They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  When the van stopped a half-hour later and the doors opened, we were in a large garage; we were told to sit down on the cement floor. I hugged my knees and rubbed my arms to stay warm. I’d at least managed to bring my jacket and shoes, unlike lots of people, who were only in their T-shirts and socks.

  The van left, more people arrived, and then even more people were brought out into that echoing, subterranean space, uneasy and cold. A group of guards in blue uniforms stood by an elevator door, conversing in low voices; they kept laughing at something, and after a while I got that they were talking about the girls, our looks or whatever.

  About half of the people who’d been rounded up that morning had come from the mosque, the rest had probably been picked up in other hiding places, or had been arrested in raids on buses and streetcars. Most were Muslim, but there were also refugees from the floods and people who I think were Jewish or just regular Swedes—yani political extremists—and a group of beggars from southern Europe. I looked for Dad but didn’t see him. Guards kept coming in and shouting names before taking people into the elevator, and after a few hours it was my turn.

  The guard who led me through the garage, gently clasping my upper arm, was black-haired and could’ve had an African parent, and I thought he was betraying something I couldn’t express.

  The Swedes had decided he was Swedish.

  I don’t know how I ended up reuniting with Dad, but suddenly I was in a room where a woman who looked tired and overworked was shining a small lamp in his mouth. He was naked. His clothes were in a pile on the floor. I remember a pinewood desk and a bed with white plastic sheets. The woman wearing blue latex gloves was sticking a finger in Dad’s mouth, pushing down his jaw.

  A man in a knit sweater was standing by the desk, taking notes on a tablet. When he asked for my passport number, Dad turned around. He saw me and covered his genitals. The emptiness pressed against my temples. The woman told Dad to turn around and bend over. I can still hear the grim, wet sound of the soles of his feet on the floor as he moved. I remember the glossy surfaces in the room. As though it had been designed to be hosed clean. The woman took out a stethoscope and listened to Dad’s lungs, and I wish I hadn’t, but I saw his face. It was like any other body part now, an elbow or a patch of skin on his belly or thigh.

  His eyes were fixed on the wall, motionless, as if his pupils were pinned in place with long needles.

  The string was stretched between her fingers, like a web. She pinched it in two places then pulled them out, making the pattern even more complex.

  A game to kill time while she waited for me to finish reading.

  The doctor had written with a request for me to return. Apparently she had opened up after meeting me, and it had been established that our interactions were beneficial for her recovery.

  Before reading even half, I put the papers down, and she seemed overcome by insecurity. She played down the anxiety with a kind of jokey hesitance—bit the string and used her teeth to pull out a loop that she then stuck her index finger through. She stretched it into an eight-pointed star, through which she looked at me.

  A light rain whispered against the armored glass, the walls of the clinic, the roofing tiles.

  “This inspection you’re writing about,” I said. “When they undressed your dad. What do you think that was about?”

  She kept looking at me through the star, and instead of answering my question she said:

  “Maybe I’ve been sent here on a mission, to your time, have you thought about that?”

  I needed to stretch my legs, so I got up and stood by the window. The Bear Man was outside smoking, sheltered by an overhang.

  “Do you remember anything like that?” I said. “Someone giving you a mission?”

  “No.”

  “But you think that’s what happened?”

  “I mean, I know some things. One: I’ve traveled back in time. Yani, my soul traveled back in time and ended up in this body.”

  “In Annika Isagel’s body.”

  “Exactly. Two: I ended up, like, out of whack, in a world where Amin’s sister died, and where I almost took her place.”

  “And why do you suppose you’ve come here? What’s your mission?”

  “To stop Amin and Hamad of course, so the Swedes don’t start killing us. Don’t you think?”

  When I failed to respond she broke eye contact. She busied herself with the string, stretching it into a new constellation, holding it out to me:

  “Want to play? It’s actually a game for two people.”

