The Dying Game

by Asa Avdic

  I performed my morning routines as if in a haze, showering, brushing my teeth, and getting dressed without any idea what I was doing. Every cell in my body felt like it wanted to flee, and on the commuter train to work I sat slightly hunched over my own body, as though someone had punched me in the stomach. It was a hangover and chemical regret; it was the feeling of not being one hundred percent sure what I had said to whom the night before; and as I sat there gazing out at the gray suburbs whizzing by the train window on my way to the department village while simultaneously scrutinizing each word and action I could recall from the night before, it struck me for the first time, in earnest, that I had probably fallen for Henry.

  A FEW WEEKS later, my boss unexpectedly called me into his office and asked me to put together a “dream team,” as he called it. We would carry out explorative studies and calculations in preparation for a potential aid mission to the Protectorate of Kyzyl Kum, on the border between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, an area that had been the responsibility of the Union of Friendship since Cold War II in the early 2000s. The more he told me, the more hopeless it seemed. Even the aid project itself, in the vague description, appeared almost unfeasible, and it sounded at least as difficult to come up with reasonable estimates of how much work, materials, and personnel would be needed, given the combination of ambiguous guidelines and strict budgetary limits. But even so, something made my knees quiver as he spoke. It was more a feeling I got than anything he actually said, that for once it might be possible to do something that meant something. Something good. It would take an awful lot of slaving away at a desk with various budgeting calculations, and it would take coordination among several notoriously poorly organized units in the involved authorities, and the time we had at our disposal was very limited. On the whole, it was an impossible task, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere in there, under all the layers of bureaucracy and complications, was a glimmer of possibility. So I said yes, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sight of my boss’s surprised face when, after making certain that I truly had the authority to handpick my team members, I accepted the assignment.

  “As long as they agree to it,” my boss said, squeezing my hand with a bewildered expression. It was obvious that he had expected a different reaction from me, perhaps rage, since he was clearly trying to kick me down a rung or two while pretending he was doing nothing of the sort. More debate, maybe; more resistance.

  The first thing I did when the meeting was over was walk into the sea of cubicles on the hunt for Henry. We’d had lunch together a few times since finishing up our last project, but it was as if our secret language had fallen along the wayside once we were no longer working together, and I was happy to have been given the perfect excuse to try to reestablish our alliance. I found him in the hallway, and as I dragged him down to the cafeteria and began to tell him about the task, I saw a gleam come to life in his eyes too. It turned out that during his years in the military he had been trained in the type of calculation program we would need to use to get an overview, and that he would be a perfect fit for the project team. We spoke for a long time about how we might proceed, who in our unit might be a good fit, and how the project should be laid out, in terms of both sheer logistics and a timeline. And suddenly it felt like we were back in our bubble again. By the time we went our separate ways that evening, I felt relieved; for the first time I was absolutely certain that whatever it was made of, there was a bond between Henry and me, and we both felt it.

  THE NEXT DAY when I got to work, I found an e-mail from Henry, written late the night before, in which he curtly informed me that it would not be possible for him to take part in the project after all because he considered his knowledge of the issues at hand to be far too elementary and inadequate. He wrote, “. . . therefore, unfortunately, I must back out, and I hope that this does not result in too much extra inconvenience for you. Best wishes.” It was such a formal e-mail, like something written by a stranger to kindly but firmly cancel a magazine subscription. An hour or so later, our unit secretary ventured into the cubicles with the message that Henry had come down with the flu and would not be in the office that day. He was back at work the next day, but he didn’t mention a single word about the project or his strangely impersonal and distant e-mail. He continued to treat me politely and correctly. One month later, he quit our unit and started working way off in the F buildings, as the unit director for a program that evaluated rehabilitation. We parted on his last day with a quick hug, awkward and impersonal, and a vague promise to have lunch sometime in the future. It never happened, because he never got in touch. I saw him once in a while from a distance at the commuter train station, but I didn’t speak to him again.

  Not until I saw him on Isola.

  THE PROJECT HENRY declined turned out—against all odds and completely unexpectedly—to be a success. Somehow, presumably mostly to show up my despised boss (and maybe Henry too), I managed to accomplish everything within the allotted time frame and budget, and with the desired outcome. As a result, I and some of my team got to visit Kyzyl Kum to make sure everything went according to plan when the aid project itself started up. Our visit was originally meant to be a one-time thing, but later on we were asked to return time and again, for longer and longer periods, and in the end I found myself running the entire aid project on-site; I was also in charge of all coordination with the military effort. When discord between the clans ramped up, the security situation deteriorated, and unrest spread in the area, we were suddenly the only humanitarian workers on the ground. The military was there too, of course, but the local population was afraid of them, and for good reason. So they turned to us, and instead of being the director of an aid station I was suddenly in charge of a refugee camp that grew with every passing day, a job I unfortunately had no idea how to handle. Nothing I’d ever done in my life up to that point had prepared me for it, this improbable onrush of desperate people who had nothing but the clothes on their backs. The reinforcements and help we had been promised never arrived, and then once it did arrive it was so lacking as to be insulting.

