They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  That was one summer.

  Now he’s on the floor, shot down, and Amin is staring at him, and at “Nour,” as he calls the girl he met one rainy day last fall, and Amin’s thinking about life, about how it goes.

  He thinks about his sister, who was also named Nour. Twirling. Her tiny baby fingers touching his. And the cops pulling him down to the ground, down into the puddles. Digging a knee into his back. Later, of course, that was much later. And of course his pops had left.

  That’s how it goes.

  And he and Hamad got tight eventually, of course, after that nerd proved he could be trusted if shit went down. Some nights, after Amin started working for him, when they were sitting in Hamad’s house, when his parents weren’t home, dividing up the hash and weed and pills in resealable plastic bags, Amin felt a strange closeness to him because he’d been a nerd for all those years. Not that Amin had ever been one. Hell no.

  But because sometimes he wished he could be a different person, too.

  “God has to touch them,” says Hamad, who has grabbed ahold of her pantleg and is tugging at the fabric, scrabbling and desperate. It’s like the comic book store is slowly being drained of air. Sitting there hunched over, the weight of the bomb vest feels new, and she sends a thought toward its dark, contained energy. The SWAT team’s flickering lights make the shadows beat like wings. The thought of large beastly moths rises up again, and again she pushes the thought back down.

  “Touch who?” she asks, and Hamad sounds surprised when he responds:

  “All of us. God has to touch everyone.”

  She calls to Amin, who is hyperventilating and has been for minutes. Eventually he reacts: he pulls the balaclava up to his forehead and takes a couple deep breaths as if he’d just surfaced from the sea.

  “Amin,” she says, and he stares at her, but instead of answering he raises his weapon over his head and fires off a salvo out the window—he’s screaming as he squeezes the trigger, but the scream is drowned out by the roaring shots—the muzzle flash lights up his open mouth.

  Her ears keep ringing long after Amin’s shots have fallen silent—a drawn, monotone wail—and she turns her head and sees a new constellation in the shop window—seven eight nine bullet holes.

  Read all about the terrorist’s insane plot.

  One: the moth was both real and not real. Two: the moths, which she often sees, are related to a flaw in time. Three: she doesn’t remember the first time she saw them. Four: maybe it had already started when she was in the hospital, before she fled that night. Maybe even earlier.

  Five: can’t remember.

  She unfastens the buckles on Hamad’s bomb vest and struggles to get it off him. He’s heavy and unwieldy in the way the dead are. She calls to Amin again, who gets to his feet, snuffling, and fires his machine gun for a second time, straight up into the ceiling—he seems to take power from its roar and fire.

  Halogen lights shatter and rain down on him like smoking crushed eggshells.

  “Handcuffs. Handcuffs.”

  Amin takes a zip tie out of Hamad’s black bag and uses it to secure one of the hostages by the door—a short man in a brown blazer. As she hangs the bomb vest on him, she notices that he’s peed himself—the urine looks metallic in the flaming blue light, like he’s leaking quicksilver.

  The infidels push a button in Las Vegas and an entire wedding party is murdered on the other side of the planet. And they call us extreme.

  These are Hamad’s thoughts inside her brain.

  She checks her cellphone to make sure the text message that will detonate the vest is ready to send.

  Amin has squatted down next to Hamad and is tugging and scratching at the dead man’s clothes and whispering to him; she goes over to them. She doesn’t know why she’s still filming, and when Amin looks up at her, straight into the camera, his face is so gaunt she thinks she can see the skeleton behind the flesh, like an x-ray—large dark holes and long bare teeth. The world contracts, becomes a band stretched tight across her temples, the blood pounding. Maybe she and Amin are in fact the ones being held hostage, by the people in here, and by the events taking place and the fear they’re spreading.

  They wanted to have something to call their own.

  They tried to find something true.

  She pulls off her own bomb vest. Puts it on another hostage, forces her to climb into the window display—pressing the barrel of her weapon into a woman’s back—where she cowers, frightened and out of place among the collectible toys and rare first editions.

  She gets the feeling she’s done this before.

  She returns to Amin and Hamad.

  “Everything is wrong,” she says again, and Amin sniffs snot back into his nose and tries to speak but it comes out as a long plaintive sound. He clenches his teeth and rocks back and forth. “Amin. Everything is wrong.”

  He looks at her, eyes red with tears.

  “Fam is ice cold,” he says. “Yani, soldier. Yani, askari, get it?”

  She nods, touches his hand, knows he’s talking about Hamad, about the square, about the slanging days and chaotic nights before Hamad went to Syria.

  “Nobody fucked with him,” Amin says. “But then he got all serious, you know? With a girl. Or with that fucking social worker who started talking to him, right?”

  The two of them have Hamad’s blood on their hands; it’s already cold and syrupy.

  “Listen to me, Amin. I don’t think we should be here. This isn’t where we were supposed to end up.”

  They should’ve cut and run.

  What kind of mission did she think she was on here?

