They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  “Where are their own children? Are they blowing themselves up to get to paradise?” he said—West African, sinewy but broad shouldered, wearing a small crocheted cap called a kufi on his head. “No. They’re studying in England, in the United States,” he looked at us, one by one, allowing the thought to sink in. “As our young people die.”

  I recognized a few of the men from my youth: brothers of classmates, faces from nights within dreams about flying or falling.

  I pressed my forehead to the mat. Submission, the feeling of rushing water, liberation from myself.

  A ragged soccer ball spun through the rising dust and seemed to hang in the air—a gray moon that for a moment eclipsed the sun. We were sitting on a park bench on the square, I’d brought cookies with me, our daughter ate a couple and then we fed the rest to the pigeons.

  “You’re thinking about her,” said Isra. “The girl at the clinic.”

  I looked at the people moving through the cool, clear air of the square, running their errands, with their worries and cares.

  “Why would she make up a story about a world where she never stopped Amin?” I asked. “And why would she say she was from here? From the Rabbit Yard?”

  Isra is from Algeria, like the mother in the girl’s account—the girl must have read about her in one of my books and used that detail to connect with me. Like with the Rabbit Yard. But why had she reached out to me in the first place? I sensed darkness again, the feeling of a threat just beyond my peripheral vision.

  I searched for the window where I’d lived with my mom but couldn’t find it. Together with the Fox Yard and the Sparrow Yard, the tall apartment blocks sinking into the violet afternoon light matched the bigger public housing projects in nearby Biskopsgården and Länsmansgården. The area had been constructed in the early sixties. As far as I know the names were plucked out of thin air—there were no more rabbits here than anywhere else.

  Many of the people I grew up with had long since left. They were behind bars or lost to drugs. One friend got shot when we were seventeen, which was a sort of breaking point for me. Some simply moved away. Did we become birds? Why that image? The terrible freedom, that’s all, of never having been wanted here. One buddy went to Syria and joined a jihadist group, and I thought about him as I scanned the hundreds of identical windows. I was remembering his laugh, bold and boundless, and how as children we’d run around these buildings, through the lobbies and into basements, sneaking cigarettes, stealing bicycles, and swapping CDs of New York rap with each other. He turned up on the front pages a few years before the attack. He came from these streets, like me. Somalian. Swedish. These streets with no end. The Rabbit Yard.

  My daughter poured a handful of cookie crumbs out of the bag and passed from sight, laughing from within a tempest of wings.

  This was the spring after I first visited the clinic.

  I know you know about insomnia because you write about it. I like your books, they remind me of people tightrope-walking, high up in the air. They’re made beautiful by fear, you know?

  I know everything about fear.

  When I woke up in the hospital I had it, fear, but it didn’t really have a target. When I was with Amin, in the days and nights we shared before the attack, I was afraid of losing him, because he was the only person I could remember. Then, in the middle of the chaos at Hondo’s, when everything came back to me, I wasn’t afraid anymore, because I believed that everything that could happen to me had already happened.

  Now, as I sit awake at night trying to figure out what to write to you, I feel afraid again.

  Liat and I headed home, past the ethanol station’s cracked sign, a yellow glow under the September sky.

  “Have you heard from your dad?”

  “Yo, cellphones and shit don’t work in the Rabbit Yard,” she said. We stopped on a footbridge, she cleared her throat and let the wind stretch the loogie dangling from her lip into a silver thread.

  Top five crazy-ass things Liat’s done in her life. Number five: filming the boys locker room and posting it online in middle school. Four: in elementary school she ate an entire glue stick; had to go to the hospital and everything.

  “Mom ended up signing it,” I said. I remember the sky was streaked with contrails that day, like hashmarks etched on a pane of glass. “You know we’re going to Algeria, right? I mean, like…moving.”

  The loogie dropped from Liat’s lip and left a white snail-trail on the roof of a moving car.

