“Are you making fun of the way I talk?”
“I do not make fun.”
“Then why say my words like that?”
Geden turned and I saw with surprise that he was hurt. “It is unusual for me to meet native English-speakers, especially Americans. Forgive me for finding the way that you speak novel.” He took one hand from the wheel and extended it toward me. “I will not insult you. Will you treat me with the same respect?”
I took his hand. “Of course.”
“You say it as if it is automatic, but it is not,” Geden said, still holding my hand with his right as he curved the wheel with his left. “I respect you.”
“I respect you.”
“Thank you.” Geden dropped my hand as easily as he had taken it.
We drove through shopping areas interpolated by stretches of farmland specked with horses and cows and a few sheep. Long low houses with thatched roofs. Exurban Denmark, a new landscape. Big-box stores or what I assumed were big-box stores, massive rectangles of black glass and smooth white cement at the center of vast parking lots. People hauled uncooperative children out of cars.
The silence in the truck hung heavy.
“I don’t know anything about you,” I said to make it real. What we were doing. “But you know so much about me.”
Geden laughed. “I have only observed. I am used to learning about people, about strangers, by watching. The habit of a friendless man.” He smiled, bare, reticent, concerned.
“And what have you observed?”
“You are a young woman in the care of one older man and currently in the vehicle of another. Both men are foreign to you. Recent acquaintances.”
I crossed my arms at the elbow and let my hands flop in my lap. “So?”
He spoke softly. “You are a young girl, and you live with a grown man who speaks a language you do not. You live with him in his country.”
“I am not a young girl,” I said. “I am a woman.”
“Fair enough.” He leaned back into his seat. “What do you wish to know about me?”
I straightened, trying to catch my breath. “What do you do for a living?” He looked at me oddly. “I mean, what is your job?”
“I am a skovrider. The word translates to ‘forest rider.’ A bit like Oliver Mellors, you might say, although I care for the trees rather than for game.” He gave a naughty little grin.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“He’s an imaginary man from a long-ago book.” Geden wiped the space between us. “I am employed by the municipality. I keep track of the forest. I monitor the growth of plants as well as the populations of deer, birds, and other animals.”
“Are you from Farsø?”
He shook his head. “I’ve lived here a long while.”
“How long?”
“Since I came from Bosnia when I was thirteen years old.”
I turned to examine him more closely. “Why did you move?”
“My family lived in Sarajevo until the city was torn apart by war. We feared we would die and fled our country as refugees. We were held in a camp here in Jutland until I was nearly eighteen.”
“A camp. Like a concentration camp?”
The corners of his mouth twitched a brief, flickering smile. “Our camp was humanitarian. In intention, anyway. Limbo. My parents were not authorized to work until we were granted asylum. By that time, any idea that my grandparents would find new lives here was completely lost.”
“Your grandparents came with you, too?”
“Yes.”
I looked at my hands, my chewed-up cuticles and unlined palms. “Are you a Muslim?”
He laughed. “You sound very grave.”
“I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter. I’m being rude.”
“You are not being rude, Roxana,” Geden said. “You are being direct. I admire that. Yes, I am Muslim. Not particularly observant, for my own reasons. Although not practicing makes me better in the eyes of everyone here.”
“Is that why Søren hates you so much?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“Because I am an ambivalent believer in the Koran? I do not think so,” he said. “I always had the sense Søren disliked me on sight.”
I studied his face for a long time, long enough that I expected him to turn away, but he did not.
Eventually we came to what looked like the outskirts of a city, with dense buildings clustered on the horizon among a handful of spires and towers. Geden wove the little truck into the winding streets, past brick and stone buildings, countless iterations of ceramics showrooms. An austere old church, white and dignified on a hill. In a small lot he parked and leaped from the car. I watched him climb back into his coveralls in the rearview mirror, pulling his black shirt over his head.
He opened my door. “You must think I’m a beast, driving shirtless like that. Forgive me. My work makes me very hot.”
He licked his lips. I looked away. “Where are we going?”
“An American restaurant.”
It was tucked inside a white building with a red tile roof, one in a curving line of white buildings with red tile roofs on a square, a Place—the Danish word was “Plads.” But I thought of a square as somewhere people would want to linger, with cafés, a fountain. This was just a parking lot. From the outside, it looked like any other Danish restaurant, a dim storefront whose exterior no one had given much thought to. Geden opened the door, shaking the shiny red buckle of silver sleigh bells attached to the hinge. Mama put a set like this on our mantel every December, beside the giant pinecones she kept in a big Tupperware box in the attic the rest of the year. But it wasn’t Christmas. It was August.
We stepped inside. The lower half of a submarine marked with the words DEEP DIVER protruded from a green-painted oval surrounded by track lighting in the center of the ceiling. Every surface was covered in a label or sign or poster or other bit of American ephemera. NEW YORK SANDWICHES! CHICAGO DANCING—NEW ORLEANS PIZZA—CALIFORNIA STEW!
