. In 2012 she was awarded the Premio Juan Rulfo for her story Un hombre sin suerte, and in 2014 she won the Premio Konex-Diploma for her career as a short-story writer.

  Megan McDowell has translated books by many Latin American and Spanish authors, and stories she translated have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, Harper’s, Vice, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

  An Unlucky Man

  SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN

  TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY MEGAN MCDOWELL

  The day I turned eight, my sister—who absolutely always had to be the center of attention—swallowed an entire cup of bleach. Abi was three. First she smiled, maybe a little disgusted at the nasty taste; then her face crumpled in a frightened grimace of pain. When Mom saw the empty cup hanging from Abi’s hand, she turned as white as my sister.

  “Abi-my-god,” was all Mom said. “Abi-my-god,” and it took her a few seconds longer to spring into action.

  She shook Abi by the shoulders, but my sister didn’t respond. She yelled, but Abi still didn’t react. She ran to the phone and called Dad, and when she came running back Abi was still standing there, the cup just dangling from her hand. Mom grabbed the cup and threw it into the sink. She opened the fridge, took out the milk, and poured a glass. She stood looking at the glass, then looked at Abi, then at the glass, and finally she dropped the glass into the sink as well. Dad worked very close by and got home quickly, but Mom still had time to do the whole show with the glass of milk again before he pulled up in the car and started honking the horn and yelling.

  Mom ran out of the house in a flash, with Abi clutched to her chest. The front door, the gate, and the car doors were all flung open. There was more horn honking and Mom, who was already sitting in the car, started to cry. Dad had to shout my name twice before I understood that I was the one who was supposed to close up.

  We drove the first ten blocks in less time than it took me to close the car door and fasten my seat belt. But when we got to the main avenue, the traffic was practically stopped. Dad honked the horn and shouted out the window, “We have to get to the hospital! We have to get to the hospital!” The cars around us maneuvered and miraculously let us pass, but a couple of cars up we had to start the whole operation all over again. Dad braked in the traffic, stopped honking the horn, and pounded his head against the steering wheel. I had never seen him do such a thing. There was a moment of silence, and then he sat up and looked at me in the rearview mirror. He turned around and said to me:

  “Take off your underpants.”

  I was wearing my school uniform. All my underwear was white, but I wasn’t exactly thinking about that just then, and I c
ouldn’t understand Dad’s request. I pressed my hands into the seat to support myself better. I looked at Mom, who shouted:

  “Take off your damned underpants!”

  I took them off. Dad grabbed them out of my hands. He rolled down the window, went back to honking the horn, and started waving my underpants out the window. He raised them high while he yelled and kept honking, and it seemed that everyone on the avenue turned around to look at them. My underpants were small, but they were also very white. An ambulance a block behind us turned on its siren, caught up with us quickly, and started clearing a path. Dad kept on waving the underpants until we reached the hospital.

  They left the car by the ambulances and jumped out. Without waiting, Mom ran into the hospital with Abi. I wasn’t sure whether I should get out or not: I didn’t have any underpants on and I wanted to find out where Dad had left them, but he was already out of the car and slamming the door, his hands empty.

  “Come on, come on,” said Dad.

  He opened my door and helped me out. He gave my shoulder a few pats as we walked into the emergency room. Mom emerged from a doorway at the back and signaled to us. I was relieved to see she was talking again, giving explanations to the nurses.

  “Stay here,” said Dad, and he pointed to some orange chairs on the other side of the main waiting area.

  I sat. Dad went into the consulting room with Mom and I waited for a while. I don’t know how long, but it felt like a long time. I pressed my knees together tightly and thought about everything that had happened so quickly, and about the possibility that any of the kids from school had seen the spectacle with my underpants. When I sat up straight, my jumper stretched and my bare bottom touched part of the plastic seat. Sometimes the nurse went in or out of the consulting room and I could hear my parents arguing. At one point I craned my neck and caught a glimpse of Abi moving restlessly on one of the cots, and I knew that, at least for today, she wasn’t going to die. And I still had to wait.

  Then a man came and sat down next to me. I don’t know where he came from; I hadn’t noticed him before.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  I thought about saying “Very well,” which is what Mom always said if someone asked her that, even if she’d just told me and my sister that we were driving her insane.

  “OK,” I said.

  “Are you waiting for someone?”

  I thought about it. I wasn’t really waiting for anyone; at least, it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing right then. So I shook my head, and he said:

  “Why are you sitting in the waiting room, then?”

  I understood it was a great contradiction. He opened a small bag he had on his lap and rummaged a bit, unhurried. Then he took a pink slip of paper from his wallet.

  “Here it is. I knew I had it somewhere.”

  The paper was printed with the number 92.

  “It’s good for an ice cream. My treat,” he said.

  I told him no. You shouldn’t accept things from strangers.

  “But it’s free, I won it.”

  “No.” I looked straight ahead and we sat in silence.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, without getting angry.

  He took a magazine from his bag and started to fill in a crossword puzzle. The door to the consulting room opened again and I heard Dad say, “I will not condone such nonsense.” That’s Dad’s clincher for ending almost any argument, but the man didn’t seem to hear it.

