Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

I said I would get back to her with which type of calls I wanted. I went into the city and bought a new phone that I would use for work and then I called up the interpreter agency again.

“Here’s my new number, and by the way: I’d be happy to take calls both day and night.”

She laughed like she thought I was joking.

“When are you going to sleep?”

“It’s no big deal. I don’t sleep much anyway.”

*

It was a perfectly normal day. To avoid small talk with his colleagues, Samuel took a late lunch. He left the office at one. He walked out into the bright autumn sun. He sat in the biting wind down at the Thai place, which was a small food cart with colorful lanterns in the parking lot behind the Migration Board building. He bought the daily special for sixty-five kronor, he thought of the friend who had ordered scampi at the Thai stand at Zinkensdamm and found a syringe in his food, he made sure his food was syringe-free, ate it up, looked at the bare trees swaying in the wind. Perhaps he was thinking that time passed slowly even when he was on break.

*

When I told my friends from interpreter school that I was going to go with nighttime calls, I was advised to prepare myself.

“Study body parts and medical terms,” said one friend.

“Brush up on your weapons,” said another.

“But you can hold off on different dialects,” said a third. “That will come later on, once you’ve been working for a while. That’s the hardest part.”

I followed their advice. I studied body parts and made sure I knew how to say norovirus and rheumatism, fly-kick and head-butt. I freshened up on the nuances that differentiate cudgels, pokers, and clubs.

“Some calls can be really hard,” said one friend.

I nodded and thought I understood what she meant.

*

After a little more than an hour, Samuel walked back to the office, that big chunk of concrete that looked like a parking garage. Activists had left stickers on the stairs; they said things like LEO, age 8, taken away in the night by police and sent to Iraq. Migration Board: as usual, everything went smoothly or ALL DEPORTATION MUST STOP . The stickers were half ripped off, but it was still possible to read the black text, tattooed on the concrete like a shadow.

*

I had been working for a month when I had my first call with Nihad. It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, the police officer introduced himself and said he was calling from the emergency rape clinic at Södra hospital.

“I’m sitting here with a woman who needs your assistance as an interpreter.”

And I remember thinking, didn’t he need it as much as she did?

The woman introduced herself, her voice was quiet and dogged, I started translating her story from Arabic to Swedish. She said that she was twenty-nine years old, she had started talking with a guy at the bar, they met at Golden Hits on Kungsgatan, they sang karaoke together, first “Winds of Change” and then a Brian Ferry song she didn’t remember the name of. Then he added her on Facebook, he called himself Bill, they started a relationship, they went out a few times, he bought her dinner, twice she slept at his place but nothing happened. He was nice, he took care of her, when they went on dates he always paid, he said he had contacts that could help her get a permanent residence permit.

The policeman’s voice: So she’s here without authorization?

Me: Do you have a residency permit?

Nihad: No. Or, I’m here on my husband’s permit.

Me: No. Or. She’s here on her husband’s permit.

Nihad: But my husband and I are separated.

The policeman: Okay. She knows I’m a police officer, right?

He said it like he was trying to make a joke.

*

Samuel approached the entrance to the Migration Board office. Something was going on. The security guards, who normally stood on the inside and kept an eye on the people taking queue numbers, were standing out in the parking lot. A young woman was holding back an older woman. The older woman was wearing a veil, she was waving her fist and screaming something in Arabic. The young woman translated it into Swedish. Samuel walked by. He heard their voices. They were shouting that this was a scandal, a violation of rights, a disgrace. They would go to the media, there would be consequences, major consequences. One of the guards waved her hand as though she wanted to shoo away an annoying wasp. The other guard looked like he had a toothache.

“Is this what you call a democracy?” the women shouted.

Samuel looked at the younger woman. He stopped. He realized that she was beautiful. Or, in Samuel’s own words later that night:

“I mean bro, bro— I like can’t sit down when I think about her. I swear, she wasn’t just beautiful, she was the foxiest fox, she was foxier than the Fox River, she was Beyoncé times a hundred, we’re talking Janet Jackson before the plastic surgery, we’re talking that girl from 21 Jump Street , the big sister on Cosby , Hilary from Fresh Prince but with brains, she was so beautiful that I DIED — I saw her and I wanted to melt, you know what I mean, I wanted to go up to her and lap up the sweat from her shoes, I mean for serious, what is it Biggie says in that song? She was so beautiful I was ready to suck her dad’s dick, you know?”

I felt strange, it was like nausea, I think it was Samuel’s story about the syringe in the Thai food.

“Then what did you do?” I asked.

“I. Uh. First I walked past her and into the office. Then I turned around and went back out. I walked up to them, said hi in Arabic, and asked what had happened.”

*

Nihad continued her story. The day before yesterday, the guy who called himself Bill came to her place without warning, he was just there in a car outside, and he called her phone and asked if he could come up.

The policeman: So she had given him her phone number?

Me: He wants to know if you had given him your phone number.

Her: Yes.

Me: Yes.

When she said it wasn’t a good time for him to come up, he left the car and came up anyway.

“He stood in the stairwell, he had flowers with him, two different colors of tulips, he wouldn’t give up, it smelled like he had been drinking, I asked how he was going to drive home, he said he wasn’t going to drive home. Finally I let him in, I didn’t know what to do, he was talking so loudly, I didn’t want the neighbors to notice, he came in without taking off his shoes, he walked around in the apartment I was living in temporarily, and he acted like he lived there, he sat on the sofa, put his feet up on the table, asked if I had any food in the house, and when I said I wanted him to leave he refused, I lied and said I was expecting someone and he said I was cheating, that I was waiting for another man, he started using ugly words, he asked if it was a black man who was coming, he said it several times, ‘is it a black man who’s going to fuck you with his big black cock, is that what you want, to be plowed by a big black cock,’ and when he said those things I realized he was touching himself, he was sitting there in my borrowed apartment, on my borrowed sofa, touching himself, and then I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a frying pan, I don’t know why I didn’t grab a knife, I said he had to leave or else I would call my ex-husband, and he said, ‘So call him, call that blackhead, what do you think he can do, what do you think will happen if I report him for threatening me? What do you think will happen if I say he came over and assaulted me?’

“While he said that he took something from the pocket of his jacket, at first I thought it was a gold ring, for a brief moment I thought he was going to propose to me, get down on his knee and break into a smile and say that it had all been a joke. But it wasn’t a gold ring, it was brass knuckles, he slipped them on and hit himself above his eyebrow, it was so strange, I just stood there with the frying pan in my hand and he sat there on the sofa in his jacket, bleeding from the eyebrow, blood running into his eyes and into his mouth, he smiled when he saw how scared I was, he asked what I was going to do now, now that I had already hurt him, now that there was proof I was unstable. ‘What do you think the courts will have to say about your chances of staying here if it comes out that you assault upstanding citizens for no reason?’ He was still smiling, his teeth were red, it was dripping on the sofa, I lowered the frying pan. At first I didn’t put up a fight, he lifted me toward the bed, I let him do it, I couldn’t feel my body, he took off my clothes and forced himself into me, it was difficult, it hurt, I looked away, there was the window, the knickknacks, the curtains I had bought just because my son liked the tree pattern.”