“I haven’t even started college yet.”
“Yes, but you are an actual American. You have lived my subject.” He tilted his head thoughtfully. “It is amazing to me that the immigrants in this country do not educate themselves about the African American experience. Perhaps if they read about the suffering caused by inflexible ideology, they would be more compassionate to the culture that has welcomed them here.”
“What do you mean?” On the table my hand leaped nervously. I pressed my other on top to calm it.
“Immigrants come here and they want to tell us what to do. They act as if the state and its society are theirs to change and alter. As if it is not dangerous to do so. As if social welfare is not a fragile construct that can break under too much pressure. Pretending that religion is a force as real as the economy or the weather. Bringing the problems of their countries here. You know, Roxana, the system will not hold indefinitely. We cannot just take and take all the world’s unwanted people. Our system is designed to help us.”
“But if they are immigrants to Denmark, they are Danes,” I said. “Like if you came to America to live, you’d be an American.”
His face creased. “Which I would never do.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised that it hurt. He didn’t notice.
“Denmark is the oldest monarchy in Europe. Our flag is one thousand years old. I know my own lineage back to the thirteenth century. Yes, there are immigrants, and yes, they can come and live here, but they are not Danes, and they must understand that. If they wish to be, they must work to earn the honor of citizenship. It is a privilege, not a right, and our system does not work if everyone does not believe in the same thing. We are supposed to be the happiest country on Earth. I am sure you have heard this. But how can such a happiness exist if there is discord and meaningless violence and a minority that insists on head rags for women and funny hats for men and Dark Age social policy?”
His voice steadily increased in volume until he was almost shouting, his hands rigid and flat on the table. Sometimes he got like this when we watched the news. One shot of a woman in a hijab or a municipal building repurposed as a mosque agitated him for hours. He peppered me with unanswerable rhetorical questions: Why did they insist on being to be so different? What were we to do if they “had their way,” three words that grew more darkly threatening every time he repeated them?
It was the conversation we had begun at the bar. I felt ashamed for not arguing with him more forcefully then. His irrational anger at immigrants confused me. Søren was clearly a smart person. A loving person, at least to me, and I was different from him, wasn’t I? I thought everyone—outside of overt racists, the kind of people I would be able to spot at a distance, the kind of people I was sure I had never met—knew that hatred and prejudice were wrong and tolerance and acceptance good. Those were the virtues that had been drilled into me for as long as I could remember. The first Thanksgiving and Anne Frank and the Underground Railroad and the melting pot and cotton plantations and Japanese-Americans in internment camps and the Trail of Tears and Auschwitz. After all that history, what else could a person think other than that it was obviously better to be good than bad to other people? It was simple. But Søren made it seem complicated and foreign, outside my realm of experience, and I was unsure how to disagree. Who was I to tell him what was good for Denmark?
In third grade my Earth science partner, Christina, was a sweet chubby girl from a big Greek family. In the spring we were given an owl pellet to dissect, and in the little clot of fluff and dust she found a vole skull that won us great praise. To celebrate, Christina invited me over that weekend to bake the Orthodox Easter bread tsoureki in her immaculate blue-and-white kitchen. When I arrived, premeasured ingredients were laid out on the counter in glass bowls, like on television, and oldies played softly from a wall-mounted yellow radio. Christina donned a clean red apron and handed me an identical one. I waited for her mother to appear, but Christina preheated the oven herself and proofed the yeast with warm water and sugar. I was impressed. At my house, I wasn’t even allowed to turn on the stove.
We boiled Spanish onion skins and vinegar into a thick syrup that dyed a dozen eggs bloodred and kneaded flour into dough until our arms were white to our elbows. We wove the dough into plaits, pushing the red eggs into the interstices, and painted them with beaten yolk until they gleamed. “My mom says she feels like she’s setting stones when she does this,” Christina told me, which made sense, as her parents’ union had joined two large Greek Orthodox jeweler families. Then Christina opened the oven, a terrifyingly hot black hole, and I slid the heavy baking sheets onto the spotless wire racks. Afterward, my unburned hands felt like miracles.
