Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  We discussed other possibilities for groups we could work with—the Association for the Unaccompanied, the local community-college program in which some refugees with residence permits were enrolled, the Malmö local government. We had tried to reach out to groups in the past. A representative from the city had come to the university to meet with us. The man had talked a lot, mostly speaking to hear how he sounded in English, but he had left sounding enthusiastic, telling us to expect an email the next week.

  We never heard from him again.

  Katja said that she’d received a message from a group of students from Malmö University.

  “They’re in a class on global politics,” she began, reading from her phone. “They would like to meet with the refugee boys.”

  “Why?” Ali said.

  “Let’s see.” She scrolled down. “They want to discuss the boys’ hopes, dreams, and experiences for a class project.”

  Everyone was quiet. I took a sip of my beer.

  “Why don’t you tell them,” Ali said, “to go fuck themselves.”

  * * *

  Back at my apartment, I found three messages from unfamiliar addresses in my inbox. The subject lines read, You Really Have to Stop the Killing, your story, and Correspondence on your story. I opened first the Correspondence on your story, which was from an intern at the magazine:

  Hi Jonas,

  We received this typewritten letter addressed to you. A photocopy is attached. Have a great day!

  The photocopy read:

  Dear Correspondence:

  “You Really Have to Stop the Killing” is a glowing tribute to the art of the short story. It’s a multi-layered tale about what it means to be a teacher, about substance abuse, recovery, about romance, fantasy, love and loss, about being young, and being not so young. All of this in the confines of a “simple” short story, which culminates with the prevailing of the human spirit through an act of kindness. I was infinitely delighted with this story.

  I felt a rush of warmth, oxylike, surge through me. How praise from a stranger could make you glow. Then I saw that the letter writer’s name was followed by a serial number and the name of a prison. I googled the name. The first result was an article from the late eighties, which detailed how the author of the letter complimenting my story had been sentenced to life in prison for stabbing a man to death and stealing his stereo. The second Google hit was an essay the convicted murderer had written for the magazine a few years earlier about life in prison. Which explained how he had access to an arts-and-culture magazine in a maximum-security prison.

  I was used to strangers commenting on the essays and articles that I had published online. But online comments were from people either harping on their problem with two words from a five-thousand-word essay, or telling the world that you were a clueless liberal, a privileged white person, a self-hating white person, a racist, a sexist, or an idiot who didn’t know the difference between your and you’re. Worst of all were the people who found something legitimately wrong with your reasoning, then posted the fault right there, right beneath the thing you had spent so much time on, for everyone to see.

  But print media. Correspondence sections! This was much better. If only all comments were from convicted murderers.

  I clicked on the next email, which read:

  Jonas,

  Wow! Thank you for “You Have to Stop the Killing.”

  Fantastic. It is propelling me out the door to a meeting.

  I read the message again. Maybe my story was a distraction, however brief, from the man’s suffering. The idea of that felt nice. He was an addict, which meant that his suffering, like my suffering, was self-inflicted. But self-inflicted suffering was still suffering. It was the only kind of suffering that I really knew.

  Finally, I opened the last email.

  Dear Jonas,

  You hit the nail on the head with this one. As a professor, I could recognize how well you described the frustration, the loneliness, and the pain I felt in my early years of teaching.

  I googled the name of the letter writer, curious where she taught. The first hit was from a college newspaper at a liberal arts school in Pennsylvania: “Cultural Studies Professor Arrested for Arson, Dismissed.” I clicked and found that the author of the letter was awaiting trial for allegedly starting a fire in a Walgreens in suburban Philadelphia to distract the employees while she stole prescription painkillers. I clicked on a few more articles describing the same event. The woman was an assistant professor specializing in phenomenology in contemporary literature and film. I clicked on her academic profile, looked through her list of publications, and found that I had read an article of hers during the research for my thesis. This woman was desperate enough for oxy that she had brought a can of lighter fluid into a drugstore to set fire to a shelf of breakfast cereal. She had thought she would get away with it. A few years ago, I might have thought the same thing.

  * * *

  On an absurdly cold evening the week before Christmas, icy wind making everything miserable, Katja, Ali, and I held the last Language Café. Torsten brought only five boys, and they were all to be placed in more permanent homes by the end of the year. There were no other volunteers. Katja, Ali, and I had discussed petitioning the city to start a real Swedish-as-a-second-language class, but we were burned out. The thought of being relieved of our responsibilities was more exciting than the thought of helping, and emails now went unsent, proposals unwritten.

  Hassan was there, but the boy with the Raiders hat was not. Today’s worksheet was one I had designed about the weather. I sat at a table with Hassan and another Syrian boy. We went over the ö sound in höst and snöar. If you weren’t Swedish, the sound was difficult to pronounce—a chesty moan. The boys kept trying to say it, and I would open my mouth wider and wider and yell, “Uuuuuuhhhhh!,” until they were both laughing.

  “Jonas, what are you doing?” Katja scolded.

  “Sorry.” I looked down guiltily and the boys followed my lead.

  “Sorry,” they said, giggling.

