The Sound of Language (9 page)

Going to prison had made Aamir angrier, while Raihana grew afraid. She didn't want to fight anyone, she told Aamir. She just wanted to live a quiet life without getting into trouble. She and Aamir argued about his continued underground meetings—and now he was dead for what he had believed in. If she now wore a
hi jab
and
abaya
and behaved like a good Afghan girl as the Afghans like Khala Soofia and Wahida wanted her to, Aamir's death would become meaningless.

When she looked through the eyes of her mind into her heart, she saw hope that Aamir was still alive. She cradled the hope that suddenly he'd be here in Denmark.

In the evenings when she, Layla, and Kabir watched Hindi movies her eyes filled with tears.

“Aamir and I saw this on video at a friend's house, with the volume low so that no one would know,” she whispered once.

She never talked about Aamir, let alone discussed such a trivial part of their lives together. Layla and Kabir waited for her to say more but she didn't.

“It's a good movie,” Kabir said finally. “So, was Aamir a Raj Kapoor fan too?”

Raihana nodded. “His favorite movie was
Mera Naam joker.”
She didn't say anything after that and Layla and Kabir didn't press her.

“Peter called us and we just had to come,” Maria said, her eyes darting around the house, searching for evidence of that Afghan girl her father-in-law had hired. “This is a stupid idea, you know that don't you?

Brian, who was six, sternly said, “Don't call
Bedstefar
stupid.”

“This has nothing to do with you, go out and play with Johanna,” Maria said.

“Stop sending them away from me all the time,” Gunnar said, grabbing his grandson in a fireman's lift, which made Brian laugh out loud. “I want to spend time with my grandchildren.”

“First we have to talk,” Maria called out after Gunnar, but he was already running outside with a hysterically laughing Brian. “Lars, why don't you say something?” Maria asked her husband.

“What do you want me to say?” Lars asked, walking toward the television to catch a game of soccer, any game of soccer. Lars's way of dealing with his wife and her problems with his father was to watch soccer. It was easier when his mother was alive because she had been the perfect buffer between Maria and his father; but now, as bad as he felt for Gunnar, he couldn't help him. His
far
would just have to learn to tune Maria out.

That night after the kids were asleep, Maria started the discussion again while the three of them sat in the living room drinking coffee. The television was turned on but Maria had muted the sound when it became obvious that Gunnar was not going to listen to her unless she made him.

“You know if you really need help, I can take some vacation for maybe one or two weeks and stay here with you,” Maria suggested. “Brian and Johanna love being here.”

“Not that you're not welcome, but I'd rather just have the kids here and …” Gunnar fell silent midsentence. He didn't know if he could take care of the kids all by himself. He and Anna always had the kids over for a week in the summer, for long weekends in May, during the potato break in the fall, and any other time that Maria and Lars needed babysitters.

Brian and Johanna came with them and the bees to the west coast where Gunnar and Anna left colonies every year to make heather honey. Anna would pack a picnic basket and after lunch Gunnar would drive the children to the vast sandy beaches.

Gunnar loved playing with the kids and reading them stories but he didn't bathe them or brush their teeth or change their diapers or take them to the bathroom or put them to sleep. Anna did that. Now with Anna gone … could he manage the kids on his own? He knew he couldn't. He was barely taking care of himself. And that realization filled him with self-revulsion. He couldn't take care of his grandchildren without her; could anything be more pathetic?

“Yes, leave Brian and Johanna with me,” he said. He would take care of his grandchildren; he would take care of his grandchildren without Anna.

Maria ignored Gunnar and looked at Lars sternly, nudging him.
“Far
, Maria is worried and …,” Lars began, but his heart wasn't in it. He really was not interested in discussing some Afghan woman and what she was doing in his father's house. His father was a grown man and Lars, unlike Maria, didn't believe in interfering in his life.

“Your friend … what's his name, Jonas, he's married to a foreigner, you don't have a problem with that,” Gunnar said.

“She's Norwegian, Gunnar,” Maria cried out.

“Still a foreigner,” Gunnar said. “And I'm not married to this girl. She just comes for a few hours, cleans the garage, helps with the bees. She wired frames for me. And last week she helped while I checked on the bees.”

“How old is she?” Maria asked, her arms folded across her chest, her tone that of schoolteacher to belligerent student.

