Montecore

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  “Well … I would probably rather choose to obtain my promised economy.”

  Your father presented a face that looked so miserable that I immediately regretted my words.

  “I lack that possibility, Kadir. Unfortunately. However, I can teach you the foundations of Swedish. This will further your future. And mine. Pernilla is frustrated that my static Swedish is never glistened to gold. And Swedish is the only language that works in Sweden. No other country I have afflicted has tied a greater worth to the perfection of language.”

  “But … which other countries have you actually afflicted? Besides Tunisia?”

  “Many upon many.”

  “Which ones?”

  “For example, Pernilla’s relatives in Denmark last summer. What do you say?”

  “Okay,” I sighed.

  Accompanied by the summer’s transformation into fall, your father and I begin to repeat Swedish personal pronouns, the intensifying of adjectives, and the mystery of prepositions. We memorize how all Swedish words referring to people and animals are noted with the indefinite form “en,” with the exception of “ett barn,” a child. We tame our tongues to the mystery of Swedish pronunciation, where there is a big difference between u and y. Migratory birds leave Sweden, green leaves become firishly red, the ground is frosted, the sandbox sand stiffens, and Stockholm loses its delicious odors. All while we note that some call Swedish “the language of twenty-nine letters” or “the language of breathing,” because h gives an actual exhalation instead of the muteness of French, and the inhaling sound with suck-formed lips indicates an affirmative response.

  I want to describe what occurred with the following words underlined in a different form of text:

  Swedish filled me. Expanded me. It harmonized every bodily particle.

  Where did this emotion come from? Perhaps from your father. It was he who passionately spoke of the Swedish language. It was he who led my process, who delegated me his antique handouts from Swedish for Immigrants, who praised my encouragement and honored my storming progress. Sometimes he mumbled:

  “You learn very easily, Kadir, very easily,” and this seemed to fill him with a big dose of happiness (spiced with a shade of jalousie).

  I said to your father:

  “My conviction was first that you just wanted to teach me Swedish in order to postpone the payment of economy. But now it feels like I have waited my whole life to get to speak this language. It is as though my tongue is made for this. Not Arabic. Not even French. Swedishness is my destiny and my studies go as quickly as a dancing feather in hurricane winds. Don’t they? Is the learning equally simple for you?”

  Your father hmmed forth his response to this question. This last part may surprise you but I must admit it: Sometimes I was given the emotion that your father learned more slowly than I. That something in his experiences blocked his learning.

  The studio continued its empty echo during the fall. Your father’s invested photo equipment glistened almost unused, the telephone waited in silence, spiders wove webs in the darkroom. The studio’s photographic activity lay quietly in hibernation, and not even your mother’s friends left their beloved Södermalm to support the studio despite their eagerly expressed curiosity for what they called “the colorful, multicultural suburb.” I never really understood the meaning of this expression. The neighborhood in the vicinity of the studio was not particularly separated from the neighborhood in Hornstull where you localized your lodgings. The same rectangular box houses, the same brown house colors. The same brightly shining mailboxes, the same Konsum grocery, the same Apoteket sign. The same red-nosed alcoholics who sat mumbling on the benches outside Systembolaget. The same Assyrians who started the same pizzerias with the same clever Italian names. Sometimes I noticed that people from Södermalm truly enjoyed pointing out every crucial difference between “the suburbs” and “downtown.” Sometimes I thought that the situation was similar to when tourists in Tabarka enjoyed pointing out the crucial difference between “the mystique of the Orient” and “the stress and pressure of the Western world.” And sometimes I was heaped, like your father, to frustration by people’s constant ambition of focusing on differences between people. Where does this infection come from? Can your memories of that fall offer any response?

  Then comes the fall, with the usual fall routines, and there are no more weekend picnics at Trekanten and no more demonstrations and Moms stop mourning for Palme and Dads stop mourning for Refaat. Moms start working as nurses and Dads leave little brothers at day care every morning before the studio. You start second grade and conduct yourself excellently and become one of the best in the class and come home with a special diploma that time when the elementary school has a competition with times table work sheets.

  At the same time it’s a split time because the others at school aren’t like you because most of them have cars and brand-name clothes and their own video games and cable TV and fancy country cottages and Christmas lists that are pages long. And sometime maybe you say that by the way you have cable TV now too and then someone asks what your favorite channel is and you think and think because you know that there’s some cool channel that plays music videos all day long and just before it’s too late you remember the name and say it proudly: My favorite is that music channel where they play very much disco. Yeah, you know, Disco-Very. And they look at you and laugh and you don’t realize your mistake until much later.

