“I probably shouldn’t have,” she responded, a nervous laugh following.
“I’m glad you did.” He smiled awkwardly, revealing small teeth, too many for his mouth. That grin made him a smirking teenager one second, and then he went back into an austere-looking man when he dropped the grin.
“This is where I hide out every time I’m in London,” he continued before pulling the drink list closer.
“Behind soulless glass and metal in Canary Wharf?” The words rambled out before she could stop them.
“Yes, my cozy place.” He laughed. She relaxed.
They ordered sake while Jonny asked the chef to surprise them on her behalf. He toasted her presence and downed his sake, eyes locking with hers over its rim.
Jonny set his glass down. “You’re the most exquisite woman I’ve ever met,” he said, unblinking. She giggled at his proclamation. He didn’t share her amusement and simply gawked at her. Was he joking? When he didn’t break into a smile, Brittany’s chortle died down, and she cleared her throat.
“Thank you.”
“I mean it.”
She soon realized Jonny was a man she had to pry words out of. Their conversation was a continuous stream of one-liners. He’d been running von Lundin Marketing since his twenties and had grown it from a small studio space with two employees in Stockholm into a multinational firm with offices in Stockholm, London, New York, and Hong Kong.
Yes, he’d been to Jamaica several times. “So relaxing” was all he divulged about his time on the island. He’d passed through her hometown of Atlanta once.
Yes, he was in his thirties. She was three years older.
Yes, he had siblings. How many? Two. Brothers or sisters? Sisters. Older or younger? Older.
By their fourth course, Brittany was exhausted.
“You don’t talk much, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“It seems like you enjoy one-word answers.” She grabbed a piece of eel sashimi with her chopsticks.
“I’m answering your questions.”
“I’m not interrogating you. And you haven’t asked me one thing about myself all night.”
“What would you like me to say? I’ll say it.”
He shifted in his seat, his left fingers starting a small tap dance on the table.
She popped the sashimi into her mouth. That was when she caught him watching her mouth, his slightly open, observing her chew, seemingly in a trance. She stopped chewing, and his eyes darted back to hers.
His rapping fingers curled back into his palm, as if he were begging his fingers to stop moving.
For Brittany, the look on Jonny’s face was more ravenous than she had anticipated. One she hadn’t expected so early on in their date. Their date. Those words turned into poison. She was on a date with a strange man while her boyfriend waited for her across the Atlantic.
She jumped to her feet. Jonny was immediately on his feet too.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come,” she said, gathering her bag, getting ready to flee.
“Wait,” he pleaded. “Please.” She scurried out of the restaurant, not expecting him to give chase, but he was hot on her heels. She barely made it a few steps down the sidewalk when he caught up with her.
“What did I do? What did I say?” He was in her face, asking her breathlessly. The air around him suggested rejection was new territory.
“I have a boyfriend. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She grasped for some semblance of dignity.
“I’m sorry,” Jonny started. “I’m so sorry I upset you.”
“You didn’t upset me. I wasn’t thinking.” She pushed loose strands of hair behind her ear. “I wasn’t…”
Brittany never finished her sentence because Jonny swiftly pulled her toward him and covered her mouth with his. In an equally fluid motion, she pushed him back and swept a hand across his face in a piercing slap. A slap hard enough to startle and reroute a couple about to walk past them on the sidewalk.
“Don’t ever do that again.” Her words delivered as a whisper. “Ever.”
Jonny’s hands remained balled into fists at his sides. She hugged her bag tightly once more. Self-conscious, she peered over her shoulder in time to catch a small group disband. The valet ran off while the maître d’hôtel and a waiter darted back into the restaurant.
She turned back to Jonny.
“Good night.”
Before he could answer, she spun around and scurried down toward the Thames River and a footbridge that would take her across to West India Quay, leaving Jonny staring after her.
* * *
Brittany arrived back home in Alexandria, Virginia, the following day to an elegant bouquet of yellow tulips and purple lilies that covered her dining table.
“What’s the occasion?” She smiled as she walked up to the spread and dipped down for a whiff. She spun toward Jamal, who was leaning against the kitchen’s doorframe.
“Baby, these are gorgeous!” She swallowed up the distance between them. “What are we celebrating?”
“You tell me.” His terse words halted her advance. Jamal stretched out a hand and gave her a card.
Opening it, the words “Please forgive me. Jonny” flew at her like a verdict.
MUNA
Herregud. My God.
The Swedish officer muttered it under his breath. Taking off his navy-blue cap, he ran large, smooth fingers through his tawny hair. Fingers that suggested desk work. He glanced wordlessly at Mattias, who was standing behind Suleiman, a native-speaking Somali interpreter the officer had brought along. Mattias shrugged. He hadn’t been there when Ahmed had turned himself into ash, he reiterated once again to the officer. But many people had seen Ahmed hand something to Muna.
Now Muna wasn’t cooperating.
While the Swedes pondered next moves, the interpreter Suleiman studied her, trying to detect evasion.