“I don't know,” Gunnar said and then added, “about twenty-two or twenty-three, I really don't know and I don't care.”

“You know what people think, don't you?” Maria said.

Gunnar looked at her blankly.

“The rumor is that something is going on between you two,” Maria said with satisfaction.

“Maria,” Lars protested. “Nothing is going on between
Far
and that Afghan girl and no one in their right mind would think that. It's pure nonsense.”

Gunnar agreed; the notion that he and Raihana were having a relationship was pure nonsense. But Skive
was
a small city where everyone knew everyone and everyone's business. It had been endearing to Anna, though Gunnar could have done without people finding out the exact day on which they ran out of beer, bought new furniture, installed their satellite, mowed their lawn …

“Look, Maria, this is not such a big deal, so don't make it one. It is nothing. She barely speaks Danish and can't understand what I say half the time. There is no chance of a relationship,” Gunnar said.

“Gunnar…,” Maria began and then fell silent when Lars started to talk about the upcoming wedding of Troels, one of Gunnar's nephews.

And as they talked about Troels and his wedding in Esbjerg, the coastal city in southern Jylland, Gunnar wondered how people could even imagine that he, an old dried-up man, could have anything remotely sexual to do with a girl as young as Raihana. It was disgusting.

EIGHT
ENTRY FROM ANNA'S DIARY
A Year of Keeping Bees

10 JUNE 1980

Today I saw some bees kick out another bee that was trying to enter their hive. I was quite impressed. If a bee doesn't smell like the queen bee, guard bees will not let the bee into the hive. They do this because robber bees are everywhere.

Robber bees rob. If you are trying to feed a new or weak colony that has other strong colonies nearby, there is a good chance the weak colony will get killed by robber bees that come to loot and pillage if there are no strong guard bees to stop them.

”
S
mager godt?”
Raihana asked nervously.

Gunnar dipped the
naan
in the spicy lamb curry again and chewed slowly. “It's excellent,” he said with a smile.

Raihana smiled too. She had been nervous as she packed her lunch with the leftover curry and
naan
from the night before. She did it in secret so that Layla would not know. Layla left at six in the morning for the supermarket on Tuesdays. It was the only day she worked the morning shift and Raihana had chosen that day to bring food for Gunnar.

The previous week Raihana had brought the leftover lamb curry with pita bread for lunch to the Danish man's house on a whim. In a rare moment of conversation not about bees, the Danish man had said that he could smell garlic in the kitchen and asked her what she'd had for lunch. Raihana told him it was a lamb dish and he replied that it smelled very interesting. Raihana then decided to bring some Afghan food for him, so that he could taste the interesting smell.

Usually Raihana made herself a white bread sandwich as she could not eat the popular Danish rye bread,
rugbrød.
Layla bought chicken and roast beef cold cuts from the supermarket and they made sandwiches for their
madpakke
, lunch pack. Sometimes they made pita sandwiches with leftover lamb or chicken curry, but only if they didn't have bread and cold cuts in the fridge. The pita sandwiches were messy and Layla thought they should eat like Danes because that would help them integrate into the Danish society faster.

They went through ten of the colonies on the morning that Raihana packed lunch for herself and Gunnar. They added new frames and new boxes for colonies to grow. They cleaned up the dead bees from the base of the colonies. And they checked all the colonies for new larvae and diseases. All the colonies were doing well, except one where the bees were not producing much brood.

When they decided to break for lunch, Raihana asked the Danish man if he would like to eat some Afghan food. He seemed surprised, but he agreed. Raihana was surprised herself that she'd had the courage to ask. Layla had told her that Danes weren't interested in the Afghan culture, their food, or their lives. Danes just wanted the foreigners to learn Danish, find jobs, and stop taking money from their government. But the Danish man had taught her so much and Raihana wanted to give something back.

“We have drink with honey,” she said and opened her Thermos. “It is called
shumlay.”

“Shumlay,”
Gunnar said, rolling the word around his mouth.

Shumlay
was a traditional drink Pashtuns made. Raihana hadn't drunk it in a long time. But it seemed like the perfect drink for the Danish man because it was made with honey.

Raihana mixed a glass for him with the yogurt mixture she got from home, some ice cubes, and the liquid acacia honey.

“Try,” she said, excited.

He didn't seem so sure. He sniffed and then looked uncomfortable. “What's in it?” he asked.

