Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

“You said thanks for last time?”

“Yeah, was that weird or something?”

“That’s what you say after you’ve been to a party. Not when you’ve had a random encounter in a parking lot.”

“Oh, but. . It felt like the right thing to. . I don’t know.”

I poured a cup of coffee, I looked out at the courtyard. An empty playground, the swings were moving gently in the wind like absent-minded leaves.

“So has she responded?”

“Not yet. But it was a good text. I wrote lots of drafts. Want me to read it to you?”

“No thanks,” I said.

But I didn’t say it in a mean way, I just informed him that I wasn’t all that curious to learn the exact contents of his text. Then I went to my room to get ready for the workday. Samuel was still sitting at the kitchen table when I came back out. He was still bare-chested, his twig-like arms held the phone, his eyes were focused on the screen.

“But of course it could be taken ironically as well.”

“What can?”

“Thanks for last time. Maybe she’ll see it and think it was a joke. Was it stupid to sign off with ‘best’? Is that too impersonal? I should have written out a whole greeting—‘best wishes, Samuel, Migration Board.’ Or maybe I should have ended with ‘all my best.’ Or ‘xoxo’? What do you think? Would it have been too much to—”

I closed the front door and pressed the elevator button. If I had been able to put a stop to it all there and then, I would have. I had a bad feeling about it. But the pinball of fate was rolling and nothing could stop it.

*

Of course it was unusual. I had no right to give Nihad legal advice. I had only heard what had happened to other women in similar situations. Maybe it was different for Nihad. I don’t know. But I asked for her number and called her right away from my personal phone and we talked as she stood up and left the room. I heard the sound of doors and running steps, elevator dings and two voices talking about a soccer match (“it was like total fucking pyrotechnics!”). Then the rubber-squeaking sound of her shoes against the hallway floor as she ran for the exit, her breathing, the scraping sound of her jacket collar, someone (a taxi driver?) calling out a last name, he said it slowly and tiredly, as if he had been standing there in the hospital entryway calling the same last name since the dawn of time. Then birds chirping and car engines and wind and creaking brakes and the hissing sound of opening bus doors.

“I’m out.”

Before we hung up, I promised to help her apply for a work permit.

*

Three days went by. Three days in which Laide didn’t respond to Samuel’s text. A normal person would have realized that it was time to let go and move on. But not Samuel. To him, the fact that he didn’t receive an answer was a sign that it was really her , she was the one . Four days after Samuel’s first text he asked if he could come with me to the gym.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“Yes. I need to get some exercise. It’s been a long time.”

“How long?”

“Oh. Eight or nine years.”

Samuel came down the stairs to the gym changed and ready. I understood. I would have done the same thing if I had arms as strong as spider webs and thighs as thick as candles. He was wearing a pair of purple sweatpants with cuffs, a T-shirt from a music festival, and two sweatbands dangling from his wrists like bracelets.

“Wanna get going?” he asked. “I was thinking of starting with the jump rope.”

And there’s nothing wrong with warming up by jumping rope, but it all depends on the way you jump with your jump rope. If you have control of your body and mix single jumps with double jumps while dancing like a boxer, it’s okay. Samuel jumped rope like he was back in the schoolyard. His feet got caught in the rope, he started over, people stared at him, people shook their heads. But the crazy thing was, I wasn’t ashamed. I liked that he was there. And since he was there with me, no one dared to say anything. But Samuel sure was talkative. As I worked through my program, he commented on the brands of kettlebells, he asked if I thought the sounds coming from the stereo were happy or sad, he wondered if I thought Laide would answer his text today or tomorrow or next week. A lot of the time I let his questions hang in the air, I was focused on doing my own thing, it didn’t mean I wasn’t listening to them, but sometimes there were so many of them that it was enough to respond to every other one.

*

The calls kept coming. I translated for moms who needed help being informed why their applications for housing assistance had been denied. Men who wanted to appeal an assault verdict. Teens who wanted help with an EU application for a cultural grant for a Palestinian music festival in Norsborg. Women who had been abused, raped, burned with cigarettes. Men who complained of discrimination in the housing market and the job market and when they tried to register the discrimination with the Ombudsman for Discrimination they were discriminated against there too. Women whose shins were kicked in half, whose eyes swelled closed. Women who pointed at the scars on their chins to show where the dog had bitten them. Women who said that when he was driving drunk I wasn’t allowed to put on my seatbelt, when I took a second helping he forced me to eat cat food, when my colleagues asked about the bruises he started pulling my hair. Women who said that he had a routine, he locked the security door with a police lock, he put a particular song on the stereo, he whistled along with the melody as he found his gloves. Then he came in and started. The men were lawyers from Jämtland, Finnish-born triathlon medalists, Swedish TV personalities. The men were Syrian fruit sellers, Belgian violinists, Skåne alcoholics. But the men were unimportant. The men were superfluous. It was the women I wanted to help.

*

We kept working out. I went for upper body, Samuel did push-ups, four regular ones, the rest on his knees (!). He looked over toward the treadmills and suddenly stopped talking.

“What is it?” I asked.

“See the guy in the red tank top? Shit, I think that’s Valentin.”

“ That’s Valentin?”

I could hardly hold back my laughter. The guy Samuel had described as the terror of the school was as muscular as an earthworm. He had the threatening posture of a croissant. He looked like he might be able to pet a kitten pretty hard.

“Where are you going?” Samuel called.

I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it, but I was, I was heading for the guy in the red tank top. I flexed my neck first to the left and then to the right.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” I said over my shoulder.

I didn’t listen to Samuel’s objections, I blocked out his cries of “come back!” You remember the people who hurt you, they leave traces that never go away and that was what I wanted to teach him, this guy named Valentin.

*

When I met Zainab for the first time she took off her veil and showed me where she’d been whipped. He’d used an old-fashioned TV antenna, the scars crisscrossed her back like veins, like stings from a jellyfish, but she said it hadn’t hurt all that much. It was worse when he degraded her other ways, like when he refused to talk to her because she came home ten minutes late or when he pushed her face into her oatmeal in the morning. The bad part about the TV antenna was that he had waited until the kids came home to do it, it was like he wanted them to watch, her daughters had cried, her son had run out onto the balcony and he just stood there and stared into a corner until it was over. When she found him and carried his stiff body inside, he had round, half-moon fingernail marks in his palms. He was four, almost five.