They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  A security guard’s car pulled up, probably thinking we were there to help someone escape. The guards started fucking with us—“Show us your passports” and stuff—two young pimply suedis, and Liat perked up, fucking with them back and she even pushed one of them. I think she hoped Bilal would wail on them. But Bilal said, “Chill baby chill.”

  In my time, you could download an app that checked a passport number against a registry of enemies of Sweden, and according to the February Laws citizens were allowed to screen each other. On top of that there were some mobile games that were all about reporting enemies of Sweden, so we “non-Swedes” always carried our passports, and it was, like, no problem—the guards typed our passport numbers into their cellphones and then told us to go home.

  “Tell me about God.”

  “What do you want to hear?”

  Mom and me, sitting across from each other on the sofa. I said: “A story from when I was little. When I couldn’t sleep.”

  “The first thing God created was a pen.”

  “A pen?”

  She nodded and a smile lit up her face, like when the wind plasters a leaf to the window and the sun shines through it and you see every rib and vein.

  Yani, you could see her soul.

  “A pen, alone in the dark,” she said. “And it asked God what he wanted to write.”

  “What did God say?”

  “Write down everything that’s going to happen from now until the end of time.”

  “Is that what the pen did?”

  “Yes,” she said and touched my neck in her tender, distracted way. “That was the beginning of everything. A pen, describing this. Me being here, and you, and us touching each other. The grains of sand changing color as the sun moves across the beaches in Algeria. The past and future.”

  I know you don’t believe me, but I’m writing to you anyway, because I have to tell somebody.

  I’m writing to you who once wrote that fear was like powder in the air when you were growing up, it got in your hair and eyes and you breathed it in.

  I don’t remember how many men were pushing their way through the mall, just that it felt like there were more of them than there were of us. I waited for Liat by the exit, thinking at first that it had something to do with soccer or a student prank. A man with steel-rimmed glasses was handing out flyers and a few people with their arms around each other’s shoulders were singing a booming, kinda melancholic song but I couldn’t catch the words. Some of the men in the group heading my direction were my age, others were older than Dad, all of them were wearing dark jackets and the occasional Swedish flag worn like a cape, streaked with soot where the fabric had dragged across the ground. A few had blue-and-yellow strips of fabric tied over their faces, and a pudgy, bald salesman type had a sword slung over his shoulder—I mean a real sword like in the Middle Ages, like something out of a museum, unwieldy and with a dull blade.

  One of them kicked a panhandler’s cup. The money scattered across the dirty mall floor. A few coins landed at my feet, and in the sunlight spilling through the mall’s glass doors they were like drops of white-hot metal. The beggar started picking them up, but the man poked him with his sword from behind pretty hard, making him lose his balance and fall to his belly. The men laughed and I remember the taste of iron in my mouth, my skin was sticky with sweat. I’d later find out that the men called themselves Crusading Hearts, a name they’d taken from the warriors that had seized Jerusalem from the Muslims. On the flyers they were handing out, Amin’s face was crossed out in blue.

  Mom corrected my Arabic pronunciation when I tried to say, “I’m from Sweden, nice to meet you.” My Arabic was better when I was little, before I started preschool. I looked out the living room window, at the willow tree, the leaves of which had wilted into dragon scales, and wondered if it had always been my fate to have my life split between two places, one where they couldn’t pronounce my last name and the other where I couldn’t speak with the people in their own tongue. I thought about Algeria more often, about the lemon groves by the sea, which I remembered from my visit as a child—their smell reminding me of dishwashing liquid and chewing gum.

  Mom said: “Ahlan wa sahlan.”

  For me the lemon trees were connected with the people of Algeria, the people who in my memory leaned against white-washed walls, unhappy and somehow unreal, and that, like me, were forever waiting for nothing.

  I said: “Allan va sallan.”

  I wrote on Sensly every night, mostly love poems. I called myself Agnes, after a girl in my class, and people commented and clicked the heart and told me to keep fighting when I was feeling down. They wrote that I seemed like a good person and that I wrote so well about what growing up was like. Some people wanted to meet IRL and asked if I actually lived in Gothenburg.

  I got something out of it.

  Me, Liat, and Bilal went back to the Rabbit Yard sometimes. It was the summer we started exploring the Mål of Gothenburg: breaking into stores and rooting around in the clothes and empty boxes. Bilal found a pair of sneakers, a few sizes too big, but he kept them anyway. Often he and Liat went off on their own and I sat there in the dark, waiting.

  Sometimes I fantasized about being able to meet Amin, like, what I’d say to him. You know:

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “For your sake,” he’d reply. “Because of what they did to you.”

  When we started school, the halls were buzzing with rumors about the Crusading Hearts. A girl in my class had an older brother who was a Crusading Heart and she said that he was part of some sort of militia and had a gun that he practiced shooting over the sea. I listened along with my classmates and felt my life being diverted away from them, like a stream of rainwater dragging a few blades of grass with it, swirling down into a storm drain.