  “It’s my birthday,” I said.

  It’s my birthday, I repeated to myself. What should I do?

  The man held the pen to mark a box on the puzzle and looked at me in surprise. I nodded without looking at him, aware that I had his attention again.

  “But . . .” he said, and he closed the magazine. “Sometimes I just don’t understand women. If it’s your birthday, why are you in a hospital waiting room?”

  He was an observant man. I straightened up again in my seat and I saw that, even then, I barely came up to his shoulders. He smiled and I smoothed my hair. And then I said:

  “I’m not wearing any underpants.”

  I don’t know why I said it. It’s just that it was my birthday and I wasn’t wearing underpants, and I couldn’t stop thinking about those two circumstances. He was still looking at me. Maybe he was startled or offended, and I understood that, though it wasn’t my intention, there was something vulgar about what I had just said.

  “But it’s your birthday,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “It’s not fair. A person can’t just go around without underpants when it’s her birthday.”

  “I know,” I said emphatically, because now I understood just how Abi’s whole display was a personal affront to me.

  He sat for a moment without saying anything. Then he looked toward the big windows that looked out onto the parking lot.

  “I know where to get you some underpants,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Problem solved.” He stowed his things and stood up.

  I hesitated. Precisely because I wasn’t wearing underpants, but also because I didn’t know if he was telling the truth. He looked toward the front desk and waved one hand at the attendants.

  “We’ll be right back,” he said, and he pointed to me. “It’s her birthday.” And then I thought, Oh please Jesus, don’t let him say anything about my underpants, but he didn’t: he opened the door and winked at me, and then I knew I could trust him.

  We went out to the parking lot. Standing up, I barely cleared his waist. Dad’s car was still next to the ambulances, and a policeman was circling it, annoyed. I kept looking over at the policeman, and he watched us walk away. The air wrapped around my legs and rose, making a tent out of my uniform. I had to hold it down while I walked, keeping my legs awkwardly close together.

  He turned around to see if I was following him, and he saw me fighting with my skirt.

  “We’d better keep close to the wall.”

  “I want to know where we’re going.”

  “Don’t get persnickety with me now, darling.”

  We crossed the avenue and went into a shopping center. It was an uninviting place, and I was pretty sure Mom didn’t go there. We walked to the back toward a gigantic clothing store. Before we went in he said to me, “Don’t get lost,” and gave me his hand, which was cold and very soft. He waved to the cashiers with the same gesture he’d made toward the desk attendants when we left the hospital, but no one responded. We walked through the aisles. In addition to dresses, pants, and shirts, there were work clothes: hard hats, yellow overalls like those the trash collectors wore, smocks for cleaning ladies, plastic boots, and even some tools. I wondered if he bought his clothes there and if he would use any of those things in his job, and then I also wondered what his name was.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  We were surrounded by tables of underwear for men and women. Right in front of me was a large bin full of giant underpants, bigger than any I’d seen before, and they were only three pesos each. With one of those pairs of underpants, they could have made three for someone my size.

  “Not those,” he said. “Here.” And he led me a little farther to a section with smaller sizes. “Look at all the underpants they have . . . Which will you choose, my lady?”

  I looked around a little. Almost all of them were white or pink. I pointed to a white pair, one of the few that didn’t have a bow on them.

  “These,” I said. “But I can’t pay for them.”

  He came a little closer and said into my ear:

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Are you the owner?”

  “No. It’s your birthday.”

  I smiled.

  “But we have to find better ones. We need to be sure.”

  “OK, darling,” I ventured.

  “Don’t say ‘darling,’” he said. “I’ll get persnickety.” And he imitated me holding down my skirt in the parking lot.

  He made me laugh. When he
finished clowning around he held out two closed fists in front of me, and he stayed just like that until I understood; I touched the right one. He opened it: empty.

  “You can still choose the other one.”

  I touched his other hand. It took me a moment to realize it was a pair of underpants because I had never seen black ones before. And they were for girls because they had white hearts on them, so small they looked like dots, and Hello Kitty’s face was on the front, right where there was usually that bow Mom and I don’t like at all.

  “You’ll have to try them on,” he said.

  I held the underpants to my chest. He gave me his hand again and we went toward the changing rooms, which looked empty. We peered in. He said he didn’t know if he could go with me because they were for women only. He said I would have to go alone. It was logical because, unless it’s someone you know very well, it’s not good for people to see you in your underpants. But I was afraid of going into the dressing room alone. Or something worse: coming out and finding him gone.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?

  He knelt down. Then he was almost my height, or maybe I was a couple of inches taller.

  “Because I’m cursed.”

  “Cursed? What’s cursed?”

  “A woman who hates me said that the next time I say my name, I’m going to die.”

  I thought it might be another joke, but he said it very seriously.

  “You could write it down for me.”

  “Write it down?”

  “If you wrote it you wouldn’t say it, you’d be writing it. And if I know your name I can call for you and I won’t be so scared to go into the dressing room alone.”

  “But we can’t be sure. What if this woman thinks writing my name is the same as saying it? What if what she really meant was letting someone else know, putting my name out into the world in any way?”