  Later, Katja called me over, pointed to the young man sitting next to her in a V-neck sweater, and said, “He has a good question.”

  “Yes,” he said. “In English, do they call it fall or autumn?”

  “You can use either one.”

  The boy looked at me. “But doesn’t fall also mean ‘decline’? And why would they have two words that mean the same thing?”

  “In Swedish, there’s only one word for it.” Katja pointed at the worksheet. “Höst.”

  “Huuuuuuhhhhhst!” I corrected.

  “Uuuuuuhhhhh!” the boys back at my table yelled.

  “Jonas, look what you’ve done!” Katja said.

  The boys all laughed. They wouldn’t leave the Language Café any better equipped to deal with Sweden than they had been when they arrived. But maybe they had learned a phrase or two they could use. Maybe they would feel a little more comfortable talking to Europeans. If nothing else, for a few hours a week, they’d been distracted. That was something—wasn’t it?

  * * *

  At break, Hassan announced that he had baked an apple cake.

  “He was hard at work on it in the kitchen,” Torsten said in English.

  Hassan began cutting it into slices, a crispy crust spilling out chunks of baked apple.

  “It does not have milk or gluten, so you can all eat it,” Hassan said.

  “Why would we not be able to eat milk or gluten?” I said.

  Hassan stopped cutting. “I was told that Europeans don’t eat milk or gluten.”

  Katja, Torsten, and I laughed.

  “I am lactose intolerant,” Torsten said.

  “And I don’t eat gluten,” Katja said.

  “Good.” Hassan shoveled a slice onto a paper plate for Katja. “You may take a picture of it, if you like.”

  * * *

  On the bus ride home, I saw that I had an email from Anja.

  Jonas, how special to get an actual
mail letter from you! I read your story! I really liked it, but I think mostly because some parts remind me of you. Your “character” likes immortal jellyfish too! Things are good here in Greece. I’m working a lot and it’s very cold in the water but nice. My boyfriend (I started seeing a boy I go to school with in Germany) is coming to visit soon, which should be fun. But he’s not a very good swimmer, so I don’t know if I can take him diving. I hope you are well!

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Anja was great and there was no reason for her to be single. In a way, I was relieved to learn that I had already blown it and wasn’t still in the process of blowing it.

  * * *

  That night, I felt a pleasant exhaustion: an exhaustion that came from doing things rather than from an overactive mind. I fell into bed and opened my laptop to watch a Clippers game. There I saw that I had an email from Stella. She started by asking about Sweden, making a joke about ABBA, and then a joke about me fucking Swedish women that were out of my league. Then she wrote, I know you said you can’t make it to the wedding this summer. But Zach and I would really like it if you could come because . . . we want you to officiate! So now you pretty much have to come, right?

  To my surprise, I got choked up. She and Zach still cared about me, after all the time I’d spent away. I wrote back that of course I would officiate their wedding. I thanked them and wrote a long run-on sentence about how much I cared for them both. Then I booked a ticket with two layovers on my credit card, googled ministerial certification, and in five minutes had the right to wed couples in the state of California. I thought of Stella and Zach, whom I’d known since we were in the dorms together, eleven years earlier. I thought of how they were both deciding that this was the person, above all other people met and unmet, that they wanted to spend their life with. I longed, for the first time since I had come to Sweden, to go home.

  Los Angeles, California

  Summer 2016

  I STOOD AT THE CURB outside the international terminal at LAX, taking in the warm wind and waiting for the shuttle. Stella had offered to pick me up, but her driving was at once reckless and uncertain, and the thought of sending her on a three-hour trip from San Luis Obispo was enough to make me book a rideshare. On a nearby bench sat an elderly couple, bracketed by two large aluminum rolling suitcases that may have been the original model of rolling suitcase. The man got up groaningly every minute or so to walk over to the curb and peer down the highway-like road that led cabs and buses and shuttles and cars around the airport’s perimeter.

  “Are you waiting for the Coastal Shuttle?” the woman called out to me.

  “I am.”

  “Why don’t you come sit down?” She scooted over on the bench. “There’s plenty of room.”

  “Thank you.” I took a seat next to her. “I guess that shuttle is a hot ticket.”

  “It must be.” The woman laughed. “Where are you flying in from?”

  “Sweden.”

  “Oh, that’s lovely. How long were you there for?”

  “I live there.”

  “Really? But you don’t have an accent.”

  “My dad’s American.”

  “That explains it! You know, my grandparents were from Sweden. We’ve been to Stockholm and Uppsala. What beautiful cities.”

  “That’s great. When were you there?” My jaw, I noticed, had unclenched. My whole body, which I hadn’t realized had been tense, relaxed. It was so comfortable to be small-talked to and to be able to small-talk back in the same register.

  “Oh, that was years ago. How many years ago was that, Bill?”

  “How many years ago was what?” the man said, returning from his latest expedition to the curb.

  “When we went to Sweden.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s from Sweden.”

  “Nineteen seventy-four.”

