The Believer

by Joakim Zander

  I’m waving the gun, and I see his lips moving. He’s praying.

  “I am brother Firas,” he says. “The brothers have shown me the path to Allah, may he be glorified and exalted.”

  And he closes his eyes and prays again, with trembling lips, quivering nostrils. And I feel my emptiness and anxiety increasing. Brother Firas is me. One more just like me. One more they found to turn into a traitor.

  But anger and hopelessness have blinded me. I realize it’s too late when I turn around and find myself staring straight into the muzzle of a gun far larger, far more modern than my own. I feel my own gun twisted out of my hands. And there is nothing I can do.

  “Give me that,” al-Amin says and looks at me with his empty eyes. “This ends now.”

  56. BERGORT—FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015

  DOWN THE SLOPE. It’s as if she’s flying, as if she’s floating over the sidewalk and through the heavy door and into the chilly, damp stairwell. The sounds above, maybe coming from a half-open door. The rifle heavy and cold in her hands. The stairs taken two at a time, and she hears Mehdi behind her somewhere, his damn wheezing. Second floor. Third floor. It’s quiet up there now. No more banging, no raised voices. And it scares her almost as much.

  Fourth floor. Just one floor left, and she stops to listen, catch her breath, still hears Mehdi’s footsteps and his whistling lungs somewhere far down behind her.

  She collects herself and takes hold of her gun with two hands, moves the safety to the side like they showed her at the shooting range, in what now seems like another life. The gun is set to fire one bullet at a time, not automatic. She glances up. What awaits her up there? What will she do when she’s there? Slowly, stealthily, she takes a first step toward the fifth floor. Then another one. And another.

  When she comes around the corner, she sees that the door is ajar. No neighbors have come out. They probably know better than to get involved. Or they’re at work or in the mosque down in the shopping center. As she gets closer to the door, she hears voices from inside. And suddenly they get louder. Suddenly someone is talking loudly, not Fadi, someone else.

  “This ends now!” she hears.

  And it’s followed by a crash, as if someone has fallen to the floor. And then confused, agitated voices.

  She’s arrived at the door now. Stands with her back against cold concrete, the rifle leaning against her upper arm, barrel pointing downward. In the corner of her eye, she sees Mehdi coming up to the same floor. She glances at him, gestures for him to stay back, doesn’t want to worry about him fucking this up too.

  Now the voices from inside the apartment again:

  “What are you doing here?” the deep voice says. “You were dead, dog. What are you doing here?”

  Then something that sounds like a kick, followed by a muffled groan.

  Fadi, she thinks. Fadi, Fadi, Fadi.

  “He’s a fucking dog,” says the deep voice. “That’s the only explanation. He’s a takfir—worse than that—worse than an apostate. A murderer!”

  Another voice now. Tense and stifled and strained:

  “Brother Fadi? What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

  She hears sobbing, shallow breaths, moaning. Then other voices. Disbelieving at first, then furious and accusing. She keeps the gun pressed against her shoulder. Feels her heart pounding inside of her. She’s halfway across the threshold, halfway inside the room, but she can’t yet bring herself to make herself known. Fear and confusion. What’s happening in there?

  Then the air is filled with chaos again. Sound cuts through the voices. Like someone rolling on the floor, tearing something down, bodies against bodies, and then voices again. Agitated and confused.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Hold him!”

  And then she hears Fadi’s voice. Thin and lonely and almost impossible to discern through the cacophony of other voices. But it’s him, and she feels her grip on the rifle loosen.

  “Quiet!” someone shouts inside. “Let him speak!”

  They fall silent, and she hears it in his voice, recognizes it from times when he’s been cornered and accused. When everything was stacked against him, when no one was on his side. Hears how he spits out the words and accusations.

  “It was you!” he sobs. “You did this. You killed them.”

  “What are you talking about?” says the calmest of the voices.

  But it’s interrupted by the deep voice.

  “We’ve heard enough, takfir. You come in here with a weapon and threaten us? Who do you think you are? You know the punishment for leaving the faith.”

