“Why?” I asked.
“For safety reasons.”
I don’t really know how sumo-sized Vandad was supposed to make the women any safer, but I let Samuel call him. I thought it couldn’t hurt to have more than two of us. And Samuel guaranteed we could trust Vandad.
*
I whizzed toward Hägerstensvägen, I fought my way up Personnevägen, I flew across the E4 bridge. I tilted like a motorcycle through the curve onto Älvsjövägen. When I arrived, Samuel and Laide were still on the commuter train.
“Wait down by the mailbox,” said Samuel. “Don’t go in by yourself, we don’t know whether he’s still in the house or not.”
I waited by the mailbox, I planted my legs wide between the two stone pillars at the bottom of the hill. I gazed up at the house that wasn’t a house. It was a palace. It had three stories and a large yard and a separate garage. Even if it was painted brown and the curtains were drawn, it wouldn’t have been totally out of the question to make a hip-hop video here. The honeys in bikinis could chill on the terrace, the guest rappers could park their Lexuses on the gravel hill, you could put the grill full of steaks and the coolers of frosty forties over there by the bushes. I stood there lost in my thoughts until I noticed Laide and Samuel running toward me from the station.
They were holding hands. Their hair was the same shade of black. They ran in perfect rhythm, although one was running with knees as high as a gazelle (Laide) and the other was running as if he didn’t want his body to leave the ground (Samuel). There are few things as difficult as running while holding hands, and I remember that when I saw them I thought: Okay. Maybe they are meant for each other. Maybe I just have to accept it. Maybe I was wrong.
Although their faces were clouded with worry, they looked happy. Samuel hugged me and thanked me for coming. Laide nodded and headed up the hill.
“Wait here,” said Samuel. “We’ll go up and check it out. Keep an eye out.”
“For what?”
“A blue Saab station wagon,” Laide called.
I stayed put. I laid Samuel’s bike down across the gravel path like a roadblock. I imagined that there was a hip-hop video shoot taking place behind my back and that I was in charge of security, I liked the feeling, I was in the right place at the right time and I kept an eye on every car that approached. They were mostly Volvos and Audis and BMWs and Mercedes, and the occasional Toyota Prius. Fifteen minutes passed. Half an hour. Samuel called and said that they were almost finished.
“Is everything okay? Do you want anything?”
“No, I’m fine,” I replied. “I have everything I need.”
No blue Saab station wagon ever appeared. When Samuel and Laide came back down the hill, they thanked me for my help, they said everything had gone just fine, but I don’t know exactly what they meant by that. “Fine” as in they had learned that the guy had been apprehended? “Fine” as in the girl he had threatened was going to move somewhere else?
“Can I buy you lunch as thanks?” said Samuel.
We went to a lunch place that was further down the same street. We filled our plates at the buffet. We sat down at a table. Samuel and I next to each other, Laide alone on the other side. We were supposed to talk, we were supposed to get to know each other, we were supposed to become friends. But Laide seemed absolutely uninterested. She spent lunch with her phone out, looking up different women’s shelters, she had a chat with a person who I think was someone’s lawyer. Between her calls I tried to ask questions, but she would only respond with one word at a time, two at the max.
When we stood up to leave and Samuel went up to the register to pay, she said:
“THANKS for buying us lunch, Samuel.”
Then she glanced at me as if she wanted me to repeat after her like a trained monkey. I didn’t say thanks. I had nothing to thank him for. Samuel and I had a different kind of friendship, one that was independent of money. So it had always been and so it would continue until the very end.
*
I never felt safe with Vandad. It didn’t matter how much Samuel talked about his loyalty. There was a darkness to Vandad. I couldn’t trust him. Every time we met he did his utmost to make me feel like an outsider. In the middle of a sentence he would start laughing and elbow Samuel in the side.
“That reminds me of Berlin. Do you remember . . . ?”
Samuel nodded. Or:
“Shit, do you remember the night at East?”
Samuel smiled.
“Girlz up hoez down, right? Broz before hoez!”
Vandad raised his hand in a give-me-five and Samuel looked self-conscious as he returned it. I sat there like an idiot. Later, when I asked Samuel what was so funny about the night at East or Berlin, he said you probably had to be there to get it.
One time, all three of us ate lunch together. Vandad cracked his knuckles and eyed me. Samuel was struggling to keep up a conversation. He asked if we had any plans for the weekend and what we had done last weekend and the more I watched him struggle, the more forced the whole situation felt. At last Samuel went to the bathroom and Vandad and I were left behind in a tense silence you could have cut with a knife. He looked at me and said:
“So . . . Samuel told me you had an abortion?”
“Excuse me?”
“Samuel told me you used to live in Brussels?”
“Did you just ask me if I had an abortion?”
Vandad looked at me like I was nuts.
“No, Brussels, I wondered if you used to live in Brussels.”
But I heard what he said the first time. And I couldn’t believe that things I had told Samuel in confidence had trickled down to Vandad.
