Then I walked home through that summer evening. Swedish summer. I love it. It was warm and green between the row houses. The air held the scent of that little forest lake. Damp, warm, green. I walked slowly, didn’t hurry home. I was in absolutely no rush to get home. He was there. He wasn’t working that evening, and I wasn’t working, and she would be sleeping somewhere else. Leaving us alone. I went into the empty playground, sat down on a swing, and gave myself a push. I think I stayed there a long time. Swinging back and forth, higher and higher, faster and faster, then I rested a bit. Stared out over the neighborhood. It was a luxury for us to live there. Not that we didn’t deserve it—we did. We’d worked hard to get there. But mostly because it was such a contrast to where we started.
I will never forget the night we moved into our first apartment on Nelson’s Hill. We came straight from the refugee camp. We were ready to start our new life. But that neighborhood . . . it didn’t look anything like what we’d seen of Sweden so far. It looked like something on the margins. On the border between Sweden and I don’t know what. Maybe emptiness. Not in some magical, fairy-tale way. The refugee camp had been like that. Charming little cottages in the woods. We had to share with another family, but it didn’t matter. It was so beautiful. This. This was asphalt and concrete and steel, and long rows of dirty green balconies shared by several apartment doors. It was ugly. It stank of urine. Drunks swayed between the buildings. There were screams coming from inside the apartments.
What could we do? We were where peace and democracy and freedom prevailed. But it was also horrible. Nelson’s Hill, landing there showed us clearly that we were on the bottom. There was us, the political refugees. And there were the drunks and the single mothers and all the others who’d been living in peace and democracy their whole lives, but who’d made it no further than this. We didn’t want to be there. And we didn’t plan to stay there any longer than we had to. So we worked. And worked. Worked, made money, and squirreled it away. Wore old, ragged clothes and were stingy at the dinner table. And then we bought the row house. Moved our few belongings to someplace nice and quiet.
A person tries. You try to build something good, because it’s better than the alternative. And you think you can, think you have the ability to create something beautiful. But it doesn’t happen. It’s not as good as it should be. Not as good as the image you had of it, as what you’d hoped. I don’t know. I still struggle to understand. You think if you’ve managed to escape a war and find your way to peace, you should be so much happier. If you’ve lived with your infant in a basement, with bombs falling above you, and now you have a garden and the sky is clear, you should be happier. You think maybe if you don’t have to live surrounded by drunkards and police sirens, you’ll be happier. But it doesn’t work that way, and I don’t know why.
I went home finally. Gently opened the door. I glanced at the clock on the wall and realized I’d been gone a long time. Too long. It was quiet in the apartment, an ominous silence. I was expecting at least the drone of a soccer game coming from the TV. But not a sound, not a movement. I walked toward the bathroom door. Thought I’d take a shower, kill some time. Then it came.
“Come here!”
Masood’s voice was harsh, and I obeyed. He was sitting on the sofa in the living room. Staring into space.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“I dropped off Aram, you know that.”
“That was two hours ago! Where have you been for the last two hours?”
“I took a walk. Around the neighborhood. It’s a lovely evening.”
“You haven’t been walking!” Now he was on his feet. “Who were you with? Tell me.”
What if I could have done something else in those moments, said something else, would it have stopped there? If I’d put my hand on his arm and said: My love. I’m sorry. I should have hurried. I was wrong. What if I’d said those words? Stretched up and kissed him. Would that have made a difference? Would everything have changed then, our whole lives? If I’d done that, maybe he would have lived. Maybe I wouldn’t be dying. Would it have been worth it? To sacrifice my pride? I’m not sure.
“What business is it of yours? I can see who I want, when I want!”