While we waited for the tsoureki, we played Go Fish with a deck of colorful, oversize cards and ate hard buttery cookies. I won again and again. Once the tsoureki was out of the oven, Christina set a second timer—the bread had to cool for an hour—and we switched to Uno. She won once, and then I won twice.
When the second bell rang, Christina took a tall thin bottle of nectarine nectar from the refrigerator, measured it into purple plastic cups, and cut great eggy slices onto two light blue plates. I didn’t care for the taste of the bread, but everything else was wonderful, the kitchen, the glass bowls, punching the dough, coloring the eggs, playing cards, winning, sweet juice from an exotic bottle. A lifetime of afternoons spent baking in Christina’s airy kitchen blossomed in my imagination. She would show me more Greek delicacies, I thought, build me up eventually to pastitsio and moussaka. But that never happened. In the languid breeze of classroom friendships Christina and I drifted to distant acquaintance almost immediately after that day. Still. When Søren got on one of his rants, I thought about that afternoon with Christina and her tsoureki, a visit to a place where things were different and more interesting, richer, exciting because of difference. Like my life now, I thought. Far from home, in a world where nothing belonged to me. Was that what Søren was afraid of—that what was familiar would become unrecognizable to him? Things like that came from inside, not outside.
Søren grew quiet. I looked up to see him gazing at me softly, his fury over. “Come here, little Roxana,” he said, holding out his hands, and I climbed into his lap. He wrapped his arms around me and rocked gently. “I’m sorry I become such an awful man,” he murmured. “You’re the best thing in the world.”
Time eddied and spent us, Søren’s dry kisses good-bye in the morning and his cock sluicing in and out of me at night, onions and pork collecting in grease at the edge of the plate, the late morning headache I was never sure came from too much coffee or too little. I had always wanted to get to this part of a relationship—a relationship, that was what I had now, a real and prolonged series of encounters that stretched into a sturdy lanyard I could dangle around my neck or from the pull of a zipper—when the fear that what we had was only a glorious encounter would give way to the assurance of continued desire. I just wanted it to keep going, for everything to keep going.
One night in the second week we were eating, normally, and I was smiling at Søren, beaming, so glad to see him after our day apart, thinking about how lucky I was, when he calmly put down his fork and stared at me.
I beamed harder, sure loving words were headed my way.
“Jesus! Close your mouth!”
Søren laughed after he said it, as if I might realize my own boorishness and laugh too. Apparently I had poor table manners. Worst of all, he explained, was the sound of my chewing, my classless way of letting my mouth hang open while I did it. Correcting it seemed impossible. No matter how hard I tried to focus on moving my jaw sedately behind closed lips, I lost my concentration a few bites in.
“It is just disgusting,” Søren said, shaking his head.
The scene repeated itself night after night. I forgot myself, apologized. Shut my mouth, tried to finish as quickly and quietly as possible. Tried not to show I was upset. Being upset made it worse. He threw up his hands.
&
nbsp; “I do not mean to be cruel! But I can’t eat, listening to that.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I muttered, trying not to cry. In those moments, I wanted to go home, anywhere familiar and safe. My house, before the divorce. The Paris I had imagined. But these places didn’t exist anymore. And Søren’s logic made sense. Of course the noise he described me making was gross, distractingly so. His imitation of it sounded vile, an openmouthed cud processing. Of course it wasn’t so ridiculous for him to want me to eat quietly. Why couldn’t I? After a week or so, Søren stopped chastising me, instead adopting the tactic of silently ceasing to eat and staring until I caught on.
Søren seemed as baffled that his irritation at my chewing upset me as he did at my inability to change it. For him it was a light that flickered on when I was doing it and when I stopped and the irritant was removed, the light turned off. Our dinners became quieter and quieter, the hum of the refrigerator and the nothing from outside filling the room. A chain of firecracker questions lit up my brain as I waited for the food to be gone. Where did the trash go when he took it out the front door? What other options were there at the grocery store? Why hadn’t Søren introduced me to anyone? Was he ever going to take me outside?