*
The second time they needed help in the house, I had just been called in to work, to empty a five-room place in Brandbergen and move everything to a house in Skärmarbrink. Samuel asked if I could drop by the house again, apparently it was urgent, and this time I took the truck. I swung by on my way to the office, Blomberg would never notice and Bogdan would never snitch. He stayed in the passenger seat as I ran up the hill with Samuel.
“What happened?”
“He was here last night. Nihad’s ex.”
*
When I brought it up with Samuel, he dodged the question. He couldn’t say what he had and hadn’t told Vandad, and when I asked him again he got annoyed and said it was impossible for him to remember all the conversations they’d ever had.
“Vandad is my friend. I share stuff with him. The same way you share stuff with your sister. You just have to accept that.”
But I wasn’t going to let him get off that easy. We kept talking, and a few hours later Samuel said:
“Laide. Please. It’s two thirty in the morning. I have to go to sleep. Please realize that the world is not out to get you. Let it go.”
I thought: You don’t know what you’re doing. You are going to regret those words.
*
I had no idea who Nihad or the guy were, but when we approached the door I saw that the glass was broken. The first woman who saw us jumped, she had a knife in her apron, I didn’t know whether it was for cooking or protection.
“Is Laide here?” Samuel asked in English.
“Yes,” said the woman, giving me a suspicious look.
“A friend,” said Samuel.
“Why big car?”
She pointed at the moving truck that was parked down on the street.
“Friendly car,” said Samuel. “No problem, nice car, nice friend.”
We walked to the kitchen, the house was even flashier on the inside. When you stood in the kitchen and looked out at the yard, it felt like you ruled the world. All you could see were the apple trees and the wind and the clouds, and far, far away, down the hill, the white cube that was our fifteen-footer. I thought: How could she have noticed the truck from way up here?
*
We tried to go back to normal. But I sensed that something had changed. One evening in early autumn, I took him along
to a birthday dinner at Lisa and Santiago’s. We arrived early, I wanted Samuel to get to know everyone gradually, I got that it could be nerve-racking to walk into a brand new situation like that. But Samuel didn’t seem nervous at all, he was psyched to get to know my friends and when we met up at the Systembolaget at Fridhemsplan he had already selected a three-liter box of ghetto wine. I informed him that it was probably a better idea to buy wine in bottles, since it was Santiago’s birthday. And Samuel wasn’t offended, he just switched out the box for a few bottles and on the way to the register he pointed at one of the labels, which read Vino ecológico, and smiled. We got in line, the cashier looked at us and asked Samuel for ID.
*
Laide was standing in the kitchen, the woman on the stool had a face but it was hard to tell eyes from mouth from cheeks because all of them were black and blue and swollen except for her mouth and lips, which were a mix of purple and red. I tried not to look at her. It was hard, because my gaze kept being sucked back, my brain couldn’t grasp how someone with that face could be sitting up and answering questions from Laide, who was speaking Arabic with her as she spoke Swedish into a telephone.
“Yes, I understand that, I’m not a complete idiot,” said Laide. “But what you don’t seem to understand is that this is an emergency.”
I left the kitchen, I wanted to look around, I walked through an adjoining room and into a dining room and then on into a gigantic room that looked out onto the terrace, which I had seen from the street. It must have been the living room once, because there was a brown piano and a crystal chandelier and the people who lived there now had stacked the furniture that used to be there in the corner, chairs and tables in an old rococo style, like the kind of furniture you see on Antiques Roadshow and that the experts say is worth a hundred thousand even though it looks like it’d go for twenty kronor at a flea market. I wanted to go all the way to the terrace but I couldn’t, because the floor was full of sleeping mats, sleeping bags, plastic bags, IKEA bags. Suitcases lined the walls, none of them had four wheels, several didn’t even have extendable handles, they were just plain, ordinary suitcases, made of hard, thick plastic. The room was full of objects but empty of people, except for two sleeping bodies, I didn’t see their faces, their hair was sticking out from under an army-green blanket.
*
Santiago and Lisa lived in a brightly lit four-room apartment with a view of the water in one direction and the highway in the other. Their daughters were with Santiago’s mom, and as we entered the hall we were hugged by a perfumed Lisa and a red-spattered Santiago, who excused himself by saying that he was in the middle of the lasagna and there had been a “tomato-related incident.” I introduced Samuel and they embraced him even though it was the first time they had met and I stood there in the hall feeling proud of my friends, that they were so welcoming and kind and didn’t show any signs of thinking that he was too young or smelled funny.
The next to arrive were Tamara and Charlie (who seemed annoyed at each other) and Ylva and Rickard (who were apparently back together again although no one understood why). We sat around the oval table and waited for a lasagna that would soon, soon be ready.
“There was a small incident,” Santiago said again. “A tomato-related incident.”
“We have all the time in the world,” said Rickard.
“I can only cook one thing,” said Samuel. “It’s called cottage-noodles.”
I heard myself laugh, a little too loud. Samuel explained how you make the dish. Two-minute noodles. Cottage cheese. Herb salt. Done.
“Hold on a second, I have to write this down,” said Santiago, and everyone laughed.
