Montecore

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  The quantity of the options was many. They wandered between “Pernilla Khemiri’s Studio” (as an appeasing for your mother, who called the studio too risky), “Studio Khemiri Inc.” (professional aura), “Khemiri Art and Photography Studio” (artistic flourish), “Khemiri’s Wild Strawberry Patch” (Bergmanesque and appetizing), “Atelier Palmé” (as an homage to Palme), and “Extremely cheap family portraits!” (as a temptation for the stingy old people at the nearby nursing home).

  Suddenly your father levitated to a standing position with a photograph stretched toward the sky like a sweaty Wall Street worker.

  “I have it!”

  The motif of the photograph was a deliciously beautiful black-haired woman, Brazilian and German in original birth, yellow skirt and blue waist with embroidered flowers … There she stood, Queen Silvia, photographed by your father on a flag-filled stage at Skansen, spring 1983. The stylish, bouclé-haired King Carl Gustaf is visible, blurry in the background. Silvia’s hand is frozen to eternity in its sideways wave, her smile politely distant, and both her eyes precisely half closed like a pupil-exempt demon’s.

  “Of course!” shouted your father. “ ‘Studio Silvia!’ That’s what the studio will be called. ‘Studio Silvia, Khemiri’s Artistic Photo Studio.’ ”

  That very evening your father projected his plan for how we would invite the Swedish queen to the studio’s opening ceremony. With fresh coffee, wine, colored balloons, and crackling artificial fires, the journalists and art critics would interview the successful man from Tunisia who had left SL and started his own photographic studio.

  “ ‘Photographer gets grand visit’ … That’s what the headlines will spell! ‘The queen on a photo visit!’ ‘The queen’s new court photographer.’ That will show those damn idiots …” (my certainty is not convinced whether your father was referring here to your mother’s family, the refusing gallery owners, his ex–SL boss, or the landlord of the store [presumably all of them]).

  Equally as much as your mother loved your father, she detested his suggestions for studio names.

  “You cannot be serious!” she auctioned on her premier visit to the soon-renovated studio.

  “Why not?”

  “Ugh … ‘Studio Silvia’? It sounds almost pornographic. Besides, Silvia gives me the willies … She looks like a vampire … Our dear Nazi queen! It’s a very bourgeois photograph, extremely antidemocratic and noncommunistic and imperialistic! Please, localize it in the trash room instead of the display window.”

  But your father maintained her faux pas.

  “It gives the studio extra-fine class!” he expressed proudly and pointed at the goldish frame he had invested for the Silvia photo. “Besides, it will tempt customers. Young and old. This is my certain conviction.”

  Your mother observed your father and, though she wanted to, could not hold her serious front. She attracted her body toward his, bent her back, and let her soft lips nose his neck.

  “I get so tired of you,” she whispered in French, but her intonation bore a warmth that spoke of a diagonal opposite. Here I remember that you and I imitated each other. Both of our cheeks were reddened by the kisses that were shared between your parents, and we took our shelter out in the courtyard until the danger had passed.

  Your mother’s protests against the studio’s name were both retarded and unmotivated. “Studio Silvia” became the name we wrote on the wooden sign that swung its squeaking sound outside the door. Underneath it said in leaning letters: “Khemiri’s Artistic Photography Studio.” Your father embellished the sign with some mountaintops at the bottom.

  Before the opening, your father formulated an elegant letter on the finest stationery with your smiling mother’s assistance. It was addressed to the royal palace. Your father praised Queen Silvia’s cleverness, wisdom, and loveliness, congratulated her choice of new homeland, and invited her majestic form to be present at an official opening ceremony addressed to her honor.

