The Shadow Girls

  From that moment I just ran. I planted the soles of my feet firmly into the ground as my father had taught me but I kept my speed up the whole time. I was so afraid I did not even stop by your grave, Alemwa. I don’t think anyone can really understand what it means to have to flee. To leave everything behind, forced to run for your life. The night I left my village it felt as if all my thoughts and memories hung behind me like a bloody umbilical cord that refused to break until I was a long, long way away. I doubt that anyone who has not been forced to flee and has run from people or weapons or dark shadows threatening to kill them can understand what that means. The most desperate fear can never be described or told in words. One can never quite say what it is like to run into the darkness with death and pain and denigration only a step behind.

  I remember nothing of my escape, only the incredible fear I felt until I arrived in Lagos and was sucked into a world I had never known existed. I had no money, no food and no idea whom I could turn to. As soon as I saw a soldier I hid and thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest. I tried to talk to you, Alemwa. But it was the only time I was not able to hear your voice. Perhaps you were sick. I tried to feel your breath but there was nothing there. The breath I felt on my neck at last stank of alcohol and smoke.

  How long I was in that city I don’t know. But at that point I was so deep in my desperation that I had decided to find a man who would give me enough money to continue my journey. I knew the price I would have to pay. It just had to be a man with enough money, whatever ‘enough’ was. Where was I headed? I had no idea which direction was safest.

  During all of the days and nights I starved in Lagos I met other people who were also fleeing. It was as if we gave off a special smell that only other refugees could smell, drawn to each other like blind animals. Everyone had dreams and plans. Some had decided to head to South Africa. Others wanted to get to the harbour cities in Kenya and Tanzania in order to smuggle themselves onto a ship. But there were also those who had already given up. They had managed to reach Lagos but did not think they would ever be able to leave. Everyone was afraid of the military, of the laughing soldiers. Many had terrible stories to tell, some had escaped from prisons with mortal wounds to their bodies and souls.

  I tried to listen to these blind animals, to interpret their smells and to answer the question as to where I myself was headed. I asked every new refugee if they had seen or heard anything about my father. But he remained gone. It was as if those soldiers had torn him apart with their laughter. I tried to speak to you, Alemwa, but I could not hear your voice. It was as if all of the eyes in the city, all these belching machines, made it impossible for me to feel your breath. I have never been as alone as I felt those days and nights in Lagos. I was so alone that I sometimes secretly touched people that I passed in the street. Occasionally they shouted out at me since they thought I was a pickpocket.

  I ran, the whole time I ran, even when I was sleeping my legs continued to move. I started looking for the man who was going to help me, but it turned out that he was the one who found me. I was at an outdoor restaurant, loitering in the shadows outside the gate where furious guards chased away all beggars and people who disturbed the wealthy as they were getting out of their chauffeur-driven cars. Suddenly I felt that stinking breath. I flinched and turned around, ready to strike if someone was preparing to attack me.

  The man who stood there was small, his face was pale. He was white with a thin moustache. He was breathing right in my face. His smile should have warned me since I had learned that laughing people can kill with brutal precision; I had seen smiling people commit acts of violence and betrayal. But perhaps it was because I was so tired that I didn’t care about his stiff smile, or perhaps it was because I could not hear your voice warning me. He asked me what my name was and then told me he was from Italy. His name was Cartini or Cavanini, I can’t remember any more. He was an engineer and he had been in Lagos for four months and was about to return home. His work was something to do with steam or coal-driven heating plants, I don’t even know, he was speaking so fast and his eyes travelled up and down my body, up and down, and I remember thinking that this was the man who was going to help me.

  I didn’t know at that time where Italy was. I didn’t even know where Africa was, that there were continents in the world separated by great oceans. I had heard about Europe and its riches and I had heard about America but no one had told me there were no direct paths leading to these places. Maybe Europe was a city like Lagos, but without the furious guards at the gate, a city where all doors were open, where even someone like me could enter without fear of threats or assault.

