The Brother

by Joakim Zander

  She nods toward the papers George has pressed against his chest like a shield.

  “Seriously,” he whispers. “We can’t do this. Not here. Not now. This is not what it looks like, okay?”

  The corner of one eye jerks, a tick from stress or something else, something deeper. Fear.

  “So when?”

  “Give me until tomorrow, OK? Give me your number.”

  Yasmine just looks at him.

  “Are you kidding?” she says. “A time and a place. Early.”

  “OK, OK,” he says. “The stairs in front of the City Library at nine then.”

  “Don’t be late,” she says and finally lets go of the door. “Don’t forget I found you today. I can find you again.”

  And with that, the elevator heads down toward the dark foyer again.

  When she gets there, a short man in a tight, dark suit is waiting for the elevator. He’s probably in his sixties, with a bald head encircled by a garland of short hair. He’s somewhat slender, almost supple, like a gymnast, or martial artist. His eyes are cold and green, equally intense and indifferent, like a dragon.

  “Why you block elevator?” he says in English with a strong Slavic accent.

  “Sorry,” said Yasmine says, and looks away as she sweeps past him.

  Is that who Lööw is meeting? If so, she understands why Lööw’s eye was twitching.

  She’s relieved to step out into the summer morning outside. A black Mercedes is parked halfway up on the sidewalk. It looks as evil and indifferent as the man by the elevator. She notes that it has unusual license plates. Blue and with a different combination of letters and numbers than regular ones. DL012B. She pulls out her phone and writes them down. How the hell could this have something to do with Fadi? She feels her desperation growing.

  But maybe this is just a dead end.

  41

  London—Friday, August 21, 2015

  It’s almost ten-thirty by the time Klara climbs up the stairs to the entrance of the institute on Surrey Street. Her legs feel as heavy as her head. Images from yesterday flash through her mind: glass after glass in the pub while she waited outside what turned out to be Patrick’s house. Then the two men. Why had she been so sure they were following Patrick? They had appeared at a convenient time, definitely. But there wasn’t really anything to suggest they were following him. Nothing except paranoia and too many glasses of wine. Nothing except a shard of intuition that sits deep inside and doesn’t want to let go.

  Then flashes of Patrick’s pale face on the tracks. His lifeless, open, empty eyes. Flashes of the officer hinting she was drunk. She closes her eyes, filled with remorse and guilt. She had been drunk. Really drunk. Was that why Patrick was dead? Would she have done something else if she hadn’t drunk those last glasses of white wine?

  “No, no, no…” she whispers and pushes open the heavy door. “No, no, no!”

  On the landing outside Charlotte’s door, someone has set up a table with a small bouquet of lilies and a burning candle; the flame trembles slightly in the draft from the poorly insulated window. A card lies opened in front of the candle, and Klara can see that many of her colleagues have already written their condolences to Patrick’s family. She hesitates a moment, then goes over to the table and picks up the ordinary, blue ballpoint pen, but something ripples through her, and she feels unsteady. The image of Patrick on the tracks. She has to grab onto the table to keep from losing her balance.

  “Klara!” Charlotte says from behind her. “I suppose you heard the terrible news?”

  She turns around and sees Charlotte standing in the door of her office. She looks tired, hollow-eyed, with her big, curly hair not pinned up, but left down, floating around her like an aura.

  Klara just nods and remains completely silent. She wants to tell her about yesterday. About the computer and the men in leather jackets and Patrick on the tracks. But she remembers Charlotte’s voice at lunch when she mentioned Stirling Security and suddenly feels too afraid. She takes a step toward the wall for support, closing her eyes.

  “How are you doing, Klara?” Charlotte says.

  Her voice is close to her ear, and she feels a hand on her shoulder, Charlotte’s hair against her cheek. She turns her face away so Charlotte won’t smell the remnants of alcohol on her breath.

  “It’s OK,” she says quietly. “It’s fine.”

  She slowly opens her eyes.

  “It’s just so awful.”

  Charlotte nods, catches her eye.