  “I’ve seen it a thousand times,” Amin says and squeezes his eyes shut. “Or the guys from the mosque start in on you with their fire and eternity talk. You get soft. And every fool you jumped comes back at you.”

  “I know, Amin.”

  “So he left,” he says. “He bounced, you know what I’m sayin’? To fucking Syria.”

  The corpse’s face doesn’t look like Hamad anymore, it’s just an obliterated, stiffening object, but Amin keeps trying to fix it up, put the head straight and raking his fingers through the wet hair. “Then he turned up six months later, saying he missed me at the mosque.” Amin laughs at that, empty and worried.

  “Why was it snowing?” she asks, because everything inside her is torn up now, and everything is coming out, all the questions she’s bottled up just so she can function. “The first thing I remember is that I went to the window, and it was summer, but it was snowing.” She’s sitting on the other side of Hamad’s body. “Why don’t I remember who I am, Amin? Why can’t I remember where I come from?” She isn’t talking to him anymore but to herself, and maybe that’s why he finally responds:

  “They killed your mother.”

  “When? When did that happen? Why don’t I remember?”

  “It’s like you said it was. You were in the camp!” His voice is panicked—you can hear it on the film even though the camera has dropped lens-down on the floor. “I love you, Nour.” He gets up in a sudden rush of nervous energy, and stares out into the night at the police, the blockade, the winter.

  “My name isn’t Nour,” she says, which is a betrayal.

  Nour is the name of his dead sister, not me.

  Twirling.

  She must remember something: Liat. Save Liat. Save Mom and Dad, even though they’re already dead.

  She stays put. Amin goes over to Loberg and gives him a few frustrated, unfocused whacks with the butt of the machine gun.

  “Camera,” he says to her, and then: “Lights.” He repeats himself: “Lights. Lights.”

  She gets up, grabs her phone. Turns on the flashlight, walks through the hostages shining light on the scene—the flag’s black plastic surface gleams, cheap and brittle.

  See the Terrorist Couple’s Private Photos.

  Loberg lets himself be dragged by his hair without a sound or struggle.

  There’s movement behind the register and
she hears the door to the storeroom opening and people fleeing, but she doesn’t bother to run after them.

  Soon it will be over.

  I Hid to Survive—The Night of the Bomb in a Hostage’s Own Words.

  She focuses on the screen, on Amin’s shark eyes. The world shrinks into the screen. The screen expands and swallows life.

  Amin digs around in his pants pocket and retrieves the knife. He unfolds the blade and pulls Loberg’s hair; her nose starts bleeding, hot and wet, from both of her nostrils.

  Sometimes her nose bleeds when she remembers something new.

  Amin puts the sharpened blade to Loberg’s throat, she sees it happening on screen, and she remembers.

  At last she remembers where she’s seen Amin before.

  She stops recording.

  2

  Tundra, a criminal psychiatric clinic, is situated in the outskirts of the Rävlanda district, an hour’s bus ride from Gothenburg. It is comprised of three buildings: two brick ones built in the early ’50s, and a larger five-story one in concrete—when seen from above the three pavilions form the letter H. The latter was added during the psychiatry reform of the 1960s, and its purpose was, and has remained, to serve as a facility for the nation’s most dangerous criminally insane.

  All in all Tundra has just over ninety beds, split over six divisions, as well as an investigative unit. It is one of two high-security clinics in Sweden.

  I walked beneath the steel palisade, under chestnut trees ravaged by rain, and into the enclosed park that surrounds the three buildings. A man was raking up a half-rotten pile of leaves. I later found out that he was the so-called “Bear Man”—the Nazi who’d killed three people with a machete in Karlshamn the year before. As I passed he stared at me, mouth open and steaming.

  At the entrance to the larger building I handed over my sharp objects (keys and pens), putting them in a plastic box, then was searched halfheartedly by one of the male employees, a guard, apparently: since the late ’90s everyone employed in the high-risk clinics throughout Sweden wears civilian clothing and can only be distinguished from the patients by the alarm units and swipe cards attached to their belts.

  The guard accompanied me down the corridor and up the stairwell. My meeting was to take place in a room that was usually used for group therapy. I saw her through the security glass before I even walked inside. She was sitting still in a blocky, molded-plastic chair. The hood of her gray sweater was up and concealed a snug black hijab. She was swollen around the eyes, presumably a side effect of some medication or other.

  My steps on the linoleum floor echoed.

  The guard followed close behind; I felt like I was approaching the abyss; I wanted to turn around and go home.

  Barely two years had gone by since the attack at Hondo’s.

  The girl’s head was bowed.

  According to the passport that was recovered in Amin’s apartment after the attack, she was a Belgian citizen. Amin had called her “Nour,” but the name on the passport was Annika Isagel.

  The guard opened the door with his swipe card. The room smelled of cleaning products, and an old camera, an early digital model, was set up on a tripod in one corner. The doctor who’d written and invited me to visit—the girl had read my books and asked to meet me—was not present, which I found a bit remarkable.

