They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  She missed Amin less than she’d expected to, but sometimes she did think about his moods, the snide comments that would have peppered the grandest of Hamad’s expositions, which he shared with the sisters from his spot behind the sheet. She knew the three of them—she, Hamad, and Amin—were meant to be close, and she told the sisters about Amin, saying he was a nice person who had taken care of her. But the sisters said that men could not control their urges, and the way they laughed reminded her of other women who’d laughed in the same way, hands over their mouths.

  She didn’t think as often about all she did not remember, all she didn’t know about herself. Who she was. Why she’d been in a hospital in Brussels.

  From behind the sheet, Hamad said that many warriors in Syria were in need of wives, and it was a woman’s duty to support them. He talked about the black widows in Russia who had blown themselves up in Moscow’s subway or taken hostages in theaters and schools to avenge their murdered relatives in Chechnya. She sat in the spartan apartment where they normally gathered, where no one actually seemed to live, and listened with devotion. On some days she didn’t think exploding into pieces would be strange at all.

  During one of his visits, Hamad called on her so they could speak about Amin.

  A man on the other side of a washed-out piece of fabric was telling her the time had finally come to get married.

  The wedding. The simplest possible. Held in Hamad’s apartment, where he was a subletter. She sat with her sisters in Hamad’s son’s room, but for some unknown reason the boy was not there—the truth, later revealed by the media, was that before his trip to the crumbling terrorist state in Syria, Hamad had lost custody of his son after beating the boy and his mother.

  They sat on the floor, as usual, and the sisters were ceremonious, tense, happy, jealous. Some were dressed up in bright, silky dresses, the embroidery and beads making them look like princesses. Hamad regarded them with contempt. She had been lent a simple dress by one of the women she lived with. She brought a teddy bear with her that was leaking small bits of foam from a tear. She lined them up in a row on the floor. Amin, Hamad, and a couple of other men whose voices she didn’t recognize were talking in the living room—she could hear their raucous laughter through the door.

  She hadn’t seen Amin since she’d moved out. Hamad had explained that Amin was on his own journey of spiritual purification and it’d taken longer for him to accept certain truths about life and death.

  She realized that maybe, in spite of everything, she longed to see his eyes, which like hers had lost far too much to ever see happiness. Suddenly, she wanted all of the guests to leave. His hands, frightening yet tender. Congratulations. May God grant you patience. His lips. People eventually slipping out into the cold, then Amin sticking his head back into the room—serious, secretive—and flashing a cryptic smile.

  “Hamad wants to talk to us.”

  The three of them sat on a plush sectional. Hamad was combing his fingers through his beard. He was dressed like it was any other day, in his black kameez and a pair of sweatpants with a white stripe. She thought, as she so often did when she saw him, of the war, its power that had made him tough and simple, like a thing hewn from rock.

  Hands in her lap, she felt the need to take in some of that power in order to keep going.

  “Those who go first into the fire curse those who follow,” Hamad said before taking a couple of deep breaths and starting to cry, sudden and shaking, but still worthy of respect, yani regal. She looked to Amin for direction, the correct interpretation of this crying warrior, but Amin’s face was blank and she couldn’t tell if he was moved by Hamad’s tears or if it was the most embarrassing thing he’d ever seen.

  For a long time, Hamad hid his face in his hands, but then the tears stopped abruptly. He looked up and said, “Those who follow curse those who go before. But God says they will be doubly punished.”

  She thought he might be talking about what he’d done in Syria, necessary crimes against any human conception of goodness and against a number of God’s laws too, possibly, beneath a sky that fell under the supersonic booms of fighter planes. But he was only talking about Amin and himself, it turned out, about hash and pills and the clients Amin had taken over when Hamad had left the country.

  “We have a lot of sin on our consciences, brother.”

  She noticed this all had a practiced quality to it, including the tears. A moth fluttered by her face and she fought the urge to wave it away.

  Hamad reached for his laptop, turned it on, and showed them drawings of Muslims: pictures that were intimately familiar in a way that made her hands and legs quake.

  Outside the window, darkness had fallen.

  She was given the job of making a flag with Daesh’s symbol, which was actually a seal the Prophet, peace be upon him, stamped on his letters.

  The flag was to be black and have specific dimensions, and because she had a hard time getting ahold of fabric, she bought black trash bags, cut them up, and taped them together with black masking tape. Then she sat with a brush and painted the emblem on the black plastic.

  There is no God but God.

  Even after all of our conversations I still can’t entirely account for why she and Amin participated in the attack on Hondo’s. For instance—along with everyone who has tried to make sense of it—I’m still not sure how Amin was radicalized. Acquaintances and family members who have spoken in interviews and police interrogations, as well as in conversations with me, have noted his lack of interest in religion, that he even disliked devout Muslims for their righteousness and meekness. He didn’t pray regularly and had drunk alcohol as recently as a couple of weeks before the attack on the comic book store—of course, that could have only been a diversion tactic, to avoid rousing suspicion.