  “Who would have believed it?” she says. “Maybe it’s always like that, but even though he was odd, he didn’t seem depressed.”

  “Why would he have been depressed?” she says and meets Charlotte’s eyes.

  They have the appearance of compassion. But underneath, Klara senses an icy abyss.

  “Klara,” Charlotte says and takes quiet hold of her arm. “The police told me that they found a suicide note printed out in his home.”

  “What do you mean ‘printed out’?”

  Charlotte shrugs.

  “What do I know? That was what they said.”

  “Printed out from a printer, or something?”

  “Yes, that’s what they said, but that’s not what’s important.”

  A cold wind suddenly blows through her, and she stiffens again.

  If Patrick didn’t use computers, why would he write his suicide note on one?

  “How awful it all sounds,” Charlotte continues. “We can’t let this distract us now. We fly to Stockholm tomorrow. The report is ready. That’s where our focus needs to be now. Everything else can be taken care of when we get back. Are we clear on that?”

  No! Klara wants to scream. We sure as hell are not clear! This is completely crazy!

  But she doesn’t. Instead she nods.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  *

  She waits on the creaking landing in front of Patrick’s office until she hears Charlotte shut the door to her office on the floor below. She has to know what he was doing in there. Why he took her computer. What Stirling Security is and why Charlotte is acting so strange. And above all, why he died.

  She takes a deep breath and presses down on the handle of the door to his office.

  To her great surprise, the door is unlocked and opens on creaking hinges. Slowly she opens the door. The blinds are down and the room is dim as usual. She takes a half step over the threshold and listens to make sure that no one is on their way up the stairs.

  When she’s satisfied she turns on the lights and turns to the whiteboard where Patrick drew his mind map. But the board is an empty, gleaming white under the lights.

  She stands directly in front of it. The whiteboard looks brand-new, not even a stain on it. She lets her eyes sweep across the desk, and notes that it too is completely empty. Not a notepad or paper. Not even a Post-it. On Tuesday, it had sagged under Patrick’s square, and obviously well-organized, piles of paper.

  When she turns toward the bookshelf, she sees it’s still filled with Patrick’s books on human rights. But the binders, which covered at least two shelves, are gone.

  She remembers reading that people who are about to commit suicide often arrange their affairs before they put their plan into action. That would be Charlotte’s explanation.

  But she’s sure this is not Patrick’s work.

  42

  Bergort—Sunday, August 9–Sunday, August 16, 2015

  I wait for the stores to open then go into the city to shoplift some jeans, T-shirts, new sneakers, and a Lakers cap. At the mall I grab a black cap with NY written on it, but I drop it, because thoughts of you suddenly flow through me. I think about how you, just like everyone else, must think I’m dead, and it makes me feel so sad and so guilty, but at the same time angry. And I don’t know what to do about it. In a way, I am dead, my body just a shell, uninhabited and hollow. As if my consciousness were weak, barely functioning, and only focused on one thing: my mission, all I have to live for now.


  And I stand in my new clothes every night, with my new, thin body, my shaved head and chin, around the corner from brother Dakhil’s apartment, where we brothers met almost every day, an eternity ago, in another life, another world, another body.

  I see them come and go. I see Dakhil and his bushy, red beard, brother Tasheem, brother Taimur. But not al-Amin.

  I don’t really know what I’m doing. Maybe I’m surveilling them, maybe I’m trying to find the right time to strike. Maybe I’m just building up my courage or trying to find my way to the bottom of my hatred. And when I do reach the bottom? When I’m done mapping out the movements of the traitors?

  What do I do then?

  All their talk. How we prayed and cried when Kobane was lost. How we cursed American bombs and Kurdish ruthlessness. How we rejoiced at the progress in al-Hasakah and in the strength of the warriors getting closer and closer to Aleppo.

  How proud they were when I finally got to go.

  “The worst is over now after Kobane,” they said. “The Kurds are strong, but in Hasakah it’s al-Assad men. And they’re tired. Inshallah, you will taste victory, brother.”

  All lies. All theater. All of it to destroy their own brothers.

  So when I’m done watching them? When I’ve found my courage again? What do I do then?

  Destroy them.

  *

  At night I sleep in a closet next to the garbage room in the basement of Mehdi’s house. It’s one of those spaces that someone always has a key to. The kind of place we used to drink in when we were kids or sleep in when we got kicked out or too fucked-up to go home. But Mehdi is a big deal around here now, he keeps an eye on the kids, and he’s the only one who has a key, so nobody bothers me when I’m lying on my mattress in the dark, wrapped in a plastic sleeping bag I shoplifted along with some white basketball shoes from a sports shop. Mehdi brings me leftovers, and sometimes we go to McDonald’s together, but not in Bergort, not in our neighborhood, somewhere else, where nobody recognizes me or the person I used to be.

  A few days pass by like that. Mehdi is free, and we drive down to a lake in a little, shitty Mazda he borrowed. It’s a warm day, and we’ve left the jetties and the small beach, left the kids and the noise, and gone up into a woodsy area barefoot, so pine needles cut into the soles of our feet. We’re sitting on a small ledge, on a stone next to a pit where we used to grill.

  “Damn, do you remember?” Mehdi says. “This was where you made out with Soledad!”

  He laughs and slaps his thighs.

  “Damn, I swear brother, she was not much to look at! But you were so fucking horny! Like an animal! A fucking rabbit, len!”

  I can’t help but smile too. It’s been such a long time. How old were we then? Thirteen?

  “Khalas!” I say. “Stop it, she was hot, brother.”

  Mehdi just shakes his head. The laughter dies out, and we sit silently in the heat for a while. Then he turns to me.

  “Do you remember I said we could help each other out?” he says.

  I look up at him, squinting against the sun, nodding.

  “Sure,” I say. “Anything, brush. I wouldn’t be here without you.”

  Mehdi moves a little closer. Squats down next to me, so he can whisper.

  “You know there’s something going down in Bergort, ey? You’ve seen it, right? The symbol sprayed all over the place? You can feel it in the air, right?”

  The sun feels warm and easy on my face, and I sink deeper into the pit, half lying against the stones and pine needles. Of course, now when he says it, I have seen those things sprayed all over the concrete, and I’ve seen something in the eyes of the kids, heard them whispering and crackling when I’ve been on my way to the basement in the evenings. At the same time, I’m so focused on my own world that I haven’t cared, just noticed it, nothing more.

  “Sure,” I say. “I can see something’s on its way, no doubt.”

  Mehdi nods eagerly.

  “Good, good,” he says. “You know, it happens sometimes. Something happens. The police beat up some dude, or somebody dies. And all of Bergort goes crazy, right? We’ve been a part of it, right, brother?”

  I nod and remember a time, maybe five years ago, when it was a hot summer and Bergort exploded for a couple of nights. The police came with their fucking shields and batons and shit, but they didn’t have a chance, we were like mercury and water, just found other channels to flow through all the time. But I don’t remember now why, don’t remember how it started or ended.

  “But this time it’s different,” Mehdi continues. “This time it’s planned. Do you understand? We’re getting help from some people who know about this shit, who can help us start a fucking war. We’re starting with this, with the symbols. It’s psychological, brother, we’re creating an atmosphere of fear, right?”

  I shrug.

  “If you say so, len.”

  “And then it’s gonna happen. One hundred percent, brother! Not just us, other suburbs, other neighborhoods, too. A fucking war! And you can help us, ghost! You only go out at night. So you can tag the symbol when you do, right?”

  I remember how it felt to go off like that. Remember how intoxicating it was. The thought of fighting back with my brothers. Paying them back for every fucking baton blow or stranglehold, for every night in jail, every meaningless evening spent in the backseat of a police van. To finally make the pigs run, make them confused and defensive. The fucking power in that! Showing them the power in Bergort.

