I pressed my hands to my face for a moment. The air between my fingers smelled of hibiscus flowers; on the basis of the smell you could have thought you were in paradise.
Bahdoon has not touched his Coca-Cola. He picks up the bottle only when I pass it to him, draining it in one gulp, as if he were afraid I would take it away. When the bottle is empty, I give him the second. He drinks it slowly and appreciatively as if he could find in the drink something new, tastes and nuances typical of this area, this year, whose discernment demands a trained palate.
‘I began to make up stories about my brother,’ I say quietly. ‘I couldn’t stand the thought that other people thought he was strange.’
‘What kind?’ Bahdoon asks, setting the half-empty bottle down on the tray for a moment, but holding on to its neck.
‘Stories where he was a hero. I said that he was unusually intelligent, that he coded computer programs and talked about them on the internet with American professors. And that he practised football in secret and could score goals like Zlatan.’
Bahdoon laughed.
‘I told the same sorts of stories about myself.’
‘You?’
‘Yes. I was always hopeless at football. Here all the boys can play.’
‘It was the same at our school. It felt as if everyone but my brother was good at it.’
‘I prayed for years to have an eye for the ball,’ says Bahdoon, smiling. ‘Although it didn’t even really interest me. I dreamed that I could one day become a researcher, spending my whole life working on one thing.’
I look more closely at Bahdoon. The lamp hanging from the pitched roof of my quarters casts sharp shadows on his face; only now do I notice the wrinkles radiating from the corners of his eyes, still faint like the channel of a river that dried up years ago. He can, after all, not be very many years younger than me; he just looks astonishingly innocent, a boy whom one would want to be able to protect.
‘What else did you dream about?’
‘That I would be able to leave,’ Bahdoon says. ‘It is still my greatest dream.’ His voice breaks. I bite my lip.
‘That was also my greatest dream.’ Fortunately I don’t say so aloud.
To leave. That was my greatest dream; it still is. I want to go away and stay away. I want to be far away from home. I want to live constantly changing places, like a nomad, to leave as soon as the place begins to feel too familiar, the people too beloved. I want to go forward without looking back, to let my senses fill with the wonder of arriving in a new place, the new smells, the air humidity, the warmth or bone-chilling wind that you encounter when the door of the train or plane opens, when you catch the first glimpse of buildings and step into a city without knowing any of the things that can be found there.
For years I felt as though I were suffocating at home. I was ashamed of my mother, who bought her clothes at flea markets and made vegetarian food that none of my friends wanted to eat. I was angry with my father, who designed parks and swimming places for African children but was never there for school celebrations. I was resentful of Aslak, who was sinking ever deeper into his own world, and at home I could not be what I wanted, an ordinary girl who blended in with the crowd.
In sixth form I realised it was possible to go away. I met a boy who thought my laugh was too noisy and my gaze too deep, whose touch tickled me and did not arouse me at all. I couldn’t leave the boy immediately, though, because I was fascinated by his mother. The mother had beautiful clothes and a reticent smile. She worked at a private medical centre, but had travelled the world as a doctor before she was married, vaccin-ating children in African and Asian villages and living in places where she could only move accompanied by a security guard.
I was fascinated by the photographs she showed me of herself in bone-dry villages, surrounded by goats, sheep and happily grinning children.
Life can also be like that, I thought, and I decided to live with that idea. It is possible to go away and begin your own life somewhere where no one knows you. I stopped drinking, took up running and yoga, excelled in my matriculation exams and started studying medicine the following autumn.
I got away. I can always leave when I want to. I travel to countries where everyone wants to get away, but few of those who leave get to their destination. I am either working or a tourist, wearing a collared shirt and a helmet, or I travel with a rucksack on my back wearing the kind of floaty skirt tourists buy in the local markets. I am often despondent or unhappy, but I am only seldom in danger and even then I am surrounded by an entire system that will ensure my safety. If I am ill, I can go home. If the country is threatened by natural disaster or conflict, I can go home. I have insurance that ensures that a helicopter will take me to a well-equipped hospital from anywhere in the world; my passport will allow me to cross all borders, back and forth; I have a savings account and a home which I can leave without checking the surroundings and to which it is always possible to return.
I close my eyes. Into my mind slip images of young people, little girls trapped in the quietness of small towns and boys who dance in front of the mirror, and the girls and boys of entirely different small towns, dark hair and eyes like coals, children wearing clothes collected from Western recycling projects, how they all dream of leaving, how all those dreams could rise simultaneously into the air, making the wind that blows across borders thick and heavy.
‘Tell me more about your brother,’ Bahdoon says. I narrow my eyes, even though it is dark, rubbing my left palm with the thumb of my right hand, and return to a real, completely dreamlike moment.
‘When we were little, we almost always slept side by side. If one of us woke up with a nightmare or to the sound of Mum and Dad arguing, we squeezed each other by the hand. I thought we would always be together.’
The crickets chirp around us. The sky is cloudless and the constellation of the Pleiades bright.
