The Believer

by Joakim Zander

  Silence again. It’s been such a long time. And quiet for a long time. She knows this is up to her.

  “I’d like to see you, Ignacio,” she says.

  He hesitates and sighs.

  “Ignacio?” he says at last. “You’re the only who calls me that, sister. You know that. OK, where do you wanna meet?”

  "I can take you out to dinner, it’s the least I can do, right?”

  “You gonna take me out? That’s a first, len. But sure. I’m at work right now in the city. How about Flippin’ Burgers at five o’clock? Before the rush. You know where that is?”

  “I’m sure I’ll find it,” she says. “See you there.”

  Vasastan is quiet and strangely lethargic, the summer has been a long one, and even if vacation is over the laziness remains. The occasional thirty-something media-type saunters home in shirtsleeves, and a few fathers on paternity leave wander by, pushing a stroller with one hand and holding a coffee in the other. The traffic inches forward.

  Yasmine spots Ignacio’s broad back at one of the tables at Flippin’ Burgers outdoor seating as soon as she swings around the corner from Upplandsgatan onto Observatoriegatan. Even from behind and from a distance, Ignacio makes his surroundings seem smaller than they are, as if the proportions don’t quite make sense.

  Seeing him again makes her somber, and she deliberately slows to put off their reunion as long as possible. It’s been four years since she disappeared without a word. And not until now, when she’s actually in Stockholm again, does she realize how far away she’s been. How far away she might still be.

  “Ignacio!” she says with a forced cheerfulness and slides down on the bench beside him. “Que pasa?”

  He turns so quickly, he almost tips over the picnic table. His shaved head is hidden under a blue Knicks cap, and he’s let his beard grow out, dark, thick, and trimmed square. It makes him look older than his twenty-four years. He’s come straight from his job, still wearing blue work pants and a T-shirt with the name of a moving company printed across the back. A wave of old love flows through Yasmine.

  “Yazz!” he says and puts his huge arms around her. “Damn, it’s been a minute, len.”

  “Four years,” she says. “Time flies.”

  He doesn’t say anything, just lets go of her gently but leaves his huge hands resting on her shoulders while he inspects her

  “You’re skinny, Yazz. Don’t you eat anymore?”

  Yasmine shrugs and smiles. Ignacio shakes his head in resignation before letting go of one of her shoulders and gently lifting her large black sunglasses. His squints and his mouth narrows to a line when he sees the sunset radiating from Yasmine’s temple. Before he can say anything, she shakes free of him and grabs her glasses from his hand and puts them back on again.

  “We better order before all the suedis start rolling in,” she says. “What do you want?”

  Forty-five minutes later they’ve finished their burgers, and Ignacio is halfway through his second cookie dough milk shake, spiked with two shots of Jack Daniel’s. Yasmine takes a sip of her Stockholm IPA (“You’re home now, Yazz, gotta drink local,” was how he’d dismissed her attempts to order an American beer) and leans back on the bench. Alcohol has stabilized her somehow, reduced the jet lag to vague background noise. The evening is still warm, the sky clear, bright, and endless.

  They’ve gone through a good deal of what happened in the last four years. Who’s left. Who put out a record. Who moved, died, or is serving time. For a moment, Yasmine can almost forget everything else, almost forget her eye and David and New York and Shrewd & Daughter. Almost forget Fadi and exile, because it’s such a relief to just lean back, drink a beer, and listen to new versions of the same old war stories and legends. For a moment, coming home is almost like coming home.

  But she knows that they’re just circling around, and they can’t keep on like that, and in the end they fall silent and let their eyes wander over the almost deserted street, over the cobblestones and Art Nouveau facades. After a few seconds Ignacio turns back to her, looks at her with a different expression.

  “I heard about Fadi,” he says calmly. “I’m really sorry, Yazz.”

  Yasmine just nods and looks down at her beer.

  “I swear,” Ignacio continues. “I didn’t know it had gone so far. You never saw him around anymore. If I’d known . . .”

  “I know,” said Yasmine. “I know, Ignacio.”

  She puts her hand on his but can’t meet his eyes.