  But I don’t feel any of that now. Just emptiness. Just a meaninglessness that vibrates and bends the pines over me, forcing away the sunlight and threatening with darkness. What’s a few stones thrown at the cops, when our brothers are dying by the thousands? A few cars burned when brothers are being blown to pieces by drones? It’s nothing—less than nothing. But I owe Mehdi this. After everything, he was still there for me, so I force myself to smile.

  “OK, brother,” I say. “I can spray those for you, no problem.”

  *

  It’s getting dark by the time we head back to Bergort, and Mehdi keeps harping on about the fucking riot, how huge it’s going to be. He talks about how they’re gonna cover all of Bergort with a symbol he shows me: a fist inside a star. How everyone will be terrified by what’s going down, all of it done with stealth, only a few shunos will know. And he gives me some stencils with the symbol on them and a few cans of spray paint.

  When we get back to Bergort, it’s dark and the streetlamps shine pale and yellow in all that gray. I ask Mehdi to drop me off at my old house, and he looks surprised when I jump out with my heavy nylon bag.

  “What the hell you gonna do here, brother? I thought you were in hiding?”

  “They’re sleeping,” I say, and glance up toward the dark windows.

  “What’s in the bag? You drag it around like a fucking donkey. Must be important?”

  I hesitate a moment, but I can’t resist it. Can’t resist the urge to show it to Mehdi. To show him how fucking serious this is. So I put the bag on the passenger seat and gently pull the zipper. He bends over and his eyes widen until I think they’ll fall out of his face.

  “What the fuck, brother?” he says. “What the fuck?”

  “I’m not playing around,” I say, lifting up the gun, which is cold and heavy in my hand. “It’s an eye for an eye, brother. The people who deceived me are gonna pay.”

  He nods seriously as I push one gun down into my pants and zip up the bag.

  “I’m gonna hide them here,” I say. “There’s no safer place. If you want, I can teach you to shoot a gun?”

  *

  The apartment is dark and quiet—they go to bed early if they’re not working. The light blue nylon bag is heavy and rubs against my shoulder as I creep through the hall. The stale air fills my lungs. It’s been several months since the last time I was here. That was another life.

  I could have hidden the weapons in the woods, like we used to hide all our shit back in the day. Could h
ave dug a hole and covered it with pine needles and leaves. They would have been safe there, maybe even safer.

  What is it that draws me here? Is there some security in the past? Or is it the vague hope that a door will crack open? That a light will turn on and muted steps will come from the bedroom? Whispering voices that will ask me what I’m doing here, what I have in the bag? A confrontation that would force me to see myself through their eyes.

  I stand still in the hall and listen. Maybe that would have been enough. Maybe it would have been enough with a ray of light, muffled footsteps, a questioning voice. Maybe that would have been enough to stop me from doing what I have to do.

  Our old room looks exactly like it did when I left it, only cleaner. Silently I pull out my old mattress and flatten the bag’s contents, insert it into the spot under the bed where I hid so much in the old days. But this will be the last time.

  On the way out I stop. I stand frozen, the hair on my neck standing up. I could swear I heard a sound from the other side of the living room. Could swear something creaked.

  Slowly I turn around. The living room is dark, almost black inside the constantly drawn curtains. The door to their bedroom closed. I stretch and listen again. Wasn’t the door open a crack before? I stand completely still, unsure of what to do, my heart pounding. But I don’t hear anything else. Just the hum of a fan somewhere below, deep in some basement. I stand like that until I get a cramp and gently turn around, creeping toward the door and back out into the warm gray evening.

  On the bicycle path outside, I stop, filled with equal parts relief and disappointment. No one saw me. The plan is intact. This is what my life is now, what I live for, what I live with.

  43

  Bergort—Friday, August 21, 2015

  The afternoon sun is high. The sky is blue and empty above the ten burned-out cars dotting the parking lot. Shards of glass cover the asphalt, and the windows of the Syrian’s store are smashed in. He’s standing out there with a broom in hand, his eyes black and angry, his lips mumbling: “Goddamn kids. Stupid fucking kids.”