She stood here yesterday, in this very place, hesitant, already aware that she couldn’t do it, that it was too much. But sleep has given her strength, and she doesn’t hesitate now.
What they fled to, what she fled from, is a high-rise apartment building with four entrances. Their entrance had been tagged back then, and it’s tagged now. Different words and patterns, different kids, the same concrete houses and barren pine trees, the same words and patterns.
She walks calmly across the asphalt to the door, pulls on it, sure it won’t be locked, the door code pads are broken so often that no one bothers to fix them, it’s easier to just turn off the locks, allow anyone who wants to go inside.
The elevator doesn’t work, same as always. The note hanging up that says it’s broken could just as well be the same one that sat there four years ago, yellowed and frayed with its edges burned by a lighter.
She takes the stairs and every step is a memory. How they raced here the first few months, up and down, up and down. The time Fadi stumbled, and she thought he’d knocked out a tooth, but it was just his lip, which bled and bled, and no matter how hard she washed his T-shirt with that shitty, off-brand detergent, she couldn’t get rid of those brown spots. She remembers how she hid the sweater at the bottom of the laundry basket, and how they still found it, how she crouched in the corner of the kitchen while her father pulled out the chairs to reach her. Then nothing after that. Everything always ends just when it begins.
She doesn’t even hesitate when she reaches their landing, not even at the front door of the apartment. Just steps left to the door, glancing at the other names: Ahmadi, Ghazemi, Lehtonen, and her parents: Ajam. Same as it’s always been. She doesn’t even hesitate to push the bell, nor when it doesn’t work, doesn’t even knock, just puts her hand to her neck. Grabs hold of a chain and pulls a key up over her bra, between her breasts until she’s holding it in her hand, and moving it toward the door. Not even then does she hesitate, just slides it into the lock, turns the bolt, and opens the door.
The apartment is dark and smells like soap. But at the same time, it’s stuffy and old, as if the windows have never been opened, as if no one really lived here. And perhaps that’s true. Her parents reside here. Sleep here. Exist. But do they live?
Is there guilt in that? Shame? That Yasmine hasn’t called her mother once since she left Bergort or since Fadi disappeared. If so, it’s hidden behind everything else, which is deeper and easier.
Yasmine doesn’t bother to turn on the light, just heads down the dark hallway into the living room. The blinds are pulled shut as they always are. Everything is cleaner now than it was. Neater. More in order. No plates on the coffee table, no bills or empty cups. She goes over to the bookcase where the photographs used to stand. The ones of her and Fadi in the old country, before they came here. Even then, on that beach with bright sunshine in his eyes, Fadi looked scared.
But that picture is gone now. There are only old pictures of relatives, of a grandmother and cousins, and her father’s sister. But none of that is what she came here for, and she turns around, crosses the scuffed wood floor, and stops for a moment. Takes a calm breath before opening the door to the room she shared with Fadi and stepping over the low, worn-out threshold.
Like the rest of the apartment, the room is dark and hot. Here too the blinds are drawn, but a ray of sunlight streaks through across the speckled gray carpet. She sees that her bed looks exactly like she left it, maybe it hasn’t even been touched. Covered by a white Ikea bedspread. Other than that, the room is not at all like it used to be. The TV is pushed against the wall, the game console stowed, no clothes on the floor, no forgotten, half-drunk Red Bulls on the desk or plates next to the bed. Fadi’s bed is made in the same tight, painstaking way as her own.
She walks quietly over to the window and pulls up the blinds, looks out at the paved bike path and the little grove of trees behind it. Sunlight transforms the room from a tomb to something else, to what it is, an abandoned room in an abandoned part of the world. She absently opens closet doors, pulls out drawers. Everything is empty and clean. As if they never lived here, neither she nor Fadi. Carefully—as if she were afraid to leave anything behind, not even wrinkles on the smooth bedspread—she sits down on what used to be her bed.
