During one of our conversations she told me that it was snowing on the night she’d gone up to the hospital window, because it had snowed in her last memory of the future, which was perhaps the memory of her death. In saying this, I knew she was trying to formulate something she’d always known. Our shadows are stuck to us. Stalk us.
The gravestones looked weighty and dense, like meteorites lodged in the frozen grass. Isra, our daughter, and I were walking to Mom’s grave for the last time. Our flight was leaving in two days. I had a bouquet of orange lilies wrapped in plastic and newspaper. We passed Hamad’s and Amin’s graves without stopping—Amin’s grave was marked with a simple metal sign, Hamad’s with a glossy black stone engraved with his dates of birth and death. I put the bouquet down beneath high-voltage power lines. Stood a while in silence. A few days prior I’d called Dad and said goodbye to his voicemail.
“The first time I met her, she was crying.” Isra was next to me and wrapped in a scarf, our daughter was leaning on her, shivering and bored. “Isn’t that strange? She looked up at me and cried.”
“You believe her,” she said, and let go of our daughter, who ran off to climb the lone chestnut tree growing large among the stones.
“Some of what she wrote might have been true,” I said. “Something did take possession of her body when she was at al-Mima. A memory of another world, a possible future. Maybe they weren’t trying to implant false memories, but to scan….the future. I don’t know, Isra.”
“Does that frighten you?”
“What she wrote frightened me.”
“But the world is already different from what she thinks she remembers, right?” Isra said.
The wind picked up, it made the tree branches sway around our daughter, who was holding on between the earth and sky. I nodded. Even though parts of the video from Hondo’s were shown in the Swedish media during discussions about Islam, and even though new laws had been put in place to regulate the influx of refugees and to counteract “radical Islam”—primarily in the public housing programs in big cities—no laws like what the girl described had been passed. There was no citizen contract; the Rabbit Yard had not become a camp for enemies of the Swedish state.
“She cried,” I said. “As though I was someone who could be wanted.”
Our daughter waved to us from the chestnut tree, the movement scaring away a couple of cold magpies. I shouted, “Be careful.” She’d never be a secure being.
“What do we owe her?” I asked. “The girl from Tundra? Don’t we owe her something for what she did?”
Isra rested her head on my shoulder. I loved her for her courage, for her way of finding the fortune in misfortune, for her wisdom.
“I know the names of the trees here,” she said. “Chestnut. Maple. I don’t know those words in English or Arabic.”
On our way to the bus stop, I stopped at Amin’s and Hamad’s graves, crouched down, and brushed the dirt from Amin’s aluminum plaque. Our daughter asked, “Did you know them?”
There on the ground, I felt the chill running through the world. Whatever I’d say would be a lie. Whatever I’d say would be the truth.
A grenade explodes in a neighborhood nearby, shaking the ground. Hamad has a hard time breathing through the wet balaclava. The gun is heavy, but he’s used to heavier things than a Kalashnikov. Five men with their hands tied behind their backs are kneeling in front of him, in that persistent rain: four soldiers, their ranks torn off their olive-green uniform shirts; and one man not in a uniform, a guy in sneakers and civilian clothing whom Hamad has to kill for some unknown reason—the guy is kneeling at the end of the row, face swollen, muddy, and obscured by wet hair. In a troubling way, he seems familiar—he stares at Hamad with a single bloodshot eye, surprised.
The gnawing worry that he’s forgotten something.
“Wait,” the guy says in Arabic. Hamad recognizes the accent but can’t place it. “It’s me.”
What does he mean, “It’s me?” It’s hard to make out his features behind that hair. The rain splashes on the walls, gushing and whispering, runs into Hamad’s eyes, and the gun is so heavy that what’s not supposed to happen happens—the barrel he’s pressing to the back of the first prisoner’s head wavers a little, back and forth.
He decides to wipe the rain out of his eyes even though it might look bad on video. As if he’s wiping away tears.
“I’m you,” the prisoner says. Is he laughing? “I’m you.” The guy tries to get up but the warrior holding the black flag kicks him in the side so he falls back to his knees.
When you lie behind a wall, aim into the light, fire off a salvo, and a blurry figure fifty meters away collapses into a heap, it’s funny, if anything. Nothing has a shine to it afterward, no power rains down on you from heaven. But this—executing a person with their hands tied behind their back—is something else, and it takes a surprising effort. If Hamad were to equate the feeling with something it would be the second when you jump off the ten meter diving board: you’ve climbed the old diving tower with your buddies and are up there, looking down, yani masculinity test, and one by one they jump and become small white explosions below, and you’re the last one, sticking your toes over the edge and leaning into the emptiness.
The gun kicks in his hand. The kneeling man goes limp and falls face down in the clay. Everything is over before Hamad has a chance to register it. He feels like whooping, not for joy but to release what built up inside him as he took aim at the guy. He moves on to the next prisoner and only hesitates for a breath this time. The gunshot is strangely muted, like a New Year’s firework. The dead body curls up, a question mark in a puddle of water.
