Everything I Don't Remember (20 page)

*

On the third day, Nihad called and said that they’d had some problems with the electricity in the house, now and then it would sort of turn off and on. They had tried
changing all the fuses, but nothing helped. I said I would come over, and that afternoon I was sitting on the commuter train again. The garden looked like it usually did, the same plastic toys, the
same piles of rotting apples, and that was good, I had been careful to tell them that they couldn’t change too many things that were visible from the outside. The inside, on the other hand,
was very lively. About ten kids were playing with a Frisbee in the part of the yard that didn’t face the street. Two men were smoking on the terrace, they said hi to me and one asked if I was
Rojda’s lawyer.

“No,” I said. “Who’s Rojda?”

“Never mind.”

I walked into the house. The spider webs and urine smell were gone, it smelled like fresh bread, an old lady about Samuel’s grandma’s age was sitting in the living room and watching
a children’s show with two toddlers. Zainab was in the kitchen, cooking, she explained that Maysa and her family lived on the bottom floor and that the new arrivals without children took
sleeping bags up and slept in the attic.

“But there’s only women living here, right?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Women and children.”

“Who are those people out there?”

“They’re leaving soon.”

Zainab explained that she only cooked for her own family. At first they’d tried making common meals but she ended up buying all the food and after a while she got sick of it.

“It’s nice that you came,” she said. “But the electricity seems to be working now—we found another fuse box in the basement and there haven’t been any
problems since we fixed the wires in there.”

I stood there in the kitchen. I wanted someone to say thanks, point out how great it was of us to organize all of this. But people were wrapped up in their own lives, the lady in the TV room
waved goodbye as I left, and Nihad wasn’t home, but I assumed her son was the one playing Frisbee, he had her dark curls and beautiful dimples and the same kind of sparkling brown eyes that
made it hard to look away.

*

That first evening we hung around the neighborhood, which was totally deserted, hardly a person in sight, even though it was five in the afternoon.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Well, they’re definitely not at work,” Panther said. “There’s, like, no one in Berlin who has a job.”

“So what do people do?”

“In my building there are two Danish designers, an unemployed Portuguese architect, a schizophrenic war veteran, and a Swedish author. He’s half Tunisian, by the way,” she
added.

“Who is?”

“The author.”

This was the first and only time I ever heard Panther mention you. Samuel seemed uninterested. We walked toward a water tower, we passed a restaurant that was closed, a few abandoned ping-pong
tables, an empty bar on a corner. Still zero people.

“It’s like Östermalm-empty here,” I said.

“Like a ghost town,” said Samuel.

“Mmhmm. But it’s this part of the city, too, they’ve gentrified the shit out of it. It’s kind of a shame. But this is sick.”

Panther ran over to the playground, she took aim and jumped onto a little mound and suddenly she was bouncing on a trampoline, her black hair became a waterfall in the wind, she bounced higher
and higher.

“Whooo! Cool, huh?”

And I twisted toward Samuel to say “What is she doing?” But I didn’t have time to finish my sentence because Samuel was already on his way to the next mound, suddenly both of
them were jumping up and down in the playground and shouting “wheee” like two lunatics and I stood there for a few seconds and didn’t know what to do. Then I looked around and
thought, Fuck it—Experience Bank, and ran toward the third trampoline mound.

*

Samuel was gone for five days, and every night I imagined he had met someone new. The first night it was a South African circus artist who had recently gone in a new direction
and become a union-representative nurse. They talked for hours about the societal consequences of living with memory loss in a post-Apartheid system. Then they went home and fucked. The second
night it was an Indonesian political scientist, they talked for hours about how they were so much more than their boring careers. Then they went home and fucked. The third night it was a
half-Jordanian performance artist. They talked for hours about the importance of frequently adding to your Experience Bank. Then they went home and fucked. Deep down I knew that Samuel lacked the
willpower to resist. An experience like that was impossible to say no to, he turned to Vandad and Panther who locked their lips with invisible keys, and to avoid being eaten up by his guilty
conscience he bombarded me with texts in which he wrote everything except that he missed me.

