Everything I Don't Remember

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  *

  The next day we rented orange bikes and went to the Stasi Museum. We looked at cases full of historical agent technology, there were scent-capturing mushroom chairs, hidden cameras, eyeglass-walkie-talkies. Then we biked to Neukölln and ate tortillas and drank beer. Panther wanted to introduce us to her friends and I nodded and thought that it might be fun to meet some Germans. Unfortunately, none of them were German. There was a Thai-American author, his Irish artist girlfriend, a red-haired British language teacher, a Polish girl who was dating a Hungarian director of short films. And later, after midnight, you showed up on a rickety black women’s bike. I watched you and Panther nod at one another. Samuel and I put out our right hands. We said hi, but as soon as you realized we were from Sweden all the interest drained from your face. You quickly moved on, and Samuel said:

  “Do you know that idiot?”

  “No,” said Panther. “We’re just neighbors. I don’t hang out with other Swedes much here.”

  Panther introduced us to more and more people and all her friends said they lived in Berlin and loved the city “despite the Germans,” but no one could speak German, aside from a few polite phrases. Time and again, Panther said that she didn’t miss anything in Stockholm, and every time she did it was like Samuel’s neck stiffened.

  *

  On the last night, I pictured Samuel realizing it was Panther he loved. She was the one he was meant to be with. His memory of me disappeared, dissolving like a dream. She was the one he’d been in love with since he was a teenager and now that they were both in the same foreign city, they had rediscovered one another. They went into Panther’s bedroom and didn’t come out until it was time for him to go home. Samuel gave his phone to Vandad and assigned him the task of walking around the streets of Berlin and sending three texts per day. Then they swore never to tell anyone what had happened. Then they returned home.

  *

  The day after that we biked to a big field with lots of sculptures that were supposed to make people remember the Holocaust. We walked around among the gray rectangles and lost each other and found each other and as we biked home, Panther told us she had met someone. She was in love (!). With a guy (!!!). From Baltimore. An artist who was putting up shadow boxes in a warehouse in Potsdam. Samuel’s jaw clenched. A basketball game was underway in a park. Samuel braked his bike.

  “What do you say? Should we hop in?”

  “I’ll sit this one out,” I said, but the question had been for Panther.

  “Aw, let’s go home and have lunch instead,” said Panther.

  “Feeling like a wuss, huh? Afraid I’ll beat you? Don’t want to rip open old loser wounds?”

  Panther and Samuel joined opposite teams as I watched the bikes. They started out playing for fun but it quickly turned into something else. Samuel and Panther were guarding each other and their newfound teammates seemed surprised that they were playing so seriously. When no one was covering Panther, Samuel shouted “LOOK OUT!” and pretended to stick his hand in her stomach so she missed the shot. The next time Panther took aim for a three-pointer, Samuel leaped into the air with a roar to block her. Too late, he realized it had been a feint and he landed hard on the asphalt, his cheek scraped up and his pinky finger almost broken. Panther’s team creamed Samuel’s.

  Afterwards they sat on their bikes, panting.

  “Well played,” I said.

  No one responded. Samuel rubbed the mark on his cheek. Then he took out his phone and mumbled:

  “How hard is it to answer a goddamn text?”

  *

  I hardly slept at all. I realized I didn’t trust Samuel. I wondered if I ever would.

  *

  The last night, we ate at a Vietnamese restaurant near a square in Kreuzberg. We took the U-Bahn there because it was raining. We walked through the yellow tunnels, we passed the junkies and the homeless people and the dogs. The place was tiny and Samuel looked at the menu before we sat down.

  “Really nice prices.”

  Panther and I exchanged glances. I wondered if she too had noticed that something was off. Was she also thinking about how Samuel hadn’t bought a single round this whole trip? Had she noticed that Samuel had changed? The person who was usually ready to do anything for a new experience had started acting like an accountant. The guy who used to say that money is there to be spent was sitting there reading the menu right to left before he ordered.

