Jonas Khemiri - Montecore - The Silence of the Tiger

Your father presented me his name sketches and smacked his mouth happily. While I observed the competing studio names, I noticed a sorrowful emotion in my chest. Where did it come from? Perhaps it was based on the insight that something had succeeded in modifying your father. Something indicated his transformed mentality; perhaps it was his condescending method toward his countrymen, perhaps it was his brilliant smile when he found a five-crown coin on the café floor. Perhaps it was the whisper that your father, despite his guarantees, would find it difficult to combine his artistic ambitions with economic maximization? My certainty is unsecured.

The next day we initialized the renovation of your father’s building. We gradually transformed the store from a forgotten sign shop in a suburb south of Stockholm to a professional photographic studio with an added vernissage room. Though still in a suburb south of Stockholm.

We cleaned out the meticulously filled storerooms, where your grandfather seemed to have saved all of everything in an infernally historical chaos. That Gösta must have been a true collector. In his stockroom were not only the antique signs, which we soon sold on to a connoisseur.

There was also Gösta’s collection of Ping-Pong paddles (18 of them), water towers for antique train lines (7), scrapped refrigerators (5), milk white firemen’s helmets (4), aquariums (3), crutches (3.5), old world maps (some twenty rolls). There was his collection of bottle caps from that kind of antique soda that was called “small beer” (3 bags!) as well as his not particularly well formed collection of stuffed scorpions (1). Your grandfather must have had a very complicated relationship with cleaning and throwing away … Fortunately enough, we did not partake this nostalgic disposition.

After emptying the rooms, we tore out shelves and filled wall holes with stiffening cream. The shabby yellow wall color was disguised behind a neutral white. We invested a complete photo lab with chemicals and copying machines via used advertisements. We invested lamps, furniture from IKEA, cord extenders, fabrics as back walls, and reflecting mirrors, as well as quantities of props (plastic fruit, candelabras, humorous crowns). The ring-spotted marble of the windowsills was hidden with pots, and the spiderweb cracks of the window panes were camouflaged with flowering curtains delegated from your grandmother.

In the stairs down from the courtyard, we taped posters from your father’s bathroom lab. There was Capa’s desperate soldier on D-Day, Avedon’s shaky, sweat-splashing Louis Armstrong, Eisenstaedt’s sailor who is celebrating peace with an unknown woman’s kiss, as well as Yousuf Karsh’s classic portrait of Einstein. The main room became the studio’s combined atelier and vernissage room. The inner room was transformed to a black-colored darkroom with insulated light barriers, wires on the ceiling, special-colored bathtubs for different chemicals, clothespins, and, like the dot that transforms a stick to an i , the orange lightbulb.

Because your mother had pointed out your apartment’s present crowdedness with cyclical repetition, I was offered lodging farthest back in the store’s special storeroom. There I partook my home with a mattress as well as many quantities of material, film canisters, developing fluids, and fixative drums, as well as the carton in which your father hid his secret whiskey bottles (your mother opposed all forms of daily routine drinking). As a stimulant your father delegated me your black-and-white fourteen-inch TV. Pretty soon I could visualize the room more as a temporary home and less as a suffocating, cramped, windowless cave.

Are you impatiently anticipating your return in the story? Do not worry. Now it is time. During the coming months, two exterior happenings were acted that presented a strong influence on your father’s future: Number one was initiated when Björn Gillberg published his article that auctioned that Refaat El-Sayed’s doctoral degree was not complete.

Refaat was apparently not the doctor of chemistry he presented himself as. The consequence? The Swedish journalists attacked Refaat, punctured his reputation, and his career fell in time with Fermenta’s share prices. The Volvo relationship was broken and Refaat was fired, indicted, erased, pulverized. Your father read the newspapers’ headlines with rising dismay, side-shook his head, and mumbled:

“It can’t be true, it can’t be true, they can’t do this, they can’t.”

But they could. Do you remember this?

Of course you remember, and there’sDads, who are sitting in the kitchen, and its green wallpaper and big black table crack that’s perfect for hiding tiny things like grains of rice and Playmobil pistols. There are Dads’ feet with holey socks and you can hear Dads’ dark voices and this must be the first memory of Kadir because Dads have a friend visiting and at first you think it’s someone from Aristocats but then you understand that it’s one of Dads’ oldest friends from Jendouba, who has jeans with patched knees and a squeaky leather vest. He’s given you Pez candy and pinched your cheek kindly and you remember his voice when he comforts Dads and says, Inshallah lebes , Refaat will survive, Refaat always survives. And Dads say: Of course, Refaat always survives, but why are they doing this, why, he’s given a billion, a billion! And then Moms’ sleepy slipper feet that shuffle in from the bedroom and they ask for help hanging up cloth diapers to dry and then Dads, who answer that they actually have other things to think about right now.

And as they say: A tragicness often comes in stereo. Our renovation of the studio was almost finalized when projectiles from an unknown pistol penetrated the praised prime minister Olof Palme’s chest. Sweden fell into a national sorrow and it took several days before your ragged mother got back a glimmer of joie de vivre. Not even your muddleheaded memory could have forgotten that day, right?

Of course you remember that too, but it’s a strange memory because it’s as close as you can get to a collective experience because you are doing exactly what everyone else is probably doing that Saturday morning. You crawl out of bed and even though you’re almost grown up you happen to be carrying the stuffed seal you call Snorre with you, and Moms and Dads are sleeping and you sneak toward the TV and stand on tiptoe to press the button to check exactly what time Good Morning Sweden is going to show cartoons. But instead of the schedule text there’s a fuzzy picture and a blocked-off police picture and you spell your way through the text easily but the pronunciation is still hard because your tongue just rolls itself. It says that Good Morning Sweden is canceled because of … and you read it again and again so that you don’t make a mistake … the muwdew of the pwime minithter Olooof Paalme! and you yell loudly toward the bedroom and Moms grunt in reply and you yell again that Palme has been murdered and you’re so happy and proud because you were the very first to find the news and you smile toward Moms’ horror and you are just about to say it again when Moms’ wailing sounds cut the apartment in two and little brothers wake up screaming and Dads wake up screaming and everything is chaos and in the middle of it all is you, who finally understand and who try to comfort Moms by letting Snorre nose her streaming tears. You climb up on the sofa and get down the framed picture of Palme and Moms hold the frame to her breast and rock back and forth and Dads comfort and you comfort while little brothers just scream and scream.

No name had yet been fixated on your father’s future studio. But I strongly remember the spring evening when your father’s brain was sparkled with the name idea. It went like this: Palme had been dead for a few weeks and your mother had recovered her failing strength. A visit down to your overfull cellar had presented your father with a gigantic amount of photos that he wanted to present in his new display window. Now we were sitting and resting in the fumes of the paint with aching shoulders and tired backs. I polished my nails free from color while your father paged through his large collection of photos. He bathed in negative cards and photographs; with a magnifying glass on his eye he examined hundreds of photos. Then he said: