They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

by Johannes Anyuru

  She wasn’t sure why she’d slept with him. She’d made the first move, maybe because of the power she felt when they were together, that buzzing behind her forehead.

  Interwoven.

  “Who was that at the grill?”

  “Who?” Amin said. One of the things she liked about him was that he was so bad at lying. She mocked him, exaggerating his tone:

  “Who?”

  He finished smoking, sat down with her. It was the first time she’d been kissed there, between her shoulder blades. He didn’t want to talk about it. She said his name, a question, and he answered:

  “Hamad.”

  “Hamad who?”

  “He used to be me,” he mumbled, his lips on the nape of her neck.

  “Be you?” she asked. That’s when he stopped kissing her.

  “He had my block, my clients. Then he bounced to Syria last winter. I took over his burner and everything.”

  “Syria?” she said, because she didn’t know much about the war then.

  He made finger guns and shook them, like rat-tat-tat-tat, but soundless.

  “Daesh,” he said. “He came back two months ago. Yani, terrorist.”

  She touched the bulletproof glass, as though she were reaching for something in the sky. No orderlies or doctors were with us in the room, but the camera in the corner was on and I assumed her doctor would watch the video later.

  “I knew I had to be near them. Amin and Hamad,” she said. “They were spectacular. Like Oh Nana Yurg,” she added, chuckling at the thought. When she turned to face me, I could tell by her expression and posture that she was gone—the other part of her consciousness had appeared and was now inhabiting her body. She said something in a soft but unmelodious language. Flemish. I later asked a Belgian author to listen to it and translate:

  “Where’s my family? Why have you locked me up here?”

  She’d stopped giving me pages—as far as I knew her story about the future was over. She had died in that bed, and her consciousness had been recorded or saved by a machine, which had sent her into Annika Isagel’s body, in another world and another time…Per the logic of her story.

  She searched her surroundings anxiously, eyes roving the clinic’s walls, the fence outside the window, the landscape beyond it, and then after a few breaths, she was back, as suddenly as she’d disappeared. She picked at a flake of paint on the window frame.

  “Will you touch my cheek?” she asked.

  I stayed in my chair, imagining this cruelty would safeguard my innocence here, in Tundra’s visitors’ room. When she noticed I wasn’t going to she said, “When are you moving?”

  “In winter.”

  “So you’ve actually made a decision now?” I nodded. “Does it feel strange to be leaving your country?”

  “I don’t know if this has ever been my country,” I said.

  The sun brightened and for a few seconds the grease and dirt on the bulletproof glass stood out as clearly as white paint—continents on a fading map.

  “You know the essay my dad wrote after Mom died?”

  “The one nobody wanted to publish?”

  “Yeah. He wrote that what happened to us was the same as what happened to the Jews, and to the Armenians. The Bosnians. He wrote a long list of people who had been annihilated, because he didn’t think the Swedes understood what they were doing.” She seemed to have given this a lot of thought, her voice was composed, full of reason. “But they weren’t afraid of that history like we were. I know that now. We read about genocide and stuff in school, but it was all about how sad it was for everyone who’d been subjected to it, not what happened to those who did the killing, how they’d destroyed their words, and everything that gave life meaning. We learned nothing about the emptiness.” Her eyes narrowed, she sighed and said, “There’s so much I could tell you. To prove I come from the future. If you’d only believe me. That’s why I started writing to you.” A passing cloud tempered the light, which flickered across her face. “So you would believe me.”

  One early summer day in the 1950s a woman turned up at an airport near Tokyo with a passport issued by a nation that did not exist. When the customs officer pointed it out, the woman asked for an atlas, opened it to Europe, and ran her finger along the border between Spain and France. She claimed that her homeland was near Andorra and became more and more upset when she couldn’t find it. Her passport was well-used and had stamps from a number of airports; she spoke several languages and had various European currencies in her wallet. The police were called. Because she’d become hysterical over the—apparent—disappearance of her homeland, they locked her in a room at the airport and searched her possessions.