  Then it’s safer to go out to the studio in the afternoons, share a snack with Dads and Kadir, and hang out with Melinda in the courtyard. You have just started to say “want to hang out” instead of “want to play.” But then you still see each other every day and play play play. No one else understands life like Melinda because Melinda has the world’s yellowest Pumas and a fluorescent gummy smile and a hairstyle that’s the school’s flattest flattop. And one time Melinda tells you that some sixth-graders set their milk glasses on her hair and told her to balance them over to the counter and she did it but then she ran home to the courtyard and rushed into the hall crying (fake tears of course) and a second later her sisters came rushing out of their rooms, the Melinda sisters who were already notorious in the area because there were four of them and they were gigantic in size and they all looked the same, with dimple thighs like logs and powerful biceps and stonewashed suspender jeans. They fought like no one else and it was total uproar when all the Melinda sisters tried to get their shoes on first and they raced to the school at full speed and Olayinka still had her hairbrush in her hand and Adeola rolled up her sleeves as they ran and Fayola, who was the quietest and had the best grades, ran farthest back and mostly came along to stop the others. The Melinda sisters invaded the cafeteria and went from table to table with the question: Was it you? Was it you? Was it you? And when they finally reached the right table with the right gulping sixth-graders came the question: Was it you? And the answer: Who did what? And that was all the Melinda sisters needed to hear and Monifa kneed groins and Olayinka punched and Adeola gobbed spit and Fayola tried to calm them down and pull them back but then some sixth-grader said something about bananas behind her broad back and then the roles switched and Fayola became the one who was winding up and Adeola got in the middle and tried to stop it.

  You’re sitting wide-eyed in the swing next to Melinda’s. What happened then? Then the janitor and the beefy shop teacher came and the fight was stopped and the sixth-graders cried and said: They’re totally damned crazy! And the Melinda sisters went as one body out of the cafeteria and someone happened to frisk a jacket and someone happened to overturn a hall table and Melinda was right behind them and you remember that when Melinda has finished telling she smiles in that way you only smile when you see your family succeed.

  On the way home you think about how you don’t have a sister army, you don’t have any relatives who can come to your rescue, you don’t have uncles who play records at the Afro-pop club at Sankt Eriksplan, you only have Dads and Moms and a worn-out Mickey Mouse Pez
dispenser that lost its dispensing power a long time ago. And little brothers of course, little brothers who are growing quickly; the nights are less screechy, but shopping is extra heavy, with milk at bulk price and canned food three for ten crowns. And soon you’ll be buying juice without pulp and then a few months later just juice concentrate and then just juice on the weekends and then only on Sunday mornings, no more than one glass per brother. And soon, written clearly on the shopping list: “Cornflakes—Eldorado, NOT Kellogg’s.” The finances are starting to waver and Dads spend more and more time in the studio and sometimes Moms say with her opposite-loaded voice: It’s lucky there are two of us contributing to the household money, isn’t it, dear? And another time, a little later that same fall with the same reverse voice: What would we do without your dad’s brilliant sense of economics?

  And in the same second you write the word “economics” and then the question mark you remember that it must be this fall that Dads formulate their new strategy for the studio’s survival.

  When do Dads present the idea? You don’t remember, maybe you’re sitting in the studio in the company of Kadir and a quietly silent customer phone? Maybe it’s the same day that Mansour has visited and shown you that article where the Svenska Dagbladet journalist Erik Lidén wrote that Refaat was certainly unique in Swedish industry because he “with his Arab origin has a totally different view of truth and life than regular Swedes.” Yes, presumably it’s that day, when Mansour has put on his glasses and left the studio in a heavy fog of smoke and Kadir is sitting silently and Dads mumble: This country is very bizarre to me, first you’re an Arab and then you’re Swede of the Year and then you’re an Arab again.

  You take the commuter train home together and Dads sit silently. Then over dinner Dads look at Moms and say: I have made up my mind. No more not-Swedish. You are right. Starting now we will ONLY speak Swedish. Both here and in the studio. The twins will not be confused by the multitude of languages! No more French, no more Arabic. I must make my Swedish seriously impeccable in order to guarantee my studio’s continued survival!

  Moms who applaud and you who protest and Dads who suddenly pretend not to understand either Arabic or French objections. Swedish, my son. Now we speaks Swedish!

  Dads change languages.

  Dads shrink a little.

  I am resuming the rudder of the narrative in order to describe the next phase in our Swedish learning. It was acted in early spring 1987. Your mother had pointed out that perhaps it was not ingenious that your father taught me Swedish (and I him). She noted the likeness to the myth of “the blind leading the blind” and recommended us to cultivate the assistance of an outsider. Who did we select? Exactly. You.

  Your father interrupted you in your games in the courtyard, called you in to the studio, and pronounced his desire:

  “We need your assistance. Instead of spending your time with childish friends you shall be our guide into the Swedish language. Daccurdo?”

  Your father explained that we were in need of explicit linguistic rules that define the structure of Swedish and you nodded your head and had a very difficult time concealing your glowing pride. The next day we initiated our lessons. When you reached the studio, which was empty as usual, you had prepared certain notes and together we parked ourselves at a table with the ambition of illuminating the dark cave that we can call the Swedish language.

  During the following months you did your best to act grown-up and assist the formulating of our rules of grammar. Here you can write in the memories that detail for the reader that it was thanks to your father and Kadir that you were infected with the ambition of an author.

