The other place we won’t even talk about, it hurts all the time and the stuff that comes out is green like sticky seaweed and it’s so disgusting it makes me vomit. Gall and shit is what it is. And my periods aren’t regular any more; blood gushes out at any time without warning – haven’t you wondered why I’m always washing myself? But I don’t care any more. Nothing you say is of any importance.
My toenails are growing, but not the nails on my fingers – well, my thumbnails are but not on the other fingers. The nails are curling over and growing crooked. They don’t look like nails any more, they look like fish scales. All of me is turning into a lizard – you are turning me into a cave lizard. That’s a species that only exists among people like me, people who are chased in and out of trucks and containers and don’t know if they’re alive or if they’re dead and lying at the bottom of the sea. I look in the mirror in the morning and I don’t believe what I see there, I try not to but I can’t help it and I look in the mirror and I think I see an old hag staring back at me.
When I was little there was a widow who lived in one of those houses that wasn’t a house any more, it had collapsed and lay along the path that went up to the mountains – do you remember her? I remember her perfectly, she was so hideously ugly. We were afraid of her but I understand now that she was nice and just old, not ugly, perhaps she had simply lived too long – that is exactly what I look like now when I look in the mirror, like that old widow. She must have been very poor. I don’t think she had children and she was probably already dead without really knowing.
The eyes that I see – I’m talking about my eyes now, not the old widow’s – are so horrible. They stare back at me with hatred. I don’t want those eyes, they’re not mine, and my tongue – do you want to see my tongue? – no, you don’t, it has a strange furry coating and it feels as if I have an animal in my mouth and that’s because you talk too much. Can’t you just be quiet, if not for my sake then for someone else’s? My father is dead; you can’t do anything more to him. I loved my father and I loved you too but I want you to be quiet. I know it’s hard for you and you are afraid – if anyone can understand that it’s me, I don’t even think my father really understood it. If you don’t stop talking I’m going to claw out your eyes. Watch out for my thumbnails, I mean it.
You’re always lying. We’ll be there soon, soon we’ll exist again, oh my God, when will that be? Tell me! No, don’t say anything, I don’t want to know, it doesn’t matter anyway since it isn’t true what you say. I am a prisoner of my invisibility, not just because I’m on the run but because you are keeping me prisoner, you keep saying we’ll be there soon but you have become a prison guard. Do you want to know what I think? Sometimes I think I’ll just disappear, that I’m going to let myself freeze to death just so I won’t hear your lies any more. I don’t mean to hurt you, I’m telling you this because I love you and because you can’t manage to formulate a single sensible thought any more. Can you understand that I’m not being mean, can you understand that? You will if you listen to me, not the words but the meaning. Are you listening to me or my words? Can you see that I’m standing here or have I become invisible for you too? And what’s the point in that case?
I don’t really know what the point is any more, but I have to make a decision now because otherwise nothing will happen. In the middle of all this talking and spitting I’ve discovered something. Do you know what it is? I’m not sure that I can explain it and even if I could I’m not sure that you would understand it, or would want to understand it since you always insist you know best. But you don’t know what’s best any more. I don’t either but at least I’m trying. It’s as if for the first time I feel something that seems like it has to do with freedom – can you understand that? A strange feeling of not being locked up any more and what I have the most trouble understanding is how one can feel the least bit free sitting in a cave and not even existing.
I’m not a child any more. I’m not an adult either, but I understand something now that I didn’t before, when I was careful never to offend you, when my whole life centred on this. That was thanks to the tradition you were always talking about, the respect that is really just another word for the noose around my neck since I was born a woman and not a man. I look at the others my age, the girls, I mean, the ones who live in this country, not the boys, don’t worry I only look at them in secret since I’m actually quite shy. I’m not going to change that about myself even with a new name. It would make you crazy to see them – the girls, I mean – they don’t go hiding behind shawls and respect and traditions and they aren’t afraid of fathers who think they can do whatever they like. I see something I haven’t seen before and maybe it’s not a good thing but I want to find that out for myself. I’m not going to let you answer for me. I’m going to judge for myself.
Up until now you were my hero, Mum. Until now. But not any more. Of course I love you, I do, don’t think any different. I’m going to love you as long as I live, I would probably give my life for you if it came to that and I know you would do the same for me but this can’t go on any longer. If we’re going to make it out of this cave we’re going to have to do what I say from now on.
That’s how she used to talk to the old Laurinda. It was the volcano that spewed out the glowing remains of feelings and thoughts she could no longer control. And the old Laurinda listened, she turned her face away but she never said anything.
Every day it is as if she falls off a cliff, as if every day she wakes up in a new place in a body she doesn’t recognise. Even her heartbeat is unfamiliar, as if someone is tapping a secret code inside her body, a prisoner in there who is sending his message out into the world. That’s what her heart sounds like.