  *

  Samuel came straight to my place from the airport. When I got home from work I found him sleeping in my stairwell. He had sunk down on the floor with one hand resting up on his suitcase handle like a patient with an IV. He had a red mark on one cheek, it looked like the trace of a violent kiss. Or maybe a bite mark. He woke up, stretched, and said:

  “I can’t find my keys.”

  *

  During dessert, Panther asked:

  “So what’s going on in Stockholm?”

  Both Samuel and I were a bit taken aback, because up to then we had only talked about Panther’s art, her gallery-owner contacts, her friends. She had told us where to find the best döner and which neighborhoods were best for drugs and what tricks you could use to avoid being turned away by the tattooed bouncer at Berghain. But she’d hardly shown any curiosity about us, not even once. I said I was still working at the moving company, but it was harder and harder to get enough hours, so I was looking for another job, among other things I had contacted a computer company with an idea for a science-fiction game. Samuel checked his phone. Panther stuck a toothpick in her mouth.

  “What about you, Samuel?” Panther asked. “What are you up to, besides being in love?”

  “I don’t know,” Samuel said, spinning his phone like a roulette wheel. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Isn’t she texting back? Maybe she lost her phone,” Panther said.

  “Maybe she met someone else,” I joked.

  “I don’t know if I’m in love,” Samuel said. “I feel more . . . sick. Nauseous. Like, a little dizzy.”

  “But you love her?” Panther said.

  “Yeah, I guess I do,” Samuel said, shaking his head.

  We sat there in silence, the waitress brought the check, Panther reached for it.

  “No, I’ll get it,” I said.

  And I did it in slow motion so Samuel would have time to grab my arm and say, “No, you’ve paid for far too much, allow me!” But he didn’t, he just sat there staring straight ahead. I paid and when the waitress came back with the change he got a text. As fast as if he were drawing a pistol in a duel, he picked up his phone to check the number. He shook his head.

  “Mom.”

  *

  We went into my apartment. He put down his suitcase in my hall. He found his keys in an inner pocket. He placed his toothbrush in my medicine cabinet. I thought he tasted and acted and looked just like normal. Except for the mark on his cheek. There was nothing about his mouth or his tongue to suggest he had kissed anyone else. But he seemed a little tense. And when he told me about their nights out it felt like he was hiding something.

  “I mean the clubs in Berlin are total madness. One night we were at a party in an abandoned bathhouse, can you believe that? You went in through the changing room and the pool itself was empty and then you climbed down through a long passageway and there, in the middle of like a big cave, was a gigantic dance floor and there was condensation running down the walls and there were sound systems in the halls and the party didn’t start until six in the morning and it stopped at ten the next night and it was so crazy, it was so awesome, shit, we should go there, we should try living there together, you and me, it would be so great to just up and leave, wouldn’t it?”

  I didn’t respond.

  *

  After dinner we dropped by a Northern Soul party where Panther was supposed to meet her Baltimore guy. The people there had a different style than the rest of the city. Here they were rocking pressed suits and lots of make-up, everyone seemed to be dr
eaming of being young in the sixties, their shoes were nicely polished and several of them had brought a white powder they poured onto the dance floor so their soles would slide better. We sat around a table, the DJ was on the stage, he was dressed like everyone else, a too-small jacket and a minimal mustache and even his headphones seemed to be from a different age, they were big and round and he only played vinyl and he handled his records like jewels, every time he took one off the turntable he blew on it carefully before he placed it in his oddly modern DJ bag. We drank and waited and tried to find our way back to the mood we’d had at the New Year’s party in Bagarmossen. But something was missing, something was different, none of us seemed to know what it was. Samuel checked his phone for the hundredth time in fifteen minutes. Panther glanced toward the entrance. I was lost in my own thoughts.

  “It feels kind of perfect to be going home tomorrow,” Samuel said. “There’s a lot to do on the house.”