  “Forty-two years ago. Can you believe it? Before you were born!” She laughed and patted me on the leg with a grandmother’s touch. “Long before you were born.”

  “Just a little bit.” I smiled.

  “What a beautiful city Stockholm is. All the water. And the light. People speak such good English there.”

  “I think it’s partly because we don’t dub anything. It’s much harder for the Germans and the French and the Italians—they don’t get to hear the language spoken by native speakers. Swedes hear English every time they turn on the TV.”

  “I had never thought of that! Isn’t that interesting, Bill? They don’t dub their TV so they speak better English.”

  “They speak great English in Sweden,” he said.

  “What do you do there?”

  “I was going to school. But in the fall I’ll be teaching Swedish courses.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

  When the long winter had finally ended and the sun had come out again, Katja, Ali, and I had found new energy for the yearlong language class for refugees permanently settled in Malmö. We were finalizing a partnership with one of the community colleges in the city. This new course would give me a purpose. It would give me a reason, and the resources, to stay in Sweden now that my degree was done—for reasons I didn’t totally understand, my professors had passed my thesis, though one had noted, I am not sure that this is literary criticism—instead of moving back to the US. Maybe I would visit Anja. It might be a little tricky with her boyfriend, but she might not have a boyfriend forever. I had been excited about teaching again, at first, but a few weeks earlier, I had run into Osman and Arash at Malmö Central, and they hadn’t recognized me. After politely listening to my explanation of how we had met at the Language Café and learned Swedish together six months earlier, they had nodded in recognition, shaken my hand, said thank you, and hurried off before I could ask them about their lives.

  In retrospect, I couldn’t say why I’d thought they would remember me. The college students I saw almost every day for a whole semester began to forget me the day after finals ended. I knew that my effect on the lives of the boys at the Language Café had been minimal—a few hours a week designed to eat up some of the time they had to spend waiting. Yet on some level I had assumed that since they had taken up so much space in my mind, I must have taken up some space in theirs. If I had known the reality of the situation, I would never have asked Torsten for Aziz’s contact info, forcing Torsten to awkwardly explain why that wasn’t allowed. I wouldn’t have spent so many evenings the previous winter scouring the internet for anyone named Aziz living in the Norrköping area.

  “Is Swedish a hard language?” the old woman asked.

  “It’s not that hard if you know English. The verb conjugations are simple. There aren’t that many words. The spelling is relatively consistent. But it’s a difficult language if you’re coming from Arabic, Dari, or any language with a completely different alphabet.”

  “Oh, dear. I’ve heard about that. Is it getting bad with all the Muslims there?”

  I stared at the woman, whose expression had changed to one of slight concern. “No,” I said.

  “There aren’t a lot of Muslims there?”

  “There’s probably a fair amount of Muslims in Sweden. But it’s not bad.”

  The lady nodded. “Oh, yes, of course.” It was as if she’d accidentally said that Oslo was such a beautiful city and, once I had told her that Oslo was in Norway, not Sweden, corrected her mistake.

  The man leaned over. “Aren’t you worried about all the Muslims over there?”

  “Bill, he just said he wasn’t worried about it.”

  I didn’t want to beat down these old people for their ignorance. But I also didn’t want to let it slide. Usually when someone said something surprisingly offensive, it took you a second to process the info, and by the time you thought of what you wanted to say, the moment was gone, and you were forced to replay it in your head for days, enraged that you didn’t get to say what you’d thought of too late. But here someone had said something offensive, given me a second to think about it, and then
her partner had leaned forward and said the offensive thing again.

  “I don’t see why I would be worried about Muslims. I think Islam is as good a religion as any other.”

  The man looked puzzled.

  The woman said, “Yes, of course.”

  “And the birthrate among white Swedish couples is very low, while the birthrate among Muslim couples is much higher. It’s lucky for us that Muslims are coming to Sweden. Without all the Muslim babies, in fifty years there’d be no taxes to fill the pension fund.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” the woman said.

  “With any luck, it’ll be a Muslim majority in Europe soon. I think business will go a lot smoother then. We’ll all have to learn Arabic. But it shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “Yes, of course,” the woman said.

  The man squinted at me, shook his head, and walked back over to the curb.

  The woman hadn’t been trying to provoke me. She hadn’t been trying to indoctrinate me. To her, asking if I was worried about the Muslims was probably just as normal as asking if it wasn’t difficult with those long Swedish winters. She and her husband were probably coming from an environment where being openly fearful of Muslims was normal enough to be acceptable small talk. They were living in a different reality—what were you supposed to do about that?

  “Professor Anderson?”

  At the sound of my name, I snapped out of my thoughts.

  “I thought it was you!”

  I turned and saw, looking taller than I remembered, in a blue skirt, blue blazer, and blue flight attendant’s beret, with a sleek black rolling suitcase by her side, my old student Kayla.

  * * *

  Kayla’s posture was still great. But she looked more tired than before—less prepared for a job interview to break out at any second. Her beret was perched neatly on her immaculately ponytailed hair, but her eyelids were heavy.

  We hugged and shared our disbelief at running into each other like this.