They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  What did I think she could answer? Which question? She turned toward the window again. The blanket of clouds outside seemed to hover just above the ground, stifling and heavy. Worry flickered across her face and she said: “Maybe they made it up.” Her finger began following the steel thread in the glass again. “Maybe they were just lying, I don’t know.”

  On my cellphone’s screen, the seconds and minutes tallied what was being recorded. She said, “You’re wondering if I feel guilty about the people who got shot in the mosque, in the Rabbit Yard, yeah? By that racist. That’s also why you’re here, right?” She nodded in the direction of the doctor and added: “He gives me the news sometimes.”

  She was right, of course: deep down I did blame her for the intensifying hatred of Islam in recent years, but I realized that I didn’t know who I, sitting there in that room with her, was to direct that accusation at her, so I kept quiet.

  “I’ve written more,” she said and handed me the papers.

  “What do you want me to do with this?”

  “Read it.”

  “And then? What do you want to happen to this…story?”

  “It’s your call.”

  I searched her eyes for something I could recognize—human contact, or guilt, after all, guilt over the world she’d helped create. There was nothing but a sucking dark absence.

  “You gonna read it?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah,” she said, but I put the papers aside and leaned back, in part to make a point.

  “So what was in those contracts you wrote about?”

  “The citizen contract?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What was it that people refused to sign that landed them in the Rabbit Yard?”

  She shrugged. “All sorts of stuff. Things about Islam and other religions. Hasn’t a contract like that appeared in this world yet?”

  I shook my head and she gave it some thought, seemed relieved, then said, “The contract had a whole bit about Sweden being special because it was the only country in the world where there was no racism. Mom used to laugh at that.” She smiled, and then seemed to sink into herself. “There were pictures too. Göran Loberg’s illustrations and other images, of Muslims and black people and stuff…illustrations from old children’s books. And when you signed the contract you were, like, signing off on the value of all of those pictures, or…how should I put it? That you supported the illustrators.”

  I wanted to splash my face with cold water.

  “Do you remember anything from when you were tortured? In al-Mima?”

  “I’m telling you, that wasn’t me.” She looked down at her hands and I thought I saw her expression of horror or disgust. “I’m not from there.”

  I’m writing to you because you know how the violence feels.

  I’m writing to you because you’ve also felt your body go tense with worry, limp and clumsy.

  I looked up into the snow falling over the courtyard.

  “What are you gonna do after high school?”

  The bottle Liat had in her pocket was already half empty. She took another gulp and replied:

  “I’m trying to get lit and you wanna know what’s up after high school.” She hadn’t had that much to drink but was already slurring—either she was exaggerating or there was something else in the bottle too, yani dope.

  My arms were hooked around the swing’s chains, hands in my pockets, freezing.

  “Just wondering.”

  The men must’ve taken the bus, because they came from the bus stop. As they marched our way, we jumped off the swings and made for my building because we could guess what they were, but they caught up with us and encircled us.

  I don’t remember what they looked like: when I think about them, their faces are just empty holes.

  Their shoes creaked in the snow.

  “Are you Muslims?” The guy talking sounded upset, he was breathing fast and seemed to be afraid of himself, of what he might do.

  Before I could answer his question, Liat said, “Yes, alhamdulillah we are Muslims.” She looked at him defiantly.

  “We don’t want Muslims here.” I remember his cap pulled down over his forehead, the angular metal pin stuck in it, like a snowflake crossed with a swastika: the symbol of the Crusading Hearts. Another guy, a shishko, yani fatty, added:

  “You and your fucking pedophile religion.”

  Shishko’s hands were red and blotchy, and I remember those disgusting words: pedophile religion. I wanted someone else to be seeing what was happening, so I looked for someone in the buildings all around. A cigarette flashed on a balcony on the fifth or sixth floor but all of our windows were dark: Mom and Dad must have been in the living room or in their bedroom, both of which faced the willow tree.