That is what I said instead, and he raised his hand above my head. I screamed, expecting her to come to my rescue. But she didn’t come. She wasn’t there.
when a man beats a woman, he can do it in so many ways. If you haven’t experienced it personally, you probably think it consists of a slap to the face. A push into a wall. But he did so much more. It was as if his anger was endless and once awakened it could not be stopped. And the sounds, if only you’d recorded the sounds. Collected the fluids. The odor. There were screams, usually not many words, mostly just screams. Just my sobs, my tears. Just his panting, his sweat. It was hot tea hitting the wallpaper. It was cigarettes smoked in the pauses. And then the sound of blows.
Most often it started that way, with a raised hand and a smack across the face. Sometimes it was a slap, but usually a closed fist. A fist to my mouth. Across my cheek. To my forehead. Under my chin. It varied. The first blow was enough, really. I usually fell from that. He could have been satisfied with that, but that’s not how it worked. He started kicking me as I lay there. Kicking my legs, stomach, and breasts if he could. I’d quickly curl into a fetal position, and he’d move on to my back. Not my head, not how I remember it, anyway. But now and then I fainted, an early blow was so hard that it knocked me out. I think that scared him. He’d usually fetch a pitcher of cold water and pour it over me. Then it would be over. If I was knocked out early, I’d escape the worst of it. The hunt. The hunt was the worst. Being hunted down by the man I slept next to at night.
When he kicked me, I tried to get up and run away. I managed often enough. He wasn’t exactly a professional boxer. I don’t think he’d been in many fights other than with me. So he kicked and waved his arms around without knowing what he was doing. When I ran, he ran after me. Once he grabbed a hockey stick in the hall and beat me down with it. Once he caught up with me and put his hands around my neck, pressed me against the bed frame, and started to strangle me. I thought I was going to die that time. So did she. Those who hear this may wonder: Dear God, where was the child? Well, she was right there! Between us.
When he ran after me with the hockey stick, he struck her down first. Not on purpose. He was never after her. But she was in the way. She could tell by looking at him when the first blow was on its way. She stood between us. Fell onto the rug as he pushed her aside. And that day, the day I thought he was going to strangle me to death, she was there. She pulled at his arms, pushed his body. Screamed: Stop, stop! But it had no effect, so she ran away. I heard her run, heard her slam the front door. She’ll get help, I thought. But nothing happened. Everything went black. And when I woke up I was lying in bed, alone. The room was dark. No sound could be heard. I tried to clear my throat, trying to wheeze out the words. When I finally succeeded, I said her name.
“Aram. Aram.” I whispered at first, but finally the terror poured out in my voice.
“Araaam, Araaam!” I screamed and screamed and screamed.
Soon I heard the front door open and then the bedroom door. She stuck her head in. Curls wild, eyes wide.
“Help me,” I said, and she came forward. Sank down on the floor. Took my hand in one of hers and stroked my hair with the other.
“Why did you leave me?” was what I said to her. Not Everything will be all right. Not I’m sorry. None of the things a mother should say. I was just angry. Angry at her.
“Why did you leave me.”
that summer night. when she’d escaped to the slumber party, to the idyllic world someone else had built for her. When I walked home slowly, swinging on the empty playground, staring at the row houses and the small garden lots that belonged to people who had not too much, nor too little. When I came home to silence, and he was waiting for me, and I mouthed off, and he stood up and knocked me down. The
n, it was as if we were both missing something. Our flow was disrupted. I lay on the floor, he stood over me, and I cried.
“I want to go get Aram,” I said. And he agreed.
I don’t remember how he put it, but he let me get up and go. I got in the car and drove the few minutes to where she was. It was after I’d rung the doorbell that I caught my reflection in the window and for a moment I wondered what I was doing. My makeup was running, my ponytail drooped, and my cheek was a burning red. When the door opened, I was quick to raise my hand to cover it. Hide the flames on my face. I had hoped that one of the children would answer the door, but it was not to be, of course. It was the mother, the woman who lived there.
“Oh, hello,” she said hesitantly.
“I’m here to pick up Aram,” I said.
She shook her head, as if it were her decision.
“Oh, but they’re having so much fun.”
I swallowed hard.
“I understand. But she needs to come home.”