  “The house?” said Panther.

  “Yeah, sorry, maybe I didn’t mention it. Laide and I turned Grandma’s place into a safe house for women.”

  I took a sip and nodded to make it look like I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “That’s awesome,” said Panther.

  Then we were quiet again. After a few minutes Samuel stood up to go outside and check his signal.

  “Have you noticed anything weird about him?” I said.

  “What do you mean, weird?” said Panther.

  “Is it just me or is he a little . . . different?”

  “I don’t know. He hasn’t talked about his bad memory even once—maybe that’s new. But otherwise, no. Or. He is madly in love. That’ll make you weird.”

  Samuel returned with his phone.

  “Can one of you text me? Maybe there’s something wrong with the network.”

  I sent a text from my Swedish phone. His phone beeped right away.

  “DAMMIT!” he yelled.

  And then, a little more softly:

  “Fucking shit.”

  *

  He said that Berlin’s official slogan is “poor but sexy” and that it’s still possible to find cheap housing and that furthermore there is a strong anti-capitalist movement. There are squatters, and they’re left alone, and near Panther’s apartment there was a store full of free stuff.

  “Isn’t that crazy? You can just go in and take whatever you want and if you wanted you could leave something in return, but you didn’t have to, either. Just think, what if that’s the way to start, to take a little place and make it into an example of an alternative, say, ‘Look, this way could work too, what if this world is within reach? Things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been.’ And that’s true not only on a societal level, but also on a more personal level, do you know what I mean?”

  I tried to nod, I tried to smile.

  *

  It was starting to get late, it was the last night, Panther’s guy didn’t show up and something had to happen. Samuel came back from the bar with a pen and paper, he looked decisive.

  “Let’s turn this around,” he said.

  The plan was to have a competition. The goal: to make the night as memorable as possible. The strategy: everyone writes three challenges on a piece of paper. The pieces of paper are put in a bowl. Whoever completes the most tasks in the shortest time wins.

  “Wins what?” said Panther.

  “I don’t know—just wins,” said Samuel.

  “What kind of challenges should they be?” I asked.

  “It can be anything. But it has to be possible to complete, on a practical level.”

  I wrote, more or less:

  1. Go up to the DJ, request The Macarena, do the Macarena dance, and when he says he doesn’t have it, say “Then any song by Phil Collins will do.”

  2. Go up to any table with more than three people and take a sip of each drink on the table.

  3. Slide out on the dance floor and pull someone’s hair.

  *

  Samuel said that on the last night they had Vietnamese and then they went to a soul club and all in all, it was an awesome trip.

  “But—”

  He paused.

  “There was something about being away from you that made me . . . I don’t know . . . I really had time to think while I was there. I thought about us, about you, about me, about this thing we’re trying to build up, this thing that’s on its way to being us. And you need to understand how awful I feel when you don’t answer my texts. You just go silent. Like a fucking parent. And then I’m sitting there, in a foreign country, terrified that something happened.”

  *

  Then we folded up the scraps of paper and placed them in the tea-light holder on the table. Panther got Samuel’s list, Samuel got mine, and I got Panther’s. And I hardly had time to read what Panther had written before Samuel was off and running. He went straight up to the table next to ours and said änshyll-digung and explained that he was so terribly “törstich is it okay if I . . .” And then he started drinking from their bottles of beer. Then he slid out to the dance floor and grabbed a blond girl by the hair. Then he went up on the stage, tapped the DJ on the shoulder, and stuck his arms out in a daring sort of Macarena dance. The DJ just looked at Samuel, his surprised eyes as round as his headphones. When Samuel received no response, he smiled and leaned over and whispered something in the DJ’s ear. Then he left the stage and came back to our table. Panther and I applauded, but then I discovered that it was just me because Panther was missing, she wasn’t in her spot, when I glanced toward the entrance there she was, standing on tiptoe and hugging a tall guy with dreads. Samuel looked at Panther.