At first, she thinks it’s the bed that squeaks, but then she hears it again, and she freezes and listens more closely. The sound is coming from the other side of the small apartment. It’s the sound of a key being put into a lock, a bolt slowly turning. Somebody is on their way inside.
21. BERGORT—FEBRUARY 2015
I CAN’T SLEEP, HOW are you supposed to be able to sleep when God has answered your prayers, given you exactly what you’ve been desiring for so long? My body trembles under the clean sheets. I’ve been chosen. I’ve shown that I have the courage and strength, and the confidence of my brothers. The passport and the satellite phone are in the rolling bag that brother al-Amin gave me, which now stands packed on the floor.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The yellow light from the streetlamp turns the lowered blinds into tired, weak shadows on the carpet. Otherwise, everything is so dark, I wouldn’t even see you if you were curled up in your bed. But it’s been a long time since you slept there, so long ago I can hardly remember it.
I get up and go over to your bed, lie down on it without getting under the bedspread. I think that if God can flow through my body and wipe out everything except my desire to be close to him, maybe I can be filled with you. When I close my eyes, I’m nine years old, waiting for you outside school behind the snowball trees. Later we’re in front of the TV, me half asleep, you reading the subtitles aloud from the American talk show. Then we laugh and wrestle on the living room floor to keep warm in the freezing apartment. Then you hold my hand and whisper that there are no trolls, it’s just a fairy tale, nothing more. And even if there were, you’d protect me, you wouldn’t let their beaks reach me, you would keep their claws from scratching me.
I open my eyes and feel tears streaming down my cheeks, down onto your pillow. You can’t protect me now. No one can protect me now. Not even God can protect me now. And I sit up and dry my eyes, stand up and push my hands through my hair. The handle of the suitcase rattles and the wheels make a muffled thumping sound along the floor as I pull it out into the hall. But I don’t make it through the living room before I see his silhouette detach from the darkness and stand in my way.
He’s in the doorway, and it’s been so long since I even saw him. He’s just shadow, not real. Just an atmosphere and a bad conscience, ballast and anchor.
It occurs to me how short he is, how he’s collapsed over the years, as if every adversity and loss cut him off at the ankles, one inch at a time, until now he doesn’t even reach my chin.
“Go back to your room!” he says, pointing with his hand—pathetic, trembling—back toward our room.
I stop, but keep my hand on the suitcase handle.
“Lay off,” I say. “Go back to bed.”
But I feel my heart pound, of all the things that could have happened this was the last thing I expected.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he says. “Go back to your room now.”
It’s so absurd. He’s giving orders and expects to be obeyed. I shake my head, unsure of how much strength this will take. How much violence.
“No,” I say. “I’m leaving now. Just move aside. It’ll be easier that way.”
He takes a step toward me, waves a stubby forefinger in my face. I can see that his cheeks are red from excitement, his eyes shiny, and it fills me with unexpected tenderness.
“I know where you’re headed, Fadi,” he says. “I know where you think you’re headed. Don’t you think I understand? You think I’m an idiot? Well? I’ve seen your friends, Fadi! Their beards and kufi. Don’t you think I know who they are?”
There’s desperation in his voice now, resignation, and loss. It makes me sad and even more determined to get past him. I focus my ey
es on him, empty them of all I feel, making them cold and violent.
“Do you think I care?” I say. “Do you think I give a shit about what you think you know? Huh? Do you think you have any power over me?”
I take a step toward him, feel his sweaty finger touch the bridge of my nose before he draws it back.
“You’re nothing to me, do you understand that? Nothing! What have you given me? What did you give Yasmine? What?”
I’ve raised my voice now. And I hear my mother moving in their bedroom, hear the door creak, but she doesn’t come out.
“Is it any wonder that she left?”
The tenderness is gone now. All I feel is hate, and I bend over the little man in front of me, and he backs up until he’s pressed against the thin, cheap, stupid plasterboard wall.
“All you gave us were blows, Papa.”