  “Say wallah.”

  “Wallah,” I said, and wanted to say more but I didn’t have the words.

  Number three was easy. The first boy she’d kissed, and back when she’d only ever kissed one boy, went around talking smack about her after, so she hit him with a hockey stick and split his lip. Hospitals and everything. She said:

  “Israel was wack cuz everybody thought I was a suedi there.”

  “Like, what you eat and stuff?”

  “Exactly.”

  The same thing had happened to me in Algeria.

  Two: She got locked out once, like in third grade, and was trying to climb over to her apartment from one of her neighbor’s balconies, but got stuck and was left dangling from a railing on the fourth floor. The fire department had to use a ladder to get her down. Number one was a no-brainer, too: In eighth grade she threw a pair of scissors at Omar because he’d started in on her about being Jewish and me being a traitor for being her best friend, and they hit him in the eye. The scissors got stuck in his face like a ninja star. Hospitals and everything.

  “When are you going?”

  “Next year, I think. We gotta get the cash together first.”

  Sometimes even I told jokes about Muslims. I told them to Liat or other kids hanging outside the mall to put some distance between me and the images, to prove I wasn’t like Amin.

  “So a suicide bomber gets to paradise,” I said, “and all of the seventy-two virgins have beards just like him.” The suedis indulged me, blowing smoke at the cool sunlight.

  I could talk about my dad’s childhood, and it would be like your story about having a parent who sometimes wished she’d stayed across the sea. I could mention that he had diabetes but still ate a bag of rosewater Turkish Delight every Saturday, while he and Mom watched their web series. I could describe his hands, those long slender fingers of his.

  But most of all he was a person who wrote, I think, but he kept it secret from me for a long time, even though I’m not really sure why. I only knew then that he was always reading: in nearly every memory he’s bent over a book and only looks up at me briefly, almost frightened. Like he thinks what’s happening on that page will keep going without him.

  I always stayed in the doorway.

  I guess he liked books because they allowed him to be someone else.

  “What’s that one about?” I asked one day. The book open on the desk was yellow and used, dog-eared and covered in someone else’s notes, and I’m guessing it was one of the books that had been banned by the so-called February Laws—the same laws that governed the citizen contract and what was happening in the Rabbit Yard—because the cover had been torn off. He said:

  “It’s about how the world’s poor will one day secure their freedom.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  I wanted to tell him that something was happening to me, something I didn’t understand. I leaned against the doorframe.

  Did you hear the one about the Muslim who became prime minister? Did you hear the one about the Muslim who wanted to fly?

  In the act of writing, I’ve noticed, there is a loneliness that reminds me of how when telling jokes you can abandon everything, even yourself.

  “You know Amin?”

  “The terrorist?”

  I nodded, said: “I dreamed about him last night.”

  “No surprise there,” Dad mumbled, never taking his eyes from the page. “With them showing his face all over.” He wrote something down next to one of the existing n
otes and flipped through the book.

  In your time, you still have paper books everywhere, but where I come from it was super weird to be sitting around flipping through a real book. It’s like, people thought you were a refugee. And Dad had a ton of banned books. He hid them under his mattress, and slept on them, which made him seem even weirder to me.

  In my dreams, which I’d started having that fall, and which I wanted to talk to him about, Amin looked at me and said, “Light.”

  That night I started an account on Sensly, which was an app, sort of like the Facebook you have in your time, Mom and Dad even used it sometimes, but you didn’t post videos, you wrote. Putting your feelings out there in short posts for others to heart or hate. Yani sensitive. Curled up in bed with my cellphone, I wanted to write something true and important, but all it ended up being was a list of Oh Nana Yurg’s best lyrics. I remember getting up and looking out the window, and seeing the swings moving in the wind, and it reminded me of a chorus in a song she’d released a long time ago, and I put it at the top of the list.

  We’re just a bubble floating in the glass of God’s breath.

  A bubble in God’s breath.