  I sat across from her and followed her instructions, pinched where she told me to, pulled the string out, wound finger after finger into what was taking shape between us.

  “Liat taught me this, right after we met,” she said, and showed me another shape. I accidentally touched her fingers.

  I felt a swell of tenderness, unbidden but overwhelming. I could’ve cried, but swallowed hard. For a few seconds the intensity of the whispering rain increased, and then subsided.

  She studied my face, curious. When I didn’t say anything, she said:

  “So…that inspection. I think it had something to do with the emptiness.” Sometimes when she talked she mumbled like a child who’s afraid of being punished. “It was inside of language, and made some things the same when they should have been different. Yani a Muslim equaled a terrorist. Or a nurse equaled a guard. There was no difference between the blood in my veins and Amin’s knife. There was no difference between my heart beating and the bombs exploding in Algeria.”

  My daughter threw a snowball straight up into the creaking, infinite stillness of the sky. She was waddling around in her nylon jumpsuit, her mouth steaming among the gravestones, and I came to the sad realization that the child she was on that cold, quiet winter day, visiting my mom’s grave…that child would disappear, or was already gone, destroyed by time.

  I crouched down by the black stones. I prayed Mom knew the peace I did not. I looked out over the crystallized landscape, at the sparkling power lines and trees.

  “Why did you come here?” I whispered into the crusty snow.

  She hadn’t told me much about the journey here, or about her family in Gambia. I knew she had crossed the Mediterranean illegally, and when we were in the mosque praying the funeral prayers for the relatives of congregation members who had died during similar trips, she’d always cried after, a helpless sobbing.

  Eventually she’d been granted a residency permit and became Swedish, but she was afraid of the authorities here, afraid of the bank, afraid of the neighbors, and I’d always interpreted that as a remnant of her homeland, a shadow she’d brought with her across the sea, but now I wondered if it wasn’t the other way around, if the fear didn’t belong here, to this country.

  “Why did you come to Sweden?” I touched the stone.

  In Islam we believe that a grave is a door to an unknown kingdom, a barrier between this life and the next. A dark parallel of the uterus. We believe the dead are waiting to be born for a second time, from the earth, to face final judgment, and that their existence in the grave is a result of their actions in life. I asked God to watch over Mom and ease her trials out there, in the unknown.

  According to a hadith, clay from this very grave plot was used when her body was created, in a Gambian woman’s uterus almost a hundred years ago. It was already decided then that she would die in Sweden and be buried here, in this deep-frozen earth. The matter was always going to find its way back here. I looked up into the light. What is it, then? Time. I don’t know. A landscape.

  I found pictures of the girl from Tundra as a child, pictures from school and from social events. A regular Belgian girl. She had braces for a few years in middle school. Her parents were university graduates, well established. Whether or not she had sympathized with Daesh before she was abducted and taken to al-Mima was disputed. I tried to reach her parents. Her mother was still living in Brussels. I called and emailed her several times, but to no avail
. There was no trace of her father after the attack on Hondo’s—he’d simply moved without giving a new address. It was no surprise that the family was hard to get ahold of—they’d been stalked by the media and harassed by racists.

  I wrote to Amin’s mother and Hamad’s parents. Unlike Amin’s father, who lived in Norway, they still lived in Gothenburg. No reply.

  Göran Loberg was in a secret location and had a twenty-four-hour security detail, but I wrote to an email address I found on his blog, and to the publisher of his book of caricatures.

  I still didn’t know if I would write the book, but I sensed that I had to find out something about the girl, find out why I was the one she’d contacted, and what had actually happened at Hondo’s that night.

  I told Mido about my visits to the asylum. He was surprised, intrigued, and asked if he could bring his camera, but I didn’t think it was a good idea. I wanted to preserve what had arisen between me and the girl, whatever it was.

  I read everything I could find about al-Mima. It wasn’t actually a proper prison, but a camp erected in the desert outside Amman in the years after September 11. I saw the pictures. The guard towers monitoring modular buildings made of concrete and plywood. Military tents flapping in the wind. Rows and rows of cages lined up in the heat. A landscape beyond the law.

