The Shadow Girls (27 page)

The tram was almost empty. I sat in the very back. I like it when the cars are empty; it’s like riding in a white luxury limousine. It seems to make the trip last longer and you can imagine that you are on your way to anywhere, like Hollywood or New Zealand, which is a place I’ve dreamed of because it’s on the other side of the earth. I’ve seen it on maps in school and on a computer: Auckland, Wellington, and all the sheep. But I know I’ll never get there.

The tram line to Nydalen goes through the city centre. It’s like travelling from a country called ‘Stensgården’ to another called ‘City Centre’ and then crossing the border into Nydalen. Maybe some day we’ll have to show our passports when we get on the tram; whenever I go to the centre on Saturday night it’s the same thing. I don’t feel welcome, at the very least I don’t feel as if I belong.

Sitting on the tram I started wondering what I was doing. My grandmother was probably still sleeping. She can be sulky or happy, you never know until you get there. Somewhere close to the bridge it started to snow. I think snow is beautiful but I wish it was warm like sand. Why can’t the snow be related to sand instead of ice? But it is beautiful. Snow was falling over the river and on a boat that was leaving the city. The sun had just come up over the horizon. I had never seen it look like that before. Mostly yellow, but a little red where the rays hit the clouds and then blue behind it.

A few people with familiar faces boarded the tram. I recognised a man – I think he is Greek and has a newspaper stand in the centre – he yawned so widely you could see all the way down into his intestines. He didn’t sit down even though there were plenty of empty seats. Then some guys got on who looked like football fans. They were wearing blue and white scarves and acted confused, as though they had been in hibernation and woken up too early. I’ve never seen such grey faces, grey like the cliffs that Dad and I dive off in the summer. I got such a strong urge just then – it’s terrible – but I wanted to stand up and start telling everyone about the slum where I was born. I almost had to jump off the tram to stop myself.

People kept getting on and off, a lot of people got off at the hospital. Most of them were women who probably worked there. And then we started leaving the city again. Because of its name you would think Nydalen – New-valley – lay in a valley, but it doesn’t, it’s up on a hill. My grandmother has tried to find out how it got its name but even though she’s asked everyone she’s never found an answer. ‘The superintendent is going crazy,’ I heard Dad say once to Mum. ‘If she doesn’t stop asking silly questions they’re going to lock her up one day.’

In Nydalen there are nine high-rise apartment buildings on top
of a steep hillside. My grandmother says people have killed themselves by jumping off the cliff but she says a lot of things and even though she is my grandmother I can tell you she tells a lot of lies. Maybe that’s why Dad has such a hard time with her. She lies to me as well. She’ll call out of the blue and say there were four masked men in her apartment – she lives alone except when her cousin who lives up in the north is visiting – and that they have taken everything she owns. But when Mum goes over to see, it turns out there’s nothing missing, only some little thing my grandmother can’t find, and then when Mum helps her find it there’s no longer any talk of the four masked men.

My grandmother tells lies, everyone does, I do it too, not to mention Dad, but my grandmother is better than us in making them sound believable. She doesn’t know anything about this country, she just talks about how afraid she used to be of the people who were going to come and kill us in the night. But now she’s also grown afraid of the cold and she doesn’t dare go outside. She even thinks it’s cold in summer sometimes when it’s actually sweltering. We have to open her windows when she isn’t looking, otherwise she thinks it’s going to kill her. She can’t speak a word of Swedish and when she got ill one time we had to go in the ambulance with her and she was convinced that the doctors – who she thought looked too young – were going to kill her.

But my grandmother – her name is Nasrin – can also do things no one else can. She can tell how a person is really feeling just from looking at their face. I know, because I can go over to her place and be feeling down but smile and laugh and then she says ‘Why are you laughing when you are crying inside?’ You can’t fool her.