  She looked up. Daylight filtered through the reinforced security glass, hazy and flat, it fell across her worn, bulky clothing, across her forehead and cheeks, across that mouth set in concentration, and I don’t know what I’d expected of her, but it wasn’t tears.

  A murderer who’d shed blood in the name of my religion. A demon who’d stolen my face. She was crying, soundlessly, while looking at me.

  I stopped in the middle of the room. The guard took a seat in one of the empty chairs. The girl used her sleeve to wipe away the tears.

  “As-salaamu-alaikum.” Peace. That was the word she used to greet me. The only one of the three terrorists to survive that wintry night of February seventeenth—the first word she said to me was peace.

  I didn’t respond to her greeting. She got up, and even though the movement wasn’t especially abrupt it made me shrink and take a step backward. The way my fear registered, behind her half-shut, swollen eyes, was unclear. She went over to a pine bookshelf and picked up a stack of papers. I’d spotted them as I came into the room, because the bookshelf was otherwise empty: there were twenty-some printed pages. I’d assumed it was a forgotten file or notes from group therapy. When she handed them to me I didn’t take them; instead, I looked to the guard for guidance. He scratched his blond mustache and shrugged.

  “Why did you want to meet me?”

  “This is the beginning of it.” Her voice wasn’t the same as it was on the video of the attack. It was calm, like an ordinary teenage girl from one of Gothenburg’s suburbs, a little edgy and shy. “Yani, the first chapter.”

  “The first chapter of what?”

  She studied me with sad tenderness, and I remember thinking something that I would have reason to reflect upon much later: She’s looking at me like she’s saying goodbye.

  “The first chapter of my story,” she said. I took the pages.

  In his email, her doctor explained that she was suffering from severe undifferentiated schizophrenia with psychotic episodes and hallucinations—maybe it was no wonder that after reading my books, she’d started writing one herself. I sat down in one of the empty chairs and flipped through the pages without reading them, and then posed the question I’d come to ask:

  “What actually happened that night? After you turned off the camera?”

  She went over to the window, watched something outside. In the daylight she looked sleep-deprived and exhausted.

  Before coming to Tundra, I’d read almost everything that had been written about the attack: in print, on news websites, and on social networks. The girl in front of me had grown up in Brussels and converted to Islam at fourteen; according to her family it was so she could be with a boyfriend she’d had at the time, a guy her age with Moroccan roots. She left home after a fight and moved in with her boyfriend’s family, and soon after that she disappeared. Her parents suspected that the boyfriend had hurt her and reported her disappearance to the police. Only after the boyfriend was in custody for several weeks did it come to light that she’d been arrested by the VSSE, the Belgian State Security Service, and had been secretly transferred to the al-Mima prison in Jordan. There she was interrogated by the VSSE, and presumably the French as well, in cooperation with consultants and specialists from K5GS. K5GS was a military company headquartered in Amsterdam that, in addition to working alongside NATO-soldiers stationed in the Middle East and Africa, provided security solutions for public transportation systems in several European cities and conducted data analysis from a complex in London. Eventually her parents, through persistent legal work, had her returned to Belgium, but she was in terrible shape from her stay at al-Mima and was hospitalized in Brussels. This was about two years before the attack on Hondo’s. For several months the doctors described her state as catatonic: she was awake but unresponsive to external stimuli; she didn’t speak, didn’t eat on her own, and never even got out of either bed or the wheelchair her visitors sometimes pushed her around in. Her pupils reacted to light, but other than that her reflexes were shut down or numb.

  On the evening of June eleventh, one and a half years before the attack, she got out of her sickbed and went over to the window. She began sobbing and collapsed to the floor.

  In the following weeks she became more and more aware of her surroundings, but still didn’t speak with anyone.

  She fled the hospital in the middle of August and turned up in Gothenburg three months later: she’d been fined a few times for fare skipping on buses and streetcars.

  One final detail, the importance of which remains undetermined, is that her waking up coincided with a meteorological anomaly: the same night she got out of bed and looked out the window, snow
rolled in over the Northeast of Brussels, even though it was the middle of summer.

  “Can we talk about something else first?” she said in response to my question about the events of February seventeenth. I shrugged; she said: “There was a tree behind the apartment building we lived in.”

  “In Brussels? Was that when you lived with your family or with your boyfriend?” I had a vague memory of a cement colossus set against a gray sky, a pretty typical piece of scene-setting from the articles about her life.

  “I never had a boyfriend,” she said. “Just Amin.”

  “I’m talking about the Moroccan guy. The one who got you to convert to Islam.”

  “It’s like…that’s not me.” She chewed on her lower lip. “I never lived in Brussels.”

  “What do you mean that isn’t you?” I asked.

  She picked underneath her nails, an attempt to fill the room’s oppressive, watchful stillness with a small nervous tic.

  “I look in the mirror and that’s not me,” she said after a while. “It’s not my face.” So much for an explanation. She continued: “It was a willow tree.”