Sometimes she senses memories of dreams she doesn’t know if she has had or if someone else passed by while she was sleeping and left them beside her, as if she were already dead and lying on the stretcher. She can sometimes remember a truck driving down the side of a cliff while grenades explode all around them. The last image she has of her father is when his head is torn away by the grenade. Only she, her mother, and siblings were left. They arrived in Sweden on a ferry that shook like an animal. They had disposed of their papers by tearing them up into small pieces and flushing them down the toilet because the unwritten rules of refugees insisted on this, that it was harder to get rid of a person without papers than if one still had a name, an identity. This is what it has come to that the ones who don’t exist are more true to themselves than those who refuse to give up their identities.
In Sweden they were provided with socks, warm coats and tea-bags in a chilly youth hostel right next to the cold grey sea that was the border to all that had happened before. It was as if they had torn up all their memories of their earlier life along with their papers. Kind people with frozen smiles had shown them to this place and then left them there. At night they had picked frozen apples and raided bird feeders. They had arrived around Christmas time. The old Laurinda understood that they had finally arrived at their destination and had lain down to die.
After that they had broken up. Her siblings were sent away to be cared for, Laurinda was also supposed to be cared for but she ran away. She walked along a road that went through the brown fields and then someone had stopped and given her a ride and each time this happened her silence was so frightening that the driver stopped and kicked her out. She continued walking. Each step was like a struggle with the earth that was trying to claim her but she didn’t stop until she found the black rubbish bag by the side of the road. It must have fallen from a truck. Perhaps someone had simply thrown it there.
The bag was full of yellow plastic frogs, the whole ditch was full of them. At first she thought they were real frogs that had frozen to death and she had tossed them back because she was afraid they might be poisonous. But when the frogs didn’t move she picked one up again and that’s when she saw the price tag on its underside. She had kept the bag and when she arrived at the next town she pour
ed them out on the pavement and waited. She wasn’t sure if she was waiting for the frogs to come back to life or for someone to buy them but she didn’t even care.
That was where she was when I came past. When I saw Laurinda crouching over her pile of frozen plastic frogs I knew I had to stop. I asked her if she had seen my monkey but she shook her head and I stayed and then she told me her story. I remember her voice. It was like the voice of the earth, of earth and pain, a hoarse voice that comes singing from a great distance.
I can’t remember when this happened any more. It might have been yesterday or a thousand years ago. It doesn’t matter. But today when I woke up I remembered what she had told me and the fact that this memory that has been gone so long has now returned is the most important thing that happened to me today.
*
Tea-Bag finished talking and sat down. The blank piece of paper she had been holding she now folded and laid in front of her on the table. Everyone in the room was silent and still. Humlin wondered what they all felt, if they felt that they had been through something earth-shattering, as if Tea-Bag’s narrative had painted the room in new colours. It’s deeper than that, he thought, but it goes so deep I can’t express what it is.
In this atmosphere that was like the silence after an earthquake, Leyla got up. Humlin thought she looked like she had put on even more weight since last time. But nonetheless she seemed to shimmer. She was smiling.
It was as if Tea-Bag’s big smile was being passed around the girls like a baton. Now, in the moment that Leyla got to her feet, it was her turn to wear it.
15
THE WORDS STARTED coming out of Leyla’s mouth first as a gentle trickle and then as an ever-increasing flood. She spoke in a low voice, forcing Humlin to lean forward to catch her words about the unexpected things that had happened to her on this frozen late-winter’s day.
*
Oh God, I say, oh God, and I know I shouldn’t use his name in vain but I am anyway, I’m going to say ‘Oh God’, because nothing was the way it should have been when I woke up today: everything was wrong. I remember thinking that it was going to be just another forgettable day. Yet another day that was not going to leave any traces, only sweep through my life like a stray wind. Another day that would make me feel like it was mocking me.
It was far too early in the morning. I hate waking up before I have to but I had been dreaming about apples – I was driven wild by them in the dream – apples that gleamed on the outside but tasted of rotten fish, or perhaps more like the remains of that cat I found once as a child. It was lying on the other side of a fence and someone had cut the paws off and it was covered in maggots. Me and some kids beat it with sticks, although perhaps all we managed to do was hit the fence, or maybe it was each other. I don’t know why we were doing it. Perhaps we just needed to hit something since life was so hard.
I can’t say for sure what it was that woke me up, if it was the apples or the memory of that cat, but I was furious. It was only six o’clock in the morning and I never wake up at six of my own free will. I suppose that’s not actually true, strictly speaking; I often wake up early but then I manage to fall back asleep. That’s a habit from when I was very little, probably from around the time that my brother Ahmed was shot. I used to wake up because I was afraid my father wouldn’t be there when I got up in the morning. I was always afraid someone would try to kill him too. I thought I could see Ahmed standing in the shadows telling me everything was all right, that I should go back to sleep. Every night was the same, even though I knew Ahmed was dead. I had seen him when they carried him away on the stretcher and his face was so peaceful, as if he were sleeping up there on the stretcher being carried away on the angry men’s shoulders. I woke up every night and every night he was there to comfort me and tell me to go back to sleep.
