Montecore (17 page)

Are you impatiently anticipating your return in the story? Do not worry. Now it is time. During the coming months, two exterior happenings were acted that presented a strong influence on your father’s future: Number one was initiated when Björn Gillberg published his article that auctioned that Refaat El-Sayed’s doctoral degree was not complete.

Refaat was apparently not the doctor of chemistry he presented himself as. The consequence? The Swedish journalists attacked Refaat, punctured his reputation, and his career fell in time with Fermenta’s share prices. The Volvo relationship was broken and Refaat was fired, indicted, erased, pulverized. Your father read the newspapers’ headlines with rising dismay, side-shook his head, and mumbled:

“It can’t be true, it can’t be true, they can’t do this, they can’t.”

But they could. Do you remember this?

And as they say: A tragicness often comes in stereo. Our renovation of the studio was almost finalized when projectiles from an unknown pistol penetrated the praised prime minister Olof Palme’s chest. Sweden fell into a national sorrow and it took several days before your ragged mother got back a glimmer of joie de vivre. Not even your muddleheaded memory could have forgotten that day, right?

No name had yet been fixated on your father’s future studio. But I strongly remember the spring evening when your father’s brain was sparkled with the name idea. It went like this: Palme had been dead for a few weeks and your mother had recovered her failing strength. A visit down to your overfull cellar had presented your father with a gigantic amount of photos that he wanted to present in his new display window. Now we were sitting and resting in the fumes of the paint with aching shoulders and tired backs. I polished my nails free from color while your father paged through his large collection of photos. He bathed in negative cards and photographs;
with a magnifying glass on his eye he examined hundreds of photos. Then he said:

“Avedon is really correct in his citation. Pictures have a reality that people lack. It is through my photographs that I know people.”

I never knew what I should answer to such citations. So I kept quiet and shined my nails. Your father continued.

“The question is which studio name will tempt Swedes the most. I mean … I will never compromise about my talent. But the name of the studio must be safe and simultaneously tempting. It should feel curious but also experienced …”

The quantity of the options was many. They wandered between “Pernilla Khemiri’s Studio” (as an appeasing for your mother, who called the studio too risky), “Studio Khemiri Inc.” (professional aura), “Khemiri Art and Photography Studio” (artistic flourish), “Khemiri’s Wild Strawberry Patch” (Bergmanesque and appetizing), “Atelier Palmé” (as an homage to Palme), and “Extremely cheap family portraits!” (as a temptation for the stingy old people at the nearby nursing home).

Suddenly your father levitated to a standing position with a photograph stretched toward the sky like a sweaty Wall Street worker.

“I have it!”

The motif of the photograph was a deliciously beautiful black-haired woman, Brazilian and German in original birth, yellow skirt and blue waist with embroidered flowers … There she stood, Queen Silvia, photographed by your father on a flag-filled stage at Skansen, spring 1983. The stylish, bouclé-haired King Carl Gustaf is visible, blurry in the background. Silvia’s hand is frozen to eternity in its sideways wave, her smile politely distant, and both her eyes precisely half closed like a pupil-exempt demon’s.

“Of course!” shouted your father. “ ‘Studio Silvia!’ That’s what the studio will be called. ‘Studio Silvia, Khemiri’s Artistic Photo Studio.’ ”

That very evening your father projected his plan for how we would invite the Swedish queen to the studio’s opening ceremony. With fresh coffee, wine, colored balloons, and crackling artificial fires, the journalists and art critics would interview the successful man from Tunisia who had left SL and started his own photographic studio.

“ ‘Photographer gets grand visit’ … That’s what the headlines will spell! ‘The queen on a photo visit!’ ‘The queen’s new court photographer.’ That will show those damn idiots …” (my certainty is not convinced whether your father was referring here to your mother’s family, the refusing gallery owners, his ex–SL boss, or the landlord of the store [presumably all of them]).

Equally as much as your mother loved your father, she detested his suggestions for studio names.

“You cannot be serious!” she auctioned on her premier visit to the soon-renovated studio.

“Why not?”

“Ugh … ‘Studio Silvia’? It sounds almost pornographic. Besides, Silvia gives me the willies … She looks like a vampire … Our dear Nazi queen! It’s a very bourgeois photograph, extremely antidemocratic and noncommunistic and imperialistic! Please, localize it in the trash room instead of the display window.”

But your father maintained her faux pas.

“It gives the studio extra-fine class!” he expressed proudly and pointed at the goldish frame he had invested for the Silvia photo. “Besides, it will tempt customers. Young and old. This is my certain conviction.”

Your mother observed your father and, though she wanted to, could not hold her serious front. She attracted her body toward his, bent her back, and let her soft lips nose his neck.

“I get so tired of you,” she whispered in French, but her intonation bore a warmth that spoke of a diagonal opposite. Here I remember that you and I imitated each other. Both of our cheeks
were reddened by the kisses that were shared between your parents, and we took our shelter out in the courtyard until the danger had passed.

Your mother’s protests against the studio’s name were both retarded and unmotivated. “Studio Silvia” became the name we wrote on the wooden sign that swung its squeaking sound outside the door. Underneath it said in leaning letters: “Khemiri’s Artistic Photography Studio.” Your father embellished the sign with some mountaintops at the bottom.

Before the opening, your father formulated an elegant letter on the finest stationery with your smiling mother’s assistance. It was addressed to the royal palace. Your father praised Queen Silvia’s cleverness, wisdom, and loveliness, congratulated her choice of new homeland, and invited her majestic form to be present at an official opening ceremony addressed to her honor.

