In the language the couple was speaking, other people had once said to her that she didn’t belong, that the language was not hers. A feeling of being turned outside in.
She was having difficulty breathing.
The voices of the vacationing couple carried a premonition of death.
She was Swedish. She was Swedish by not being Swedish.
She hitchhiked north. Learned to say “Sweden.” Hiked across the fume-colored grass at the edge of the road. She found that she could sleep when in motion, curled up in the back seats of cars or sitting with her forehead against the dashboard.
In dreams, remnants of some incomprehensible experience searched for corresponding images. She remembered hands in blue latex gloves searching her mouth. A young black man watching her, saying her pain was being recorded. Once she woke up because the car she was in had stopped in traffic. Tall fences and uniformed men. Her body started shuddering so intensely that the woman giving her a lift thought she was having a seizure.
She crossed borders.
She wandered into fields to pee and spied cities in the night, lighting up the sky like grass fires beyond the horizon.
She stole a map at a gas station and seemed to recognize the name Gothenburg.
North.
A woman shouted from a balcony, the name she was calling echoed between the tall buildings. I’d bought a bag of bread at the grocery store and was tossing crumbs to the pigeons. A fight had broken out the night before. A group of kids set fire to a car and then threw rocks at the fire trucks and police; the stillness that now lay over the Rabbit Yard was oppressive and restless. As if an evacuation was underway. An older man in a fluttering white jallabia passed by on his way to the same basement where I was going to pray my nighttime prayers. The man recognized me from my visits over the years, nodded, and wished me peace. One hand on his heart.
A corrugated copper building towered over the structures that ringed in the square, its windows shimmering in the violet-gray night. Social and health services. The place the girl from Tundra had called Building T in her account. The place where she thought she’d died, in her world’s future.
She had crossed this square, sometimes with Amin. She’d written to me that it was like walking over her own grave.
We were moving to Toronto in the spring, finally, and as I scattered the last of the crumbs from the bag, I realized I’d come here to say goodbye. I wanted to say goodbye to the buildings, chain-link fences, electrical boxes, and cement slabs. Goodbye to what these things still retained of the person I had once been.
Almost fifteen years before I’d stood on this square holding a moving box. It was shortly after I started university, I was on my way to my first apartment, which was a few stops closer to the city. I’d stopped and just stood there. Like now, I’d wanted to keep everything with me. I still remember that night so well. A group of old friends were smoking outside the grocery store and one of them raised a hand in greeting, already half a world away, the chain hanging over his warm-up jacket glimmered like light through the gap of a closed door. Ten years later, he would travel to Syria and die. I took the bus, the box on my lap. I sat down in my new apartment and started writing.
The girl had claimed my books were full of fear. That fear made them beautiful. Maybe it was true. But I’d always thought that most of all they expressed sorrow for the passage of time, a sorrow over how nothing will last.
I thought about my books, about my childhood, about friends who had died, about my parents’ fate, and knew that my writing stemmed from what I’d left behind.
I knew the book I was writing now came from Sweden.
Again, the voice shouted from the balcony high above me. It sounded like Mom’s voice, which had so often echoed over the square.
Calling me home.
She reached the Öresund Bridge. Crossed parking lots and walked alongside traffic jams. She waited for someone to wave her down and bring her to the other side. The wind splashed her face with sea water. She was impatient, fearing an evil force was about to catch up to her, and finally boarded a train, even though she had no money. She watched the bridge trusses dissolve in speed—the horizon’s granitic hues. The first Swedish words she said were, “I don’t have a ticket.”
She was kicked off but hitchhiked up the coast to Gothenburg’s yellow broadleaf trees, which made her remember a man who’d said he liked the fall—a slim man who might have been her real dad.
She spent her nights at a McDonald’s, sitting on the uncomfortable plastic furniture. The memories of al-Mima must have been inside her, buried beneath amnesia: waterboarding, strange experiments in which her consciousness was manipulated with electricity and sensory deprivation.
She slept on streetcars and buses, moving away from that which was unnamed but constantly flickering on the outskirts of her memory.
The black line toward Bergsjön, her forehead resting against a foggy, night-chilled window; she yawned and looked out at the footbridges dripping with rain. She’d been dreaming of a man walking through a mall with a sword slung over his shoulder—so random—she laughed, but noticed tears in her eyes.
She collected empty cans, recycled them, and paid to use the internet at 7-Eleven. Googled the name in the passport. She read about the girl from Belgium, about her fate, which seemed both wrong and eerily familiar.
Why were they lying about her?
Outside the Nordstan shopping mall, groups of girls were wearing headphones with small beads threaded onto the wires and clothing that looked old-fashioned somehow, like it belonged to their parents. She never spoke to them. But sometimes an adult would buy food for her after seeing her sneak leftovers off the sticky plastic trays at McDonald’s. Sometimes she ate and sometimes she just sat there, staring at the food they offered her, convinced it was poisoned, or irradiated.
Was she Swedish?
Was she one of them?
Sometimes a name skirted the edge of her mind, and she wondered who that person had been: Liat.