  Mostly suspected terrorists and so-called “unlawful combatants” from countries in the Third World ended up in al-Mima, but several European and American citizens had been sent there to be subjected to interrogation methods that were legally and politically impossible in their home countries. In addition to the girl from Tundra, it is said that a Swedish citizen with Somali heritage was there for a time. His name was only mentioned on the record once in Sweden: he was cited as a source in an article in Aftonbladet. I emailed the journalist, requesting to be put in touch with him, but the reply took its time.

  Al-Mima had been shut down and razed to the ground when a bunch of documents and films from inside had leaked to the media.

  Mainly the leaked material showed how prisoners were subjected to the interrogation methods recognizable from other so-called “black sites”: waterboarding, sexual and religious humiliation, dogs, electricity, long-term isolation, forced feeding. Among these better known images another set of material was unnoticed, one that seemed to bear witness to more bizarre and inexplicable treatment. There were photographs showing people on a cement floor with wires operated into their bodies or stuck into suction cups all over their skin. In some pictures they seemed to be being subjected to brain surgery without anesthesia.

  Eyewitness testimonies from al-Mima often had internal contradictions and were otherwise confused: the victims spoke of having been injected full of chemicals and connected to computers, being submerged in saltwater tanks, sensory deprivation. At least three victims described their experiences in al-Mima in religious terms, saying their souls had been taken out of their bodies or that they had been possessed by djinns—invisible beings that, according to Islam’s expansive and multidimensional cosmology, were created by desert winds and fire before the time of man.

  The prison hadn’t been manned by standard guards or military personnel but by employees of K5GS, and the suspicions about the company, among which were reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, suggested the company had used the prisoners in al-Mima as guinea pigs in neurological experiments.

  After the prison closed down, the majority of the prisoners were lost to other types of confinement, and the few who once again saw the light of day were hardly in a state to give a clear account of what they’d endured.

  It was there, in the Jordanian desert, at the border of technology and theology, that the girl in the clinic had been put into the unreachable, peculiar state she had been found in following her repatriation to Belgium.

  I was at my living room window. Isra was playing with our daughter down in the courtyard—the girl fell into a snow drift, ice and snow got inside the fur collar of her snowsuit and Isra brushed it away, laughing.

  When she was born it was like the vulnerability I’d always felt when facing the world, when facing the cruelty of others, had finally found its target. I survived my childhood—my childhood as a black person in Sweden—only to find that she was the one who saved me. She saved me from the Rabbit Yard. Their laughter echoed between the buildings—she and Isra were having a snowball fight.

  When the girl from Tundra left her hospital bed in Brussels that summer night, it was snowing. As far as I understand, researchers have dismissed the phenomenon as an oddity, an anomaly.

  Maybe the coincidence meant nothing.

  What did she want with me?

  Who was I to her?

  In her seminal work A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway wrote about science fiction—to which the girl’s delusions perhaps should be counted—and how it was a “negotiation of reality.” Remembering the pictures from al-Mima, I wondered if the girl’s writing wasn’t doing exactly what Haraway was talking about: finding a way of negotiating with the world that had hurt her so terribly.

  4

  Who knows how we eventually arrived at the Rabbit Yard. I don’t know if we came by bus or car, or if we walked. I don’t remember the gates or the color of the guards’ uniforms. But I can tell you about the pork dished up every single day. Every single slice of sausage and cold-cut.

  I’m writing to those of you who don’t know yet that madness will always become normal; in the end, normality becomes madness.

  On the day in camp we were shown the Amin video, we were given sandwiches, and the thin slice of pink pork on my bread was streaked with blood. It reminded me of flayed human flesh.

  The dining hall was a former gymnasium filled with clunky furniture that could have been taken from parks or highway rest stops. An old basketball hoop was still mounted to one of the walls.

