The Swimmer
Translated from the Swedish
By Elizabeth Clark Wessel
For Liisa, Milla, and Lukas
‘Around us, the madness of empires continues.’
—Jane Hirshfield
July 1980
Damascus, Syria
Every time I hold you is the last time I hold you. I’ve known that since the very first time. And when you came back, and I held our child in my sleepless arms, all I could think was, this is the last time.
You look at me, eyes as pure as the promise of rain, and I know you know. That you’ve known as long as I have. My betrayal. Tonight it’s so close that we can both feel its stinking breath, the pounding, irregular rhythm of its heart.
The baby whimpers in the crib. You stand up, but I get there first and lift the child up. Hold her against my chest. Feel her breathing, feel her heart racing through the thin, light blue blanket your mother knitted. This heart is my heart, and there is no convincing way to explain abandoning your own heart. Just disguises to assume. Just varying levels of lies to tell. Both of which I, if anyone, can master.
The city is beyond hot. After two months of relentless dryness, it glows like lava. When evening finally comes, the city ceases being gray or beige, and becomes transparent, quivering like jelly. No one thinks clearly here. Everything smells like trash. Trash, exhaust, garlic, and cumin. But I only smell my child. I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, my nose pressed against the top of her almost hairless head. And the baby is still hot. Way too hot. The fever refuses to break.
You tell me this is the third day. I can hear you rummaging through drawers looking for aspirin or whatever you can find. This heat. It drives us insane. We both know I don’t have anything like that here, in my apartment, in my mirage. Why are we even here?
‘Give me the car keys,’ you say.
You wave your hand, like a vendor in the bazaar asking for money. And when I hesitate:
‘Give me your goddamn keys.’
Your voice is an octave higher, a shade more desperate.
‘No, wait… isn’t it better if I…’ I begin.
The baby is completely still against my shoulder. Breathing so weakly, it’s almost imperceptible.
‘And how the hell do you plan on getting into the embassy? Well? Surely you can see we need something to stop the fever?’
I reluctantly grab the keys in my pocket. Balancing the child against my chest, I lose hold of them, and they land with a dull clatter on the marble floor of the hallway. The heat even muffles sound, I think. Delays it, slows it down. We both bend down to pick up the keys. For a moment our fingers brush against one another, our eyes. Then you snatch the keys, stand up, and disappear into the echoing stairwell. You leave behind only the muffled sound of a slamming door.
I stand with the baby in the sliver of shade on the balcony facing the street. The memory of a breeze floats across my face. The heat makes it difficult to breathe. In the air: exhaust, cumin. What happened to the jasmine? Once this city smelled like jasmine.
The locket you gave me, before everything turned to heat, fever, and flight, burns against my chest. The one that once belonged to your grandmother, your mother. I’m thinking about leaving it here. I’m thinking of leaving it on the sideboard in the hallway, the one with inlays of mother-of-pearl and rosewood that we bought together in the bazaar when this bond had been growing for less than a week. I don’t feel like I have the right to take the locket with me. It doesn’t belong to me anymore. If it ever did.
I know everything there is to know about surviving. I know every street in this city, every café. I know every mustachioed antique-store owner with shady business contacts, every gossipy carpet dealer, the boy who sells tea out of the huge samovar he carries on his back. I’ve sipped imported whiskey with the president in smoky rooms, together with the leaders of organizations he officially repudiates. The president knows my name. One of my names. I’ve been handling the money. Making sure it ends up in hands that benefit the interests I’ve been sent here to protect. If you meet me, I speak your language better than you do.
At the same time: move me somewhere else. Drop me in the jungle, on the steppes, in the lobby of the Savoy Hotel. Give me a minute. I’ll become a lizard, a yellowed blade of grass, a pinstriped young banker with hair that’s a little too long and a motley but privileged past. I know your friends from university, vaguely, through others. They never remember me.
You don’t know it, but I am so much better than you. I change faster. Fit in better. I have hazier outlines and a harder core. I keep my bonds loose. If they tighten, I cut them. And now? I lost my concentration and let them grow beyond my control, let them harden, coagulate. Blood bonds.
The game is forever, but this round is over. I hold the child tighter against my chest and shuffle impatiently on the concrete. When images of death sweep through me, I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head. Whisper to myself. ‘No, no, no…’
The swollen face in the open sewer out by the highway to the airport. Those staring eyes. The flies in the heat. The flies.
‘No, no, no…’
Why didn’t I just let him be? I already knew everything. Why did I persuade Firas to have another meeting when the trail was already red-hot, glowing? But it was too inconsistent, too hard to believe. I had to hear it again. Look into Firas’s nervous eyes one more time to see if something was hiding there. See if a shadow passed over his face when he reluctantly repeated the details one last time. See if his nervous tics had escalated or disappeared completely. All of those signs. All those little nuances. All those things that make up the almost imperceptible line between truth and lies, life and death. I close my eyes and shake my head while anxiety and guilt wash over me. I should have known better.
