Everything I Don't Remember (11 page)

“I’ll be back in a sec,” I said over my shoulder.

I didn’t listen to Samuel’s objections, I blocked out his cries of “come back!” You remember the people who hurt you, they leave traces that never go away and that was
what I wanted to teach him, this guy named Valentin.

*

When I met Zainab for the first time she took off her veil and showed me where she’d been whipped. He’d used an old-fashioned TV antenna, the scars crisscrossed her
back like veins, like stings from a jellyfish, but she said it hadn’t hurt all that much. It was worse when he degraded her other ways, like when he refused to talk to her because she came
home ten minutes late or when he pushed her face into her oatmeal in the morning. The bad part about the TV antenna was that he had waited until the kids came home to do it, it was like he wanted
them to watch, her daughters had cried, her son had run out onto the balcony and he just stood there and stared into a corner until it was over. When she found him and carried his stiff body
inside, he had round, half-moon fingernail marks in his palms. He was four, almost five.

*

When I came back, Samuel was crouching behind the dumbbell rack.

“What did he say?” Samuel asked.

“He didn’t say much.”

I went back to my routine. Samuel was quiet. Then he said:

“How did he manage to hold his breath for so long?”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

I walked over to the punching bag and slid on my gloves. Samuel followed.

“Did you say hi from me?”

“No, did you want me to?”

“I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me. But now it feels like I want him to know who was behind that treatment.”

“If he comes back I can tell him you say hi. But something tells me this is the last time he’ll show up here.”

Samuel looked at me with glistening eyes. He looked sad, but happy too, and I thought it was strange how little things could mean so much to him and big things so little.

“What’s with you?”

“Nothing, I just . . . It’s such a crazy feeling. To have someone who . . . I don’t know. Is on your side.”

“Aw, it was nothing.”

“I’ve never had that.”

“Now you do.”

A few days later, Laide answered his text. They decided on a time and place for a first date.

*

Zainab didn’t want to get divorced, she was also here on her husband’s visa, her husband had a work permit and she had to hold out until they could apply for
permanent residency. When the girl who worked at the women’s shelter asked if she wanted to report him, Zainab explained that her husband was not a monster.

“He has his reasons. He’s under a lot of pressure, his boss doesn’t pay him the salary that they settled on, he says they had a different agreement, and it’s true, my
husband didn’t know that there was a minimum payment clause, he did everything he could for us to make it here. I don’t blame him. I understand. I’m not saying it’s okay,
but at the same time. Yes. Okay. I love him. But our love is gone. I can’t leave him. I have to leave him. I have nowhere to go, but I’m convinced that Allah, the merciful and
compassionate, will find a way.”

The representative for the women’s shelter cleared her throat and explained that unfortunately, their facility was just as full as all the other shelters. They had a long waitlist.

“I would recommend that you apply for your own work permit. That’s the first step toward freedom.”

As we stood out on the street, I promised Zainab I would help her with the application. I had helped Nihad and it went well, and now I would help Zainab too. As soon as that was taken care of,
we just had to find somewhere for her and the children to live. Then it would all work out. We handed in an application. We were rejected. Even though we had written exactly the same thing as in
Nihad’s application. We went out to the Migration Board in Hallonbergen to try to find out what had happened.

*

HAHAHA, allow me to laugh my ass off! Who said that Samuel and Laide’s first date was “magical”? Who is spreading the rumor that they were
“soulmates”? They weren’t exactly breakdancing on air, no no no. Their first date was a catastrophe. I wasn’t there, of course, but I saw how Samuel looked when he came
home. He stood in the hallway looking grim.

“What the hell are you wearing?” I asked.

“Her hoodie. She came straight from the gym.”

“Straight from the gym to a date? What did I tell you? This girl is sketchy.”

Samuel sank down onto the stool, took off the hoodie, and sniffed it. He gazed ahead emptily.

“No, it wasn’t her fault, it was the circumstances. Things kept going wrong all night.”