I spit out the word Papa. My saliva lands on his cheek. I see it shine faintly in the dark.
“All you taught us was fear. Do you realize that?”
I push him away from me, toward the wall. He holds up his weak, old hands and grips my forearms. I put my hands around his neck. My fury grinds away inside me, wrestles with my self-control. My fingers close around his thick neck, his pulse rushing now, and his Adam’s apple bobs as I press harder. I can feel him struggling, feel how helpless he is, how powerful I am. I don’t really want to, but it’s as if I have to finish this, as if I need to close this door and I push harder, as he gets weaker and heavier in my arms.
In the end, she’s the one who brings me back. I hear her yelling behind me, and I turn my head and see her eyes are wide and frenzied, her mouth is open, and from it comes a desperate, animal-like scream, unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. It scares me, that sound, and it forces me back into the world, away from what I’m close to finishing, and I release the man I’m holding, and he falls heaving and gasping to the floor. The scream stops, and she falls down on the floor beside him, holding his head in her lap. I turn my back on them, grab hold of my bag, and leave the past behind me.
Out on the bike path a quiet winter rain is falling. I shake myself off and take a few steps. Then my black wings unfurl, lifting up through the rain and the light of the streetlamps, lifting up over the empty parking lots and satellite dishes, up above all that asphalt and concrete. Gone.
22. BERGORT—WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2015
HER MUSCLES CONSTRICT, and she shudders when she hears the sound of that door. She stands up carefully, leans forward to listen, and the front door opens with a sucking sound. It’s the middle of the day, her parents shouldn’t be coming home yet.
Slowly, tentatively, she takes a step toward the door to the living room. Whoever has entered the apartment is no more than thirty feet away from her. She thinks about the symbol on the wall at Story Hotel, the fist inside the star, and she reaches out and grabs hold of the thin door’s plastic handle. Is someone following her? But nobody knows that she moved to the Lydmar. Someone must have seen her in Bergort. Ignacio? Or whomever Ignacio ratted her out to?
She closes her eyes and prays the door won’t squeak as she slowly pulls it toward her. She hides behind it, leaving a small gap that offers a glimpse of the living room.
The footsteps in the hall subside and are replaced by another sound, a clip-clop across the living room floor. She leans against the door crack waiting for the person to appear in her field of vision. And when that finally happens, she feels the whole apartment tremble, her past and the future are suddenly the same thing.
Slowly she pushes open the door and goes out into the living room.
Her mother stands in the middle of the room, still wearing her gray-green scrubs, her makeup faded after a double shift, maybe even triple shift, but her hair still tight in the little knot on her neck. When she hears Yasmine open the door she turns around, not overly fast, not as if she’s shocked or scared, more as if she’s been waiting for this moment.
Yasmine stands there, quiet, hardly breathing. She looks at the person she and Fadi stopped calling Mama a long time ago. They never talked about it, but when they switched to Swedish “mama” and “papa” disappeared—replaced by “he” or “she” or “them.” As if she and Fadi had to leave certain words and constructions behind them, as if there was no longer room for them.
“Yasmine,” she says in Arabic. “You came back.”
Yasmine clears her throat.
“I got your email,” she says.
Her mother approaches her with hesitant steps. Yasmine smells the sterile scent of hospitals and disinfectant combined with her floral perfume.
“Yasmine,” her mother says in a voice that’s lighter than the one Yasmine remembers, not as heavy with dashed hopes.
She allows herself to be embraced, lets her forehead fall on the starched, stiff fabric of her mother’s scrubs. For a moment, she’s a child again, and she feels tears welling up in her eyes. For a moment, it’s so close she just stands still and lets time take its course. It’s so long since she let herself be held by her mother. So long since her mother let herself be held. But it doesn’t work, there’s too much between them, so she pushes her away and looks into her mother’s eyes.
“Did you talk to him?” she says. “After you took the picture?”
Her mother’s eyes are tired and confused.