He shoots number three and is, like, zoned out: he’s thinking about the film he watched last night on the laptop he brought from Sweden. An action flick he wants to finish after dawn prayer. So what if some of the stricter brothers disapprove of him consuming the kuffar’s entertainment. He shoots number four quickly and presses the barrel to the nape of the last prisoner’s neck; he’s about to pull the trigger when that feeling returns—there’s something important he’s supposed to remember. It irritates him that he can’t. He looks up and lets his eyes drift across the buildings, over broken cement pillars and half balconies, across the buildings’ exposed innards: furniture and rugs, doorframes, and crumbled walls and stairs—he’s inside a rupture of the very material of creation, and knows he’s changed. He doesn’t come from Sweden anymore—from its classrooms and suburban streets—he is pure, without history.
He realizes that this is what he’s been searching for his whole life.
He might go back to Sweden soon, it could happen. The brothers talk about how actions in the West are needed to wake up Muslims there, the ones who don’t get that this is war. He thinks about what it would be like to be in Gothenburg again, how everyone would think he comes from there, when really he no longer comes from anywhere, now that he has been freed.
He wants to roar.
He comes from the moment he shot that first prisoner. He comes from this desolate landscape inhabited by ghosts and flies and dogs, this caliphate where everything is beginning anew. There is no one who can claim to know him anymore, to know who he is. He belongs to no one. He is no one.
A monster.
The rain makes it hard to see. But he doesn’t need to see well, just to keep the barrel of the gun pressed to the back of the prisoner’s head. The guy’s entire body shakes and it still seems like he wants to talk. He mumbles something that sounds like nonono, Hamad notes with amusement as he pulls the trigger. He doesn’t think it’s tears that he keeps wiping away. He feels a pleasing emptiness, a nothing feeling. He looks at the sky for a second. That’s when he sees the emblem.
It’s one of those extravagant souvenirs that pilgrims buy on their last day in Mecca. The seal is painted in gold against a black background and framed, hanging crooked on a living room wall on the fourth floor, among junk scattered by a rocket attack. There is no God but God. Gold A
rabic lettering glinting through the rain. No God. He feels sick, wobbles, and bends over, hands on his thighs. Everything is spinning, seems to be turning upside down; somehow, he ends up on his knees.
He tries to get up. He’s confused, his hands are tied behind his back. Wait. He must’ve collapsed and the brothers have mixed him up with a prisoner because of his mask.
“Wait,” he says. He laughs, he says: “It’s me.” What a story this’ll be later. But wait.
He isn’t masked anymore. They should recognize him. But there’s a man looming over him in the rain wearing a balaclava. “It’s me,” he says again, in Arabic, but nobody seems to notice. Hold on. Fuck. Fuck, come on, it’s him. It’s Hamad standing there with a balaclava on, broad shouldered but stooped.
“I’m you,” he says, and the man with the gun looks at him. “I’m you!” He’s shouting it now, and tries to get up again, but somebody kicks him from behind and he falls, winded, into the mud.
The first shot makes him flinch, and he gets back on his knees. Everything seems reasonable in the way of a nightmare: Hamad over there shoots prisoners number two and three and four, and is now about to shoot himself—he stands behind his kneeling self, the rain running into his mouth tastes like sweat and mud and he looks up at himself, not finding any of what’s happening strange in the least. But he’s amazed: it’s impossible to imagine that you will soon cease to be, in spite of the superficial talk about death that the brothers get into during their free time—heartwarming wishes about martyrdom, so false in the end—he just can’t wrap his mind around his own end. He becomes aware of the mass of his organs, the pressure they exert on his pelvis. He understands what it means to be made of clay, of dead matter. He shakes and cries and turns halfway around to look up incredulously at his own masked face. Wants to ask himself to turn back, to become something else once again, but the eyes through the slits in the mask are unrelenting, so foreign, he curls up and says no, no, no. He loves his body because it is all he has. He tries to come up with some detail only he knows, something to shout so Hamad will understand he’s about to murder himself.
He got contacts one summer, to fit in, but that’s too sick to say, here on a muddy field in Syria a lifetime later.
He looks down. Plumes of water where the rain hits the ground.
I’m you. That’s what you are supposed to remember.
We’re the same.
A rising roar cut off.
Darkness.
He’s in a sack. Who has put me here? Is this the grave? Am I dead now? He thinks he hears somebody sniffling, maybe a woman. He can smell damp earth and feels a terrible pressure on his chest.
He opens his eyes.
Five men with their hands tied behind their backs are kneeling in front of him.
A grenade explodes in a neighborhood nearby, shaking the ground.
“We made the right choice.” Isra put a moving box down. A patch of white winter light was reflected in the glossy parquet floor.
