They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  My head was resting on Dad’s chest. The sound of a patrol car’s electric engine accelerating away between the buildings faded.

  “What is it you see in those pictures?”

  When he just kept lying there staring at the ceiling, I opened one of his photo albums. The mom was posing for a portrait. Her child was in her arms, they were standing in bright light by the wall of a red house.

  I thought the Rabbit Yard was the ground they were standing on, a patch of earth in the midst of everything normal.

  I touched the photo hesitantly.

  “I’m listening to their faces,” Dad said.

  I inspected the woman’s lips, the spots on her skin, eruptions of sun and joy.

  “What are they saying?”

  “Thou shalt not kill,” Dad said, using the old timey words, but then reflexively he rephrased it for me: “It means you’re not supposed to murder people.”

  His chest was rising slowly, hissing under my head. He must’ve guessed what I was going to say, I’d said it so many times before after all, because he asked, “Where would we go?”

  “Away from here.”

  I put the photo album down, and joined him in staring up at the moldy, cracked ceiling.

  “Do you remember her face?” he asked. I knew he was talking about Mom. When I closed my eyes I could see the creases around her eyes when she smiled and how she’d reach out and brush my cheek. The ocean’s roar.

  If I’d been a real poet, like Rabia or the blind woman from Iran, I wouldn’t have to write all of this down. It all feels like lies anyway. I would’ve been able to write a poem and hold out each word one at a time, showing how broken they were in my time, how they were like the rest of the trash strewn in the Rabbit Yard.

  Words like old refrigerator doors and bricks broken in half, words that were no good for anything, words like the innards of cars and washing machines. Buckled, rusty words, words like punctured hoses and torn clothes and rugs, words you wouldn’t touch unless you were wearing gloves.

  I left Dad.

  I remember my jacket ripping as I climbed over the fence and the guards chasing me into the abandoned shopping center where I hid among clothes racks and broken mannequins. I remember the plastic body parts all around me, and the dogs’ claws clacking on the shop floor as they came to find me, and that they just stared at me, tongues wagging.

  Then how they went quiet and retreated.

  I remember having become someone whom even dogs were afraid of.

  I hid in the old shopping center for half a day, and then struck off across playgrounds and school grounds, through the long shadows. Two children were kicking a ball against a wall, and it seemed unreal that children could still play.

  If I’d written a poem about everything, I would’ve used the melody from a song I’d heard a group of women in black singing during a burial when the plague was at its worst. A Kurdish or Persian tradition, where they walked in line behind the bundle of cloth that was to be buried. They screamed. Screamed as if they could wake the dead. Screamed until their voices cracked.

  Screamed because they had survived.

  Yellow leaves blew around my feet. I took the routes where I thought I wouldn’t be stopped by Crusading Hearts or guards or ordinary Swedes. They were playing the video of Amin again. He was watching me from billboards and bus stops.

  A light was on in our living room window. Where else would I have gone? When I drew close and peered in I was almost surprised to see a Swedish family sitting there instead of me, Mom, and Dad. A car passed by on the road past the playground, the sound made me jump and cower.

  I was a memory, a refugee.

  Liat’s window was dark. I climbed up the drainpipe. The height didn’t scare me. I knew there was danger in normalcy, in happiness and safety.

  The apartment was empty. It wasn’t even furnished anymore.

  Like we’d never existed.

  The two empty swings nearby swayed in the wind. Top five nice things Liat had done for me. Number five: protected me from annoying boys. Four: taught me to dance like Oh Nana Yurg when we were nine.

  Over by the bus stop Amin was pulling Göran Loberg by the hair. I swung faster and the wind dried my tears. Liat and I had been a part of Sweden that wasn’t Sweden, a part the country around me needed to be able to cleanse itself of.

  We had been Sweden’s dead skin and long nails.