The officer turned to Suleiman, his face flushed red with frustration. “Ask her if she was fucking him,” he demanded in Swedish.
“That is inappropriate. I cannot ask her that type of question.” Suleiman turned sharply toward him.
“I don’t care. Ask her now,” the officer grumbled back. “The man burned himself alive last night.”
Muna listened to their conversation. She’d been living in Sweden for two years and took abridged Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) language classes weekly at the asylum center. As the asylees didn’t have personal identification numbers yet, lessons were taught by volunteer teachers from the local municipality. They needed those ID numbers to officially register for free language classes subsidized by the government.
The municipality had also volunteered a handful of advisors to help Solsidan’s dozens of asylum seekers expedite submitting their applications. Strategic saints, Mattias often joked about them to Muna. The sooner they could get everyone uprooted and out of Solsidan, the quicker the locals would have their lake back. Despite having nothing else to do for two years besides sweeping Solsidan’s front verandah and ridding it of dead leaves during autumn, snow during winter, and loose flower petals during spring, Muna’s Swedish was competent enough to understand him.
Still, the police officer had insisted on bringing along his interpreter despite Mattias assuring him that Muna spoke Swedish. “Så hon fattar.” So she understands, the officer had stressed.
Mattias’s office doubled as a makeshift interrogation room. Several police officers were already checking buildings and property grounds. Ahmed’s locker had been emptied of its sparse contents. Someone had tipped them off that Ahmed had given Muna a small sack before killing himself.
Now they wanted to know what and why and if Ahmed was just the tip of a radicalized iceberg gliding beneath the surface of Solsidan.
“What did he give her?” the officer asked Sule
iman.
Even though she’d known Ahmed since their arrival, they’d become closer over the last nine months when they often sat silently with each other’s company as comfort. That sack he’d given her was what she’d waited patiently for him to share. There was no way she was letting this crimson-faced man destroy his memories. Ahmed had placed what was left of his heart in her palms. She hadn’t even had time to mourn Ahmed.
Suleiman gave an audible sigh and proceeded to ask her if she had indeed been fucking Ahmed. Muna remained tight-lipped. Suleiman knew their relationship never reached that depth, because she glared unwaveringly at him.
“I need you to respond,” Suleiman said in Somali. “Do something. Say something. So they leave you alone.” His pitch lowered to a whisper. The officer eyed Suleiman suspiciously. Those were too many words for a direct question.
She peered at him for a few seconds before shaking her head. “Nej,” she answered in Swedish. No.
The officer leaned in closer. “Then what did he give you?” He was getting more impatient, yet not once did he scream at her. They must teach them this self-restraint, Muna thought to herself as memories of Somali police officers surfaced. She remembered hearing them screaming randomly at jaywalkers as they lollygagged around Mogadishu. This Swedish officer didn’t need to yell. His clear eyes were screaming loudly at her.
Suleiman translated, and Muna shook her head once more.
“She’s obviously lying because we have several witnesses who saw Ahmed walk up to her and hand her a bag or something!” the officer asserted. Mattias—who’d been standing with his arms crossed over his chest, rocking on the back of his heels, and taking in the conversation—decided to step in.
“Who are the witnesses?” Mattias asked.
“Several.”
“Well…are they Somali? Arab?”
“Does that matter?” The officer seemed perplexed.
“Yes, it matters. Here, the Arabs don’t like the Africans, and the Africans don’t like them either,” Mattias started. “And the Syrians don’t like the Kurds and vice versa.” Suleiman glanced at Mattias, a wry look that seemed to question his audacity. Mattias had just summarized complex cultures spanning centuries into a melodic rhyme delivered in Swedish.
“I’m tired of this tribal nonsense,” the officer muttered under his breath. “Get to the point.”
“What I’m saying is that you may not have credible witnesses,” Mattias explained. “Everyone is trying to get everyone else kicked out of the center. I know for a fact that there are a group of Ahmed’s own countrymen who would have loved to have seen him kill himself months ago.”
The officer flew to his feet, towering to just under the door’s top frame. “This is getting us nowhere,” he proclaimed before telling Suleiman to warn Muna that if she didn’t produce what she was hiding by the end of the day, she would be sent back to Mogadishu on the next flight. He stormed out of the room.
Muna pursed her lips at his empty threat. He knew nothing about asylum and how his own system worked. Suleiman got to his feet to follow his boss out.
“Macasalaamo,” he said softly to Muna. Goodbye. He lingered on her oval face an extra second before picking up his black folder from the table, nodding at Mattias, and striding out.
Mattias watched him go and then turned back to Muna, who was still sitting and staring at him. He studied the eighteen-year-old quietly.
“Was Ahmed your boyfriend?”
“Nej!” Muna screeched in Swedish. She seemed to have caught him off guard, as his shoulders bunched up at her scream, and he adjusted his glasses. “Nej! Ahmed is dead! Let him rest in peace!”
“I didn’t mean to upset you, but the police want him to rest in peace too. They want us all to live in peace. They want to know if Ahmed had, you know, radical thoughts or leanings.”
