Montecore (8 page)

Let me first describe my arrival: The journey passed pain-free. Pernilla’s letter invited me to cross the border to my new homeland. Pernilla’s lodging is localized in a very modern neighborhood in Stockholm’s vicinity. Her house is one in a row of eight identical boxes. They are all well formed, with modern angular lines, brown color, mirror-clad elevators, and floor buttons that glow when you push them.

The bolt of nervousness filled me when I elevated my body toward her seventh floor. I alarmed her bell and waited in silence. Nothing happened. I alarmed her bell again. Nothing happened. I alarmed her bell again and again and again and again. Then I heard pattering whispers from her neighbors. I alternated my strategy. On a scrap of paper I noted the following phrase:

“Je t’attends à Centralen …/Ton Chat Unique”
¹

I dropped the paper in the mailbox and then I returned my body to Central Station. Sitting in a multitude of hours at a café, drinking coffee with added cognac, I was piled with the questions of doubt. Perhaps I should have forewarned Pernilla of my arrival? Perhaps the ingenious idea of offering her the surprise of my presence was not an ingenious idea? Perhaps she is on vacation? Perhaps she is full of wrath about my method of silencing my correspondence? All these questions grew me in tempo with the time of hours. Lunch became afternoon became evening. The disappointment about my fiasco, the inconvenienced hmmings of the waitresses, the mountain of splintered toothpicks and consumed sugar packets. She must have forgotten me, everything is lost, what have I done? The level of the alcohol added my tragedy and my remorse grew.

Then … in the midst of the twilight of disappointment I heard a call from the entry of the café: “ABBAs!”

And there she stands in the mistiness of the backlight. Pernilla. Her long body with the firish gaze and the goddessish nose. And then she sprouts the smile. The smile that avalanches forth through the dark-as-night twilight room and shines the café’s colors to new levels and is reflected in the pastry glass and dazzles punks and interrailers and tired conductors …

She studies my gaze and she shakes her head and we meet our smiles. She reaches my table, she notes my alcoholic odor, she studies my shabby status, and expresses in a whisper:

“Couldn’t you have called first?”

And I find no response. No words are nearby to me. All that exists is she. She! I sobered myself quickly, transported the bottle to my inside pocket, and followed her to the metro.

Since this day we have lived in fantastic symbiosis in her little two-piecer where Bob Marley sits as a poster on the wall and odor of the incense is to me homey. Pernilla flies domestically so it is seldom that I am forced to pass longer times in isolation.
When she is working I associate with my notebook where I collectionize observations and poetic phrases. Like for example this: “Sweden … oh, Sweden. A land of quiet metro cars, delicious women, and possibilities of the plurality. Sweden is airy cleanness, watery celestiality, and breathtaking views from centrally located bridges. Everything in Sweden is odorless and colorless, properly squared, white and pink and soft in resemblance to the forearm skin that is Pernilla’s. Oh, Pernilla’s skin. Only one of numberous motives for why I chose to leave my best friend and newly started photographer career.”

The celebrating of Christmas was lived through by me without great difficulty. Before the festival Pernilla said:

“Just so you know—Swedes’ Christmas traditions are a very internal affair and it takes many years before one reaches the status of being invited as an external guest.”

Consequently I passed my Christmas holidays waiting solitarily in Pernilla’s apartment. The silence of the neighborhood was tombish. Nowhere was there the tiniest indication that this was a festival of rejoicing. I portioned my company with the television, I forced myself to understand sporadic Swedish words and mixed my
julmust
with alcoholic reinforcement. I played my newly invested Stevie Wonder record. I smoked frequent cigarettes on the snow-filled balcony. The time without Pernilla was experienced by me as bizarrely protracted. I do not understand what she has done with me. Is it really this that is called love, Kadir? To experience oneself in solitary status as so split that each breath becomes an effort?

Pernilla returned from her parents two days after the eve of Christmas and I noted the modified shine of her eyes.

“What has taken place?” I interpellated.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“No … I do not want to summarize it.”

“My dear Pernilla, let us not carry secrets between us. Now portion me your emotion.”

Pernilla sighed her lungs and vibrated her lower lip.

