Golnaz Hashemzadeh

She Is Not Me

Translated from the Swedish by Katarina Tucker

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Golnaz Hashemzadeh, 2012

English translation copyright © Katarina Tucker, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Silveri/Plainpicture/Hollandse Hoogte

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Hon är inte jag in Sweden by Wahlström & Widstrand, 2012

Published by agreement with Ahlander Agency

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-032-5

nur 302

The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Phone: +31 (0)76 523 3533. Email: info@worldeditions.org.

#

ARRIVAL

The Girl knew they had done something big. She had felt it in Mama’s shaking hand as the soldier studied their passports and cast coal-black glances at her face, comparing it to the photo.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Setareh,’ Mama had answered.

She had wanted to protest, but Mama’s nails were digging deeply into the palm of her hand. Pomegranate-red drops pushed out through her skin and burnt her fingers, tearing her eyes away from the soldier’s darkness.

‘Can’t she speak for herself?’

‘She’s tired; it’s early.’

She knew they had done something big. She had felt it in the pit of her stomach as the plane was taking off, and Mama was sometimes shaking with laughter, sometimes shaking with tears, or was it something else entirely? But most of all she had seen it in Grandpa’s eyes when he released his tight grasp on her and handed her to Mama. Grandpa, the biggest and strongest person she knew. Who hated tears.

She had felt the unknown, ungraspable plan so strongly that she had felt called upon to do her part when the plane touched down and they were met by the police again. Police officers who said no. Police officers who opened the door to a small room. She had pulled away, screamed. She had tried running out to Papa. Wasn’t that his voice she heard on the other side of the thin wall? They couldn’t be stopped now, not when they were so close, had come so far. Where were they going?

She had been caught and gave up. She lay down on a cold stone bench, and with her eyes half-closed she followed the police officer’s writing hand, as it filled in one sheet after another. Mama’s voice churned on, a mixture of words she understood and something else. The Girl could see in the police officer’s hesitating hand that she didn’t understand all of Mama’s words either, but there were stacks of paper with questions that needed to be answered.

She didn’t understand the police officer, and she didn’t understand Mama. She didn’t understand how the police officer could be a woman, a woman with such thin, such fair-coloured hair.

‘Tell them your name,’ Mama said now, and stroked her back. She hesitated. What did they want to hear?

‘Setareh,’ she heard herself answer. She was trying to support the plan, but it must have been the wrong answer because the policewoman stopped writing. Mama froze.

‘No, your real name!’ Mama’s nails dug into her skin again.

The policewoman stood up, and shouted out into the corridor. She closed her eyes completely, hoping to make herself invisible until the plan had been carried out. It was probably too big for her.

The small room was smaller than all of the flats they had lived in over there. She knew because she had measured by taking long strides from one end to another. But this room felt bigger, it felt endless. She curled up in the window. The white ground stretched as far as the eye could see, and then those tall trees took over. The window made all the difference. They had never had windows before. Back there they had hung large sheets along the walls; it was the first thing they did every time they moved in someplace new. Dark sheets that sometimes allowed blinking police lights to slip through, making Mama’s hand search for hers, and Papa’s hand reach for the pack of cigarettes. Back there, the world had ended at the wall. Here, it was at the wall, at the window, that the world began. She stretched out on the windowsill, rested her ear against her upper arm. There was no movement outside. She was used to outside meaning that she had to hold Mama’s hand tightly and struggle against the flood of people who wanted to pull her along with them. She was used to seeing the women’s black chadors dragging in the dust from the street. She was used to everyone looking like Mama. And to the fear that one day she would look up and discover that she was holding the wrong hand.

She was used to new smells at every street corner: saffron on newly steamed rice, raw lamb, man-sweat, and heated oil. She was used to Mama’s eyes opening wide every time they left the house. Used to focusing her own gaze up, toward Mama’s face. She was watching over Mama’s eyes.

She was used to the crushing sound of car tyres against uneven asphalt, the street seller’s songs, the sirens that screamed the second before a sea of people dressed in black streamed toward open cellar doors in search of protection. She was used to the loud beats of Mama’s heart drowning out the ear-splitting sound of the sirens. The beats that never grew silent, not even when they were lying next to each other at night.