  When the door was opened about an hour later, the woman was gone. She had left no trace.

  Incidents like this occur a couple of times a decade. People going into convincing detail about countries that don’t exist. Every time I read one of these stories I thought of the incredible loneliness in not being able to share your world with a single other person.

  Isra and I sorted our belongings into boxes: what was coming with us and what would be left behind. It was slow going, maybe because it was a labor of grief. On certain nights, as I sat going through my books and notes, or just a box of clothes, I felt like I was searching a ruin, sifting through the remnants of the life I thought I was going to live, but that had now ceased to exist.

  I wrote about the girl at the clinic from time to time, searching for a beginning, an opening image. I went through my notes again and again, dogged by the thought of having missed something important.

  I revisited the leaked material from al-Mima. Thousands of hours of torture recorded on cellphones and video cameras. There was reason to suspect that the black boxes or closets the witnesses had described as “computers” were some kind of neurological recording apparatus, or even quantum computers, for which K5GS had a number of patents, remarkably enough—in theory, calculators connected to an endless number of similar structures in parallel worlds. An endless number of memories. I looked through the films showing people drowning, crying, and shuddering on cold cement floors. A library of screams out in the desert’s light. I wondered if the person who the girl at Tundra thought she was wasn’t just a feedback wave that had flowed into Annika Isagel’s brain after it had been connected to al-Mima’s black boxes. A sort of static or spillage.

  A dream from the desert.

  I sat with my sleeping daughter so I could listen to her breathe.

  She laughed in her sleep. I touched her forehead. If she disappeared, I would too.

  Why couldn’t I forget the girl at Tundra? It was no surprise that she was writing, her illness itself was like writing. I felt isolated from my time and my country; I heard my daughter breathing in the dark and a wall inside me was about to collapse.

  Maybe it all had to do with our move. Soon we would be leaving Sweden and these stories behind.

  Hamad’s dad covered his flowerbeds with decaying leaves to protect them from night frost.

  “This will all be sunflowers,” he said. “In the summer.” He pulled off his tattered gardening gloves and held them in one hand. The dome of sky above the suburban houses was cornflower blue and as smooth as velvet. He was short and slender-limbed but still had something authoritative about him. His padded jacket made me think of hunting or riding.

  “This life was never enough for Hamad.” He looked around the garden. “This Swedish life was never enough.”

  Beyond the brick roofs and chimneys shined the windows of Hasselbo where Amin had lived, and where he and the girl at Tundra had tooled around on his moped before Hamad got his claws into them.

  “Even as a child he was always asking about Syria, about his cousins. He thought there was something better for him there. He thought that’s where he came from.”

  Amin’s mother was in some sort of contact with Hamad’s family, and had apparently given them a positive impression of our meeting. This was how my visit at Hama
d’s childhood home had come to pass. It was difficult for the dad to get close to the subject—he poked around in his flowerbeds, telling me about his own life, about studying economics while working as a janitor at night and how his wife was a specialist nurse at a private clinic, about them buying this house seventeen years ago and the comprehensive renovations he’d carried out. Only then did he mention his dead son. The mastermind of the attack on Hondo’s. His head was bare and still hot from having worked in the garden, steam rose around his shaved scalp.

  “Why do you think he went back?”

  “Aren’t you Muslim?” More than anything, he sounded contemplative. “Doesn’t the Koran say we’re supposed to make war on the infidels? Kill them?”

  There was a theological argument against what he was saying: the verses regarded a specific historical situation, and were mitigated and restricted by other parts of the Koran. But that’s not what he was after. As far as I understood, he was Muslim himself, but not particularly devout.

  “He broke his mother’s heart when he left,” he said. “Mine too, but she’s Alevi. Do you know what that means?” I nodded—one of the minorities persecuted by Daesh in Syria.

  A streetcar glided past, heading toward the apartment blocks.

  “Did you ever meet Amin or his wife?”

  “We didn’t even know Hamad was back in Sweden,” he said. Then Hamad’s mother opened the front door and called me into the warmth. He stayed outside, in the cold.