We’d been living with friends for a couple of weeks before finding an apartment one stop away from the area in Hasselbo where Amin grew up. I stood there with my moving box as she went to fetch another from the car. Our daughter running, her feet drumming in the empty rooms. I looked out the window at the concrete buildings and empty swings. Stood there for a long time as a ghostly impenetrable sorrow moved through me.
We had stayed.
The girl closed her hands, tight. The baggy clothes, one size too big. Her eyes were dark and sort of wedged beneath her wrinkled forehead. She relaxed her fists, then clenched them.
“This is Isra.” We were in the doorway, and I couldn’t tell if she even registered our presence. “My wife. You wanted to meet her.”
Her fists relaxed, clenched.
An orderly sat in a chair next to her, a man with a high hairline and a watchfulness about him that made me suspect she’d recently had a violent episode.
“I don’t speak Swedish,” she said in English, low, without looking up, and though I wasn’t surprised that her voice sounded different than from our meetings, I felt rejected. Like she was punishing me for some shortcoming, something I should’ve said while we still had time.
“Do you remember me?”
She shook her head, and started wringing her hands, agitated, like she was trying to tear her own fingers off.
One day in March, as the snow melted and the migratory birds returned, a girl with dark bushy hair sat in one of the swings, wearing only overalls and a T-shirt. I saw her through my office window and called to my daughter, who’d been having a hard time making friends here, telling her to go outside. Soon, she was walking across the playground, head bare, winter jacket open. She climbed onto the swing next to the new girl. They started talking and soon their laughter rolled in through my window.
We stayed because we owed that girl in the asylum a feeling of hope. Because everything was different because of her. We stayed with the gravel fields and misty rain, with the power lines and contrails, with our living and our dead.
My daughter sat on her bed. A glass mobile hung in her window, a souvenir from one of Isra’s trips to Algeria many years before. The pieces were shards of window glass and bottles polished by the Mediterranean; they spun slowly round and round, casting dancing colored flares across the walls and over my daughter’s arms and face, set deep in concentration.
She was still so close to the beginning that I could watch her for hours, because I sensed the roar against her outer walls.
She was playing with a string—a long cord she’d found somewhere or coaxed from Isra—pulling it out into a star between her fingers, biting down on one end, pulling it into another shape.
She noticed me and looked up.
“Dad, can you help me? It’s for two.”
I remember having a sharp headache that day, but otherwise it was a day like any other. The day I finally realized who the girl at the clinic had been. What she always wanted to, but never dared, say.
I sat on my bed, pinching the correct part of the string without my daughter having to show me, and she laughed with delight.
“You know it?” I nodded. It was the same game the girl from Tundra—who had been my shadow, or my daughter’s shadow, or maybe just my daughter—had taught me one rainy day many years ago.
“My new friend showed me,” she said. The world did not shake. I felt an incredible despair over what she’d experienced in another world, but also hope—the hope in having stayed, a sibling of the hope that had made my mother cross the sea.
Later, my daughter ran outside into the meltwater and sunshine, still without a history, and I watched her and Liat from the window and remembered her heart on the ultrasound. The gray matchstick-flame flickering on the screen. The underwater drum of life. Allah. God’s name.
We stayed with the willow tree, its branches that swayed in the wind. We stayed with the ice crystals on the window glass, with the Swedish social insurance agency and the basement mosques, with rows of preschool children in neon-yellow vests crossing the street. We stayed with the birch-tree pollen that glued itself to the window when spring arrived, and with the melancholy that came deep into summertime.
In the swings they get ready, set, and then jump. Liat and my daughter. I play the video from Hondo’s in my office. Hamad is shouting:
“You desecrate Islam!” And I hear it so clearly this last time: most of all he’s trying to convince himself. The rage is theater, an attempt to create meaning.
I stay to give my daughter an inheritance other than madness.
I hear the screams, the gun salvos.
I watch them as they swing higher and higher.
This country became our sea.
I turn off the video. Find an audio file from one of my meetings with the girl from Tundra. The static of the clinic. Our breathing.
“Does it scare you that you might stop existing?”
“I’ve always been afraid,” she says, and her voice fills me wi
th a longing so acute that I have to steady myself on the desk so as not to fall to pieces. She’s gone now. Gone. My daughter, who saved me. This meeting was one of our last. “When I disappear maybe I’ll end up in a place where I’m not afraid anymore.”
I remember her smiling as she said it, one of her fleeting smiles.
“Do you remember a place like that? A time before the fear?” I ask on the recording, with all the tenderness I never thought I’d let her hear.
“Maybe in the beginning.”
Then we fall silent, and I can hear my daughter and Liat’s laughter through the window. They’re sitting in the swings, gaining speed before they leap. Our threadbare strips of the future. And when the wind picks up and lifts the sand they just laugh, covering their eyes.
The light ahead.
They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears Page 20