Montecore

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  Here many pages are dedicated to equivalent examples. At the end your father celebrates one of his Swedish favorite words: “drive.”

  Oh, that magnificent word which in the form of symbols shows the poeticness of Swedish! By context, “drive” can bear three diagonally separated meanings. There is to “drive” something through, as in firmly advance a particular politic. There is to “drive” as in controlling a moving vehicle. There is also to “drive” someone up the wall in the aim of annoying.

  And then, just when your father was done, you said:

  “And then driving as in the meaning of driving snow!” and your father nodded happily and added it in the book.

  MNEMONIC RULE 4

  Swedes love music and particularly birds’ song! On the radio there are intermission birds, and the vitality of birds is mirrored in hundreds of Swedish expressions.

  Here we noticed how you began to be more interested in our language discussions. The day after the formulating of that rule you came back to the studio with a long list of examples:

  To “rule the roost” is to be the leader, and “pecking order” describes the ranking of colleagues. When something is “scarcer than hens’ teeth,” the rarity is very intensive. When one “wings” something, one is improvising. One is free as “a bird” and watches like “a hawk,” and to arrange a home is to “nest.” To admit error is to “eat crow,” and the ideal saver of time is to “kill two birds with one stone.” The reddish spots of itchy disease on small children are called “chicken pox.” The coldness of skin is related to “goose bumps,” and one provokes by “ruffling feathers.” Information from a concealed source is from “a little bird,” cowards are named “chicken,” and an unlovely person is named an “ugly duckling.” And knowledge about the oldest art of love is of course related in “the birds and the bees.”

  Jonas—I know that you collectioned even more examples but perhaps these are sufficient?

  MNEMONIC RULE 5

  For that matter—let us reformulate; not only birds are vital for the Swedish mentality. ALL of nature is constantly present for them. They are alone in the celebrated Everyman’s Right. Nature is EVERYTHING for them.

  Here you began to spend more and more time with our rules. You began to read dictionaries and snickered yourself through your father’s old Swedish-French gems. Then you formulated this rule and presented us examples in quantity. Your father was impressed and encouraged you. Initially. Which in turn only seemed to feed your hunger rather than to satisfy it.

  A “happy camper” is someone very content. When two people are extremely similar they are “two peas in a pod.” An evil person is “a bad apple,” and one who is silent at a party is a “wallflower.” Life is compared with “a bowl of cherries,” and a bad thing is “the pits.” The Swede’s ideal is “down to earth,” people are the “grass roots,” a mysterious person is a “hard nut to crack.”

  Nature is always near in the phase of reproduction as well. The beautiful woman is called “a chick.” She is stroked on her bosom, or her “melons.” Soon her “bush” is moistened. She is fertilized by the man’s “wood” when he sows his “wild oats.” Together the woman and the man then carry out the act called “a roll in the hay.”

  These phrases wakened great humor in the three of us. The space for this rule ends here, but a few pages ahead the enumeration of nature continues …

  For that matter—let us not forget the Swedes’ names. What can trace the influence of nature better than the last names of celebrities? There is the pianist Lars Roos, like a rose; and the pop star Lasse Berghagen, “mountain pasture”; the author Astrid Lindgren, “linden branch”; and the skier Gunde Svan, “swan.” There’s the architect Asplund, “aspen grove”; the director Bergman, “man from the mountain”; the skier Stenmark, “stony land.” The journalist Lagercrantz, “laurel wreath,” and the politicians Palme, “palm tree,” and Björck, “birch.” And last but not least: Magnus “Här-en-stam”—“Here a log.” The Swedish nature is near to us everywhere! Sometimes also in first names! What other people name themselves Stig (“path”) or Björn (“bear”) or [X].

  Here I cannot really decipher the handwriting. We continue with …

  MNEMONIC RULE 6

  Hmm … My son says: Of course NATURE is vital, but is it not IN PARTICULAR the forest that the Swedes idolize the most? The forest and in particular the trees. Swedes are the Forest People! Sweden is the Land of Trees!

