Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

“How about you, Laide?” said Samuel. “What is your definition?”

“I don’t know. But I know that the few times I have been in love, I have never had to ask myself whether I am or not.”

Ylva let go of Rickard’s hand. Santiago cleared his throat. Samuel took a sip from an already-empty glass.

*

We went back down to the kitchen, Laide was finished making her call, she still hadn’t said hi to me. She was treating me like air, like someone even more unimportant than air, because after all there are still those short moments when you are reminded that air exists and that it can be useful to have. Nothing like that happened for Laide when she looked at me.

“There might be a spot in Bergshamra,” she said. “They’re going to call later this afternoon.”

“Have you been upstairs?” Samuel asked.

Laide didn’t answer.

“There are like fifty people living here.”

“More,” I said.

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Did they ask you for permission to bring in more people?”

Laide fixed her eyes on Samuel as if he were the one who had done something wrong.

“What was I supposed to say? ‘No. This house is empty but you can’t let anyone else in even if they’re going to die without shelter’?”

“The guys on the balcony don’t exactly look like they’re dying,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘guys’?” said Laide.

It was the first time that day she looked me in the eye.

“The guys who are smoking on the balcony.”

Laide darted from the kitchen. It was quiet. The women at the kitchen table couldn’t talk to us. We couldn’t talk to them. Outside the window was a birch tree whose sad branches were moving in the wind. The house creaked with small noises, and coming from the basement we could hear footsteps and children’s laughter.

Another woman came up from the basement with a bucket, she nodded at us and started filling it in the kitchen sink.

“No water downstairs?” Samuel asked in English.

“No water — broken,” said the woman.

Laide returned to the kitchen. She started speaking Arabic with the women at the table. It sounded like she was telling them off. She must have been telling them off. Laide shouted and waved her fist and slammed it on the table, but it didn’t make a very impressive sound. Nihad and Zainab mostly just sat there without saying anything. When she was finished, Laide shook her head and said that we should go.

“What did you say?” Samuel asked as we were walking toward the hall.

Laide didn’t answer. We left the house. Somewhere inside me I started to realize that it was up to me to help Samuel.

*

The taxi zoomed across Central Bridge, dark water, heavy sky, red lamps swinging from boats. Samuel held my hand, he touched it, he stroked my arm up and down, at first it tickled, then it just felt creepy. I pulled my hand back.

“They were nice,” said Samuel.

“Mmhmm,” I said.

“Are you mad?”

“No.”

“You seem mad.”

“But I’m not mad.”

“Okay. But why are you being so quiet?”

I didn’t answer, but I met the taxi driver’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. He was thinking: Shouldn’t you be with someone your own age? Someone who’s ready for something serious? Someone who doesn’t think that life is just drinking box wine, eating cottage-noodles, and filling up your Experience Bank? Someone you can trust? I nodded, I agreed with him. Samuel broke into my thoughts.

“All your friends seemed to know about the house.”

“So?”

“I was just a little surprised.”

The taxi driver turned up the volume on the radio.

“They’re my friends. They just think it’s really awesome that we—”

“I get it. But didn’t we agree not to tell anyone outside of us about it? Because that’s not why we’re doing it, is it? So we can tell people about it?”

The taxi drove on. We didn’t say much more before it pulled up outside my door. I had my card out, out of old habit.

“I’ll get it,” Samuel said, handing over his card.

We snuck up the stairs and fell asleep on opposite sides of the bed.

*

It was Samuel’s idea for me to take over running the house. He was worried that more and more people would show up, and he asked me to stop by once a day and keep an eye on things so it wouldn’t get out of control.

“Maybe you can make up a list of everyone who sleeps there. Like, write down their names and where they’re from and how long they’re planning to stay.”

He repeated several times that the most important thing was that everyone understood that it was a temporary place to stay, and it could end any day.

“We can’t give them false hope. If my relatives want to get into the house, they all have to be out with a few hours’ notice.”

“It’s going to be a little hard for me to keep an eye on the house and still get in all my hours with the moving company,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that. We’ll figure it out. We’ll keep splitting what I make.”

And sure, it was generous of Samuel. But it wasn’t enough for me to start paying off my debt to Hamza. He was contacting me more and more often to inform me of how the interest had grown. Sometimes he texted pictures that showed what would happen if I didn’t pay up soon. It might be a hand without fingernails. A hockey pro who’d taken a puck to the eye. A cartoon character, tarred and feathered. A cute lamb that had been gutted on a strip of gray asphalt.

*

Then it started. And it was impossible to stop. First it was his voice. I started thinking that Samuel sounded fake. I noticed that he always adjusted his manner of speaking. If we were at a flea market and he wanted to buy a cigarette case from an old woman, he talked like an old woman.

“My, what miserable luck!” he might say when the old lady said that she didn’t take cards.

When we walked by the square to buy fruit, he would start speaking in an Arabic accent. He haggled over oranges by calling the seller alternately “ brushan ” and “ habibi .”

“ Baraka’Allah Oufik ,” he said, winking, when he received his change, totally unaware that the guy was a Kurd.

When we went to the library he would walk among the shelves and talk about how much he longed to read a “present-day political novel with a contextual framework that problematizes the formats of its contemporary peers but simultaneously takes a critical stance on modernistic history.” And the sick thing was that it worked. Not always, but pretty often. The librarians and the old lady at the flea market loved him. But I noticed that the guy on the square looked at him with squinting eyes, as if he could tell that something was wrong. As if he knew: this guy has an accent because I have an accent. I started wondering who Samuel really was. Did he talk like me when he was with me? Who was he when I wasn’t there? Did I even know his true self?

One day we said goodbye in the hall, he had to run to the Metro to make it to work on time, I kissed him goodbye and locked the door behind him. Then I watched him through the peephole, as he entered the stairwell and started going down the steps. I wanted to see what he looked like when I wasn’t there. I wondered if he would speak Finland-Swedish with the one neighbor and southern Swedish with the other. Because I noticed how quickly he switched from one personality to the next, and the more I noticed it the more obvious it became that the version I knew was just one of many.

*

Every morning I biked over to the house and made the rounds. I checked off the residents against my list, I explained to new arrivals that the house was primarily for women and children but that in exceptional cases and on a short-term basis there might be a chance that men could sleep there too. Often there were practical items that had to be purchased, toilet paper and soap and dish detergent wouldn’t last forever, and I started collecting an administrative fee from people who wanted to stay in the house so that Samuel or I wouldn’t have to pay for those things. It was a small, symbolic fee that really didn’t cover very much more than those practical items. I knew that Samuel wouldn’t have anything against it, so I didn’t tell him about it.