Montecore

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  Your father thought: “My son has lost his mental balance. He is crazy. He has been captured in the fog of role-playing.” He remained sitting in the storeroom, with an accelerating desperation and a growing need to pee. Out there you played pumping hip-hop music and howled your shouts where you constantly named each other “ey bro” or “ey blatte” as though they were delicious compliments. Then the music was stopped. It turned into noises of bags and your voice, which again, for the third time, compared your father’s existence with that of an “Uncle Tom.”

  Then your father experienced a rage that he had not known since his youth. It was a fury that collectioned all the years of degradation, all the years of invisible striving and struggling and providing for his family that was now flushed into the drain by a crazy son who hallucinated forth invisible forms that he called “his army” and cyclically shouted:

  “Let’s jet, bros! It’ll be a blatte revolution with no mercy! Maximum fat caps up their asses.”

  And I remember that night because the sky is cinematically starry clear and we’ve puffed zut and sipped near beer and as usual I was the evening’s game master, and as usual it was a wild success. We left Dungeons & Dragons a long time ago, now it’s a new time new battles and instead of Miss Super Zulu and MC Mustachio everyone is themselves. Almost. With a little extra strength and increased courage and maximum talent for handling paintbrushes at night. We’re ready for the next task, it’s black sky and autumn night, cold wind in frozen-stiff gloves, paint cans in plastic bags, and just-bought wide brushes.

  • • •

  The door was locked, your shouts died away, the studio was left in silence. Your father crept out from his hiding place and emptied his bladder in the bathroom with relief. Then he left the dark of the premises and followed your four silhouettes toward the commuter train station. He had gotten an overdose of something. He was pushed over a line. Perhaps it was your repeated insultations that ached him. Perhaps those words turned on his innermost fear? (For certainly it is the truest insultations that ache us the most?)

  From the footbridge, Abbas saw how you painted the nocturnally deserted train station with a multitude of light blue words. Quick as rats you wrote idiocies like BLATTE 4 LIFE and FUCK WAR on the platform floor and the glass panes of the waiting room. Your father thought satirically: “Wow, this will no doubt have a broad political effect.” At the same moment, he noticed his dangling camera around his neck. This was no planned intention. It was just hanging there. And without knowing why he exposed the lens and began to shoot.

  Your father followed your steps all night. He saw how you painted your idiotic letters on the white triangles of Sergels Torg, random electrical boxes, the chess squares at Kungsträdgården. He saw how you sullied the statue of Charles XII with light blue color and how Patrik wrote BLATTE POWER on some nearby steps. He saw how you spelled on the bridge that leads over to Gamla Stan. He saw how you were seconds from being discovered at the palace, how you painted your letters on the antique palace wall, hid the brushes, and half-ran whistling to Slussen when the patrol guard came stamping. Your father’s camera documented everything.

  That night we stamp the city with our words. Melinda, Imran, Patrik, and I. We cover everything in our colors, we leave our mark. I remember the excitement that pounds in my chest, my mouth steamed by the autumn air, the hoodie’s neck warmth, the smell of paint, paint-sticky brushes, my worn-out right arm, steam breath in the face-shielding scarf.

  After a few hours we’re almost done and the paint starts to run out. There’s just one attack point left, absolutely the most risky one. But what do you say, maybe this is enough? Melinda adjusts the comb in her hair and stares at us. She has a little drop of blue paint on her chin, and at that moment she’s the most beautiful in the world because she’s standing there in the yellow streetlight and yelling: If you want to give up, fine, do it, I’m going to keep going.

  Of course we keep going. All in a quartet down toward the skinheads’ helicopter platform. The giggling is long gone. Imran’s Adam’s apple goes up and down, Patrik checks over his shoulder, the cans clang, and taxis are watching. Melinda goes first, the bag paint-flecked with light blue, her furiously hopping comb that glitters in the cold tunnel light.

