They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  I would have wanted to protect her from al-Mima. From the torturers and what they turned her into.

  A bee buzzed by; she watched it go.

  “Bees were smaller in my time,” she said. “As small as fruit flies. They’d done something to their DNA so that they wouldn’t die from pesticides.”

  Would she ever leave Tundra, would she wake up one day and remember what happened to her in the desert, and her parents, her life in Brussels, her language?

  The thought frightened me more than anything else.

  “We learned about it in school,” she said and dropped the white flower, letting it fall to the earth.

  The black hood covers her head. She can make out the ceiling lamp through the dark fabric—a dancing beam of light pushing through the darkness.

  They arrange her body so her head is tilted back and put something else over her face, something heavy and cold that intensifies the dark and molds to her cheeks, sinks into her eye sockets. It’s just a wet towel. They’re pouring water on it; it’s running down her chest and through her hair, going up her nostrils and seeping into her mouth. Her body quakes, arms and legs shaking wildly.

  She’s trying to hold her breath as hands press down on her chest, slow and business-like, forcing the air from her lungs.

  Bursting pain.

  Animal panic flooding her mind.

  Who is she? Why are they doing this to her?

  She breathes in; can’t help it. She wants to stay in the light and heat—she inhales the ice-cold water.

  Here is the hollow core.

  Here is where she begins and ends.

  The intersection.

  Why does she remember a pig’s head among shards of glass? A man who stashes books under his mattress? The dark water runs into her lungs and the world narrows into a strip, seconds expand into extinguishing days, years.

  But in another world.

  In another time she’s in another place.

  She isn’t here.

  My toes sank into the wet sand. Isra and I were carrying our shoes, the wind was blowing through our clothes and carried with it the smell of rotting seaweed. This was in the summer, before our daughter’s school started up again and we’d booked a room at a hostel just outside of Halmstad for the weekend. She was playing in the waves, collecting shells and stones in a plastic bag; Isra and I were ambling under a turbulent August sky, full of shrieking gulls and sardine clouds.

  The summer ripened then reached its end, in those years as ever.

  “She asked me if I felt hopeful. About Sweden.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t have an answer.”

  Isra was quiet; I was quiet. We caught sight of a structure a little way off and wandered in that direction. A group of teens were just beyond it, they might have been drinking beer or making out. A bare cement cube, half buried in the sand.

  “Why would a military contractor plant that story in her?” I wondered. “About Sweden? About a future where Muslims are annihilated by fascists?”

  Isra looked at me, worried, disappointed.

  “What is it about her that draws you in? Why can’t you just let her go?” She’d flipped through the girl’s papers and listened to the recordings of my visits to the clinic; the magnetic power of the girl from Tundra evaded her.

  The feeling that one time our fingers touched.

  Interwoven.

  I didn’t reply, Isra said, “If she really started to have doubts about the attack—why didn’t she leave? She must’ve had plenty of chances to just open the shop door and walk away before the weapons came out. She could have left and called the police.”

  “She thought she recognized Amin and Hamad. From her real life.” I don’t know why I was defending her, only that I had to. “But really I think she’d seen them on a computer screen at al-Mima.”

  Our daughter shrieked as she ran along, the waves roaring onto the land and crashing into white foam. Now and then she picked something out of the sand and put it in her plastic bag. Tiny, simple, holy things, salvaged from what to her must resemble God.

  But God resembles nothing.

  The building was just an old bunker, a fortification left over from the Second World War—probably part of what had been called the Skåne Line, built as a defense against invading Germans. The roof was overgrown with beach grass and the concrete was graffitied inside and out. A memory from a war that never reached us. A future that had existed only in the minds of military strategists.

  “Do you remember Jamila?” Isra said. I nodded. A young girl Isra had taught to recite from the Koran. Lively, intelligent. Played tennis. Tunisian parents.

  “Her older brother went to Syria last week,” Isra said.

  “To Syria? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  She didn’t reply, and her silence made me feel guilty, as though my meetings with the girl from Tundra betrayed something between me and my wife.

  “Their mother can’t stop crying,” Isra said, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to lose my own child to Daesh, to that suicide cult the movement, after the most recent military defeats, had unarguably become.

  “They will drown in their mothers’ tears,” Isra said. “Those who go there to die. In the next world.”

  The gulls screeched overhead.

  “Maybe we should move.”

  “Where? To Algeria? Like in that girl’s story?”

  “To my sister’s,” I said.

  “Toronto?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of what she says about Sweden? Do you believe her?”

  I shook my head firmly and gave a laugh, short and then severed.

  Sometimes I thought that night had yet to end: Amin still had Göran Loberg in his grasp, ready to slice up the world with his little box cutter, and let the darkness in. That’s why I had to write the book. To resist him, like the girl from Tundra had done.

  I peered into the structure. A few centimeters of mud covered the floor and it smelled of urine and saltwater. The rough concrete was cold and scarred. I felt something moist. Jerked my hand back. Blood? Red spray paint. It must’ve been from those kids ahead of us up the beach. A geometric shape that looked like a rune. Hard to make out in the twilight of the bunker.

