Then one morning your father was back. He invaded the paillote at dawn with his camera around his neck, a stale stink from his tight polyester shirt, and a multitude of twigs in his black hair.
“Kadir! Now I am going. I have found my insight. It is time.”
“Where have you been?”
“On a photographic and spiritual expedition!” responsed your father with his smile shining.
Still today I am unstable about where and why he localized his body during these eight days. Your father can be so curious. Perhaps one must just observe and accept.
I admit that I tried to convince him to stay in Tabarka. I described my plans to open my own hotel and cautioned him humoristically about Sweden, that northerly country of chilly blonds, Eskimos, and fully frozen winters. I pointed out the risk of colds and the threat from hungry polar bears. But your father only laughed and promised his cyclical letter correspondence. “A friend’s loss is a loss. But a life without one’s beloved Pernilla is no life.”
This he repeated again and again. Only to later pronounce an interpellation that would be fatal:
“I must, however, ask you for a favor of gargantuan value. The tongues of the village whisper about your latest period’s gigantic prosperity at the poker table. Can you delegate me a loan to enable my move abroad? I have invested my last finances in the obtaining of a falsified Tunisian passport to enable my exit. If you accept this inquiry I promise you a repayment with well-formed interest. What do you say?”
This was not an ideal position. I had packed abundant amounts of cookies and glistened monstrously many glasses and invested everything on exactly the right poker card in order to save my finances. And now they were to be delegated to your father? He observed me breathlessly:
“My future is in your dependence. Do not deny me. You will get interest. I promise. As soon as my photographic success has been achieved in Sweden. Please. Do not be a doorsill on that wide motorway we call love!”
It was truly impossible for me to deny your father this service. I generously delegated him my saved capital and detailed in a document how the interest would grow exponentially during the coming years. I postponed the opening of my hotel and wished your father’s happy journey.
If there is anything that is vital in this chapter it is this: Many consider me to be a man of risk, with a great portion of courage. In reality I have wandered carefully through life as though in a newly colorized corridor. I have invested all of my risks in the secure context of the poker game. Considerably larger balls are required by the man who invests his risks in life itself. Your father staked EVERYTHING on relocating his address to Sweden. All for his love for your mother. Never forget that, Jonas. Never. No matter what the future has in its muff.
PART TWO
Dearest greetings!
Thank your continued description of daily life as a Swedish debut author. Are you serious when you write that you trained all the way to Sundsvall to “chat books for three coffee-slurping ladies and a snuffling bulldog?” HA HA, this aroused much humor in me! Are you entirely honest when you write that you are enjoying every second? Is there no glamour missing?
Also thank your diligent questions. Who is it that has radiated you this information? Of course I am grateful that you are collecting data in other directions as well, but … Do not play on the high side of ambition! Too many cooks can transform our delicious broth to soup in the alphabetic sense.
When you write that “certain sources” characterized your father in Tabarka as “the stallion from Jendouba” or “the Tunisian Stud” or “the eternally unfaithful,” I am filled with unease. These sources must be contaminated! Is it your father’s flapping friends who reported these nicknames to you during your vacations in Tunisia? Was it the semideaf Amine or the semidwarf Nader? Do not rely on people’s flapping mouths! Certainly your father had a reputation as a Casanova, but this is NOT the same thing as if he were to share a plurality of women’s relationship in permanence. In any case not after his rendezvous with your mother! And that he would have courted your mother AFTER having “been totally dissed” by her red-haired, large-bosomed flying colleague is also the type of lie that we can call untruth!
There are many women but only one Pernilla. There are many rumors but only one truth. It is the truth that will be presented in the book. Nothing else. Do I have your full understanding?
