They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  “Quiet. Keep quiet. Yo. Yo!”

  It’s no help. Weeping all around her. Why does she keep feeling like she’s remembering this as it’s happening?

  Hamad walks backward through the door. He’s dragging Loberg by the collar, one of the man’s legs is leaving a bloody trail on the floor. Like someone painting with a broad brush.

  One: she only has Amin and Hamad, and this violence, this revenge she is taking because of unclear assaults in her past.

  She becomes aware of a crowd. They’ve gathered outside the store’s window, beyond the shelves of comic books and collectible toys, a cluster of shadows; and right then, as she’s looking out, the first police car arrives, blue lights blaze and spin through the winter night, making the reflection in the window disappear, reappear, disappear.

  She should’ve left.

  Hamad pushes Loberg up against the checkout counter and presses the barrel of the gun to his forehead. She watches it happening and feels paralyzed. Why was it snowing the night she came to? Why doesn’t she remember her real name?

  Hamad butts Loberg in the temple with the weapon and he drops. Hamad doesn’t shoot.

  Get it on film.

  Loberg is slumped against the counter, body limp, legs sticking out, glasses broken. He’s staring at her. Nearby, Hamad is forcing the hostages to their knees, cuffing them with white plastic zip ties, covering their mouths with silver duct tape and their heads with black canvas bags. He works quickly and when one of them disobeys he gives them a stressed slap.

  Loberg has a strip of tape over his mouth but no canvas bag over his head; he’s staring at her through the jagged hole smashed in his glasses. She turns away.

  She dries her sweaty palms on her pants and takes the cellphone from her pocket.

  At the hospital they insisted she was someone else. Called her by a name that was not hers and spoke a language she didn’t understand.

  She is one of thousands who have been kidnapped and tortured since 9/11. That much she knows.

  That much she thinks she knows.

  Hamad switches places with Amin at the front door. He’ll handle the police while she and Amin make the video.

  Amin, stance wide, poses in front of the black flag. The balaclava he’s wearing was bought at an Army surplus store along with the fishing vests. However, the black canvas bags they’ve put over the hostages’ heads are stolen: pillowcases from a furniture store.

  “In God’s name,” says Amin, who, like she and Hamad, has taken his jacket off, exposing another bomb vest. “We send greetings to our brothers on the front lines.”

  She zooms out. Even so, she has to take a few steps back so the camera can take in the whole scene.

  She’s the one who made the flag, based on pictures she found on the web. Four cut-up trash bags pieced together with black tape, the white emblem painted by hand. It’s hanging behind Amin on a bookcase.

  She’s responsible for the video. She’s live streaming it via a number of social networks and YouTube channels—Hamad has helped her access the right accounts and set up her phone.

  Amin takes a piece of paper out of his pants pocket. He reads a sentence in shaky Arabic. Under their black hoods a few hostages start crying again, because of the incredible and frightening power of people with automatic weapons speaking a foreign language, which is easy to mistake for the power of God’s word. She sees a man who might be Latin American or Turkish, a student—she noticed he wasn’t Swedish before Amin put the hood on him—bend forward as if he were anticipating a sweeping blow from up high.

  They spend eight hours a day watching television. And they call us extreme.

  They laugh at our religion.

  They murder us in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Chechnya, in Palestine.

  She tries to get everything on video; it’s shaky and blurred.

  Amin wanted to steal her a “dope” digital camera, but Hamad said that everything should be filmed with a cellphone.

  The format should attest to their modest means.

  “In the name of the Leader of the Faithful. In the name of every Muslim’s honor…” He cuts off his speech and goes over to Loberg, who’s still sitting against the checkout counter. Through the camera’s eye, there’s something disoriented and dazzled about him. Because he will die first, and because his death is meaningful precisely because of who he is—unlike the other hostages, who will die because they’re nobodies, ordinary infidels, chosen by chance, that is to say, by God—he’s not wearing a hood.

  Pulling at his rough cotton shirt and spurring him along by kicking him, Amin leads Loberg over to a spot in front of the flag, a spot she thinks of as a stage. He crawls, hops on his knees, and falls on his face a few times when Amin prods him with the tip of his shoe—it makes Hamad laugh with malicious delight from his post at the front door.