Studio Silvia opened its doors in April 1986. It was a magnificent Saturday. The walls of the foyer presented the best of your father’s photographic Sweden suite. There was the series of snow-frozen day-after vomits in extreme close-up. There were dried leaf poles and piles of empty beer bottles. There were several photos of proper-suit Swedes standing on sunny street corners with the exact same serene expression. There was a black-and-white blur picture of a Volvo Amazon that had crashed a softly bent street sign at Sankt Eriksplan. There were three colored-over levels and the Silvia photo in blowup. Farthest in the corner there was even a photo with your father’s initial favorite motif: a powerfully snowed-over, brown-rusted bike with punctured tires, frosted handlebars, and icicles erected from the seat.

Our preparations had been meticulous. All the Swedish papers had been invited with personal exhibition cards, and neighbors had been informed with leaflets. Swedish houses of publication had been invited because your father wanted to inspire them to do a book about Swedes in the same format as Robert Frank’s
The Americans
. In
Current Photography
, under the heading “What’s Happening,” everyone with an interest in photos could look up the page before the last and read: “The photographer Abbas Khemiri exhibits ‘The photo that should have won the Sweden Picture’ at Studio Silvia in Stockholm.” The announcement found its position right between information about an exhibition in honor of Arvika’s seventy-fifth anniversary and the Sven Wingqvist Secondary School’s student exhibition at the Photo House in Gothenburg.

Your father greeted all the guests with wine and coffee in plastic cups. Balloons adorned fluorescent lights, pretzels filled bowls, and your whole family was present, even your grandmother, who greeted me politely, shared me a cigarette, and gave me a very kind impression. Soon the studio was piled with generous laughter and billowing cigarette smoke, flowers and shouts of “hooray,” praisings and hugs. In order to be able to court his guests, Abbas delegated me his compact camera and comically named me “the photographer’s court photographer.” I accelerated myself in order to document all the guests in attendance. In one corner, your mother’s political friends. One could recognize them by their ample lunettes, their antinuclear brooches and beige trench coats. They waved their coat belts and incited politics while they scratched their mustaches (both the men and the women). Near the entrance: the retired ladies from the nursing home who were tempted by the free coffee. They drank with birdishly quick sips, pressed their handbags against their stomachs, and exposed suspicious line-mouths. The hippie friends parked themselves on the floor, men in soft sandals with socks and women in ponchos and newly created nicknames like “Sundawn” or “Light Reflector.” In the other corner, the Aristocats installed their bodies around a table and by habit turned their backs on the rest of the guests: the old ex-boxer Nabil, Mansour with the square portfolio, and Mustafa with the little tinfoil packet whose contents your father
directed him to smoke outdoors (after getting himself a little sample).

Aziz was responsible for the music; soon the volume was levitated and the party was our fact. Just as your father had prophesized, a great quantity of alcohol was needed before the Swedes left their sphere of politeness and attacked the dance floor. But when they did so they bore a frenzy and jerkiness which can most closely be called epileptic. The hippies made circle movements with their hands and limbered their heads like pendulums. The political friends bounced their bodies first unwillingly and then frenetically until the sweat dropped from their nonimperialist beards. Even the Aristocats were attracted to finger-snapping cries of jubilation when Aziz invited your grandmother to dance. Ruth first declined repeated times, but then she suddenly said yes and everyone’s applause claps accompanied Aziz’s instructions for typical eighties dances like the pirouette, the hand clap, the caterpillar (connect-both-hands-together-and-undulate-them-like-a-wave), the mime (pretend-to-walk-into-an-invisible-wall-which-is-then-lurched-to-the-side), the hand shaker (shake-your-hands-above-your-shoulders-like-they-contain-small-dice), and the famous “Michael Jackson owl” (move-your-head-very-quickly-sideways).

Who else was there? I am ransacking my memorizations. Raino, of course, permanently positioned at the bar, toasting solitarily. And those two Chilean brothers who had been welcomed to Sweden after the coup and now projected a theater society localized on the green metro line to the south (unfortunately I remember neither their names nor the metro station’s). And that beautiful friend of your mother’s who had studied in Cairo and attempted to converse me about your father’s “ironic work with the Swedish self-portrait.” While I attempted to discuss … entirely different, considerably more erotic subjects.

In the photos I have from that Saturday, your father’s nervous form is in the majority. First in the morning: updressed in a pressed
mint green suit and patterned tie, correcting his cravat pin, and water-combing in front of the mirror in the hall. Then happily smiling with you, draped in a white shirt and overalls. Then his arm around his beautiful wife with a gold-decorated dress and coral necklace. Then distributing a hug as thanks for a bouquet. Then thumbs-up in front of the Silvia photo. Then a photo where his back is marching the hall away toward the storeroom. Then a later photo when your father is standing back in the studio, most of the guests have gone, the dance floor is deserted, some balloons are lying air-free and punctured on the floor, your father’s cheeks are red, his smell a shade modified, filled up by a certain confidence of drink and unnoticing of your mother’s furious background eyes. Then the last photo, when he tipsily waves farewell to the last guests (Aziz and Raino supporting each other like a capital A). Here your father’s smile is strapped on like a fighter pilot’s gas mask, his sweeping movements reduced to two blurry thunderclouds; his voice echoes forth the promise that everyone who wants to will get future family portraits at a reduced price. The opening was a complete success. Right? Who didn’t come?