  “We’re conducting a citizen’s interrogation,” one of the men said, and even though I don’t remember his face I can tell you he looked like anyone, like any skinny old Swedish man who plays the lottery and is strict with children. “According to the February Laws, we have a right to interrogate suspected enemies of Sweden.” He was pulling a small black dog on a leash so tightly he was almost strangling it.

  The snow fell around us, slowly, like that white fluff inside pillows.

  I remember thinking how we were inside a glass vacuum chamber.

  “Well then I can interrogate you, too,” Liat said, “because I’m also a citizen.”

  That made the shishko and another one of the guys laugh out loud, as if Liat’s sass gave their game a new and unexpected, but welcome, dimension. But the guy with the cap grabbed hold of her jacket so hard the fur trim came loose—by the way, that was the jacket she would give me later, another winter.

  “You aren’t citizens,” he hissed.

  “And your breath smells like a fucking urinal,” Liat said, tearing herself free and trying to push her way out of the crowd, but the men pressed together to stop her. She spun around and tried to push her way through in another spot. When that didn’t work either, she went still.

  She fingered the torn collar. I remember her hand shaking, and that this was the first time I’d seen her scared.

  “You owe me four grand.” That’s what the jacket would’ve cost if it hadn’t been a knockoff that she’d bought out of the trunk of a car. The men laughed again, and the old man with the dog demanded to see our passports. He typed our numbers into his phone and when he saw that we weren’t on the list of enemies of Sweden he snorted and threw our passports in the snow. I remember their winter boots. Bluish snow. The gold lettering on the passport glimmering in the streetlight: Sweden.

  Liat picked up the passports and tried to get out of the circle again, and the faceless men reluctantly let her through; I ran after her.

  We went to my building. I tasted blood and was digging my nails into my frozen palms so hard it hurt, a dull pain. When the man with the dog shouted after us, a blast of sound like aha or well, well or hello, I took a few bounding steps, but the men just laughed again, triumphantly and mockingly, and I understood it was only a joke, he was just showing us who was boss.

  I sat in my room and watched the snow bury the playground. The men had vanished. I wanted to write about how fear clogs the body like the hair in the school’s shower drain, but I didn’t have the words for Sensly. Maybe because I wasn’t using my own face.

  I clicked on the video again. He looked right at me. Amin. Like in my dreams. I thought he looked serious, weighed down by his destiny, but maybe bolstered by it too.

  Interwoven, the two of us.

  I clicked play on the video, the blade of the knife moved across that fucking artist’s throat, the blood that spilled out was like black paint in the flashing blue lights coming in from the street.

  I clicked on the video again, freezing it.

  She sat at the kitchen table cutting up her credit cards. The grip she had on the scissors as she cut through the hard plastic made her look angry and crazy. I knew she was cutting up her cards because she’d refused t
o sign the citizen contract: the bank accounts of people who became enemies of the Swedish state were frozen at the same time as they lost their citizenship, so those cards would be useless soon. She swept the plastic slivers into her hand, threw them in the sink, and started on the next card.

  When she saw me at the kitchen door she put the scissors down.

  “We have the tickets. We’re going to Algeria.”

  My legs almost gave out under me. I didn’t like Sweden, and sometimes I longed for Algeria, but I couldn’t leave Liat. Mom looked at me. I can’t remember the color of her eyes.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said, because she mistook my sadness for worry. “It’s much easier to leave this country than it is to get in.”

  I don’t remember if she and Dad fought about the contract again. I don’t remember what Martin, Liat’s new boyfriend, was like, or if I ever met him, or if Oh Nana Yurg had dropped another playlist.

  There were a lot of demonstrations that spring, Swedes protesting the fact that some of the people who were fleeing large floods in Southeast Asia had made their way to Sweden. Liat and I saw the crowds through the bus and streetcar windows, waving flags in the rain, and sometimes counter-protesters were there too, small black-clad groups being led away by police.