  The screen went black, the text said that everything could’ve been different, if only the Swedes hadn’t been so kind, Hondo’s would never have happened. The video started again, Amin taking out the knife, sliding out the blade. I didn’t notice when the guards arrived. Too tired to run. Now that Liat wasn’t here anymore, I wanted to be back with Dad.

  The guards were wearing yellow hats with brown lettering, which meant they belonged to the company that handled security in the neighborhood—some of my old neighbors must’ve seen me in the swing and called them. I didn’t have my passport with me of course, they checked my eyes with an app, locked me in the backseat of their car. They’d parked by the bus stop and the LCD screen’s light flickered through the window, onto the tattered seat, over my hands. After a while a car came from the company that ran the Rabbit Yard and I was transferred.

  We followed the outer border. Night had fallen and it was raining, again I saw the fences, apartment blocks that had gone up in flames, the misty rain on the car windows looked like hairspray. We pulled into a garage under Building T and one of the guards took me to a changing room where a towel and a gray sweatsuit were laid out on a bench. I showered and changed, and two other men, dressed in white, came to get me.

  They locked me in a room where a guy with a shaved head was sitting on a mattress. He was staring straight ahead, like he was inspecting the cracks in the paint on one of the walls. It took a minute before I saw who it was.

  I sat down on the empty mattress. He said, “As-salaamu-alaikum. I’m Bilal.” He didn’t seem to recognize me. Liat’s old boyfriend, the one with the cauliflower ears and beautiful eyes who’d been so in love with her that summer when we were still in the midst of life. I hadn’t noticed him in the Rabbit Yard so he must’ve come to Building T from a different camp, or straight from the streets.

  “I knew Liat,” I said, but he didn’t understand. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved scalp.

  “Who?”

  “I’m Liat’s best friend.”

  He wrinkled his forehead and said, “Shit.”

  I thought about what I’d imagined: the black hole in the middle of the Rabbit Yard. That’s where I was now.

  “So you just got here,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “You still have your hair.”

  5

  She was staring through the fence at the pale, stubby grass on the other side.

  “Where are you going?” The voice was a hoarse whisper. She looked older, in that timeless way you sometimes see in the institutionalized—on her way to becoming an overgrown, ancient child.

  “To Canada. My sister lives there.”

  “When?”

  “It’s a long process. We have to organize visas and work. A place to live. It won’t be for at least a year.”

  She nodded curtly. Sometimes I wondered how the crushing sorrow she radiated squared with the notion that she’d escaped a fate that, according to her story, might have been worse than death. In her mind, hadn’t she stopped everything she was writing about from happening?

  There was a change in her energy—maybe an indistinct shift in her posture.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked, and she turned her attention to me, squeamish, as if the sound of my voice had surprised her. She took a step back, seemed introverted and nervous. Something had happened to her face, her expression—it was like a different consciousness was inhabiting her nervous system. Her curious illness.

  I asked her if she was angry, and she turned away, back to the fields, to the grass and sky. She kept
sneaking frightened, wary looks at me, and after a minute or so I thought I saw her change again: shoulders drawn up in her usual crooked way; the band of panic stretched tight across her eyes vanished.

  If I’d known her real name, or if like Amin I’d given her one of my own, I would’ve said it.

  Another minute passed.

  “Sometimes I’m that other girl,” she said. “The one they say I am. Annika.”

  “You remember your real life?”

  She shook her head, slowly, like in a fog.

  “It’s not like that. Who I am now, the person talking to you, disappears. It started happening like a month ago. I slip away.”

  “Slip away?”

  “You know, like when you fall asleep or whatever. I don’t exist anymore. Then I come back. Sometimes it’s been a minute, sometimes an hour, sometimes longer, and I know she’s been here, in her body.” Her laughter sounded distressed. “Balagan,” she sighed.

  The word, which recurred in her account, was modern Israeli slang. Maybe it wasn’t strange for her to be using it: she may very well have been friends with a Jewish girl before she was sent to al-Mima.

