The Singularity E-Book

Balsam Karam

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 168

Beschreibung

In an unnamed coastal city home to many refugees, a mother of a displaced family searches for her child, calling her name as she wanders along the cliffside road where her daughter used to work. She searches and searches until, devoid of hope and frantic with grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to this suicide is another woman – on a business trip from a distant country, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers her own litany of losses – of a language, a country, an identity – when once her family fled a distant war. Weaving between both narratives and written in looping prose rich with meaning, The Singularity is an astounding study of grief, migration and motherhood from one of Sweden's most exciting new writers.

Leseprobe

‘I don’t know anyone who writes like Balsam Karam. She blows me away. Truly one of the most original and extraordinary voices to come out of Scandinavia in... forever. You’ll realize twenty minutes after you’ve finished this book that you’re still sitting there, holding on to it.’

— Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove

‘The Singularity by Balsam Karam is a novel about loss and longing—a mother who misses her child, children who miss their mother, and all of those who miss their country as they try to feel the new earth in their new land. A deeply moving work of fiction from a true voice of Scandinavia.’

— Shahrnush Parsipur, author of Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran

‘Balsam Karam writes at the limits of narrative, limning the boundary of loss where “no space remains between bodies in the singularity”. With a lucid intimacy, Karam braids a story of witness and motherhood that fractures from within only to rebuild memory and home on its own terms. The Singularity is a book of conviction where those who have been made to disappear find light and keep their secrets too.’

— Shazia Hafiz Ramji, author of Port of Being

‘Astringent, fuguelike.... A knotty, sui generis evocation of mothers’ feelings of fear and loss.’

— Kirkus

‘Reading The Singularity is like drinking directly from a flood of tears.’

— Aftonbladet

‘The Singularity is a novel that appears to have been created from dark matter, elusive, giddying and with an enormous linguistic and narrative density.’

— Expressent

THE SINGULARITY

BALSAM KARAM

Translated by SASKIA VOGEL

To Mum and Dad, Alaa, Eman, Tania, Adel, Jian, Salam

‘Perhaps, perhaps oblivion on earth, like a mantle

can develop growth and nourish life

(maybe), like dark humus in the forest.

Perhaps, perhaps man, like a blacksmith, seeks

live coals, the hammering of iron on iron,

without entering the coal’s blind cities,

without closing his eyes, not sounding

the depths, waters, minerals, catastrophes.

Perhaps, but my plate’s another, my food’s distinct:

my eyes didn’t come to bite oblivion:

my lips open over all time, and all time,

not just part of time has consumed my hands.

That’s why I’ll tell you these sorrows I’d like to put aside,

I’ll oblige you to live among their burns again,

not to make time as in a terminal, before departing,

or to beat the earth with our brows,

or to fill our hearts with salt water,

but to set forth knowing, to touch rectitude

with decisions infinitely charged with meaning,

that severity may be a condition of happiness, that

we may thus become invincible.’

— Pablo Neruda, Canto General

‘My firstborn. All I can remember of her is how

she loved the burned bottom of bread.’

— Toni Morrison, Beloved

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphPROLOGUETHE MISSING ONEI.II.III.IV.V.THE SINGULARITYDay 1Day 2Day 3Day 4THE LOSSESCreditsAbout the AuthorsCopyright

PROLOGUE

¶ Meanwhile elsewhere – just as the light turns green and the cars along a coastline prepare to leave the city towards the half desert and the mountains – more slowly than ever a woman crosses the highway, which, along with the corniche, is all that holds the ocean ever rising at bay.

The woman is alone, searching for her child.

Nothing in her face recalls what once was, and if someone shouts her name, she doesn’t turn around and say no or stop it in the language no one here understands or wants anything to do with; if they stop, she doesn’t meet their gaze, and if they say, wait, she doesn’t come back with a why nor later I have just as much right to walk here as you do, why can’t you understand that?

It’s Friday and soon the city almost dissolved by the heat will fill up with tourists dressed in bright clothes and on a ramble through the food markets with fried fish and oysters. From the large galleria, the tourists as if from out of a hole will make their way to the museum quarter and the souvenir shops and afterwards, once they’ve finished shopping, move on to the rose garden, the university and the bookshops, to the corn vendor on the corner by the drooping palm groves, alone in the sun, and the cats in repose, stretching out, waiting for the heat to break and for the sun to set.

Further on – furthest on where a hill obscures the view and the road muddies in the tracks of digging machines waiting for work to begin – are also abandoned new builds made of pale concrete and steel girders and a small library where only students go.

Yes, right across the road, invisible to those at the university looking out across the green space and the faculties, stand the new builds half-finished, missing most of the walls to what could have been a living room or bedroom, a bathroom, kitchen or storeroom, and that now gaping mostly keep the students shielded from wind and rain.

At night the students roll out their bedding on the concrete and each pushes their one bag all they have left against the wall, dozes off beside it. Then they wake to the sun and the morning haze and lug their bags across the muddy earth up to their department, cast a look around. At this time of day no one but the cleaners walk the empty corridors and no cafés are open with discounted tea, coffee and yesterday’s sandwiches; none of the guards asks where you’re from or what you’re doing there and no one plants their backpack on the empty chair beside them, saying sorry this seat is taken. The students wash under their arms and between their legs in the large bathroom at one end of the corridor, then take a seat in the armchairs by the door to wait for their first seminar, falling asleep and sleeping long.