  Our family’s plan was to travel to Algeria from Germany. Before she lost her Swedish citizenship, Mom had been a dual citizen, so she might not end up in the Rabbit Yard if she was arrested—she could also be deported. But here’s the thing: just as likely as being allowed to go back to Algeria was ending up in one of the camps in Turkey or the Ukraine, where refugees arrested at the border were sent, so it was important we leave Sweden in secret.

  We lived in a shadow world. We kept the blinds down all day and looked through the peephole for minutes at a time before leaving the apartment. A couple times guards from the housing authority rang our bell, and even though Dad talked to them through the door, without letting them in, my mother hid in the bathroom.

  I remember the iWatch14 was released that year, and a sex tape featuring Oh Nana Yurg and a Japanese model called Tudi was leaked. For weeks I watched it several times a day, searching for something beautiful in those shaky images and in Oh Nana Yurg’s eyes staring blindly into the dark. They were doing it on a hotel bed in Hong Kong and their bodies looked pale green, like lizard bellies. I wondered if that was the kind of thing Liat did with her boyfriend.

  When I told her about Algeria, we were sitting in her room searching for news about Tudi on our smartphones, and she said wallah without looking up and I said wallah and saw her eyes go all shiny. I wanted to hug her and tell her I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t. Who knows if that was true anymore? Everything would be different in Algeria, and I’d started to long for it more and more since Mom had said the trip was actually happening. I thought wanting to go there was enough to mean I’d be welcome once I arrived, but I would’ve been wrong.

  Dad and I visited the last mosque in Gothenburg. It was in an industrial building on Hisingen and the people who ran it had made compromises so they wouldn’t lose their lease, like letting the Secret Service install camera globes at the entrance and replacing the usual Korans with new Swedish ones with blue-and-yellow covers and edits to the verses about war, the ban on charging interest, men and women, and stuff like that.

  It was weird but that was where the contact who was going to help us get to Germany wanted to meet. Dad spoke in low voices with the man, off in a corner of the blue carpet, while I flipped through a blue-and-yellow Koran. As we were leaving, Dad nodded at me and said it was done, the arrangements for the trip had been made.

  One day I asked Mom why Dad didn’t keep any of the books he’d written at home. Incense was burning in the green dish, and she sat down next to me on the sofa.

  “Do you remember what he was like when you were younger?” she asked.

  “He wasn’t always like this, huh?”

  “What do you remember him being like?” Her voice was a rough, probing whisper, and I searched for a word that wouldn’t betray Dad.

  “Closer,” I said. “He was closer to us, closer to the world.”

  She nodded, more to herself than to me. Her eyes reflected the willow tree and the apartment blocks, shrunk down so they all could have fit in a drop of water.

  “That attack happened,” she said. “The one where they went into the comic book store and killed people. ISIS was still called Daesh then. Your dad tried to write about it. But he couldn’t.”

  “Why?” I thought I was on to something, something that could explain why I was dreaming of Amin, and why Dad hadn’t told me about his books of poetry, but Mom threw open her hands in a gesture that meant only God knew.

  “He told me he published his books in a different time. What did he mean?”

  “I don’t know, darling.” She shook her head and was sort of absent, like she’d been sent back to that time, and said: “He wrote a book about it, in the end. But he was harshly criticized for it. Sweden had changed without him having noticed. After that he started hating his other books.”

  A stifling calm filled the living room, and I thought I saw a shadow around her. “He burned up every copy he could find of the books he’d written that the Swedes had liked.”

  In the images from the floods in Southeast Asia, rain clouds were rolling in from the ocean and towered over the horizon like mountain ranges, giant waves rolled in between crumbling skyscrapers and washed away traffic signs and roofs and people, and I thought how a storm was raging in Sweden too, a storm of emptiness moving through the trees.

  “Yo.”

