The Believer

by Joakim Zander

  Behind her she hears footsteps on the carpet and pulls back quickly, turning toward her own office.

  “What are you doing?”

  Patrick’s just come around the corner. She jumps—caught in the act—and feels herself blush.

  “Nothing,” she says as calmly as she can.

  He pushes past her and into his office, turns around and looks at her furiously.

  “I thought you had more respect for me,” he says.

  “Give me a break!” she says, suddenly irritated by his dramatic behavior. “I peeked into your office, that’s all. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Patrick doesn’t say anything as he simply turns around and closes the door on her.

  17. STOCKHOLM—TUESDAY, AUGUST 18, 2015

  THE SUBWAY STATIONS are cool and clean in the inner city, the tiles polished, the light muffled and warm. Yasmine sinks down onto a blue seat in a half-full train headed toward Bergort and tries to collect her thoughts. It’s bewildering to be back in Stockholm. She was once a part of this city, part of this subway, part of the concrete and rails and tiles. But now it’s as if she doesn’t fit. She has no function here anymore, no system to operate within.

  She should have gone out yesterday, of course. She has no time to lose. But after the meeting with Ignacio, jet lag beat her into unconsciousness, and when she woke up sometime late in the evening, her body felt full of sand and water, too heavy and cumbersome to maneuver. All she could manage was to order room service with a whispered thank you to Shrewd & Daughter for the credit card before falling back into a jerky trance-like sleep and a recurring dream, in which she hunted Fadi through snow in Bergort. His short pants flapping in the wind, his laughter bright and shrill like a child.

  Now the train moves slowly southward. The sound of the doors closing, movement over the rails, hip-hop leaking out of the headphones of the short guy opposite her. It’s exactly as she remembers it, but in an inverted form. She has never returned to Bergort, not even back then, when the train was moving in this direction with her on it. Even then she was moving away from there, maybe even more so. She always closed her eyes and dreamed of something else. After basement clubs in southern suburbs, she’d stumble out of the train and up the escalators at dawn completely oblivious to her surroundings, still drunk on beer and the future. She never even thought about where she was before she put the key in the door to Parisa’s or Abdul’s or wherever she happened to be crashing. She dreamed about the future until the future became a part of her, until she lived inside it. Until the future turned out to be something other than what she’d imagined, until suddenly she’s sitting on this blue seat, riding through these tunnels, finally on her way home.

  Yasmine holds her breath and closes her eyes for a moment when the train leaves the tunnel and rushes out among the pines and shrubs and the light of a late summer afternoon. That shaking, swooshing noise the train makes as it tears itself free of the darkness of the underground used to make her happy. It was the only time you really felt the speed and direction of the train—the force of it, how it could keep moving forward forever.

  Now she opens her eyes and sees Bergort emerging like a gray, cubist fortress next to the tracks, high-rise apartment buildings standing like a forest of watchtowers around the shopping center and beyond that stand the low-rise buildings. She sees the parking garage, cars in jagged lines on its roof, sees the satellite dishes stretching their beseeching arms to the sky. Home, she thinks, but all she feels is her chest constricting and her breath becoming shallower.

  The train stops on the platform, and for a second, she considers just staying put, but at the last second before the doors close, she gets up and exits onto the heat of the platform. She’s barely stepped out of the train car when she sees the symbol on one of the worn concrete pillars holding up the roof of the station. Simple and compact, newly sprayed, no more than a week old. A red fist inside a five-pointed star.

  She walks slowly down the ramp from the station, down toward the shopping center, down to Skutvägen and the Fregatten block, toward Mistlursgången and Vasatorget. All those Swedish street names were so provocative and exclusionary that the kids tore down the signs and renamed every corner, made Bergort their own. Skutvägen became Shoot Road, Fregatten became Fuck Street, Vasatorget became Pirate Square.