The wall above the table was decorated with a pair of ice skates, a framed black-and-white photograph of old-timey football players in leather helmets, and a giant neon sign offering BUICK SERVICE in hot-orange cursive. The place was called Bones or Bone’s, both spellings plastered interchangeably all over the dining room.
A listless blonde waitress appeared, wearing a black polo shirt with BONE‘S embroidered over her slouchy left boob and led us to a blond wood table identical to the one on which Søren and I ate dinner every night in the apartment. The chair spindles were cut into the shape of bones. The waitress thrust two laminated menus at us.
“Thank you,” Geden said in an exaggerated American accent. “We are so excited to have some real food from home!”
I stared at him incredulously.
She slurred uncomfortable English. “Would you like beers?”
“Two beers,” Geden said, still playing American, hissing the s. “Please.”
The waitress disappeared. Geden made a neat stack of the menus at the edge of the table.
“I didn’t get a chance to look yet,” I protested. “And why are you talking like that?”
He resumed his normal voice. “You will have a cheeseburger.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m going to order.”
Geden laughed. “Cheeseburgers are the only edible item here.” He handed me a menu. “You do not want to eat the ribs. The less said of the barbecue, the better. Trust me.”
I looked into his eyes, rimmed with black lashes. His eyebrows were so evenly shaped I wondered if he waxed them. The hollows under his cheekbones were violet. His hair was blue where the light caught it. What did he see when he looked at me?
“I do,” I said softly.
He grinned at me. “We are getting married?”
“I trust you.” My face was hot.
The waitress reappeared with two pints of golden beer.
“Thank you very much,” Geden said, American again. “We would like two cheeseburger
s, please.”
The waitress reluctantly opened her pink mouth. “Pomfritter?”
Geden gazed at her uncomprehendingly.
The waitress sighed and tucked a hank of yellow hair behind her ear. “Do you want fries?” she fairly spat.
Geden smiled like he had won the lottery. “Oh! Yes, please. And salad on the burgers.”
“Go to the salad bar,” she said. We watched her black work pants slump away.
“Why are you pretending to be American?” I whispered.
He opened his hands. “Look around the room. What do you see?”
The other customers were families with children. Nearly every table had red balloons tied to its chairs. Towheaded little kids toddled aimlessly, politer and quieter than any American children I had ever seen.
I looked back at Geden. “Balloons?”
“This is a place people bring their children. Popular for birthdays. What could be more lovely than feeding your little child some Dane’s idea of American food in a windowless restaurant in Preislers Plads?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I pretended to be American because I wanted the waitress to treat us well, Roxana. We are not Danes to her.”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned across the table, speaking quickly. “Danish families come here. People who work in factories and as pedagogues and in shops. Who knows what they might do if they discovered two suspicious foreigners in their midst? You are a bit swarthy, as am I. We could be Arab.” His eyes twinkled. “We could be Bosnian.”
A little boy in a red shirt ran by, bleating, “Nej, nej, nej, nej!”
“What do you think would happen?”
“Let me show you something.” Geden unzipped his coveralls and withdrew a folded newspaper and handed it to me. The entire front page was a mess of red and pink, like an abstract painting. My eyes refocused and I saw that it was a photograph of a blonde woman’s badly beaten face, blown up so big there was room for hardly anything else on the page, only the name of the paper and a headline I couldn’t decipher.
SIGRID, 19 ÅR: “JAG SÅG ALDRIG HANS ANSIKTE”
Dark rivers of blood split the woman’s face under her light hair. One of her eyes was completely swollen shut.
I pushed the newspaper back across the table. “I can’t read Danish.”
Geden did not touch the newspaper. “This is a Swedish newspaper from a few weeks back. It says, ‘Sigrid, nineteen years old,’ and then a quotation: ‘I never saw his face.’“
“The face of the man who attacked her?”
“Yes.”
“That’s terrible.” I refolded the newspaper so all I could see was her pink neck and the stained collar of her white blouse. A little girl from a nearby table darted in our direction. I slid my hand over the image. “Can you put it away?”
Geden looked at me as if I were small. “Not yet,” he said. “Do you believe it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the picture. In the article it says that Sigrid was beaten until she lost consciousness. Does she look as if this happened to her?”
I pulled the newspaper squarely in front of me. “She’s bleeding.”
“Yes, but what else happens when you are beaten?”
When I was ten, one of Mama’s patients had taken a swing at her as she worked on his PICC line. She came home with a deep blue bruise glowing to the right of her left eye. Dad and I had watched her press a bag of frozen spinach to her face. “It was an involuntary muscle reaction,” she told us.
“You get a black eye,” I said to Geden. “Bruises.”
“Look closer.”
I reluctantly returned to the image. Sigrid had no visible bruises, only streaks of blood that striped evenly down her neck. Her eye wasn’t swollen. It was closed and red, not purple or black.
“There are ways to beat people up that don’t leave bruises,” I said.
Geden pushed the newspaper closer so that when I looked down all I saw was Sigrid’s bloody face. “Do you think that’s what happened here?”
Now I couldn’t unsee his doubt.
Geden waited. I sucked in breath. Stared at the picture again.