  “Sometimes I remember things after she’s been here,” she said. “Like when a window stays fogged with breath after someone’s been standing there looking out, you know?”

  On a gravel path behind us the Bear Man passed by with a guard—I turned, because I didn’t like having my back to the Bear Man. Both he and the guard were smoking and speaking softly to each other.

  “Do you remember anything now?” I asked when they were out of sight.

  “I remember a woman who played with me, and a few words in another language.”

  I was full of misgivings. I didn’t want that—what had happened right then when she hadn’t been in my world—to happen again. I felt dizzy.

  “Yani, Belgian,” she said.

  “Flemish,” I corrected, and she put her hands in her pockets. Something seemed to rise up, then sink inside her.

  I wanted to ask her to describe the symbol the fascists had used in her future, to compare it with the one the kids had painted at the beach last summer. But then I would’ve been giving into something.

  Everything was wrong.

  “Lately, they’ve been showing clips from the video to justify shutting down the Öresund Bridge, did you hear about that?”

  “My video?” she said. “From the comic book store?”

  I nodded. “Big demonstrations and counter-demonstrations down in Malmö.”

  “I have to ask you something.”

  “Ask.”

  “I know you’re gonna say no.”

  “Ask.”

  “Can I meet your wife?”

  “Isra? Why?”

  “Please,” she begged in a childish tone that was new.

  “But why?”

  She couldn’t answer, and the question ran into the sand.

  What did she want with us?

  Everything was wrong.

  A flock of birds had been scared out of a tree on the other side of the fence and was circling it, a shrieking dark ring.

  We sat on the rug in our living room, twelve people in a circle, a halaqa: men and women gathered to forget the world for a while, scarves wrapped around their shoulders or draped over their heads, crocheted kufis or baseball caps on backward, hoodies and jallabias, one sister who’d come straight from work was wearing a bus driver’s uniform. Isra was carrying around a dish of incense, the sweet sandalwood smoke rose to the ceiling. We’d moved the sofa out of the way, the chairs and table were against the wall to make room for it all; I was holding my daughter, and when we began the evening’s dhikr she mimicked me as my inadequate voice called for the Unparalleled, that which carried our souls in His open palm. Allah. I rocked back and forth, eyes shut. Her higher-pitched voice within mine. Allah. The windows were open to the cool fall evening and under our chanting voices the sound of traffic and shouting teenagers died out.

  Was the girl from Tundra the reason we couldn’t stay here? Were her words what was driving us to leave my mother’s grave, the communal laundry rooms, and the trees lighting up in fall?

  Nothing in me was freed from the world’s forgetfulness, nothing remembered that this world was not mankind’s home.

  When we had finished our dhikr and prayed, my daughter stayed in my arms, and like me she cupped her hands and whispered into their bowl.

  She and I had tried to save a magpie’s life earlier in the week: our cat caught it and left it on our balcony and we gave it scraps of food and water and then buried it together. We’d even read a passage from the Koran, crouching by the flowerbed. She was at that age where not one day would pass without her tugging at me, eagerly pointing out a cloud formation or the opalescent shine of a beetle’s shell, and I didn’t know what she was praying for there in my lap, because I imagined she was already in paradise.

  Make me true, I whispered and looked down into my own palms. Cupped, the lines and folds of skin were like the facets of a crystal.

  Turn my body into a question.

  Forgive us.

  After tea, the guests left, brothers and sisters dispersing under a darkening cover of clouds.

  We’d told them about our plan to leave Sweden. Mido had tried to convince us to stay, others understood, harboring similar plans.

  Down in the courtyard Mido turned to me, up on the balcony, and waved. He put his hand to his heart.

  Were we birds?

  Have mercy on us.

  Put light inside us. Light around us.