  He asked me if I wanted to come along, what my price was, if I was alone. I thought it was strange that these questions came in the wrong order. He asked me for my price before he even knew if I was for sale. Perhaps he thought all black women could be bought, that there was no dignity in a land where almost everyone lived in poverty. But even though he asked the questions in the wrong order I went with him.

  He had a car. I thought we were going to a hotel but he drove to a large villa that lay in a fenced-off area with other villas and dogs who barked in identical ways and guards that all looked like each other and bright lights in front of each house that almost burned. We went into the house. He asked me if I wanted to have a bath and if I was hungry and the whole time his eyes travelled up and down my body. I was wearing a blue dress that had torn in one seam. When I sat and ate at the large table in the kitchen he reached over and touched me through the hole in the seam and I remember that I shivered. He asked me for my price. I had not answered him since a person cannot have a price. This must have been what made me hate him.

  I already knew what was coming. When I was thirteen my mother told me it was time for me to get used to what men wanted from women and had a rightful claim to and that it was one of her brothers who was going to show me. I didn’t like him. He had a wandering eye and wheezed when he breathed. It was a horrendous experience, like being torn apart by someone kicking their way into my body. Afterwards I cried but my mother said that the worst was over now and that it would get better, or at least not any worse.

  We went into the pale little man’s bedroom which was on the upper floor. A window was open and the night breeze came in. In the distance I could hear drums and people singing. It was dark in the room and I lay down on the bed, pulled my skirt over my head and waited. I heard him moving about the room and it sounded as if he was sighing. Then he climbed on top of me and I listened to the sound of the drums and the song and the sound grew and became stronger. I never felt him inside me although he must have been, I was only aware of the drums and the song that rose and fell and sometimes changed into a scream.

  Suddenly he pulled my skirt away from my face. Even though it was dark in the room with only the streetlight coming in from outside I could see that his smile was gone. He was sweaty and panting, beads of perspiration hung from his moustache. His whole face was distorted as if he was in pain. He started screaming at the same time as he grabbed my throat in his hands and tried to strangle me. I knew he wanted to kill me. I struggled with all my strength, but he was stronger. The whole time he kept screaming. He blamed me for everything, for being in his bed, for being black, for smelling strangely of spices he didn’t know, for having the skirt over my face, for selling myself, for existing. Finally I managed to kick him so hard that he lost his hold. I rolled down from the bed and tried to find my shoes. When I turned around he had one arm above his head and in his hand he held a large hook, the kind for catching sharks. I looked straight into his eyes, they were like two heavy doors about to slam shut.

  Then there was a sound and he paused, the doors in his eyes stayed open. I saw him turn his head towards the window where a thin white curtain was moving in the warm breeze. A little monkey sat in the window. It had brown-green fur and it was scratching itself on the forehead. I don’t know where it came from but it saved my life. I lifted a heavy wood
en chair from the foot of the bed and smashed it as hard as I could over the pale little man’s head. The monkey looked at me in surprise, then continued its scratching. I don’t know if I killed him or not. I simply gathered up my shoes and took the man’s wallet and watch that were lying on the bedside table. Then I ran. When I came out in the garden I turned. The monkey was still in the window, a shadow against the white curtain.

  I crept through the city afraid of being caught by the laughing soldiers or of being robbed by someone who could smell the presence of the wallet and the watch. I hid by an old bridge. It was very dark and I felt rats brush by my legs and I flipped through the wad of notes in the wallet. It was a lot of money. I heard the monkey who had saved my life tell me that I should leave the city at dawn and take a bus going north. I didn’t know where I was headed but I knew the monkey would be waiting for me at my destination. When I got on the bus I hid the money and the watch inside my underwear, clasped my hands tightly between my legs and fell asleep.

  When I woke up the bus had stopped in the middle of a plain. It was the middle of the day and the sun gave no shadow. The bus had broken down; sweaty men lay under the engine and were trying to fix a leaking oil pan. I got off the bus and started walking. To protect myself from the sun I stuck some palm branches under my headscarf. Sometimes I heard the monkey calling out to me from a tree. I thought about the fact that the one who had saved my life was out there somewhere, watching and waiting. I no longer felt alone as I walked along those dusty roads in the red sand. The monkey was with me, and so were my other invisible companions: my parents and you, Alemwa, you above all.