“Ahmed wasn’t a terrorist!”
“I am not saying so. Just that he was on a hunger strike. He stopped shaving for many months and…”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know, Muna. You knew Ahmed better than anyone here. Does he have other friends we should know about?” Mattias asked. He ran the place, was responsible for divvying up chores among the refugees, and Muna knew he’d seen her and Ahmed frequently spend time together on his verandah. “Ahmed the gardener,” Mattias had often called him fondly. Ahmed’s roses were now in bloom.
Muna glared at him, biting hard on the inside of her cheek to stop her tears. She would not cry in front of him.
“Please help us help him rest in peace,” Mattias continued, walking closer to her. “Muna, be reasonable. If you’re lying, you will get into a lot of trouble.”
She sprang to her feet in defense of Ahmed. “Leave me alone, and leave Ahmed alone!” she wailed before dashing out of his office, her gown billowing behind her. She ran down the hall and into the open courtyard now sprouting with Ahmed’s flowers.
The officers were trickling back from their various tasks around the property, adjusting caps and hopping into white vans etched with fluorescent yellow and blue blocks of color. They would continue another day.
When Muna got to her room, Fatimah from Eritrea was sitting on the bunk bed beneath hers, breastfeeding her baby. Both mother and son turned in Muna’s direction when she flung the room door open so widely, it hit the wall. Muna’s chest was heaving. Fatimah eyed her as Muna started gathering folds of fabric between her thighs, ready to climb up to her top bunk.
“Muna…” she started, but Muna wasn’t having it.
“Did you tell them?” she railed at Fatimah. The baby didn’t seem startled and just clamped down harder on his mother’s overstretched nipple.
“Why are you screaming?”
“You were sitting next to me.”
“Everybody was there. Everyone saw that crazy man give you a bag. Don’t accuse me!” She clicked her tongue in annoyance and readjusted the boy as he slurped greedily. Muna’s nostrils flared.
“If you told them about Ahmed’s bag, may Allah punish you!” Muna spat, not waiting for Fatimah’s reaction before climbing up the ladder to her backup safe space.
The tree by the lake where she had often met Ahmed was now off-limits because she’d buried his memories there last night after he’d killed himself, to be retrieved under similar cover of darkness once she left Solsidan for good.
* * *
Since its opening, Solsidan had received batches of asylum seekers quarterly, holding them while Migrationsverket decided if they could take an inch forward or a triple jump backward. When she’d asked Mattias about their benefactor, he’d told her he was a rich man named Johan von Lundin who preferred to remain anonymous in the media. Mr. von Lundin had visited once in its five years of operation. It was on Solsidan’s opening day when he had cut the blue-and-yellow ribbon patterned after Sweden’s flag to welcome them. After that glorious day, he had never visited again, though the center did receive its monthly allowance through his assistant.
Now Muna had been granted residency before Ahmed’s death and was being relocated from Solsidan to temporary housing in Tensta, a suburb northwest of central Stockholm. The last time she spoke to her Migrationsverket case handler—Mr. Björn, she called him by his first name—he’d delivered the news in person. She was being placed in a three-room apartment with two other Somali women who would be joining her from different centers—one in Dalarna and another south of Stockholm.
She didn’t know the ages of the other Somali women, but if Mr. Björn was also finding them a home as Muna’s roommates, then maybe they were very young and had come alone too. She held on to that knowledge like a lifeline. It meant she could look forward to isolation loosening its grip soon.
A few weeks prior, when Mr. Björn had granted her asylum, they’d been sitting in a sparse conference room with muffled voices outside
its walls as the only noise, joined by the occasional swooshing of paper being flipped as he studied documents in front of him. Muna sat, hands clasped and resting in a makeshift cloth valley between her thighs as she waited for him to speak. Mattias no longer had to be there as her guardian. She was eighteen now.
“Congratulations—you can stay here forever,” Mr. Björn said in a tone that had flatlined decades ago. The grandfather figure with thinning hair and a moustache he never bothered to prune hadn’t looked up at her when he uttered those words. Muna had remained silent, waiting for his next words, which he delivered at sonar frequency.
He glanced up from his manila folder of papers resting on the small conference room desk. “If you’re a bad girl,” he said, “we can take it back. Fattar du?” He slid Muna’s proof of residency certificate toward her. Muna nodded.
“If you’re good, you can get citizenship in five years,” he said. He then stressed the low probability of her becoming fully Swedish, since she came from a “strong” culture that was hard to shake. He spoke this to her without reservation.
“Good,” he said, closing his folder and shuffling to his feet. Tucking the folder under his left armpit, he flicked his right palm upward, summoning her like a magician to stand. He walked her down the gray-washed corridor into an open hall where varying shades of brown bodies, interspersed with the occasional white of Russian and Polish descent, were slid halfway down seats waiting for their numbers to be called.
Mr. Björn had wished her well.
Four
In Every Mirror She's Black Page 6