The Friend

by Joakim Zander

  He walks to the edge of the terrace and looks out over the city, run down, broken, missing walls, bullet holes, the injustice and chaos and confusion and beyond that the Mediterranean lying in the darkness. He can’t see it, but he knows it’s there.

  He feels like he could put his beer down on the ground next to him, climb onto the concrete ledge in front of him, take aim at one of the ten towering cranes down below, stretch his arms out like wings and fly.

  And then he hears a voice close beside him. First he lurches in surprise. He can barely hear the party any more, barely hear someone strumming ‘Redemption Song’ on a guitar. Has almost forgotten there is a party, that there are other people here at all.

  ‘You look like you’re about to take off?’

  He turns to the voice. And somehow he knows before even turning, before seeing the face that belongs to that voice, from this moment on everything will change. There’s no going back, no past, only future. Nothing will ever be the same again.

  Then he sees those eyes, the smile in them, and more than that, Jacob feels like he’s seen them before. And he says as much: ‘Have we met?’

  His English feels shaky, his accent so Swedish despite struggling for a cool British sound. But those eyes just smile at him. He knows they haven’t met, he’s just dreamed about this moment, what it would be like to look into eyes like those. He almost falls backwards, not smoothly like a bird, but clumsily, like a badly trained clown, and if the hand that belonged to that voice hadn’t grabbed his left arm maybe he would have stumbled over the ledge and down into a coal-black Lebanese night.

  ‘Careful,’ the voice says. ‘Don’t disappear, we haven’t even met yet.’

  21 November

  Sankt Anna

  When Klara finally starts to cry, she can’t stop. She cries like a child, shuddering, sobbing, in the church pew. She cries for Grandpa and Grandma. For everything they’ve done for her, because it’s incomprehensible that she’ll never sit with Grandpa in his boat again, unimaginable that she’ll never hear him sigh or see him shake his head in disappointment when she doesn’t recognize some distant birdcall. She cries through a veil of tears when she catches sight of Grandma’s resolute face, and realizes she doesn’t know what her life will be like now. But most of all she cries for herself.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers and looks up at her grandmother. ‘I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I can’t control it.’

  Grandma turns to her and caresses her cheek; there’s warmth and something almost like relief in those eyes.

  ‘Crying is the best thing you could do for me,’ she whispers back. ‘You’ve kept too much inside for too long, little love.’

  Klara knows it’s true. She knows that for the last few years she’s been carrying a weight inside her. Ever since Mahmoud died on the dirty floor of a Parisian supermarket, ever since a man who turned out to be her father died in the snow out here in the archipelago. A father she was never able to meet or get to know. She hasn’t cried, hasn’t grieved, not really. Didn’t know she deserved to, didn’t know she was entitled to relief and the atonement grief would bring. And she hasn’t wanted to let go, hasn’t dared to let go, to move on. Instead, she’s buried herself in work and wine, late nights and short, empty relationships, pushing things deep inside and keeping a stiff upper lip, that’s how you live. You keep it together, you buck up, you do what you have to do.

  But now, in the church, with the sound of the organ and the priest’s dry, monotonous voice, surrounded by ritual and candlelight, with Grandma and Gabriella and her relatives, she realizes it was always impossible, not everything will fit inside, you have to let go of something. You have to find a way to reconcile with yourself.

  *

  Afterwards, Klara stands in the darkness, in blowing snow in front of the church receiving hugs and condolences and pointing people in the direction of the reception at the parish house near the newer, bigger church. The wind is blowing faster now and heavy snow drifts across the fields, through birches and firs. She feels Gabriella’s hand around her elbow.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she whispers. ‘Keeping it together?’

  Klara turns to her and smiles weakly. The tears have finally stopped, but she still takes sobbing breaths, like a little child whose crying fit just ended. She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m not holding it together at all.’

  Gabriella smiles back. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘We’ve all been waiting for you to stop doing that.’