  They are simple people who exist beyond the lies and distortions of the media machine.

  Soon they will be in paradise.

  Still no communication with the police outside.

  Amin returns to his spot by the black flag. He straightens his balaclava, pinches it at the cheeks—apparently it’s itchy.

  The martyr leaves this world before the first drop of his blood hits the floor.

  She watches Amin on the screen, with Loberg kneeling in front of him, and to banish an awful worry that nothing is as it should be, she thinks of paradise and its immense trees—their crowns moving in the wind.

  The film is supposed to be pixilated, shaky, with unexpected close-ups of the speaker’s shoes and so on—she’s following Amin’s movements, but the lens captures the comic books spread across the floor, overturned chairs, somebody’s elbow, blood splatter from Loberg’s leg.

  “We have passed judgement on this man, who is known to all of you,” Amin says. His body language belies his nerves. He wants to rush it. He’s having a hard time sounding slick. “This so-called artist. I mean, this man whom we have judged. For blasphemy and dishonor. He has not honored our Prophet.”

  She zooms in on Amin’s eyes, staring through the narrow opening in the balaclava. She feels dizzy, looks up from the bright display, and blinks away the flickering spots. The headlines and news reports in her head, yani, a voice saying we would like to offer a warning to our more sensitive viewers. You know: sick.

  Who is she?

  She glances at Hamad, who is peering out the window.

  Hard to see what’s going on outside with the emergency vehicles’ blue lights sweeping through the store.

  Breaking: Terrorist Attack in Gothenburg.

  The light through the cellphone screen has a greenish tint and she focuses on the action there. She wants to feel how it disturbs her, which has something to do with her thinking that she’s remembering what’s happening right before it happens—a phrase Amin uses, a hand gesture—it’s like a double exposure, an echo.

  “The punishment is death,” Amin says on the stage, and Göran Loberg snorts, as though low pressure is drawing the air out of him, and he doubles over from the undeniable power of a worldview that takes it upon itself to rule over life and death.

  She recognizes this.

  Why does she recognize these scenes?

  Amin looks at the figure at his feet with surprise and appreciation. Maybe Loberg needs to vomit, his hair is sticking out in every direction and his bumbling quasi-aristocratic dignity is gone. Mostly he looks like a homeless man who’s been slapped around after having been caught pickpocketing.

  “The punishment is death,” Amin repeats, stroking the machine gun pensively. He nods to himself, appearing to go through the text in his head.

  His face isn’t covered to hide his identity. It’s covered to show that he’s part of an anonymous mass, that he could be anyone. He could be the Muslim sitting next to you on the bus, unemployed and friendly—an ordinary well-mannered young man who gives up his seat for the elderly, most of the time, but who has had it up to here with racism and colonialism.
/>   “The punishment is death,” he says for the third time, and laughs.

  He is nineteen years old and never finished grade school. He laughs again, louder. He’s polite and right now he’s between jobs because he hasn’t been given a fucking chance, that’s the way it is, that’s what he usually tells her—the Swedes haven’t given him one single tiny fucking chance.

  He could be anyone, a guy from Hasselbo who’s smoked his share of hash, okay, sure, he’s sparked up plenty in the glow of his computer, amid the whirl of local and American trap videos or conspiracy theory videos—the Illuminati and whomever else he was talking about when he was stoned…the Rothschilds—while he fantasized about success and revenge and anything that could speak to the feeling of having been taken for a ride. He does usually get up for the elderly, and even for Swedes, especially for Swedes, to show them what Islam stands for in a world that never rewards goodness.

  She keeps watching him on the screen, standing there with his head slightly bowed and laughing a kind of middle-school giggle, so much more pleasurable because right here, right now, is not the time or place.

  He picks up one of Loberg’s books from the desk and flips through it. The pictures silence his laughter—using his entire body, he demonstrates his disgust for what he’s seeing. He holds the pages out to the camera.

  Another one of Loberg’s pictures: a man with a lampshade on his head, electric shocks being administered through his nipples. The camera’s autofocus blurs the speech bubble. The man’s wide-open eyes and mouth shine on a newspaper being read by a burqa-wearing woman in an armchair.