I saw the way she looked at me. She didn’t want to move out of the way. But she realized it wasn’t her right to resist.
“Has something happened?” she asked.
I didn’t answer.
“Can you go get her?” I just said.
She looked at me, a long look. I don’t know if she was judging me or feeling sorry for me. But she went inside. I heard the sound of happy voices, heard them being interrupted. Saw five girls come toward me in the hall. Staring at me. With the same expression as the mother, or so I thought, but what did they know. Then she came. Her things packed, a backpack in hand. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t look at her friends, either. She just said goodbye straight into the air and walked out. Walked past me.
Maybe pain moves in a circle. Maybe I caused her pain to avenge my own.
When she was little, i’d put her in the car and just drive. Those are probably the best memories I gave her, even if they were rooted in my anxiety. Maybe she didn’t notice, maybe she saw only energy. The energy I conjured up to escape from what pursued me. We drove through green meadows and thick forests and over sparkling water. The archipelago entranced us, even though we were living in the middle of it. We mostly listened to Persian music. Googoosh. Just like now, driving with Johan on our way to see his family. I like that she’s playing the same music around him. That she shows off what I’ve given her.
Man o to ba hamim ama delamon kheyli doore. We sit so close to each other, but our hearts are far apart. When she was little, she looked at me with wide eyes while I sang. She liked it, I could see that, and it made me sing even louder. Sometimes she asked me to turn off the stereo and sing other songs, ones that weren’t on cassette or CD. The folk songs of my childhood. She knew a few lines, sang along. She didn’t understand the words, the strange dialect, but somehow she knew what they meant. I saw it on her face. Or maybe she was just mimicking me unconsciously. My loss, my grief. Such things are handed down as sure as the raven-black hair.
We felt protected in the car. Protected by metal and by speed. The two of us were protected without having to protect each other. And the music, it was our link to the outside. It tied us to where we came from. She probably felt that too. This was the music she came from. I think, in some strange way, she feels closer to those songs than to the glittering archipelago. Maybe that will be the case for as long as I exist. Maybe she’ll finally be free from them, too, when I die. Maybe then she’ll be able to move her roots to the islands and the sea instead.
But now it’s Midsummer, and somebody else is driving the car. A person she’s found, from her world. I’m sitting in the back seat, protected from nothing. Everything has caught up with me now and nothing in the world moves fast enough for me to escape.
We arrive at the water and park the car. This is where our car rides used to end. I drove and drove until we reached the water. Then we sat and looked at the sea for a few minutes, until I turned and drove the other way and we reached water again. But today we’re being picked up by boat. Today the world stretches a little farther. Johan’s father helps me aboard and everyone stares at me, as if I might break at any moment. Don’t worry about me, I want to say. I’ll be fine. But I stay silent. Thinking of how my insides are being devoured and broken down, becoming more and more crushed by the hour.
The motorboat probably isn’t going that fast, but it feels like it to me. I hold on tight, close my eyes, and let the wind whip me. Whip against my skin, through the scarf around my head and against my bare skull. I hear nothing but the wind and the engine, and I like it. It makes me feel alive, more alive than I have felt in a long time.
“Thank you,” I say to his father as the boat slows down.
I try to say it so he understands. But he thinks I’m thanking him for the ride.
“Of course,” he says. Only that. Of course.
Perhaps it’s not possible to understand that someone is thanking you for life if you are not also about to die.
My father was ill for as long as i can remember. He lay on his bed in the kitchen to be close to us, to be among us. Next to him stood a tray, always with a burning hookah and a glass of tea. He had opium, his painkiller, in a water pipe. No medication, no complaints. I used to lie down next to him and listen to his stories. His thoughts. He had so many thoughts about life. On a level that I didn’t really understand. He was a Sufi, a dervish. I didn’t know what that meant. I thought a dervish was a beggar who knocked on your door, who read you prayers in exchange for food and a place to sleep for the night. Sometimes they told children stories about dervishes to frighten them. If you don’t eat up, the dervish will take you! I thought that couldn’t be what my father was.