*

The next day we rented orange bikes and went to the Stasi Museum. We looked at cases full of historical agent technology, there were scent-capturing mushroom chairs, hidden
cameras, eyeglass-walkie-talkies. Then we biked to Neukölln and ate tortillas and drank beer. Panther wanted to introduce us to her friends and I nodded and thought that it might be fun to
meet some Germans. Unfortunately, none of them were German. There was a Thai-American author, his Irish artist girlfriend, a red-haired British language teacher, a Polish girl who was dating a
Hungarian director of short films. And later, after midnight, you showed up on a rickety black women’s bike. I watched you and Panther nod at one another. Samuel and I put out our right
hands. We said hi, but as soon as you realized we were from Sweden all the interest drained from your face. You quickly moved on, and Samuel said:

“Do you know that idiot?”

“No,” said Panther. “We’re just neighbors. I don’t hang out with other Swedes much here.”

Panther introduced us to more and more people and all her friends said they lived in Berlin and loved the city “despite the Germans,” but no one could speak German, aside from a few
polite phrases. Time and again, Panther said that she didn’t miss anything in Stockholm, and every time she did it was like Samuel’s neck stiffened.

*

On the last night, I pictured Samuel realizing it was Panther he loved. She was the one he was meant to be with. His memory of me disappeared, dissolving like a dream.
She
was the one he’d been in love with since he was a teenager and now that they were both in the same foreign city, they had rediscovered one another. They went into Panther’s
bedroom and didn’t come out until it was time for him to go home. Samuel gave his phone to Vandad and assigned him the task of walking around the streets of Berlin and sending three texts per
day. Then they swore never to tell anyone what had happened. Then they returned home.

*

The day after that we biked to a big field with lots of sculptures that were supposed to make people remember the Holocaust. We walked around among the gray rectangles and lost
each other and found each other and as we biked home, Panther told us she had met someone. She was in love (!). With a guy (!!!). From Baltimore. An artist who was putting up shadow boxes in a
warehouse in Potsdam. Samuel’s jaw clenched. A basketball game was underway in a park. Samuel braked his bike.

“What do you say? Should we hop in?”

“I’ll sit this one out,” I said, but the question had been for Panther.

“Aw, let’s go home and have lunch instead,” said Panther.

“Feeling like a wuss, huh? Afraid I’ll beat you? Don’t want to rip open old loser wounds?”

Panther and Samuel joined opposite teams as I watched the bikes. They started out playing for fun but it quickly turned into something else. Samuel and Panther were guarding each other and their
newfound teammates seemed surprised that they were playing so seriously. When no one was covering Panther, Samuel shouted “LOOK OUT!” and pretended to stick his hand in her stomach so
she missed the shot. The next time Panther took aim for a three-pointer, Samuel leaped into the air with a roar to block her. Too late, he realized it had been a feint and he landed hard on the
asphalt, his cheek scraped up and his pinky finger almost broken. Panther’s team creamed Samuel’s.

Afterwards they sat on their bikes, panting.

“Well played,” I said.

No one responded. Samuel rubbed the mark on his cheek. Then he took out his phone and mumbled:

“How hard is it to answer a goddamn text?”

*

I hardly slept at all. I realized I didn’t trust Samuel. I wondered if I ever would.

*

The last night, we ate at a Vietnamese restaurant near a square in Kreuzberg. We took the U-Bahn there because it was raining. We walked through the yellow tunnels, we passed
the junkies and the homeless people and the dogs. The place was tiny and Samuel looked at the menu before we sat down.

“Really nice prices.”

Panther and I exchanged glances. I wondered if she too had noticed that something was off. Was she also thinking about how Samuel hadn’t bought a single round this whole trip? Had she
noticed that Samuel had changed? The person who was usually ready to do anything for a new experience had started acting like an accountant. The guy who used to say that money is there to be spent
was sitting there reading the menu right to left before he ordered.