One question has pondered me lately: What do you define as the biggest risk against the quality of our book? In my opinion it is the dullness of the reader. Entirely too many books exist where the dryness of the phrases monotonizes the reader to sanded eyes. I presume that your book view is compatible with mine? Your father has detailed how in your teen years you made a repetition of racing swearing out of heavy-aired literary readings and feeding the garbage chute with newly published novels. (By the way, is it true that you and Melinda splintered Norstedts’ show window in the early nineties in rage over the book Colored Conspiracy, where Tom Hjelte and Dr. Alban interviewed “coloreds” like Mauro Scocco, Jan Guillou, and Izabella Scorupco? Have you admitted this to your editor, Stephen? HA HA, you were comically confused in your youth … [But I realize why your father did not share this humor.])
In order to feed the reader’s successive will to read I propose the following: Let us cyclically transform our book into new literary molds! Let us now initialize the secondary section of the book, where we will first serve the reader your father’s authentic letter texts and thereafter invite you to present your first memories of your father. How is this idea appraised? I am snugly securitized about its ingenuity. Let your father be the pilot of the section; I will reduce myself to footnote level. (And you will be … the map holder? The stewardess? HA HA! I am just tickling.)
Affixed you will find your father’s corresponded letters translated into melodious Swedish. I have maximally forced myself and my hope is your appreciating appraisal.
Your ceaseless friend,
Kadir
Stockholm, February 2, 1978
Greetings, Kadir!
Many salutations are presented you in capitals from the wintry European corner that we can call Sweden. I am sitting in Pernilla’s minimal kitchen and formulating you these phrases. The frost is whistling the exterior of the house but today the cold is still somewhat humanized. Compared with before. Even by a Swedish standard this year’s winter has been brutal; the cold record has been demolished, and one night the temperature crashed to thirty below. But with triple clothing layers and a newly invested tricolored scarf I have passed the winter’s cold before the radioactively strong fire that we poets call love.
Let me first describe my arrival: The journey passed pain-free. Pernilla’s letter invited me to cross the border to my new homeland. Pernilla’s lodging is localized in a very modern neighborhood in Stockholm’s vicinity. Her house is one in a row of eight identical boxes. They are all well formed, with modern angular lines, brown color, mirror-clad elevators, and floor buttons that glow when you push them.
The bolt of nervousness filled me when I elevated my body toward her seventh floor. I alarmed her bell and waited in silence. Nothing happened. I alarmed her bell again. Nothing happened. I alarmed her bell again and again and again and again. Then I heard pattering whispers from her neighbors. I alternated my strategy. On a scrap of paper I noted the following phrase:
“Je t’attends à Centralen …/Ton Chat Unique”1
I dropped the paper in the mailbox and then I returned my body to Central Station. Sitting in a multitude of hours at a café, drinking coffee with added cognac, I was piled with the questions of doubt. Perhaps I should have forewarned Pernilla of my arrival? Perhaps the ingenious idea of offering her the surprise of my presence was not an ingenious idea? Perhaps she is on vacation? Perhaps she is full of wrath about my method of silencing my correspondence? All these questions grew me in tempo with the time of hours. Lunch became afternoon became evening. The disappointment about my fiasco, the inconvenienced hmming
s of the waitresses, the mountain of splintered toothpicks and consumed sugar packets. She must have forgotten me, everything is lost, what have I done? The level of the alcohol added my tragedy and my remorse grew.
Then … in the midst of the twilight of disappointment I heard a call from the entry of the café: “ABBAs!”
And there she stands in the mistiness of the backlight. Pernilla. Her long body with the firish gaze and the goddessish nose. And then she sprouts the smile. The smile that avalanches forth through the dark-as-night twilight room and shines the café’s colors to new levels and is reflected in the pastry glass and dazzles punks and interrailers and tired conductors …
She studies my gaze and she shakes her head and we meet our smiles. She reaches my table, she notes my alcoholic odor, she studies my shabby status, and expresses in a whisper:
“Couldn’t you have called first?”
And I find no response. No words are nearby to me. All that exists is she. She! I sobered myself quickly, transported the bottle to my inside pocket, and followed her to the metro.
