They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  “Mom?” I remember her nightgown fluttering, and that’s what made me realize somebody had broken the window. “What’s on the floor?” I asked. Something big and dark was among the glass. Dad replied without turning around:

  “It’s just a stone. Don’t turn on the light.” A nauseating, sweet smell, like garbage filled the room.

  “That’s no stone,” Mom kept repeating: “That’s no stone.” Her voice rose and became more piercing. “That’s no stone.”

  I think each of us was going mad, each in our own way.

  Dad slowly backed away from the window, and repeated:

  “Don’t turn on the light. If they’re going to…” He didn’t finish the sentence, to try to shield me from the knowledge of the threat that I nonetheless knew hung over us now. If they’re going to shoot. Kill us because we’re Muslim. I remember my parents’ frozen silhouettes, and a cloud, backlit by the moon, floating through the glass on the floor. I remember the sound of cars passing by on the road beyond the willow tree and the field, and I felt like the apartment was floating in space, and that each second was stretching into an eternity. In the end I was the one who broke the stillness and turned on the light so we could see what was on the floor: a pig’s head.

  Amin. Elongated flashes of blue light reflected in his dark eyes. His pale lips. His sunken cheeks. I sat on my bed. I started the video and Amin sliced Loberg’s throat, his body twitched and struggled, eyes wide open.

  Maybe he was trying to scream behind that silver tape.

  A mosaic of amber-colored shadows fell across the scratched linoleum floor in the visitor’s room, over the plastic furniture, the desk, and the pine bookshelf and the walls that were scarred with misdirected rage. She was sitting in a chair and watching me closely as I read. Beads of sweat had formed on her forehead, along the edge of her headscarf. The air was hot and thick, as though we were waiting for a thunderstorm that would never come. I set the papers aside.

  “How far have you gotten?”

  “To…the pig’s head.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “No,” I said. “But you can write,” I added, which made her smile, lost and disarmed.

  “I wrote lots on Sensly.”

  “You say here that you were Sufis?”

  “It was mostly Mom who was into it,” she said. “She used to get together with a group of sisters who did dhikr at our place in the evenings.”

  “But you people hate Sufism.”

  “Which ‘people’?” she asked.

  “Daesh,” I said, and she looked away, rejected, possibly ashamed.

  The word dhikr means “mentioning,” but it’s just as much about forgetting. For example, you repeat God’s name or a mantra, in order to forget the dust of the world, in search of a trance state, a paradise state, prehistorical, pre-identity.

  I crossed my legs, waited.

  The professed Orthodox forms of Islam, which in part are kind of a shadowy mirror image of modernity, actively resist the practices that sometimes fall under Sufism, among them the many forms of dhikr: they’re not allowed to enter mosques, those who practice are considered renegades, their books have been burned and graves considered sacred by some practitioners destroyed.

  Without making eye contact she said:

  “I mean. I didn’t remember all of what I’m describing when I was with Amin and Hamad. I didn’t remember who I was or where I came from. Otherwise I would’ve hated them.”

  The doctor stayed in his corner, observing the girl. I kept expecting him to chime in, like now when he moves his head a little or clears his throat, but he remained an observer, mute.

  “What was it you saw in them? In Amin and Hamad?” I asked.

  She replied, “I was drawn to them by a power that…” She still hadn’t looked up from her hands, her finger was moving, scratching the top of her other hand. She never finished the explanation, instead she said, “I saw Amin on the streetcar one day, and I knew his name. I just knew, you know? Your name is Amin. And it was like I knew every line in his face. So I followed him into a building and we started talking in the elevator.” Some large emotion quivered behind those downcast eyes. “That’s how we met.”

  She stopped speaking. Twilight fell, a silvery cornflower blue and a welcome coolness. I listened to the building’s dull, indistinct sounds—water streaming through the pipes, noise from fans, footsteps somewhere overhead.

  I’d read versions of her encounter with Amin in various articles. They got to know each other quite soon after she’d arrived in Gothenburg, and began a relationship.

  It was like I knew every line in his face. Falling in love probably always contains an element of madness. It was like that for me and Isra many years before, when we met at the university where she then worked.

  “The Prophet,” she said after a while, finally making eye contact, inviting me in with that secretive, half-pleading way of hers.

  “Salla llahu ’alay-hi wa-sallam,” I said—may God’s blessings and peace be with him.

  “He found a crying man,” she said. “The sun had set before the man had a chance to pray his afternoon prayer.” This was a hadith, one of the tens of thousands of accounts of the Prophet’s life and deeds collected in books and oral traditions. I happened to know the story, which is about God’s power over time, and I continued for her:

  “The Prophet prayed to God, asking him to allow the man to say his prayers in time.”

  “Salla llahu ’alay-hi wa-sallam,” she said.

  “Salla llahu ’alay-hi wa-sallam. And the sun rose again over the horizon,” I said. I believe, as many Muslims do, that this actually happened, it’s a historical fact: two men crouching in the desert, the sun rising in the west and making their shadows pull back in, backward into their bodies. Backward into history.

  “I mean, I’m not saying it was God,” she said.

  “Who sent you back in time?”