‘My father and my grandfather looked at the stars to determine the beginning of the growing season,’ says Bahdoon.
‘And then there weren’t any proper growing seasons any longer,’ I say, and he looks me in the eye, the outlines of my own face reflected in his eyes.
‘Yes. Why are you afraid something is happening to your brother?’
Bahdoon has drained the second bottle too. Slices of mango in the shape of fishing boats stand in a row on the tray; in the ripe flesh the fibres are clearly visible. I think of the velvet-sweet fruit between my teeth. I cannot imagine when I will next be able to eat.
‘At this moment in Finland someone is shooting people from a rooftop.’
‘Has he killed many people?’
‘I don’t know. The internet isn’t working.’
‘You’re afraid your brother is there?’
‘I’m afraid he’s the gunman.’
‘Your brother?’
‘Whenever something like this happens, the first person I think of is him.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s something about him . . . there’s been something like that about him for a long time. As if he’s shut himself off completely from other people. We text sometimes. And then, in some texts, he’s said things that frighten me.’
Bahdoon takes a slice of mango and sucks the flesh from the skin. I offer the tray to encourage him to take more. I hope he will feel he can eat his fill and go when he wants to.
‘My best friend said everything straight out,’ Bahdoon says. ‘He waited for years to get into the suicide brigade. It was his dream. He thought it was the purest thing possible. To kill people for a good cause.’
Something touches my neck. I wave my hand. A large, flying cockroach flies off. It has transparent wings and a body covered by a hard shell that drips with slime when you hit it.
‘It is pure to kill people for a good cause. My brother wrote in the same way. Pure.’
‘What was the cause?’
‘What?’
‘The good cause. The thing you could kill for.’
&nbs
p; I look for one of Aslak’s messages. I read it aloud to Bahdoon, translating the most important parts into Somali.
‘I am drowning in this shit. Everything is polluted. The whole of Western culture is just one hedonistic performance. The civilisation we’re so proud of died a long time ago. Our only religion is the belief that we have the right to everything we want. The only human right is the human’s right to consume. That right destroys everything.’
Bahdoon makes a flower out of the mango skin. The murmur of French voices from the other side of the yard grows gradually louder. I can make out Gerard’s voice, the slightly overenthusiastic, tinkling laugh he uses in big groups. Bahdoon takes a piece of chocolate from the tray, breaks it in half and eats. He is silent for such a long time that I smooth my skirt and rise. My thigh muscles have gone numb and the wind is too cool. I begin to clear the dishes, avoiding making too much sound.
‘My friend talked about the same thing,’ Bahdoon says quietly. ‘That Western culture is all of that. Hedonism. Sick consumption. Polluted.’
‘And in his opinion it was pure to try to destroy everything associated with it?
‘That’s what he said. But I don’t believe that was really the issue.’
‘What, then?’
‘The fact that he wanted to escape.’
‘Like all of us,’ I said, so quietly that Bahdoon doesn’t necessarily hear me. More loudly, I say: ‘Thank you for the company.’
‘Likewise,’ Bahdoon answers. ‘And for the food.’
Bahdoon disappears behind the high sage bushes. The internet is working again. I set the tray back down on the step and search for the Finnish news.
31
Nothing irrevocable has happened yet.’
He stops shooting. For a moment. To get time to think. It already seems like a mistake. His thoughts press so hard that his head feels heavy. The lightness he felt a moment ago is gone; his limbs are heavy and stiff, hard to move.
This may end badly, he thinks, feeling the fine spider feet of panic beneath his skin. The police have cordoned off the area. He has been surrounded; inside the ring, besides the police, there are only people lying on the ground, wounded or dead; he is not sure whether he has killed any of them.
The police have delivered an old-fashioned phone to him using a drone. The drone is almost the same as the toy he used to play with as a child with his big sister and his father. It rose quietly buzzing through the air; blue lights flashed on the rotor blades. For a moment he was a little boy again, enchanted by the silver-sided toy that was coming towards him.
He has read about this kind of situation. He has wolfed down thrillers and news reports, the internet’s mass-murder websites’ detailed explanations of how the police act in this kind of situation, what kind of psychological method they use in their conversations with the gunman, how snipers try to ensure that nothing fateful will happen. He imagines the policeman who will talk to him sitting in a van surrounded by a negotiating group, with the officer directing the situation stationed opposite in a parked car.
‘Nothing irrevocable has happened yet.’ It is the right sort of phrase, calming and hopeful with regard to the situation; the intention is to get him to participate in a dialogue, to show that the police are on his side, to show that it is possible for him to surrender with honour.
He squeezes the phone in his hands. His breathing is heavy; words will not come. The city is quiet. The thick fog that has persisted for some days hides the empty streets and buildings; only the blue lights of the police cars and ambulances glow through it. The streets have been closed and the trams and cars directed to more distant roads; the restaurants, shops, hotels, cinemas and railway station emptied. Only in the restaurant on the top floor of the department store is there movement. He imagines how somewhere in that restaurant, behind the tinted windows, a police marksman is standing, taking aim at him.