Here, outside was something else. It was quiet outside. She had never heard such a silence. It was so quiet it was deafening. If she lay in the window long enough someone would race by. Someone in bright, colourful clothes. Someone who held two sticks in his hands and glided over the white. Someone just as soundless as the trees. The colourful one reminded her of the white rabbit that leads the way to Wonderland, the rabbit that is in a terrible hurry. She wanted to run after the colourful figure to see if he had fallen into a hole when he changed from a ball of colour to a dot to nothing. She had tried once. She had run out into the snow in just her socks, but there was nothing there. Nothing but the silence. She had fallen to her knees and felt the tracks in the snow with her bare hands to reassure herself that something had actually passed by. There was something unnatural about the movement, the speed. This place was made for silence. She breathed in the scentless cold. Treading carefully, she tried retracing her steps back to the window.

It deserved stillness, this place.

*

The Girl chose to lie with her back to the room and to Mama and Papa, her gaze focused outside. She didn’t need to look to know that Papa was resting his head in one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. Or that Mama was standing by the simmering teapot on the stove. They were waiting. In the same place. With the same expression on their faces every day.

‘They decide if we’re allowed to stay,’ Papa had explained. She had only nodded in reply. She didn’t need to ask who they were. As long as she could remember, they had decided everything. They had taken Amo Taghi, Papa’s best friend. They had taken the red car. They had forced Mama to wear a heavy, black chador. It was time to move again, because of them. And now they would decide: between sheet-covered walls or the white endlessness. She thought that the big plan was to get away from them, to make Mama stop arching her eyebrows, to keep her eyes from becoming wide and filled with fear. To make Mama’s heart stop pounding when they were lying close together in the large bed, all three of them. Make it so that she wouldn’t have to feel the beats echoing inside of her.

*

Sometimes she felt something in the air change and Mama and Papa would go into a kind of trance. Papa’s wide Cheshire grin stretched out bright and shining, and Mama’s laughter raced like pearls between the walls. Papa slapped oddkollon against his newly shaven cheeks and pulled her in so close that the aftershave made her eyes water, and Mama drew black lines around her eyes and looked at Papa, blushing.

‘We did it, dokhtaram, Mama and Papa did it!’ Papa would shout then, while Mama stood at the stove and carefully spread esfand over the warm burner. The burnt seeds would make sure that the good luck didn’t end here. It would travel through the cosmos and make sure they made the right decisions. ‘We’re in Sweden! Do you know how many people there are back in Iran who want the same thing?’

She had no idea how many people were left in Iran, but she knew how much Mama and Papa had wanted this. How much they had whispered, how often they had made phone calls at night, how many times they had packed and later repacked.

‘Do you understand what’s different, dokhtaram?’ Papa looked at her with hope in his eyes. She wanted to point out the window. She wanted to discuss the stillness, the endlessness, dots of colour gliding over untouched snow, rabbits and holes. But she let him answer the question. The plan was his, after all.

‘Here, you’re free! You are free dokhtaram! You can do whatever you want. You have rights. There are laws and rules that say you have to be treated like a person. No one is allowed to force you to think and believe what they think and believe. No one is allowed to kill you. Do you know what that means?’

She nodded, shook her head. Looked deep into his honey eyes, so many shades lighter than hers. Papa’s honey look was so pure. She wondered if it knew what his hands seemed to know. His hands that shook and fumbled for the pack of cigarettes when his honey gaze disappeared and was replaced by something she still didn’t understand.

‘Everything we’ve been hiding from, all of the terrible things that could have happened, are gone. As soon as we get the right papers from them we’ll get a new home, a home no one can make us leave. You’ll get your own room with your own toys that will be yours forever. Then you’ll learn Swedish, and do your homework, and get the highest marks, and do you know what the best thing is? Then you can become whatever you want. You can become a doctor, an engineer, a cabinet minister, a lawyer, anything! There are emkanat here, dokhtaram.’ Opportunities.