“It is just that … Do you know how it feels to be crestfallen by the prejudices of the people you are closest to?”

“Well, that emotion is actually not particularly known to me.”

“Then you do not know how I feel. My mother is scared to the death over our initiated relationship. Ever since I told her about you she has warned me cyclically about the aggressive temperaments of Muslims. She has presented me numberous articles about Muslim terror; she persists in calling you ‘the gold digger.’ ”

“Hmm …”

“And now she refused to invite you to our Christmas celebration.”

“But … you said that the celebrating of Christmas was familially internal …”

“I lied. My older brother’s goddamn tennis partner and his girlfriend from the U.S. were invited. The whole neighborhood gathered on Christmas Day. Neighbors, cousins, the cousins’ kids’ goddamn dogs. But not you, who share both my love and my lodging. Sometimes I really hate them.
HATE.
”

Here her tears burst and I held her shaking shoulders and hugged her warmth. I thought: “Even her crying presents its own character. Pernilla’s crying is so far from the generality of other women. Never can it be referred to resignation or weakness. Instead it is vibrations with volcanic internal hate. She dries all the tears with her hand as quick as the windshield wipers of a car. Every tear that she does not succeed in holding in seems to corrode her pride. We comforted each other’s sorrows all night and at the moment of slumber my lips whispered:

“My dearest Pernilla. I love you above everything. We will survive this, together we will show them, we will never be conquered.
NEVER!!!!
We will dazzle your damned family, we will break their
images, we will delight their forgiveness. They commit me as a political fundamentalist and you as a duped daughter. These are my whispering words; I think them now and let them be tattooed on my forehead as punishment if I fail: After my success your family will, crying, lap the sweat out of our sumptuously invested shoes. My mentality will be more Swedish than their imaginable ideal. My photographic success will be more illuminated than their goddamn Christmas trees. The assets of our economy will grow higher than their goddamn Kaknäs Tower. Let us start the countdown to the day when Khemiri creates a familyesque Swedish superclan with the influence of Bonniers and the finances of Rockefeller.”

Pernilla woke and whispered with diamondish eyelashes:

“But … We can’t forget the people’s fight.”

No one has been more lovable to me than that bizarre woman, Kadir. I solemnly auction that we are going to share our common futures for all of the future!

Our New Year celebration was sparkled with all of Pernilla’s friends in a big house in the Skarpnäck neighborhood. There were woodish parquet floors and monstrous multitudes of alcohol. Pernilla’s friends were warmly inviting to me, they smiled me kindly, requested my view on politics, and praised their repeated tributes about the book
The Prophet
by Khalil Gibran. At the countdown of the strike of twelve, Pernilla dragged me aside, she whispered me words that I can’t write you, and we shared heavenly kisses accompanied by the heavenly explosions of artificial fires.
²

In the dawning of the new year, Pernilla and I promenaded Stockholm’s hundreds of parks, lakes, and bridges. The snow softened itself down from the sky, the air smoked our mouths, and the chill was so cold that the interior hairs of one’s nose adhered themselves together when one breathed (an unusual but not uncomfortable emotion). The snow crunched our shoes, the sun was squintingly beautiful, and the water lay deeply iced. One day we observed the majority of children who threw their backs into the snow and kicked and twisted their bodies in wild spasms. Pernilla pointed the pattern of the snow and informed that they were making so-called angels. Then we mirrored each other’s eyes and without saying anything we said something—if you understand what I mean?

I am terminating here with hope for your soon response.

Abbas
³

Stockholm, April 15, 1978

Greetings, Kadir!

Thank your finely formulated letter and your particular specification of how my interest on the loan has expanded this first half year. My Swedish life has now found its everyday. Pernilla and I share our permanent company, a little like you and me in Tabarka. Together we manifest for the expanded power of women and choir our critique of nuclear power, capitalism, apartheid, and fur industry. Together we pass evenings at cinemas and wander toward the metro enjoying the smells of wakened spring: carefully sprouting leaves, the food odors of the hot dog men, my beloved’s lavender soap. Do you remember how I named Sweden as “the land of odor- and colorlessness?” This is no longer adequate. Spring in Sweden smells and lives, people are dormanting from their hibernation, they smile on the metro, and sometimes (but seldom) the neighbors return one’s greetings in the elevator. The warmth of spring modifies everything.