  “This is on me,” she says quietly. “Nobody else. I’m the one who left.”

  She turns to Ignacio and takes off her sunglasses, looks him in the eye.

  “It was fucked-up,” she says. “To flip out and leave like that, without a word. It was really fucking wrong, Ignacio. To Fadi and to you.”

  Now it’s Ignacio’s turn to avert his eyes and let them sweep out across the dusty pavement.

  “You don’t owe me anything.” He shrugs. “It was already over between us, wasn’t it?”

  “But to just take off like that? I owed you more than that. I wrote so many emails to you in my head, but I never sent them.”

  Ignacio turns back to her with a wry smile.

  “It is what it is, sister,” he says. “You do what you gotta do, right?”

  Yasmine nods carefully and takes a sip of her beer.

  “So que pasa, Yazz?” he says gently. “What are you doing here? Four years? You disappeared without a sound, baby. You didn’t just come back to see me?”

  “He’s not dead,” she says quietly.

  Ignacio seems to flinch, then leans across the table.

  “What? Who isn’t dead? Fadi?”

  Yasmine takes her phone out of her pocket and opens the picture her mother sent. She pushes it across the table to Ignacio.

  “See for yourself.”

  He picks up the phone and drags his finger across the picture, enlarging it, and holds the phone close to his face to study it. Finally, he puts it down on the table again. There’s sadness in his eyes.

  “Maybe,” he says. “Yazz . . . Don’t get your hopes up. It could be him. But seriously, it’s pretty dark and blurry, don’t you think?”

  “It’s him,” she says calmly.

  “So you came back to try to find him?”

  “Not try. I will find him.”

  Ignacio looks worried but nods calmly.

  “Where you staying?” he says.

  “Story Hotel, at Stureplan.”

  Ignacio whistles.

  “Sweet. You’ve come up in the world, sister.”

  “I have a job,” Yasmine says. “Or, I do stuff for advertising agencies. Find artists and shit. Trends. You know, big companies want to be down with the kids.”

  She bends her arm in an ironic hip-hop gesture.

  “Anyway, right now I’m working for an agency that wants to find out what’s up in Bergort.”

  Ignacio shakes his head and sucks on his milk shake.

  “What the hell are you talking about? What do they want with Fadi?”

  “They don’t know anything about Fadi,” she says. “But there’s something else out there. Something that Fadi might have gotten mixed up with.”

  She shrugs again.

  “I don’t know what. Fuck that anyway, but it was enough to make them pay up.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ignacio says. “Some ad agency in New York wants to know what’s going on in Bergort? How the hell did that happen, len?”

  Yasmine smiles tiredly and takes a sip of beer.

  “Just an old-school hustle,” she says. “You’re not the only one that can shake money outta the trees, brother.”

  Ignacio laughs, leans back.

  “So you made them pay your way home? Your hotel? Shit, Yazz, I’m proud of you.”

  “I have to find Fadi. But David . . . He made off with all my money. I needed somebody to bankroll this.”

  She takes out her phone and opens the image of the cat hanging in
the snare.

  “Here,” she says and pushes the phone across the table again. “I was sent three pictures, which seem to be related to Fadi.”

  He takes the phone back and glances at the picture but closes out the screen almost immediately before handing it back to Yasmine.

  “No idea,” he says defensively. “Where did you get that?”

  She looks at him questioningly.

  “Ey, Ignacio. There are more pictures. A stencil of a fist inside a star.”

  She picks up the phone and turns the screen on.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that, okay?” he says.

  His voice is suddenly curt, almost aggressive, and she quickly looks up at him, but he’s turned his gaze to the street, to the Art Nouveau facades that look soft and matte in the afternoon light.

  “Come on, man,” she says. “You haven’t even looked at the pictures.”

  She bends over the phone again, but he takes it from her and places it on the table.

  “Wallah,” he says. “I swear. I don’t know anything about that.”

  He looks her in the eye, his expression no longer warm and ironic now, but more like Bergort itself—all concrete and complicated loyalties. There’s worry there too, and something else. Something he’s not saying.

  “Seriously, Yazz,” he says.

