Jonas Khemiri - Montecore - The Silence of the Tiger

And you remember summer days that are called workdays and everyone, absolutely everyone, helps with the raking and the outhouse painting and the cleaning of the creek and the sawing down of shading pines. And you remember Dads, who stand on the roof and clean the gutters, Dads with a borrowed lawn mower in the area that used to just be for compost, Dads who chop wood in the dusk until uncles come out and say that the woodpile was full a long time ago. Dads with bulked-up arms and a V-shaped upper body in overalls with paint flecks, who fix flat bike tires and repaint window frames and fell birches with cracking sounds. Dads, who bend down with the rake to fill hundreds of plastic buckets with needles and pinecones, Dads who suddenly stop and call your name because the back pain has come and you have to support Dads into the house and their face is grimacing when they slowly slowly stumble along and lie down on the sofa. And then Grandma’s voice, murmuring from the kitchen: So convenient. And you who don’t really understand what she means.

And you have just written “ … what she means” and put the period when you realize that you’re mixing up summers. Because it can’t be eighty-nine when you borrowed your cousin’s bike, right? Because you saw it a year or two ago, rusted out and tiny. And the creek was already drained in eighty-seven and Dads’ back pain must have been when little brothers were newborns because Grandma would never say that in eighty-nine. You must remember wrong. The summer of eighty-nine, what really happened then?

This is the summer when finances for once are not the family’s constant concern. It’s the first summer that Dads don’t need to work extra at either SL or a restaurant. Dads come along to the country and Grandma makes an effort to not clear her throat over Dads’ strange ways of making bread and killing mosquitoes by throwing hand towels at the ceiling and his even more suspicious way of cleaning off tartar with a razor blade. It’s the summer when Hallandsås for once doesn’t serve up weeks of rain and little brothers have gotten teeth and learned to run and can follow instructions to build Legos. It’s the summer when you take sunset walks on beaches like real families and sometimes Grandma comes along and sometimes Grandma and Dads agree that the day was nice but that the sunset was really more beautiful the day before. Dads pull little brothers in the wagon proudly like a real dad and in the evenings you can maybe afford mini golf or arcade games in front of the downtown kiosk or soft-serve from the ice cream bar or bulk candy for watching track and field on TV. And Dads are nice and polite, Dads eat their kassler and speak their Swedish and don’t even start a discussion when Moms’ aunts comment on the hundred-meter race and the camera shows the waving Kenyan (he looks dangerous) and then the waving black American (wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley) and the waving Irishman (oh, he looks nice). Dads just swallow hard and look out at the chopping block and soon the extra shed has so much wood that it will last for the next four summers.

It’s this summer that you meet Patrik, who’s a few years older and has premature pimples and legs bent like parentheses, and together you spy on uncles’ wild midsummer parties and taste schnapps when no one’s looking and discuss who is prettier, Madonna or Paula Abdul.

But pretty often you are homesick for Melinda and Imran, because sure Patrik is great and stuff, but at the same time you’re very different, because Patrik’s parents are totally Swedish and Patrik has another country place that’s near the Riviera and they have sunny balconies and waiters as servants there. You sit on the beach and Patrik tells about his luxurious school in Täby and his sister who got to go on a language course abroad and his jeans are real Levi’s and he has a bought tape of Guns N’ Roses and … what do you counter with? How can you answer? You who live in a Million Program box in the city and have secondhand jeans and not even a single video game? You who have never been the richest and never been the poorest but instead have always been the constant in-between. You just take Patrik by the forearm and lead him up from the beach to the sunset light where long-shadowed Dads are standing, still, a whole afternoon later, with paint-flecked overalls and the whole yard full of billions of raked-up leaf piles. Dads with a bare chest and a slightly bigger stomach than previous summers but with the same just-worked smell and the same eternal greeting: Hello, you damn fools! And you don’t bother with introductions, you just ask Dads to do the knuckle-cracking trick and Dads raise his hands and crack his knuckles, one after the other, and the sound echoes forth as it always does and it gets white around Patrik’s pupils and on the way back to the beach Patrik is finally quiet.

But it’s also the summer when you’re on the way home from Patrik’s and you take the beach road with your Walkman loaded with Imran’s NWA tape. It’s washed-up jellyfish in the dusk and sea-grass-covered, hard-packed sand and you are the biggest badass in the whole entire world because you’re walking in exact rhythm with Dre’s beat and you are Ice Cube in the first verse and MC Ren in the second and you’re just about to become Eazy-E when you see your shadow in front of you and notice the car that’s following your steps. And because cars are allowed to drive on the beach it takes a while before you notice that this Volvo doesn’t want to pass but would rather drive really, really close. And you stop and turn around and behind the blinding of the headlights you see the silhouette of two piggish sneers and the one is shaved and the other has long thin hair and there are more sneers in the backseat and their music is white Viking power and white revolution without mercy and you’re standing alone there in the car light on an eternally long beach and the sun is going down out by the horizon and they’re staring at you and idling the engine and revving the motor and you’re waiting each other out and you swallow and they sneer and you get ready and they roar the gas and you throw yourself to the side and they disappear laughing off toward the downtown kiosk. And it’s a red Volvo with a license plate you’ll always remember and they’ve made it twenty meters when someone on the passenger side sticks a brännboll bat out the window and you see the silhouette of the brännboll bat when you, like the world’s least-badass, run like a rabbit up to the cottage and you get rid of the tears in the woods but then they come back when you tell Dads. You expect fury and uproar and a nighttime expedition to find the racists. Moms swear in long strings about idiotic farmers while Dads get a wrinkle in his forehead. Then he says: How do you know that they were racists? Maybe they were just joking?

And you think that this is the last time that you’ll try to get Dads to understand. 18

ABBAS’ DEPARTURE FROM HIS FRIENDS

Here you’re once againa little unsure about what Kadir means. His departure from the Aristocats? Or some other departure? You remember, anyway, that the Aristocats’ visits to the studio become more and more rare, and that the only time Dads speak Arabic is on the telephone with people in Tunisia. Sometimes it’s with Amine and then Dads speak so loudly that the windows rattle, and sometimes it’s with Cherifa and then Dads promise to come down soon with the whole family. But most often it’s Kadir. Kadir, who’s started to call more and more often at stranger and stranger times. Sometimes early in the morning, three times in a row, and sometimes in the middle of the night and sometimes on the customer line, again and again until Dads, sighing, unplug the phone. With Kadir, Dads’ voices are quieted to a hissing. They talk about money and finances and chamsa mie and attini flous and then Dads who suddenly slam the phone down and say to you, sighing: You must be very careful who you choose as a friend. You can’t trust anyone. Remember that. And you nod and promise. Then Dads: By the way, why do you only play with that Melinda? You should call that boy, what is his name, who you met last summer? Patrik!