  I tried to compensate for my lack of knowledge and all the other shortages by working as hard and as much as I possibly could. At first this meant all day, and eventually it was all night too. And it worked. It was as if I had found an undiscovered bank account inside myself, which until that point had just been sitting there full of enormous sums. I did things I never thought I could manage, making withdrawal after withdrawal from my inner funds, and by the time I discovered the cost of doing so it was too late. In the moment, there was no time for that sort of reflection. It was the end result that mattered. So I kept working, along with everyone else; we worked until our eyes couldn’t focus any longer, and suddenly we discovered that in the distant view of others we had become heroes of some sort. Journalists began to travel down to see us; they took pictures, asked questions, and went back home again in their secure transports. Sometimes we were sent pages of newspapers in the unreliable mail, and in them we could read about our own spectacular feats, which felt surreal and ridiculous as we stood up to our knees in mud, trying to explain to people why there was no food and why we couldn’t help them get away. But it just kept happening. We were given honors and we received media attention. My young boss was promoted to another unit, and I myself grew more and more famous. Every time I came home it got worse. I was invited to participate in TV and radio programs, first in my capacity as a Kyzyl Kum expert, but as time went on the interest shifted to me personally. One of the big state news portals designated me one of the “Heroes of the Union.” I received offers to come prepare food with celebrity chefs on TV, have my living room redone by celebrated interior decorators with horrid taste, sit in prominent seats at large galas and party functions, walk on red carpets. I always declined. The thought of becoming someone everyone recognized terrified me, and it was always a relief to return to the catastrophe, no matter how strange that might seem.

 
IN THE END, something had to give. Of course. For many different reasons. And once it started to fall apart, it happened fast. I was ordered to terminate my project and I left Kyzyl Kum for good two years after I went there for the first time. When I got back home, I was in very bad shape. I spent my first month at home in the closed recovery unit of the veterans’ hospital. Later I was moved to more specialized rehab units, and eventually I was discharged and was able to return home, to my family and my desk job at the department. Then came the melancholy, the pointlessness, and the shame. Because there I was, back again, in my safe country, in my comfortable home, with my stocked refrigerator. The people of Kyzyl Kum were still there and I had let them down in so very many ways. I remembered a book I had read a long time before about how people who have been through tragedy are often struck by terrible feelings of guilt over having survived, which at the time had seemed preposterous. But now, in light of my time in Kyzyl Kum, it became perfectly understandable. It was as if I were not in the right. As if something had gone wrong somewhere, or maybe it was me, maybe I had cheated? When I first came home and was in the hospital, all I wanted to do was sleep, but once I was discharged from all the various steps of rehabilitation and was back to my everyday life again, I had more and more trouble sleeping. Kyzyl Kum was still there in my body. I was like a miner who could no longer get all the coal dust off her hands. The fear and uncertainty had become part of me. The cold nights, the fear, the whispering sounds from the dormitories, the explosions at night, sometimes far off, sometimes close by. I heard the rats scurrying, the people moving; I pulled my thin army blanket over me as if I were freezing, even though I was lying alone in my apartment under a warm down comforter. I often found myself sitting on the sofa at night, staring without seeing at TV programs about dangerous animals, wars, or crimes committed long ago. Black-and-white newsreels and slow documentaries that were broadcast when normal people were asleep. I often sat like that until the morning paper thudded through the mail slot at dawn. That was a sound I both feared and welcomed, a signal that this night, too, was lost, that I had officially failed once more, which meant I could go lie down and sleep dreamlessly for a few hours before my alarm clock rang and yanked me into yet another day.

  SIRI CONTINUED TO live with Nour. There was nothing strange about this, and at the same time there was. Even back when Siri was born, Nour had surprised me by doing things I had never seen her do during my own childhood. Her first gift to Siri was a dress that looked like a cake for an oligarch’s wedding, a gigantic, pink and white croque-en-bouche, with lace every which way. When I turned the dress inside out I noticed that it was dry-clean only, but when I pointed out the absurdity in giving a baby a dress that couldn’t be machine-washed, Nour tossed her head in irritation.

  “You really need to stop being so uptight, Anna,” she said, taking a deep drag from her cigarillo, which she had lit in the hospital despite all the warning signs. “Let the girl have nice clothes, it’s never killed anyone.” This was pretty rich coming from a woman who had cut her own daughter’s hair with kitchen shears and let her go around dressed in secondhand Pioneer clothing every day year after year, because they were “priceworthy, practical, and political,” Nour’s three catchwords when it came to my upbringing, back in the day. But if there was anything Nour was good at, it was forgetting. And I was grateful that she was taking any interest in Siri at all; from where I was standing this was not an automatic result of becoming a grandmother.