I tried to pry around the edges of our life, stir them. The long evening hours stretched out in front of us and a spike of inexplicable terror would drive itself through my middle, a sensation like vertigo and drowning at the same time. I became afraid of time, a stealthy beast that roamed the apartment. Our third roommate. I was careful of it, fearfully avoidant and polite. I let it have whatever it wanted, tried not to pay attention.
The beast could be led out. Søren would snap out of it, be funny and kind again. He would talk about books and movies, pull me onto his lap and reverently smell my hair. He told me he had never met anyone like me. The feel of his body coiling my form became what was good to me, what I waited for. Because no matter what he said or did, at the end of those early nights Søren took me into the bedroom and made love to me. How I lived for the moment when he turned to me and pulled me by the hand back down the hallway to the white room where the windows throbbed with violet light. Sometimes he made me wait, sat me on his lap on the couch and felt me up from behind, pressed his open mouth to my neck and beat his tongue rhythmically into my skin, whispering, “Nej, nej, nej,” while I squirmed and finally fought, assaulting him with kisses until he lay head-to-toe on top of me, our hands clasped over my head, his erection pressing urgently into my belly.
Fucking Søren, taking his pants down his slim hips, running my hands over his smooth bones up under his shirt, going at it so hard that we bruised each other. The way he came up behind me and rested his hands on my shoulders and chanted my name. Rubbed his stubbly head against my neck, setting all of me alight. The moment, in bed, when he lost control and bucked against me panting. My badges, my record.
I was proud of it all, so pleased with myself that I didn’t notice my fear transform from a spike into an expansive garment that covered me neck to ankle, didn’t see the beast grow elephant tall until it was too late. I couldn’t see. I had been waiting so long for something to happen to me.
A week later, Søren announced a surprise and produced a small paper bag from his backpack. Inside was a tiny plastic baggie of dark greenish shards. I opened it. Sniffed.
“Pot?” The oily smell hung in the air between us.
“Hash, actually,” Søren said, taking it from me. Hash. I had heard the word before, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. It was somehow related to marijuana. I knew that. The shards looked like chipped chocolate or hard-packed dirt. In the heat of Søren’s palm they made muddy smudges on the inside of the plastic bag.
“I felt nostalgic today and returned to those mongoloid twins the Madsen brothers. I used to buy from them as a teenager when we visited my uncle in the summers. Ah, memories!” He made an expansive gesture, as if he had told a charming childhood story.
“You shouldn’t use the word ‘mongoloid,’“ I said.
Søren shook his head, the hash still proffered in his right palm. “English is hard enough without the American insistence on continually removing words from the vocabulary. I understand I am not to call people like this retards or morons or imbeciles. And now I cannot use the proper term for their condition?”
“Their condition?”
“They are born with it. In the chromosomes. Not enough or too many, I cannot remember. A bit of the—” He squinted and put on a dumb smile, curling his hand into a claw, and thumped against his chest, making a horrible guttural noise.
“Mentally disabled?”
I watched him try to hide his smirk. “As you say. This kind is generally sweet and well dispositioned. Below average intelligence and sometimes a bit fat, but they can work basic jobs. The eyes look Oriental.”
“Are you talking about Down syndrome? People with Down syndrome don’t do that.” I gestured at his still-clawed hand.
“Certainly I cannot be expected to understand what this unfortunate accident of birth is called in every country.” Søren’s voice rose. “They have a fine life and I do not begrudge them it, the Madsens, selling hash out of their group home while the unsuspecting pedagogues happily provide them with an endless supply of little plastic bags for their ‘craft projects.’“ Pedagogue was a job everyone in Jutland seemed to hold, engaged at each level of the massive infrastructure of social welfare.
“They actually believe these two criminals make jewelry from beads, that that’s what they’re selling at such a fine clip.” He laughed at the jolly thought of his mongoloid dealers.