  I kept walking north and became one of the many who wandered along the roads in unruly flocks, running away from their suffering towards a goal that most often was simply a mirage, not even a dream. At last I reached the beach. On the other side of the water lay Europe.

  *

  Tea-Bag fell silent. She slowly unzipped her jacket and Humlin jumped. He thought he’d seen an animal peek out of her coat, leap down to the floor and run out of the room.

  Tea-Bag looked at him and smiled.

  He wondered if Tea-Bag’s story was over now, or if it was just beginning.

  17

  THE SILENCE TOOK Humlin by surprise.

  No one asked Tea-Bag any questions. Had they heard all this before, or was her story a combination of everyone’s experiences? Had they even been listening? He didn’t know.

  Tanya had been at the stove stirring something in a pot the whole time. When Humlin got up to fetch a glass of water he realised to his consternation that the pot was empty and the burner cold. Leyla sat with her watch in her hands, as if she had been timing Tea-Bag’s story.

  ‘Why don’t you ask her anything?’ Humlin finally asked.

  ‘Like what?’ Leyla said, continuing to stare at the watch.

  ‘Tea-Bag has just told you a remarkable and gripping story. She certainly doesn’t need to attend a writing seminar in order to learn that.’

  ‘I can’t write, though,’ Tea-Bag said. She had clearly worked up an appetite and was squeezing mayonnaise onto a piece of bread.

  A phone rang. Humlin flinched, and even Tea-Bag reacted uneasily. The only one who seemed unaffected was Tanya, who seemed to be able to tell the rings of all mobile phones apart and even to detect if the caller was her enemy or not.

  It was Leyla’s phone. She looked at the display and then handed it to Tanya.

  ‘It’s from home,’ she said. ‘Can you answer and say we’ve got our phones mixed up? Tell them you don’t know where I am.’

  ‘It’ll just cause trouble.’

  ‘Not any more than I’m already in. Go on – just answer it.’

  ‘No, you have to do it.’

  ‘I can’t. You don’t understand.’

  ‘I do understand. But you still have to answer.’

  The phone continued to ring. It lay on the table and was sent back and forth across its surface like a half-dead insect. Humlin saw how afraid Leyla was when she finally grabbed it and answered in her own language. Humlin heard a man. He sounded extremely upset. Leyla initially hunched her shoulders at the sound of this voice but suddenly she straightened her back, shouted back at him and ended the conversation by banging the phone on the table until the battery cover came off. She yelled out something that Humlin didn’t understand, got up with clenched fists and then sank down on the chair again and started to cry.

  Tanya had resumed stirring her empty pot. Humlin wondered if she were preparing an invisible meal for her daughter who was somewhere far away. Tea-Bag picked up the battery cover from the floor and put the phone back together.

  Leyla stopped crying.

  ‘That was my dad.’

  Tanya groaned.

  ‘Don’t go home. He’s not allowed to lock you up. Your brothers are not allowed to hit you.’

  ‘I can’t stay here. I can’t stay with my grandmother.’

  Tanya flicked her tea towel angrily at Leyla’s arm.

  ‘But you can’t go home. When you told me what happened to your sister I thought you were talking about yourself, right up until the end. It was only then I realised it couldn’t be you because you were right there in front of me and your ear wasn’t burnt away with acid.’

  Humlin drew back in horror.

  ‘What’s this – a sister? What ear?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell. At least not with you sitting here.’

  Tanya kept flicking the tea towel at Leyla’s arm.

  ‘He’s our teacher; he’s supposed to listen. Perhaps he’ll learn something from what you say.’

  ‘I want to hear it,’ Tea-Bag said. ‘I need to listen to someone else for a while. My head is filled with my own tongues. They fly around in here like misshapen butterflies.’