  The girl’s path, in some sense, is shrouded in darkness, too. She had nightmares about what she would later believe was the Rabbit Yard; stray sequences, often centered around everyday objects—a stretch of chain-link fence, sandwiches, plastic cutlery, a soccer goal—nonetheless saturated with a vast, stifling fear. She didn’t just think she was missing a past, but also a future. Even though she didn’t drink, she sometimes smoked hash, even after she married Amin. Other times though, she seemed completely consumed by her (possibly superficial) piety.

  Maybe it was as simple but as complex as this: Hamad offered her and Amin a dream that accommodated them. So she sat down and wrote the word “God” on a flag made of trash bags.

  They face each other. Their chests are heaving, fast. Amin’s sweat gives his curls an oily sheen.

  After a period of silence, the megaphone starts blaring again, out there among the police cars and the people.

  “You have to let him go, Amin,” she says, but another sharp wedge of pain drives itself between her eyes and she stumbles backward, steadying herself on a bookcase.

  Everything is inside her, everything that happens to her in the future, everything these events will lead to: the citizen contract, the Crusading Hearts surrounding her and Liat in the snow, the video playing at the bus stops, the storm blowing in over Sweden.

  “It’s too late,” Amin says. “It’s too late.”

  “I had a best friend,” she says. “Liat. She was named Liat. We used to sit in the swings.”

  Amin wets his lips. “Liat. What kind of name is that?” His eyes flit. By now, he’s only holding on to a few hairs on Göran Loberg’s head.

  She says the name again, Liat, mostly to herself, to taste its sound and experience the swell of emotion it brings up.

  “We used to watch a video of you.” She holds her cellphone out. “Liat and I used to watch this video all the time.”

  “You watched the video you just recorded?”

  She nods.

  “Yes, this video.”

  “What are you talking about?” Amin asks, and then repeats himself, hysterically, again and again: “What are you talking about, what are you talking about, what are you talkin
g about?”

  “I came here from the future, Amin. Listen, please. What we’ve planned to do here tonight will lead to emptiness.”

  His body is limp.

  “What fucking emptiness?”

  “They’ll put us in camps. Normal Muslims. If we kill these people, Muslims won’t be able to live here anymore.”

  Amin doesn’t reply. Time swells again, the moment becomes a booming focal point. Loberg’s crumpled at Amin’s feet, the duct tape over his mouth reflecting the blue light from outside.

  Everything is inside her. The metal box with Mom’s ashes. The plague that killed so many in the Rabbit Yard. Building T. Bilal screaming as he clings to the toilet.

  Eventually, Amin says, “Good.” Just the one word. And she understands. She understands why he’s here. He thinks it’s good this will lead to the bus driver they once saw not being able to live here anymore—praying his prayers during his break—and everybody else who keeps their heads down and thinks they’re better than Amin. It’ll be good for them to see that this is war and they have to choose sides, like he has—or die, which soon he will too. He gets a good grip on Loberg’s hair and yanks him up.

  Everything moves slowly.

  The blue lights slide across the walls, slow as a tide—her hand finds the machine gun’s grip, and without actually thinking about what she’s doing, Amin—

  “Amin!” She shouts his name as she squeezes the trigger, shouts to warn him.

  “Amin!”

  She squeezes the trigger once but fires three shots—it happens automatically—the weapon nearly flies out of her hands.

  Amin.

  He falls backward into the flag. It comes loose and sinks down over him like a wide black wing.

  Everything could have been different.

  Amin.

  She squats at his side, digs him out of the black plastic.

  Two shots hit him, one in the shoulder above the vest, one in the throat.

  “Who’s shooting? Hello in there! Who’s shooting?” The voices from the street.

  Amin, your delicate lips. Your long eyelashes. Her hands tremble as she peels the black flag from his face. He coughs and blood sprays his chin.

  She says, “Amin.” The name that has pursued her, and she takes his hand, which is limp as though with sleep. He lifts his head and nestles into her.

  She has saved them.

  Nothing has to happen now.

  She props him in a half-seated position against the bookshelf and tries to wipe his chin with the flag, but the black plastic only smears the blood around. Amin is pale; he coughs, curt and bubbling, and says the name of his long-dead sister. He smiles like he’s just woken up.

  Interwoven.

  Balagan.

  One of the police vans outside turns on its headlights, brightness fills the store, and everything is sharp and clear: Amin’s closed eyes and open mouth, the coins and bills in the blood, the victims’ cuffed bodies here and there, the disarray of comics and books, the cash register Hamad kicked off the counter, his body by the window—it all looks sort of discarded and worthless, as if the white light through the window is illuminating more than the objects, but life and time itself in a final state of waste.

  She gets to her feet and hurries over to the window. The SWAT team is by the door.

  Think.

  She curls up behind some boxes and feels a stinging loneliness, a whirling, the impossibility of holding on to a single thought. Think think. Top five crazy things about having traveled through time. Number five: Could she find herself as a child? Four. Think think think. She picks up Amin’s knife and cuts the zip ties that locked the man in the bomb vest to the door handle. She opens it onto a winter night.