  She glanced out the window. In the deep stillness of the room, the movement seemed rushed and sweeping.

  The time for evening prayer had come. Maybe that’s what she was thinking about.

  “Sometimes I dream about things that must’ve happened in her childhood,” she said. “The Belgian girl, the one they say I am.”

  “What do you dream?”

  “Short scenes. A man tosses me up in the air and catches me. I walk on a beach, my toes dig into the sand.”

  “So now you know that you’re her? Annika?”

  She shrugged, then said, “I know this body once went by that name, and used to live in Belgium, and later was tortured. But I also know that I’m not her. I’m someone else, someone who came here from the future. That Annika might’ve died if I hadn’t woken up in her body. Maybe she died in my world, instead of Amin’s sister, or something.”

  I hmmed in reply. She’d given this a lot of thought.

  I’d been having trouble sleeping. The tiredness rose behind my eyes like sharp flickering static. Something else was bothering me, a worry at work inside me that I had to address while I was there.

  “You don’t remember a…time machine?” I asked, and had to laugh at the word, but when I listened to the recording later, I realized that’s right when I moved the conversation away from reality: shifting focus away from the fact that she, in spite of everything, was a girl from Belgium, and back to her misconceptions.

  It was because of what was unclear inside me. What I hadn’t managed to examine, what frightened me and made me want to keep coming back.

  For a long time I thought it was all about the writing.

  “I ended up somewhere, in the end,” she replied. “But it’s hard to organize the events in my head. That’s also why I’m writing them down.” Her eyes rested on the stack of paper in my hands and then I sensed a more familiar worry in her: even if we were discussing a fantasy, she’d still revealed something personal.

  “Why did you come back?” she asked. In the silence that followed I once again became aw
are of the din of rushing water and clattering fans. A voice came through the floor or the wall—a scream cut short. The waiting room quality of the place. Hades. My eyes focused on a mark on the wall where someone must have slammed a piece of furniture. The mark could also have been made by a skull or elbow.

  “I came back because of what happened at Hondo’s,” I said. “Because of what you did that night.”

  Her gaze darkened and drifted out the window into the night outside.

  She turns the flashlight on her smartphone off.

  “What, did the battery die?” Amin lets the blade drop, exhausted, as though he had been powered by the light and can no longer hold up the small box cutter.

  He’s still got a hold on Loberg’s hair, trying to maintain a decent grip, and she watches him claw at the sweaty white mop, thinking: Amin is clinging to the edge of an abyss.

  Out in the winter night the police shout into a megaphone. The amplified voice is hard to understand. Something about talking. Talk to us.

  She notices Amin squinting, straining to see her in the dark store.

  “Your nose is bleeding again,” he says. “Why aren’t you filming?”

  Impossible to answer. Can hardly think about it. The future. She comes from the fucking future.

  Loberg’s feet are sliding around in the blood. Mumbled groans come from behind the duct tape.

  “Nour?” Amin says, the name he uses that doesn’t belong to her, but to his sister, the girl who died in a bathtub in this world, but who was with them in her world, instead of her.

  “I remember you.” She lifts up her phone. “From here. From this video.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She’s speaking to Amin, who used to tell her she was his dead sister returned—she says:

  “I’m not from here.”

  “From Gothenburg?”

  She’s only saying it now.

  “I am not from this time.” She gets a blinding headache, it makes it hard to think. She runs her sweater sleeve along her upper lip but can tell all she’s doing is smearing the nosebleed across her face.

  She’d like to crumple to the floor and cry for everything. For Liat and Mom and Dad.

  “We’re going to wake up all of Europe’s Muslims,” Amin says—those are just Hamad’s words, they don’t mean anything anymore.

  They’re facing each other, hunched in the blue light as the din from the street clamors in the venue. Around them, the hostages in their black hoods are bowed over. She thinks they look like those hangmen back when there were crusaders—like those ripped guys with mega axes.

  “Amin. I don’t know how, but I’ve come here from the future.”

  She thinks the room is turning itself inside out, the corners pushing inward, and she stumbles backward, trying not to fall.

  She remembers. She closes her eyes and sees a clap of pigeons rising past the flickering LCD screen down at the bus stop. Past Amin’s face. She’s on the verge of falling backward again, and a sharp blade slides between her eyes. She remembers everything. The footbridge. The room with the aluminum boxes. The pair of empty swings rocking in the wind.

  I’m writing to what’s inside you that we’ve lost in ourselves. Writing to your eyes, to your eyelashes, your lips and cheeks, to your tongue.

  Mom and I climbed over the steep slabs of rock at the beach and threw ourselves shrieking into the waves, their snowy green explosions. We liked swimming in late fall, when we could be alone. We swam a few strokes out into the chilly water, teeth chattering, then turned back and crawled, blue and cold, up over rocks slick with algae.

  We sat wrapped in our towels, and Mom, who was finally starting to get over her depression, looked out over the sea and said:

  “There are trees out there, beneath the surface.”

  “Trees?”

  “Everything there is on land has a counterpart in the sea. There are mountains in the sea. Storms that rage under the ocean’s surface.”

  That was Sufism, yani mysticism.