  She takes a deep breath, trying to find a rhythm, a way to take in all that is so familiar. The rusty railing, the tags she and Red sprayed on the electrical boxes when they were thirteen still visible under a new layer of tags. Farther and farther down the ramp, farther into the past, farther into herself. The ragged buildings, the grass between the flagstones on the square, the signs outside the grocery store, the eternal chicken, Faruk’s pizzeria, which seems to have made a halfhearted attempt to change its name to Paradise, but the drunks remain. The men in the square with their prayer beads and suit pants, their broken Swedish and perpetual unemployment, the truant kids outside the Syrian’s shop wearing caps and tank tops and sneaking cigarettes in the sun. All of this is her. All of this is what she created herself from, the material she used to build her wings, all of this is the air through which she flew.

  Parisa sits smoking outside her mother’s hair salon, long nails, long lashes, slightly wider hips, slightly bigger hair. Otherwise, it’s as if nothing has changed, as if this summer has lasted for four years and Yasmine just went into the city for an hour to buy new boots.

  She watches Parisa from afar and stops, unsure how to begin, how to approach this. Yet it’s so safe, so natural, how Parisa wobbles on the plastic chair, clicking her nails on her phone. Without really knowing how, Yasmine is suddenly beside her, the smoke from Parisa’s cigarette sweet and full of mint.

  “Shoo, len,” Yasmine says and squats down beside her.

  Parisa jumps, looks up from her phone, turns her head, her eyes wide, getting bigger and bigger.

  “What?” she says and stands up, the chair falling backward down onto the concrete. “Yasmine!”

  Yasmine smiles, stretches, and open her arms.

  “Yazz!” Parisa shouts. “Baby!”

  She turns back toward the small salon where her mother stands working on a hair treatment.

  “Mama!” she screams. “Look who’s here! Yazz, my gahar, my sister!”

  Afterward, they sit on the benches in the playground. Yasmine takes one of Parisa’s menthols and can feel the nicotine, sharp and unfamiliar, flow through her, leaving her light-headed and shaky. Parisa puts her arm around Yasmine, pulling her closer. Her cheek is smooth, oily with makeup and the August heat. Yasmine feels Parisa’s fake lashes flutter like an insect against her temples. She turns toward Parisa, smiling.

  “So are you still with Mehdi?” she says.

  She got a long, cheerful, almost happy email from Parisa a year ago. It was strange. Mehdi. Little fat Mehdi. Fadi’s friend. But fuck it. It made Yasmine happy, too. She’d printed out the email and saved it, but never replied. Just as she’d never responded to anything Parisa had sent over the last four years.

  Parisa sighs, smiles halfheartedly, before looking away and shrugging.

  “I guess,” she says. “A lot has happened, sister. So much has happened. But to hell with that now.”

  She pushes Yasmine away, pinches her shoulder, gently strokes her collarbone.

  “You’ve gotten skinny, sister!” she says. “And I got fat.”

  She slaps her thighs.

  “Shut up,” Yasmine says. “Everybody likes a booty. You were always Beyoncé, baby. I look like a guy, as usual.”

  “But a skinny shuno anyway,” Parisa says. “Where you staying, Yazz? Out here?”

  She shakes her head.

  “A sweet hotel in the city, on Riddargatan. It’s a long story.”

  Parisa whistles.

  “Nicely done, sister,” she says seriously.

  Yasmine shrugs and smiles.

  “I’m not paying.”

  Parisa nods and runs her finger gently acro
ss the swelling near Yasmine’s left eye.

  “I knew he was no good,” she says quietly.

  Yasmine stands up, shakes herself, takes one more drag before dropping the cigarette on the sand and stomping on it.

  “We all did,” she says. “But he was there, right? When I needed him.”

  “You could have fixed it yourself, Yazz. But you were so impatient that you couldn’t wait. You just wanted to get away.”

  She shrugs again. If only it were that simple.

  “And now I’m back,” she says.

  Parisa nods and extinguishes her cigarette.

  They look at each other in silence for a moment, the past hanging like fog between them.

  “I’m sorry about Fadi,” Parisa says at last. “I can’t believe he went away. That he turned to air, bre. That’s what happens to them when they get sucked in. Like air, you can’t reach them anymore.”