My uncle used to call him the philosopher, and I suppose that was more how it was. He talked about life and love. About our love for him and his love for the earth. About the beauty in lifting a handful of sand and watching it slip through your fingers and seek the ground. I didn’t understand much of what he said, but the image of the sand stuck with me. I used to squat outside our door, lifting handfuls of yellow sand and slowly watching it fall back to the ground.
“Why are you getting your hands dirty!” my mother cried when she saw me.
When I replied that it was because of what my father had said, she rolled her eyes and slammed the door. Her world was in the everyday. Cooking, working, cleaning. But my father’s world, that was something else:
Sand streams down to the earth because that’s where it belongs. We can lift it, capture it, transport it. But even after oceans of time pass by, even after we’ve carried it across thousands of miles, sand will seek the earth again when the opportunity arises. So we are all bound to our origins.
If my life had turned out differently maybe I’d remember something else of all the things my father told me. But those are the words I think about.
I wander away to the little beach, while everyone else stays seated around the Midsummer table on the dock. The white sand isn’t natural; it’s been brought here. Transported across the sea to this tiny island. I sit with my legs pulled up, my red toenails pushed beneath the surface. I gently lift a fistful, embracing it, holding tight. Maybe you can defy it, maybe you can make things stay put even where they don’t belong. The sand in the air, in my hand. I squeeze so hard, my hand cramps. Then I let go with a groan.
“Is everything okay?” Aram calls from the dock.
I nod. The sand has fallen back to the earth.
This is an island, and they own it. A piece of land that rises straight out of the sea, and they own it. I marvel at that. In addition to the sand on the beach, which has been brought here, everything on the island is sturdy and solid. As if nothing could shake it. There are trees across most of it, towering trees. Trunks so wide that they block your view. I marvel at them, at things that are left in peace. When you walk down the paths, roots crisscross under your feet. I feel them with my hands. They can’t be lifted, can’t be forced to go anywhere else. They’ll never slip
through any fingers, never fall to the earth seeking home again. They’re already there, will always be there. I look out at the people sitting around their Midsummer feast. Think, I’m a people of sand, and they are a people of roots.
When it got time for me to start school, my mother told me I was moving in with Maryam. She worked in a small town three hours away, and I would be in her class, become her student. In the evenings, I was supposed to help out around the house. Cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing. It still makes me angry to think of my mother sending me away. Sending me off to relieve the burden on my sister. It makes me angry because I was used. Like a tool. I wasn’t treated as something with intrinsic value, not as something to cherish.
Maryam had been married that summer. Her husband was also named Masood. I suppose it was just the irony of fate. There were not as many liberal men available as there were women in my family. So, often we were stuck with assholes. Masood was a teacher like Maryam and a year younger than her. I think that’s where the problem started. My sister was more than him. Better at mathematics, the subject they both taught. Better with people—he was constantly ending up in conflicts, and she had to step in to solve them. Besides, she was beautiful, proud, strong. Everything a woman can’t be, not even in Sweden, without getting shit for it. So he pushed her down. He forbade her to work in the evenings. She was supposed to cook, tend to their home, wash his clothes. And while he was working, she had to sit next to him, sewing holes in his shirts and polishing his shoes. That’s how things were, just like that. And so I was needed, to help wait on him. To keep her company in the kitchen after he’d screamed at her and she’d retreated. As a kind of shield. At least, that’s what they thought I’d be.
It was impossible for a teacher not to work in the evenings. She needed to correct exams and plan her assignments. So she slipped out of bed after he’d fallen asleep, lit a dim light far from the bedroom, usually in the entrance hall. And there she sat, with her piles of papers, glasses on her nose and pen in her mouth. Her mahogany hair was piled in a high bun on her head and her long neck and thick eyelashes made her look like a fairy in the dim light. Beautiful, beautiful. She was so beautiful.
What We Owe Page 6
