Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

*

When I came back, Samuel was crouching behind the dumbbell rack.

“What did he say?” Samuel asked.

“He didn’t say much.”

I went back to my routine. Samuel was quiet. Then he said:

“How did he manage to hold his breath for so long?”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

I walked over to the punching bag and slid on my gloves. Samuel followed.

“Did you say hi from me?”

“No, did you want me to?”

“I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me. But now it feels like I want him to know who was behind that treatment.”

“If he comes back I can tell him you say hi. But something tells me this is the last time he’ll show up here.”

Samuel looked at me with glistening eyes. He looked sad, but happy too, and I thought it was strange how little things could mean so much to him and big things so little.

“What’s with you?”

“Nothing, I just. . It’s such a crazy feeling. To have someone who. . I don’t know. Is on your side.”

“Aw, it was nothing.”

“I’ve never had that.”

“Now you do.”

A few days later, Laide answered his text. They decided on a time and place for a first date.

*

Zainab didn’t want to get divorced, she was also here on her husband’s visa, her husband had a work permit and she had to hold out until they could apply for permanent residency. When the girl who worked at the women’s shelter asked if she wanted to report him, Zainab explained that her husband was not a monster.

“He has his reasons. He’s under a lot of pressure, his boss doesn’t pay him the salary that they settled on, he says they had a different agreement, and it’s true, my husband didn’t know that there was a minimum payment clause, he did everything he could for us to make it here. I don’t blame him. I understand. I’m not saying it’s okay, but at the same time. Yes. Okay. I love him. But our love is gone. I can’t leave him. I have to leave him. I have nowhere to go, but I’m convinced that Allah, the merciful and compassionate, will find a way.”

The representative for the women’s shelter cleared her throat and explained that unfortunately, their facility was just as full as all the other shelters. They had a long waitlist.

“I would recommend that you apply for your own work permit. That’s the first step toward freedom.”

As we stood out on the street, I promised Zainab I would help her with the application. I had helped Nihad and it went well, and now I would help Zainab too. As soon as that was taken care of, we just had to find somewhere for her and the children to live. Then it would all work out. We handed in an application. We were rejected. Even though we had written exactly the same thing as in Nihad’s application. We went out to the Migration Board in Hallonbergen to try to find out what had happened.

*

HAHAHA, allow me to laugh my ass off! Who said that Samuel and Laide’s first date was “magical”? Who is spreading the rumor that they were “soulmates”? They weren’t exactly breakdancing on air, no no no. Their first date was a catastrophe. I wasn’t there, of course, but I saw how Samuel looked when he came home. He stood in the hallway looking grim.

“What the hell are you wearing?” I asked.

“Her hoodie. She came straight from the gym.”

“Straight from the gym to a date? What did I tell you? This girl is sketchy.”

Samuel sank down onto the stool, took off the hoodie, and sniffed it. He gazed ahead emptily.

“No, it wasn’t her fault, it was the circumstances. Things kept going wrong all night.”

For one thing, it was cold. Unusually cold. Almost below freezing, even though December was still far off. They had decided to meet at the intersection of Vasagatan and Kungsgatan, and he was there on time. He thought it was a poor choice to meet there because cooking smells were pouring from the kebab stand and he didn’t want to go around stinking like falafel on their first date. But it seemed that he didn’t have to worry, because she didn’t show up. It was five past. Ten past. He started to send a text, but just then he saw her coming from up by Hötorget, walking fast. She waved and shouted that she had mixed up Sveavägen and Vasagatan and she had been waiting up there.

“Then she came up to me with her arms sticking out for a hug. But I had already put out my right hand. And by the time I opened my arms for a hug, she had stuck out her right hand. A perfect start.”

*

Our application was denied, the guy at the front desk at the Migration Board didn’t even want to take our case number. He had a Spanish accent and his breath smelled like bananas and he had the nerve to try to explain to me that “here in Sweden we happen to have an excellent system called ‘waiting your turn.’” I admit it, I was a little annoyed, Zainab tried to calm me down, the guards escorted us out. As we stood there in the parking lot and everything seemed hopeless, I heard a discreet throat-clearing and a voice asking us what had happened.

*

There was a bar at a hotel near Norra Bantorget that Samuel had Googled and walked by and stared into for twenty minutes before they met to double check that it looked good, not too full, not too empty, not too flashy, not too anonymous. They started walking along Vasagatan in the direction of the bar, they tried to talk to each other but the conversation limped along. She had a backpack full of her gym clothes and was wearing a purple hat because her hair was wet and she didn’t look the way Samuel remembered her. But he thought that if they could only find a place to sit they would have the chance to get to know each other. When they arrived at the hotel bar, Laide said she didn’t like the “vibe” there.

“What did she mean by that?” I asked.

“No idea. Instead she suggested that we ‘walk around a little.’”

“‘Walk around a little’?”

“‘Walk around a little’!” Samuel shouted. “Do you know how cold it is out? And how hard it is to keep up a normal conversation when you have to focus on not freezing to death at the same time?”

“Or slipping and falling?”

“Exactly. Thank you.”

*

There stood Samuel. His blue-black hair neatly styled. His nose a little crooked. His sideburns grown out. There were two red chili stains on the collar of his wrinkled shirt. His shoes needed a polish. His eyes were kind. His cheeks were downy. He was wearing the biggest smile I’d ever seen.

*

They started walking. A few times, Samuel suggested that they take a seat in a bar or a cafe. But each time, Laide said that bar felt too flashy and that place looked like it was for winos and that cafe reminded her of an ex and that place was closed. So they walked. They walked and walked and walked and walked.

*

A few weeks later we met up downtown. Samuel had texted me, and we took a walk in Vasastan. It was a brisk autumn evening, I had just been swimming at Eriksdal bathhouse so I was a few minutes late. It never felt like a real date. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was so easy for us to talk to each other. Maybe because I suspected he was gay. He kept coming back to the fact that he lived with a guy named Vandad and that they had a really great relationship and I remember that when he said that I felt a pang of jealousy, which was a little strange, since we had known each other for about fifteen minutes.

*

They walked for an hour. Two hours. Three.

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“Everything and nothing,” said Samuel.

It got late. Their bodies were on the verge of frostbite. Samuel asked questions to avoid awkward silence and Laide answered because she loved the sound of her own voice.

*

For the first hour we mostly talked about work. He told me how he had ended up at the Migration Board, first a degree in political science and then the job on the side that had turned into a full-time position.