In the Name of Love (17 page)

‘Yes, I can.’

‘But let’s speak Swedish. Nahrin doesn’t understand French. And I must learn to speak better Swedish anyway. Where we were in Malmö, in our quartier, we spoke only Chaldean, or sometimes Arabic. In the shops, on the street, in the cafés. It made life easy. Here, with my old brain cells, I must learn a new grammar, new verbs. Gabriel is helping me.’

He smiled and thanked Dan again, this time taking his hand. One by one the others came forward, Gabriel too, Jamala came with him, and each shook hands with Dan in an almost formal procession.

Outside the late evening sun was low though the air remained warm. The dog barked loudly. Through the kitchen window he saw Nahrin make a sign to Jamala. Jamala ran to the door. She opened it and gestured with both arms. The barking stopped. She stood watching Dan as he went. He waved to her. After a moment’s hesitation she raised her arm in return but didn’t move it. Then she went back to pull at her grandmother’s dress and point. Nahrin turned her face patiently. When she looked Dan saw the whole family gathered a moment through the frame of the window. They looked utterly foreign there. But they were a family.

He was scarcely home when Lena rang. She said she’d tried several times during the evening.

‘Were you out?’

‘Yes.’

‘Walking?’

He hesitated no more than a fraction before saying yes again.

‘How are you? You sound odd.’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘What an Anglo-Saxon answer! Don’t you people ever talk about your feelings?’

‘I’m not Anglo-Saxon.’

‘Anglophone, then. It’s all the same. Wouldn’t you like to do something dumb for a change, Mr I-Am-Fine? Like go to Paris?’

‘I thought you must have forgotten.’

‘Wednesday next week all right?’

‘Suits me.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘You don’t sound it.’

Anders Roos’s words were on his mind. But he wanted to go. Now that his routine was cracking he needed something new. A trip abroad would be just the thing. ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ he said. He meant to sound breezy but it came out like a bark. She hesitated again. ‘Me too,’ she said.

He woke early to a clouded light, milky as liquid helium behind the window glass. It brought back the memory of the first and only time Connie had slept in this house: 7 June 1984. Then, too, the morning light had been grey and soft as silk. Fog dripped from the gooseberry bushes and the juniper trees outside the kitchen window. The grass, still stiff with frost, crackled like paper beneath their feet when they went out to discover their new world.

Only forty-eight hours later the pathologist, answering Dan’s question about her arm moving back in the ambulance helicopter to touch him, said: ‘It didn’t mean anything. A muscular contraction. What we call a moribund reflex.’

‘Of course, she never knew what happened,’ the police inspector said when their inquiry was closed. ‘Pulmonary embolism. You go out like a light.’ Dan could see he was trying to make it easier. ‘For all practical purposes she was dead before her body touched the ground.’

The phrase came back to him many times in the years that followed. For all practical purposes, he’d tell himself. For all practical purposes she’s dead.

Two days before Dan was to fly to Paris with Lena Sundman, Gabriel came to see what needed to be done in the garden. Apart from an old lawnmower and a shovel that Dan had used sporadically, whatever tools had once been in the house had long since gone. Gabriel said that wasn’t a problem. He’d be back next morning with what was needed. His grandaunt would drive him over in the pick-up. He’d work here three days a week. At the end of each day his grandaunt would collect him and they’d take the tools back to the farm.

‘No extra charge,’ he grinned.

Things had changed between them since their joint effort with the calf. Did Gabriel trust him now? Because they had got cow dung on their shoes and trousers together?

‘Fine,’ Dan said.

‘I could drive the pick-up myself just as well,’ Gabriel added. ‘Probably better. But they insist.’

‘Aren’t you too young to have a licence for a truck?’

‘Who’d see me? There are no police out here.’

‘That’s hardly the point.’

‘The calf’s coming along fine.’ Again he gave his grin. ‘We did a good job, you and me. Have you ever done it before?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither.’

He said that the calf recognized him. Whenever she saw him in the field she came across and licked his hand and nuzzled her head under his arm.

‘It’s the smell,’ he said. ‘She remembers it. You too. Next time you come over you’ll see.’