Since this day we have lived in fantastic symbiosis in her little two-piecer where Bob Marley sits as a poster on the wall and odor of the incense is to me homey. Pernilla flies domestically so it is seldom that I am forced to pass longer times in isolation. When she is working I associate with my notebook where I collectionize observations and poetic phrases. Like for example this: “Sweden … oh, Sweden. A land of quiet metro cars, delicious women, and possibilities of the plurality. Sweden is airy cleanness, watery celestiality, and breathtaking views from centrally located bridges. Everything in Sweden is odorless and colorless, properly squared, white and pink and soft in resemblance to the forearm skin that is Pernilla’s. Oh, Pernilla’s skin. Only one of numberous motives for why I chose to leave my best friend and newly started photographer career.”
The celebrating of Christmas was lived through by me without great difficulty. Before the festival Pernilla said:
“Just so you know—Swedes’ Christmas traditions are a very internal affair and it takes many years before one reaches the status of being invited as an external guest.”
Consequently I passed my Christmas holidays waiting solitarily in Pernilla’s apartment. The silence of the neighborhood was tombish. Nowhere was there the tiniest indication that this was a festival of rejoicing. I portioned my company with the television, I forced myself to understand sporadic Swedish words and mixed my julmust with alcoholic reinforcement. I played my newly invested Stevie Wonder record. I smoked frequent cigarettes on the snow-filled balcony. The time without Pernilla was experienced by me as bizarrely protracted. I do not understand what she has done with me. Is it really this that is called love, Kadir? To experience oneself in solitary status as so split that each breath becomes an effort?
Pernilla returned from her parents two days after the eve of Christmas and I noted the modified shine of her eyes.
“What has taken place?” I interpellated.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, tell me.”
“No … I do not want to summarize it.”
“My dear Pernilla, let us not carry secrets between us. Now portion me your emotion.”
Pernilla sighed her lungs and vibrated her lower lip.
“It is just that … Do you know how it feels to be crestfallen by the prejudices of the people you are closest to?”
“Well, that emotion is actually not particularly known to me.”
“Then you do not know how I feel. My mother is scared to the death over our initiated relationship. Ever since I told her about you she has warned me cyclically about the aggressive temperaments of Muslims. She has presented me numberous articles about Muslim terror; she persists in calling you ‘the gold digger.’ ”
“Hmm …”
“And now she refused to invite you to our Christmas celebration.”
“But … you said that the celebrating of Christmas was familially internal …”
“I lied. My older brother’s goddamn tennis partner and his girlfriend from the U.S. were invited. The whole neighborhood gathered on Christmas Day. Neighbors, cousins, the cousins’ kids’ goddamn dogs. But not you, who share both my love and my lodging. Sometimes I really hate them. HATE.”
Here her tears burst and I held her shaking shoulders and hugged her warmth. I thought: “Even her crying presents its own character. Pernilla’s crying is so far from the generality of other women. Never can it be referred to resignation or weakness. Instead it is vibrations with volcanic internal hate. She dries all the tears with her hand as quick as the windshield wipers of a car. Every tear that she does not succeed in holding in seems to corrode her pride. We comforted each other’s sorrows all night and at the moment of slumber my lips whispered:
“My dearest Pernilla. I love you above everything. We will survive this, together we will show them, we will never be conquered. NEVER!!!! We will dazzle your damned family, we will break their images, we will delight their forgiveness. They commit me as a political fundamentalist and you as a duped daughter. These are my whispering words; I think them now and let them be tattooed on my forehead as punishment if I fail: After my success your family will, crying, lap the sweat out of our sumptuously invested shoes. My mentality will be more Swedish than their imaginable ideal. My photographic success will be more illuminated than their goddamn Christmas trees. The assets of our economy will grow higher than their goddamn Kaknäs Tower. Let us start the countdown to the day when Khemiri creates a familyesque Swedish superclan with the influence of Bonniers and the finances of Rockefeller.”
Pernilla woke and whispered with diamondish eyelashes:
“But … We can’t forget the people’s fight.”