“I didn’t take the picture,” she says quietly. “Shirin took it. You know, my colleague? She lives around here too, on Briggvägen. She was on her way home after a late shift and saw that cat. I don’t know why she photographed it. But while she did, a boy started painting on the wall.”
She falls silent.
“Then she showed it to me because she thought the boy reminded her of Fadi. And she helped me to send it to you. I don’t know what it is, Yasmine. I don’t know what to believe.”
Her mother sinks down to the floor and puts her head in her hands.
“It looks like Fadi,” she whispers, shaking her head. “But Fadi is dead. They say he’s dead, he died a month ago. Yasmine, I don’t understand, I can’t take it, I . . .”
She falls silent. Yasmine hesitates a second then sinks down next to her mother on the floor and wraps her arms around her. They sit like that in silence for what might be a couple of seconds or maybe an afternoon. Finally, Yasmine gets to her feet and leads her toward the bedroom. Gently, almost tenderly, she puts her on top of the bedspread and wraps a cardigan around her. She sees how heavy her mother’s eyelids are, maybe she’s already taken a sleeping pill on the way home, like she usually does after long shifts. But she struggles to keep them open and raise her head to Yasmine.
“Is he dead, Yasmine?” she whispers. “Is Fadi dead? Do you know? Please Yasmine, you must know.”
Yasmine gently strokes her hair. All she felt for her parents. All the hate and contempt. Still there’s a gap in that sticky, coal-black anger. A gap that could never be closed completely. She takes her mother’s dry hands in hers.
“I don’t know,” she says. “But I’m going to find out.”
Afterward Yasmine is alone in the living room. Her mother is asleep in her room, just like so many times in the past, with earplugs and sleeping pills after eighteen hours at the hospital. So many times Yasmine has found herself in this living room, listening for the front door to open, waiting for him to come home, exhausted and humiliated, ready to be set off by anything or nothing.
So many times he came across that floor full of exaggerations and gossip, rumors about her or Fadi, things he heard from his friends in the square at Radovan’s crappy café. So many times she’s pushed Fadi behind her, tensed up, prepared herself, and waited.
So many times she directed his rage at her instead of at Fadi. So many times that her quota was ultimately met. And in the end nothing was left. She sacrificed the one she was supposed to protect and ran away with someone like David.
She goes over to the window and looks out onto the small balcony, letting the afternoon sun flood inside, opens all the door
s and windows. The afternoon smells like spruce and hot asphalt. She feels the same stress as always. He could be on his way home. He may already be on the stairs. She doesn’t want to stay here any longer than she needs to.
She returns to her room, pulls up the blinds there too, opens the window and sits on the bed with phone in hand. She doesn’t care about creasing the bedspread now. All the shelves and drawers are empty, even the desktop is cleaned off, and the beds made. But there’s something whispering to her in here.
Something that tells her he’s been here—and not that long ago. If he returned alive from Syria and is in hiding, he’s been here. She can almost feel him. Like her, he would have returned to his starting point.
She gets up and goes over to his bed. Suddenly she remembers a space under the bed where he used to hide his stuff. His prized shoes and his beer.
She bends forward and pulls the mattress onto the floor. Carefully she lifts up the base of the bed and pulls it out as well, puts it on top of the mattress.
And indeed something is there: a light blue nylon bag with a zipper. She grabs hold of its strap and coaxes it upward. The bag is heavy and unwieldy, difficult to remove, but finally she gets it onto the floor. The zipper jams at first, but she works at it and manages to open it enough to lift the flap. Underneath she finds something that makes her heart stop.
Two weapons.
On top lies a scratched, black handgun. She lifts it out with trembling hands. It’s cold and solid, as if molded from one piece. Carefully she puts it down on the floor beside her, leans over the bag again. The other weapon is even more surreal. Everyone’s seen them in movies, in photos of wars or robberies. A weapon so deeply embedded in the culture that it’s difficult to believe it’s real, that it would work. That it could kill.
The Believer Page 13