Jonas Khemiri - Montecore - The Silence of the Tiger

In the following time, your father’s sleep was more and more sporadic. He was plagued by hazy childhood memories. He mourned the political loss of his parents. He was grieved by the growing political turbulence in Algeria. Instead of tumbling his perspiring body in the bed, he began to take nightly walks. It was on the way out for one such walk that he met your sleepwalking form. You gesticulated wildly with half-open eyes and auctioned that you wanted two lawyers immediately. Your father transported you back to your room and waited by your delirious side until you fell asleep. Then he patted your cheek and levitated toward the stairwell.

Then it’s Octoberand two new attacks and first it’s Shahram Khosravi, who is shot in the jaw, and then it’s Dimitrios Karamalegos, who is shot in the stomach, and both are blattar and people are talking about a red light again like on a laser sight and people are starting to whisper that the Laser Man is a racist who is at large in the city and you and your friends join together and you feel how you grow in Dads’ silence, how your contours become sharper, how something is growing in you that won’t be able to be stopped.

During the same time, you go around town with Melinda and Imran and the security guards at Mega do their routine lookout and they follow your steps closely and smile when you walk toward the cashier to pay for the cassette tapes. You leave swearing and say that this is the last time we’ll go to Whoremega. Then past Åhléns and there it’s the same lookout gazes from a different security company and when you pass the CD register, constantly pursued, the alarm goes off and time stands still and everyone stares and the guards come running and you think: Shit, maybe I took something? There’s lineup for inspection and then: Shut up when you try to explain that it must be the cassette from Mega that set off the alarm. Then in a line to the special square room, stares and index fingers and someone who snickers and an old Swediot man’s serves-them-right laugh. There’s waiting and more careful inspecting and then instead of apology the girl guard who says: All right, you can go now. You’re already presenting the plan for counteraction at the outer doors near the subway where warm wind is blowing and double mirrors turn you into infinitely many.

Two days later you’re back at Åhléns. You, Melinda, Imran, who invade the department store with shouts and maximum blatte accents. You yell: Hey, bro, whazzup! to alarmed perfume fags, you mack on scared student interns, you play mini-basketball in the sports department, and try on ladies’ coats in the clothing department. You fuck up signs and mess up folds and Melinda waves to the uniform guards who swallow nervously. The undercover tries to play invisible and it works pretty well up until Imran goes up and pinches his behind and introduces himself as Don Corleone. The alert is at the highest blatte level and you stay until you get the sign and then you sail back down the escalator and the guards escort you all the way out to Sergels Torg. Everyone lets out their breath. And of course no one has seen Patrik, who’s been hanging out in skinny Levi’s 501 jeans, borrowed glasses, and his stepdad’s sailing shoes farther away in the same department. Of course no one has seen his homemade alarm-deactivating magnet, no one has seen his growing Peak Performance backpack. And it takes maybe a half hour for them to notice all the empty shelves where there had recently been Champion shirts, NBA shorts, and piles of genuine Raiders caps.

Patrik comes out through the warm-air corridor with his cheeks red and his mouth whistling and you race away toward Kungsträdgården to split up your loot.

• • •

Your father continued his nightly walks all autumn. He wandered in a standardized circle. Night after night. Mostly he interpellated himself the same repeated questions. What am I doing here? How can this country note me as immigrated after so many years of taxable lodging? And why does my idiotic son take this insultation and exalt it as ideal? The sleeplessness forced him to thoughts of the character: And why are they attacking my studio when there are so many other immigrants who don’t behave properly? Perhaps it is other immigrants who are attacking me, with jalousie or location temptation as a motive!

Then it’s Novemberand Heberson Vieira da Costa is shot in the face and the stomach and it’s the fourth blatte in one autumn and once again it’s the red laser sight and this time the news becomes internationally big and there’s a description of someone in a beige trench coat and suddenly every Swediot in the whole city has a beige trench coat and everyone leers menacingly and everyone’s shoulders stick out in that suspicious way at the armpit like with a holster.

Then the fifth blatte is shot and this is the first one who dies, the student Jimmy Ranjbar, who’s shot in the head outside the same student housing where Mansour lived when he first arrived and there’s a moment of silence and demonstrations and torchlight processions and you remember how you start to see red laser light wherever you turn, it blinks red in the corner of your eye and what started as a funny game is suddenly super serious and you feel so threatened that Imran starts to carry a butterfly knife in his inside pocket and you and Melinda each get a CO 2pistol and you never leave home without being strapped and you remember that night at McDonald’s when Melinda accidentally drops her pistol on the floor by the register and how you run away laughing and you remember how you start to blink and startle when the green walk light turns red and you remember how the city’s traffic lights take on a whole new meaning and one night when you’re walking on Norrlandsgatan a car brakes beside you and the red glare from the brake lights makes you startle and almost duck and a second later you are so ashamed it hurts.

The EXACT same emotion was felt by your father! But why didn’t you ever talk about your common fear? Why did you never meet in discussion? Your father began to have his studio door constantly locked, he sat hidden inside among his props, he canceled appointments, he found himself paralyzed like in a dream. He stopped functioning but could not explain why. Still, on certain nights he left his home and took his walks. Despite his terror of nocturnal shadows with beige trench coats and aimed red lights. Everything was better than passing more sleepless hours in solitary battle with invading thoughts. And perhaps there was some bizarre part of him which he will never be able to explain that almost longed for a confrontation. He does not remember much more of that fall.

And you remember January 1992, and it’s teenage emotion with sore forehead pimples and chafe-inducing jack-off habits. It’s the time when Dads start to get fuzzy contours, Dads are practicing ballet, Dads jump through burning rings in a leotard, Dads photograph pets and smile gratefully at the audience’s thunderous applause.

Dads refuse to choose a side.

Dads are cowardly betrayers.

Dads come, Dads go, and only Moms endure.

Because it’s only then, when Dads start to fade away, that you rediscover Moms. It’s as though Moms suddenly materialize themselves out of anonymity. Moms who have taken on the real responsibility, Moms’ invisible battles that have made everything possible. It’s Moms who hold down the fort, it’s Moms who never give up and who never betray. But now Moms are starting to get tired and sometimes you hear how she cries in the bedroom and sometimes she looks through Dads’ jacket pockets and one time she asks if you think Dads have a mistress. But it’s also Moms who still have everything under control and who only let her weakness show when Dads are in the studio or out on one of his ever longer “walks.”