I got off the tram in Nydalen and it had started to snow even harder. The ground was almost totally white. Nana lives on the
ground floor in the building that is the furthest away from the edge of the cliff. I walked into the stairwell where someone had scrawled ‘Terror’ on the wall and again I started wondering what I was doing there. Why wasn’t I still at home or on my way to school? But I rang the doorbell and thought maybe she’ll be happy to see me. I know she likes me, she pays almost no attention to anyone else when she comes over to our house.

The door opened and at first I thought I had made a mistake. A young man had opened the door. He was about my age and he stared at me as much as I stared at him. I saw at once that he was Swedish, not because he was blond, which he wasn’t, but because he had that look in his eyes that only those people born in this country have when they look at people who are not from here. Oh God, I thought, but I kept looking at him and he kept looking at me.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Who are you?’ I replied.

‘My name is Torsten and I’m Nasrin’s assistant.’

‘Nana doesn’t have an assistant. You’re a burglar.’

He started to protest but I was panicking at the thought that something had happened to Nana. I had never heard that she had any help at home and I was sure I would have since Dad loves to talk about Nana even though he can’t stand her. But Nana was sat in a chair watching TV, even though she couldn’t understand a single thing the people were saying. She lit up when she saw me.

‘I dreamed about you last night,’ she said. ‘There was a red bird pecking at the pillow next to my ear. The sound forced its way all through my dream and that’s how I knew you would come. Every time a bird visits me in my dreams I know you are on your way. When I dream of wriggling fish washed up on the shore it is your father who is coming.’

‘I didn’t know you had help, Nana.’

Nana looked momentarily confused, as if she too had no idea what the stranger with the duster was doing in her apartment. Then she waved me closer and whispered that it was a secret. She and Mum had agreed to go behind Dad’s back on this since he was so stingy. Mum paid for the help, and arranged for Nana’s other children to chip in and Dad was on no account to hear of any of it.

I asked her why she hadn’t come to me for help with cleaning the apartment and combing her hair but when she said she didn’t want me to neglect my studies I felt bad for the first time that I almost never go to school. But of course I didn’t say anything about that. I took off my coat and the whole time we were talking the guy called Torsten was dusting Nana’s photographs. Nana’s apartment almost looks like a photo studio because there are so many photographs on all the walls. There are even old photographs in the bathroom that are so faded you can hardly make out the outlines of people’s faces any more.

Technically in our religion we aren’t supposed to even own photographs. I don’t know why exactly. But Nana wants all these old pictures on her walls, she says the photos ward off evil spirits and the thoughts of those who don’t wish her well – the ones who forced us to flee. This way, wherever she is in the apartment, she has loving eyes looking at her and that helps calm her down. Every time I come over Nana leans on my arm and then we walk around together looking at all the pictures. Even if I have been there two days in a row she forgets that she’s just showed me the pictures. She tells me who they are and what their names are and says they are family, even though it’s not true.

Mum is the one who told me that ever since she came to Sweden Nana has been collecting old pictures that others have thrown out.
She’s looked for them around the rubbish bins and in the basement storage area, and every single picture she’s found has gone up on the wall. She gives the faces names and makes them cousins or second cousins or even more remote family connections. She has given them dates of birth and decided if they died peacefully in their beds or in terrible accidents. She has given them occupations and let them be poets or singers or remarkable prophets who have wandered in the desert and had visions, or women who have given birth to children with diamonds in their mouths. Even though I know nothing of what she tells me is true I always go around with her and she never changes a single word of her stories. These pictures are Nana’s family and sometimes it feels as if it were all quite real.

The whole time we walked around together Torsten was cleaning in the background. I felt him looking at me when my back was turned and I blushed even though he couldn’t see my face. The picture Nana always ends with is of a man carrying a rifle. He is laughing and Nana calls him Ajeb, the chieftain who hides out somewhere in the desert and who will one day perform a miracle that will transform our lives. I once tried to press Nana on exactly what this miracle was going to be, but that made her angry and she slapped me. It is the only time she’s ever done that. She doesn’t want me to ask anything, just listen.