  More cameras than she can count.

  God God God God.

  Journalists and TV cameras, crowds of people all filming with cellphones, the roar of wind and human voices, everything mixed together in the snowy rain—she puts her hands up and screams over all of it:

  “I was killed!” Her voice is a hoarse shriek. “I was killed by the Swedish government!” Tears draw icy channels down her cheeks. “It’s over,” she screams, without entirely knowing what she means. “It’s over.”

  7

  Have you ever set out to search

  for a missing half?

  The piece that isn’t shapely, elegant, simple.

  The half that’s ugly, heavy, abrasive.

  —Shailja Patel, Migritude

  Blue-gray clouds hung over the clinic. Something was making the inmates restless, making them roam the corridors and scream in their locked rooms. The girl and I stood at the window. Even though I would visit Tundra once more, this was, in a way, the last time I was seeing her, and the premonition of this may have made us both reserved.

  “They’re letting me watch the movie tonight,” she said.

  “The Seventeenth of February?” The film about the events of the previous year had simply used the date as its title. I’d seen it in a movie theater but had avoided the infected debate that followed its premiere.

  “The doctors say it might be good for me,” she said. She was scratching her hands again, in that vaguely self-harming way. “It might promote healing.”

  A guard sat next to the camera and fiddled with her cellphone, playing a game or texting. I said it was hard to imagine that seeing the film would be good for her.

  “They’ve changed some things, huh?”

  I nodded. We stood near the window and the chill from through the glass was streaming over my skin.

  “A number of things. There was a lot of talk about it in the media.”

  I wanted to keep discussing the film’s interventions in the story, the changes that had troubled me when I’d first seen it, but I noticed the shift in her posture that I’d come to associate with the other part of her taking over, the part that was a Belgian girl who’d been transported to al-Mima and who might be remembering even more of that place.

  She tugged at her hijab, tucking a lock of hair under the fabric.

  By then I was familiar enough with the change to know it was useless to try and talk to her when she was like this, so I held my tongue and looked out over the rays of light and darkness in the flat September sky. More than fifteen minutes later, she was back. Like always, it took another few minutes before she broke the silence. As though she had to reorient herself in time and space.

  “When is your flight leaving?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “How will you bring everything with you? All your stuff?”

  “We’ve packed a container and are shipping it over.”

  “In two weeks?”

  “Yes,” I said. I had questions but they wouldn’t come out.

  Maybe it was the same for her. She nodded to herself. Her eyes grew wet. She said, almost inaudibly, “A love poem.”

  A fist or a head pounded against a wall one floor down. The noise kept going for a while and by the time she looked up at me she’d disappeared again. I waited for the part of her I was speaking to—and with which I would always be interwoven somehow—to return, but when that didn’t happen I said goodbye, even though I knew she didn’t understand Swedish. She pulled away when I tried to touch her cheek.

  During the bus ride home, the first snow of the year fell, heavy and wet. I wondered whom it was sitting with the doctor in the clinic’s TV room. If it was the Belgian girl or the one I’d known, the girl with memories of a world that never was, a future she thought she’d prevented.

  In the movie about the events of February seventeenth, she’s depicted as an ordinary girl from the ghetto who falls prey to Amin. He manipulates her using religion and the threat of violence. Her Belgian citizenship isn’t mentioned, nor is her time at al-Mima. Otherwise, some details are correct—movements and expressions taken straight from the cellphone video.

  Amin, in front of the black flag, wearing a sweatband embroidered with Arabic script—an embellishment.

  “
In the name of the Commander of the Faithful and for every Muslim’s honor,” he says, but stops himself.

  She must be blinking, dazed, at the TV, with a sense of a dual reality.

  I looked out the bus window, out into streaming streetlights, out onto small villages nestling together, single-story homes and rows of townhouses clustered around grocery stores and shuttered post offices.

  I wonder what kind of answer she’d anticipated when she asked if I felt hopeful about this country.

  In the film, Amin kills the artist before the police storm the shop and shoot him. Yet another thing the filmmakers changed. To slit the artist’s throat, he doesn’t use a box cutter, he uses a utility knife with a crescent-shaped blade—an exquisite detail. As the blood spills out, the actor throws himself backward so it sprays the terrorists’ faces.

  I once asked her if the future she remembered could be stopped by foiling the attack, didn’t that mean the genocide, from one perspective, was justified, or at least caused by Muslims themselves? But what if it’s the opposite? If the images in her mind can’t be stopped, those pictures from her future, doesn’t it imply that there’s a force in the world that runs deeper than the superficial events of history? A secret force. An incredible force. A storm.

  I wondered if her skin crawled with madness, too, as she watched the scene. The artist’s corpse on the floor. The police storming the shop. The girl detonating her bomb vest.

  If she’d gone out on the balcony after the movie, maybe a little snow would have been blowing in through the bars meant to keep inmates from jumping, and maybe she cupped her hands into a bowl, as if in prayer, to catch a few snowflakes.