  Then keep watch in the dark on the other side and there’s the starry sky and there’s the lapping water and there’s the rocking helicopter platform and traces of the skinheads. Empty beer cans, fluttering Systembolaget bags, racist graffiti. The silhouette of Riddarholmen towers to the right and you can hear music from a distant party. But we are alone. No one there. Melinda’s hissing cry: Go! and with the clumsiest glove fingers pry open dented paint lids; Patrik and I start while Melinda and Imran keep watch in different directions. The water laps and sweat dampens my upper lip when I dip the brush in the soon-empty can and start crossing out all the Nazi signs. Then painting letters that run tearlike over the concrete wall, words that shine sharply and they will sit there for always and they’re written like in a trance and I barely remember what I write, just words upon words upon words and at this point all the fear disappears because it’s just me and the paint and the eternal feeling of being permanent. And obviously it would be cooler to claim that I was used to doing real tags and didn’t write in a style that Melinda and Imran laughed at and called old lady writing. And obviously it would be cooler if we had fat caps and real spray cans and stood under a starry clear Compton sky and sprayed multicolored graffiti with starry shine and perfect shadowing on our lowriders. But there’s also something beautiful in dirtying the skinheads’ favorite place with big brushes and Grandma’s leftover light blue garage paint.

  Soon we change position, a nighttime commuter train passes, electric cables spark. Patrik watches the tunnel, I watch the dock, all clear: Go! I listen for boot stomps and heil shouts, I listen for that jumpy sequence of tones that comes from police walkie-talkies and that always makes me think of R2-D2 in Star Wars. But I don’t hear anything more than the lapping of the water and distant bass lines from the party. Melinda’s letters shine more clearly than mine, SCREW KSS! and Imran writes, FUCK WAR’S MOTHER! and then the not really equally badass BERT = DIRT!

  Then suddenly you hear steps. Were they steps? I try to squint myself through the compact darkness. Is it a lost dog owner or a drunk or maybe ten or twelve skinheads who’ve been lying in ambush? Then suddenly I’m blinded by a flash. What the hell was that? yells Melinda and Imran drops the brush and Patrik yells: It’s the train! But everyone realizes that the tracks are lying silently deserted and Melinda starts to get paranoid, looks toward the dock: Is there someone there or what? And I crouch down, am about to say no when there’s another flash, one flash, two, three: There’s someone taking pictures! and we tear down into the tunnel and we pull our scarves over our faces way too late as an army of hard-soled skinheads pant at our necks and shout racist slogans behind our backs.

  We have just come out of the tunnel when the car motor growls itself up behind us. We slow down our steps and try to walk calmly, no one hurries until the world suddenly turns blue and someone’s called the cops and in one second we cut into the alleys of Gamla Stan and it’s forced breaths and shifted motor, walkie-talkie sounds and loudspeaker voices, blinking blue lights and Melinda who shouts: Drop the cans! even though they’re still sitting over at the helicopter platform. We rush through alleys, past a café, cobblestones, into a backyard, catch our breath, watching from the shelter of a rainspout. Waiting them out. Are you with me? Right when we think we’ve made it, in the middle of that laugh that’s always at its biggest when you’ve been close to being caught but succeeded in tricking the pigs at the last second, they’re there again and now there are two cars and we run as a quartet, Imran just a few steps after, hunted by sirens and accelerating sounds, steps echoing between the narrow houses, clattering up until we’re caught in a dead end and it’s a cinematic ending, the loudspeaker voice in the shadows that shouts STOP! and we stop, out of breath we stand t
here caught with blinding blue light in our faces.

  • • •

  Write me … How did you dare, three thin teenagers (and one gigantically fat), to positionate yourselves at the helicopter platform? Did you not realize the risk? Your father chose to use his flash with intention. To teach you a lesson. And he enjoyed the view of your bodies which suddenly became trembling hares that rushed back into the tunnel of Gamla Stan.