“They live in a group home? Where do they get drugs?”
“Their mother’s boyfriend is a Hells Angel. I have never seen fit to inquire past that fact.”
“The motorcycle gang?”
“The Hells Angels are very contemporary, Roxana. In this country they are locked in a battle for drug territory with the Arab gangs.” He laced his fingers behind his head, taking on a philosophical look. “I do not empathize with criminals, but given the choice, I will throw my lot with the Angels, I suppose.”
Wasn’t Søren a criminal too, buying drugs from disabled people living in a group home funded by the state? I wanted to ask, but his mood seemed to have lifted, and I didn’t want to mess it up.
“Shall we?” He lifted the bag and held it over his open mouth, as if to swallow it whole.
“Sure,” I said.
Søren’s face fell. “I apologize, Roxana. I did not ask before I got the hash. I just wanted to give you some excitement.”
I wanted to tell him that the days I had spent in the apartment were the most exciting of my entire life. Sometimes, walking between the rooms in the afternoon, I was overcome by wonder at where I was. At who I had become. And this feeling raised me, muting his moods and complaints about the sounds my mouth made when I ate, his lovemaking sealing me in my certainty: I was free but didn’t need freedom. I could do as I liked, and I did. Our life together, we often joked, was my real International Abroad Experience. The only place I wanted to go was between his legs.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said.
He flinched. “Please do not call me names. I never call you names.”
“I wasn’t calling you a name. I was calling your idea stupid. Of course you haven’t made me do anything. And of course I want to. I just never have before.”
Søren straightened. “You need not to be embarrassed, Roxana. It was I who was embarrassed, thinking that I was corrupting you.”
“You can’t corrupt what wants to be corrupted,” I said.
He liked that. Søren took a small chopping board to the table, withdrew a cigarette from his pocket, and passed it over the flame of a green plastic lighter, back and forth, until the paper blackened. He crumpled the tobacco into a pile, shaped it into a line the length of my pinkie, and sprinkled shards of hash over the line. Then, producing a cigarette paper from somewhere—had it been in the paper bag with the hash?—he
flipped the cutting board over so the hash and tobacco fell neatly into the paper. Almost without looking he rolled this into a new cigarette. Twisted it together. Licked the seam.
Søren put a heavy purple ceramic ashtray on the coffee table and lit the joint with a match. I remembered another word for this kind of thing. Spliff.
“Watch.” He took a long drag and exhaled a viscous blue stream. “Do you think you can do that, little Roxana?”
I held it to my mouth and tried to do as he had done. The smoke was thicker than a cigarette’s. I coughed. Then I couldn’t stop coughing.
Søren brought me a glass of water. “Let me help you.”
He took another long drag, grabbed me by the shoulders, and gave me a long, openmouthed kiss, guiding the smoke into my mouth with his tongue. I froze, dazed, trying to hold it in. When I exhaled, the smoke seemed to leave me more slowly than before.
“A shotgun.” Søren stretched the word luxuriously.
“Shotgun,” I incanted.
I wanted him to shotgun me again, but he made me do it myself. This time the smoke stayed inside.
The edges of the room softened. How had I never noticed how comfortable the couch was before? Perfect, really, as if it had been made just for my body. When I looked at Søren, I had to hold my features carefully to keep from bursting into uncontrollable laughter. And yet I felt tender, too. I wanted to cover him in kisses. Nestle in the crook of his arm.
I climbed onto his lap and kissed his neck.
“Hello, little Roxana.”
“Hi,” I whispered, giggling.
“Do you feel all right?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Good.” We fell silent.
“I feel really, really good,” I said suddenly, and we laughed so hard I thought I’d pass out.
From then on hash became part of our nightly routine. Stoned, food was astonishingly good. After dinner Søren cleared away the dishes and stacked them in the sink to wash in the morning. We smoked more hash and Søren played music and I stretched back on the couch and let its waves crash over me. We watched dramas that Søren narrated for me.
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