  We sat across from each other in leather armchairs. On the glass table between us she’d set out a metal tray with a pot of tea, cups, and cookies. We’d only been in touch by email and I wasn’t sure how to begin the conversation. She noticed me looking at a carpet under the table. It had an intricate geometrical pattern in red and black and might have been the only thing in the room that didn’t suggest Swedish upper middle class.

  “Nomads in the mountains weaved it on a loom, which they dismantled each time they moved,” she said. “Hence the irregularities.” She pointed out a few lines that weren’t entirely symmetrical. “We brought it with us from Damascus, from our apartment.”

  She poured us both some tea, and the way she held her cup made her look as if she were freezing and craved the heat.

  “Are you writing about her? The girl who shot Amin?”

  “About the events of that night.”

  “And why not?” She was wearing a black turtleneck and an elaborate necklace from a Scandinavian silversmith—I would have guessed it was very expensive and by some prominent artist or designer.

  She was still holding the hot cup, and the spoon clinked against the porcelain—her hands were shaking.

  “How is she?”

  “She’s locked in a mental institution. She’s very…sick. She suffering from schizophrenia.”

  The elder of Hamad’s two younger siblings came into the hall carrying a green gym bag, and her mom reminded her to bring home her team uniform so that it could go in the laundry. The daughter told her to stop nagging—resplendent bickering about the practicalities that hold the days and nights together. I stirred a spoonful of honey into my tea, waiting for Hamad’s mother to return to our conversation, but it seemed to take her a while to remember I was even in the room. She kept looking into the empty hall and her face was no more than a surface, abandoned and eerie—then she was back, smiling apologetically at me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  “Maybe all refugees are crazy.” Her laughter was joyless. “Because we’ve lost the world that gave us meaning.” Finally she took another sip of tea and put the cup down, casting a knowing glance at the front door her daughter had just shut behind her. “She’s trying to hide it, but I can see she’s inherited it from us. The fear.” She studied my face. “You have it in you, too, don’t you? From your parents?”

  “Maybe,” I replied, and thought about the moving boxes at home, the airplane tickets we’d recently bought, forever being chased by worry.

  Something in her way of speaking reminded me of my own mother and others of her generation—people who thought they could come here and become Swedish, unlike us, their children.

  “Hamad was always good in school, write that,” she said firmly. “And write that even after he started having problems with the police, he could have become a doctor with his grades. He was studying at the university right up until he went to Syria. Biology, chemistry. Online classes. But nobody knew, of course.”

  Each time she fell silent and we were left looking at each other across the glass table, the large house felt desolate, as though it had been abandoned long ago, and then, each time, she would offer that polite, apologetic smile. I took it as an attempt to restore dignity, which was futile considering my errand.

  “There’s a video,” she said. She cleared her throat and ran her hand down the crease of her pants. “They say it’s him. Killing those people in Syria.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “I watch it at night. When my husband is asleep.” Silence swallowed the house again. I could hear us breathing. With a short nod, in an intimate tone she said: “I watch it every night. All you can see is the eyes through the mask. I’m trying to tell if it’s really him.”

  I was reminded of something Isra once said, about those who left their families for the war. They would drown in their mothers’ tears.

  “At one point, he wanted to change his name. Did you know that? Have the newspapers written about that?” Helpless rage somewhere inside her. I shook my head. She smoothed the pleat in her trousers again. “Maybe it was in fourth or fifth grade. What was it that he wanted to be called? Harry? Larry?”

  She saw only a fragment of Hamad’s face. It was hanging in the small mirror, vibrating along with the motor.

  “Our dead look like they’re sleeping,” he said. The car was running even though they had been parked for almost ten minutes. Because he wanted to be able to escape, thought the girl, who by then even thought of herself as Nour sometimes.

  Amin sat in the passenger seat next to Hamad, pretending to listen. Mostly Amin thought Hamad was a nag, he would later confide in her. Overkill.