  Yasmine nods and squats down in the sandbox, lets hot sand run through her fingers, squints up at the dazzling reflections of the sun from the windows of the high-rises.

  “You haven’t heard anything more?” Yasmine says. “Since they posted it on Facebook that he was dead?”

  Parisa sits down beside her in the sandbox.

  “What do you mean?” she says. “All we heard was what those jihadis posted on Facebook. You saw it for yourself? His squad down there was on some frontline, and they were bombed.”

  Yasmine shakes her head slightly, takes out her phone and opens the picture before handing it to Parisa.

  Parisa stares at it for a while, magnifies it, then turns back toward Yasmine.

  “Is that him, sister?” she says.

  Yasmine just nods. “It’s him.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t taken before he left?”

  “My mother sent it to me. And she said it was taken last week.”

  Parisa looks at the picture again, closer now. She shrugs.

  “It’s probably not even him,” she says. “Better to just accept that he’s gone, sister. Nothing we can do anyway, right?”

  Yasmine looks at her in surprise. What is it Parisa doesn’t understand?

  She’s standing here with a fucking picture of Fadi in her hand.

  “You were so close when you were small,” Parisa continues. “He used to wait for you after school, right? You couldn’t even speak Swedish yet. But everyone noticed you two. There was something about you even then, baby.”

  “Stop,” Yasmine says.

  She can’t stand to hear more, can’t stand to hear about the past.

  “But why did you stop talking to each other?”

  Yasmine gets up again, brushing the sand off the knees on her jeans.

  “Why does anything end?” she says. “I was angry at him at first. You know after the Pirate Tapes thing, which was so fucking stupid. So I didn’t answer his messages. I didn’t answer anybody. We left right away. The morning after all that fucking shit. David just booked tickets, and we flew to New York. It was . . .”

  She falls silent, can tell she may not be able to hold back her tears, clears her throat.

  “It was like a fairy tale. Wallah, I swear. Everything I dreamed about, you know? I just couldn’t deal with Fadi. Couldn’t deal with Bergort and my parents . . .”

  By now tears are flowing down her cheeks, and she hates herself for it. Hates that she can’t stop them, she doesn’t deserve the relief of weeping. Parisa goes over to her now, puts her arms around her, pulls her close, and Yasmine lets her for a moment, before shaking herself free. Suddenly she feels it again. How the concrete leans over her, shutting her inside.

  “Never mind,” she says and wipes her cheeks with her palms, feels the remnants of the sandbox scratch her face. “He’s not dead, Parisa.”

  But Parisa says nothing, just continues to stare up at the concrete and roofs, not meeting Yasmine’s eyes.

  “Don’t talk like that,” she says. “It’s not good, sister. Not healthy.”

  Yasmine takes her phone out of her pocket again and scrolls down to the image of the cat in the snare. She hands it to Parisa, who receives it with some surprise, her eyes widen.

  “Do you know what this is?” she says.

  Parisa almost immediately returns the phone to Yasmine, as if she wants to get rid of it as soon as possible.

  “Never seen it before,” she says.

  Yasmine puts a hand on her arm.

  “What about this?”

  She flips to the next image, the stencil, and puts the phone on Parisa’s knee, but Parisa only throws a quick glance at it before turning off the phone and handing it back.

  “No idea,” she says curtly. “Never seen it before either.”

  Yasmine feels her frustration grow. First Ignacio’s bullshit and now this?

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she says. “They’re sprayed all over the place, are you serious, you’ve really never seen it?”

  Parisa stands up and brushes the sand from her thighs, throws a dark look sideways at Yasmine.

  “I said I’d never seen it, OK?”

  Back in town now, Yasmine is so tired she can barely make it the few steps from the subway to her hotel. The jet lag and the toll of seeing Bergort again have drained her completely.

  After she said good-bye to Parisa outside the salon, Yasmine’s legs carried her as if of their own will toward the building she grew up in. The same dirty walls. The same blinds and dirty windows.