  Here you began to be entirely too overactivated in your collection of linguistic examples. One can see more and more often that your fingers have taken the pen and themselves written in wordish examples.

  Among other things, it reads:

  Everything on a tree can become a new word in Swedish. The frequent customer of a bank can go to a “branch,” and we are “rooting” for the studio to succeed. A Swede removes his body and “leaves,” a perplexed person (or a political speech) is “stumped,” someone in love “pines.” To redecorate is to “spruce up,” and a complicated situation is “sticky.” Comedy is “slapstick,” a policeman has a “nightstick,” a child plays with a “pogo stick,” and you light a candle with a “matchstick.” The ideal of life is often to “turn over a new leaf.” When a Swede is on the wrong track he is “barking up the wrong tree.” Oof, my fingers are getting tired.

  … you had actually written that in the notebook …

  You can also “go out on a limb” and “put down roots.” To snore is to “saw logs;” to go insane is to be “barking mad.” If someone is scared they “shake like a leaf.” One is poor because “money doesn’t grow on trees.”

  When we had written this I hacked my throat and coughed a few loud times … Your father ignored me.

  And what can be better proof of the Swedes’ tree fixation than this: Their capital city is called STOCKholm! And their economic currency is called “CROWNS”! (The stock bears up the tree, and the crown, of course, sways above.)

  Then follows a section that we can exclude because it is crossed out. In it you wanted to convince us that Swedes are the Alcohol People. Under the lines one can decipher “the ideal is to be ‘in high spirits’ or ‘drunk with joy’ or ‘intoxicated by life,’ ” and farther down, “a Swede who doesn’t express feelings ‘bottles them up,’ something small is ‘pint-sized,’ and …”). Then your father seems to have stopped you in the middle of this rule and taken the pen back.

  MNEMONIC RULE 7

  What do the Swedes love more than products from the dairy? Nothing! Their milk exists in a majority of differentiated variants, and they drink it like water. They are the Dairy People, mark our words!

  In the notebook it says:

  The Swede with importance is called “big cheese” and something that is too sentimental is “cheesy.” When we photograph, the customer says “cheese.” Something that works smoothly is “like butter,” and someone who is angry is “cheesed off”!!! “Don’t cry over spilled milk” is called scornfully at someone who is upset over a triviality, and when one takes full advantage of a situation it is “milked.” And, and … there is more, I am convinced. YES! What is the ideal in the world of the Swede? To find the type of success that is called being “the cream of the crop.”

  Somewhere around here your father got the task of photographing a newly deceased senior citizen’s home of death at the nursing home. Your father carried out the task with brilliance and precision. In the darkroom he took me separately and whispered:

  “Am I exaggerating if I say that my dear son seems to be a little … special?”

  “No, but in which respect? His late speech or his corpulence or his persistence in discussing with himself?”

  Your father angrily hacked his voice.

  “Watch yourself, Kadir. I am referring to how he invests so much time in our rules of grammar. Haven’t you seen him? He yells, ‘Wow, my theories just grow in expansion—Swedish has surrounded me, I see the patterns, knowledge is swirling me! My theories ar
e developing with the heat and speed of a forest fire!’ I am alarmed by his development! It is not positive that my son has the tendency to grow his passion for things with such a strong strength.”

  “I just think he is reminiscent of you.”

  This made your father quiet his voice. We continued with the darkroom work. From your father’s position I heard him say:

  “This does not prophetize well about the future.”

  Here follow two empty pages (a mistake?) before the next rule is presented.

  MNEMONIC RULE 8

  The Swedes are also the Climate People? Right? Well, perhaps. YES!!! Snow and ice are central to the understanding of the world of the Swedes. When the Swedes are extremely occupied, they are “snowed under.” After one’s day of death one hopes to reach the heaven that the Swede calls “paradice.” Even the winds are important. A success “takes something by storm.” One shouts, “Okay, we will do it—let us throw caution to the wind!” A solution is discovered by “brainstorming.”