Parallel with Pernilla’s and my love progression I have devoted time to my photographic career. The premiere step was to localize an assistant job. I wandered my steps from studio to studio; I presented my portfolio from Tabarka and offered myself at a reduced or almost free cost. My success was not particularly abrupt. Frequent were the photographers who detailed that they unfortunately could not assist an assistant who does not cultivate the Swedish language. My arguments that the world of images does not automatically require linguistic exactness were ignored.

Luckily enough, one of Pernilla’s colleagues has introduced me to a Swedish-Finnish photographer by the name Raino. Raino is specialized in the delicate art that we call food photography. His eyelashes shine like white mammals above his reddened nose. His mustache is of yellowed walrus model and his drinking habits are unmoderate. The studio is very modern in comparison with Achraf’s primitive utensils, however. It is localized in the luxurious neighborhood of Flemingsberg, near Stockholm. I pass circa twenty hours per week in service to Raino, developing potatoes au gratin, warmly steaming Falukorv, and delicious pâtés. I am learning many special tricks. For example, do you know how one photographs the most delicate portrait of a cup of coffee? One fills the cup with soy sauce mixed with a few foaming drops of dish soap. Consequently one escapes the uglifying surface coating! Methods like these reinflate my fascination with the magic of photography. Which other expression has such a privileged relation to reality that it can grow one’s appetite for coffee at the sight of a cup of soy sauce?

When the customers of photo tasks are limited, I assist Raino with other services.
⁴

The position with Raino strengthens my routine, but the economy offered me is nonexistent. The weight of the worth lies in the chance to be able to polish my own projects. Let me take the opportunity here to repeat my thankfulness for your generously delegated
economy. Thanks to your loan my arrival in Sweden has not been honorless; I have not had to profit from Pernilla’s finances, and in addition I have invested myself a new system camera.

The multitude of motifs in this country is monstrously many to me. In every neighborhood, at every metro station, through every window it seems to me motifs lie brooding, awaiting their documentation. Sometimes it experiences me as inspiring, sometimes as stressful.
⁵

Today the spring was invited to Stockholm. The sun shone in the typical Swedish way; it dazzled one’s eyes without offering more than the superficial warmth of the skin. Pernilla was at work, Raino had liberated me early, and I wandered my solitary steps through central Stockholm. Soon I parked my body on a bench in a park that in Swedish is given the name Humlans Gård. On the opposite side of the street was localized a sunshined corner; birds chirped, and everything was maximized harmony. Then I suddenly noticed a man who was swinging his briefcase, flapping his skinny tie, stressing his clomping steps, and glancing his wrist …

“A typical office drone,” I thought. “Run farther, you poor slave, while we artists delight sunshine on parkish benches.”

Then something bizarre occurred. When he turned around the corner of the neighborhood and collided with the sunlight, he was hypnotized into stillness. He stopped his steps in slow motion, localized his body to the vicinity of the wall, stretched his neck like an odor-searching dog, closed his eyes, and then … he just stood there. Like a statue. And enjoyed with a heavenly expression, which
of course I documented with my camera. The interesting thing was that he was not solitary in his behavior.
ALL
of Stockholm was filled with compatible patterns this first spring day; in
EVERY
sunshined neighborhood, at every bus stop, on every square they stood, suddenly placed out, all the neatly dressed office Swedes with the same backward-tilting head, delighting mouth, and closed eyes. Hundreds of people who sought the first blessing of light like thirsting plants. Often accompanied by a noise trickling from their lips that is best described like this: Mmmm. My camera documented this bizarre behavior and my plan is to name my premier collection
Stockholm: Sunnish Corners and Wintry Bicycles
. It will probably be ready in the summer.
⁶

I have also followed the latest episodes in Tunisia’s tragic fate from a distance. Did you participate in the general strike also? My eyes have read the letters of the journals, but my brain refuses to realize the magnitude. Fifty to two hundred dead? Thousands arrested? Do not let yourself be lost in the cul-de-sac of politics!