It was far too early in the morning. I hate waking up before I have to but I had been dreaming about apples — I was driven wild by them in the dream — apples that gleamed on the outside but tasted of rotten fish, or perhaps more like the remains of that cat I found once as a child. It was lying on the other side of a fence and someone had cut the paws off and it was covered in maggots. Me and some kids beat it with sticks, although perhaps all we managed to do was hit the fence, or maybe it was each other. I don’t know why we were doing it. Perhaps we just needed to hit something since life was so hard.
I can’t say for sure what it was that woke me up, if it was the apples or the memory of that cat, but I was furious. It was only six o’clock in the morning and I never wake up at six of my own free will. I suppose that’s not actually true, strictly speaking; I often wake up early but then I manage to fall back asleep. That’s a habit from when I was very little, probably from around the time that my brother Ahmed was shot. I used to wake up because I was afraid my father wouldn’t be there when I got up in the morning. I was always afraid someone would try to kill him too. I thought I could see Ahmed standing in the shadows telling me everything was all right, that I should go back to sleep. Every night was the same, even though I knew Ahmed was dead. I had seen him when they carried him away on the stretcher and his face was so peaceful, as if he were sleeping up there on the stretcher being carried away on the angry men’s shoulders. I woke up every night and every night he was there to comfort me and tell me to go back to sleep.
Now I don’t see him any more. Perhaps he doesn’t feel comfortable here in the Swedish light. But I wake up anyway and sometimes it takes me a long time to fall back to sleep. But this morning I didn’t want to wake up, I wanted to sleep. Why should I wake up and go to a school where I don’t understand anything anyway? I don’t know what it was but I got up because I was so anxious. I put on my clothes and went outside. It can be beautiful in this country at dawn. There are almost no people around and the tall apartment buildings look like frozen pillars carved from huge granite slabs.