For one thing, it was cold. Unusually cold. Almost below freezing, even though December was still far off. They had decided to meet at the intersection of Vasagatan and Kungsgatan, and he was
there on time. He thought it was a poor choice to meet there because cooking smells were pouring from the kebab stand and he didn’t want to go around stinking like falafel on their first
date. But it seemed that he didn’t have to worry, because she didn’t show up. It was five past. Ten past. He started to send a text, but just then he saw her coming from up by
Hötorget, walking fast. She waved and shouted that she had mixed up Sveavägen and Vasagatan and she had been waiting up there.

“Then she came up to me with her arms sticking out for a hug. But I had already put out my right hand. And by the time I opened my arms for a hug, she had stuck out her right hand. A
perfect start.”

*

Our application was denied, the guy at the front desk at the Migration Board didn’t even want to take our case number. He had a Spanish accent and his breath smelled like
bananas and he had the nerve to try to explain to me that “here in Sweden we happen to have an excellent system called ‘waiting your turn.’” I admit it, I was a little
annoyed, Zainab tried to calm me down, the guards escorted us out. As we stood there in the parking lot and everything seemed hopeless, I heard a discreet throat-clearing and a voice asking us what
had happened.

*

There was a bar at a hotel near Norra Bantorget that Samuel had Googled and walked by and stared into for twenty minutes before they met to double check that it looked good, not
too full, not too empty, not too flashy, not too anonymous. They started walking along Vasagatan in the direction of the bar, they tried to talk to each other but the conversation limped along. She
had a backpack full of her gym clothes and was wearing a purple hat because her hair was wet and she didn’t look the way Samuel remembered her. But he thought that if they could only find a
place to sit they would have the chance to get to know each other. When they arrived at the hotel bar, Laide said she didn’t like the “vibe” there.

“What did she mean by that?” I asked.

“No idea. Instead she suggested that we ‘walk around a little.’”

“‘Walk around a little’?”

“‘Walk around a little’!” Samuel shouted. “Do you know how cold it is out? And how hard it is to keep up a normal conversation when you have to focus on not
freezing to death at the same time?”

“Or slipping and falling?”

“Exactly. Thank you.”

*

There stood Samuel. His blue-black hair neatly styled. His nose a little crooked. His sideburns grown out. There were two red chili stains on the collar of his wrinkled shirt.
His shoes needed a polish. His eyes were kind. His cheeks were downy. He was wearing the biggest smile I’d ever seen.

*

They started walking. A few times, Samuel suggested that they take a seat in a bar or a cafe. But each time, Laide said that bar felt too flashy and that place looked like it
was for winos and that cafe reminded her of an ex and that place was closed. So they walked. They walked and walked and walked and walked.

*

A few weeks later we met up downtown. Samuel had texted me, and we took a walk in Vasastan. It was a brisk autumn evening, I had just been swimming at Eriksdal bathhouse so I
was a few minutes late. It never felt like a real date. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was so easy for us to talk to each other. Maybe because I suspected he was gay. He kept coming back
to the fact that he lived with a guy named Vandad and that they had a really great relationship and I remember that when he said that I felt a pang of jealousy, which was a little strange, since we
had known each other for about fifteen minutes.

*

They walked for an hour. Two hours. Three.

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“Everything and nothing,” said Samuel.

It got late. Their bodies were on the verge of frostbite. Samuel asked questions to avoid awkward silence and Laide answered because she loved the sound of her own voice.

*

For the first hour we mostly talked about work. He told me how he had ended up at the Migration Board, first a degree in political science and then the job on the side that had
turned into a full-time position.

“But it’s just temporary,” he said. “It’s really just temporary. I’m not cut out to work for the government.”

“So how long have you worked there?”

“Far too long.”

I told him about the differences between my job in Brussels and what I was doing in Stockholm. How much easier and, paradoxically, less draining it was to help women than to translate endless
contributions about fishing tariffs. He told me that he had chosen political science to change the world, and several of his classmates had gotten jobs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the UN.
While he lived in a sublet and worked at the Migration Board’s Embassy Division.