  “You want to dishonor Islam!” Amin holds out the pages toward Loberg and says, “Huh? Huh? Huh?” while smacking Loberg on the back of his head and across his face.

  One of the male hostages is breathing heavily, panicked—as she turns to look the camera follows along—the black canvas bag is being sucked into the man’s nose.

  The canvas bag blows out, is sucked back in—he looks like he might actually be suffocating.

  She notes the madness in being the armed ones in a room.

  Amin flips to another picture, says “Do you?” and Loberg utters a few frightened, lowing sounds in reply, possibly because it’s finally dawning on him that he is about to die. Amin jerks his collar to get him to sit up.

  He resumes giggling to himself. She zooms in and out at the right times. Amin tugs at Loberg’s collar even though the man is already sitting—he’s taking something extra out on Loberg that has to do with an old teacher or his pops.

  She can’t get her head around her lack of compassion. Maybe it has something to do with the camera, how it isolates events from each other and from reality.

  She’s also familiar, in a secret way, with the cruelty hidden in Loberg’s well-ordered world, the one in which he’d just been sitting, joking, and jotting down notes. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t feel the slightest tenderness for this man’s abused body. Because of something heartless and raw hiding in the handshakes and bus schedules and pert comments, something she can feel in her skin and hair.

  At some point Amin hit Loberg in the nose, it’s bleeding profusely. She angles her camera down and to the side, out of weakness and out of sorrow, in spite of it all, a sorrow over what she’s seeing and immortalizing, a sorrow that has nonetheless caught up with her.

  Amin has trampled around in the blood from Loberg’s wounded leg and has left a trail of sticky, red Nike logos on the gray linoleum floor.

  A comic book stuck to his sole flutters.

  By now it’s around 7:30 p.m. Squad cars and police vans have rolled in, along with several ambulances and a fire truck. The prime minister has been informed and a task force is on its way from Stockholm in a military helicopter.

  Her hands are stiff and remote because of adrenaline and shock; she keeps nearly dropping the phone.

  Amin takes out a knife—a box cutter with an orange plastic handle. He fiddles with it, sliding the blade out, drawing it in, sliding it out. She’s focused on the knife’s cold fish-scale shine, but senses movement over by the entrance: Hamad is pressing one of the hostages against the glass while screaming at the police outside in the darkness and snow:

  “Back off!” He holds the hostage by the neck: “Back off!” He takes a step back and curls himself around his weapon, ready to fire, feet spread wide—he pushes the barrel into the hostage’s neck as a threat, as if to say: I’ll shoot him if they don’t obey me. “Back off!”

  She’s trying to follow the action with the cellphone camera, but it’s hard to know what’s key—at one point she decides that a furtive glimpse of Amin is the thing, but he’s consumed by the action at the front door, so she pans back to Hamad screaming, weapon still raised—it’s the viral cellphone video’s hyper-present wired aesthetic—my God, I can’t believe my eyes; have to get it on film—she’s both perpetrator and witness.

  Two policemen from the Gothenburg van have approached, guns drawn, going against established procedures for a hostage situation, and Hamad, who had counted on more or less set responses from the police, is losing it—he shouts again:

  “Back off!”

  It happens first in her head.

  She wants to tell Hamad to get down.

  Click on the link to watch the video.

  “Hamad!” she manages to say. She sees it first like a memory, a film scene on the backs of her eyelids, then on the cellphone’s small screen, and then—mostly a confused afterthought—she looks up and understands that this is really happening.

  At first the shots from outside are hollow and faint, what follows is glass shattering and finally a sucking smack.

  Harrowing images from the terrorist’s own camera.

  Hamad’s head is flung backward—Hamad with his old white Opel and his stories about Syria—his head is flung backward and on the footage you see part of his scalp fly off—blood and gray mush splash across the boxes of comics. He said it wouldn’t happen—the bomb vests were their back-up.

  She hears shouts from outside, unclear and mixing with the hostages’ voices, which are now screaming, unhinged and shrill, behind strips of duct tape.

  What am I doing here?

  Everything is wrong.

  Wasn’t God on Hamad’s side?