  The angular metal pin stuck in it, like a snowflake crossed with a swastika.

  Against the light I searched for the kids, trying to see if they were Swedish. If Swedes would call them Swedish. I shouted to our daughter to come join us. Shouting that the world is less safe than the sea.

  And the Xerox-pulse of blue light sweeps through the store, moving soundlessly over Amin’s pallid face, over the triangular blade of the knife, over the overturned and scattered comic books.

  Outside the megaphone blares. Talk. Talk to us.

  I’m writing to those of you who won’t believe that what I’m saying can happen in Sweden. You’ll think I’m lying because you still think you’re Swedish.

  The bluish smoke from the shot-down drone was bitter and burned my eyes as I pushed my way through the crowd.

  People were clapping and singing. Amin, something, Amin, Amin.

  The image on the rain-splattered paper someone shoved in my hand was faded. His face. A still from the Hondo video and something in Arabic I couldn’t make out.

  A young guy with a black-and-white striped soccer shirt was standing over the smoking wreckage and talking excitedly while waving a homemade weapon, which I assumed he’d used to shoot down the drone, a tangle of duct tape and steel pipes and plastic. The drone’s fins and camera casings reminded me of something that had evolved in the ocean over millions of years, or an exercise device you order online to get buff biceps.

  Amin, sang the crowd, Amin, something, Amin, Amin.

  His gaze, warped and blurry. His eyes, recognizing me.

  The black zones in the Rabbit Yard were stormed that night. From our window, Dad and I saw the security company’s bulldozers and armored vans cr
ashing through the tents and trailers. In their riot gear the guards looked like large insects working in the fiery thunder of spinning emergency lights, spraying tear gas and using blocky, nasty weapons that shot violet blinding flashes: people who got hit put their hands over their eyes and threw themselves on the ground, flailing.

  Wallah, Star Wars.

  A few days later Dad and I were taken aside on our way into the cafeteria. A guard confiscated our ID cards and issued us new ones using a tool hanging from her belt; our threat level had been raised. I think it was my fault, maybe they’d gone through the security footage from the crowd by the shot-down drone and spotted me.

  We were banned from the striped zones. Dad asked one of our neighbors to bring us what was left of our things from the apartment, and we squeezed into an old grocery store where lots of people were already living.

  I don’t remember how long we’d been living in the Rabbit Yard then. I don’t remember if we talked to the people we were living with or if we kept to ourselves. I still thought about Liat sometimes: how she was doing and what she’d been doing since finishing school. Dad couldn’t get ahold of insulin anymore, and his eyes bled—ugly reddish yellow marks flaring like sunspots on the whites. I talked to him about trying to leave the Rabbit Yard, because sometimes people did climb over the fence into Sweden, even if lots of them were arrested and ended up in Building T, never to be seen again.

  “Dad,” I said. “There’s no life here.”

  He listened halfheartedly, paging through one of his photo albums, but instead of answering he took a closer look and squinted, as though it wasn’t me, but the family in the pictures talking to him.

  He didn’t say a word when we walked through the cafeteria. He would pick the ham off the bread or out of the pasta sauce. His shaking, tired hands would guide the white plastic fork to his mouth and carry his silence the same way a conductor’s hands can when they’ve stopped the music.

  I started visiting the area where the drone had been shot down, wandering among the trailers and burned-out cars. Sometimes men hollered at me, threatening, yani come here or what you doing here. Sister. Yo, sister. Flyers fluttered in the mud. Some people were calling themselves The Martyr Amin’s Holy Warrior Brigade—they must’ve run an Arabic phrase through some bad translation program. It must have been them who handed me the paper in the crowd by the shot-down drone. I even found pages with poems on them, short verses about fire and paradise, which I folded up and saved.

  After a while the women started greeting me, even as they pulled their veils around themselves more tightly, hiding their features.

  One evening, the air smelling of trash and dusty earth—a smell I associate with summer in the Rabbit Yard—I thought I saw the Arabic guy who’d shot down the drone and who I was sure had been taken away, but when he turned around I realized it was just someone else wearing his black-and-white soccer shirt, a North African, a few years older than me, with mussed dark curls. He was hanging around a tent with his friends, who noticed me looking at them. They pointed and laughed, but then muttered something in Arabic, scolding. There was something searching in the way he moved, and when he turned to face me I saw that his eyes were pale and cloudy, and the skin around them was burned—a strip of wrinkled flesh across his cheeks and forehead—he must’ve been hit by the weapon the guards were using.

  “Dad. It’s death here. We can’t stay.”

  “Death does not exist in the world,” Dad said. “Death is inside us.”

  Top three things I missed about our last apartment…Number three was a working toilet. Since moving we’d only used the porta-potties that had been put around an old square and that didn’t get emptied often enough. I mean total balagan. Two: having a door to close, so I could be alone with my thoughts. Number one was the window, where I could sit and look out. All the windows in the grocery store were covered with plywood and taped-up cardboard. Maybe that was why I was almost never there, because I felt shut in.