  But you must believe me about one thing. It was not your father who called the police. That he corresponded his photographs to the police is another matter. He did it in a haze of revenge. He did it in a betrayed temperament. He did it for YOUR future care. He was very careful not to include the photos where you were documented with brushes. Only Patrik, Melinda, and Imran were exposed. And these are three people who are not worth your escort anyway. These are three who should know better than to encourage my son’s confused imagination! If they try to cultivate seeds of outsiderness in my son’s head, this is the price one must pay! (These were your father’s words.)

  And this is the last fall we have left together, because Patrik, Imran, and Melinda’s sentences come down in the spring, and they’re harsher than expected. Maybe because we tried to run. Maybe because they discovered our tracks all the way from the helicopter platform to the palace to the statue to the studio. Maybe because we refused to confess to the very end (despite the paint flecks on shoes, hands, and jacket arms). Maybe because of the series of photos that someone gave to the police—the photos that documented everything from the train platform to the helicopter platform in blurry photos as though from a crying lens. Presumably it was the photo series, because photographs don’t lie, as a judge says and smacks his mouth and fixes his eyes on Melinda, who’s sitting thin-shouldered on an adult chair and she looks at her sniffling mom and her bodyguarding sisters and her Afro is combed down neatly and her green gold chain is hanging hidden under her Singapore shirt and her hand has an almost-washed-off BFL tattoo and her voice almost disappears in the courtroom when she takes the blame for all my letters without blinking and says: Of course I’m the one who wrote that all racists can fuck their mothers of course I’m the one who wrote FUCK THE FIVE-O and of course I’m the one who wrote that weird stuff on the far side that one with the kind of strange writing that I can’t even explain what it means.

  Dads stand strong.

  I barely remember the final scene. I think it’s blurry Moms who unscrew the padlock on Dads’ mémoire, Dads who have returned to Sweden, Dads who are back to being a gate guard, notice has been given on the studio, and Dads are sleeping on the sofa while waiting for the divorce to go through. What else do I remember? Moms’ gasping sounds? Moms’ short moans?

  Moms are standing there with the envelope, and it’s overstuffed with negatives and out falls proof of things Dads have stubbornly denied. Do you believe it yourself? That I was unfaithful? Or that I would follow my own son and then try to get his friends arrested? Never!

  But the negatives are lying there, and some of them depict faceless bodies and others depict an opposite world of nighttime colors where my blue panther back is painting a train platform. Melinda and Imran are painting Sergels Torg, Patrik writes BLATTE POWER on some steps, and all four silhouettes are standing in a row and coloring the wall of the Swedish palace.

  Moms display their perpetual uprightness. Moms don’t let in the tiniest compromise. Little brothers are sent down to the cellar to get Dads’ suitcases, Moms get the orange kitchen scissors and start packing.

  When Dads come home from SL that night, the bags are ready in the halls, filled with ties, socks, underwear, shirts, pants, and T-shirts—all carefully punctured with at least one or two scissor holes.

  And I remember how Dads just stand there in the hall in his SL jacket with the evening paper in his right hand and his beret at an angle. Dads looks at Moms and looks at sons and at first he seems to think it’s all a joke because he laughs nervously. You can’t be this angry about a little white lie and some mistakes? Who hasn’t done things they regret? Dads untie shoes and Moms roar with a mirror-cracking voice and little brothers start to cry and Dads try to explain, try to find excuses, try to say I did it for the good of our son and those women were a long time ago and meant nothing. But Moms’ tears are as heavy as surprise rain on picnics on sand dunes and her cheeks as tight as when she saw Bert Karlsson give the victory sign and Dads try to say sorry in a bunch of different languages and layer French declarations of love on Arabic nicknames on Swedish forgive me’s but Moms won’t let herself be calmed in any language and when Dads try to touch Moms’ cheek she steps to the side and shoves him toward the door and her cheeks are so red that her forehead shines white and Dads suddenly change voices and say: I refuse. You don’t refuse at all. Dads look at me and I at him, our eyes meet, we stare at each other’s pupils but I don’t give up, not this time, because nothing ever comes between Moms and sons.