She recognized that voice. Papa had used the same voice during his jaleseh: meetings with strangers who arrived by motorbike; they would put on blindfolds and sit in a circle on the floor and never stop talking. She wondered where all of the words came from. Wondered who had taught these strangers all the thoughts and ideas that kept the sentences alive. Circle after circle of grown-ups with covered eyes who never stopped talking. They picked their noses and scratched their groins, convinced that no one saw. That was the whole point: the words could never be connected to a face. No one ever tried to look, to cheat. No one except her. She couldn’t resist.

She recognized the voice and suspected that things hadn’t turned out the way Papa had hoped the last time he had spoken that way. She hoped that he didn’t remember, that he wouldn’t be reminded. That this time was the time the plan would work.

In these moments, Mama didn’t say much. Her red lips cast pearl laughter against the walls, but her eyes were blank between the lines of kohl. If you looked carefully, you could see that Mama sometimes let her guard down, that she tried to imitate Papa’s happiness, but sometimes she forgot why. The Girl nodded to herself. That’s the way it is. She looked at the empty air between Mama and Papa. There was no tension. They hadn’t noticed that Mama wasn’t really participating. The Girl chewed on the inside of her bottom lip and wondered how long it would take for them to notice, and if she could deceive them, mount blinders alongside their bright eyes, and absorb their sight into her own dark gaze.

She could read their every thought. In her, they only met silence.

LETTERS HOME

It’s hard to explain. If only you were here and could see for yourselves. I wish I was there with you and that things hadn’t ended up like this, but we can’t turn back time. Both of us have understood that. We talk about it a lot. What if we had done this, what if that had worked, what if we had come up with a different plan. But we understand that there were no other options. No, I’m lying when I write that. I haven’t understood. But he says that I have to, so I’m trying.

This is a strange place. I was prepared for the cold; that’s not a problem. There are many different types of clothing to wear. A ski-suit for her that’s made of plastic and feathers. Pants and jacket-in-one. Like baby clothes, only thicker. He thinks we should get some for ourselves too. It’s important not to get sick, he says. We need all our energy to understand this. He says that all the time. That we need to do our best to understand. He wrinkles his brow and rubs his chin as he did when we were writing speeches and planning travel routes. Do you think this is a maths problem? I say to him then. Do you think we can sit and philosophize and suddenly, eureka, there’s the solution? We’ll never understand because we won’t be here long enough to understand; that’s what I say to him. Then it becomes quiet, and he turns his back to me.

FREEDOM

Spring came outside the window and they were still waiting. They walked back and forth and around each other at the asylum centre. In the afternoons, the Girl would stretch out on the windowsill, dozing in the weak rays of sunlight that burnt through the windowpane. Mama sat at the kitchen table, writing letter after letter to her sisters. She looked up sometimes, but not to look at anything. Just to find the words. Papa wasn’t there. Papa left the tiny room as often as he could, and was gone until bedtime. He sat in the common room and talked to the people who worked at the asylum centre.

‘Do you think you’ll get to stay if the Swedes like you?’ Mama had said with her arms crossed, the first time he wound the scarf around his face five times in order to take the ten steps over to the main building. She gave him that look that made him crumble and look away.

‘They are uneducated, untrained prison guards. Your new friends have no say in this.’

‘I’d rather be there than sit here with your sour expression. I’m learning something about the future,’ he had replied. He had slammed the door and stayed away for several hours.

The Girl had sneaked after him once when Mama wasn’t looking, and seen him sitting among the thin-haired blonde women drinking coffee from a small porcelain cup with blue flowers on the sides. The cup drowned in his large hands, that is how small it was. The women couldn’t take their eyes off him. They were looking at Papa the same way Mama did when she drew black lines around her eyes and enhanced the redness of her lips. And Papa talked, went on and on. What did he have to say to them, and why did they giggle when it was impossible for them to understand him?

‘He’s sitting alone,’ she assured Mama later.

‘What else? Who would want to talk to him?’

*

Papa was sitting talking with the fair-haired women and Mama was sitting whispering over her stationery, her pen making scratching noises as she wrote, when a sharp ring cut through the silence.

‘Why don’t you get it?’ Mama didn’t look up from the words she was writing; she was staring down as though someone was looking back at her through the thin sheet of paper.

The Girl got up from her spot at the window and ran to the door. No one had come to their Swedish door before. She associated the sound of a doorbell so strongly with grown men playing blind man’s buff that she hadn’t expected anything else when she opened the door.

