Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

“You don’t happen to know where I can find a knife, do you?” he asked me.

I pointed at the knife block.

“Thanks.”

Samuel took a watermelon from the fruit bowl, split it in half, and asked if I wanted a piece. I nodded. Then he cruised through the kitchen, handing out pieces of watermelon to anyone who wanted one.

“Lame party,” he said when he came back.

I nodded.

“Are you guys going somewhere else later?”

I shrugged.

“Do you want to try something cool? Here — stick your hand in here.”

Samuel held out the watermelon half. I wondered if he was entirely sane.

“Seriously — do it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It will be memorable.”

And without really knowing why, I put out my hand and stuck it into the melon.

“How does it feel? Weird, right? Awesome? Now it’s my turn.”

It didn’t feel like anything special. Wet. And crisp. I pulled my hand out of the watermelon and Samuel stuck his own in. The other people in the kitchen looked at us like we were pissing in the sink. But Samuel just smiled and asked if they wanted to try it.

“You’ll regret it,” he said when they shook their heads.

*

The neighbor sighs. He stood there. Next to his grandma’s Opel. With his hand raised in greeting. And I was close to waving back. But then I saw the soot-covered yard, the remains of what had been his grandma’s attic, the black burn marks on the roof of my garage. I remembered how badly it might have ended if the wind had been blowing in a different direction. I looked away. But it was harder than I would have expected. I nearly had to do this so my hand wouldn’t wave all on its own [pushing his right hand down with his left]. Some things are so deeply ingrained that it’s impossible to stop yourself. You’ve done them all your life and they’re just automatic. It’s like with sexuality.

*

Samuel wiped his hand and introduced himself. I didn’t know which name I should use because when I was out doing rounds with Hamza I never gave my real name. One time I called myself “Örjan.” Another time I introduced myself as “Travolta.” Once when we slipped into a private party in Jakobsberg, on the hunt for twin sisters who had borrowed money to keep their hair salon afloat, I called myself “Hoobastank.” I could say anything I wanted, because when you look a certain way no one would dare to tell you that your name is not your name. But when Samuel introduced himself I told him my real name. I braced myself for the inevitable questions. “What did you say? Vamdad? Vanbab? Van Damme? Oh, Vandad. What kind of name is that? What does it mean? Where are your parents from? Did they come here as political refugees? Were you born here? Are you whole or half? Do you feel Swedish? How Swedish do you feel? Do you eat pork? By the way, do you feel Swedish? Can you go back? Have you gone back? How does it feel to go back? Do you maybe feel foreign when you’re here and Swedish when you’re there?” When people realized I didn’t want to talk origins they would ask about working out, whether I liked protein drinks, or what I thought about MMA.

*

The neighbor pushes away his coffee cup and clears his throat. In retrospect, I think I might as well have waved back. What difference could it have made? Maybe none at all. Samuel’s day would have started out a bit more pleasantly. He would have been in a slightly better mood when he pulled out into traffic. But there was no way I could know that it would be the last time I saw him.

*

Samuel was different. Samuel didn’t try to talk origins or working out. Samuel just said:

“Vandad? Like the shah who battled Genghis Khan? Rad.”

Then he devoted ten minutes to talking about Mongols. He said that point-five percent of the men in the world share DNA with Genghis Khan solely because he had sex with-slash-raped so many girls. He said that Genghis Khan’s empire was the largest in world history and that the Mongols killed like forty million people. He said that the Mongols punished cheapskate village chieftains by pouring freshly melted, red-hot gold into their bodily orifices until they were fried. I had no clue why this scrawny little dude was talking to me about Mongols, and I had no clue why I was listening. But there was something different about the way we were chatting. We never brought up jobs, addresses, or backgrounds. We only talked about Mongol weaponry, their battle techniques, their loyalty, their horses. Or. Mostly Samuel was the one doing the talking, and I listened. But when the girl whose party it was came into the kitchen and saw us standing there, super deep in conversation, it was as if she started seeing me in a different light. I liked the way she was looking at me.

“How do you know all of this?” I asked, thinking that maybe he was a history teacher.

“I don’t know,” Samuel said, and smiled. “I think it comes from some computer game. My memory is fucking weird. Some things just stick.”

“But mostly they just vanish,” said his red-blanket-clad friend, as she came back in from the balcony in a cloud of smoke.

*

The neighbor brushes a few crumbs from the vinyl tablecloth and says that he certainly isn’t like some people in the neighborhood. I don’t have any prejudices against people from other countries. I have never understood the point of different cultures isolating themselves from each other. I love to travel. Ever since I retired I’ve spent the winter abroad. Indian food is very good. There’s a guy who works at the fish counter at Konsum who’s from Eritrea and he is very nice. I had no problem at all when new people started moving into Samuel’s grandmother’s house. It didn’t bother me that some of the women had veils. On the other hand, I didn’t like it that they used the grill out on the roof terrace and threw their garbage bags in my garbage can. But that had nothing to do with their background.

*

When Hamza came back, the mood in the kitchen was transformed. People held their glasses closer to their bodies.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Do fags fuck in the woods?” he said.

“Why do fags fuck in the woods?” Samuel asked.

“Aw, it’s a fucking figure of speech,” Hamza said. “Read a book and maybe you won’t have to broadcast your ignorance.”

Hamza and I took off; I noticed that he was in a mood, something had gotten into him, it was going to be a long night. I was right, before the night was over some stuff had happened, I can’t get into exactly what, but I backed him up, I didn’t let him down, I’d said that I would be with him all the way and I was, I had his back, loyal as a Mongol. But on the way home I promised myself I’d scale back and try to find a new way to pay the rent.

*

The neighbor shakes my hand and wishes me good luck in reconstructing Samuel’s last day. If I were to give you one piece of advice, it would be to keep it simple. Just tell what happened — no frills. I’ve read parts of your other books, and it seemed like you were making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself.

The nurses’ aide on the first floor says that she doesn’t want her real name to appear in the book. Call me “Mikaela” instead. I’ve always wanted to be “Mikaela.” I had a friend in daycare with that name, and I was always so jealous that she could say it and no one would ask her any questions about where she was from and what her name meant. She looked pretty much like me but because of her name she was treated differently. Put that I didn’t really know Samuel. I had only met him a few times at work; all I did was open the door for him when he visited his grandma. The last time he was here I heard a rapping sound at the door, a sharp noise that hurt my ears, and when I came out Samuel was standing there knocking on the glass with a car key. I had given him the code before and once I had even given him my mnemonic, the one I used to remember the code at first, but now there he was again, knocking and looking kind of ashamed when he saw me. He looked like he’d just woken up. He was holding a plastic bag that was full to bursting and a round ring of vapor had formed in front of his mouth and I recall wondering how long he had been standing there trying to remember the code.