They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

The article I remembered him from included some of his criminal record. He had, like Amin, been found guilty of several petty crimes: in his case carjacking. Most recently he’d been involved in credit card fraud, he was the one referred to as “the goalie”—that is, the one who let his face be caught on the ATM machine’s security camera. He’d probably owed somebody money and they’d forced him to take part in the fraud. He spent a couple of months at a facility in Helsingborg and was let out about a month before this meeting.

  Stray January snowflakes blew across the square and collected in a thin white line on the wall of a hair salon. He repeated:

  “It’s nothing.”

  I looked at him and thought: Love mistaken for weakness.

  “Did you notice when Amin started becoming interested in Daesh?”

  Amin’s mother picked up the photo and carefully tucked it into her handbag.

  “I noticed his eyes change. And that he stopped smoking hash.” She snuffled and laughed and gave me a self-conscious look. “A mother knows.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about it? About Daesh?”

  She fumbled with the brass buckle on the bag.

  “Once, I think. I was surprised to hear him talking about Islam at all.”

  “Excuse me, but aren’t you Muslims?”

  She opened her hands and said, “Alhamdulillah. But he didn’t like religion. He didn’t want to listen when I tried to talk to him about God, about him bettering himself, about Yawm al-Qiyamah.”

  “The Day of Judgement,” the cousin translated, and even though I knew the Arabic term, I thanked him with a nod.

  “He thought we were dumb. Muslims. Backward. So I don’t know how he got it in his head that he was going to do jihad.” She smiled when she said it, a pure and honest smile, like a camera flash, quickly snuffed out, leaving a sort of soot in her eyes. She stirred her coffee. “But he brought the girl to my house once. The girl who killed him.”

  “Tell him what she told you,” the cousin said; she shook her head—a movement that resembled the cousin’s gesture when he’d talked about the streets—like she wanted to shake something off that was stuck to her, tangled in her hair.

  “It was like they were playing, you know? They were pretending. He said her name was Nour. But that’s my daughter’s name.”

  “Tell him what she said,” the cousin repeated.

  “She told me that I shouldn’t have pictures on the walls. Can you imagine? She’s my guest, and she’s saying angels won’t visit my home if I have pictures on the walls. She’s telling me to take the pictures of my girl down.”

  I nodded, wanting to offer comfort, but I couldn’t find the words. I looked at the square and remembered my childhood in similar places. It could’ve been me out there freezing by the newsstand, full of rage directed at a country I didn’t think acknowledged my humanity, and running around the streets at night. Reaching for something shimmering deep inside the fights and flexes with my aching, bruised hands. Scribbles of ink on the surface of a world that would never be mine.

  The Rabbit Yard.

  I got ahold of Göran Loberg and interviewed him over Skype one spring evening. The internet connection on his end was bad: he was either overseas or in some remote location in Sweden.

  “A young man is holding a box cutter to your throat,” I said, and the video stream froze in a low resolution, pixelated portrait of him. “Are you still there?”

  “You’re wondering what I was thinking?” his voice said, floating around my kitchen.

  “Exactly.”

  “It was quite a long and drawn out situation. I was angry, of course. I was worried about the wound in my leg, where one of them had shot me.”

  On the screen he was mid-gesture, sitting in front of the white plaster wall, bare-chested for some reason. His face was grooved and the reflection of the computer screen in his glasses was like a neon blue chip.

  “Hamad,” I said.

  “Right. Then they were disagreeing about something, too.”

  “What can you remember about it?”

  “The young woman was having some sort of psychotic break, I think. By then I was probably too shocked to be following along.” His cough was wet and rattling. “Please excuse my being in bed,” he said—it hadn’t occurred to me. “I have a hard time sleeping at night.”

  “Because of the death threats?”

  “Maybe.” The video stream came back to life again, and from another coughing fit he’d collected phlegm or a blood clot in his mouth, which he sucked on and dissolved, smacking it like old people do. He swallowed it with a bitter look and cleared his throat. “Whatever the case, I’m not sure my thoughts are what’s interesting in this situation.”

  I was at the table, outside the streetlights shone on frosty sandboxes and steaming laundry vents, single snowflakes sailing past what should have been safe.

  “So what’s interesting, then?”

  “The role of the girl, of course. The idea of giving death meaning by filming it.”

  According to his blog, which I visited before our interview, his latest work was about filming the dying at a hospice, a concept that, prior to this exchange, I’d read as a return to a type of art he’d done early in his career, when he’d explored time and death, in more or less dogmatic forms—for example with illegal sculptures that posed a hazard to the public.

  The shadow on the wall behind him was bluish, and I sensed something barren and dismal about the place he was in: a hotel room or some other impersonal dump furnished so it could be left in a rush.

  “What do you think about when you lie awake at night? May I ask that?”

  He scratched his chest hair and his hoarse laughter triggered a convulsive coughing fit, more phlegm came up, and he smacked at it again in order to choke it down.