  “Vandad. I love her. I want to be with her always.”

  “Which one?” I said.

  *

  I wanted to respond, I tried to explain what happens inside me when someone leaves and how hard it is for me to trust people and that I had gotten the feeling that his texts weren’t honest, that they were written only to reassure me, so that I wouldn’t worry, and for that very reason I started worrying, and— He cut me off.

  “But Laide. Don’t you know that I love you?”

  *

  On the last day we woke up around lunchtime. Samuel and I were lying under the blanket in the cold bedroom. We were wearing the same clothes as the day before, we smelled like cigarette smoke and yesterday’s beer. Samuel gave a start and quickly rose from the mattress.

  “Everything okay?”

  I nodded. Noises from the bathroom told us that Panther was awake—first the sound of puking and then an electric toothbrush. Samuel started tossing his belongings into his suitcase.

  “When does the plane leave? We’re not going to miss it, are we? Should we take a taxi or are there any buses to the airport?”

  “We’re going to take a taxi and you’re going to pay for it,” I jokingly said.

  “Sure. Of course. I just have to make sure I have enough euros.”

  Panther came out of the bathroom, stretched, and asked if we wanted breakfast.

  “Is this the way you live here?” Samuel asked.

  “Pretty much. When I’m not working.”

  “When do you work?” I asked.

  “When I need to. Should I call a taxi?”

  The last sounds we heard after we’d hugged goodbye and gathered our bags to head down to the street were a few gags and the mechanical buzz of the electric toothbrush, like a battery-driven bumblebee.

  *

  Samuel said it like he wasn’t even thinking about what would happen if I didn’t say it back. He said it like he’d just realized it himself. He said it like he was overjoyed at the realization. He said it and then he smiled that brilliant, yellow-toothed smile that made girl cashiers postpone their breaks and made bouncers become suspicious. He said it like he didn’t give a single fuck that the balance of power between us would be forever shaken if I didn’t respond in kind.

  “I love you too,” I said.

  An abyss
opened up beneath us. We clung to each other and persuaded ourselves that we could fly.

  *

  Then we came home. I applied for more jobs. I applied to be a fish farmer, a fire-damage cleaner, a car re-conditioner. Always the same response. Or the same non-response. I borrowed Samuel’s bike instead of buying a Metro pass. I returned bottles so I could afford food. All throughout, I kept thinking that things would work themselves out. But I wasn’t sure how. Hamza started calling with updates about compounding interest.

  *

  Are you okay? Should we take a break? Should we stop there and continue another day? You look tired. Do you have allergies? We’re nearly there, so I’d prefer to keep going. Would you like more coffee? Should we go sit out on the balcony?

  *

  In early July, Samuel called and his voice sounded like he’d been running.

  “Are you at home?”

  I was about to say “of course.” But instead I said:

  “Yes. What’s going on?”

  “We need your help.”

  I had my shoes on before he had even told me what was up. I ran down the stairs just as he was saying that there had been “trouble at the house.”

  “The house?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Grandma’s house.”

  Apparently someone who shouldn’t have been there had been there and the women were frightened, so Samuel and Laide were on their way over and he said it would be really great if I could come by too.

  I was already on my way, I knew the deal, they couldn’t call the police so instead they called me, they needed some muscle for backup, they needed an extra brain to handle the situation. Samuel texted me the address and I started running toward the house, then I saw on the map how far it was, turned back to the apartment, and grabbed Samuel’s bike.

  THE BALCONY

  It was our rule from the start that the house had to be kept a secret. I had told this to everyone who moved in.

  “This is a temporary refuge and there are several people here who are under threat, so be careful who you give the address to.”

  But one day Bill contacted Nihad and claimed that he knew where she was. He included the address of the house and described in great detail what he would do to her once he found her. We went over. Samuel wanted us to call Vandad right away.