  It soon turned out that Nour didn’t just show interest in Siri, she truly loved her. And Siri loved her back. Her “Mommo” with the furrowed cheeks, black hair (Nour’s hair had gone gray, maybe even white, years ago, but she continued to dye it), her hard pinches and rolled-up sleeves; Mommo who smelled like tobacco and patchouli shampoo, who rapped her crutch on the floor when she was angry, made ćevapčići while humming and smoking at the stove in her old apartment in the Olof Palme neighborhood, which had once been called Gamla Stan. Even before I went to Kyzyl Kum, Siri spent a lot of time there. Maybe too much, I sometimes thought in retrospect. Nour was the one who picked her up from the Pioneers’ day care, brought Siri to her place, prepared food. I would go get her from Nour’s around seven; when I worked late she would sleep over.

  In time, Nour’s office turned into Siri’s bedroom. Like Nour herself, the piles of books and papers did something they’d never done during my own childhood: they moved aside and made space. A slow army of stuffed animals and toys, little dresses and floral sheets captured more and more territory in a clever pincer maneuver until the piles of books retreated and were crammed up along the wall. Eventually some of them even ended up in cardboard boxes up in the attic. So it wasn’t strange at all that Nour should be the one to take care of Siri when I went away the first time. The strange part was what happened later: Siri never really came home again, and I didn’t quite know how it ended up that way. I recall a passage from one of Nour’s dusty old favorite novels that she had presumably forced me to read when I was younger, in which one of the main characters is asked how his financial ruin came about, and he responds, “Gradually and then suddenly.” That’s exactly how it happened when Siri moved in with Nour. The first time I returned home from Kyzyl Kum, I already knew I would be leaving again soon, so it seemed pointless to bring Siri home. And the next time it seemed pointless again. And again. And later, when I came home sick, it seemed not only pointless but also impossible. And in the end it seemed pointless for other, more difficult reasons. I watched them together, Siri and Nour, with their dark heads bent together, the small one and the larger one. They had started to belong together. When they walked outside, Nour held her crutch in one hand and Siri by the other, even though it must have been difficult and unsteady.

  I had never experienced that side of Nour. Suddenly great care flowed out of her hands. They prepared food, braided hair, tucked in blankets, zipped zippers, tied shoes. And Siri always had one hand on her, in her hair, on her arm, against her cheek. When I saw them together I saw a closed, self-sustaining system, in which energy was transferred from one party to the other, in which nothing was really lacking. I had been away, they had been home; they made up one another’s everyday lives, while I was the exception. It felt as if I were mostly a bother to them, as if they were both ashamed because they were supposed to love me but couldn’t. So Siri stayed with Nour. I was the one who came for visits, twice a week. And even when we were all in the same room, it felt like I was observing them from the outside. They sat in a circle of light, leaning against one another, bent over a joint project that demanded their full attention. Part of me wanted to put out my hand and touch them, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was no longer part of my own family. They had become one thing; I had become another.

  The person who gazed back out of the mirror at me these days was someone very like myself: a tall, thin, middle-aged woman, short hair that was no longer blond but gray, dressed in dark, practical clothes. Her face was gaunt, serious; perhaps it had once been pretty, or at least not completely off-putting, if it hadn’t been for the hints of wrinkles, the red, stress-induced eczema, the dark shadows under her eyes. Those eyes were the problem. They were no longer mine. Someone else was staring at me out of the familiar eye sockets; someone was hiding in there, a person peering out of a black window, hidden in the darkness, impossible to see. I found myself wishing more and more often that I was back in the camp in Kyzyl Kum, even though that was the last place on earth I wanted to go. I was home, and yet I had never been more lost.

  That was the shape I was in when I was offered the assignment.

  STOCKHOLM

  THE PROTECTORATE OF SWEDEN

  MARCH 2037

  THE EVENING BEFORE our departure, I went over to say good-bye to Nour and Siri. Nour’s apartment was on a narrow street that was among the oldest in all of Stockholm. The Olof Palme neighborhood was almost the only one that had survived the demolition. There were even still cobblest
ones on some streets, and I was secretly glad that this part of the city had not been razed and straightened out, even if I would never say so out loud. Nour had been allowed to take over Grandpa’s apartment when he moved back home to Bosnia, which had left the Union after the Balkan War. This was after they had started seriously building up the outer suburbs, which enjoyed express train service every five minutes. Life in the city suddenly seemed seedy and low status, and that was how we ended up with the peculiar reality in which almost the only people who lived in the beautiful flats in the old part of the city were immigrants like Grandpa. And now Nour.