  A seagull dove overhead at the same time as it seemed to be rising from the dark pitching waves, the image fluttered like a white sheet. It is said that our actions echo in the sky, but maybe the sea is that sky.

  “There are seahorses,” I shivered, half serious, half joking. “Sea cucumbers.” That last one made Mom laugh.

  When it was time for afternoon prayer we used our towels as prayer mats, and when we bowed down it was like God was impressed on the rough surface of the rocks and in the roar of the wind and sea. While we were still kneeling, she turned to me. She took her headscarf off and her hair blew around her face, and right then I thought she looked as ancient as the rock we were on, and it was like I didn’t know her at all.

  “Whatever happens, I want you to remember one thing,” she said. Rain clouds had gathered in dark blue and black layers behind her, and between us was something that had to do with God, but also with two people at this point in history, two Muslims in Sweden, seventeen years after the attack on Hondo’s, and she reached out and touched my cheek and the wind picked up and her smile frightened me. “Remember,” she said. “We are a love poem.”

  She went missing later that night. She used to go for walks when it stormed so she could be alone on the streets, and when she’d been gone for two hours and hadn’t answered her phone Dad put on his red raincoat and crossed the fields past the willow tree, and I went in the other direction, toward the square and the bus stop. After a while I couldn’t stop shouting:

  “Mom! Mom!” My voice felt weak and small, swallowed by the night like something sinking into mud, gone.

  When I approached the footbridge where Liat and I would sometimes stand and spit I saw the yellow lights of a patrol car flaming in the rain and had an awful premonition.

  I ran onto the bridge.

  She was on her back across the hood of a car down there, her head sunk through the crushed windshield. Somebody had pushed her. I looked into her open mouth. The raindrops falling between her lips seemed to darken and disappear.

  I stumbled through the bushes, onto the road, and the lights seeping into the wet asphalt made me think of what she’d said by the sea, about, like, mirror worlds, and time seemed to be going backward, or at least in some different direction, sideways.

  The car she’d landed on after she was thrown over the railing must have skidded, because it was parked crooked in the middle of the road. A couple of other cars had stopped along the curb and the rain hung like tinsel in their headlights.

  Everything was wrong.

  Someone kept honking—angry, drawn-out sounds that cut through the wind and rain.

  Balagan.

  Balagan.

  In addition to the patrol car blocking the traffic was an ambulance, but instead of helping Mom the EMTs were flipping through what I could tell was her passport—checking it against a smartphone. I think her insurance was invalid because she was an enemy of Sweden, and they were trying to figure out who was going to pay for her care. The reflective strips on their clothing gleamed.

  I crawled onto the hood of the car. I remember praying to God as I slipped around on that wet metal sheet. Change it. Do everything different. A guard spotted me and ran over.

  “She’s alive,” I said. “She’s still alive.” I lifted her head up. It was like a bundle of wet fabric, and I remember that the guard issued an order and his voice was firm, but the words didn’t reach me.

  “Mom,” I said. She registered my presence, her lips moved, and she said:

  “There is no God.” Her eyes were like fogged glass, water ran from her clothing and hair, out over the hood of the car, in pink streams, and she said:

  “There is no God but God.”

  The guard pulled me away, and the leaves whipping across the road looked like curls of ash rising from a fire.

  In Hondo’s window display was a row of French comics in plastic sleeves. The various covers were a mash-up of a polished-chrome, kitschy futuristic ae
sthetic and a Stone Age world, all of it vaguely pornographic and priced around the thousand kronor mark.

  I stuffed my kufi in my shoulder bag before walking through the door.

  Right before closing time, not many customers. I was hoping to chat with the owner, Christian Hondo, who had been there the night of February seventeenth. I didn’t see him.

  I’d passed by the store countless times but had never been inside. The space was smaller than I’d imagined after seeing it in the photos, hardly bigger than a living room. I flipped through a comic book—an issue of X-Men I’d read as a child—and looked around.

  I saw the corner where the girl had filmed Amin with her smartphone.

  That’s where the black flag had hung.

  The stage.

  The feeling that I might be exposed, discovered with my thoughts.

  I went over to the spot, dragged my shoe across the floor, wondering if it had been replaced or if Göran Loberg’s blood had merely been scrubbed away.

  “We’re closing soon,” said a woman behind the counter. Even though it was a hot September day, she was dressed in black layers. Her dress had buckles and leather straps over the chest and arms.

  I looked up at the ceiling and found a small bullet hole near the exit, where Amin had fired his gun.

  I wanted to experience something that would give me clarity and make me hate the girl from Tundra.

  I took the comics I’d been flipping through to the checkout, mostly to have an excuse to talk to the salesperson.

  “So Christian isn’t working today?”

  She punched in the price, which I hadn’t even checked. It was much more than I would’ve guessed.

  “He doesn’t work here anymore,” she replied.

  “Did he sell the store?”

  She gave me a practiced dismissive look. People must come in here asking for Christian Hondo a couple times each week, for reasons that all had to do with the events of February seventeenth, and I suspected that she was debating whether or not to ask me to leave.

  “I’m writing a book about what happened here,” I added. “I’m an author.”