  He puts one of his hands on hers, so big it completely covers her own and presses, not hard, but enough to remind her of the past—of Bergort and growing up, of claustrophobia and confinement. Of helplessness.

  “There are things you just gotta forget about, okay?”

  “There are things you can’t forget about,” she says quietly. “But I hear you, brother.”

  They drink in silence for a little while. Until Ignacio can’t hold back anymore.

  “Your eye? It was him, right? That Swede you left with. The artist.”

  He spits out the word artist with the satisfaction of someone who’s had a piece of food stuck between their teeth and finally got it out.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m here now.”

  She takes a deep breath. They had to end up here eventually.

  “What the hell, Yazz—”

  “Fuck it,” she interrupts. “I had to take off, right? After the break-in and all that. I did it for Fadi. I thought I was doing it for Fadi.”

  Ignacio leans forward, his eyes are soft again, familiar.

  “But Yazz, querida. Didn’t you realize everyone knew anyway? Did you really think they’d believe you pinched that stuff from the studio?”

  She feels a cold wind blow through her. Of course, she knew it was an excuse, just something that pushed her over the edge. Something that gave her the strength to go.

  “You do what you gotta do, ey?” she says. “I’m here now. What do you want me to say?”

  She takes a sip of beer. Ignacio shrugs and glances at his phone.

  “Gotta go,” he says, and gets up. “It was good to see you, Yazz.”

  The shadow of his huge body blocks the sun and falls across Yasmine. She stands up too, kisses him on the cheek, but he grabs her shoulders and pushes her away a bit, looking at her seriously again.

  “Don’t run around flashing those pictures, OK?” he says. “Seriously. You don’t wanna end up in the middle of that.”

  “In the middle of what, len? Tell me then. They’re all I’ve got.”

  “There are some things you just don’t talk about. Mind your own business. Bergort style, ya’ know.”

  “But you’ll check about Fadi, right? Check if anyone’s heard anything?”

  “Sure. But don’t get your hopes up. Seriously, Yazz, it’s better to lie low here. If he’s alive he’ll get a hold of you. Believe me.”

  13. BERGORT—JULY–OCTOBER 2014

  IT’S A HOT summer. That’s what the Swedes say over their thermoses and cheese sandwiches on the loading dock behind the vegetable wholesaler in Fittja where the unemployment office eventually forced me to work. It’s nice in the sun, they say, and turn their pale hungover faces to the sky to make sure they burn.

  “What do you think, Abdullah? Just like home in the desert, right?”

  I don’t sit in the sun on my break. Eat no cheese sandwiches, drink no coffee. Just nuts and tomatoes I pinch from a pallet, while I wait for them to take their plastic lunch boxes and bullshit and go out onto the dock, then I wash myself in the dressing room and go into one of the coolers, spread out the worn carpet I bought for forty bucks at the Sunday flea market under the overpass. Didn’t even try to bargain, not for this, not for my new life.

  Now, I don’t even have to look at my Mecca app anymore—I know to turn toward the cucumbers and eggplants. Behind them, if you draw a long, straight line, lies Mecca. It’s the same at home in our room, just turn toward your pillow, or what used to be your pillow, and a straight line from my forehead, through your pillow, that stops at Mecca.

  Every day, at every prayer, I think I’m a bad Muslim, a bad brother, because I don’t feel God inside me while I pray. I don’t feel the light flowing through me, and I steal tomatoes and can’t remember my rak’at, my Qu’ran verses, so I always Google them and read them on the screen of my phone. With the Swedish transcription, because the Arabic is too difficult.

  Every day I curse how hard we tried to be part of what we could never be part of. We learned the entire Swedish dictionary but forgot our Arabic. Every day I promise to get better, to learn, stop bullshitting. You can’t bullshit in this new life.

  When I’ve finished praying, I hear the Swedes coughing and snickering outside the storage room door and I quickly whisper my as-salamu alaykum wa Rahmatullah twice, stand up, roll up the mat, slide it under the shelf of pears, and leave the fridge and go back to carrying boxes of bananas, lettuce, apples, and cabbage until the time to take the subway home finally arrives.