Two men in uniform. She saw right away that it was them. They were the ones who had rung the bell. Papa and Mama had carried out the big plan so they would never have them at the door again, she knew that much. And here they were standing, and looking at her, as if they weren’t the ones Mama and Papa were most afraid of, the ones they hated the most. Something warm and wet ran down her legs, but she hardly noticed. They were here. Mama was sitting there unsuspecting, writing to the aunts who in turn were convinced that something good had come out of the distance, that they were safe. Papa was probably on his way home, maybe whistling. Probably mumbling the new words he had learnt today: butter cookies, Eurovision, light beer. He was mumbling his way right into the trap! She was standing there with all the information but there was nothing she could do. They stepped in, walked past her, and she was powerless. She ran. She ran as fast as she could in her wet pants, all the way over to the woods, in among the trees, and didn’t look back.

*

It was Papa who found her. When she heard him shouting she thought she was dreaming, that she was mistaken, that they were trying to catch her. But no, it was Papa’s overexcited Cheshire-grin voice. She could never mistake that voice. She got up carefully, wrinkling her nose at the sour smell of dried urine. The white envelope in Papa’s hand was shining as white as his teeth.

‘They’ve made the decision! We get to stay! We’re staying here! Dokhtaram, did you hear that? Freedom, dokhtaram, freedom! Everything starts now, everything starts today!’

LETTERS HOME

Everything is sorted now. The residence permit came last week. It’s a strange feeling. We’ve been talking about it and yearning for it for so long. We had put our lives at the feet of this decision. And then it comes, in a white envelope, and is so ordinary. You can scrunch it up or burn it, just like any old piece of paper. He says that I’m being silly; that I know it’s the kind of letter that exists regardless of what I do with the paper. He says that I have a bad memory; that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to walk around and hide every day, with the smell of death tickling my nose. He has the audacity to say that I’ve forgotten.

But I have to admit, no matter how much we’ve planned and sacrificed for that damned residence permit, I had in some way hoped we wouldn’t receive it. If they had said no, we would be forced to go back. Then we could comfort ourselves by saying that we had tried this escape, and understood that it doesn’t work. And we would come back to handle the situation while in our own country, among our own people. He thinks I’m selfish for thinking like that. We have to think about her, he says. What will happen to her if they take us, execute us?

To be honest, and I can only say this to you, I lie awake at night thinking. Yes, my heart pounds just as loudly as it used to. I’ve tried the herbs mother sent, but they don’t help, I lie awake night after night, my heart pounding. Sometimes it feels like my girl’s heart is pounding just as loudly as mine, but maybe it’s just the echo of my own body that I hear.

In any case, I can lie and think, okay. If it were to happen, okay. It’s simply the consequence of our own actions, right? Who are we to run away? Think that we can get away with it? Who are we? With this shame something will always be lost inside me.

My girl was the one who opened when the letter came, completely unaffected. She just ran past them, two uniformed men, out into the woods to play. If only we could be as unaware and innocent as she.

NELSON’S HILL

It didn’t take long for them to pack their things, and after only a few days a yellow delivery van pulled up outside the door.

‘That’s a mail van,’ Papa explained. ‘They’re smart; no wastefulness here. The mail van will bring us to our new home!’

Our home. He said it with the same tone of voice he used when saying dokhtaram. With the same facial expression he had had when he put together the ping-pong table in the house with the large basement, the house where they hadn’t stayed for more than a few weeks. The house over there.

‘Our home,’ Mama shook her head. ‘Just like that?’

He pulled Mama close, gave her a wet kiss on the forehead.

‘Not even you can make me feel homeless today.’

She sat on Papa’s lap and listened to the story about our home while the yellow van drove between the motorway and the small cities with red houses and green mailboxes. In and out. The trip in the mail van was long. It almost felt longer than the plane trip from over there.

‘It’s a factory town. All of the porcelain in Sweden is made in Factory Town. It’s an important Swedish city. You know those delicate cups in the common room at the asylum centre? They’re from Factory Town. And the toilets! Only Swedes live in Factory Town, so you’re going to have Swedish friends, and eat Swedish food, and play Swedish games. You’re going to speak Swedish right away, then Papa’s smart girl will have to help Mama and Papa learn. You’ll learn much faster than us! Oh look, maybe this one.’