“She doesn’t have a black eye. The cuts on her face could be makeup. Maybe. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Smart woman.”
I was thrilled, but I tried to keep it off my face. “So what then? The newspaper is fake?”
“It’s a real newspaper.” Geden tapped the image. “Some Swedish gentlemen got together and hired a young lady to sit in a makeup artist’s chair for some hours before walking into a police station and claiming she had been assaulted. By men whose faces she never saw, but who, she was certain, were Somali, Turkish, or Palestinian. Immigrants or immigrants’ children. Even better, perhaps, refugees. Syrians, men named Khaled or Abdul. Dark skin, curly hair. Men who beat her because they were driven to unimaginable rage by her very existence. Certainly it is not impossible. There is no end to the horror men do to women. A Muslim or an immigrant or even a refugee could have attacked Sigrid. Her story could be true.”
I watched his alert eyes, asking me a question. “But you don’t think that it is.”
Geden shook his head. DEEP DIVER hung above us, a moon, lighting our faces with underwater glare.
“Believing that Sigrid was attacked by this specific type of unwanted person also serves a purpose,” Geden said. “A purpose that suits many people with the power to make it a reality.”
“You think it’s some kind of conspiracy? That the government did this?”
He brought his face so close I thought he would kiss me.
“No, I do not think the government planned the crisis any more than they planned for unemployed young men in public housing to come under the sway of radical ideas. But they didn’t see fit to give those young men jobs, either, or think twice about passing laws that allow them to repossess all the worldly belongings of the poor damned who can even make it here. Scandinavians do not like the idea that anyone would have reservations about their country, even the passing thought that it might not be the best place in the world. They require absolute conformity and obedience. They have fetishized the art of tolerance, but only as an accessory. Something to put in the front window of their design stores.”
As he spoke the moles on his face sharpened into black diamonds.
“Why were you reading a Swedish paper?”
“I sought out a copy once I learned about this. I keep it as proof.”
“Didn’t the newspaper find out the story was fake?”
“Of course. They printed a correction in small font on the thirty-eighth page of the Tuesday edition.”
A white plate bearing an anemic cheeseburger descended over the front page. I covered the edges of the image with my palms, but the waitress was beyond caring.
“Do you think things in America are better?” I asked.
Beside us, a family burst into song. Geden laughed as the children’s high voices revved. At the singing, maybe, but mainly at my question.
That day was a split screen. On the right, Geden’s eyes, the newspaper, our conversation, dried-out cheeseburgers, and Danish children. On the left, my gauzy fantasy—the Goat and me in some blue-velvet dark together, stacked like elegant cutlery, turning and tuning. His bare chest in the close heat of the truck’s cab, his neat hipbones peaking over the hem of his leggings like noses. I had to blink and blink to square the halves.
We did not speak Søren’s name again until the ride back to Farsø, until we were almost back to the place where I had found Geden, or Geden had found me.
“So,” I said, when the park came into view. I already had a stomachache at the idea of going back to the apartment. Could he sense it? Would he touch me?
“Are you unhappy?” Geden asked gently.
“Excuse me?”
Geden pulled back into the spot where his truck was always parked, took the keys from the ignition, slippe
d them into the pocket of his coveralls, settled back into his seat, and looked at me. “Are you?”
I took his hand. Held it against my roaring gut. His fingers tensed, monitoring, and then relaxed. I couldn’t look at him. A bead of sweat traveled from behind Geden’s left ear down across his throat, into his collar. He dropped his other hand on his thigh. His palm glared at me like an eye. If only he would move his hand lower.
“This was a very pleasant lunch,” he said. “Thank you for joining me.”
He had paid the bill while I was in the bathroom at Bones. I didn’t want to owe him. I already owed Søren too much. The day before I had gone to an ATM for the first time in Denmark and withdrawn a thick roll of money, brightly colored and the wrong size. I took my wallet from my pocket, counted out a hundred kroner, about twenty dollars, and pressed it into Geden’s open hand, trying not to linger against his skin. “For my burger and the beers.”
“Thank you.” He folded the bills and pushed them into the pocket that held his keys. Why was I disappointed?
The lip of the pond was just visible in the far right of the windshield, unreal, as if it could be peeled away. Geden exhaled. I couldn’t go back to the apartment as if nothing had happened.
He looked at me. “I am here in the park every day at one o’clock.”
No, you aren’t, I almost said. I looked for you so many times and never found you.
“Every day I am here.”
It was time for me to go. I looked out my window.
“Roxana.” All the humor had left Geden’s face. I leaned into him, wanting his whole smell, and he pressed his open hand right between my breasts, stopping me. The tiny red bow at the center of my bra met the heart line in his palm, separated only by the thin black fabric of my shirt. It soared up, shocking me: my cathedral feeling. I was in the presence of some great order, witnessing its acts.
When he spoke his voice was silken. “If you like, you can come visit me. I will take you to my house in the woods.”
I didn’t dare look at his face. “I’m afraid.”
“Mmm,” Geden purred, a sound that made my thighs clench. “It is frightening to be free. To trust.”
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