  “Punishment?” Fadi spits out the word. “Punishment? It was you who murdered our brothers! It was your phone! It was you who sent the drones. I got the phone from you!”

  The higher voice again, slow and doubtful now.

  “What phone? What is he talking about?”

  “Brother al-Amin’s satellite phone,” Fadi says.

  And when he doesn’t get an immediate response, he continues:

  “What? Don’t you know anything about it? The telephone al-Amin gave me?”

  A dull thud interrupts him, and Yasmine flinches behind the door.

  “Shut up!” the deep voice says. “He’s lying! He’s a murderer and a spy, I swear!”

  “What is this telephone he’s talking about, brother al-Amin?” says the calm voice.

  Behind him now she hears the voices of the others, puzzled and confused.

  “There’s no phone, he’s made it up. He’s afraid to die. Afraid that God will punish him as he deserves, that’s all, brother Dakhil.”

  But the voice is different now, stressed. There is desperation in it. A tone of fear that frightens her. Slowly, with shaking legs, she pushes open the door to the apartment. Slowly she twists her head around the door and looks into the dark hall. Her temples are damp with sweat, her knuckles white around the rifle. The door on the other side of the hall is half open, and she can see backs and shoulders moving in what seems to be the living room. The widest back is bending over someone lying on the floor. She can’t make it out really, just a leg, which might belong to Fadi. With lungs pumping, heart thundering, she presses herself into the narrow, dark hallway.

  “Stop lying!” roars the deep voice from inside. “Everyone knows you’re lying!”

  The other seems to gasp for breath. Voices screaming and upset. She hears only what the high voice says:

  “Put down your weapon, brother al-Amin, let’s sort this out.”

  But the broad back doesn’t seem to be listening. It looks as if he’s standing, legs apart, leaning forward, with his arms in front of him. As if he were preparing to shoot.

  It’s quiet for a moment. Then she hears Fadi’s voice, low and half smothered.

  “It was you,” he mumbles. “You killed them.”

  “Shut up!” screams the deep voice. “Your lies stop now.”

  And then the shot.

  The sound is deafening, shocking, compressed inside a small apartment. The world shrinks inside her, and she thinks she’s going to vomit in the silence that follows, but instead she puts the gun to her shoulder, feels her temples pounding, her chest thump and cramp. She takes three short, quick steps through the hall, inhales, and kicks open the thin door to the living room. The room sways and turns, a moving mosaic of faces and bodies, a kaleidoscope of blood and confusion. She shuts out everything. Just aims for the man holding the gun. Shuts out everyone else. Shuts out everything except the gun.

  Until she sees Fadi. He’s lying on the rug on the floor, with his head down. When she finally takes in this image, it’s as if everything ends. As if the whole world is made of bricks that are falling around her. There is nothing left. The world is nothing. She feels her hands around the barrel. Feels her finger on the trigger. She opens her mouth and screams.

  57. BERGORT—FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015

  IT’S WHEN I hear you that I realize I’m not dead. It’s when I hear your voice, hear y
ou screaming, like that Syrian woman did when the brothers arrived carrying her dead son from the front. Completely raw and endless, like an animal or a monster. Terrible, sudden sadness, nothing else.

  But I’m not dead, and I try to move, try to say something.

  “Yasmine,” I hiss with my mouth still pressed halfway on the rug, filled with the taste of blood and anxiety.

  I look up and see Dakhil standing there. He holds the gun I had in his hand. But he bends down now and lays it on the floor slowly, his eyes on the door where I heard your voice. I think he must be the one who shot, shot into the air, maybe he just wanted to scare al-Amin? Al-Amin, who has now given up.

  When I realize al-Amin is no longer pointing his gun at me, I turn to you, pushing myself up on my elbow. I see you for the first time. I see your eyes and they are unlike I’ve ever seen them, void of emotion, inhuman, eyes that are ready to kill, eyes without any thought of consequence. I see how skinny you are, how you have a swelling on your temple, how your mouth is half open, and how your lips are moving, soundlessly. And I see that you’re holding the gun I took home with me, and it’s huge in your arms, grotesque, and you’re aiming it at the man that I have almost forgotten about for a moment.