Every time the van turned off the motorway, Papa would sit up straighter. He got ready to get out in front of every house with white eaves and overhangs. He would sit quietly for a moment when the sliding doors remained closed, before continuing with his story.

‘Do you know why it’s a good thing we’re moving to Factory Town? There are other places where Iranians and people from other countries live, and if we were to move to one of those cities it would take much longer for us to learn everything about Sweden. It’s important to learn; this is our future.’

Mama shook her head and held the Girl’s hand tightly.

‘He has such high expectations. He’s going to be disappointed. You’ll have to help him then. I’ve said everything I can say.’

Papa pretended not to hear.

‘Sometimes, dokhtaram, you have a dream and then you wake up. You can become sad, especially if it was a really nice dream, like the one Mama and I had. But just because you’ve woken up doesn’t mean it’s time to stop dreaming. Then you have to close your eyes and find a new dream, start working hard for that one instead. Those are the two most important things in life: dreaming and working hard.’

He looked out at the greenish-yellow fields and weighed his thoughts on a precise scale, squinted to make sure he was reading off the correct weight.

‘The most important thing is to work hard. Dreams come and go, but if you work hard you’ll win in the end.’

Mama looked up.

‘Oh, really? What happened to the idealist? Who lived for his dream? Has he given up? Didn’t it take more than some fundamentalist illiterates with turbans and machine guns to turn him 180 degrees?’

Papa kept his gaze focused on the fields.

‘Dreams are fleeting. You don’t have control over them. Other people can destroy the dreams. People can wake you up; do you understand? But if you’re able to work hard, then you’ll always have something to fall back on. Then you can always have new dreams. It’s important to have new dreams. Otherwise you wake up and just lie there and think about what could have been. That’s when you stand still. You shouldn’t stand still. You should look forward.’

Mama clenched her hands and turned to look in the other direction. The Girl could see Mama’s jaws quivering, she knew that Mama was trying to remain silent. Mama was trying to remember why it was best just to emulate Papa, why it was best to push her own voice aside. But it didn’t work, Mama couldn’t remember.

‘That’s how a real fighter talks! A real warrior! What kind of man are you? You long for your new home in a dirty toilet city, think it’s so good because it’s Swedish. If we had decided to live in one of the places we were told about we could have been closer to our friends. We could have gotten the news quickly, continued the debate, held meetings, planned …’

‘We didn’t come here to plan the past, Baba, stop. We’re here to start a new life.’

‘You should hear yourself. You sound like a deserter. Like all those we’ve despised over the years. You make it sound like it’s over. It’s called a fight because you don’t stop fighting. I’m not thinking about giving up. What’s wrong with you, tarsoo? It’ll turn around. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not this year, but it will turn around.’

Papa didn’t answer Mama. He wasn’t listening. He pulled his daughter’s head toward his and buried his cold nose in her locks.

‘It’ll be okay, dokhtaram; it’ll be okay.’

*

When the driver finally spoke it was already dark outside the van’s windows. Mama and Papa were sleeping deeply. The Girl leaned forward toward the driver’s seat, as if she would understand if only she heard the words. He was driving up a long hill. ‘Nelson’s Hill,’ he said. She whispered, imitating his syllables. Brown blocks of flats with orange-coloured balconies stretched along both sides of the street and broke through the darkening spring night. They were identical, those buildings on Nelson’s Hill. And there were more than she could count. She expected a small red house with a white picket fence to pop up off to the side of the massive buildings. Preferably with its windows facing the woods and the endlessness. She was chewing on the inside of her bottom lip when the van stopped in front of a grey metal door. She hoped Papa hadn’t been expecting the same home she had.

They followed the driver up the stairs in silence. He unlocked the door to the flat and handed the keys to Papa, who received them with cupped hands.

‘Home,’ Papa determined proudly. The fifth Swedish expression he had learnt, after hi, thank you, excuse me, and my girl.

The postal worker looked surprised. It was hard to tell if it was because of the Swedish word or Papa’s ceremonial pride.