The 52 bus turned off the freeway and stopped on a hill. She woke up to a view of a junkyard, hubcaps and old computer shells in a jumble, and she thought she remembered a similar landscape, an entire world made of ruins and abandoned things, and she felt simultaneously that everything belonged to her and was also withdrawing. She pushed a button on a toilet at the Central Station and the whole world was torn up by questions. Where do I come from? Why is it still here? Why is everything? Existence was like being chained to a clumsy doppelgänger.
She shouldn’t exist.
Everything was wrong.
She dreamed of a woman by the sea. The bus stopped, she woke up slowly—the light from a lotus flower on a restaurant sign dulled by rain was hanging in the distance, under colorless skies.
Amin was sitting on the 9 toward Angered in early winter, looking out at the construction sites and furniture warehouses.
She thought his buzz cut made him look like an inmate. Jaw clenched in the drizzly light. She knew his name was Amin and they belonged together and when he got off the streetcar she followed him.
Followed him between tall apartment buildings, their blue paint peeling, a few steps behind, hands shoved in the pockets of a hoodie she’d found at McDonald’s. She rushed over and caught the elevator door before it glided shut behind him.
He was leaning against the elevator’s rattling wall. Finally, a clue about the person she once had been. Rainwater pooled around his shoes—she remembered his running shoes with the neon-yellow stripe and air cushions. She remembered his patchy black beard-fluff and acne scars. His brown eyes, flecked with gray and green.
He seemed to be emanating a kind of restrained power, like a hot metal wire.
Why did she recognize him and why did he not recognize her?
A moth crept over the graffitied elevator mirror.
He took out a cellphone, typed something, put it back in his jacket. He was getting off on five and she realized that she hadn’t pressed a bu
tton yet and pressed four. The elevator pinged and stopped. When she didn’t get off he turned to her.
“It’s a Muslim.” Those were his first words to her, and then he stood there, lips parted in a dopey smirk, and when she said, “Huh?” he nodded toward the yellow warning decal showing a trashcan stuck in an elevator doorway and a man being crushed against the ceiling.
“That dude being crushed. He’s Muslim,” he said, and when she still offered no reaction, he added, “or maybe you know a lot of suedis who are garbagemen?” He laughed, like he was surprised by her stubborn silence. She remembered something. Not him, but someone else, each on their own swing, laughing. Was it childhood? Liat—that name again. Sorrow, dense as scar tissue. What happened to her? She had to know.
Amin reached out and wiped a tear from her cheek, an unexpected, tender gesture that must have meant something to her. She said, “Your name is Amin.”
She came to on the back of the moped, the wind hitting her face like air through an open vent, her arms around his slim, tight waist.
Spring days in a whirlwind of illness, barely a year before the attack.
She was living with him. According to her, their relationship was platonic then, sibling-like and close. Amin had a record of drug possession and misdemeanor assault. He was eighteen and had just gotten his own apartment. Rarely saw his mother, never saw his dad. What could he have seen in a seventeen-year-old girl, all on her own, who was clearly unstable? What got him to let her use his shower and sleep on his sofa that first night, after the encounter in the elevator? Why did he welcome her into his life?
Maybe the explanation lay in his relationship to his little sister, who’d been dead for so long, Nour, or in the story about the relationship, which had come to him in part after his childhood—a whisper of a more innocent time, when Dad was at home and Mom was happy.
In the months since she’d arrived in Gothenburg, the girl had scraped together a story about herself that went like this: She had been locked up in a camp somewhere in Sweden, maybe because she was Muslim, which certain memories led her to believe she was. Her true identity had been hidden from her by the Swedish authorities and she was sent to Belgium where they’d tried to trick her into thinking she was someone else, as part of some plan she didn’t really understand.
She talked with Amin about this, quite often, and he added his own speculation, like maybe she’d freaked out on hash and taken herself to Brussels. But that whole thing about the couple pretending she was their daughter, that was hella shady.
He smelled of cigarettes and sweat and a cologne he said his cousin bought in the mosque, even though he’d never been there himself. They shared intimate moments while looking out over the streetcar tracks from a footbridge, and he said she could be his sister returned, and maybe that was why she recognized him—and she almost believed him.
He taught her to recognize undercover police cars—pointing them out when they passed by: Volvos with extra sideview mirrors and cameras fixed to the dashboards.
They watched bad movies or chatted about nothing late into the night and she knew, in an intense and clear way, that he would lead her to the answer to the question about her identity, because they had known each other in her old life. She was so sure that they ended up fighting about it—why didn’t he just tell the truth about who they were?
One day he stopped his moped and pointed at a parked bus and it took her a while to see what it was he was trying to point out: the driver was on a break, praying on a mat he’d rolled out in front of the radiator grill, an African man wearing a crocheted cap. Amin stared at him incredulously, spit on the asphalt, and said, “I hate them.”
The bus driver bowed, put his forehead to the mat. Traffic roared past.
“Bus drivers?”