  Finally Dads tie his shoes, pick up the suitcases, and walk toward the balcony walkway. Little brothers are crying even louder and Velcroing themselves to Dads’ legs and Dads are biting lower lip and Moms are crouching with her hands like pitchforks in her hair. I wave Dads’ farewell with words that I will never forget and that I want to but can’t include in the book.

  Oh? You may certainly exclude things, but your father may not? Here shall be injected exactly what you said because this is a vital phrase for your long silence. You yelled your father’s adieu with the words:

  • • •

  When your father returned from Sweden I barely recognized his exterior. His hair was silvered and in certain places his hairstyle resembled a cue ball. His eye bags were swollen and he was limping from a foot sprain he happened to get in the airport bar of the layover in Frankfurt.

  “Well, how did your reunion with your family happen?” I wondered with concern.

  “Oh, it happened well. My wife was sorry and wanted to have me back as a spouse. And my son and I are the best of friends.”

  “So … what are you doing here again?”

  Your father compressed his lips.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “But another time?”

  “Another time.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Your father settled himself permanently in Tabarka. He took over Achraf’s old atelier, modernized it, and offered tourists the chance to be photographed with their heads stuck into Arabic milieu scenery. There was the desert scene where one became a dromedary driver, the harem scene where one became a fat sultan, the Kaaba scene where one became a Muslim on a pilgrimage.

  Abbas bore a constant longing for his family, for the delicious tap water of Sweden, for bridges’ views in sun layings, for the summery odor of lilacs. But to live isolated in that country where he gave his all was to him impossible. He had transformed his name, he had curved his tongue to perfection the Swedish language. He had even named his son Jonas instead of Younes! What more could be expected? For all that, Sweden was the country where he was still seen as a constant outsider.

  I must admit that during the following years he still considered your betrayal the most devastating. Late at night when we shared our company over a whiskey he would say this about you:

  “What right does that snake have to say that I have betrayed my roots? What does that confused damn idiot know about roots? What does he know about fighting? He spends his constant time in the phase of confusion. Because what else could one call a person who is born in Sweden of a Swedish mother and still spends his time in the company of idiotic immigrants, eagerly proclaiming the fight against racists as his goal? What else can one call a person who, with intention, has an accent in the language he himself was raised with? My son is a sad figure who lacks culture. He is not Swedish, he is not Tunisian, he is NOTHING. He is a constant cavity who varies himself by his context like a full-fledged chameleon.”

  (Excuse me, Jonas, but
I must write you your father’s true words.) I responsed:

  “But … aren’t you too?”

  “Yes! But for me it is a proud prestige. I am a free cosmopolitan! But for my son this is a shame.”

  During the following years I did my diplomat. I tried to convince your entirely too proud father not to stifle his relation with his sons. Call them! Correspond them your begun but never terminated letter! Your father only refused my propositions. His pride blockaded him. And so you know: I was the one who indicated to your father that he should send those postcards to your little brothers in the fall of 1997. It was my fault. Sorry! I thought it might be good if your father let out a bit of furious steam and therefore we formulated the text of the cards in an alcoholic intoxication. Your father already regretted this the next day. But as usual his prestige blockaded him from telephoning you with an apology.

  And you remember that day because soon it’s double little brothers’ birthdays and you’ve started high school and you come home from school at lunch and it’s you and your school friend Homan who are going to watch last night’s Yo! MTV Raps and your home is his so you kick off your shoes in the hall and Homan rewinds the video while you look through the mail. The absolute worst is your second-long joy when you see the postcards and the motifs from Tabarka and the Tunisian stamps, the joy of seeing Dads’ classically beautiful handwriting with the specially bent numerals in the zip code. And although you have the feeling you’re going to regret it, you read the text on the two postcards that have been sent to your two little brothers and although you know it’s going to leave traces that will never be rubbed out you read the phrases, which are exactly identical on both postcards: