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THE RABBIT YARD De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar JOHANNES ANYURU Published by Norstedts, 2017, 294 pages English sample translation by Sara Nelson [email protected] [email protected] www.norstedtsagency.se “I have always written about people trying to build their little nests in the world and how the large schemes of politics sweep them away like a storm, blowing all dreams and relationships away. The Rabbit Yard is about two girls and their strong friendship which is shredded by all this. It is about a father who wants to protects his child from the cruelty of the world. And it is about how we must learn to live together, all of us.” JOHANNES ANYURU Synopsis A winter night in Gothenburg. Three individuals, who have sworn allegiance to the crumbling terror state Daesh, enter a local book store where a controversial comic artist has been invited to talk about freedom of expression and blasphemy. His appearance is disrupted by gunshot, panic breaks out and everyone in the store are taken hostage. One of the attackers, a young woman, is tasked to film the violence and put it up on a live feed on internet. But as the situation escalates, she turns to one of the others and whispers: ‘Everything is wrong. We shouldn’t be here. We should leave.’ Two years later, an author visits the young woman at a clinic for forensic psychiatry. She has read his books, and asked for him. He comes, reluctantly; in his eyes she is a demon that has stolen his face, his religion. At the same time, he is curious to find out what she wants. Curious about the mystery of this young Belgian girl, who suddenly showed up in Sweden, no longer knowing her mother tongue or acknowledging the name in her passport, and who performed this heinous act of terror. She hands him a bunch of papers, asks him to read them, to tell her what he thinks of it. And as he is about to leave, she tells her secret: that she is not from here, not from this now. That she is in fact from the future. Over the next couple of years, the author seeks up the survivors as well as relatives of the attackers, tries to find out more than what can be told from medias headlines and the brutality of the girl’s film. He continues to visit the girl in the clinic 2 and she continues to write about the reality she comes from: the persecutions, the degradations, the Rabbit Yard. There is something about her story that he can’t put his finger on, that cannot just be attributed her schizophrenia. At the same time, he and his wife are planning their move to another country, to secure a better future for themselves and their daughter. The young woman in the clinic is disappearing more and more often, giving room for that other girl, the Belgian one, who does not recognize his face or speak his language. Time is running out for him to unlock the mystery. The Rabbit Yard is an intense story filled with sorrow over the state of the world today. It’s about hope and hopelessness, about friendship and betrayal, and about the ugly theater of terror and fascism. Johannes Anyuru shows us once again that he is a master of words and time, and that he justly deserves his place among the big international names of his generation. “With an unconventional and fateful dramatic composition, Johannes Anyuru depicts the chain of events in a contemporary and future Sweden, where the tapestry of society collapses, leaving the field open for terror and repression to take over. With poetical slowdown, Anyuru shows the vulnerability of the individual in a world of shrinking life opportunities and urgently examines the effects of human actions.” Motivation from the August Prize Jury, Winner Best Fiction 2017 3 [Sample translation, pp. 7-66] There is no history in Guantanamo. There is no future in Guantanamo. There is no time there at all, since there is no limit to what can happen. PRISONER released after thirteen years in Guantanamo Bay What happened in the houses. As much as nothing. It went to fast to truly happen. Imagine there’s a clock upon a nightstand that set to measure time in seconds surprised, finds itself melting boiling into gas all in the millionth of a second. HARRY MARTINSON Aniara, song sixty-seven 4 Now a wind blows in. It lifts sand from the playground and a handful of dry blades of grass, up against the facades of the high-rise apartment buildings. The two girls swinging on worn tires, rise higher. I watch them through the glass. I do not hear their laughter. I hear panicked hoarse screams, the roar of automatic fire, the crashing of objects and bodies flung to the floor. 5 1 This is her first memory: snow tumbling down in windswept sheets, over the hospital wings, over the parking lot and poplars, over the roadblocks and ambulances. And before this, nothing. She is silent and keeps her eyes closed as Amin several times repeats the name he gave her. Nour. Only when she notices a tinge of hysteria in his voice does she open them. “You remember something new?” His face is haggard, his mouth tense, he sits beside her in Hamad’s white Opel, in the backseat that leaks foam crumbs that stick to their clothes. She shakes her head. Hamad speaks from the driver’s seat, hurrying them on, and Amin wets his lips, and with trembling hands turns on the cell phone duct-taped to the metal pipes on her vest. She sits breathless. Solitary snowflakes fall in front of the yellow brick wall outside the car’s window. If she were to feed in the four digit code on the cell’s keypad, the pipes will explode and throw off as many nails and buckshot that fit within two cupped hands, and the shockwave produced will break bones and crush internal organs of people within a radius of five, perhaps ten meters. Same thing should someone send the code via a text message to the phone. They exit the car. Hamad has parked it on a backstreet, concealed behind a dumpster. He heaves up the large, black duffel bag from the trunk. The cold stings her cheeks and hands; she stamps her feet a little to warm herself. They arrive together into the commotion of the main street and split up. When she, after a few steps, turns around, Amin stops and lingers by a shop window with his hands stuffed in his pockets, pretending to admire men’s suits. She feels they are entangled. She wishes a different life for them. It is February seventeenth, a good hour before the terrorist attack on the comic book shop Hondo’s. At one point she nearly steps into the street to be hit by a passing tram – a woman stops her, grabbing her coat – the clanging of the tram is shrill, hollow, and she is left 6 standing in the grey slush, her gaze quivering in the light snowfall that hangs suspended in the darkening afternoon. Again she tries to remember who she is, where she comes from. She only reaches as far back as the hospital room. She stood up and walked, pulling the IV drip along, over to the window. She remembers the rushing swell of her pulse and the coolness of the floor under her naked feet. She has read that the snow that fell over the hospital area that summer evening was caused by environmental issues, or military weather manipulation, or that it was not snowing at all but some leakage from a chemical plant. The woman who stopped her from stepping into the street touches her arm and says something she doesn’t catch, the voice is flat and distant and when she doesn’t respond the woman leaves. Another tram passes, people cross the street around her. She thinks she knows, at least, that she is from here. From Gothenburg. And her mother is dead. Died, somehow. Was hit by a car. No. Can’t remember. She clenches her fists, opens them. A single action can awaken the world. She moves on, becomes part of the stream of shoppers and youths in bulging winter jackets and couples pushing strollers. A torch outside the comic book shop’s open door flickers in the dusk, in front of a handwritten sign: Today at 5pm Göran Loberg will sign his new comic book and talk about Freedom of Speech and its boundaries with Christian Hondo. She starts to sweat when she comes in beneath the ceiling lights, because of the crowd and because of the bomb vest concealed beneath her winter coat. And because of what looms ahead. She stands in a corner looking through a box of hardcover comic books, as to not draw attention. She picks one of them up, flips through it. A single action, radical enough, pure enough, will communicate with the indigent masses of the world, reconnect the bonds between the caliphate and the stray Muslims, increase the influx of new recruits. Turn the fortunes of war. Hamad’s words. Hamad’s thoughts. She continues to flip through the comic book. In it, needle-shaped space crafts travel past planetary rings and nebulas of burning gas. Men in lumpy, minutely detailed space suits walk in surrealist deserts. She is surprised by how childish the images are – it makes her laugh to herself, broodingly.

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