  It’s just them now. Klara, Gabriella and Grandma, who exits the front door of the church and squints her eyes at the wind and the snow, while pulling her hat lower over her ears and forehead.

  ‘He gets his way to the very end,’ she says. ‘There was nothing he was so fond of as a nasty autumn storm. Right, Klara, my love?’

  Klara smiles cautiously and nods. ‘He would have liked this,’ she says. ‘No doubt.’

  ‘Come on,’ Grandma says, walking firmly past them down towards the parking lot. ‘They can’t very well have a funeral reception without us.’

  Klara feels Gabriella lean towards her ear, feels her breath.

  ‘She can handle this,’ she whispers. ‘You know that, right?’

  Klara turns to her and feels something like the contours of a distant calm inside, the promise of a feeling she’s almost forgotten. She nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘She can.’

  Klara peers into the gloom, searching for Grandma’s slender figure through sheets of snow. She still moves smoothly, surely and quickly across the uneven surface. It’ll be some time before Klara has to convince her to leave Aspöja, where she and Grandpa have lived all their lives, and where Klara herself grew up. Grandma is well over seventy, but for a few more years she’ll manage the everyday hardships that come with living on an island in the archipelago. And then? Klara doesn’t even want to think about it. Not yet. Not today.

  Klara thought only Grandma’s and Gabriella’s cars were still in the parking lot. But something slightly further down the road catches her eye. In the darkness it’s hard to make out, but Klara thinks it looks like a shadow jumping into a car. Then the dull thud of a door closing and a motor starting, dampened by the snow and the wind. No headlights are turned on. But Klara could swear a car backs out and disappears down the road. With a couple of quick steps she catches up with Grandma.

  ‘Who was that?’ she says, pointing to the spot the car just left. ‘I thought everyone was already at the parish house by now.’

  Grandma turns around and follows her finger, but there is only darkness there now. She shrugs. ‘Maybe somebody couldn’t find their car keys until now.’ She turns and smiles at Klara. ‘We’re not so young any more, you know.’

  Klara turns around and sees Gabriella coming down to the parking lot a few metres behind them with the phone in her hand, a worried look in her eyes. She gestures that she’ll follow them in her own car.

  ‘Maybe,’ Klara says. But something gnaws at her. Maybe it’s just habit after what she’s been through in the past few years, just the after-effects of suspicion and fear from twice landing in the middle of strange and dangerous circumstances. But when they cross Highway 210 driving to the parish house, Klara throws a glance westward, towards the mainland. Halfway up the hill she thinks she sees two red tail lights in the snow. A car parked by the road? She lingers on the sight while Grandma drives them to the parish house. Someone lost in the snow? But it’s unusual to see unfamiliar cars here at this time of year. She feels a tingle run down her spine. Something doesn’t seem right.

  5 August

  Beirut

  It all happens fast; maybe it’s the alcohol or the trip or the party. But it’s not just that, it’s something more, something else. Something about those eyes, that look. Some gleam of adventure in them.

  ‘I’ll be by the stairs,’ the voice says quite close to Jacob’s ear. ‘It’s better if we aren’t seen leaving together.’

  He nods, but he doesn’t know which s
tairs the voice is referring to. The stairs in this building? Some other stairs? But the man has already turned around and is heading towards the door.

  ‘Wait!’ Jacob says and grabs his shoulder. ‘Which stairs?’

  The man turns around, his expression still warm, but he’s no longer smiling, and something flashes in those eyes when he glances down to where Jacob is holding his shoulder. Jacob feels guilty, as if he’s committed some inexcusable mistake, and perhaps he has. He read that it’s illegal here, what the two of them are obviously up to. The police usually ignore it, but if you’re unlucky or if they want to hurt you, you can be arrested for being gay. Thrown in prison, deported, subjected to humiliating medical exams. Jacob pulls his hand back.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles.

  The man smiles again, just a little, and bends towards him. ‘You’re new to Beirut,’ he says. ‘I understand. Take a left on Armenia Street, go fifty metres, it will be on your left side. The colourful stairs that lead up to Ashrafieh. Hurry.’

