Her voice on the phone calmed him. Had he packed gloves and a scarf? The winter in Paris wasn’t like the winter in Stockholm, even though Stockholm winters were nothing like the Arctic landscape he had dreamt of as a little boy, with penguins, seals and polar bears. The layer of powder snow that sometimes fell was usually thin enough not to settle on the asphalt, but it gathered in drifts and crept inside your collar on the faintest of breezes, or melted into sludgy patches and seeped into your shoes.
The night before his departure, he had slept poorly. He had one of his recurring nightmares, the one where he was stuck between two checkpoints. One checkpoint was on his right, and the soldiers were calling him over. Then he heard voices from the left and turned around. The soldiers at that checkpoint were waving for him to come, too. He started moving in their direction, until a round of rifle fire in the gravel made him stop dead. Come here! This way, you idiot! No, this way, or I’ll shoot!
He turned left and right, increasingly unsure about which way to go. Which checkpoint was more likely to let him through, if he even managed to get to it? Then he put his hands in his pockets and realized he had lost his identity papers. He had nothing to prove who he was. Without papers, he was lost; without papers, he was no one. The bullets struck the sand, closer and closer. In that moment, he had woken up.
* * *
—
We fit inside a single broken ray of light that contains the echo of every spring.
One day, the people would be victorious; Sami still believed that. The dead would never come back, but the perpetrators would be held accountable through fair trials and proportional punishment. Because that was the ultimate sign of a free society, that even the criminals benefited from democratic rules and laws.
So it’s freedom you want? I’ll show you freedom!
The memory was as brief as a breath. But it was possible to remember together, to turn it into a collective act. Under the regime’s censorship, reading itself became a protest and spreading stories became resistance. More voices would be needed. Voices to provide wind beneath their wings.
But our bird already knows how to fly.
Exactly, it just needs to be reminded.
The plane began its final descent and everything came closer: the sea, the sun, the snow-covered city. Soon, he would see her face in the arrivals hall.
* * *
—
The darkness fell quickly outside her family house, the streetlights glowing like big fireflies in the winter landscape. Her parents said that he should feel at home. Home. No more than that. But for a moment he forgot to breathe, the pain tingling in his chest.
The night before Christmas, he gave her an early gift: a notebook bound in maroon leather. In it, he had written down details from their first weeks as a couple. The morning she had knocked on his door with breakfast. The way she walked, that her steps could be slow or fast without her getting winded. There were words in it that made her blush: about her skin, hands, the curved arc of her fingernails which left marks in his flesh. His exhilaration when their lips caught on each other. They sat in bed and Sami watched her read his scribbled notes.
To’bri albi, you bury my heart. Tishkli assi, you will put flowers on my grave. Tetla’ae ala abri, you may step on my grave.
‘All your declarations of love are about death,’ she said.
Perhaps the violence was buried in the language, Sami thought, and maybe that’s where the change had to begin. With a new language, and new stories. Or maybe death and love really did exist in symbiosis, equally transformative and unpredictable, equally inevitable and absurd.
Sami watched her close the notebook and run her fingers over the cover.
‘One day, I’m going to give you a book,’ she said. ‘And that book will contain your story.’