  Studio Silvia opened its doors in April 1986. It was a magnificent Saturday. The walls of the foyer presented the best of your father’s photographic Sweden suite. There was the series of snow-frozen day-after vomits in extreme close-up. There were dried leaf poles and piles of empty beer bottles. There were several photos of proper-suit Swedes standing on sunny street corners with the exact same serene expression. There was a black-and-white blur picture of a Volvo Amazon that had crashed a softly bent street sign at Sankt Eriksplan. There were three colored-over levels and the Silvia photo in blowup. Farthest in the corner there was even a photo with your father’s initial favorite motif: a powerfully snowed-over, brown-rusted bike with punctured tires, frosted handlebars, and icicles erected from the seat.

  Our preparations had been meticulous. All the Swedish papers had been invited with personal exhibition cards, and neighbors had been informed with leaflets. Swedish houses of publication had been invited because your father wanted to inspire them to do a book about Swedes in the same format as Robert Frank’s The Americans. In Current Photography, under the heading “What’s Happening,” everyone with an interest in photos could look up the page before the last and read: “The photographer Abbas Khemiri exhibits ‘The photo that should have won the Sweden Picture’ at Studio Silvia in Stockholm.” The announcement found its position right between information about an exhibition in honor of Arvika’s seventy-fifth anniversary and the Sven Wingqvist Secondary School’s student exhibition at the Photo House in Gothenburg.

  Your father greeted all the guests with wine and coffee in plastic cups. Balloons adorned fluorescent lights, pretzels filled bowls, and your whole family was present, even your grandmother, who greeted me politely, shared me a cigarette, and gave me a very kind impression. Soon the studio was piled with generous laughter and billowing cigarette smoke, flowers and shouts of “hooray,” praisings and hugs. In order to be able to court his guests, Abbas delegated me his compact camera and comically named me “the photographer’s court photographer.” I accelerated myself in order to document all the guests in attendance. In one corner, your mother’s political friends. One could recognize them by their ample lunettes, their antinuclear brooches and beige trench coats. They waved their coat belts and incited politics while they scratched their mustaches (both the men and the women). Near the entrance: the retired ladies from the nursing home who were tempted by the free coffee. They drank with birdishly quick sips, pressed their handbags against their stomachs, and exposed suspicious line-mouths. The hippie friends parked themselves on the floor, men in soft sandals with socks and women in ponchos and newly created nicknames like “Sundawn” or “Light Reflector.” In the other corner, the Aristocats installed their bodies around a table and by habit turned their backs on the rest of the guests: the old ex-boxer Nabil, Mansour with the square portfolio, and Mustafa with the little tinfoil packet whose contents your father directed him to smoke outdoors (after getting himself a little sample).

  Aziz was responsible for the music; soon the volume was levitated and the party was our fact. Just as your father had prophesized, a great quantity of alcohol was needed before the Swedes left their sphere of politeness and attacked the dance floor. But when they did so they bore a frenzy and jerkiness which can most closely be called epileptic. The hippies made circle movements with their hands and limbered their heads like pendulums. The political friends bounced their bodies first unwillingly and then frenetically until the sweat dropped from their nonimperialist beards. Even the Aristocats were attracted to finger-snapping cries of jubilation when Aziz invited your grandmother to dance. Ruth first declined repeated times, but then she suddenly said yes and everyone’s applause claps accompanied Aziz’s instructions for typical eighties dances like the pirouette, the hand clap, the caterpillar (connect-both-hands-together-and-undulate-them-like-a-wave), the mime (pretend-to-walk-into-an-invisible-wall-which-is-then-lurched-to-the-side), the hand shaker (shake-your-hands-above-your-shoulders-like-they-contain-small-dice), and the famous “Michael Jackson owl�
�� (move-your-head-very-quickly-sideways).

  Who else was there? I am ransacking my memorizations. Raino, of course, permanently positioned at the bar, toasting solitarily. And those two Chilean brothers who had been welcomed to Sweden after the coup and now projected a theater society localized on the green metro line to the south (unfortunately I remember neither their names nor the metro station’s). And that beautiful friend of your mother’s who had studied in Cairo and attempted to converse me about your father’s “ironic work with the Swedish self-portrait.” While I attempted to discuss … entirely different, considerably more erotic subjects.