  And with that, he’s gone.

  It doesn’t take Jacob long to find Alexa, and thank her for the wine and the party. She smiles and kisses him on both cheeks.

  ‘Just promise me you won’t turn into a real diplomat,’ she says.

  That ‘real’ stings a bit, but Jacob lets it pass. He doesn’t want to be seen as somebody who’s not ‘real’. And besides, what does Alexa know? She’s just a hippie, right? But he promises to try, smiles indulgently, and feels like the naturalness of his smile is proof of an innate talent for diplomacy that will take him far.

  ‘Here,’ Alexa says, pushing a business card into his hand. ‘In case I don’t have time to say goodbye tomorrow. If you ever want to visit me. Just call first, baby. Shatila is a labyrinth. You’ll disappear there if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

  She kisses him on the cheek again, and Jacob smells wine and garlic and also a sort of natural self-confidence on her breath. She steps back and looks deep into his eyes.

  ‘Beirut is not Sweden, habibi,’ she says. ‘Be careful. About everything.’

  *

  A few minutes later he’s stumbling over the broken cobblestones and concrete of Armenia Street, past the bars on the narrow sidewalks where parties spill out into stationary traffic. Honking and revving motorcycles. Calvin Harris and Arabic pop music, which sounds like nothing he’s ever heard before. He feels confused and exhilarated and exhausted – like he might never sleep again.

  The man from the terrace was right: the stairs are only fifty metres further down the street, each step painted in red, green, blue, black, yellow, forming an abstract pattern that leads straight up into the darkness and another part of town. Ashrafieh. Mar Mikhael, where he lives, is a working-class neighbourhood; Ashrafieh is for the rich, Christian elite.

  Jacob sees the man standing halfway up the stairs and raises a hand in an eager, childish greeting. The man smiles and calmly waves him up. Jacob stops for a moment. He shouldn’t be doing this. Not on his first night in Beirut. He should say: ‘We’ll talk some other day.’ He should sleep and focus on his career and his new life. What he’s dreamed about ever since he started dreaming. Call Agneta early and ask if he can go in to the embassy, show them his resourcefulness, his sense of duty, his abilities.

  He should, he should, he should.

  But he knows he won’t do that, and as soon as he takes the first step onto the staircase he has to hold himself back from running up to the man.

  *

  They walk in darkness down the street above the stairs. Jacob is still winded; the stairs were longer than they looked. It’s unusually quiet up here in the middle of the night – not even the honking on Armenia Street makes it all the way up here. They walk in the middle of the street, because here among the crumbling art deco houses there’s no traffic, not now – this isn’t the Beirut Jacob saw earlier in the day, this is another city. Still chaotic, but calmer, with empty streets and alleys. Abandoned perhaps, a city after an evacuation or an apocalypse.

  At first they say nothing to each other. Jacob feels like he’s lost his voice, or has suddenly forgotten how to formulate words and sentences. There’s so much he’d like to say, so much he’d like to ask or discuss, but he’s giddy and excited and tired, and this moment is so crisp and brittle that language might destroy it, words and sentences and subject matter might ruin it, change it, shift it up or down, or just cause it to disappear completely.

  So he stays silent, and they walk side by side in the same direction, even though Jacob has no idea where they’re headed. He doesn’t even know where they are. They zigzag between the hundreds of dusty cars parked on the sidewalks, glancing at each other now and then, while avoiding each other’s eyes. Jacob’s thoughts dart back and forth, searching desperately for the right words to begin. There should be a thousand things, but his brain is too fast, and it stumbles over every idea, never able to focus on just one. Finally, he gives up completely, just lets things be as they are, realizes he has no control over anything now, nothing at all, just has to follow. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. He never loses control of himself. One night in Beirut, and he’s already fallen. Suddenly they stop at a garden hidden behind a rusty iron fence. Jacob can just make out a large house behind it, a palace in the darkness. He bends forward to peer between the rails of the fence. Gardens and parks are apparently quite rare in Beirut. He read that the American University campus is the closest thing to a park that Beirut has. He clears his throat.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asks.

