They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  “A willow tree?”

  “Behind our apartment.”

  Her gaze drifted through the foggy reinforced glass. She seemed to be holding back an incredible inner pressure.

  I felt like I was having a meeting with evil right there in that room, like a single glance would leave a stain on my soul.

  In one sense she was a prime example of a young person who’d been drawn into religious zealotry. Before she got together with the Moroccan guy in Belgium she had, according to her family, been fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism and yoga, and on one occasion she’d overdosed on DMT, a drug that in certain circles is said to have mind-expanding properties.

  One thing complicating this picture was the fact that she did not speak the language she should—Flemish—and as far as I knew, there was no reasonable explanation as to why she could speak Swedish.

  During the first phase of the trial—it had of course been held behind closed doors—she’d made certain assertions, the exact nature of which were not revealed to the public. These had led to the psychiatric evaluation, which in turn had ended with her being placed in Tundra’s division for its most dangerous patients.

  “My mother loved that willow tree,” she said. She was slurring slightly, and I thought this too might be a side effect of her medication. “I liked resting my head on her stomach and looking up into its leaves.” Her eyes, fixed on something outside the window, were dark and anxious. “That tree used to make me think of death,” she said. “The light through the leaves, you know?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Extensive materials had leaked about K5GS soon after the girl was set free. Primarily videos depicting daily operations at the al-Mima prison: people with electrodes fixed to their shaved heads, people submerged in water or being shot through with an electric current. Some of the prisoners in al-Mima, in addition to the waterboarding and abuse, were said to have been subjected to neurological experiments.

  I wondered what happened to her out there, in the desert.

  “Do you want me to write a book about you? Is that why I’m here?”

  She nodded. There was something ambiguous about the gesture, as if she wanted to add something but couldn’t get it out. The silence between us thickened.

  “I wonder if it made Mom think of the same thing. That willow tree. If it made her think of death, too, and if that’s why she liked it. My real mom, I mean.” She glanced at me in the chair and waited. “My real dad wrote poetry. Like you.” She smiled as she said it.

  Much of what happened on February seventeenth after she turned off the camera on her cellphone was unknown to the public. Some sort of internal conflict had erupted.

  A private video existed that had been shot through one of the store windows, jerky and blurred by sudden movements and flares of light.

  Amin looked like he was about to slit Loberg’s throat, but the girl who was now in front of me had raised her machine gun and shot him.

  Of course, countless analyses had been made of that video—attempts to get to the bottom of what had happened. In some versions, the film had been slowed down and the action was played back frame by frame, and others zoomed in on Amin’s face or hand or the girl’s to be discussed for hours, by experts on terrorism, psychology, radical Islam.

  “If you want, I can write more,” she said, pointing to the papers I was holding. “If you come back.”

  I wondered what connection was being made by the simple fact of me being there in the room with her—if I was becoming an accomplice to something. I folded the papers in half, got up, and on my way out the door she said what I assumed she’d been keeping in for the entire conversation:

  “I’m not from here.”

  My back was to her. “So where do you come from, then?”

  Her reply startled me:

  “The Rabbit Yard.”

  I took the bus through the barren West Coast landscape, home to Isra and our daughter. I read the girl’s papers and tried to understand what I was up against. This was during that long, warm fall when the government was considering declaring a state of emergency in a number of the country’s public housing developments. It was the eleventh month in a row that the Swedish Air Force—along with the French, Americans, and others—was bombing the last remnants of Daesh in Syria, ISIS, and that summer there were terrorist attacks in Berlin, Toulouse, and London, the first executed by a group of right-wing extremists, the latter two by people who claimed to be connected to Daesh.

  I looked up from the papers and caught my reflection in the bus window, a transparent mask floating over the spruce trees and road signs.

  I worried about my country.

  That night when I told Isra about the meeting, something remained unsaid. I couldn’t find the words. Isra flipped through the girl’s pages and dismissed the account, more or less, as paranoid fantasies, and when I told her that the girl had said she came from the Rabbit Yard, the same public housing development in Gothenburg I had grown up in, she simply took it as a sign that the girl was trying to manipulate me and that nothing about our meeting had been innocent.

  We sat on the sofa; I was watching the news on my laptop; our daughter was sleeping in my arms; outside, the autumn rain was finally turning to snow.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “She has something about her,” I said. “Something just outside my field of vision.” My daughter’s fingers gently scratched my arm and the wrinkled domes of her eyelids quivered in the screen’s bluish green light. I stroked her hair. Something about the girl in the clinic, something I sensed like an echo or a shadow, frightened me so much it made my hands shake.

  I’m writing to those of you who can’t sleep either. Every time I close my eyes, I straight up get the feeling that they’re searching the halls, and they’ll soon find me. People who wish me harm.

  I’m writing to those of you who have also spent hours staring at shadows on the ceiling.

  Sometimes I could catch some sleep on buses and streetcars.

  Wallah, I used to nod off on the back of Amin’s moped.

  All this is about him, but not like you think.