  “About how the hours pile up like driftwood,” he said. “Shapes in blowing sand. I’ve begun to understand that time is an organic membrane that lays itself on top of things.” He scratched a scab on his forehead. “Maybe time is no more than a film of skin cells on a pillow in a hotel room where an artist, marked by scandal, is hiding out for a couple of nights,” he added, with a self-mockery that made me feel some sympathy for him.

  He picked a dry flake of skin off his forehead and looked at it.

  “Nowadays it’s the racists who are taking the place traditionally occupied by artists,” he said, a notion, a thought that came from sleeplessness. “That is to say, today the racists are the provocateurs getting people into a carnivalesque mood.” I wondered if he’d brought this up to reassert the distance between us.

  “Is that how you came up with the idea for your comic book?”

  He looked incredulous.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “How did you get the idea? Do you remember?”

  Of course, I had a copy of the book somewhere in my office, but I rarely opened it because the pictures disgusted and hurt me.

  “I was flipping through the cable channels one night,” he said. “Floods. Sports. Porn. And then those pictures from Iraq flickered by. Abu Ghraib? Do you remember them?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d seen them before, but that night I was struck by—shall we call it a philosophical notion? A man with a dog collar around his neck. People piled up like pyramids.” He looked invitingly into the webcam and reached for some indistinct shape in the air in front of him. It reminded me that he’d spent years teaching at an art school in Gothenburg. “What torture does,” he says, “is put the body on some sort of stage. It shows that nothing but the body matters. Right?”

  “Maybe,” I said, not because I didn’t understand the logic, but because I didn’t necessarily want to be drawn into his world of ideas.

  “Torture shows how impossible it is to have a body while imagining there’s anything to ideology, religion, culture, right? Torture shows the tortured, and everyone else, how ridiculous it even is to be creatures made of flesh and skin and nerves who allow t
hemselves to believe that some things are holy. Do you follow?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. He sighed and seemed to be deciding whether or not to elaborate.

  “What I’m saying,” he said, “is that I was on the sofa one night and saw those pictures on CNN. A man smeared with feces, for example. And I couldn’t help cracking up, you know? Do you understand?”

  I didn’t know how to react. I changed the subject. The interview went on for no more than another half hour, we talked about his childhood, the place of freedom of speech in Enlightenment ideals, and various comic book artists we had both read and whose work resonated with us.

  A couple of times I noticed his left hand start shaking as he tried to force it into a fist but his fingers refused and cramped up like a claw, which he then tried to bind with help of the other hand—he would busy himself like that for a while, almost automatically, but each time, when he realized I was watching him through the webcam, he dropped both hands. I wondered what it meant. I studied his aging body in the computer screen’s unforgiving light. After our conversation he’d still be lying there thinking about time, about what it was. If it was anything more than a dark speck of dust and dead flies collected at the bottom of a bathroom light fixture.

  I asked him if he thought our mortality made us human—an attempt to push past the academic surface of the conversation and reach something else—but he just laughed at the question. By then he’d taken out a roll of paper towels and was spitting the phlegm into a torn-off sheet.

  “What should I have asked instead?”

  “You should have finished thinking that through,” he said. “If death makes us human, then what does art do, art which makes us immortal? The picture stuttered and his gravelly, disembodied voice said: “Does it make us inhuman?”

  The speakers crackled. His face had frozen again into a pixelated mask.

  The minaret rose like a finger pointing to the sky. A couple of teens stood outside the mosque, stamping their feet to stay warm as they handed out free cash cards to those of us pouring out the doors—some sort of marketing campaign. The people I’d just prayed with passed me by and headed for the parking lot or the bus stop. I shook some hands, I watched their flapping jallabias and scarves, various head coverings, all of these signals, all that shimmering fabric, all the many interpretations of the world. Images turning like leaves in the wind.

  Only by dying would we become real again.

  Were we images?

  A video in which Hamad executes a row of men, their hands tied behind their backs. He is masked and shoots them in the back of the head one by one. The media got ahold of and disseminated the video after the attack on Hondo’s. Presumably filmed in Syria, the buildings in the background are damaged beyond recognition.

  It’s raining, drops collect on the lens—spidery gray clusters of light that seem to wander across the screen—a hand wipes them away again and again.

  Isra came into the office and stood behind me.

  “I couldn’t sleep either,” she said, absently massaging my shoulders.

  A jihadist behind Hamad holds up a black flag, it’s soaking wet, looks heavy, as if it’s made of iron, obsidian.

  I’d just pressed play on the video for the third or fourth time. Hamad stands with his pistol pressed to the back of the first prisoner’s head. Something happens before he pulls the trigger. There’s a hesitation, like he doesn’t really want to go through with it. The pistol wavers from side to side and he wipes rain or tears from his eyes.

  He squeezes the trigger. The man in front of him collapses in the mud. As he moves on to the next prisoner I pause the film.

  “I just mailed the copies,” Isra said. She was talking about the scanned copies of our tax returns, which the Canadian Embassy needed for our visa applications. She was hoping to get a job at a university in Toronto as part of an exchange program, and my plan was to keep publishing books here in Sweden, even though I’d been feeling blocked lately.