  I’m the world’s loneliest Muslim. I pray in solitude. Read in solitude. Believe in solitude. Sometimes I go down to the mosque on Fridays. I stand on the other side of the square and watch the old men heading down to the basement, always the same men. Mehdi’s father and grandfather. Old man Jamal, who fixes shoes by the subway. See their dress pants, quilted jackets, mustaches and bent, submissive necks. How could I be a part of that umma? It’s not for me. It’s a fucking club, not serious. They just nag and whine. I need more. I’m waiting for more. Until I find it, I’m a brotherhood of one.

  And while I wait, I have no congregation, no one to pray with in a religion that is all about community, justice, and solidarity. While I wait I’m preparing. Forcing myself to read more than ten consecutive lines in the Qu’ran. Forcing myself to remember my prayers.

  I’m preparing myself and finding new, virtual brothers online. They aren’t like the men in the square, they’re serious and militant, and my faith grows stronger with every video from Syria, with every sermon they send me. My new brothers have handles, not names, and they’re as angry as I am, as ready to blow this shit up as me. Just as lonely too. Brothers from whose eyes the veil has been lifted, just as it was lifted from my eyes, to reveal the world as it is: oppression, colonialism, imperialism, and injustice. It’s incomprehensible that I couldn’t see it. I lived it, forced myself to adapt to it, and even tried to become a part of it. It fills me with hatred and self-loathing. How could I have been so blind for so long? How could I choose the Swedish dictionary over the Arabic? But that’s all over now.

  Now I see it on the screen in front of me every day after work, gritty films, pixelated evidence of oppression, blood in the sand, my brothers and sisters driven from their homes, murdered, and raped in the blue twilight. Now I see the ignorance and evil in Gaza and Syria, as well as here, in Bergort, where we’re imprisoned and locked out at the same time, stuck in the concrete, with no future, no history, completely at the mercy of corrupt people with no morals, people who are impossible to respect, a godless government that lacks all legitimacy.

  It’s so obvious now that my whole
life has been wasted, but that doesn’t matter, none of it matters. Everything is new now, and I kneel on the floor, on the carpet I use at home, and I bend toward your pillow, toward Mecca, and I can’t help thinking what you’d say if you saw me now. Would you be relieved or horrified? And I feel that sea take hold of me again, the emptiness, the endlessness, feel it spreading like mercury through my bones and my blood, and I mumble what I remember of my prayers and fall down on the mat to keep it inside of me, to force it back into its nest at the bottom of my stomach, at the back of my chest.

  And it works. I push it away with prayer. So what if I wasn’t filled with God instead? So what if I can’t feel his love and grace? This is one of his tests. I have to prove myself worthy before he’ll allow the golden light to descend upon me.

  Months pass by without me talking to anyone except the Swedes at work, which I do my best to avoid, and the anonymous brothers who I chat with online. I’m in my room or in the gym where I do what I can to prepare myself, and I feel my body growing and aching, and I know I should thank Allah for each weight I lift, but that’s hard for me, seeing God in the everyday. I need something bigger, more important.

  I’m a bad Muslim. I know I should respect and honor my parents, but I hide from them, at work or at the gym or in my room. I don’t know what to say to them, what they’ll say to me. It’s easier since you disappeared. I’d like to tell you that, because I know that keeps you awake, the idea that I’m still here. But he’s calmer now, maybe older. I was always better at avoiding him and rarely provoked his rage, despite all the shit I got up to.

  It worries me even more that you probably don’t live righteously. I pray to Allah that you’ll understand and open your heart before it’s too late. And when I think about it, the darkness grows inside me until I have to recite lines from the Qu’ran aloud, words I don’t even understand, but they help me, and I stop thinking of what I cannot change.

  Sometime in October I run into Mehdi down by the bridge to the subway. He’s still fat and short of breath, and he’s sitting on a bench down by the gray tiles outside the Syrian’s, drinking one of those Turkish liter bottles of cola that the old man sells. I consider just walking past. I don’t even remember the last time I talked to my old crew. Probably not since you disappeared?