Jonas Khemiri - Montecore - The Silence of the Tiger

While Dads finds a home in the studio, you find a home in the role-playing. Nothing can beat the feeling of being the master of everything. You invent adventures that make Imran and Melinda sweat, roar, cry, and once, when MC Mustachio loses a battle against a CIA-trained giant amoeba, Imran takes his dice and chucks them away over the tracks, almost all the way to the platform, where regular people discover you and wonder what you’re really up to.

During the summer, Dads’s customer phone keeps ringing. Dads’s calendar goes from totally empty to three shoots a week to the time when Dads has to say no to a commission for the first time, because of lack of time. Soon all of Dads’s hours are dedicated to work. At breakfast Dads sits with magnified eyes and checks contact sheets. In the morning there are shoots and at twilight, the darkroom. Dads shoots a retired general in uniform with his German shepherd, a smiling lady in strawberry shorts with two Rhodesian ridgebacks, a wheelchair guy’s Labrador. While you sit out by the train tracks and toss dice and fight against amphetamine-junkie elves.

It is soon obvious that you are something of a gifted game master. At first, of course, it was mostly fights with black orcs and princesses with hard-as-steel slanted bangs and Hubba Bubba gum who must be rescued. But soon you learn more about the world. You read up on monsters and their characteristics, you learn everything about Cerberus and Evard’s Black Tentacles, ice dragons and hydras. Imran has played with four other gangs of friends before, in three different cities. But no other game master has created adventures like you. No one else has let all times be mixed together into one, no one else supplies rakshasas with mini-Uzis or basilisks with mirrors (so that their petrifying gazes can be sent around corners). No other game master lets two-winged dinosaurs attack on those air skateboards from Back to the Future . And only you persist in never letting the adventure end. Because right when the head boss is conquered and Miss Super Zulu Sister and MC Mustachio are catching their breath and doing high fives and are about to take the treasure, some extra-hungry hippogriffs or some manticores with newly sharpened claws and rocket packs always show up. And Imran shrieks in fury and Melinda threatens you with a real beating but that’s life, manticores are monsters like everything else and you haven’t finished your task until you’ve gotten out of here, so what do you say? Who’s going to attack first?

The final battle begins and it’s always just the right level of bloody; Mustachio throws his razor-sharp vinyl records and Zulu Sister peppers with the AK-47, and the manticores attack with their tail spikes. Just when it seems that the lion monsters with the human faces have the advantage, you let Mustachio get out his Forty Ounce beer grenade and the manticores flee and Zulu and Mustachio fall down to the ground half dead. But alive. With yet another treasure. You did it! Again!

And you have just written “Again!” when you’re struck by the fact that “manticore” is like monte and you think about the Kroumirie Mountain Range and Dads, who says that you’re monte -men, and Moms, whose name was Bergman, and as usual you’re tempted to see a pattern, proof that nothing is random.

But then you suddenly remember the summer of 2001 when you were in Tunis to study Arabic and had just started seeing Faiza, the first since E. who really meant something. And you two live in that run-down apartment with the piss-smelling stairwell, and of course you tell the story about your parents’ first date and the symbolism of their names, Moms Bergman and Dads Khemiri. And Faiza laughs and lets you look up the letters of Khemiri in her Arabic dictionary and you look up KH and you find KH-M and you find KH-M-R.- And you realize that the consonants without their vowels mean … drunkard. And you remember that then, sitting there on the brown sofa with round cigarette burns, you think that nothing is a pattern, that everything is random, and you promise yourself to stop looking and stop missing Dads.

You contemplate whether you should really keep the chapter above.

You are still contemplating.

Now you have decided.

You push control s and paste in the next heading from Kadir’s mail. 15

MORE DETAILS OF YOUR FATHER’S SUCCESS

What else is there to tell?Dads finally get customers. But instead of artistic photographs that capture the fleeting spirit of time, Dads capture the cairn terrier Matilde in the middle of a jump. Instead of documenting the landing in Normandy like Robert Capa, Dads document a conductor’s bulldog in a humorous high hat. Instead of summarizing impressions from his new homeland like Robert Frank, Dads summarize impressions from the Scandinavian Sealyham Terrier Society’s annual special exhibition, where the dog Torset Temptress wins both Best Bitch and Best in Show.

Dads buy economy packs of dog treats, print real business cards, and promise discounts to owners of standard schnauzers. Dads rescue the family finances and soon Moms can stop cutting their hair and Dads can afford squeaky brown leather jackets from Rocco Barocco. Soon you start buying juice for everyday use and Kellogg’s cornflakes instead of those crispier Eldorado ones. Soon you start having whole-grain bread instead of rye bread and one time you have Skagen shrimp salad at home and it’s a weekday and it’s just sitting there in the refrigerator and there’s not even a note about “for the weekend” and you think that this, just like this, must be what it’s like to live in the rich part of Söder and have vice president parents. But at the same time, Dads have gotten so busy. Dads always have to work late and never have time for anything and instead of photographer quotes, Dads start to mantra the lines from the pilot film Top Gun where the instructor says with a steely voice: This school is about combat. There are no points for second place. And Dads agree: “Remember that, my son, in life there are no points for the second. You always have to be the absolute best.”

When it gets too cold out you move your role-playing into Kadir’s old room, the storeroom in the very back of the studio. You sit on the soiled mattress and make a game board from old boxes and you always close the door carefully so that your friends won’t hear how Dads answer the telephone with his enthusiastic almost-Swedish voice. Hello-this-is-Krister-you-have-the-animal-I-have-the-camera …

Because for some reason it’s hard to hear Dads, who have given up his beautiful Khemirish where all the languages were blended with all the others until no outsider could understand. In order to instead start stumbling over consonants, abusing prepositions, and taming his tongue to approach the melody of Swedish. In the studio it works, because here Dads soon have a routine of fawning his voice and presenting himself as Krister and shooting the wind, petting cocker spaniels, and angling the reflector so that the pets’ eyes have the exact right Disney shine.

But outside the studio it’s another world. There it only takes one single mini-mistake for Dads to be met with the obnoxious smile, the smile that smells like dill chips, uncooked meatballs, and egg farts, the smile that has hidden fangs and pats his head condescendingly and whispers clever idiot and trytofitinbutyoucan’tfoolme. The smile that laughs deep down in the belly but can’t be seen on the outside, refuses to understand Dads’ questions, and, at the same moment Dads clear their throats to try again, turns to you in order for you to act as interpreter. Explain now what Dads’ tongues can’t. But Dads don’t give up, Dads learn that it’s called Magnum’s “annual” instead of “annuary,” “deposit slips” instead of “deposition papers,” “olive oil” instead of “oil olive,” “macaroni” instead of “potties.”