And now there’s no time to waste. One of my contacts has rented a car, and it’s parked around the corner. A backpack with clothes, money, and a new passport is waiting in the trunk. The escape route is activated, tattooed across the inside of my eyelids. It’s the only solution now. To become mist and then just air. To become part of cumin, garlic, garbage, exhaust. And perhaps on a good day, jasmine.
I hold the baby up in front of me. I’m relieved to see she has your eyes. It’ll be easier that way. What kind of man leaves his own child? Even if it’s to protect her. Betrayal after betrayal. Lie after lie. For how long can relativity save a person’s soul?
The sounds from the street. Slower, more indolent in the heat. Traces of voices that barely reach me on the third floor. Cars crawling forward—dehydrated, racked—over the scalding concrete.
And then, a car gasping as its ignition refuses to bite. A key is being turned, but the sparkplugs don’t respond. Once:
Aaaaannnnnananananananan.
I move out into the sun, up to the balcony rail, shielding the child. It feels like slipping into a bath that is much too hot. The sweat runs down my cheeks, my armpits; my back and my chest are already completely soaked. I bend over the railing, my gaze finds the rusty, old green Renault. Across the street. Thoughts run through my head. How happy I was to find that particular parking spot. How I thought it would end up being parked there for weeks, months. How maybe one day you’d finally find the keys and move it. But why would you care about the car?
The reflection of the sun flashes off the driver’s-side window. But when I squint, I see you. Your beautiful, blond hair, flat and greasy from sleepless nights, water shortages. Bent forward, your face contorted with irritation, headaches, all your worry, your mind racing. I think you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and this is the last time I’ll see you.
You turn the key in the ignition once more:
Aaaaannnnnananananananan.
It’s the sign. One of the signs. One of the thousands of signs I’ve learned to recognize for my own survival. And I know it’s too late. The realization rushes through me. Fear of death, hopelessness, guilt, guilt, guilt. All in the amount of time it takes for a nerve to respond to pain.
By the time the explosion tears my eardrums to pieces, I’m already lying on the balcony floor. The explosion isn’t muffled, not muted by the heat. It’s awful, majestic. It’s a whole battle compressed into one moment. I feel thousands of small, very light, very sharp particles cover me like ashes. Glass and what might be chunks of the concrete facade, bits of metal.
Afterward, it’s completely silent. I seem to be lying under a blanket of glass, a blanket of cheap concrete, rusty steel. I think I must be bleeding. I think, if I’m thinking, I must be alive. I think, my arms must be here somewhere, I can feel them under the concrete. I think, what am I holding, what am I lying on top of? I manage to roll onto my side. Concrete and glass crunch and clatter around me. I start to sit up carefully, lean on an elbow that seems to be responding to my nervous system.
The child is lying under me, my hands pressed tightly against its ears. The child blinks at me, takes a thin, feverish breath. Not even one sliver of glass has reached her.
December 8, 2013
Uppsala, Sweden
Mahmoud Shammosh wasn’t what you’d call paranoid. On the contrary. If someone were to ask, he’d describe himself as the exact opposite. Rational. Academic. And above all else: stable.
Mahmoud had never believed in the claims of alienation or the conspiracies that had been so common in the Stockholm projects of his youth. That was for teenagers, jihadists, and foil-hats. He hadn’t fought his way out of suburban concrete and hopelessness, through all that and more, making it all the way to a Ph.D. program at Uppsala University, by finding excuses. If there was anything he was sure of, it was that in nine cases out of ten the simplest explanation was the right one. Paranoia was for losers.
With a little jerk, he pulled his rusty Crescent bike free from the bike stand in front of the Carolina Rediviva library. It’d been bright blue long ago. But only freshmen had nice bikes in Uppsala. Old hands knew they’d be stolen in the first week. Mahmoud’s bike balanced on that fine line between perfect camouflage and complete inoperability.
He stomped a few times on the pedals and then let the slope down to the city do the rest. After nearly seven years in Uppsala, he still loved racing down Drottninggatan with the wind in his face. The air was cold as ice against his knuckles. He threw an unwilling glance over his shoulder. The electric lights on the hill leading up to the library glowed, lonely and melancholy, in the early December darkness. No one was following him.
The reception desk at the Faculty of Law on Gamla Torget square sparkled with Christmas decorations. Even on a Sunday, they kept the Christmas tree and Advent candles lit, but the hallway on the third floor was dark and quiet. He unlocked the door to his small, cluttered office, walked in, turned on the desk lamp, and started his computer.