  I got to know a group of women who cooked watery soup for people in the black zone. They reminded me of the bearded brothers who’d come to the last mosque, and I ended up with the job of collecting and washing the plastic dishes. I started mimicking their speech and their modest way of covering their mouths when they laughed, and was let inside their tents and trailers, where I sat with my legs folded under me, listening. They belonged to a group who believed that liberation would be ours if Muslims gave up dunya, yani this world, which wasn’t actually real anyway.

  You know, Sufis, like Mom.

  One of them had worked as a journalist before she ended up in the Rabbit Yard. She was a Somali woman, the most beautiful person I’d ever seen in my life wallah. She’d found a printer in a school and dragged it to a trailer where they connected it to a cellphone so it could print out poems by Rabia Basri, a Sufi saint I knew about because Mom talked about her sometimes.

  I think that was my third summer in the Rabbit Yard. I was looking for a home or a way out. It might have been three years since Mom’s death. Dad cried often, silently, his mouth ajar, his hard face wet with tears.

  “Dad. If I leave the Rabbit Yard, how will you manage?”

  His silence, I thought, was how the emptiness screamed.

  I walked through those mild nights, over the fields littered with cars and trailers and tents. Rabia wrote that she carried a torch and a pail of water so she could burn down the gardens of paradise and quench the fires of hell, because she wanted people to pray to God for God’s own sake. The women made fun of me because I was unmarried, laughing behind their hands flecked with ink from old broken toner cartridges.

  Dreams about Amin, still.

  “Amin?”

  “Hamad.”

  He was sitting on a bed with me. He held his hands like a machine gun and shook them silently.

  I woke up in the grocery store’s oppressive dark. A car drove by outside. By the time I got dressed and was at the door, another one passed by. Trash and dry earth whirled around the tires. I went out into the dusty night. The machines were at work off in the distance.

  They were using shipping containers to build a wall outside the fence.

  I sat outside the store on an upside-down milk crate and watched the sky brighten. The morning was unusually peaceful. When we got to Building K for our lesson, which had been changed to the morning since our threat level had been raised, it was locked. Something was wrong. There were no guards anywhere and no lunch was being served. I saw shadows in the windows of Building T, high up on the hill, but otherwise the entire Rabbit Yard seemed to have been abandoned by anyone who wasn’t locked in. By the afternoon, after I’d spent hours trying to get through to Dad, he said, like he was talking about someone about to repaint the walls in his apartment:

  “They might firebomb us.”

  In the evening trucks arrived and men and women with white surgical masks climbed atop the containers and threw in large white sacks of rice.

  I visited the women. They were sitting outside their trailer. One of them said there had been a terror attack in Stockholm, another said she’d heard the Swedish military was going to attack the Rabbit Yard in order to train for an overseas mission, the third said it was all a cost-cutting measure.

  I remember a shirtless man. He had dark fungal boils on his chest and walked around the square, screaming and pointing at them as if they were signs of the infidels’ evil or marks that God had made in order to elevate him to king.

  I don’t know if the Rabbit Yard had been blockaded for days or weeks or longer, but the first deaths happened that night, and the next day during the burials panic spread, as the size of the death toll sank in.

  We hid in the shop for a long time, it could have been weeks.

  I remember my hands running over my skin, terrified of every little speck of dirt and scratching at my birthmarks until they started to bleed. I remember crumbling up a slice of bread and feeding the crumbs to Dad.

  When I headed out in the m
orning it was quiet, like the whole world was underwater or in a glass case. As though the emptiness had finally taken over the Rabbit Yard.

  A guard stood on one of the containers and, instead of keeping out of sight, I stood below him, waiting for him to look at me. I wanted to be seen by eyes that did not belong to those of us who were locked in here. But the visor of his helmet was pulled down. It shimmered a little when he moved his head.

  I heard a whining sound, either a man praying or a barking dog.

  A forgotten line of laundry stretched between two apartment balconies fluttered in the wind.

  I remember a corridor full of flies and a woman, her face covered in scabs like a mask of dried clay, who said the company in charge of the Rabbit Yard was allowing us to be used as guinea pigs for new medicines, and that’s where the plague came from.

  At some point the blockade must have been lifted, because I remember new people arriving in buses and the lessons in Building K starting back up.

  The dead were buried in the soccer fields.

  I know you don’t want to believe this can happen in the country where you and your children are living. My parents didn’t want to either.

  But the Rabbit Yard was in Sweden.

  In the mornings the blankets we’d wrapped ourselves in were covered in ice crystals. I spent my time with the women in the black zone; I wanted them to keep telling me about God’s wrath, about how the earth would one day quake and throw up the dead, about how the angels would drag people behind them on iron hooks on the Day of Judgment.

  One day, a pair of them were outside their trailer, hands bound with zip ties, and the journalist was kneeling in the mud and trying to wrap herself in a blue veil with gold embroidery, which a dog kept pulling off her. The guards around her were laughing and filming with their cellphones.

  The printer came flying out of the trailer door and smashed to bits.