Authors: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
“ ‘Your father … dear Moussa. Is your separation not tragic?’
“ ‘Please, Rachid, tragicness exists to be overcome. This is my life philosophy. But are you acquainted with any information about his present existence?’ Rachid’s face looked ashamed.
“ ‘I promised your father, you know … to assist you if anything happened … He had given me the pay of advance … But I didn’t have any chance myself to … Well … Of course I couldn’t take care of you alone … After all the rumors that Haifa had spread. And the economy he left behind was barely enough for … My hope is for your broad and eternal understanding?’
“ ‘Of course, of course … My understanding is wide as a soccer field,’ I noted impatiently. ‘But my father … Moussa … do you know if he survived his journey abroad?’
“Rachid observed the angles of both of his shoulders and then gave a close-leaned whisper.
“ ‘I believe that your father is alive … but under a modified identity in a secret place … ’
“My nervousness throbbed when I asked:
“ ‘And do you know which name is his name now?’
“ ‘According to the rumors, he names himself … What was it now … Ron Arm Stuntech. I think.’
“With the beating of my heart and my tongue sticky, I wrote the name on a scrap. Rachid leaned back and looked like someone who had settled the payment of a long debt. Before we …”
“Speaking of debt and payment …,” I interrupted your father.
“
SHUT UP!
” your father cried. “Do not interrupt me now! Before we separated our paths, I asked Rachid if he knew why my father had delegated me a chestnut that time we saw each other so many years ago. Rachid observed me with a sorrowful face.
“ ‘When you saw each other?’
“ ‘Yes, my father gave me a chestnut when he afflicted us in my childhood …’
“ ‘But … Your father never afflicted you. You have never spent time at any restaurant. He did not have any lifeguards. You must
be remembering wrong. You must have fantasized that … Just like Haifa, you have perhaps been infected with that infection which has always characterized your family—the one where the forms of fantasy are given life in excess and in dangerous cases collide with reality.’
“ ‘But … then how do you explain this chestnut?’ I roared in desperation, and tore the chestnut from my pocket.
“ ‘Hmm … perhaps you found it yourself in your yard?’
“These words lurched my entire existence. Suddenly all the details of my life seemed to be suspiciously slipping and uncertain. What else could I have fantasized? What else can be untrue that is reality in my thoughts? In a last effort to find assurance I quieted my questions, localized Rachid’s body near mine, and eternalized us with a sequence of photos. After this we said our good-byes. Rachid wandered his steps back up toward the souk, waving a humoristic farewell with one of the turkey’s wings. Then he was gone. And I was alone with my confusion.”
“But not totally alone!” I placated.
“Actually, yes, Kadir. Totally alone.”
“But you have your family. And me!”
“Yes, but … who knows … Perhaps you are not real, either?”
We reflected each other’s pupils and then broke the silence with a tension-breaking laugh attack.
“
HA HA!
That was a humor that we can call extremely comical.”
Your father stuffed the paper scrap with his father’s alias in his wallet.
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” your father said tiredly. “But if this is Moussa’s new name I should try to localize him. Sometime. In the future. A son and a father must never separate their relationship, no matter what the magnitude of conflict.”
Abbas and I passed four days’ nostalgia in Tabarka. We afflicted restaurants, summarized memories, joke-uttered our antique
pickup routines. Your father did not sexualize any touristettes. Even if frequent invitations were given. Then your father informed me that he still lacked the capacity to repay me my economy. Then he said:
“But feel no doubt, Kadir. Success is waiting ‘around the corner,’ as one expresses in Swedish.”
Then we said our farewells.
You can conclude metaphorically:
“Without his family, Abbas felt holey in symbolic form. A little like the cheese that the Swiss eat on mountaintops in the company of yodely watch sellers and professional chocolate designers. Kadir noted a parallel emotion from never recovering his finances.”
As a farewell gift, your father delegated me a sagging envelope with photographs. In it were numberous photos of your steadily growing body, your cramped apartment, your mother with those gigantic seventies eyeglasses and her hippie shawl, your father’s growing record collection, your Swedish relatives’ country cottage. As well as a portrait where your father shared his company with his colleagues at the metro company
SL
. He was standing straight-backedly positioned in a coldly shining coffee room in his metro getup with a blue suit and pointed hat with the silver logo. The last photo made me a bit sorrowful. Your father’s mouth showed the sort of smile that most resembles a grimace.