  I scrolled around for a nice selfie, changed my mind, and looked for a picture of a Swedish girl instead. I didn’t pick the most extra one, you know: a blond with braids in a folk costume, like certain politicians were wearing in parliament. Just a Swede.

  This is the first time I’m telling anyone this.

  I pretended to have a different face.

  Liat met someone and dropped off the radar that winter, and I posted on Sensly about BFFs who betray each other and about the freezing sparrows flocking in the willow tree. I rarely wrote about God, and never about being Muslim or that my best friend was Jewish and her dad was in the Rabbit Yard.

  I started reading the books on dad’s bookshelves. I learned to like their weight and the rough touch of the pages. I was drawn to poetry, which could compress the world into a single Sensly line. One of my favorite poems was written by a blind Iranian poet. It was about how her blindness made her helpless against men who pulled her into the dark, but one day her blindness protected her from the brightness of bombs being dropped on the city where she lived. What I actually liked the most was how she imagined everything she couldn’t see—yani beauty, like fall colors, which she referred to as gold tossed into a grave, wasted, or how the shadows under trees went white with frost, as if the grass were the hair of summer aging.

  It was like she could see better because she was blind.

  I thought about words that winter. Like “Swedish.” You were Swedish if the Swedes thought you were Swedish—that’s what we learned in our Core Values class. I wasn’t Swedish because I was Muslim or whatever. But I mean, who was the first Swede anyway—the one who’d decided who got to be Swedish? He didn’t exist, and there was a hole where he was supposed to be, a hole inside the word “Swedish” that sometimes made it look like the faces of my laughing classmates were masks cut out of plastic or paper.

  An emptiness.

  I sat in the living room window thinking. I missed Liat. We met up a few times when our class schedules lined up, but she was quiet and depressed. Balagan. #boytrouble.

  Dad took me downtown one night. As usual he was sunk into himself, even sitting next to me on the bus, shadows flitting across his face. I asked him where we were going, and that’s when he told me. He’d noticed I was reading a lot of poetry. Did I know that he wrote poetry himself sometimes, and once his poetry had been published in books? I felt a pang of loneliness when I realized he must have gotten Mom to help him keep that secret from me my entire childhood, and I remember the words he used to brush it all off, “It was another time.”

  We got off and walked to a venue with white walls and furniture made of polished metal. Piles of glossy magazines were lying around. A year ago, Oh Nana Yurg had been photographed for one of them, and Liat and I had drooled over the issue in a store window, so I knew the magazines were about fashion and art and were sometimes printed with real gold leaf and each issue cost, like, as much as a month’s rent in our neighborhood.

  When Dad introduced me, the people in the venue hugged me like I was their long-lost daughter, and I understood they were part of Dad’s former life, when he’d published books and was maybe even Swedish.

  Eventually the reading began, which didn’t sound at all like the poems in the books Dad had at home, but more like a code, or like drunks on the bus mumbling to themselves, repeating the same sentence over and over again but never getting anywhere. I could tell that this was how the poets were trying to point out the emptiness in the words.

  When Dad took a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and walked to the stage, which really was no more than a raised part of the white floor, the audience laughed because he wasn’t reading from a tablet or a cellphone—wallah senior citizen.

  I remember the clean white wall behind him, how it seemed to swallow him, and his trembling hands made the paper rustle like dry leaves. I associated his nerves with the expensive magazines, the color white, and how people were dressed.

  He read a poem about stones that melted because they bore a light that he related to sharia, the law, and the audience fidgeted anxiously and many looked disappointed when he said the Arabic word. A few slipped out to smoke. He didn’t notice what was happening. I remember the weakness I perceived in his smile on the bus ride home.

  During physics the next week, our teacher created emptiness in a glass tube using a vacuum pump, and I panicked because I imagined the glass was going to blow up and unleash that emptiness. I got up from my seat and bolted from the school.