  In the photos I have from that Saturday, your father’s nervous form is in the majority. First in the morning: updressed in a pressed mint green suit and patterned tie, correcting his cravat pin, and water-combing in front of the mirror in the hall. Then happily smiling with you, draped in a white shirt and overalls. Then his arm around his beautiful wife with a gold-decorated dress and coral necklace. Then distributing a hug as thanks for a bouquet. Then thumbs-up in front of the Silvia photo. Then a photo where his back is marching the hall away toward the storeroom. Then a later photo when your father is standing back in the studio, most of the guests have gone, the dance floor is deserted, some balloons are lying air-free and punctured on the floor, your father’s cheeks are red, his smell a shade modified, filled up by a certain confidence of drink and unnoticing of your mother’s furious background eyes. Then the last photo, when he tipsily waves farewell to the last guests (Aziz and Raino supporting each other like a capital A). Here your father’s smile is strapped on like a fighter pilot’s gas mask, his sweeping movements reduced to two blurry thunderclouds; his voice echoes forth the promise that everyone who wants to will get future family portraits at a reduced price. The opening was a complete success. Right? Who didn’t come?

  The journalists.

  The publishing people.

  The art critics.

  The queen.

  The most important ones seemed to be conspicuous in their absence.

  Here follows a section that we can call “Studio Silvia awaits success.” We wait patiently for the attention of journalists. We observe newspapers in hope of praising reviews, we correspond yet another series of invitations to art critics. The result? A monumental silence.

  Three weeks after the opening ceremony, your father received a letter from the Swedish palace. The envelope bore the king’s official seal and the queen’s typed “thanked for the congratulations.” Your father framed the letter behind glass and placed it in the display window, to the right of the photograph that sparked his brain with the idea for the studio’s name.

  My official task at Studio Silvia was soon transformed. From photo assistant and makeup-responsible to coffee maker, backgammon player, and general waiter.

  Your father tried to putter parallelly with a new artistic collection, but he had difficulty finding inspiration. He noticed that time was limited, that he had invested his wife’s patrimony in an uncertain photographic studio. The future suddenly seemed to glide uncertainly like a water slide.

  In the summer of 1986, your day care was annulled to save economy. Instead you spent your time down in the studio in our company. Do you remember those summery days? Do you remember how your child arms helped us spread leaflets in the newly built shopping center, where many retail spaces still stood unrented? Do you remember how we let you sneak into the nursing home and nail leaflets onto the bulletin board? You worked very effectively, although your age was that of a child. And although your father perhaps did not pronounce it in your presence, he was very proud of you. Very, very proud.

  Do you remember how we partook our lunches? How we assisted your father when he apart-took his camera? How we began to roar rude Arabic insultations after the customers who invaded the studio, encountered your father’s welcome greeting, and then for some bizarre reason returned out to the courtyard with a regretting exterior? And do you remember how you often imitated your father when he nervously drummed his fingers against the perpetually silent booking telephone; you drummed your small fingers in the exact same rhythm and your father lost his train of thought, silenced the drum, and regarded you, a copy of himself when young, the same suspect imagination, the same speech-related problems. He lovingly patted your cheek. But the telephone continued its silent rest.

  And you remember the silence, the ticking of the kitchen clock, the gaze from the blown-up Silvia portrait, the framed letter, and Dads, who drum their fingers, the sun which moves over the courtyard and filters through the curtains, and Dads’ friends, who drink coffee and billow cigs and play backgammon, joke about cheating at dice, and sometimes borrow the bathroom, and once Kadir, who wants to fix the washer in the dripping faucet, the faucet that’s bothered Dads for several weeks but that now they want to keep.

  The economic success for Studio Silvia bided its time like a patient meter maid. Your father said:

  “Do not worry, Kadir. This is a premier phase. Swedes bear a certain initial suspiciousness, particularly toward us Swedes who do not bear a Swedish appearance. But soon, anytime, our business will take off. In just a few weeks they will realize my artistic talent. Soon there will be lines and guest lists in order to access my photographic services.”