Now it is up to you. Do you feel prepared? My hope is for your emphatically positive
YES!
So that you do not stray yourself in sidetracks, I propose to you to structure your memories as follows: Begin with your father’s homecoming and the information about your mother’s pregnancy. Then possibly something about “the dynamic duo.” What was this phenomenon, exactly? Your father mentioned it, but I never understood its exact meaning. Terminate the triangular section with the description of your brothers’ delivery and your grandfather’s tragic death.
So now you’re sitting there
, just back from a reading in Södertälje, with a paper-wrapped bouquet and a book about rune stones by a local author. You read Kadir’s commentary and feel an aching sinking feeling in your stomach, the kind of sinking that says that this will never work, that you’re not ready, that instead you should concentrate on working more on one of the other projects. The ones where you devote time to thinking up plots, where the characters are just inventions, and a moderate amount of peripety can be injected in just the right place. And you have just finished writing the sentence when you realize that “inject” is Kadir’s word and not yours, that it’s his language that has started to influence you, and then your doubt gets even stronger. Because how good an idea is actually a collaboratively written book?
11
You read his latest mail again and decide to give it yet another try. You take a deep breath and make use of his instructions …
Dads’ homecomings
. There are so many. But this one must be when they came home in the spring of 1984. Moms have taken time off from their jobs as stewardesses even though of course they’re really “airborne people’s representatives of the overexploited service sector.” On the same day that Dads are supposed to
come home you borrow Grandpa’s car and have a winter picnic by the lake Trekanten. You slide around on the ice together and play Bambi and drink hot chocolate way too fast from the thermos and so you get that special rough tongue that in Khemirish is called “picnic tongue.” Even though it’s wintery cold, Moms have green sunglasses, which are as big and round as boat windows, and over their hair are the thin shawls, which you can borrow and put over your eyes so the smell is Moms’ and your nose is coldly rough and the world is light blue with gold stripes. You can still see Moms’ contours where they’re standing farther away against the light, the world’s most beautiful Moms, who are taller than regular Dads and who have purses as big as hockey bags and always have to have their seats in the car as far back as they go to have room for their legs.
After refueling and candy buying you go back to nervously waiting Grandpa; you sit in front and are on police lookout while Bob Marley clunks himself out of the speakers and careless drivers roar-brake and taxis honk and bus drivers blink their headlights. Because Moms persist in driving at speeds that make the Toyota’s glove box open and sometimes Moms happen to signal left turns by turning on the windshield driers instead of the blinkers, and all the road signs are mostly like recommendations, and sometimes you drive one way for several blocks and sometimes you back out onto major roads and Moms just smile at shaking fists and honk back with a little melody. Then Moms continue to tell you about the order of power in the world. Everything in life is politics and nothing is a coincidence and that is why we will never fill up at Shell because they support apartheid in South Africa. To choose a party is
politics and to choose gas is politics and to choose friends is politics and … Candy? you ask. Yes, even choosing candy is politics. Here, give me the bag and I’ll show you … You reluctantly hand over the bag of candy. If all this is the Western world’s money, then this raspberry boat is the poor world’s money. Do you understand? Injustice is everywhere; everything is power structures and nothing that we see in this corrupt society is real. Everything is imperialism’s damned attempts to keep us quiet. TV is opium for the people and your father is a bit of a dreamer, but you can never let yourself be fooled. And you quickly take back the bag of candy and say: But what about
Dallath
? Because you watch that series together every Saturday. And Moms explain that
Dallas
is like a terrible warning about how the system of capitalism distorts people’s brains. And besides, that Bobby is a real hunk, Moms add, and laugh their bubbly laughs while you skid up onto the E4 highway.
Soon the police car rumbles up in the rearview mirror and it shines its sirens and Moms swear behind smiling lips because they have just played the zigzag game between the centerline dashes or considered doing a U-turn on the highway. And as usual you do the routine where you play sick and whimper while Moms slow down, roll down the window, and: Excuse me, Officer, my son doesn’t feel well and of course you may see my driver’s license. Moms look through their entire gigantic handbag a second time and it rustles and jingles, but too bad. I must have forgotten my billfold at home. Again. And then the smile that melts all policemen in all parts of the world, and the policeman clears his throat and looks toward his colleague in the car and
says: All right, but try to keep on the correct side of the centerline in the future.