  “They’re birds now. Birds in paradise,” Hamad said. They had been to Friday prayer in an apartment in Hasselbo. Hamad didn’t like regular mosques. Everybody who went to one was a hypocrite or a pretender. Yani fake Muslims. She prayed in the women’s area, which was just a closet where someone had pushed the clothing to one side and laid out a prayer mat.

  A moth crawled over the cracked vinyl backseat. By now she knew she was the only one who could see the moths. She’d talked to Amin about it, but all he did was shrug.

  Hamad said, “This photographer. A Russian. He noticed it.” Again he went still, mouth half open. Ping. Ping. Pigeons hopped around a broken wastebasket, tearing at cigarette butts and silvery candy wrappers in the afternoon light. The pinging meant fasten your seatbelt. “He said…Assad’s dead look like they’re screaming…” That’s how Hamad talked, in bursts, punctuated by reflective silences that didn’t seem like they should be interrupted. Ping. “Their faces are straight up purple, tongues sticking out and shit… Astaghfirullah.” The last part was a prayer of forgiveness for having used the word “shit.” Ping. Ping. His face in the juddering mirror—she thought it was like he came from a denser universe.

  “He said. Yani, the photographer. He said. Your dead. Brother. They look like they’re sleeping.” He scratched the tip of his nose, gestured with his hand. “He noticed. The difference between their dead and ours.” He shut off the motor, finally, and the flutter of pigeon wings could be heard; she thought it sounded like bare feet running down stairs.

  That same weekend. Amin had parked his 180 by the on-ramp of the Älvsborg Bridge where they had a view of the harbor. One of the best places to share a joint. Sometimes she smoked too. A couple lost weeks between worlds.

  She and Amin on a moped, the first hint of fall in the air, in the fog ar
ound the cranes and trucks, the thing about the dead had stuck with her. How Hamad said it. Our dead.

  Memories of the woman she thought was her mother grew clearer and clearer, the one who’d been murdered or maybe run over. She took a drag and passed the joint to Amin. Welding sparks blinked down in the harbor, the feeble light of falling stars. She knew she wanted to be in a world with her own dead. Share death with someone.

  She used Amin’s phone to make a call that very night. Hamad’s voice was rough and sleepy, and she told him how they’d killed her mother. She heard him take a few breaths. She waited for him to speak, but he just listened.

  “They did something to the Muslims where I lived,” she said. “They killed us.”

  “The Swedes did?”

  She moved out of Amin’s apartment in the beginning of October, because Hamad told her she couldn’t stay there as long as she and Amin were unmarried. She listened to him because his talk about war and death made an impression, resonating with a thick darkness inside her, and because, like Amin, he glowed with meaning—both promising and threatening.

  She lived with a woman Hamad connected her with. They studied Islam together a couple of times a week—a group of women meeting in an apartment in Hasselbo, reading from the Koran and talking about the Holy War to restore the caliphate. They never went to regular mosques and they didn’t answer the greetings of other Muslims. When Hamad visited, he’d speak to them from behind a hanging sheet. She sensed that she was fulfilling her destiny. More and more often, she saw moths, which she associated with a mission, still unknown—something with Amin and Hamad—they crawled over the walls in the room where she slept and swarmed around streetlights when she walked between the buildings. She was full of buzzing, unknown powers. She couldn’t tell if she was very happy or deeply sad.

  She was an exciting feature of the sisters’ meetings. They kept asking her to tell them what she remembered from the camp where she’d seen guards abuse people and where Muslims were forced to eat pork. A few times she made up details when she couldn’t actually remember. She was a survivor and a clear sign of the infidels’ untrustworthiness. It made her feel chosen in way that must have spoken to her illness, to the schizophrenia at work inside her, and to her conviction that something important lay ahead. She watched leaves fall over courtyards and playgrounds, thinking God knew about each and every one of them, and God was guiding her, but really it was neither religion nor ideology that had drawn her to Hamad and his circle, it was an internal wound that whispered about a vague but incredible wrong to be avenged.