‘Welcome,’ he replied and then pulled his cap down over his eyes and disappeared, his heels sounding against the concrete.

‘Welcome,’ Papa repeated to himself as he hurried to place their suitcases on the soft linoleum inside the door, as if to mark off his territory before anyone closed the door.

‘Residim!’ We have arrived.

LETTERS HOME

We’ve gotten our flat now. It’s small and dark. The ceiling isn’t that far above our heads; sometimes it feels like it’s inside me.

We have nothing! We’ve spread the blankets over the floor, so it won’t echo as much. I’m so happy we could bring the blankets! I lie on them for hours, with my eyes closed, inhaling the scent of parsley and dried lime. Sometimes, when I’m lying in that sleeping-awake state, I forget everything that has happened the last ten years. I’m sixteen years old again, slumbering after lunch, hearing your breath next to me. I get angry at my girl sometimes when she makes noise and brings me back to the present, to where everything is lost. I yell at her often. I don’t like that I do it, but how can I stop?

She lies next to that red merry-go-round, just like she always did at home. It seems like it doesn’t matter to her that everything has been turned upside down, that we’re entirely alone. It is as if she might as well be lying here, or back there, as if it were the same merry-go-round. It may be the same piece of plastic, but it’s not the same merry-go-round. Every single piece has been replaced!

If she understood my pain she wouldn’t give me such a scorching look with those black, black uncomprehending eyes. Her beautiful eyes. Beautiful untainted eyes.

And him. He runs around all day. I don’t really know what he’s doing. I’m building our future, he says. He waves papers under my nose, wants signatures, wants a smile, wants joy. Where is your joy? he says. What should I say?

HI

The Girl sneaked out when no one noticed. It wasn’t that difficult. Mama was usually sleeping with her head buried in the blankets, and Papa left early and didn’t come home until evening with his arms filled with papers and books and the kind of food the blonde women at the asylum centre had talked about.

‘The future has no horns and no tail—it’s endless,’ he explained. ‘It tastes, it talks, it reads.’

Sometimes he let the future trot along outside without him, that is when he sat with his Swedish-Persian dictionary and read official correspondence, maps, tables of contents. Mama spent her waking moments bent over stationery, in anxious conversation with her sisters. Both of them were too busy to notice how busy they were. So she filled her pockets with uncooked grains of rice and slipped away.

It really was endless, the hill with the brown buildings. She carefully marked the path with the grains of rice every time she went out, memorizing the differences between the identical trees. You must work hard for the future, Papa had said, and she wasn’t planning on being second best. She had been to four playgrounds so far, and different children played at each and every one. They had light-coloured hair: light brown, light red, or simply no colour at all. They were dressed in something that looked a lot like pyjama fabric. They were snot-nosed, and they shouted at each other. Dug in the sand with their bare hands. She had followed the same route several times now, and tried to evaluate which group looked the most welcoming. They had started recognizing her; it showed. Did she dare? Papa’s words in her head: don’t get comfortable. Finally she ran over and jumped up into an empty swing.

‘Hi,’ the girl in the swing next to hers said and then stuck her tongue out and cleaned the green snot from her upper lip in a skilled movement.

‘Hi,’ she replied. Hard work wasn’t harder than this.

LETTERS HOME

He has gone crazy! Yesterday he came home with pig’s blood! Pig’s blood! He came home with pig’s blood, a knife and a frying pan, and he cooked pig’s blood on my stove! Set it in front of us. I’m not eating that, I said right away. What do you mean—should we throw out food? he replied. Food? FOOD? That’s not food. Get out your dictionary. I said. Read what it says. What IS that? That’s not food. He listened for once, opened that book he carries around wherever he goes. Stuffed a big piece in his mouth before he started reading, just to quarrel with me. Then he threw his beloved book on the floor, ran out to the bathroom and threw up. Pig’s blood! I had to laugh. Him and his future!

She’s crazy too, just like her father. She sneaks out when she thinks I’m sleeping. Stays away for hours. A mother never sleeps! I sneak after her, check on her several times. She doesn’t notice. Do you know why? Because she’s sitting among the swings TALKING to those dirty children who run around outside after dark. Which language is she speaking? What does she have to say to them? I don’t understand. The first time I wanted to run over, grab her, crawl under a blanket with her and never let her go. Hold her in my arms forever. But his words have had an effect. I don’t know if this is the future, but it is our today. My little girl is brave, braver than her mother who hides all day.