  “Lay off, I’m busy.”

  “Yo.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Yo.”

  “Come on, stop it, I’m watching the news.”

  Liat unwrapped a lollipop and tossed the wrapper aside, it spun away in the wind, a metallic strip glinting in the light. She bit off some of the lollipop and said, “Oh, so she’s watching the news. The girl is serious.”

  They attacked Algeria four days before our flight was scheduled to leave Germany. The suicide bombers made their way into several mosques, and one group took hostages at a resort and blew themselves up when the military tried to get in. I remember Mom and Dad sitting with their packed bags, crying.

  A nuclear bomb was detonated only a few days later. The news said that someone had put a Chinese nuclear warhead in a truck parked in central Algiers. Videos of blurry flames and whirling building dust floated together in my mind with images of the empty storm blowing through Sweden and Oh Nana Yurg’s sex tape. All the same colorless shaky images.

  “Yo.”

  “Not now.”

  “Yo.”

  “What?”

  “Yo, I just want to ask you something.”

  “Wallah, ask.”

  “Yo.”

  I, like, never went to school that year, I couldn’t cope, #no_future anyway, plus Mom was super depressed after Algeria and didn’t have it in her to login and check my attendance anymore.

  “Yo, just one question. It’s important.”

  The second to last summer of freedom.

  “What?”

  “Yo.”

  The second to last breath.

  “What?”

  “Yo. What are you doing after high school?”

  “Ha ha.”

  Liat was way hung over, she kept leaning forward in the swing like she needed to throw up, but didn’t. She’d broken up with Martin and didn’t have a boyfriend. Her dad had been in the Rabbit Yard for more than two years, her mom was unemployed, and she thought everything was useless, wallah.

  “Yo, Liat?”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Liat.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “You know Amin?”

  “The terrorist?”

  I nodded and kicked the sand and felt everything I didn’t have the words for spread inside me like a drop of black ink in water. “I dream about him. Like, we
’re riding on a moped or sitting around talking. Or I’m with him when he smokes that guy.”

  Liat laughed.

  “Sick.”

  Our doorbell rang. I looked through the peephole. It was dark out there, and I thought the emptiness had finally swallowed everything, but obviously somebody was covering the hole, and I remembered a movie were a guy gets shot standing like that, peering out. I took a few steps back. The doorbell rang again.

  Maybe it was Liat. The girl made jokes.

  Mom was in the kitchen drinking tea and I sat down with her.

  “They’re covering the peephole,” I said, but she barely seemed to hear me. She was twirling a couple of locks of her long black hair and staring at the kitchen cabinets. I said, “It’s just some kids.”

  She’d started taking sleeping pills after what happened in Algeria and it weighed her down. When the doorbell rang again she looked up at me and smiled dozily.

  “We’re a love poem,” she said. “Do you know that?” She made a gesture that took in our kitchen, the dirt on the windows, the swings outside, the bus stop. “You and me,” she said, “and even the people out there ringing the doorbell. Everything is God’s love poem to the Prophet.”

  We sat in silence. The buzz of the doorbell filled the apartment again and again, but after a while they gave up and slid a piece of paper through the mail slot, saying they suspected an enemy of the state was hiding with us and they were going to report it to the landlord. At the bottom of the page someone had drawn the symbol for the Crusading Hearts in pen. From the kitchen window, I looked across the yard and saw the man with the little black dog, the one who’d been with the guys who’d stopped me and Liat, walking past the swings.

  Dreams about Amin, bright and self-contained, hard like pearls.

  He kissed me between my shoulder blades. I said, “Amin?”

  He replied, “Hamad.”

  A sharp crash woke me up. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, and when I couldn’t fall back asleep I put on my sweatpants and went into the living room.

  Mom and Dad stood in a sea of shattered glass. First I thought Mom was holding a shard too, but it was a kitchen knife—the big one with the triangular blade that she and Dad used to gut fish.