They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  “And you want to talk to Christian?”

  “If possible…”

  She was still holding the comic book. “And this?” she said. “Did you actually want to buy it?”

  Christian Hondo lived one block from the store, which he still owned. The woman closed the store, locked up, and called him from a Thai restaurant on the corner—apparently a daily delivery of takeout at the end of business hours was now part of the job description.

  I flipped absentmindedly through my far-too-expensive childhood souvenir as they spoke. Hondo must have asked my name, because the woman had me repeat it and then said it into her cellphone. She waited—my guess is that Hondo was googling me.

  She bought two Thai dishes and explained, without me having asked, that Hondo saved one of them for lunch the next day. I made sure she didn’t see my kufi as I stuffed the comic book in my shoulder bag.

  Hondo’s apartment was cluttered with posters, books, stray papers, sculptures, trash.

  We sat in the kitchen. The woman from the store had dropped off the food and left.

  “I rarely get out nowadays,” Hondo said, eating straight out of the box with the splintery wooden chopsticks that came with the food—a noodle dish with bean sprouts and egg. In an overly formal tone and with a touch of self-deprecation, he added, “Feeding the owner is now part of the employment contract.”

  Out the window, between the office buildings and rental apartments of City West, the Denmark ferry passed by, gliding slowly into harbor.

  “Is this because of what happened on February seventeenth?”

  Hondo wound the noodles around the chopsticks and slurped them down. My question might have been too forward. He seemed to be deciding whether to lie or ask me to leave.

  “You could say,” he said, “I’m suffering from a certain…ochlophobia.” He whipped the chopsticks around in the air. “Fear of crowds.” His laugh was affected. “A phobia of visiting places where terrorists might strike.”

  His face was ruddy, he had a pronounced overbite, and he was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. I’d put him at around forty years old. He had a tic that made his mouth jump, and something made me think he talked to himself, held long monologues in the empty apartment.

  “Do you feel hatred?”

  “Hatred?”

  “Antipathy? Vengefulness?”

  He left the living room, fetched a large art book, and put it down in front of me. Drawings with a 1970s aesthetic, all politically provocative and with a sexual undertone. Genitals in the colors of the Swedish flag, the royal family in their underwear.

  “I exhibited these in the ’90s.” He tucked a strand of long hair behind his ear to keep it from falling in the food. “Pretty banal, one might say.” I rocked my head in an ambiguous nod. “They tried to burn the store down,” he said. “Back then it was skinheads.” He slurped up another mouthful of noodles. “I don’t hate people. I want to rattle their preconceptions of the world. Their assumptions about morals, about nations. About themselves. Have you read de Sade?”

  “A long time ago. At university.” He gestured with his chopsticks again, inviting me to fill in the rest myself.

  “They wanted to murder me,” he said. “All I want is to murder God.”

  When he’d finished eating he fetched medicine from a kitchen cabinet, shook out three small yellow pills, and washed them down with a few gulps of soda. I read what it said on the bottle, which he’d left in view, something for anxiety.

  He didn’t ask me about the book I’d said I was writing, what it would be about, or who else I’d met with. I didn’t stay long. I asked a lot about the attack, about what he remembered, but mostly because I thought it was expected of me. He didn’t follow me to the door on my way out. Instead he waited nervously in the living room as I tied my shoes in the hall. It occurred to me that the woman who worked in the store had her own set of keys. She’d unlocked the front door and let herself in.

  I remember him peering through the crack after I closed the door behind me.

  “How’s it going with your family?”

  “Alhamdulillah,” Mido said. We walked down Vasagatan Avenue, under the yellowing crowns of the trees. We had just left a screening of Mido’s latest film, a documentary about the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

  He was an old friend, a political activist more than a filmmaker, originally from Egypt.

  “How’s it going with you?”