  “What shall we do until then?”

  “We wait.”

  And you remember the waiting and the faucet dripping which continues and Kadir, who again offers to fix it: It’s simple, it can be done in a few minutes, but Dads don’t want to, Dads refuse to let him repair the faucet: I want to keep the dripping! shout Dads suddenly with a slightly too loud voice and you remember that in particular but don’t really understand why. It’s the summer of 1986 and the studio is empty of customers and you’re starting to hang around the neighboring courtyards, starting to explore the shopping center, starting to chat with the drunks and becoming friends with the dry cleaner. And then sometime in the middle of the summer you catch sight of Melinda. And the first time you see each other you both just watch suspiciously from a distance and the second time Melinda shows you her homemade Super Mario belt and the third time you play Indian tiger tamers with extra-long whips and specially made tranquilizer darts. And doesn’t someone get angry at you because of that very game? You don’t remember. But you remember that Melinda soon becomes your first real best friend because Melinda is just like you. Melinda gets why you can think imagination games are fun even though you’ve begun elementary school and Melinda also has a bunch of imaginary friends who really exist but can’t necessarily be seen by regular adults. Melinda agrees that you can play Super Mario Bros. even if you don’t have that new TV game called Nintendo and she just gets mad that time when you suggest that instead of being Mario she should be the princess who must be rescued.

  And we waited. With the ambition of patience we let the hours tick on while waiting for the assault of customers. To pass the time your father and I started to layer our backgammon games with nostalgic discussions. While you found your friendship with the neighborhood children, your father portioned his memories of his father and the lostness he felt from having been abandoned. I also remember how he very poetically related his longing for his father despite that this father had never been his actual knowledge.

  “Is this not bizarre, Kadir? That my soul feels perpetually hollowed. It has only become worse since I became a father. I thought the consequence would be diagonally opposite. How can a hollowness arise even though what I miss has never been experienced me? How can an emptiness cause pain? And how can one cure the pain that is caused by an emptiness?”

  “I do not know. Have you tried exchanging these thoughts with your wife?”

  “It does not work. I can’t. I do not know why. She still believes that Cherifa and Faizal are my real parents. And she knows nothing about the loan I owe you …”

  Here we were interrupted by your storming income. With sweaty forehead, bare chest, and a long whip made of a string you whistled down
the stairs and took shelter behind your father. A second later the door was opened by the master of the nearby flower shop. Furiously he sought after “the Turks who chased his grandmother’s cat with darts.” Your father hid your body effectively and pointed out that anyone who likened his son with a Turk would be afflicted with rumbling fists, understood? The flower master mumbled that “this neighborhood is really going downhill.” He excited the studio and you crawled, smiling, from your hiding place.

  “Where were we?” I coaxed. But your father did not want to continue. He signaled in your direction and made me understand that this was NOT intended for your ears. Your father varied the subject:

  “Anyway: I am very glad to have your company here in Sweden, Kadir. But I have to reveal you one thing. I have no possibility of returning your economy. Unfortunately. Not right now.”

  “That pains me to hear.”

  “It pains me to admit.”

  “But my salary?”

  “I will outpay your salary, I promise you that. With a certain delay. This studio’s success has perhaps not become as I had hoped. But I want to present you an offer: If you agree to postpone the repayment of the loan, I will offer you a golden exchange.”

  “What? Free passport photos?” I sighed.

  “No, much better. The possibility to learn the foundations of Swedish!”

  “How can that benefit me?”

  “Well, imagine. Swedish is a Germanic language with many international loan words. If only you know Swedish you will soon know German and Dutch and after that almost English.”

  “So?”

  “If you want to cultivate a future as a hotel owner you MUST learn many languages, particularly Swedish. Then you can return to Tabarka with perfect prerequisites for hotelish success. By the time I repay you my debt you can open the doors for your own hotel that tempts Nordic tourists. And Nordic touristettes. What do you say?”