When Dan heard the pick-up next morning he went out at once. The whole family was there. Gabriel unloaded the tools. It was then that Dan first realized what he had agreed to. The tools belonged to the farm and to whoever inherited it. The Selavas, still mere tenants, had no right to borrow them for outside work. Were they aware of this? He wasn’t sure but one thing was already clear. As soon as it became known on the island that they were doing it, he would be assumed to be complicit.

Gabriel said he would explain to the others what Dan had asked him to do. They made brief comments as they walked around. Meanwhile Dan went into the kitchen to prepare coffee. When the others came in Gabriel said at once that his grandaunt had a few suggestions to make. Dan, who had been firm in his demands for simplicity, listened unenthusiastically. Anything over and above the simple lawn with three mixed borders that he had described to Gabriel would be overwhelmed, he felt, by the landscape around them – on one side a vast meadow with carpets of wood anemone and cowslip rolling out to the edge of the forest each spring, on the other dense pine trees with huge boulders surrounded by all sorts of wild flowers, their colours rich now in mid-July, purple birthwort mixed with yellow primroses and asters of a startling blue.

It turned out that Nahrin wanted to plant a vegetable garden, though mostly in the spring. Gabriel didn’t know all the names in Swedish and even some of the Chaldean names seemed strange to him, but he translated her descriptions. Witch hazel for insect bites, Nahrin ticked off, coltsfoot for coughs, angelica against colds and many others Dan could not identify. Finally he gave way. What does it matter? he told himself. Gabriel will take care of it. And who knows, maybe one day some of the plants will be useful? It was a weak argument, he knew, but he was flying to Paris tomorrow and Nahrin was clearly used to getting what she wanted.

‘I’ll be gone for a few days,’ he said to Gabriel, ‘but you know what to do.’

In Paris the days were sultry, carrying a shifting load of smells. There was the rotting stone around the Odeon, the smell of dank river water on the quays, and then, magic­ally, sudden bursts of sunshine washing along the great boulevards.

They stayed in the same hotel, separate rooms. For the first three days, Monday to Wednesday, Lena was occupied until late in the evening. Her job was to help at a worldwide holiday congress for professionals, where WingClub had a stand. Thursday and Friday she was free from lunchtime on. They walked everywhere together on those afternoons, sought out small restaurants away from the tourist streets. Dan marvelled at what was happening to him. After over three years of solitude here he was, laughing happily as they strolled along beneath the trees, the air spiced and heavy. At dinner, the restaurant around them hummed with conversation.

On the weekend Lena was busy again but Dan collected her when she’d finished and together they walked back to the hotel through crowded night streets, talking endlessly about what they saw. On Monday, their last day, she had lunch with the WingClub CEO, Lennart Widström, at
Le Meurice
. He was passing through Paris and wanted to know how she’d got on. Dan met her that evening for dinner in a bistro near their hotel. She arrived late and said she didn’t want to eat. When he asked her if everything was all right she made no attempt to answer. Instead they talked about what time they should be out of the hotel next morning. Then she said she wished they didn’t have to go back. Ever.

At that moment some force rose up in her, some gathering of decision Dan could see in the set of her lips, but almost at once it was defeated. He did not know what had happened, only that something had.

‘We can stay on a while,’ he said, ‘another few days if you like.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Why?’

She shrugged.

‘Why?’ he insisted.

Again she shrugged. She turned her face away as though she might be about to cry.

‘Should we talk?’ he asked her gently.

She said no. Talk was no fucking use whatsoever.

By now he suspected what it was. She’d learnt she didn’t get this job for nothing. Widström expected a thank-you in his hotel bedroom after lunch. Whether or not he succeeded Dan had no idea, but she deserved better. The thought of her being dependent for her livelihood on a man like Widström made him angry.

‘To hell with dinner,’ he told her. ‘Let’s have a bottle of champagne.’

By the time they were finishing the champagne she said, ‘There’s no use brooding, is there?’

‘No. Not a bit.’

She took the last drink from her glass and began to laugh. ‘You always know how to do it, DeeJay, don’t you?’

‘I only wish I did.’

‘Let’s get another bottle. This time it’s on me.’

