Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

*

Spring became summer. Time passed. Samuel continued to ask people about definitions of love and when he encountered people who seemed content in their relationships he would always ask how they met. I stood next to him, thinking that everyone had a tale and that tale grew taller and taller every year.

“How did we meet? Oh, that’s actually an amazing story.”

And even though no one but Samuel cared, they would start telling it. They were in the same class in elementary school and hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years when, by “huuuuge coincidence,” they ran into each other at a market. In Italy. At sunset. They were at a conference and ended up next to each other in line for the breakfast buffet. They sat there until lunch. Until dinner. They didn’t leave the dining room for several days. They stood next to each other at ICA in Bredäng in two cash register lines that were exactly the same length, and after the line had stood still for thirty seconds, five minutes, fifteen minutes, they started talking to each other. The conversation never ended and “that’s how it happened” they said, smiling their liar smiles. I suppose they wanted our eyes to light up, wanted us to share their joy. But in fact, both Samuel and I thought that they ought to keep their joy to themselves, because they didn’t get that there were people out there who hadn’t experienced that, who were still waiting.

*

I refused to become one of those people who gets stuck in a place just because it’s comfortable, who meets someone and takes out loans and buys an apartment and imagines that this shithole of a city with its nervous baristas and bartenders who drool over celebrities and racist bouncers and narrow-minded politicians and redneck police force is the norm; who forget that Stockholm is an anomaly, a tiny goddamn backwater populated by peasants, as far north as you can get, a city that completely lacks purpose and is so afraid of its own shadow that people don’t talk to each other even when the Metro stands still in a tunnel for fifteen minutes. It’s the only city in the world where newborns learn how to avoid eye contact. You see it in children who grew up somewhere else, they come here and think that people will fawn over them on the Metro, they flutter their eyelashes, they offer pacifiers to dogs, but their fellow passengers quickly let them know the score, not a single glance up from the phone, not a single smile from anyone in return, like mummies, like pillars of salt they go back and forth, to work, home from work, each fellow human is treated like a beggar, and if there’s only one thing I must remember it is that this is not everything. There is a way out, there is always a way out, I thought as the train approached the city.

*

My theory is that Samuel had waited so long that in the end he was ready for it to happen, no matter where, no matter who with. And when it happened, it happened later that same year, when the summer was over. The trees had started to turn red and the sidewalks were getting slippery. The place was no Italian vegetable market, no flashy conference dining room. The place was the parking lot outside the Migration Board’s offices in Hallonbergen.

*

Then I arrived and everything shifted. My sister was standing there at Cityterminalen. Around her: Ylva, Santiago, Shahin, Tamara, and several friends from interpreter school, plus a few people from my syndicalist years whose names I don’t want to use. They had made a laughably ugly banner that said WELCOME HOME LAIDE! (with glitter around my name) and they had put on party hats. Shahin had brought her saxophone, but since she had forgotten the mouthpiece it just hung around her neck, all shiny. They caught sight of me and everyone rushed up and screamed and clapped their hands and there were group hugs and pictures and I was so overwhelmed that I hardly knew what was going on, you can tell in the pictures from that day, I don’t even look happy, my mouth is just open like a fish and I’m looking around in confusion, as if I have just found out that the world is one big set and my friends are actors. Only afterwards, once we were in the car on the way home, did it start to sink in that my sister had organized all of this for me. She was sitting in front of me in the passenger seat and checking her phone as if nothing much had happened, as if she put together this sort of surprise once a week.

“I did thank you, right?” I asked.

“You stood there without saying a thing for five minutes.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

She reached her hand back over her seat and I took it.

*

This is more or less the way Samuel described it to me when he came home from work and ran into the kitchen with his shoes still on:

“Oh my fucking holy shit I mean whooooaaaa I think I met her or I mean I don’t know but shit I mean shit it was so fucking I don’t know oh my God I mean shit I phew hold on a second I’ll tell you hold on I just have to calm down a little but holy shit I mean holy shit!!!”

I looked at him, waiting for him to utter a complete sentence. Or at least a third of a sentence.

*

We arrived home at my old apartment, five years had gone by, first a French student from Tours who was doing a Ph.D. in biology had rented it, then a Senegalese couple, and most recently a Hungarian family with two children. Five years and so many people ought to have changed the smell of the apartment. But as I stood there in the hall, breathing and looking at myself in the hall mirror, it was like no time had passed.

*

After about half an hour the story of what had happened came out. Samuel had gone to work. Same as always. He took the red line to T-Centralen. Got on the escalator, the moving walkway, the escalator. Transferred to the blue line toward Akalla. Got off. Walked by Hallonbergen Centrum, wondered whether he should buy a lunch now or go with the Thai takeout. Settled on Thai. He walked toward his building. He swiped his access card. He sat in his ergonomic chair. He glanced through his cases, he contacted a few embassies, he booked a few trips, he wrote a few reports. None of what he was doing demanded his concentration. His thoughts wandered freely and presumably he was thinking what he usually did at work: here I am with my degree in political science, sorting papers like a mailman and booking trips like a secretary and writing reports like a report-writer. Or maybe he was thinking about something else.

*

When I left Sweden I was pretty new as an interpreter. I had my degree and I’d been working for one and a half years when I received my special-project assignment in Brussels, which soon turned into a permanent position. For five years I sat at meetings that lasted an eternity, I translated phrases like trade-barrier speculation clause or EU subsidy reform supplements from French to Swedish; from English to French. Only when I went to restaurants did I get to use my Arabic. I knew more than I wanted to about the UN convention on maritime law, ocean-sonics studies in international waters, and the precarious situation of the bluefin tuna. Back in Stockholm, I had no trouble finding a job. Everyone wanted a licensed interpreter with my experience. But I felt like I wanted to do something different. Something that really affected people’s lives.

The girl at the agency said I would have no problem at all finding work as a phone interpreter.

“All you have to decide is whether you want to take daytime or nighttime calls.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, we have a lot of different clients. But in general, the nighttime calls tend to be a bit more emotionally demanding. There are more calls from the police and the emergency room at night. And during the day, there are calls from the Social Security Agency and the Employment Agency.”