“Wallah you’re so out of it sometimes. Muslims,” Amin said. “I mean those Muslims who keep their heads down and their nose to the grindstone and think that makes them better than other people.” He glared at the man. “They think they’re better than us, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah,” she said, even though she didn’t know—something private and wounded in him was speaking—maybe he was talking about his dad, who she knew had left a long time ago.
“Fucking straight up slave,” he said of the praying bus driver, and repeated himself in a way that sounded like a complaint but also like he couldn’t believe the man’s miserable existence, “fucking slave.”
He could spend an hour, unreachable, staring at cigarette butts overflowing from a soda can, then start laughing and drag her out to play shooter games in the arcade at Liseberg, and as they mowed down dinosaurs or zombies with plastic guns, he’d say he was going to move in with his dad in Norway, or become an airplane mechanic, or go live with a cousin in Germany who had a car dealership.
They traveled between Gothenburg’s neighborhoods with a bag full of hash and weed and pills, and ran into guys in windbreakers who shook his hand and mumbled greetings, exchanged rumors—black-haired, unloved boys like himself, shadows on the square, “And what about Zaid, he still in juvie?”
Under the image of the grill’s pink-and-blue neon sign in the mirror, Hamad was grim and soldier-like with his full beard and combat pants tucked into high-tops.
That afternoon, the girl and Amin were each eating a mixed grill plate. Later, the three of them would say this encounter was qadr, fate, but when it happened it wasn’t like that: Amin was trying to avoid being seen—he’d pulled up his hood and kept his eyes fixed on the greasy plastic tabletop.
Hamad sounded disappointed when he said hello, he even put on a plaintive and, she thought, fake pious tone, “Where do you say your Friday prayers, brother?”
Amin lied and said he worked Fridays and then they spent a while talking about people they both knew. Hamad had a gritty, awful heft about him, but she thought something magnetic too, as she poked at her food, listening; the man behind the counter shouted, “Wrap with extra everything,” and even though Hamad’s order was up, his gaze bore into Amin a little longer.
Out on the square a moped buzzed past carrying three children, barely older than ten. One girl in front, her sparkly purple veil rippling in the wind, two boys on the back. Their shouts faded and left behind a feeling she couldn’t articulate. Something about being a girl in Sweden. Memories she couldn’t access.
Hamad wished them peace and disappeared across the square with his food.
When it happened between her and Amin she knew it was her first time ever. Amin sat on the edge of the bed afterward and she took in his naked back, the bend of his neck, the light spilling in from outside turning his downy hair a luminous blue. Feeling how the world around her had aged. How a mark was made. Her first time.
My first time, Liat.
Amin got up, opened a window, lit a joint; she laid there and tried to keep the memories surfacing because of his nighttime silhouette at bay. Couldn’t.
“Why should anyone have to see their dad getting stripped?” she asked.
“Maybe he was in the hospital?”
“It was, like, guards undressing him.”
The things she remembered must have shocked Amin sometimes. But maybe that was part of what he liked about her—he didn’t really know who he was either.
Maybe he put his mouth to the crack in the window and exhaled the smoke.
“In fourth grade,” he said, “you had to have Air Force Ones.”
“What are Air Force Ones?”
“Sneakers. Everyone in my class had them but me.”
She lay on her side, hands under the pillow. Right now was good. She thought Amin had something vulnerable and remarkable about him, and she wished she could stretch the moment out, make it last longer.
“This fool Mahmoud was on me about it every day. He was, like, a head taller than everyone else in our grade. He was all: ‘Ugly shoes.’ Every day. ‘Ugly shoes.’ Getting the whole class to laugh at me, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So I kept bugging Mom, and eventually she bought me a pair. It musta cost her a month of groceries.” He laughed, short and bitter. Pinching the joint to get the last hit. The image of her dad was still in her mind. He was naked in a room and someone was forcing him to bend over. She squeezed her eyes tight, then looked at Amin again.
“What happened?” she asked. “Did he stop teasing you? The guy?”
“Mahmoud. Did he stop teasing me? Nah. You know what he did?”
“What did he do?”
“He saw me lacing up my Air Force Ones. During the first recess. He stood there, just staring at them for a long time. I thought he was jealous, you know what I’m sayin’, because his were like a year old and mine were box fresh. But then he busted out laughing, and he said it again. ‘Ugly shoes.’”
She didn’t really get it. Amin’s rage had returned, a hard tension that frightened her a little.
“Were they the wrong shoes?”
“They were the same shoes as everybody else’s,” he said. “But it didn’t matter. That was the point, Nour. Do you know why he was laughing?”
“No?”
“The whole time he’d been waiting for me to buy the same shoes as him. So he could show me just how much power he had—he could still get the whole schoolyard to laugh at my shoes.”
His posture was slightly bent, a few vertebrae in his neck sticking out. The cherry of the joint singed his fingertips and he swore softly, changed hands, and blew on them. “You gotta understand. People like us, we have no power,” he said. “Your dad had no power. That’s why they stripped him in front of you. To show you.”
She didn’t know what to say. Emptiness streamed through her, an icy chill.
“Your nose is bleeding again,” Amin said. She wiped it with her finger and licked the finger clean, a worthless little gesture that felt new.
They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears Page 17