  I see that you are close to doing it. Close to firing and stepping over the threshold to something else, into a world you, my sister, should never enter. Into a world no one should enter. I scream:

  “Yasmine! I’m alive, Yasmine! I’m here!”

  You look away from the man and at me for a moment, surprised, almost frightened. As if I’m a ghost, and maybe I am. You blink and your eyes change, going from empty and indifferent to something else, something I remember. Something I lost and couldn’t live without. You lower the gun, take a confused, uncertain step aside.

  That’s all they need, all al-Amin needs. He’s empty-handed—he must have dropped the gun on the floor when you came in—but now he bends down quickly with his eyes glued to you. You are so shocked or confused that you barely react, your mouth is half open, the rifle vibrates in your hands.

  I spin around, groping for the gun Dakhil dropped, the gun I brought with me. It’s slippery, but I grab hold of it, my hands clinging to it, the blood sticking to my face. I don’t think, just turn around, both hands outstretched, just a few yards from al-Amin. I close my eyes and press the trigger.

  58. BERGORT—FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015

  SHE COLLAPSES TO her knees with the gun to her shoulder again. She turns toward Fadi, sees him holding the gun with one hand while trying to get up with the other, his face covered in blood.

  “Stand still!” she roars and moves the barrel of the gun toward the men. “Get into the corner! All of you! Now!”

  They obey instantly and silently, moving into the corner of the apartment with their hands up and their eyes wide and frightened.

  “Mehdi!” she shouts out toward the staircase. “Go get the fucking car!”

  He doesn’t say anything, but she hears his heavy footsteps disappearing down the stairs, echoing through the suddenly palpable silence. Fadi has stood up now, and he turns toward her.

  “Yasmine.”

  His eyes are full of something, maybe love, but also something else.

  “You came back,” he says.

  But he doesn’t go to her. He goes over to the burly man lying on the floor, his face striped by the sun shining in through the blinds. He breathes and groans slightly, hugging himself. Fadi bends over him.

  “Who are you?” he says. “Who do you work for?”

  The man turns his gaze up toward Fadi, and Yasmine sees that he’s holding his shoulder.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he hisses.

  Fadi looks at the man with something like a smile at the corner of the mouth. Slowly he raises the gun and points it at the man’s forehead.

  “I don’t give a shit really,” Fadi says. “I don’t care. You murdered my brothers, that’s all that matters now. And there’s only one punishment for that, brother.”

  He spits, which sprays a thin coat of blood over the man’s face. Yasmine shifts her gaze between Fadi and the men still standing in the corner. It can’t end like this.

  “Fadi!” she says. “It’s over, brother! Let him be!”

  “Who?” he repeats. “Wallah, there is nothing I would rather do than to execute you, dog.”

  “Fadi!” she screams. “Damnit, Fadi, it’s over!”

  The man looks away, toward the floor, mumbling something, quietly, almost inaudibly.

  “What did you say?” Fadi says and bends over him.

  The man closes his eyes and clears his throat, coughs.

  “I work for the police,” he mumbles.

  “What? The fucking police?” Fadi screams.

  “Swedish intelligence, Säpo. Brother, I swear it’s true,” he says.

  Fadi looks confused, suddenly uncertain.

  “Säpo? You’ve been working for them this whole damn time?”

  The man turns his eyes up toward him and looks him straight in the eyes.

  “Fadi,” Yasmine says as calmly as she can. “We have to leave now. We can’t stay here. Especially if he’s a cop.”

  She nods toward the door, taking a half-step toward it. Fadi doesn’t seem to hear her, remains with a gun pointed at the man on the floor.

  “But who sent the drones?” he says.

  “Don’t be so fucking naive. Don’t you realize the West is working together?”

  “So I was just a mark for you? An idiot you could murder in order to get to someone else?”