  He regrets it immediately, because his English sounds so Swedish and childish in his ears, the question so flat and silly, and he wishes he could take it back, had stuck to saying nothing at all.

  But the man standing next to him, the man who has eyes Jacob recognizes though he’s never seen them before, just laughs and shrugs his shoulders and follows the fence, drumming his fingers along it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Some rich family that fled during the war?’ He turns and looks at Jacob. ‘It doesn’t matter. Tonight it’s ours, habibi.’

  They stand in front of a warped, high gate locked with a chain. The man bends down, pulls the gate and succeeds in creating a small opening near the ground.

  ‘See if you can squeeze in there,’ he says.

  Jacob doesn’t say a word or even hesitate, just falls down on his knees and crawls through the little gap into the garden. Right now he doesn’t care what the consequences are; he doesn’t care about anything except making sure this continues.

  As soon as he’s through, he grabs onto the bottom of the gate, bending it up so that the man can crawl in over the broken cobblestones between which yellow grass is sticking up.

  Then they’re both in the garden. The man points to a lopsided wooden bench under a magnolia tree weighed down by heavy flowers that almost glow in the dark. They sit down there. They both open their mouths at the same time, then laugh, fall silent, then try again.

  ‘My name is Jacob,’ Jacob says.

  He turns to the man next to him, who is finally looking straight into his eyes. ‘My name is Yassim,’ he says.

  *

  Jacob has never snuck into parks late at night or sought out many hook-ups on Grindr. How could he have? His ambitions have been higher and more narrowly defined. It’s not that he hasn’t fantasized about it; in high school it was the only thing he thought about while surfing restlessly on his phone in bed, the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears. All the sites and images and films dampened it, allowing him to temporarily find release and some imitation of satisfaction. But to seek it out for real? Back then? It would have been impossible. It wasn’t until Uppsala and Simon that it actually… became real? And it wasn’t what he’d thought it would be. Not like this, whatever this is.

  He looks around. He’s never been in a place like this one. He’s never seen a darkness that crackles and shivers and trembles like this. He breathes shallowly, cautiously, barely at all. He doesn’t
really know why, but it’s as if a single deep breath might disrupt something fundamental, some law of nature, that has turned the world upside down.

  He glances at the man sitting next to him, whose name is apparently Yassim. He has stubble on his chin, black, medium-length, wavy hair, a white T-shirt, well-worn jeans. He looks like a thousand other people, Jacob thinks. Why is this happening? What is it about Yassim? What is it about his gaze and voice that brought Jacob here, that makes him lose control and follow after a feeling he’s never experienced before?

  When Yassim turns to him, Jacob doesn’t turn away like he did earlier. He meets his eyes. He holds his breath, and it’s as if blood no longer pumps through his body, as if everything is completely still. He clears his throat, tries to smile.

  ‘Those flowers are odd,’ Yassim says, and it’s barely more than a whisper. ‘Magnolias usually bloom in the spring.’

  A gentle breeze Jacob didn’t notice before whispers through the top of the tree and a few white petals, soft as silk, land on his hand. There’s a swish as bats dive in under the high branches and disappear.

  Something loosens inside him, a lock silently opens, and it’s as if a part of him is now free and rising up to the top of the tree with the bats. He’s staring down at himself on the bench, his thin body in a pressed, baby blue button-down shirt, slim chinos and brown dress shoes, and in the gap between his trousers and shoes a flash of colourful socks. He looks so young from up here. So stiff and naive and restrained. Why has he never been in a garden like this before? Why hasn’t he lived a life of chaos and risk and pounding, rushing blood?

  He knows why. Choosing chaos and risk is a privilege, and it costs. And where he comes from, there are no extra resources. But tonight, what’s happening right now, is not a choice, nothing he sought out. It’s just happening, and he’s letting it happen.