The next day they took the plane home. Parting at Arlanda airport they told each other they’d be in touch.

‘Fuck that,’ she said. ‘We sound like strangers again.’

‘Come out to Blidö. Have dinner. Lunch. A swim in the sea. Anything.’

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what do you actually do out there? Alone at night?’

‘You’ll meet someone, Lena. You’ll marry and—’

‘Jesus, some of the loneliest people I know are married. Bricked up in their own little huts. What do you
do
, DeeJay? What do you do alone out there when you know you’re going mad?’

What did he do? He worked, walked, slept, saw Sune Isaksson almost every day now, Gabriel Rabban three times a week. Gabriel cut and weeded, fertilized with cow dung that came in a barrel on the pick-up driven by Nahrin. Sometimes Josef came and stayed to have coffee with Dan. French had become their language. Nahrin said that certain herbs could be planted now. The rest not until spring.

She brought Jamala with her. Josef explained that Jamala was one of Mary’s attributes. A Chaldean custom. In addition to Mary’s name (Miriam), other names referring to her were given to girls in baptism: Kamala (Miriam’s perfection), Jamala (her beauty), Afifa (her purity), Farida (her uniqueness). There were many such words.

‘You knew when she was born that Jamala would be beautiful?’

‘Yes,’ Josef answered gravely. ‘We all knew.’

Dan suspected that informing him of such things might be part of a pitch the family were making for his support, but a genuine bond was growing between them nonetheless. Josef’s background was clearly intellectual. His knowledge of his people’s past, of the great Mesopotamian cradle of human civilization, was vibrant. Before he married Nahrin, he said, he had been a teacher in Mosul. The furrows cut deeper into his cheeks when he smiled. Dan began to notice other things about him. His ears, set close to his head, gave his face a remarkably neat appearance. His nose was aquiline and, by European tradition, vaguely aristocratic. He admitted he knew little about agriculture. The land they had held in Iraq had belonged to Nahrin’s family. Her two brothers were killed within a year when called up by Saddam Hussein to fight against Iran.

‘Nahrin and I are cousins. We’d met a few times at family events like weddings, funerals. When her parents drew up a list of possible suitors she didn’t like them and she got in touch with me. I was a widower, at that time twice her age. Which could, of course, be the reason she chose me.’

The recklessness of what he had just said surprised him. He laughed again, throwing out his hands, a gesture which invited Dan to share the joke at his expense.

‘As you may have noticed, she is a strong-willed woman. It was in the months after our marriage that we began to fall in love. A common occurrence in our culture. You don’t do that in the West.’

Dan wanted to hear more about their family life in Iraq. Josef sighed, looking out over the garden where Gabriel worked. ‘A long story,’ he said. Meaning another time.

Already Dan had pieced together a rough mosaic. After the success over Iran in early 1983 internal fighting began in the north of Iraq. The Christians were heavily outnumbered.

‘The Baathists were fighting the Kurds,’ Josef said, ‘but they both wanted our land.’

Of their four children, two of the sons had fled with their families to Syria, the third to Lebanon. Their daughter, a girl as headstrong as her mother according to Josef, had married a man with land outside a town called Alqosh. When he spoke of his son-in-law Josef’s voice was carefully neutral. Dan got the impression of a macho type, a man who trained his three young sons, Josef’s grandsons, to shoot accurately, to shoot to kill. When their farm was attacked, Josef said, they hid Jamala in the big outdoor oven. Her father had made her practise lying there silently. She would have heard the screams, of course. She didn’t come out until everything was over. Her family lay in the yard, their throats cut. Since then she could neither hear nor speak. When they got to Sweden they had taken her to the district health clinic in Malmö. The doctor found no physical damage. Two years of psychiatric therapy made no difference. They said she would have to start in a school for the deaf and dumb, learn proper sign language. In the meantime they went to France and came back with Gabriel. Since he had always spoken Swedish with his mother, they asked him to teach Jamala to read and write in Swedish instead of Chaldean. That was to be her new language, her new life. It was slow painstaking work. Gabriel pointed to the word in her Swedish children’s book and formed its counterpart in Chaldean, then in Swedish, while she watched his lips. Line by line they advanced through the text.