And Moms promise and wish him a good afternoon and dump the handbag back over onto you. And you remember how weird it seems that the police always fall for the trick because even before Moms have rolled up the window they shout
SUCKER!
and gas away from the scene of the crime in second gear. Also, Moms’ handbags are a little like Noah’s ark because there are at least two copies of everything in there: billfolds of soft Indian leather, Band-Aid packages, loose change and old SL tickets, house keys and fliers from demonstrations, nail scissors and nail clippers, packets of tissues and rolled-up extra socks, old Läkerol lozenges, and a few bags of green tea in a plastic bag. But the only thing that isn’t there is a driver’s license, because it was confiscated by that class-traitor policeman two summers ago.
Then you’re back at Grandma and Grandpa’s and Grandpa is swearing because the antenna is bent and the choke has been pulled out all day and Moms are swearing about Grandpa having the energy to care about something so worldly and then you take the commuter train home to the apartment to wait for Dads.
It’s Sunday evening and Moms are freshly showered and have gone from robe to clothes instead of to the nightgown with Chinese embroidery. The apartment is newly cleaned, with newly smoothed newspapers as a shoe mat and newly lit fancy incense on the special dish in the kitchen and a filled fruit basket, and Moms with evening perfume. At eight o’clock it’s
Cosby
and you ask Moms: Is this capitalist propaganda too? And Moms smile and say: Not too much. So you keep watching while the clock ticks in the kitchen. You’re waiting for
Dads, who have been home in Tunisia to bury Grandpa. But Dads are late and while Moms start to call Arlanda to check the delays, you crawl down on the floor and growl the noise of superstrong jet engines. It’s the old apartment from below; the scratched coffee-table legs and the parquet squares on the floor which are the perfect pattern for car races in angular figure eights with garage spots in the secret underground tunnels of the rag rug. It’s one gummy Ferrari against another and they are different colors and they’re sitting ready at the starting line and belching their motors. It’s the red Ferrari against the black one, and of course the black one is theirs, the bad guys’, U.S.A.–sponsored and capitalistic and full of Shell gas. And the red one is yours, the good guys’, righteously communistic,
halal
from the headlights to the trunk, full of Arabian gas and Arabian horsepower. Fatima’s hand is hanging from the rearview mirror and a keffiyeh is flapping from the radio antenna. Tires that vroom, mirrored visors that are flipped down, leather gloves grip the wheel and you’re sitting ready in the red Ferrari and looking at the girl who’s waving her long-nailed manicure hands from the cage where she’s sitting locked up over the crocodile pool. Now everything is up to you, either you win the race or we colonize new territory and she becomes crocodile food, laughs the bad guys’ boss, who is called Ray Gun, where he’s sitting high up on a throne with a spiked hand that’s petting a black red-eyed cat and she’s waving and crying and blowing you kisses and you are just about to imitate Dads’ thumbs-up sign when the starting flag is waved and it starts, the audience crowd roars, gas pedals floored, and the bad guy takes the lead! Max speed through the first curve, the wheels roar on,
Marlboro ads quaver in gas fumes, the draft blows off audience toupees, curves are taken on two wheels and you ease up, the speedometer that laps itself, spinning around and around like a propeller, the red car nears the black car and on the third lap you’re neck and neck and you’re leading, no he is, no you, no him, and the audience screams itself hoarse and choruses your name and then you push the extra-turbo-booster and swish by him and you see him in the rearview mirror, the size of an ant, waving angrily, and it’s you alone on the last lap and there’s the finish and there’s the referee and there’s the checkered flag waving, and do you make it? Of course you do, first to the finish and then victory lap and wave to the crowd’s cheers, let the girl out of the cage, foam her in champagne, be introduced to her equally beautiful twin sister, and then into the car with them to glide on to new adventures.
Uppuppupp, yell Moms when you try to put the Ferraris back into the candy bowl. Not a chance, you eat those up now. You look down at the worn-out Ferraris, dusty after the race around the parquet floor, with crooked grills and scratched hoods and strands of hair around the wheels, not at all as good as the other candy, which lies shiny and ready to go in the candy bowl. You’re just about to protest and explain that your cars are used and in the next round you have to be able to upgrade when you hear the elevator noise and Moms give a start. A shadow passes the balcony walkway. But no Dads.
Moms wring their hands and look anxiously at the clock. Moms get up from the chair, make a round of the kitchen, and come back with an apple, which no one eats. Dads have disappeared.
