The Shadow Girls полностью

The phone continued to ring. It lay on the table and was sent back and forth across its surface like a half-dead insect. Humlin saw how afraid Leyla was when she finally grabbed it and answered in her own language. Humlin heard a man. He sounded extremely upset. Leyla initially hunched her shoulders at the sound of this voice but suddenly she straightened her back, shouted back at him and ended the conversation by banging the phone on the table until the battery cover came off. She yelled out something that Humlin didn’t understand, got up with clenched fists and then sank down on the chair again and started to cry.

Tanya had resumed stirring her empty pot. Humlin wondered if she were preparing an invisible meal for her daughter who was somewhere far away. Tea-Bag picked up the battery cover from the floor and put the phone back together.

Leyla stopped crying.

‘That was my dad.’

Tanya groaned.

‘Don’t go home. He’s not allowed to lock you up. Your brothers are not allowed to hit you.’

‘I can’t stay here. I can’t stay with my grandmother.’

Tanya flicked her tea towel angrily at Leyla’s arm.

‘But you can’t go home. When you told me what happened to your sister I thought you were talking about yourself, right up until the end. It was only then I realised it couldn’t be you because you were right there in front of me and your ear wasn’t burnt away with acid.’

Humlin drew back in horror.

‘What’s this — a sister? What ear?’

‘I’m not going to tell. At least not with you sitting here.’

Tanya kept flicking the tea towel at Leyla’s arm.

‘He’s our teacher; he’s supposed to listen. Perhaps he’ll learn something from what you say.’

‘I want to hear it,’ Tea-Bag said. ‘I need to listen to someone else for a while. My head is filled with my own tongues. They fly around in here like misshapen butterflies.’

She rapped her head with her knuckles. Leyla pointed to Humlin.

‘Not while he’s still here.’

‘He can wait out in the hall.’

Tanya gestured for Humlin to leave and so he took his chair and went to sit out in the hall. I’m not supposed to see her in the act of making her confession, he thought. Leyla was quiet for a long time before she started to speak.

Once upon a time I had a doll named Nelf. I found it under one of the beds in a room at the refugee camp where people came and went, and where you could hear people scream and cry in their sleep. But there was also an atmosphere of relief there. We had arrived. We were in Sweden. Everything was going to be all right, without anyone actually being able to say what ‘all right’ was. I thought it was ‘good’ that I found the doll, and I immediately gave her the name Nelf. I was surprised that no one seemed to understand what it meant. Not even grandmother Nasrin who was still clear-headed those days. But even she didn’t pick up that it was the name of a god.

We had just arrived from Iran but I don’t remember much about that trip, only that when we were about to land my dad tore up all our documents. My parents’ passports, Nasrin’s passport — which actually wasn’t hers but belonged to Uncle Reza. First we landed in the small Swedish town called Flen where I found the doll and a few months later we moved to Falun where we lived for three years before we came to Gothenburg, to Stensgården.