  She rapped her head with her knuckles. Leyla pointed to Humlin.

  ‘Not while he’s still here.’

  ‘He can wait out in the hall.’

  Tanya gestured for Humlin to leave and so he took his chair and went to sit out in the hall. I’m not supposed to see her in the act of making her confession, he thought. Leyla was quiet for a long time before she started to speak.

  *

  Once upon a time I had a doll named Nelf. I found it under one of the beds in a room at the refugee camp where people came and went, and where you could hear people scream and cry in their sleep. But there was also an atmosphere of relief there. We had arrived. We were in Sweden. Everything was going to be all right, without anyone actually being able to say what ‘all right’ was. I thought it was ‘good’ that I found the doll, and I immediately gave her the name Nelf. I was surprised that no one seemed to understand what it meant. Not even grandmother Nasrin who was still clear-headed those days. But even she didn’t pick up that it was the name of a god.

  We had just arrived from Iran but I don’t remember much about that trip, only that when we were about to land my dad tore up all our documents. My parents’ passports, Nasrin’s passport – which actually wasn’t hers but belonged to Uncle Reza. First we landed in the small Swedish town called Flen where I found the doll and a few months later we moved to Falun where we lived for three years before we came to Gothenburg, to Stensgården.

  It was in Falun that my dad decided my sister Fatti was going to marry one of Mehmed’s brothers. Mehmed lived in Södertälje and was one of the first to move to Sweden; he came even before the Shah was overthrown and Khomeini had us all under surveillance and was in the process of making the country into something better and which maybe one day it actually will be. But Fatti had eavesdropped on the conversations between Dad and Mehmed – she had been told to stay out of the way – by crouching down outside the door to the living room and when she crept back to bed in the room that we shared I heard her cry.

  I got up and crawled into bed with her, which is something we always do when someone is sad or has a nightmare or is just alone. Fatti dredged up the terrible words she had just heard through the
closed door, sobbing as she told me. She had heard Mehmed and Dad agree to marry her to Mehmed’s brother Faruk. Both of us knew who he was, he had a little shop in Hedemora and everyone took it for granted that Mehmed was supporting him since there were never any customers in there. Faruk often came to visit us at the weekends. Neither Fatti nor I liked him. He was nice, but perhaps it was that he was too nice, so you actually became afraid of him. And now Fatti was going to have to marry him.

  She said she would run away, but she didn’t know where to. We both knew you can’t run away from your father; he would look for you for a thousand years and finally find you. I said this to my sister and that there had to be another way for her to escape a marriage with Faruk. Our mother was not going to be a help; she never did anything without asking Dad first, but maybe Nasrin could stand up to him. The following day was Midsummer’s Eve. I remember that Fatti and I walked down to the lake through the birch trees and talked with Nasrin. But Nana just got angry and said that Fatti should be grateful to get someone like Mehmed as a relative. I’ll never forget the fact that Nasrin talked about Mehmed the whole time even though Faruk was the man Fatti was supposed to marry. I could see how desperate Fatti was getting. Nasrin had been her last hope. She pleaded with her for help but Nasrin just kept on talking about how wonderful it would be to have such a well-established man as Mehmed in the family.

  That night I crawled into Fatti’s bed again. She told me she was going to run away but I didn’t believe her. Where would she go? Sometimes girls from families like ours run away but I’ve never heard of anyone who didn’t eventually come back. Even the ones who commit suicide are brought back. But when I woke up the next morning the bed was empty. Fatti was gone. At first I thought she was in the bathroom or out on the balcony wrapped in a blanket, but she was gone. I peeked in all the rooms. Dad was snoring, Mum’s foot was hanging down on the floor. Fatti’s red coat was gone. She had not taken very much with her. The only bag that was missing was her little black backpack. I walked out on the balcony. It was still early. A bird somewhere was chirping, the sun was rising out of the mist, and I wondered where Fatti could have gone. I thought that I should have gone with her because Fatti and I are really the same person. Fatti is thinner than I am. That’s the only difference.