  Did you hear the one about the Muslim who was shopping for a car? Why don’t Jews or Muslims eat pork? What do you call a Muslim who can swim? Did you hear the one about the Muslim who met the pope?

  Liat broke up with Bilal, maybe because he never really ripped on the guards who kept chasing us away from the Rabbit Yard. Instead she got together with a dude in our class named Martin, a Swede.

  Once, when Liat and I were talking on the swings, Bilal showed up. He was crying and saying he wanted her back, he’d do anything, and she kissed him goodbye one last time. I remember them holding each other, wound together against his car that magnetic fall night.

  Over at the bus shelter they’ve begun showing that video with Amin again, because yet again it was time to sign the citizen contract.

  We looked at each other.

  “They’re pitting us all against each other. You’re either an enemy or a friend.”

  “No, I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” Mom said. There was something in Mom and Dad’s voices when they talked in the kitchen in the evenings: fear pulsed beneath their words. “You’re either human or an animal.” I remember praying with them later, and how the traces our hands left on the prayer mats resembled feathers.

  One night I saw a man on the bus wearing a real knight’s helmet. He was wasted and stumbling around and screaming about Muslims as was to be expected, about how we were all going to die or whatever. He might have been, like, a physics or history teacher. Swaying from the helmet was a red plume.

  “They’re giving me cancer,” he screamed, and I rested my forehead against the frosty window and pretended he wasn’t talking about me, and thought about how the events I’d witnessed growing up were like a force in search of the lowest common denominator in people, which it wanted to harness, and then put to its own use.

  The frozen image on the laptop screen seemed to vibrate. I’d spent hours watching the video from Hondo’s, playing it, replaying it. Right where I had paused it, Amin looked starved. The balaclava was pulled up to his forehead. Behind him was a shelf full of comics and a small stain on Hondo’s shop window.

  The girl who’d written the mysterious story about the future—by
this point I’d read the story at least twenty times—had been his wife and must have loved him.

  Isra sat down with me at the desk and rested her chin in her hand.

  “Are you going back?”

  “To Tundra? Why?”

  “So you can get answers to your questions. To find out why she contacted you; hear the rest of her story.”

  I didn’t reply. Isra reached out and touched the screen, unexpectedly, lingering.

  “You know what this picture reminds me of?” she said. I shook my head. “Those photographs of soldiers from before and after war. Remember them?”

  I nodded. The photo series had turned up on social media. Portraits of Swedish soldiers. The first pictures were taken before they traveled to the newly opened fronts of the war on terror, in Yemen and West Africa, and elsewhere. More pictures were taken while the men and women were in the throes of war. Then, pictures were taken after. The aim was clear: to show the impact of war on a human face—when the soldiers returned to Sweden they had an extinguished and somehow sullied look in their eyes. Isra and I had talked about it because she’d discussed the photographs in an academic paper she was writing at the time. What had maybe been more shocking to us than seeing the entropy of war at work was how their faces looked so strangely alive in the portraits taken during combat, as if they were in a hypervigilant state, run through with something that resembles joy.

  We sat in front of the screen. I wasn’t able to say that I was wondering if we too had been drawn into a war. A war that was a measure of speed, a war where skin—or something more diffuse, something called “Swedishness”—was the uniform.

  Amin’s face was pale and the shadows made it look inhospitable and sharp. A landscape of white cliffs. The tense mouth. His hand blurred by movement.

  A spectral war, a war that, in a terrible way, was made up of images of the dying and the dead.

  A war on what was war and what was peace.

  Flashes of blue light in those large, dark eye sockets.

  Daesh believed themselves to be in a war with the entire world. They thought they were fighting a war that would call angels down to earth. Literally speaking, a war that would annihilate creation.

  Did I want to return to Tundra? I scratched my beard, shut my eyes tight. Which of my questions did I think a locked up, schizophrenic girl could answer?

  That night I spent a long time looking at our daughter’s face as she slept. I swept back the fever-wet curls plastered to her chin. She writhed in her sleep, inside some vision that responded to my touch. Her face, I knew, was as endless as paradise.

  Maybe the pictures were only like that because the soldiers had been photographed deep inside a dense and all-penetrating desert light.

  Maybe violence had been emptied of emptiness too.

  On June nineteenth, an unknown man shot up the prayer hall I visited in the Rabbit Yard. A sixteen-year-old died, several people were injured. A minute of silence for the victims was held at his school but no greater interest was shown by the media or governmental bodies; it was assumed that the shooting was related to the dead’s connection to certain gangs. It was one of many fatal shootings in the Rabbit Yard that year. Like many Muslims in Gothenburg, I visited prayer halls. A few days had passed, but surprisingly enough, two police were posted by the broken basement window: apparently someone, possibly the murderer, had thrown a hand grenade through the window during the night. A young guy who’d been praying next to me mentioned it on our way out the door—nothing was in the news.

  I remember the bullet holes in the windowpanes. They were like craters in the lunar landscape that had been expanding between me and my country during these years.