  And you must admit that Kadir actually has a point because it is in the formulating of the rules of grammar that you see Swedish from the outside in for the first time. And maybe this is where your linguistic curiosity is wakened? Dads who decide that there is a system to language and ask for your help and what is bigger than dads who ask sons for help? The whole spring you go directly to the studio after school. You help with grammar, practice pronunciation, and correct their texts with dictionaries. You do your best to make up simplified rules of grammar, which Dads collect in the black wax notebook. And you remember how strange it feels to know more than Dads for the first time in your life. The feeling intoxicates you, takes over, and maybe sometimes you correct mistakes that are really correct and maybe sometimes you make up rules that aren’t exactly right, but Dads continue to write in the wax notebook and Kadir continues to imitate your pronunciation and you have a power that you’ve never had before. Soon you feel how the language opens up, how the linguistic structures are everywhere, how you are always on the trail of the truth. You collect more and more rules with a huge amount of examples. Until the day when Dads suddenly take the notebook from you, hide it in the mémoire, and forbid you to continue collecting rules. Why? You don’t remember. But you remember that you keep going in your head because not even Dads can control the inside of your head and in there you build new systems and new structures for how Swedish is constructed. And just one time, right before Kadir returns home, you try to convince Dads that Swedish is actually a total Arab-hating language, and Dads, sighing, ask why, and you only have time to give one example: What about the expression pyramid scheme? What’s more Arab-hating than that? And Dads whip around and the cuff on your ear burns your cheek red and Dads hiss: You’re Swedish, you goddamn bloody idiot!

  Right now I’m sitting here behind my reception with the black wax notebook with our rules of grammar in front of me. Its exterior is worn, the shine is lost, and a brown coffee ring tattoos its first page. Still it is very grandiose to me in its nostalgic value. What fun we had when we together became each other’s astronauts in the universe of the Swedish language! Was our togetherness not delicious? Everyone received compensation: You practiced your tongue to say r and s (finally!!!). I prepared my hotelish CEO proficiency. Your father practiced his Swedish in order to be able to wait on photo customers in the right language. Do our rules of grammar justify their position in the book about your father? I believe so. Below I have translated the text from the booklet, approximately how we wrote it (spiced with a little extra metaphoricalness). And by the way, before I forget: If you persist in bringing up a certain cuff your father happened to delegate you I want to remind you of the truth. It was a “cuff” that we can sooner call a “pat softer than a sweater present on Christmas Eve.” And it was for your own sake, memorize that.

  14. Your father included three drawings in the letter. Here he is maximally generous … In actuality, your speech pattern was a long way from normalcy. And your drawings? Well, of course you know how they looked …

  KHEMIRI’S (& KADIR’S) RULES OF GRAMMAR

  Formulated While Waiting for Photo Customers, Spring 1987

  INTRODUCTION

  Swedish is the language of the Swedes. The Swedish mentality bears a great interest for different phenomena. This mentality is reflected in the Swedes’ language. This is vital. In order to understand the Swedes and their humor and their bizarre manner of discussing the weather and nodding forth their refusal we must understand Swedish. The mentality and the language are linked together, back and forth in the mirror of eternity that is symbolized by two mirrors put up facing each other in a sweaty changing room.

  Jonas—this is my decorative introduction with a poetic metaphor stolen from your father.

  Who, then, are the Swedes? Let us describe them and relate their language to their mentality.

  MNEMONIC RULE 1

  Swedish is the language of loans. When in doubt about a Swedish word—choose the French equivalent. Or English. This saves a lot of time in the learning of vocabulary. Swedes are a people with quick influences from the world around them.

  This was our initial linguistic rule. In the composition book we collectioned a monstrous quantity of correspondences between Swedish and French and English in order to effectively build our vocabularies. In double-column form with linked arrows
are nouns like “chauffeur,” “avenue,” “premier,” “voyeur.” The adjectives include words like “maladroit,” “excellent,” “vital.” A particular page has been dedicated to the verbs of quantity; there are “pronounce,” “terminate,” “disregard,” “march,” “respond,” “lodge.”

  MNEMONIC RULE 2

  One can also visualize Swedish as the language of melody—when in uncertainty, notice the nuance of intonation. Swedes love song and music. No people sings in choir more than Swedes. Incidentally, Pernilla has taken music classes. Swedes sing songs on holidays, birthdays, and before they drink alcohol. Someone who does something well has “struck the right note” and people who disagree are “out of tune.” Everything in Swedish is music.

  This was our secondary rule, formulated in order to try to differentiate between words that in Swedish are confusing copies with only the vital difference of tone. We expose examples like “bass” (partly the guitarly, partly the fishly). The baby’s “mobile” is compared with a book“mobile” with the city of “Mobile.” The “Polish” (from Poland) compete with “polish” (for shoes). “To reject” is mirrored against “to be a reject.” It also says:

  You can eat chili and be chilly.

  You can sit on a board and be bored.

  You can hit the brake and take a break.

  See also hail, fall, hit …

  Your father and I carefully practiced the tones of pronunciation to the correct Swedish melody before we onwent to the next rule.

  MNEMONIC RULE 3

  Also, when the melody is exactly identical to us, the poetic ambiguity of Swedish can deceive. Be wary of the context! Swedes are, for example, extremely amorous about payment to the government. Thus “the Treasury” takes one’s stately tax compulsion and “treasure” is a precious chest of riches.