Free Everything I Don't Remember by Jonas Hassen Khemiri Page B

narrow-minded politicians and redneck police force is the norm; who forget
that Stockholm is an anomaly, a tiny goddamn backwater populated by peasants, as far north as you can get, a city that completely lacks purpose and is so afraid of its own shadow that people
don’t talk to each other even when the Metro stands still in a tunnel for fifteen minutes. It’s the only city in the world where newborns learn how to avoid eye contact. You see it in
children who grew up somewhere else, they come here and think that people will fawn over them on the Metro, they flutter their eyelashes, they offer pacifiers to dogs, but their fellow passengers
quickly let them know the score, not a single glance up from the phone, not a single smile from anyone in return, like mummies, like pillars of salt they go back and forth, to work, home from work,
each fellow human is treated like a beggar, and if there’s only one thing I must remember it is that this is not everything. There is a way out, there is always a way out, I thought as the
train approached the city.
    *
    My theory is that Samuel had waited so long that in the end he was ready for it to happen, no matter where, no matter who with. And when it happened, it happened later that same
year, when the summer was over. The trees had started to turn red and the sidewalks were getting slippery. The place was no Italian vegetable market, no flashy conference dining room. The place was
the parking lot outside the Migration Board’s offices in Hallonbergen.
    *
    Then I arrived and everything shifted. My sister was standing there at Cityterminalen. Around her: Ylva, Santiago, Shahin, Tamara, and several friends from interpreter school,
plus a few people from my syndicalist years whose names I don’t want to use. They had made a laughably ugly banner that said WELCOME HOME LAIDE! (with glitter around my name) and they had put
on party hats. Shahin had brought her saxophone, but since she had forgotten the mouthpiece it just hung around her neck, all shiny. They caught sight of me and everyone rushed up and screamed and
clapped their hands and there were group hugs and pictures and I was so overwhelmed that I hardly knew what was going on, you can tell in the pictures from that day, I don’t even look happy,
my mouth is just open like a fish and I’m looking around in confusion, as if I have just found out that the world is one big set and my friends are actors. Only afterwards, once we were in
the car on the way home, did it start to sink in that my sister had organized all of this for me. She was sitting in front of me in the passenger seat and checking her phone as if nothing much had
happened, as if she put together this sort of surprise once a week.
    “I did thank you, right?” I asked.
    “You stood there without saying a thing for five minutes.”
    “Thanks.”
    “No problem.”
    She reached her hand back over her seat and I took it.
    *
    This is more or less the way Samuel described it to me when he came home from work and ran into the kitchen with his shoes still on:
    “Oh my fucking holy shit I mean whooooaaaa I think I met her or I mean I don’t know but shit I mean shit it was so fucking I don’t know oh my God I mean shit I phew hold on a
second I’ll tell you hold on I just have to calm down a little but holy shit I mean holy shit!!!”
    I looked at him, waiting for him to utter a complete sentence. Or at least a third of a sentence.
    *
    We arrived home at my old apartment, five years had gone by, first a French student from Tours who was doing a Ph.D. in biology had rented it, then a Senegalese couple, and most
recently a Hungarian family with two children. Five years and so many people ought to have changed the smell of the apartment. But as I stood there in the hall, breathing and looking at myself in
the hall mirror, it was like no time had passed.
    *
    After about half an hour the story of what had happened came out. Samuel had gone to work. Same as