  I remember Dad poking at his sandwich. He picked off a cucumber slice and the meat underneath had paled, like the skin under a Band-Aid.

  We’d never eaten anything that had even been near pork before. We ate a few vegetables from the edge of the plate, if we could, or bread and jam that Dad got ahold of somehow.

  It wasn’t only for religious reasons, but more to have control over something. Yani #eatingdisorder.

  My shoes squished when I got up: we picked the pork from our plates and threw it on the floor, so a layer of grayish, squishy meat built up under the tables and chairs. A bit of sausage from yesterday’s lunch stuck to the tread of my sole, and when I dug it out with a plastic fork I was reminded of the man who’d been swallowed by a giant fish in the Koran, and who was stuck inside.

  I thought: We’re in the belly of Sweden.

  We had daily classes in Building K, a yellow brick building that must’ve been a real school once, because there was a jungle gym and a paved soccer field outside. There were different teachers every day: one time it was a Swedish guy my age who talked about men having to change diapers and vacuum; the next time one of the guards put on a cartoon about how children are made—with sperm that were like little white submarines and stuff—and the next time it was something different again. The teachers called themselves “democracy entrepreneurs” and “free speech coaches” and “dialogue activists,” and wrote their names on the whiteboard.

  On that particular day our teacher was an older man with gray dreads knotted at his neck and lots of bronze and cloth bracelets. The head of a museum, apparently. He pulled down a projection screen, started the film, and sat in a corner of the darkened classroom, looking pained by the events on screen.

  “Light,” Amin said, and his sister turned on the cellphone’s flashlight and pointed it at him.

  He looked at me as he killed them. I felt an ache in my gut. Like I missed him or he missed me, and I shut my eyes but I still heard the screams and cries and chairs falling over. I opened my eyes right as Amin’s sister turned the camera on the shop door, where the police were trying to get in. Blue lights twinkled
in the darkness, and when she detonated her bomb vest the screen went black.

  I remember thinking that she and Amin had let the emptiness in and it made them strong.

  The teacher switched on the overhead lights and rolled up the blackout blinds. That day, sand was blowing through the air, spring or fall. A patrol car was turning around on the soccer field outside. The teacher was going on about freedom of speech and the, you know, right to blaspheme. He showed us posters of Göran Loberg’s drawings, which we’d all seen a hundred times already—in the citizen contract and at school and as everybody’s profile picture each year on February seventeenth. Then he handed out paper and pens and asked us to make our own drawings. He said it was an opportunity to break the psychological barrier.

  Dad drew a black man with thick balloon lips and charcoal skin. Others drew pictures of men with turbans and long, drooping noses. I realized that everybody was copying Loberg’s pictures so their threat level wouldn’t be raised, so I did too. Afterward the teacher put the pictures he liked best up on the classroom wall.

  I get a lot of headaches. It’s like my brain is being split in half. I sit in my room at Tundra and listen to the other inmates screaming. I look out at the falling leaves, the falling snow, the falling rain, and I know that what I remember was real, but also that the proof would be me not being able to say a single word about it.

  The map of the Rabbit Yard is still burned into my retina.

  During the first year, Dad and I were living in a striped zone in one of the tall apartment buildings I’d seen when me, Liat, and Bilal drove out there. If our threat level was raised—which could happen if you wore religious clothing, were caught in the wrong zone, didn’t cooperate in class at Building K, or had a certain style of beard, etcetera—if that happened we’d have to move to a checkered zone, which apparently meant we wouldn’t have our own apartment—we’d have to live in a parking garage or gym. If our threat level was raised even more, we’d end up in a black zone: only allowed out on the open fields where the drones could film us, where maybe we’d find a burned-out car or an old trailer for shelter, or live in one of the hundreds of little tents a theater troupe had donated to the Rabbit Yard once upon a time—flimsy tents made of dirty neon fabric that collapsed when it rained.