  I have a small window in my room here. I sit up. Sometimes I see snow and rain or leaves blowing off the trees. One of the lights in the rec yard is right under my window and it makes everything that falls through the night shine as though dipped in silver.

  I run to the fence, jump up, and climb. As I’m hurling myself over, my parka snags and the padding comes out in a tangle of long white cotton intestines. I land on the other side. Behind me I hear guard dogs barking. I tear off my jacket, and that’s when I remember Liat, because she had given it to me years ago. A black parka with a hood and a fur trim, an American knockoff.

  My mother once said that history is a memory that flashes through your mind when you’re running for your life, and as I’m running from the Rabbit Yard, over gravel and stubbly grass, I remember the playground in our yard and the swings where we used to sit.

  There’s an old shopping mall ahead, towering in the night like a fortress. I know it. It was built when I was a newborn but no one went there. Crawling in through a broken shop window, I get cut by the glass. I make my way up an escalator and run past rusty, graffitied shutters and cement pillars. Death to Islam. Amin = All Muslims. I’ve been here with Liat; I know my way. I crawl into a clothing store, in among fallen mannequins, curl up, and listen to the barking dogs.

  A carpet over a balcony railing beating in the wind. The empty swing between us rocked slowly.

  Let me start with Liat instead.

  Start with love.

  I chugged my energy drink and threw the can in the sand.

  Let me start with the ordinary, because that’s where the madness is.

  We sat in the same swings we’d sat in as children. It was one of the first days after summer vacation, but we were already ditching school.

  Liat had freckles but was dark-haired like me; she was shorter than me, but her shoulders
were broader. She’d gotten them from handball. Earbuds in, one hand drumming her thigh. We were crazy about this one pop star called Oh Nana Yurg. We copied her hairstyles and bought knockoffs of the designer clothing she wore in her videos, wishing she’d come pick us up in her helicopter.

  The empty swing rocked, the rug flapped in the wind. I leaned back, gained speed. If you looked past the playground’s rusty jungle gym and beyond the apartment blocks you’d have seen a bus shelter, but instead of an ad, on the side a video would be playing on an LCD screen. That was normal. Where I come from, those panels playing the video are everywhere.

  The video was a little choppy and pixilated where people had thrown stones at the glass or kicked it. The important thing wasn’t that a video was playing at a bus stop, yani, but which video was playing: the same one I recorded during our attack.

  The video about him.

  It was an average day in the place where I came from, the place I finally remembered in the comic book store, and there, in that world, it wasn’t me who had filmed those events, but Amin’s sister, Nour. She didn’t die when they were little; she’d grown up with Amin.

  Liat took the earbuds out.

  “Huh?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” I said. She spit in the sand. Oh Nana Yurg’s latest track was buzzing and rattling in the earbuds that hung from a neon yellow cord around her neck. “So did your mom sign it this year?”

  Liat nodded. On the flickering display out in the dust and sunshine, Amin was grabbing hold of Loberg’s hair and pulling his head backward, but right before he slit his throat, the video clip cut and a line of text appeared, white on black:

  It all could have been different.

  What came next was information about the so-called “citizen contract”: an electronic document that every adult in the place I’m from had to sign when they filed their taxes each spring and then again in the fall. Some people refused to sign and they became something called an “Enemy of Sweden”—yani Muslims and Jews and other, like, extremists—and ended up in a place called the Rabbit Yard. Whoosh. Gone.

  In my hands, the swing’s chains were cold.

  I’m only writing this now.

  I come from a place where Amin did kill that artist, and where his sister detonated her bomb vest when the police tried to enter the store. They got everything on video.

  I don’t remember what year I come from. When I was on that swing, the iWatch 9 had just been released, and Oh Nana Yurg had dropped a new playlist with a BDSM theme, but none of this means anything here, in your world. I also know that I was in my third year of high school and I was one year old when the attack on Hondo’s happened, and so I must come from somewhere fifteen years in a future.

  I leaned back in the swing and opened my eyes, saw the world upside down, the playground, all those windows reflecting the clouds. You know, my social studies teacher out there in the fucking future used to be all, “How about you share something with us about sharia law,” and “How about you tell us a little bit about the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims,” and “How about…?”

  What a loser.

  “Mom probably isn’t gonna sign this year,” I said and shut my eyes.

  “Balagan,” Liat said, and if you don’t know that word, it means crash, yani, chaos.

  Leaking from the earbuds around Liat’s neck, Oh Nana Yurg’s voice was rough and paper-thin. It was a song about chasing this one thing from Shinjuku to Beijing, and back then I thought that thing must be happiness—wallah, what a baby—later we got that it was about this one drug that made it impossible for you to say no—she wanted to get some and give it to a special guy.

  I felt the blood flowing through my upside-down head and it pounded dully and kinda creepily, but I laid there and echoed:

  “Total balagan, yo.”

  Liat’s father was already an enemy of Sweden but not because he’d refused to sign the citizen contract. He’d smuggled illegal meat into the country. Her family wasn’t actually strict about stuff like that, but that spring he wanted them to have a real Passover and got caught near Öresund with a frozen lamb shank in his trunk. He and Liat’s mom had been divorced for years, and Liat didn’t really know him. I guess that’s why he’d tried to hook up the lamb. To give her something of himself. Same difference, though: him being in the Rabbit Yard now or him being in that apartment he used to have across town.