  Fadi presses the barrel harder against the man’s head and breathes heavily. Yasmine sees it expanding in his eyes now, a darkness that is so big and black that the whole room suddenly seems dim.

  “Fadi,” she says. “It didn’t happen. You survived.”

  She takes a step toward him and stretches out a hand.

  “You got another chance. Don’t throw it away, please.”

  His face twitches as he bends forward again and pushes the cop down onto the floor with the gun.

  “I trusted you,” he whispers, and Yasmine sees tears flowing down his cheek.

  She quietly lays her hand on Fadi’s and twists the gun slowly away from the man’s forehead, and down onto the floor.

  “Jalla, Fadi,” she whispers. “Come with me now.”

  59. STOCKHOLM—FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015

  WE’RE OUT OF Bergort now. I heard the police on the way out, saw the blue lights and police vans, but Mehdi took it easy for once. He kept driving under the speed limit, like somebody’s dad.

  We’re out on the highway and calm now. The car is full of guns, but it’s fine, the brothers were confused and furious, but they will certainly make sure al-Amin doesn’t get the chance to rat us out before we get away.

  I saw the shame in Dakhil’s eyes as we left the apartment. Despite all their precautions, they had an infiltrator in their midst. And if they had any balls they’d kill him. But they’re all talk and airline tickets. In the end, they’re just like everyone else. They don’t know anything about war.

  The sun shines over the concrete and industrial buildings, and I try to wipe the blood off my face with some wet wipes Mehdi found in a diaper bag in the backseat.

  I know you’re looking at me. I feel your eyes on my cheek, on my shaved head, my eyes squinting against the sun. But I can’t turn to you, can’t look at you. There’s too much between us, too much time, too much of me.

  “Is it really you, Fadi?” you say.

  I nod and keep my eyes on the chimneys and warehouses, brown brick covered by billboards and newly built, paper-thin office buildings made of thin steel and reflective glass. And then we’re up on the bridge. Then everything is sparkling water and gleaming facades. It takes ten minutes for the world to change, and now we’re flying again, and I can’t help glancing at you.

  The sun falls over your hair where you sit with your face turned toward the dirty windows, toward t
he city, toward the view that’s impossible to ignore. It’s impossible to understand that you came back. And I whisper it quietly, so you might not hear.

  “How’d you find me?” I say, and my voice isn’t even a croak anymore, just high and thin.

  You turn to me, and I meet your gaze for the first time without averting my eyes. Your eyes are tired and full of something I don’t recognize, something I don’t know what to do with, not yet. Something that looks like love.

  “Fadi,” you say. “You wanted to be found, habibi.”

  Mehdi drives along the waterfront, past the Opera House, and those white boats out among the islands, past Kungsträdgården, the Royal Garden, and then along the water past fancy buildings and museums. Finally, he slows down and stops outside a large building, which also looks like a museum. On the other side of the water, behind the boats and quays, sits the gloomy, gray palace. He bends forward and checks on another building a little farther up the street with large trees in front of it.

  “You live there? At the Lydmar?” he says over his shoulder. “Pretty fucking luxurious, sister!”

  “Seriously?” I say. “How the hell did that happen, Yazz?”

  “Long story,” she says.

  “Look,” Mehdi says from the front seat.

  He points at two guys sitting farther down the street. Two shunos in jeans and hoodies, with their caps pulled low on their foreheads.

  “Who are they?” Yasmine says.

  Mehdi shrugs. “No idea, but they sure don’t look like guests at the hotel, do they?”

  His phone rings again, it has been ringing constantly on the way into town, but he’s ignored it. Now he lifts it up and looks at it nervously.

  “Fuck,” he says. “Parisa.”

  He presses the phone to his ear, and his whole appearance changes. He’s no longer the guy from the streets, but the sweet boyfriend, willing to serve.

  “Hey, baby,” he says, and Yasmine and I smile at each other in surprise.

  But then he says nothing more, and from the rear-view it looks like he turns pale.