On the asphalt lie four people, each of whom he has shot. A woman his mother’s age and another, much older. A man in a fancy suit and a woman whose breast the man was caressing as they walked. Not one bullet to the head, although that is where he was aiming. Shoulder, side, stomach, leg.
He wanted to join the army, but was not accepted; he was not the kind of material that was needed to protect the country. The wounded people are still alive, or so he believes. His aim was not accurate enough; it seems like a humiliation. This was supposed to be done cleanly and quickly, but the wounded are a job half done, a mess he can’t clean up, a trail that reveals everything about him.
He also aimed at a young mother, holding the hand of a small child who was walking uncertainly. He did not press the trigger. He could not go on.
He sees massive vehicles driving along the empty street. They look strange, as if from another world. Perhaps nothing that is happening is real after all. The army tanks approach him.
Is this the beginning of war? he thinks, and the thought is a flame, hot and mesmerising.
Are they all at war against me?
32
The tanks roll forward to protect the doctors, the nurses and the police. He cannot do anything. He is powerless, surrounded, humiliated.
The ambulance drives through the police cordon. The people he has shot are lifted onto stretchers. Siren howling, the ambulance drives through the deserted city. He wonders why the driver is sounding the siren even though the streets are empty. He hopes the people will survive. He hopes they will die. He hopes he himself will die soon, or just disappear.
His head hurts. Everything is foggy and confused; he would like to jump head first off the roof, to fall to the asphalt and for everything to be over.
He eases the weapon into his hand. He feels the marksman’s gaze, the hands lifting the weapon, the soldiers in the tanks, the police, everyone, become alert around him. They are waiting to see what he will do next. He has no idea what to do. The butt of the rifle is smooth and cool against his hand. The city is beautiful in a new way, the police cars’ lights glowing as if someone has put them there to create atmosphere. His clothes are wet and his heavy breathing hurts his chest. He is cold and he is hungry.
As children, when Dad and Mum argued, he and his sister made a den under the covers and he climbed into his sister’s lap. They had a torch and his sister read him a story; he felt the warmth of his sister’s breath on his neck and thought he could spend his whole life like this, in a dark burrow under the soft, sweet-smelling covers.
He wants to go under those covers now. Into a small space where the air is warm from breathing, with no room for anyone but him and his sister. His sister’s strong hand would smooth the nightmares away.
He wants to take everything back and walk back along the days, the weeks, the months and the years, to return to a time when everything was just beginning and no one expected anything from him. He wants his sister to have a soft nightdress and a book that they both love. He wants to be small and curl up in his sister’s arms.
33
We can’t afford to give up hope.’
That is what his mother said in the lectures she gave for students, those incomprehensibly optimistic-looking young people. Years ago he often went and listened to his mother’s lectures. The things his mother talked about allowed him to forget for a moment the alienation he felt among people.
When he listened to his mother and watched the students enthusiastically taking notes on their computers, it felt as if someone had pulled back a camera from a close-up to take in the whole world. Nowhere, nowhere at all, was he an issue. It was a perfectly liberating thought. The issue was something bigger, something much more important than what he felt.
The world may be headed for destruction, he thought, his mind full of horror and burning zeal. How many possibilities it opened up, how much more merciful it was. A whole world does not need any one person on its side; everyone is needed to save it from destruction.
Me too, he thought then. It is possible that this world needs me too.
In addition
to his mother’s lectures, he began to read other things. He read long reports which described what would become of the world if climate change continued. He read about businesses that prospected for more oil in the most fragile corners of the globe, even though they already had enough fossil fuels to destroy the entire world. He read about deserted villages and cities ravaged by floods, people who left their homes and never found a place to sleep in peace. He read about felled rainforests and coral reefs that were in danger of disappearing completely. He read about the Great Pacific garbage patch, which may be twice the size of the United States.
In reading, he forgot himself. All his attention was directed at the environment: nature, which was wild and stupefyingly functional, and at the same time fragile and in danger of destruction. He thought of the tortoises floating in oceans that had existed long before people, their steady swimming and their slowly turning heads. The fact that human activity threatened the existence of such creatures made him feel pure hatred towards the whole of humanity.
All of this brought him closer to his mother. He was there when his mother returned home after speaking to members of parliament about how important it was to limit fossil fuel emissions with stricter legislation. His mother’s mouth was pursed tight and there was a broken blood vessel in her eye; she put her coat and shoes away with the tenseness of a leopard preparing to leap, poured herself a glass of wine and said to his father: ‘I felt like throwing the whole lot of them out of the room. Grown-up people. Our decision makers. The elite of society. Sitting there and pissing around with each other while I tried to explain how they could save the world as even a semi-tolerable place for their own children. Clowns! Asking stupid questions and harping on about so-called facts, every one of which is wrong. Praising the achievements of their own party and complaining about the faults of others as if there were an election coming!’
When Time Runs Out Page 11