Then, just as you’re trying to smuggle the Ferraris to the flowerpot, you hear the creak of the elevator doors and the walkway door clunks and Moms meet your gaze the second before Dads stomp in through the double doors with snow crisps on their boots and their berets at an angle.
HELLO, YOU DAMN FOOLS
! Dads’ faces are browner than usual; their teeth are shining white and their mustaches are back and they prickle you during the hug while Moms stand blurry in the background. Dads are home! Dads smell like newly tested airport perfumes and tax-free drinks, a little like wet wipes and a lot like travel sweat. As usual, Dads have gotten stuck at customs but as usual everything made it through, the new leather ottoman and the refill of olive oil and the new brik ingredients. And a candy refill for your Mickey Mouse Pez, of course. Dads say hi from Grandma and say that the funeral “went bravissimo.” Then Dads look down on you where you’re Velcroing yourself to their legs. With slightly anxious eyes Dads ask: And how is my Mowgli? You answer, “Jutht fine,” and Dads tousle your home-trimmed bowl cut and say that you have done well, having responsibility for the family all by yourself.
Then Moms clear their throats and say something that is not “welcome home” at all. And their French voices are unusually strong and sharp and there’s a word that you don’t really recognize.
Enceinte
? Twins? Dads freeze their movements in the hall dimness, stop in the middle of their duffel coat removal, and let their mouths make the sound like when you create suction with the hose to clean Grandpa’s aquarium. Dads stand with their berets on, snow on their duffel shoulders, and the new newspaper has gravelly shoe prints.
What are Moms saying? You don’t care. Because Dads are home and you press your face harder against the duffel pocket and smell the prickly wool smell and you think that no matter what Moms say it doesn’t matter because Dads are home and that’s all that means anything because Dads are the world’s biggest heroes and Dads are everything and Dads will never be like other dads.
12
And you remember the coming weeks that spring, when kitchen doors are often closed and you hear French voices mostly as vibrations and it’s Moms’ light ones and Dads’ deep ones and then silence and then Moms’ light ones and then silence again. It’s dinners when Dads have no appetite and sit in their workrooms instead of eating. Dads who lift a stool and move the copy machine, rolling out drawings of possible studio locations and writing in numbers on the calculator. Dads who wrinkle their foreheads and hmm their voices. While Moms remain sitting at the dinner table with their hands on their stomachs and don’t answer when you ask if you may leave the table. You can tell something is going on, but you don’t know what. Soon you run back and forth between the lab and the kitchen with your Mickey Mouse Pez sticking up out of your pocket. Dethewt? Want dethewt? Dads mumble numbers and Moms sigh and no one answers. You and Mickey go into the living room instead and Mickey asks: Dessert? And you answer: Yes, please, with pronunciation
exactly as good as regular people’s, bend Mickey’s head back, and feed out a raspberry-flavored rectangle candy. Mickey smiles and says: By the way, fuck all the day care idiots, just fuck their teasing and laughing because you have a special way of talking! Fuck everyone who laughed when you said that your mom was going to start her education to be a wedge-turd nurse soon. And most of all, fuck that speech therapist! And Mickey shouts his swearwords with the exact same girl voice as on the Disney hour and it sounds so funny that you laugh out loud and you push his head back again and feed out a new rectangle candy. Because this is the same spring that you visit the speech therapist for the first time, Dads, Moms, and you. The speech therapist sits there behind her tall desk and folds her hands like a priest and says with concern that your delayed speech development is presumably due to a linguistically confused home environment and Moms and Dads hold each other’s hands and look quickly at each other; no one says anything. Except for your newly filled Mickey Mouse Pez, who hops angrily out of your jeans pocket, pogos himself onto the shiny speech therapist desk, bends himself backward, and starts to pepper the speech therapist with rectangle candies. The sound is machine-gunny and the projectiles bounce and the speech therapist tries to take cover behind her briefcase but it’s useless because pieces of candy block her eyes and explode her ears and when she’s lying there dead in the corner with running blood from her nose Mickey Mouse laughs scornfully and you say: Well done, Mickey! And you do repeated give-me-fives until you look up and discover three pairs of concerned grown-up eyes looking at you. And the speech therapist
asks if Moms and Dads have noticed anything else … special? You and Mickey don’t care because it’s you against the world, you against the day care idiots, you against speech therapists and dark rooms and closet phantoms and the lady who whispered nigger lover to Moms that day at Skansen when Dads were photographing his first Swedish National Day. Besides, Dads have explained that the speech therapist was a typical Swede. A real racist.
13