No one has been more lovable to me than that bizarre woman, Kadir. I solemnly auction that we are going to share our common futures for all of the future!
Our New Year celebration was sparkled with all of Pernilla’s friends in a big house in the Skarpnäck neighborhood. There were woodish parquet floors and monstrous multitudes of alcohol. Pernilla’s friends were warmly inviting to me, they smiled me kindly, requested my view on politics, and praised their repeated tributes about the book The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. At the countdown of the strike of twelve, Pernilla dragged me aside, she whispered me words that I can’t write you, and we shared heavenly kisses accompanied by the heavenly explosions of artificial fires.2
In the dawning of the new year, Pernilla and I promenaded Stockholm’s hundreds of parks, lakes, and bridges. The snow softened itself down from the sky, the air smoked our mouths, and the chill was so cold that the interior hairs of one’s nose adhered themselves together when one breathed (an unusual but not uncomfortable emotion). The snow crunched our shoes, the sun was squintingly beautiful, and the water lay deeply iced. One day we observed the majority of children who threw their backs into the snow and kicked and twisted their bodies in wild spasms. Pernilla pointed the pattern of the snow and informed that they were making so-called angels. Then we mirrored each other’s eyes and without saying anything we said something—if you understand what I mean?
I am terminating here with hope for your soon response.
Abbas3
Stockholm, April 15, 1978
Greetings, Kadir!
Thank your finely formulated letter and your particular specification of how my interest on the loan has expanded this first half year. My Swedish life has now found its everyday. Pernilla and I share our permanent company, a little like you and me in Tabarka. Together we manifest for the expanded power of women and choir our critique of nuclear power, capitalism, apartheid, and fur industry. Together we pass evenings at cinemas and wander toward the metro enjoying the smells of wakened spring: carefully sprouting leaves, the food odors of the hot dog men, my beloved’s lavender soap. Do you remember how I named Sweden as “the land of odor- and colorlessness?” This is no longer adequate. Spring in Sweden smells and lives, people are dormanting from their hibernat
ion, they smile on the metro, and sometimes (but seldom) the neighbors return one’s greetings in the elevator. The warmth of spring modifies everything.
Parallel with Pernilla’s and my love progression I have devoted time to my photographic career. The premiere step was to localize an assistant job. I wandered my steps from studio to studio; I presented my portfolio from Tabarka and offered myself at a reduced or almost free cost. My success was not particularly abrupt. Frequent were the photographers who detailed that they unfortunately could not assist an assistant who does not cultivate the Swedish language. My arguments that the world of images does not automatically require linguistic exactness were ignored.
Luckily enough, one of Pernilla’s colleagues has introduced me to a Swedish-Finnish photographer by the name Raino. Raino is specialized in the delicate art that we call food photography. His eyelashes shine like white mammals above his reddened nose. His mustache is of yellowed walrus model and his drinking habits are unmoderate. The studio is very modern in comparison with Achraf’s primitive utensils, however. It is localized in the luxurious neighborhood of Flemingsberg, near Stockholm. I pass circa twenty hours per week in service to Raino, developing potatoes au gratin, warmly steaming Falukorv, and delicious pâtés. I am learning many special tricks. For example, do you know how one photographs the most delicate portrait of a cup of coffee? One fills the cup with soy sauce mixed with a few foaming drops of dish soap. Consequently one escapes the uglifying surface coating! Methods like these reinflate my fascination with the magic of photography. Which other expression has such a privileged relation to reality that it can grow one’s appetite for coffee at the sight of a cup of soy sauce?
When the customers of photo tasks are limited, I assist Raino with other services.4
The position with Raino strengthens my routine, but the economy offered me is nonexistent. The weight of the worth lies in the chance to be able to polish my own projects. Let me take the opportunity here to repeat my thankfulness for your generously delegated economy. Thanks to your loan my arrival in Sweden has not been honorless; I have not had to profit from Pernilla’s finances, and in addition I have invested myself a new system camera.
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