  It was the summer of gold caps and Soulland sweatshirts, the summer the iWatch 12 came out and Oh Nana Yurg released an album with a cover photo of her dressed as a soldier with night-vision goggles and a tight black stealth outfit.

  The morning of one of the first days of summer vacation, Dad was kneeling in the living room, bent over his cupped hands, whispering a prayer into them. The window was open, the curtains were rippling, and I remember his hands and thinking that it was like he was trying to protect something small and fragile from a storm.

  That summer Liat reappeared, as suddenly as she had disappeared, and we hung out on the roof of the parking structure, tanning and smoking.

  “I mean, smoking used to be legal.”

  “That’s crazy, cuz,” she said.

  “Hella crazy. That’s what I’m saying. Balagan.”

  Liat took a drag of my cigarette.

  “My mom used to smoke a pack a day when we moved here from Israel.”

  She’d broken up with her boyfriend, who hadn’t allowed her to see anyone else, wallah #stalker, and her new one, Bilal, was sitting on the edge, and he had his long, muscular arms around her waist. His dad was from Senegal and he had a Swedish mom, did MMA—yani mixed martial arts, in case you know what that is—but I thought he seemed fragile, with those cauliflower ears of his sticking out and his glittering black eyes that were like two drops of a clear and starry sky. I liked him because he didn’t say much, was older, and had a car.

  Liat asked what was up with Algeria and I said we’d probably go in the fall, but we still didn’t have the cash. Liat offered Bilal the cigarette over her shoulder so he could smoke without letting go of her. He started coughing. He was only smoking because of her. It made me dizzy seeing them sitting there, so close to the edge, high above the dry lawns and speed bumps and roundabouts. Liat leaned her head against Bilal’s chest and shut her eyes against the sun.

  “Yo,” she said. “Let’s go to the Rabbit Yard.”

  It might sound crazy to you that people ended up in a camp because they hadn’t signed their contracts or had eaten kosher or halal, and that my best friend’s dad was there. But for us it was normal. We crossed the bridge in Bilal’s rusty car; we blew smoke out the windows and blasted Oh Nana Yurg—Bilal let us even though he thought it was kid’s music. After we passed t
he last bus stop Liat’s eyes went dark.

  We drove through an industrial area, past piles of roofing tiles and gas-powered cars that had rusted away, and then past the empty shopping center. In pink letters that stood several meters high on the roof, it said Mål of Gothenburg.

  As we approached the tall fence topped with rolls of razor wire, Bilal turned off the stereo.

  When Amin and I were rolling around on his 180 or messing around in random apartment buildings, before we met Hamad, we sometimes ended up at the Rabbit Yard. Amin dealt, yani selling hash and speed and blow and stuff back then. You’ve probably read about it in the papers, our life together. And the thing is that sometimes when we crossed an empty square out in the Rabbit Yard, with our hoods up against the wind, I’d get the sickest feeling that I’d been there before and start shivering like I was freezing, and the hair on my neck would stand on end, and I’d say to Amin that it was like I was walking over my own grave or visiting the place where I’d die.

  I no longer think time is a straight line. I don’t think this story or any other story a person can tell has one single beginning, but several. And nothing ever really ends.

  In the world I come from, what happened was that there’d been chaos in the Rabbit Yard, shootings and car fires and stuff, balagan, and mold was found in lots of the buildings too, so eventually the politicians cleared the people out and the buildings stood empty, but then a company started putting refugees in them, and then after all the refugees were deported, it became one of the places where the enemies of Sweden were sent.

  A pair of crows circled the buildings. Lots of the balconies had rusted to pieces, and you could see right through a crumbled wall. In one of the apartments a woman wearing a niqab was praying.

  Liat was clutching the fence, staring at something, and Bilal killed time shadowboxing by the car, short, tight blows, spinning, kicking, feinting.

  I remember Liat’s hair in the wind, her just standing there, completely still.