  She should go up to her parents, to her mother. She should find out what they know and check out her and Fadi’s old room. But it was as if an invisible force field repelled her. As if she weren’t strong enough yet. Still, she sat on a bench in the parking lot outside her old building until the sun disappeared behind the high-rises and exhaustion forced her back to the subway.

  Back in the city, in the soft light of the fourth floor of Story Hotel, she takes out the note with the door code the receptionist gave her, punches it in, and opens the door to her room. Immediately she gets the feeling that something’s not right. The lights are on, and she’s almost positive she turned them off this morning.

  Carefully, as if on tiptoe, she continues inside. One of the reading lights is on and angled up toward the wall above her bed. She follows the beam of light up to the wall and sees that someone has sprayed a fist inside a five-pointed star. On the pillow beneath lies a photograph.

  She slowly lifts it up. It’s a zoomed-in version of the same motif she was sent: a cat hangs in a noose from a lamppost. She turns the photo over and reads the short message on the back.

  Stay away from Bergort, whore.

  18. BERGORT—FEBRUARY 2015

  AUTUMN TURNS TO winter, Christmas comes and goes without me even noticing. I do my morning prayer, fajr, at home because I won’t make it to work if I go meet my brothers at the imam’s home in the low-rise building. I pray dhuhr and asr in the fridge at work, but I don’t hide it anymore. To hell with those Swedish bastards, they can say whatever they want. But it’s as if they can see it in me now, that I won’t stand for it, that I don’t need to put up with it, and they leave me in peace, no more jokes about terrorists or camels or deserts. They just keep their mouths shut and chew on their dry fucking sausages. They’re so weak, even weaker than me, with their greasy lunch boxes, body odors, and forgotten Christmas decorations.

  After work one of my brothers usually comes by, and we go to the shopping center and get a cup of coffee at the café, whisper to each other about Syria, leaning close. I like brother al-Amin best. He’s quiet and calm, lets me talk and ask about anything that I don’t yet understand, everything I’m trying to learn. About the rules and the prayers, about shari’a and haram. But mostly we talk about the struggle and our brothers who are fighting. How Allah, may he be glorified and exalted, has rewarded our brothers in Syria by giving them the possibility of martyrdom.

  Brother al-Amin says he wishes he were younger, he’s too old and slow for the battlefield now, though grateful for the
role he’s been given. He says, people like me are what they need in Syria, men like me will build the Islamic State.

  And it fills me with pride and confidence when he says that. It makes my wings start to grow again. They’re big now. As big and black as the Prophet’s flag. Then it’s easy to forget that God’s hand still feels so cold. Then it’s easy to avoid thinking of your eyes, of what you’d say if you saw me now.

  One afternoon, sometime in mid-February, brother al-Amin is waiting for me outside my door when I come home from work. That’s not unusual in and of itself, the brothers know my parents don’t sympathize with the struggle, they know it’s better not to provoke them, so they always wait outside.

  I’m happy to see brother al-Amin standing there; he told me earlier this week about how the courts are organized in the Islamic State, and he’s promised to tell me more about daily life there next time we meet. Several of his relatives have joined the fight, and he receives reports about how wonderful life is there every week via Skype.

  But today, I can see already from the bike path that there’s something different about him. There’s something almost solemn in the way he stands, straight backed, his eyes searching for me in the pitch-black, winter darkness, even though it’s not yet four in the afternoon. When he sees me, he takes a few steps forward and waves impatiently for me to hurry up. I start jogging along the bike path with expectation rising in my chest.

  “Salaam alaykum, brother Ajam,” he says and kisses me on the cheek. “We have no time to lose, brother Dakhil is already waiting for us.”

  My heart skips a beat, and I feel my whole body fill with something like carbonation, something effervescent and exuberant.

  “What has happened?” I say.

  “Come now, you’ll know soon,” he says and walks ahead of me toward the parking lot, away from the house where I grew up, toward a future I haven’t even dared to dream of.