“Green chiles, coriander, cumin, and …,” Raihana said nervously.

He looked even more nervous than she.

“And honey,” Raihana added hopefully.

He sniffed the
shumlay
again and took a tentative sip. He nodded appreciatively and then drank some more.

“Excellent,” he said and poured a second glass.

“We will make it with our honey after the first harvest,” Gunnar said.

In the four months since she started Danish classes, Raihana's Danish had gotten better. She comprehended more and more, and the language didn't seem as distant now.

Layla said she was envious of how quickly Raihana was picking up Danish. Raihana wasn't sure what there was to envy. She had passed her module 2 exam just the week before. The exam hadn't been hard, but she had spent all her evenings poring through grammar books, checking and rechecking words with her Danish-to-Dari dictionary. She hadn't told the Danish man about the exam. But she told him after she passed. He congratulated her but Raihana could see that he didn't understand the achievement, not really.

Christina was full of praise and so was Sylvia Hoffmann. They were both convinced that it was Raihana's unorthodox
praktik
that had taught her Danish so quickly. For Raihana, passing the exam meant she was more comfortable with the language.

Still, she wasn't comfortable speaking in Danish beyond the confines of the language school and the
praktik.
In the supermarket she still stuttered, stammered, and sometimes ended up gesticulating to explain.

As her fear of Danish subsided, so did her fear of bees. Getting stung had made her less afraid instead of more. It had hurt but not too much and not for that long.

She continued to wear a protective suit as she and Gunnar worked with the bees. But now there was a new fear, the anxiety of being watched. Every time she and the Danish man worked in the backyard Raihana could feel the eyes of the neighborhood on them. Cars slowed down on the street when she sat in the garage and people peered into the Danish man's garden to catch a glimpse of her.

Some of the neighbors came to visit the Danish man while she was there. She usually stayed in the garage then, away from their curiosity. But sometimes she got caught and her heart all but leaped out of her chest. She felt she was on display, as if she were doing something wrong. A part of her wondered if the other Afghans were right, if it was somehow wrong for her to be here with a strange man in his house. But she was having fun; for the first time in a very long time she was excited about something and despite the doubts she found herself willing to take the risk, to come to the Danish man and his bees.

“Gunnar, how are you doing?” one of the neighbors, a portly woman who wore unflattering black shorts and a red tank top, called out while Raihana and Gunnar worked in the backyard one day.

It was unusually hot for late April. For Raihana, the sun and summer held another promise, the promise of honey. The Danish man had said that soon they would harvest and Raihana could hardly wait. She loved to read about harvesting in the black leather notebook, of which she understood more and more now.

“Good, good, Ulla,” he said, looking up at her, but Raihana could see he was irritated.

“So, we should reserve our jars of honey now,” Ulla said.

“Sure, sure, always honey for you,” the Danish man said casually. He looked uncomfortable when she crossed her yard into his.

She stood by the table they used to place supplies, both her hands behind her back as if she were doing an inspection.

Raihana didn't like her. She looked mean. The skin on her face wobbled while she talked and she stared at Raihana even when she spoke to the Danish man. Raihana hated the perusal of her face and clothes. She hated that this woman could just openly watch Raihana, accusations written on her face.

“So, do you know everything about bees now?” Ulla asked.

Raihana took a deep breath, not wanting to panic. What if she couldn't answer? Could this woman file a report at the Integration Centre saying that Raihana had not learned any Danish or anything about bees? Would they throw her out of the country and send her back to Afghanistan because she couldn't answer this woman?

Her mind raced with images of being told by Sylvia Hoffmann that she wouldn't be allowed to attend class anymore, of being told that she had to leave Denmark and …

“She knows,” Gunnar said.

The woman kept waiting for Raihana to speak but Raihana's throat was closed up and the Danish words refused to come out.

“Jeg ved nok,”
she finally managed to say. “I know enough,” she repeated and added, “enough to help.”

“Ah,” the woman said, clearly not impressed, and then started talking to Gunnar again. She spoke fast and even if she hadn't Raihana would have had trouble understanding. She couldn't hear past the anxiety pulsing inside her.

Propelled by a need to prove her knowledge of beekeeping, Raihana did something she had never done by herself. She walked over to one of the boxes and started checking the frames. She wanted to ask the Danish man if the colony needed more room, but she didn't want to stop and ask and maybe even sound foolish to the woman. So she looked through the frames again.