  “Alhamdulillah,” I echoed. It was late afternoon, lots of people on the go, bicycles, strollers, briefcases. Mido’s film had roused something in me. The pictures of rickety boats landing on slippery black rocks. A fiery field of empty life vests rocking in the swells. People fleeing their homelands. It was the day after my strange visit with Christian Hondo.

  “Even though there’s reason to worry, you know?” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About how the world is.” I hadn’t mentioned my visits to Tundra to anyone but Isra, and I didn’t know how I would even begin to discuss the girl, her writing, the book I was maybe thinking about writing. “About what it will be like in Sweden in five years.”

  Mido popped the collar of his blazer. He was a little older than me and his black shoulder-length hair was graying.

  “We have to fight, brother,” he said. “We have to tell the Swedes our stories.”

  “Yes,” I replied awkwardly. I’d always admired Mido’s pathos and frankness, which had once forced him to flee Egypt—he’d made films criticizing the regime that governed the country before the Arab Spring had turned into fall and now perhaps into an Arab Winter.

  “Do you ever look at your children…” I said, but my voice caught. I was surprised how hard it was to express myself.

  Mido’s eyes were charcoal-rimmed, black lines accentuating his almost bluish whites. He looked at me with curiosity.

  “Do you ever look at them and wonder if they’re going to be able to live their lives here?” I said.

  “Because they’re Muslim?”

  “Because people are scared, and because in the end they’ll do anything to not feel that way.”

  The trees behind Mido—all of those thousands of bright, yellowing leaves looked like the stained glass windows of a church.

  I’m writing to those of you who still have words for what’s happening to you and whose entire world is wrapped up in mine.

  Your words, hemmed in by all I cannot say.

  I stuffed half a potato in my mouth. “A girl in my class has a brother who’s one of those, you know.” I chewed for a long time before swallowing. “A Crusading Heart.”

  Dad put down his knife and fork, propped his elbows on the table, and pressed his fingers to his head as if he needed to keep it from exploding. I poked at my food, waiting for him to say something. I wanted him to ask for the name and address of the girl in my class so he could take his revenge on her brother.

  The security company that handled traffic safety in our neighborhood had determined that Mom’s death was a suicide, so the police didn’t do anything. But I know someone pushed her. One of them. A Crusading Heart. Maybe the man with the black dog, whom I’d never seen again.

  “She’s a martyr,” Dad said, his tone muted and strange. “Martyr.” The word was the sound of a door slamming shut inside him.

  The walls were covered in scuffed aluminum pigeonholes. One of the caretakers in blue overalls had let us in, and when Dad showed him our numerical code the man took out a big bunch of keys, riffled through them for a while, and then turned a lock, pulled out a box, and put it on the table.

  Dad opened the box, his hands unsteady. I remember it clattering and thinking about how his hands had shaken when he read the poem about sharia to the Swedes.

  What was in the box looked like volcanic sand or ground black chalk, and for a long time we just stared at it.

  The caretaker jangled his keys impatiently.

  Dad shoved his hand into the box and filtered the dusty matter
between his fingers. Because Mom was an enemy of Sweden, she couldn’t be buried in the country, so they’d cremated her, like automatically, even though she was Muslim.

  We backed away and stood in a corner of the room, as the caretaker put the box back in the wall.

  I remember Dad’s hands, blackish gray with ash, and him not knowing what to do with them when we left that place: brush them off on his blazer or stuff them in his pockets or kiss them.

  That was the winter Liat gave me her jacket because Dad had stopped working and we couldn’t afford to replace my raggedy-ass old one.

  You could say I was the one who ended up taking care of us. Cleaning and making food and stuff, frozen pizza and chips. If I had to make a list of all the lame things that happened after Mom’s death, those goopy pizzas we used to eat would be number four; number three would be Dad not praying anymore. Number two would be that he got sloppy about taking his insulin, and his eyesight got so bad he sometimes couldn’t see me and would shout my name loudly even though we were in the same room. Wallah, it made me feel like a ghost.