  That evening, an anonymous blogger claimed the deed. He described the ammunition that had been used, which the police interpreted as proof that he, in all likelihood, was the murderer. The blogger turned out to be a white Swede, motivated by racism. He wasn’t called a terrorist by the media, because then Swedish families would have to be bugged, monitored, and harassed.

  I returned to the place again a couple of days later, not really knowing why. People who’d visited the prayer hall after the blog post, anti-racists mainly, had stuck flowers through the bullet holes in the window, echoing a gesture from the attack on Hondo’s—where people had stuck white roses through the bullet holes in the store window the following morning. I wanted to go in and pray, as though to reestablish something holy, but the door was locked.

  The feeling of theater, unreality.

  One night during a grocery store run with my daughter, she looked up at the stars that had appeared high above us and asked why they existed, and I said they were there so travelers could find their way home in the dark. Then I thought about the girl from Tundra, about her story, I thought I understood her desire to transform the events we’d both been witnessing for years from a descent into the abyss to exactly what I was telling my daughter about: a way home.

  3

  The doctor was a Swedish man, a little younger than me. We were alone in the visiting room: he shook my hand without getting up, asked me if I’d had a good journey, and said something about the weather, about lingering thunder; and then he asked if I’d read her account and what my thoughts were, as an author. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t tell if he was observing me or looking out the window—his glasses reflected the room’s bare walls, the halogen lights on the ceiling, the small rectangular window’s armored glass.

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “But I’d say that she’s done some writing before.”

  “That was my assessment too,” he said. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the name of what I assumed was a hard rock band written in barbed wire across his chest, and distressed jeans—clothing that sharply contrasted with his mannerisms. I would’ve guessed his family was upper class; he had an alarm unit on his belt.

  “Has she had any visitors besides me?”

  “Her mother’s been here twice, once with her brother.”

  “From Belgium?” I asked. His hands were clasped over his belly and he nodded slowly. He had a sort of measured arrogance about him.

  “But, as noted, she doesn’t believe they’re related.”

  “This idea that she’s from the future,” I said, “how does she think she ended up here, in our time?”

  He studied his watch with a pout.

  “We don’t know. In fact we’ve never been able to come as close to understanding her imagined world as when she wrote you.”

  I sensed I was part of a power struggle between him and someone else; I could only guess at the contours of the conflict, but in one way or another it must’ve been about who the patients opened up to.

  “Of course we monitor the inmates’ activity on the library computers,” he said. “Why do you want to see her again?”

  “I might write about her.”

  “A book?”

  “Maybe an article,” I said.

  She turned up eventually, accompanied by a guard. She was thinner than when I’d last seen her; she seemed drained: dull skin, dark rings under her eyes.

  “As-salaamu-alaikum.”

  “Wa-alaikum-as-salaam,” I replied, more out of reflex than anything else; I still felt the same about her using those words to greet me. I pressed record and put my cellphone on the table. She went over to the window. The view must’ve been different than from the other rooms she had access to. She was holding a bunch of papers, folded lengthwise, and I scolded myself for the prick of joy I felt when I saw them.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “What landed you here, with us? In the past?”

  The window was reinforced with chicken wire enmeshed in the glass and she followed one of the thin threads with her finger.

  “I mean, for me this isn’t the past. When I traveled back in time I didn’t arrive in the history of my world, but in a different history, you see what I mean?”


  I decided to keep playing along, since I’d already committed, and said:

  “Where you grew up, in your future, Amin’s sister participated in the attack against Hondo’s. But in our world she died in an accident in a bathtub when she was little.”

  She turned around, glanced at the doctor, a smile passing over her lips, possibly with a touch of mocking hostility.

  “You all think I’m crazy,” she said. I would’ve responded that I thought she was sick and needed help, and I waited for the doctor to say something along those lines, but he didn’t, so I said:

  “You wrote something about time.”

  “I don’t think time is a line.”

  “So what is it then?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A landscape.”

  “But how did you get here? To our time, our world?”

  “I’ll try to write about it. It was like…” She interrupted herself, her eyelids fluttered. “I was in that comic book store looking down at my phone. And it was like waking up and finding my entire real life inside it. I knew I’d already seen what I was filming at least a thousand times before.”

  “Because it was used by the fascists in the Sweden you come from?”

  “I don’t know what that word means. Fajists.” She mispronounced the word, but I didn’t bother to correct her.

  “It means people who follow a certain ideology.”

  “We didn’t have that word,” she said. “Or, like, maybe Mom and Dad knew it, but I never heard it, at least.”

  “It’s the name for the people you call Crusading Hearts in your account.”

  She tucked a lock of hair under her headscarf and said:

  “Anyway, the video of Amin killing Göran Loberg was the most viewed video in my time, in the Sweden I remember. It was like, always on…at bus stops and on the web…”

  “And as you remember it, Amin killed Loberg?”

  “Yes. And then his sister blew up the store. Just like our plan. But they didn’t usually show that part when they used the video in PSAs and stuff. With the blood and the explosion. But if you searched for it online you could see it.”