Three were full of brood, which was good. It meant the colony was growing. She walked up purposefully to the table where the woman and the Danish man were standing to get three empty frames.

She added the frames to the box and then looked for the queen bee as he had taught her to do. She placed the queen bee excluder on top of the frames, closed the box, and secured the lid with a metal clip.

Then she stepped away from the colony to admire her handiwork. Just for a moment she was so caught up in what she was doing she had forgotten about the woman and the Danish man. They were both watching her. The woman was looking at her and the Danish man was smiling.

He didn't say that she had done a good job until the woman left. He understood, Raihana thought, he understood that she needed that woman to think that she worked like this with the bees all the time, that she knew what she was doing.

Christina had never liked Maria. She hadn't understood how Anna could stand her, this woman Lars had made the mistake of marrying. She reeked of gossip and malicious curiosity.

Lars had been such a wonderful boy and then
she
had sunk her claws in and he would never been the same again. He seemed more distant than ever and spent all his time in front of the television or with the kids.

But Anna had seemed to love Maria. She told Christina that she loved Maria because Lars loved her and that was enough for Anna. She then confessed that she had never felt that Julie was
her
daughter—Julie had always been more Gunnar's than hers—but Lars, he had been hers. And even if he'd married the fattest, ugliest, and rudest woman in the world, Anna would love Lars's wife. To push Lars's wife away was the same as pushing him away and that she wouldn't do.

Christina knew why Maria had shown up at Christina and Ole's house on Sunday afternoon with a frail-looking Shell gas station flowerpot. Christina and Maria sat in the garden by the greenhouse while Ole worked on their vast herb garden.

How Maria felt about immigrants was not a secret. During various parties she and Maria had carried on heated discussions about foreigners, especially refugees, in Denmark. Maria thought they should all be thrown out, while Christina believed that the homogeneous Danish society needed foreigners and their knowledge, skills, and perspective to grow as a culture. The time for holding on to one people, one nation was long past. The world was becoming smaller and in a country the size of Denmark where interaction with other countries was vital to sustain the economy, there simply was no choice.

But Maria was one of those people who had voted against Denmark even joining the EU and was adamant about not joining the euro countries either. She thought that if Denmark started using the euro it would allow stronger countries like France and Germany to dictate Denmark's economic policy. And Danes would lose their excellent social welfare system.

Maria didn't like Christina or her job, so it wasn't surprising to Christina that Maria definitely did not like the fact that Christina had convinced Gunnar to hire an Afghan refugee.

The conversation started out innocuously enough, with both of them drinking coffee and snacking on homemade butter cookies. But soon enough Maria told Christina that she didn't approve of the Afghan girl working in Gunnar's house.

“We don't know anything about their kind of people,” Maria said sweetly enough as Christina lit a cigarette. “I mean, I won't feel comfortable leaving my children there if she's there.”

“She's there for only a few hours three days a week,” Christina said blowing out tiny smoke rings. “She's helping Gunnar and he's helping her. She's learning Danish very quickly.”

“But why should Gunnar help her learn Danish? Isn't that your job?” Maria asked, the sweetness leaving her voice.

“It's the society's job,” Christina said. “Look, Maria, until she came he was just sitting at home drinking and smoking and living in filth. Now he's working with the bees. He's not mourning Anna the same way as he was.”

“So now that she's there he's not going to miss Anna?” Maria asked. “Why, what is she doing for him? Or should I ask what is she doing with him?”

Christina crushed her half-smoked cigarette. “She's a young and innocent woman who has been through hell worse than you and I can imagine. She deserves our compassion and our help, not innuendo like this.”

“It's not me, it's everyone who is talking,” Maria said, undaunted. “I spoke to fat Ulla who lives next door and she thinks something is going on. The Afghan girl spends a lot of time inside the house with Gunnar.”

“So what?” Christina said, though she was nervous about Raihana spending time inside Gunnar's house. This could cause problems, not just for Gunnar but for Raihana. If the Afghan community found out they would be furious. Christina knew from the whispers at school that there was already pressure for Raihana to wear a
hi jab
and
abaya
and find another
praktik.
But whenever Christina asked Raihana how it was going, she always replied it was good and asked for more help in reading Anna's bee journal. Christina was amazed that Gunnar had let her keep it, but also pleased that he had.