Now I don’t see him any more. Perhaps he doesn’t feel comfortable here in the Swedish light. But I wake up anyway and sometimes it takes me a long time to fall back to sleep. But this morning I didn’t want to wake up, I wanted to sleep. Why should I wake up and go to a school where I don’t understand anything anyway? I don’t know what it was but I got up because I was so anxious. I put on my clothes and went outside. It can be beautiful in this country at dawn. There are almost no people around and the tall apartment buildings look like frozen pillars carved from huge granite slabs.
It was cold and suddenly I knew I had to visit my grandmother who lives in Nydalen. She and my father, her son-in-law, don’t get on so she can’t live with us. I don’t know why they fight. We gather at every holiday and once every other month she comes over to eat: Ramadan, the end of Ramadan, all of these holidays we celebrate together but otherwise she and my father never want to see each other. I looked in on my parents before I left; sleeping people always make me nervous, they seem so unreachable as if they are already dead.
I can’t remember the last time I went out so early in the morning. There were no people anywhere. I walked over to the tram stop and there was a man there called Johansson and he’s Swedish, although I think he’s originally from Russia. He gets drunk every Friday and he hangs around the tram stop, never going anywhere, just standing there as if he were waiting for someone who never comes and the whole time he mumbles to himself. Me and my sister tried to get really close to him one time to hear what he was saying but all we heard was ‘Trouble, trouble, too much trouble.’ It is as if he were saying his Friday prayers there. He must be close to a hundred years old, maybe he’s already dead and doesn’t know it, maybe he has no relatives to bury him.
The tram was almost empty. I sat in the very back. I like it when the cars are empty; it’s like riding in a white luxury limousine. It seems to make the trip last longer and you can imagine that you are on your way to anywhere, like Hollywood or New Zealand, which is a place I’ve dreamed of because it’s on the other side of the earth. I’ve seen it on maps in school and on a computer: Auckland, Wellington, and all the sheep. But I know I’ll never get there.
The tram line to Nydalen goes through the city centre. It’s like travelling from a country called ‘Stensgården’ to another called ‘City Centre’ and then crossing the border into Nydalen. Maybe some day we’ll have to show our passports when we get on the tram; whenever I go to the centre on Saturday night it’s the same thing. I don’t feel welcome, at the very least I don’t feel as if I belong.
Sitting on the tram I started wondering what I was doing. My grandmother was probably still sleeping. She can be sulky or happy, you never know until you get there. Somewhere close to the bridge it started to snow. I think snow is beautiful but I wish it was warm like sand. Why can’t the snow be related to sand instead of ice? But it is beautiful. Snow was falling over the river and on a boat that was leaving the city. The sun had just come up over the horizon. I had never seen it look like that before. Mostly yellow, but a little red where the rays hit the clouds and then blue behind it.
A few people with familiar faces boarded the tram. I recognised a man – I think he is Greek and has a newspaper stand in the centre – he yawned so widely you could see all the way down into his intestines. He didn’t sit down even though there were plenty of empty seats. Then some guys got on who looked like football fans. They were wearing blue and white scarves and acted confused, as though they had been in hibernation and woken up too early. I’ve never seen such grey faces, grey like the cliffs that Dad and I dive off in the summer. I got such a strong urge just then – it’s terrible – but I wanted to stand up and start telling everyone about the slum where I was born. I almost had to jump off the tram to stop myself.
People kept getting on and off, a lot of people got off at the hospital. Most of them were women who probably worked there. And then we started leaving the city again. Because of its name you would think Nydalen – New-valley – lay in a valley, but it doesn’t, it’s up on a hill. My grandmother has tried to find out how it got its name but even though she’s asked everyone she’s never found an answer. ‘
The superintendent is going crazy,’ I heard Dad say once to Mum. ‘If she doesn’t stop asking silly questions they’re going to lock her up one day.’
In Nydalen there are nine high-rise apartment buildings on top of a steep hillside. My grandmother says people have killed themselves by jumping off the cliff but she says a lot of things and even though she is my grandmother I can tell you she tells a lot of lies. Maybe that’s why Dad has such a hard time with her. She lies to me as well. She’ll call out of the blue and say there were four masked men in her apartment – she lives alone except when her cousin who lives up in the north is visiting – and that they have taken everything she owns. But when Mum goes over to see, it turns out there’s nothing missing, only some little thing my grandmother can’t find, and then when Mum helps her find it there’s no longer any talk of the four masked men.
My grandmother tells lies, everyone does, I do it too, not to mention Dad, but my grandmother is better than us in making them sound believable. She doesn’t know anything about this country, she just talks about how afraid she used to be of the people who were going to come and kill us in the night. But now she’s also grown afraid of the cold and she doesn’t dare go outside. She even thinks it’s cold in summer sometimes when it’s actually sweltering. We have to open her windows when she isn’t looking, otherwise she thinks it’s going to kill her. She can’t speak a word of Swedish and when she got ill one time we had to go in the ambulance with her and she was convinced that the doctors – who she thought looked too young – were going to kill her.
But my grandmother – her name is Nasrin – can also do things no one else can. She can tell how a person is really feeling just from looking at their face. I know, because I can go over to her place and be feeling down but smile and laugh and then she says ‘Why are you laughing when you are crying inside?’ You can’t fool her.