“But even if it doesn’t pay very well in money, it pays a lot in other ways,” he said.

“Like what?”

“That remains to be seen.”

*

As the blood in their veins approached freezing point, Samuel suggested they head home.

“And at some point during the evening you borrowed her sweatshirt?”

“Exactly. I was about to freeze to death. Then I forgot about it.”

“No sex?”

“Definitely no sex.”

“Sounds like a wasted night.”

He didn’t say anything.

“For real, it sounds like a huge catastrophe of a date,” I said, without sounding happy about it.

“Maybe not a catastrophe, but . . . Now that I think about it . . . I don’t know. We sort of have different senses of humor. But at the same time, I liked talking to her.”

*

We walked in expanding circles but in some magical way, we always came back to Norra Bantorget. The first time, we confirmed that both of us were equally bad at constellations.
I pointed at the sky and showed him the stars that made up the Big Wi-Fi Symbol. He pointed out the Little Nike Logo.

“And there’s the Curtain Cord!”

“And check out the Big Radiator!”

We laughed and sneaked looks at each other.

As we came back around to Norra Bantorget for the second time, Samuel talked about his grandma. He said she was a strong woman who had always made it on her own, but now,
lately, she had started to become addled. She forgot to take her pills, survived on raspberry gummy boats and thumbprint cookies, and had been involved in three car accidents in as many months.

“But she still drives?” I asked.

“Mmhmm. But they’re going to revoke her license soon. She’s a menace behind the wheel. Last time I visited her it took several minutes for her to remember who I was. It was
such a sick feeling. Standing there in front of someone you’ve known your whole life and they treat you like a stranger.”

The third time we approached Norra Bantorget we were talking relationships. I told him about my ex-husband and our marriage and the divorce. For some reason I felt safe telling
him those things. Maybe because Samuel asked the right questions. Maybe because it felt so easy to be with him. Undemanding and simple. Neither of us was thinking about anything other than what we
were talking about, and I had a hard time figuring out how it could feel so natural. It was like our brains had played music in a former life, they had practiced scales and tuned their neurons in
the same key and now that they were finally meeting again they could just jam away, no sheet music necessary.

*

Then a few days went by, the usual daily routine. Samuel showed no signs of having been struck by true love. He didn’t walk around with his phone in his hand, freaking out
about some text he had written. He didn’t sit there with his notebook, writing down things he wanted to tell her. He was his usual self. But now and then, details he hadn’t mentioned
about the first date slipped out. Like that she had given him a peck-slash-kiss (!). And that he had mentioned his dad (!!!). Both of those things must be considered unusual, because I had known
him for a year and a half and could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had mentioned his dad.

*

Toward the end of the night I said I had never felt like someone who could be with just one person all my life. Samuel turned to me, cleared his throat, and said:

“But, Laide.”

Pause for effect. He batted his eyelashes. In a deep voice:

“Maybe you just haven’t met the right person.”

For a second I thought he was being serious. Then we started laughing and we laughed until Samuel suggested we head home.

We walked toward the Metro. In the light from Drottninggatan I could see that his lips were purplish-blue, even though I had loaned him my hoodie. I talked about my ex-husband,
I said that if there was anything I had learned it was never to stay in a relationship that takes more energy than it gives and that people who are not energy thieves are very rare. We stopped in
the red glow from the Skandia movie theater.

“Who do you think you are?” Samuel said suddenly. “A fucking nuclear reactor? Live a little, woman.”

He looked surprised, as if the words had come from a place he didn’t have total control over.

“Sorry. That talk about energy. It reminded me of my dad. That’s the sort of thing he would say to justify the fact that he took off.”

We resumed walking toward the Metro. I turned to the side and gave him a peck on the cheek. As my lips touched him, he reacted as if I were trying to brand him. He flew sideways and looked
terrified.