  Here your father began to say that you should devote more time to homework than to linguistic rules. Simultaneously I began to project my journey home. The letters in the notebook now cease to relate examples in complete phrases. Instead the words are presented helter-skeltered in chaoticness.

  MNEMONIC RULE 9

  In addition, let us not limit the Swedes’ interest for Nature. The fablish world of animals is also central and vital. To bother is to “badger” and to imitate is to “ape,” and the police are called “pigs” and one’s love is complimented with “love bug,” even though to annoy is “to bug,” and when one struggles it is called “floundering” and having to “grin and bear” something makes no one happy and one feels “happy as a clam” or one feels the opposite and “clams up,” and there are “scales” like at the grocery store and “scales” like on a fish and insectly “bees” and “bees” for spelling and that was great and thus “a whale of a time,” and a distraction is a “red herring” and a pain in the leg is a “charley horse” and a snitch “rats” someone out and one drinks “like a fish” and the “donkey work” is boring and a scream sounds like “a stuck pig” and to ignore is to “play ostrich” and nervousness fills stomachs with “butterflies” and the pants with “ants” and something unusual is “neither fish nor fowl” and one “squirrels away” like a miser, and when one is hungry one “could eat a horse” and one can “go ape” and “have a cow” and have free reins and sit on “high horses” and live “high on the hog” and … (height essential—Swedes v. tall!).

  Here your father began to spread active irritation about your constant talk of wordish rules. He said to you:

  “Twist your focus to your homework instead! Go out and play soccer! Be a bit normal! I wanted to formulate these rules with a gleamed eye, not with the passion that you seem to show. I do not want to see hide nor hair of you here!”

  And do you know what bizarre you respondered? You sat with the yellow pencil chewed between your lips, pondered, and then pronounced:

  “Even this can be salvaged as a rule of grammar! ‘Hide nor hair’ is like ‘scarcer than hens’ teeth.’ And who cares about hair more than Swedes? The contours of truth are near now!”

  Your father side-swung his sighing head. On the next page is the tenth and terminating rule:

  MNEMONIC RULE 10

  The Swedes are also the Hair People. Hairstyles bear a great weight in Sweden; the work of hairstylists exposes a well-formed status and also this can of course be noticed in the Swedes’ linguistic use. Absent is when one has not seen “hide nor hair,” of something, a neat person does not have “a hair out of place,” something subtle is as “fine as a hair,” something uncertain “hangs by a hair,” something that makes one tough “puts hair on one’s chest,” finding subtleties is “splitting hairs,” to be anxious is to “pull your hair out,” and to inspect carefully is to use “a fine-tooth comb.” Do not touch a “hair” on my friend’s head and do not give yourself “gray hair” in your attempt to “let your hair down” and a “hair-raising splitting of hairs does not make a hair’s breadth.”

  These were our ten rules. We can conclude the section with your father’s recurring praise of the poetic excellence of Swedish (this is actually not in our notebook). Do you remember it? He would say something like this:

  Let us now ring out our cry: Swedish is the language of loans, melody, the dairy, nature, animals, fine as hair! And of optimism! Swedish is the language where the narrow end of the alley is not a “dead end” (like in English) or the “rump of the bag” (like in French). In Sweden, the reuse, the compromise, and the side step are a perpetual alternative. In Swedish, this street is called … “the alley of returning …”

  In actuality, our book is terminated by a page where someone has written with angry black letters:

  BUT ALSO THE LANGUAGE OF ARAB-HATING: FOR WHAT OTHER LANGUAGE HAS EXPRESSIONS LIKE PYRAMID SCHEME!

  This phrase is, however, carefully crossed out by your father.

  In April of 1987 I chose to return home to Tunisia. My breast had shrunk my belief in your father’s economic talent and grown my longing for Tabarka’s touristettes, the daily life of Hôtel Majestique, and my nightly poker partners.