*

Samuel came straight to my place from the airport. When I got home from work I found him sleeping in my stairwell. He had sunk down on the floor with one hand resting up on his
suitcase handle like a patient with an IV. He had a red mark on one cheek, it looked like the trace of a violent kiss. Or maybe a bite mark. He woke up, stretched, and said:

“I can’t find my keys.”

*

During dessert, Panther asked:

“So what’s going on in Stockholm?”

Both Samuel and I were a bit taken aback, because up to then we had only talked about Panther’s art, her gallery-owner contacts, her friends. She had told us where to find the best
döner and which neighborhoods were best for drugs and what tricks you could use to avoid being turned away by the tattooed bouncer at Berghain. But she’d hardly shown any curiosity about
us, not even once. I said I was still working at the moving company, but it was harder and harder to get enough hours, so I was looking for another job, among other things I had contacted a
computer company with an idea for a science-fiction game. Samuel checked his phone. Panther stuck a toothpick in her mouth.

“What about you, Samuel?” Panther asked. “What are you up to, besides being in love?”

“I don’t know,” Samuel said, spinning his phone like a roulette wheel. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Isn’t she texting back? Maybe she lost her phone,” Panther said.

“Maybe she met someone else,” I joked.

“I don’t know if I’m in love,” Samuel said. “I feel more . . . sick. Nauseous. Like, a little dizzy.”

“But you love her?” Panther said.

“Yeah, I guess I do,” Samuel said, shaking his head.

We sat there in silence, the waitress brought the check, Panther reached for it.

“No, I’ll get it,” I said.

And I did it in slow motion so Samuel would have time to grab my arm and say, “No, you’ve paid for far too much, allow me!” But he didn’t, he just sat there staring
straight ahead. I paid and when the waitress came back with the change he got a text. As fast as if he were drawing a pistol in a duel, he picked up his phone to check the number. He shook his
head.

“Mom.”

*

We went into my apartment. He put down his suitcase in my hall. He found his keys in an inner pocket. He placed his toothbrush in my medicine cabinet. I thought he tasted and
acted and looked just like normal. Except for the mark on his cheek. There was nothing about his mouth or his tongue to suggest he had kissed anyone else. But he seemed a little tense. And when he
told me about their nights out it felt like he was hiding something.

“I mean the clubs in Berlin are total madness. One night we were at a party in an abandoned bathhouse, can you believe that? You went in through the changing room and the pool itself was
empty and then you climbed down through a long passageway and there, in the middle of like a big cave, was a gigantic dance floor and there was condensation running down the walls and there were
sound systems in the halls and the party didn’t start until six in the morning and it stopped at ten the next night and it was so crazy, it was so awesome, shit, we should go there, we should
try living there together, you and me, it would be so great to just up and leave, wouldn’t it?”

I didn’t respond.

*

After dinner we dropped by a Northern Soul party where Panther was supposed to meet her Baltimore guy. The people there had a different style than the rest of the city. Here
they were rocking pressed suits and lots of make-up, everyone seemed to be dreaming of being young in the sixties, their shoes were nicely polished and several of them had brought a white powder
they poured onto the dance floor so their soles would slide better. We sat around a table, the DJ was on the stage, he was dressed like everyone else, a too-small jacket and a minimal mustache and
even his headphones seemed to be from a different age, they were big and round and he only played vinyl and he handled his records like jewels, every time he took one off the turntable he blew on
it carefully before he placed it in his oddly modern DJ bag. We drank and waited and tried to find our way back to the mood we’d had at the New Year’s party in Bagarmossen. But
something was missing, something was different, none of us seemed to know what it was. Samuel checked his phone for the hundredth time in fifteen minutes. Panther glanced toward the entrance. I was
lost in my own thoughts.

“It feels kind of perfect to be going home tomorrow,” Samuel said. “There’s a lot to do on the house.”

“The house?” said Panther.

“Yeah, sorry, maybe I didn’t mention it. Laide and I turned Grandma’s place into a safe house for women.”

I took a sip and nodded to make it look like I knew exactly what he was talking about.