  One night I was walking home from the bus stop with Liat. We’d been at the mall. I stopped and laid down on the asphalt. She stared at me and said, “Yo.” She said, “Yo, what are you doing?” But I didn’t reply. I just laid there and let the chill from the earth creep through my jacket into my life, and then she did the same thing, and took my hand, and we laid like that for a long time, silent next to each other, watching the perforated dome of darkness as stars spun away above us, and the tears in my eyes froze into snow.

  Bummer number one: Dad would sit awake at night, hunched over his computer, writing. No news site would publish his article, so in the end he put it out on the web himself, and I read it and realized he was losing it. He wrote about us being annihilated because of a crack that was running right through Sweden. He wrote that language had once been a gift from God, but was now the devil’s tool.

  He had too many words in him and all of them were wrong.

  He didn’t sign the citizen contract that spring, and because he was now an enemy of Sweden and they were going to track him down to put him in the Rabbit Yard, we left our apartment and moved in with a couple he knew, a couple that had been there on that spring night he’d read his poem.

  It was the year the iWatch 15 was released.

  He told me to make sure no one was following me as I walked home from school.

  Sometimes when I just couldn’t deal, I slept at Liat’s.

  Time was God’s fire, annihilating everything.

  Along the bike paths, men in reflective vests used leaf blowers to make last year’s dead leaves spin away in small cyclones. The school guidance counselor clasped his hands on the table in front of him.

  “Is your dad forcing you to do things?”

  “Like, what things?”

  “I’ve noticed you often wear a beanie sort of like a hijab, for instance. Pulled down over your hair.” His bottom lip was pierced and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, exposing tattoos on his forearms. Horned Japanese demons with round, staring eyes. “Did you pick it out yourself?”

  “I am Muslim, in case you didn’t get that.”

  I’d automatically become an enemy of Sweden along with Dad, actually, but the law said even the children of enemies of Sweden had to stay in school, yani, partake in Swedish culture, and law enforcement wasn’t allowed to take kids from school and put us in camps, so I was, like, safe there.

  “Where do you live now?” the counselor asked, like I was actually going to tell him, right? So he could note it down in the same file the security companies had access to? I snapped my gum to show him what a dumb-ass he was. “Are you allowed to have a boyfriend?” he asked. “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m thinking about what I’m going to tell my friend about you.”

  Liat leaned back in her swing. She’d dyed her bangs the same light blue as Oh Nana Yurg’s in the videos for her new acoustic playlist.

  “How sweet is it that we never ever have to see that school again. It’s like, ‘Later, victims.’” The blue tufts of hair flickered like a lighter’s flame. Amin’s video was playing on the screen at the bus shelter; he looked at me as that line of text popped up.

  It all could have been different.

  I shut my eyes. Mom by the sea. Reaching out and touching me. When I opened my eyes, there was something finite about the dust in the air, something important had ended.

  “What about us?” I said.

  “What about us?”

  “Will we always know each other?”

  Liat stretched her legs up into the air and checked her sneakers for stains, a pair of Balenciaga knockoffs in pale leather that she was still trying to keep clean, even though one of the soles was already coming loose.

  Over by the bus stop Amin put the knife to Göran Loberg’s throat and the screen went black.

  “Always,” she said.

  I’m not sure how long we lived with Dad’s friends, it could have been a couple of weeks or six months, but it got messy with them in the end: they showed us an email from the landlord saying they’d be kicked out if we stayed there.

  I remember that we were sitting at the kitchen table, their eyes pleading with us to leave, go out into the emptiness, so that they could get on with their lives.

  We didn’t sleep that night. Our mattresses were in their living room and Dad sat by the open balcony door, talking. I have a hard time remembering exactly what he said. Distance. Distance had spread between everything, he said. An attempt to put words to the emptiness, like when he wrote that nasty article. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and thought that maybe he was talking to the people who’d liked his books once upon a time, or with Mom. He said the devil was distance. Distance from God. Something like that. It was his grief talking. The tower he’d built. I remember being scared by his voice and his confused hand gestures, and that he’d stop talking mid-sentence.