  Two teenage girls were smoking in an entryway across the courtyard and what could I think of if not her. She, Amin, and Hamad were liminal beings, caught mid-transformation. And therefore monstrous. They’d gone around with their machine guns, through the blood spatter and scattered comic books and toys, screaming about God and the Prophet. I thought they were the monsters of the Reformation, without really knowing what I meant by that. An image from the war came to me. Where had I seen it? A jihadist had gotten hold of a tank and was tooling around on a street. Like a child skidding her bike on gravel.

  Amin’s mother was waiting for me in a café on the square in Hasselbo. I’d been trying to reach her, via various mosques and trying my luck with phone calls, when suddenly she’d picked up and agreed to meet.

  At the table next to us, a group of older Arabic men were drinking tea, dressed in suits even though it was a Tuesday afternoon. They were loud and jolly, and made her—hunched over her coffee in a fluffy gray winter coat, hair in a bun at her neck, bent by an incredible weight—seem like she was on a planet where gravity exerted a stronger pull.

  Amin’s cousin, a few years older than what Amin would’ve been, sat next to her and seemed sulky even as he wolfed down his cinnamon bun. I recognized him from a couple of articles I’d read. I don’t know if she’d asked him to join her for our interview or if it had been his idea.

  I greeted them, bought a cup of tea, joined them.

  A biting cold day, a bluish whiteout rolled over the cement slabs outside the café window.

  The cousin asked if I was a journalist. I said I was a poet and author, which he didn’t really seem to relate to. He was wearing a white polo shirt and a blue cap, faded by sun and rain. A string of numbers was tattooed on his neck. Later I found out it was the zip code of an area in Borås where he’d lived for some of his childhood—you could find out a lot about him, and the rest of Amin’s family, on racist web forums.

  “What do you want to know about Amin?” Amin’s mother asked. When I told her that it was up to her, she took a photo out of her handbag and put it on the table’s crocheted lace cloth.

  The picture had been taken outside, on a patch of grass with a cement wall in the background. A boy, maybe three years old, was holding an infant. It had to be Amin and Nour.

  “He had a lot of love in him,” she said. The cousin shifted in his chair and made a face that suggested nausea, rage, and also maybe a measu
re of healthy suspicion for yet another man who wanted to write about their dead. “A lot of love,” she repeated, caressing the photo. The little girl. “Do you know what happened to her? To Nour? Has anyone told you?”

  “Only what I read in the papers. She died. An accident.”

  Of course there had been articles about all of this after the attack. Most of them painted her as quite a terrible mother—a welfare case, irresponsible, a parasite, even though she’d been working at various old age homes and as a personal assistant since she and her husband had arrived in Sweden in the late ’90s.

  The accident, Nour drowning in the bathtub, was painted as suspicious in the most speculative reports—a sign of the darkness that had come to haunt the family.

  “Look at all the love.”

  “Yes,” I said, and it was like her fingertips had burned to the waxy faded surface—her hand was shaking but didn’t leave the photograph. “He only left her in the bathtub for a second,” she said. “Amin’s dad. He just wanted to see the news.” She couldn’t stop staring at the picture, her face twisted into a searching and tormented grimace, as though she were loosening a knot tied tight inside her.

  “It was about the war. In our country. He just wanted to see the news.”

  “About Iraq,” the cousin interjected.

  “About Iraq. He just wanted to see what was happening back home as it was being bombed.” She made an evasive gesture with her free hand, and said: “He couldn’t stay with us after that. He lives in Norway.”

  She told me about Amin’s childhood, about his dreams of working at Volvo on Hisingen, about him drifting ever further away from the family over time. During our meeting she was often on the verge of tears, and when she did cry, the cousin put a comforting hand on her shoulder. I don’t know why, but it surprised me—because of who I thought a young guy from Hasselbo with a neck tattoo could be. Toward the end of our conversation he tilted his head to the side and looked at me, eyes narrowing, sizing something up, and said:

  “I tried to tell him. Brother. This life you’re living, brother, it’s nothing.” He shook his head. “Running the streets. It’s nothing.”