When we were finished with our tour of the photographs and Nana was back in her chair in front of the TV with a blanket over her legs, Torsten came and said he was done for the day and that he was going to be leaving now but that he would be back on Friday. I was disappointed and wanted to say something but I didn’t dare. Nana patted him on the cheek and then he left.

‘He’s a good boy,’ Nana said and ran a hand over her hair. ‘I never knew before that a man could be so good at combing hair.’

I saw then that Nana’s hair had been brushed so it gleamed. She has long hair that reaches all the way down her back. I couldn’t understand how Nana who is so afraid of everything in this country could let a boy like Torsten comb her hair. I wanted to ask her more about him, where he came from and how they had found him, but I didn’t because I was afraid she would get angry.

Suddenly Nana grabbed my hand and pointed to the screen. There was a programme on about a refugee camp in Africa. A little black girl – so very thin – was walking around in a desert landscape dotted with low bushes. She walked slowly and hesitantly and then she pointed to something on the ground. Suddenly crushed skulls and white pieces of bone appeared on the TV screen. The girl cried and she was speaking a language I couldn’t understand but I could follow the subtitles that said her parents had been killed here by soldiers who had been crazed by alcohol and blood lust and she had seen everything and everyone had died except her because her mother fell on top of her when she died.

We sat completely still and Nana was holding my arm so tightly it almost hurt. She forced us to watch that girl who wandered around and cried among all the dead and all at once both Nana and I started crying. Suddenly the girl turned towards the camera or the people operating the camera and it looked as if she were turning towards us, as if she had heard us crying. Then the programme ended simply by cutting to a black screen and then – without even a moment’s pause – a programme came on about cultivating tomatoes in a cold climate.

It was quite a shock to find ourselves looking at tomatoes after that girl weeping among her dead. I tried to hear if the sound of her crying reached the studio where they were talking about soil acidity but there was nothing. Nana grabbed the remote control
angrily. She pushes all the buttons – since she doesn’t know how it works – until the TV shut down. Then we drank some tea without saying anything. It was as if that little girl was in the apartment with us. I thought about her and I thought about Torsten and Nana was thinking about something so far away that she closed her eyes and forgot to touch her tea until it was cold. It was still snowing outside but not as much. Nana finally pushed her teacup away and asked me why I wasn’t in school.

‘There’s no school today.’

‘How can that be?’

‘It’s some kind of holiday – I don’t know exactly.’

‘All the children in this building left for school as normal.’

It was getting harder and harder to lie, but there was no way out of it now.

‘It’s a holiday today in Stensgården.’

Nana nodded. I don’t know why I returned to the idea of Nydalen and Stensgården being different countries, just like I had been thinking about on the bus when I was still irritated by the fact that I couldn’t sleep. But Nana accepted my answer and didn’t pressure me with any more questions. I washed the teacups and then I was at a loss as to what I should do next. I couldn’t go home because then Mum would nag at me for not being in school. I supposed I could go to school late and say I had had a stomach ache or that Nana had been ill – no one really cares if you go or not. But I didn’t want to go there today. I didn’t want to stay with Nana either. If I did she would make me play this card game that she has invented, a game I still don’t understand all the rules to and that takes several hours.

I stood up and said I was going home. Nana nodded again, got up awkwardly from her chair and stroked my cheek. When she does
that her eyes are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I get completely relaxed when she touches me, I stop thinking about the cat with its paws chopped off and I feel how the world calms down around me. When I was younger I used to imagine that I would one day see the man I was going to marry at one of these times when she was touching me. But God help me – the only thing I saw this time was Torsten’s face.

I flinched as if Nana’s hand had burned me – she couldn’t know that I had seen Torsten and not one of the beautiful men she used to talk about like one of Mum’s cousins who wasn’t simply a picture on the wall but a living person who lived somewhere in a country far away or in a refugee camp. We have relatives all over the world, in Australia, the USA, even in the Philippines. It is as if families on the run are shattered by something other than just grenades. The flight and fear tears us apart and those parts land in all kinds of places – we don’t even know where. But we always try to find them afterwards.