  Somewhere out in the courtyard a dog was barking.

  “They reported themselves to the landlord,” he said. “You understand that, right?”

  We ended up at the mosque with the blue and yellow Korans, where Dad had once found the man who was supposed to smuggle us into Germany. Apparently, there was a back door with no cameras, and a secret room on the top floor. We lived with ten other families, crammed in with our bedding and bags.

  Dad often read the Koran with the other men—not the blue and yellow ones stacked in the prayer room, but the real one, which people had brought with them.

  I slept half the day away now that I wasn’t in school anymore. At night I snuck out through the back door and went to a newsstand and bought an energy drink. We’d kept our cellphones off since Dad had become an enemy of Sweden, but there was a cellphone in the mosque I could borrow, and I called Liat during my walks.

  “When are you coming back?” she asked, and I said I didn’t know, but soon, inshallah. “Have you heard what they’re saying about Oh Nana?”

  “We, like, don’t have internet here,” I said, even though, real talk, since Mom died I couldn’t have cared less about the latest on Oh Nana Yurg.

  “They’re saying she doesn’t exist,” Liat said. “She’s just a computer program.”

  “Balagan.”

  “It’s all over the web. They’re saying a company created her and the songs were all written by a computer program.” I noticed that Liat was trying to pretend she didn’t believe it, but she was actually shocked. “I mean, they’re saying it was just a hologram performing at her concerts.”

  I didn’t know how to feel. I wasn’t disappointed. Not even surprised. I was nothing, maybe. Liat kept talking, changed the subject eventually, and told me about who from our class had been in fights and who was going out with whom, but it was like she was talking about things happening in a country far, far away.

  I bought my energy drink at the newsstand, and even though it was dangerous for me to be outside I stayed out. Steam ro
se from the vents of the laundry rooms in the buildings all around. I thought about Oh Nana Yurg, whom I’d loved so much.

  Those of us hiding in the mosque who hadn’t been to the Rabbit Yard yet were less afraid of going than the people who’d already spent time there. A woman around Mom’s age who comforted me when I cried in my sleep said that the Rabbit Yard was a place where there was no truth, and I pictured a giant, rotating hole behind the fences and buildings, an emptiness surrounded by whirling leaves, bricks, road signs, and people. A lie.

  A group of guys cooked soup for us. They served it out of the trunk of their minivan—steaming lentil soup ladled into paper bowls each night, five brothers with beards like old men.

  Liat talked about guys and how rotten the Suedis in the class were being to her, and how she wished for school to end, and when I didn’t respond we listened to each other breathing and then said goodbye.

  Cities of frost appeared on the secret room’s poorly insulated window.

  One morning I heard voices from the ground floor—screaming in Arabic and Swedish: “Help, this is a democracy, we have rights, we are Swedish citizens.” And the woman who comforted me when I cried ran into the room and hurled herself out the window, pulling the curtains and blinds behind her, like a broken wing of fabric and rustling aluminum strips.

  We were led out to the parking lot, where ambulances and cars from various security companies were parked. Dad was wearing the tunic he usually slept in—it caught around his legs and made him trip when one of the guards prodded him on. His eyes met mine as he climbed into a white van.

  Total balagan all around me, noise and screaming. The woman who’d jumped through the window was strapped to a cot carried by two orderlies. She pulled at the straps, making the cot rattle and seem ready to fall to pieces, but she didn’t scream. Her leg was hurt: a shaft of bone stuck out from her skin like a broken, red-streaked halogen light.

  I ended up in a van with four guys who were refugees from the floods, shy young people from, like, Nepal—they weren’t Muslim but I remember them from the secret room, where they kept to themselves, quiet and polite.