  Real talk, it was still balagan for her.

  I started to feel sick and sat up. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to get a tangle out—this was when she was still climbing up balconies, stabbing people in the eye with scissors, before she realized the danger that was inside her, too, like with guys and stuff—and over at the bus stop Amin was raising the box cutter, the screen went black, and that text popped up again:

  It all could have been different.

  Mom put out a ceramic dish of incense on the coffee table. I remember that dish exactly, the blue and green floral pattern and each hairline crack in the glaze. Mom bought it on a pilgrimage to Mecca, before it was illegal to go. The smoke rose to the ceiling, I sat on the sofa in front of the window and ran my hand through it to make it twirl into tiny clouds. Mom sat next to me. I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember where in Gothenburg we lived or what she did for a living.

  “Would you like to go to Algeria?”

  “On vacation?” I asked. That’s where she was from, and we’d visited when I was little, but that was years ago. The willow tree outside moved in the wind, the slim leaves rustling like metal strips.

  “On a trip,” Mom said. She was Sufi, yani a mystic, and I remember her sitting awake all night meditating by whispering God’s ninety-nine names again and again. Wallah, a Jedi knight.

  “When?”

  “We have to save up for it. Next winter, maybe?”

  I don’t remember the color of her eyes. I do remember the fading henna tattoo on her hands, which I’d applied the week before.

  Dad was cooking in the kitchen, he heard us talking and called out:

  “If you don’t sign they’ll freeze our bank account.”

  Mom didn’t reply. I couldn’t tell if Dad was joking or serious. The citizen contract was usually something faraway that had nothing to do with my life, something that belonged to the world we learned about in school, yani government and districts and Swedish values and stuff, but still, sometimes it was like central to everything, central to each ordinary moment.

  “Are you really not going to sign?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, darling.”

  A flutter of sparrows swarmed and landed in the willow tree. There’s something doubled about my childhood, a feeling that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I remember wanting to change my name to Hedvig or Elsa, names that seemed to belong to the ground beneath my feet and the blue sky above.

  I imagined switching bodies with Liat, of course to get her muscular arms and those eyes that narrowed into slits when she smiled or got angry, but also to get her courage.

  “I don’t know,” Mom repeated. This was the day she first started talking about fleeing to Algeria, but I didn’t really get that then.

  I remember her watching the sparrows, saying that they were gathering for evening prayer. Their habit of arriving in a twirling cloud and making a racket was how they praised God.

  Dancing by myself in the storm of light from a disco ball, spinning with my arms out like a cross. #Houseparty. Liat’s older brother had gone to the liquor store for us and I raised the bottle and took a drink, and it was like I was still and the parquet floor and house were spinning around me, faster and faster, and then I threw up a transparent mess that splashed on my feet and someone shouted, “You nasty Muslim, learn to hold your fucking liquor.”

  Balagan.

  The way we used to chase down happiness.

  I remember the reflections of light sliding across my half-digested food.

  Two Swedish girls followed me out into the
garden; they had gold makeup around their eyes and I thought they were angels because they held my hair while I vomited. I remember the grass under my wet socks, the throb of music through the walls. Do you think the conflict between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims can be resolved peacefully? Does your dad make you wear such big pants or did you pick them out yourself? Do you think people should be allowed to vote if they don’t have Swedish values?

  After a while the two girls left, and I sat on the lawn with my head in my hands. I was chasing something from Shinjuku to Beijing. Maybe it was God. I started laughing. A joke I’d heard by the lockers in school that day. Why can’t the peace force defeat the terrorists? Because they don’t have access to the latest weapons of mass destruction: immigrants, those illiterate welfare cases that multiply like #rats.

  The space where we went to pray was quiet and damp, located on the ground floor of a twelve-story building. The ceiling was inlaid with large ventilation ducts made of mottled gray aluminum. Isra and our daughter went into the women’s area, and I slowly washed my drained face.

  During the sermon I looked out the window, at the apartment blocks across the way.

  I’d come to the Rabbit Yard to go to Friday prayer, but also to take stock of something in the girl from Tundra’s story. I wanted to hold what she’d asserted about this place up to the light of something tangible and see what gave way.

  Now and then a bicycle or moped passed by outside.

  Mom arrived from Gambia alone and moved here after spending a few months at a refugee camp outside of Helsingborg. She met Dad, a Swedish social-work student, at a nightclub, and they were both a bit rootless. They got married before I was born, but divorced when I was just a few years old and my sister was a newborn. Dad moved to Uppsala, where he still lives, and I grew up here, in the Rabbit Yard with Mom.

  The imam holding the day’s sermon was only a few years older than I was. He seemed about to be swallowed by his baggy outfit made of a patterned fabric with a waxy shine. He spoke about Daesh, about the leaders who were recruiting our children to die in their increasingly hopeless war, in a jihad that didn’t annihilate the “self” in humanity, but rather the “other.”