  A voice inside the store shouts that it was one of them, the police shot one of them—it’s Loberg shouting, the only hostage who doesn’t have a black bag over his head and can orient himself somewhat—probably to calm the others.

  She makes her way over to Hamad, crouched so low that at times she’s crawling on all fours. She’s still holding the cellphone—filming the floor, red speckles, comic book panels.

  The body is on its back, arms and legs flung out, breathing fitfully through its mouth, face swollen, bluish.

  She thinks she sees a moth, large as her palm, crawling over Hamad’s face.

  “Turn it off,” he says. “Turn it off.”

  The moth’s wings are darkly dappled, brown streaked with blue.

  The clamor of time.

  She isn’t who she appears to be.

  Doesn’t come from here.

  “Turn off the light.” The bullet hole in Hamad’s cheek is so small you could barely fit a finger in, but blood is streaming from it, pulsing out over his pale, sunken cheek.

  Wings trembling, the moth creeps across his forehead and into his hair. She stares at it, frozen. A new memory: A man looking out into the night through a shattered window. Her dad. She remembers her dad. Her mom beside him, knife in hand. She sees them clearly.

  What happened to her?

  Turn off the light so they don’t have anything to aim at. That’s what Hamad means.

  She points the camera at Amin, who’s crouched behind a box of shrink-wrapped comics, the machine gun in his cramped embrace. She hisses his name but he doesn’t respond.

  She senses a mechanism inside time, a power that sucks everything backward into the dark.

  This isn’t the first m
oth she’s seen.

  Don’t think about what it means. It’s too late to think.

  Too late, Nour.

  But her name isn’t Nour. That’s just a name Amin gave her.

  She crawls over to the light switch behind the cash register and turns off the ceiling lights. Then the blue light flashing through the window is the only light in the store.

  Hamad’s free hand starts fumbling in the air, movements that seem blind. She looks for the moth, but it’s gone.

  The seconds, a roaring river delta.

  On film: the side of Hamad’s bloodied face, as though shot in passing. She points the camera at him so she can find comfort through it. The shine of the camera’s gaze, its final judgement, and his eye, so close to the lens, no longer belongs to the anatomy of the face, it’s something else, inhuman and obscene: the bloodshot, egg-white-soft glassine structure; the eyelid’s shimmering pink cusp; the canopy of the iris around the pupil’s black hole.

  The globe of the eye blinks slowly.

  The film recorded at Hondo’s as Hamad nears death is streamed by millions around the world, via cellphone, laptop, tablet. Several of the larger news outlets overseas—but no Swedish outlets—put it up in real time.

  The eye, moist and dying, blinks ever more slowly.

  A thought gets rattled loose from the mire of Amin’s mind when he sees Hamad’s hand raised in a clawing or penitent gesture, with half his brain splattered across the comics, coins, and bills: Hamad must have gotten contact lenses the same summer he started hanging out on the square.

  So many years ago.

  He wants to crawl over to Hamad, but he’s being held in place by a force beyond his will, a pounding, paralyzing heft—the intimate inertia of survival presses him to the floor.

  Blood mixed with cranial grit pools behind Hamad’s head.

  Remembering that summer.

  Hamad went to the same school as he did. He came from the subdivision just east of Hasselbo. Two years older, but nerdy, chubby, acned, he tucked in his shirt and wore glasses. The kind of fool Amin and his friends would have messed with during break time. Then the summer between ninth grade and high school Hamad turned up in Hasselbo wearing a black windbreaker and tracksuit pants and started hustling hash, and guess if that motherfucker got on Amin’s nerves? It was so obvious he was fronting with those clothes and acting all hard and shit—for so long Hamad had been among those who were not wanted here, directionless, smoking in the light of tobacco shops and in a colder light of a fortified anger that came out during fights with chain-wrapped knuckles. Yeah, this is what Hamad was all about even though he came from a nice neighborhood and had a dad with a good job—like at a bank or something—who was around. And he’d go on and on about the price of an eighth or a kilo—it made Amin want to stomp his ass. But at the same time…at the same time Hamad was older and had managed to gain the respect of other older kids. Amin started hearing that Hamad was helping set up break-ins at his own dad’s company and was raking it in for some O.G.s.