*
On the way back to the kitchen I heard one of the women crying, and someone comforting her. As I came in I realized that it was Nihad, the beaten woman, comforting the woman with the knife, Zainab. Even though it should have been the other way around.
“How many people are actually living here?” I whispered to Samuel.
“What do you mean? Two or three families.”
I laughed.
“What?” Samuel asked.
“Have you seen the living room?”
We walked over together. Samuel’s hand flew to his head.
“Three very large families,” I joked.
We went up to the second floor, the same thing there, piles of sleeping mats, bags, banana boxes. There was a balcony up there, and two guys were having a smoke on it. They nodded at us and smiled, and one of them opened the door and asked in English if we were “Rojda’s lawyer.”
“No,” we responded.
“Okay,” they said, closing the door.
Samuel went from room to room, his hands clenching and unclenching, he took out his phone as if he wanted to call someone, but who could he call? Who could help him out of the bind he had gotten himself into by trusting Laide?
*
The lasagna had been eaten, the wine glasses had lip prints and were cloudy with grease spots, they had left round red footprints on the table. We had talked about the health risks of plastic toys (Lisa), criticism of Montessori preschools (Santiago), the art fair in Basel (Tamara), the poor financial situation of the municipality of Södertälje (Charlie), the proof that homeopathy really works (Ylva), and how good the dessert was (Rickard). Toward the end of the evening, I started to relax, Samuel could handle this. I went to the bathroom and when I came back I heard him say:
“. . . and everyone has their own personal definition of love—don’t they?”
I sat down beside him and patted his arm so he would understand that this wasn’t the time, not here, not now. We could talk about topics like that at recess when we were thirteen, but now we were adults. There was a short silence after Samuel posed the question. Tamara, who had hardly smiled once since arriving, maintained that love had to be linked to humor, that you had to be able to laugh together. Charlie said that for her, love is when you have an unfortunate urge to want to own the person you’re with and control everything they do. Ylva said that love is accepting everyday life, lowering your expectations and forgiving your partner for being human. Rickard didn’t say anything. Lisa said that love involves addiction somehow—daring to let yourself become maximally dependent. Santiago talked about the role of love in the capitalistic world order, how a couple’s solidarity is the key to constantly increasing consumption. Then everyone turned to me.
“How about you, Laide?” said Samuel. “What is your definition?”
“I don’t know. But I know that the few times I have been in love, I have never had to ask myself whether I am or not.”
Ylva let go of Rickard’s hand. Santiago cleared his throat. Samuel took a sip from an already-empty glass.
*
We went back down to the kitchen, Laide was finished making her call, she still hadn’t said hi to me. She was treating me like air, like someone even more unimportant than air, because after all there are still those short moments when you are reminded that air exists and that it can be useful to have. Nothing like that happened for Laide when she looked at me.
“There might be a spot in Bergshamra,” she said. “They’re going to call later this afternoon.”
“Have you been upstairs?” Samuel asked.
Laide didn’t answer.
“There are like fifty people living here.”
“More,” I said.
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Did they ask you for permission to bring in more people?”
Laide fixed her eyes on Samuel as if he were the one who had done something wrong.
“What was I supposed to say? ‘No. This house is empty but you can’t let anyone else in even if they’re going to die without shelter’?”
“The guys on the balcony don’t exactly look like they’re dying,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘guys’?” said Laide.
It was the first time that day she looked me in the eye.
“The guys who are smoking on th
e balcony.”
Laide darted from the kitchen. It was quiet. The women at the kitchen table couldn’t talk to us. We couldn’t talk to them. Outside the window was a birch tree whose sad branches were moving in the wind. The house creaked with small noises, and coming from the basement we could hear footsteps and children’s laughter.
Another woman came up from the basement with a bucket, she nodded at us and started filling it in the kitchen sink.
“No water downstairs?” Samuel asked in English.
“No water—broken,” said the woman.
Laide returned to the kitchen. She started speaking Arabic with the women at the table. It sounded like she was telling them off. She must have been telling them off. Laide shouted and waved her fist and slammed it on the table, but it didn’t make a very impressive sound. Nihad and Zainab mostly just sat there without saying anything. When she was finished, Laide shook her head and said that we should go.
“What did you say?” Samuel asked as we were walking toward the hall.
Laide didn’t answer. We left the house. Somewhere inside me I started to realize that it was up to me to help Samuel.
*
The taxi zoomed across Central Bridge, dark water, heavy sky, red lamps swinging from boats. Samuel held my hand, he touched it, he stroked my arm up and down, at first it tickled, then it just felt creepy. I pulled my hand back.
“They were nice,” said Samuel.
“Mmhmm,” I said.
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“You seem mad.”
“But I’m not mad.”
“Okay. But why are you being so quiet?”
I didn’t answer, but I met the taxi driver’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. He was thinking: Shouldn’t you be with someone your own age? Someone who’s ready for something serious? Someone who doesn’t think that life is just drinking box wine, eating cottage-noodles, and filling up your Experience Bank? Someone you can trust? I nodded, I agreed with him. Samuel broke into my thoughts.
“All your friends seemed to know about the house.”
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