IN-BETWEEN WORLD

Every Saturday morning Mama dressed the Girl in layer upon layer of wool and thermoplastic and braided her own long hair into two stiff braids that fell down over her breasts. Mama rolled up the past week’s notes and placed the bundle of paper under her arm in a skilled and secure fashion. Then they travelled hand-in-hand, the Girl and Mama, first on the red bus from Factory Town and then on the subway’s blue line to another world: Raspberry Hills. They marched into a circle of beret-wearing men and women without make-up who were dutifully gathered in the Community Centre awaiting their arrival. Mama unrolled her papers and changed her tone of voice. Spoke in a pitch that would have cut through the traffic noise of Tehran like a hot knife through cold butter, but which in the mid-morning desolation of the suburbs mainly clung to the walls, searching for openings leading to very distant places.

She sat in the middle of the circle and watched. The circle of people and their never-ceasing words opened the tap to a rippling flood of fear that travelled from her throat down to her big toe. She never understood what it was she was so afraid of. It was as if a hazy reflection of clear, everyday situations lived inside her. As if some of these images resonated in memories she couldn’t access. Like patrolling police officers or the emergency siren that was tested on the first Monday of every month. Those types of things made the forgotten memories whisper inside of her.

After the meetings they strolled about in Raspberry Hills’ selection of Iran: bookstore, bakery, rugs and the delicatessen. Mama and the women without make-up browsed music tapes and movies from the Iran they had revolted against, the Iran that was the only homeland they wanted to be associated with. She waited at the escalators, rode them up and down in the grizzled mall of Raspberry Hills. It was a mystery to her how a place so deprived of air and light could bear such a promising and inviting name.

As soon as they came home to the archipelago-framed Factory Town, Mama put on a scratchy cassette tape and lost herself again. Mama would sit on the thick blankets for hours and write long letters to every single one of her six sisters, filling the letters with details of the everyday, repeating time and again her most vivid memories from childhood. She would ask if they remembered how they used to sit in a circle and braid each other’s hair while they debated who was the cutest boy in the world, the neighbour on the left or the neighbour on the right? She wondered what had happened to the boys—had they been sent to war? Had they come home safe and sound? She wondered what it had been for, the whole revolution, and wished she could change what had happened. In letter after letter she asked her youngest sister for forgiveness, wished that she had been the one to have taken the lashings, wished that she could slice off her unscarred feet and hand them over to her sister. Those letters were returned every time, the text crossed out with a thick, black felt-tip pen. Mama wrote the same words over and over again, hoping they would eventually slip through the censorship machine.

The Girl would lie next to her with her chin in her hand and watch Mama’s hand as it wrote. The hand with a glowing cigarette constantly positioned between its fingers. She always smiled when Mama looked up. Mama always smiled back.

They lay there in a longing togetherness, and the Girl spun a picture of Iran for herself. The fairyland where you were never alone. Where men with deep, yearning voices couldn’t live without their pure, innocent princesses. Where the air was filled with the sweetness of the flowering trees. But when darkness fell outside their still curtainless windows and Papa threw open the front door, the picture vanished into a thousand vaporized drops. There was a chill in the air every time he came in and found Mama lying there on the floor among the cassette tapes and cigarette butts. He would stand next to Mama for a long time without saying anything, before he started yelling. Always the same words.

‘You’re wasting everything! We could have lain on these blankets in Tehran and cried over everything having gone to hell. We didn’t need to come here for that. Pull yourself together.’

She always stood at attention at these moments. Alert, ready to serve everyone.

‘I’ll cry as much as I want to! You don’t care. Run around and become Swedish if it’s that easy. I’m going to lie here.’

Papa shook his head, closed the door to the bedroom and hid behind his adult education books. The Girl was stuck in between. She learnt Swedish words through Papa’s textbooks and teaching aids, and Persian melancholy from Mama’s cassette tapes.

They lived in that ice-bound silence for a long time.