  I rested my head in my hand, not taking my eyes off the screen, and said, “Sometimes when we meet, I see the great darkness she’s carrying. Like she actually comes from…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “The future?” Isra asked, and as she said it, I heard the madness that had crept into me unnoticed.

  “Not from the future,” I said. “But from a holocaust.”

  Isra sounded pensive.

  “James Baldwin and Audre Lorde were in conversation once,” she said. “Baldwin said something about the American Dream, that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had believed in it, in spite of everything. Something like that. Then Audre Lorde said no one had dreamed about her ever, not once. No one dreamed about the black woman except to figure out how they would eradicate her. When I read the girl’s account I wondered if that’s what it’s like for Muslims in Sweden today. No one but Daesh dreams of us.”

  On the screen, Hamad still had his pistol raised. The rain was suspended around him, like silver light, a shattered mirror.

  Isra went back to bed, but I stayed put. I wondered what dreams were being dreamed of me.

  The Hondo film. I clicked on the sequence where Amin was laughing. Through the balaclava, his eyes looked happy, if touched by madness.

  Göran Loberg had seen the images from Abu Ghraib and al-Mima and laughed.

  Why was a man standing on a stool with electrical wires fixed to his groin and nipples? Maybe the answer was “Because it was being staged, because someone had a camera.” Maybe the film was reason enough, maybe the film was the precedent for the events.

  Why put a dog collar on a Muslim? Why was a man, dressed in a sweat-stained T-shirt, riding a naked Muslim who was on all fours? There’s an answer that allows us to forget the question: These things happened because they thought Muslims were ridiculous. Laughable. On-screen Amin was still giggling, but he was shaking his head and even gently stomping his foot.

  First came the unbelievable; then the guffaw.

  Maybe that’s what Göran Loberg’s drawings were expressing, and maybe that’s why I experienced them as being so violent, even though they were mere strokes of ink.

  I propped my elbows on the table. Felt sullied by the light of the screen. I started crying. I was seized by an incredible longing for Toronto, which I hadn’t visited since my daughter was born. I longed for the city’s chestnut trees, the sycamores in Rouge Park, for my sister, in whose face I could still see Mom.

  Amin stared at me from the screen, laughing.

  In Abu Ghraib, and maybe also in al-Mima, the victims were forced to partake in the production of the very images that made the violence possible. The gaze was a necessary part of both the torture and the terror attacks. My gaze. I shut my eyes, hard.

  A war in which the gaze, our most tender touch, had been weaponized.

  Amin laughed.

  Why is a soldier building a pyramid of living people? Why is a prisoner being smeared in feces?

  Isra would say that we were living in a time where every stone in the world had witnessed enough human cruelty to burst into shards.

  I remembered something the girl from Tundra had written, about how the Rabbit Yard was the place from which they spent all their time looking out at Sweden, and that was why they hadn’t seen the camp. Something like that. The camp had been invisible, because it was right beneath their feet.

  I’m writing to those of you who have never existed.

  I’m writing to you, to whom I have always written.

  Me, who doesn’t exist either.

  My pulse sounded like it was hammering underwater, like it was echoing against the white-tiled walls, wet and distant.

  “Do you speak Swedish?”

  The blond man dropped a white sheet of some paper-thin material over my shoulders and fastened it tight around my neck with a strip of tape.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said.

  Something that sounded like a drill started buzzing behind my back, and I jumpe
d, but it was just hair clippers. They tickled my temples and I watched my black curls fall in tufts.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You can have a veil, all you have to do is ask,” the man replied. I don’t know if he seriously thought he was answering my question or if he was just making fun of me. When he was done he took a tablet from a shelf and started asking me if I had heart problems or epilepsy or migraines, stuff like that.

  Then I was in another room, its window facing the Rabbit Yard, the expanse of it beyond this enclosure. I remember looking down on the red broadleaf trees along the bike paths and footbridges, and I saw the apartment building where Dad and I had lived when we first came here.

  “Can you let my dad know I’m here?” I said, but the woman who was with me in the room now—broader in the shoulders and older than the man who’d cut my hair, but with the same polite manner—didn’t respond to that. She said:

  “Please lie down here.”

  The hospital bed was surrounded by machines that had white plastic casings, and an IV-stand was hung with bags of translucent liquid in various colors.

  “I didn’t get sick.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I never had the plague,” I said. “When people died.” The woman laughed softly.

  “That’s not what this is about. Don’t worry. Just lie down here.” She patted the bed, and when I finally obeyed she stood at its foot, strapping my legs down with plastic straps.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Your arm, please,” she said mildly, then strapped my wrists to the metal bedframe. I told myself that maybe she just wanted to protect me, that she wished me well. When she was done, she left the room and in the silence, the wet rush of my hammering heart returned as I tried not to panic. A detergent-like smell pierced my nostrils. Footsteps overhead died away.

  I remembered the guys who’d said that dogs were scared to death of coming near here and birds didn’t want to fly over this building.

  The sheet I was on was made of the same papery material as that man who cut my hair had used, and it rustled as I twisted in the bed and tugged at the straps.

  Mom used to say the sound of the human heart was God’s name.