  My emotion for your family’s status had also begun to distress me. Your father’s dirty shoes and holey beret, your mother’s tired nurse exterior, your constant economy-size packages from the cheap stores in Skärholmen, your magnet-attached three-crown rebate coupons on the refrigerator, your TV with a taped antenna cord, your little brothers’ hand-me-down rompers, your room with your father’s home-constructed bookshelves. Everything filled me with the tragedy of aversion. For certainly it was not this your father projected when he left Tunisia?

  Your father closed the studio and escorted me to Central Station for me to say farewell. Before the departure he delegated me a certain reduced salary plus our joint linguistic-rule notebook:

  “Here, a souvenir. You may as well take it so that my son escapes confusing himself even more in the fog of his imagination.”

  I accepted the book. And then pronounced a phrase that I would probably regret and draw back into my mouth with the same suck as in the Vicks cough drop ads of the time. If I only could.

  “Thanks, Abbas. Good luck for the future. I hope you succeed in your ambition of not infecting your son with being an outsider.”

  “What do you mean, infect?”

  “Well, certainly it seems being an outsider wanders in inheritance from one generation to the next? And simultaneously infects those who are near? A little like a contagious disease?”

  This was a thought I had polished in my solitude and I felt proud about, for once, being able to sprinkle your father with a new insight. Your father nodded his head.

  “That is the most intelligent thing I have heard you say for a long time, Kadir. Being an outsider as an infection. I will memorize that. And if you ever come across an idea of how I should grow my studio’s success, then contact me … I guarantee to pay my borrowed sum with added interest as soon as it is possible.”

  We waved our farewell. This picture, of your unshaven father who grimly waves me through the glass on the airport bus, is to me a strong memory. This was the last time I saw your father and automatically recognized him.

  PART FOUR

  Dearest greetings!

  Naturally I am gladdened by your athletic ambition. But I am darkened when I do not understand your insinuations. You write: “Isn’t it true that you and Dad had a huge beef before you parted? That you had a big fight with yelling and scuffling and uproar?” What kind of knickknack is this? Is it your mother who has said this? Is a “beef” equivalent to a fight?

  I will unmask something: Your mother may be a woman unique from the generality of ALL other women. BUT her interest in your father’s friends was never bigger than that of a puddle. She constantly mixed their names, and when your father named them Aristocats your mother soon began to name th
em the Aristoidiots. She was irritated by their drinking habits and would probably rather see your father’s relations with her secure communist circle. This is my truth and you can verify it with your mother.

  That you do not remember my friendly farewell or all our linguistic rules surely doesn’t mean that they have not existed? I have the proof before me this very second. Write me, by the way … What do you remember of the moon landing or the Olympics in Mexico or the summer of ’74? Not much, right? Do not let the precariousness of memory swirl our focus.

  On the other hand, you are possibly correct that the rules would uptake too many pages in our book. In order to shape a global master opus the alternative that these linguistic rules are injected ONLY in the Swedish version is presented. In the French version we can let your father applaud the Eiffel Tower, Jacques Brel, and nuclear tests in the territory of others, enjoying a Brie-filled baguette. The Australian version can fantasize forth a customer who invades the studio and tells of his time as a kangaroo hunter. In the South American version an Indian can play a melody on a pan flute. Indian readers can be served your father’s recipe for curry; to yellower Asians we can introduce a passage where your father expresses himself positively about small, cute stuffed animals, video games, raw fish, sumo wrestling, industrious men, and obedient women. What do you think?

  Now we will initiate the book’s quadratic section, and once again it is time for you to invade the story. You must be rather hungry for revenge after your latest defeat. Naturally you will get a new chance; no one is infallible, not even Dr. Phil. (Except maybe in his master opus Defining Your Authentic Self.) Let us now show how your father succeeded in rousing his studio to a success story. Let us simultaneously hope that you have grown your talent since last time. I affix you an adequate introduction with added headings in order to guide the book in the correct angle.