Later they’ll meet up around the fire and go over how best to make this unfinished building a home – they’ll discuss which walls are essential and from where they’ll get the sheet metal and who among them is best at construction and where they can get a hold of screws and drills. The students will talk and laugh and before bedtime open their bag and repack it, take out dry socks and a sweater and walk with their torch and books in hand up to their spot by the wall.

It’s Friday a late summer afternoon and soon the beach now vacant will have litter spread across its sun chairs and parasol stands as the ocean draws back from the rocks and reeds; the ice-cream vendors will shove their broken carts up the hill past the palms and grill kiosks, and the taxi drivers will run a rag over the seats and the cracked windshields, will wait for men in suits to wave them down and with someone beside them ask to be driven away from the corniche. Soon, the tourists – just as they for safety’s sake place a hand over their handbags and keep an eye out for the children who while waiting for work on the beach have fallen asleep sack and rake in hand – will climb the wide pavement along the twilight bright corniche and the ocean view beyond words even for those who can afford dinner and a little wine at one of the restaurants there. The tourists will take a seat and ask for sparkling water and maybe a large bottle of house wine, marinated olives with capers and garlic and salted nuts to tide them over, reclining with the late summer sea in minor revolt and the sky pitch dark and dull above the soon over-encumbered corniche.

The woman searching for her child has been there, she knows what the corniche looks like, and tonight as every other Friday night since her child disappeared she will go back there and wait; she will watch the girls, who appear out of nowhere with a mop and rag in hand, and follow them as they approach fresh spills and polish the floor to a shine once again just as the Missing One did.

She will search and look around the corniche.

Slowly endlessly tired she will wander up there – determined and clutching her bag like it’s the most valuable thing she owns, she will sit on one of the benches outside the restaurant where her child was working soon before she went missing and keep the knife warm by passing it between her hands on the corniche.

It’s the corniche she thinks of as the traffic light turns green and the shadows deeper than the day before render her invisible; it’s the corniche and the girl and the children she sees as she steps out and slowly starts making her way across the road – it’s the waiters in their black trousers black shoes and the men with their glasses of beer who stop to shout as the children walk by.

Like any other day she means to continue to the square – to the razed lot they call the alley, and on to the place where the greengrocer is already stacking melons, stone fruit and the coriander the Missing One always wanted to bring home – but she can no longer move, is stock-still in the middle of the road.

Today the world feels different somehow new and if she squeezes her wounds round and open, it doesn’t matter if the pus seeps out yellow thick and if she loses her headscarf at the roadside where she in her tiredness has lain down to sleep, it doesn’t matter if she gets it back – the air is both replete and empty and just as the woman perceives this she also senses the Missing One’s presence and perhaps her smell across the road.

If she stands here long enough – if she stands among the cars, eyes and hands tightly shut in a prayer so intimate nothing but her wish pushes through – maybe the God who proffered but then took back this child will return it to her.

If she prays loudly enough dear God as the shouts from the cars resound and the great sun keeps burning unbounded I pray to you with all I have maybe something will happen that couldn’t have happened before.

If she puts words to the unthinkable of all my children as she falls to her knees on the asphalt she was the one I loved most maybe something beyond comprehension can come to pass and the child will appear as if in a dream.

She waits, why doesn’t the dream manifest?

In the heat her knees stick to the ground and go numb; alongside her the traffic slows to a crawl and then moves on.

In the cars children sit up and watch the woman – across her chest the shirt is gossamer and along her back a tear running down from one shoulder, her body already fading in the late summer heat, and across her trouser leg dried blood in black stains from thigh to ankle and out to her toes blue and swollen. She seems unfazed by the people who want her to move along, and when she turns around and fixes her gaze somewhere, it is as though she still sees nothing of this world.

Is she going to get run over, their children ask, is she going to die here on the road, they ask, and their parents say, I don’t know, maybe she will, and turn away.

In the bag are the same flyers as always, and across her slippers worn ragged by the streets, the same broken straps that rub the back of her foot red then fall off – around her neck one of the girl’s shawls darker with each passing day and in her pocket the knife she carries with her wherever she goes in the city.

Later when the slippers no longer hold, she’ll walk barefoot to the corniche and the restaurants and up to the railing; later, when no one is looking, she will climb up and over to the sea- and sky-darkened cliffs.

Today something is different somehow stillborn and the woman feels it as she pounds her fists on the hood of the car that comes closest to her and presses a flyer to its windshield:

HAS ANYONE SEEN MY DAUGHTER?

17 YEARS OLD, MISSING SINCE DAWN ON 1 MAY.

HELP ME FIND HER, HELP ME GET JUSTICE.

She wedges the flyer under the windshield wipers and doesn’t turn around when the driver calls her back, doesn’t care if he spits, and doesn’t go back to hit him when he shouts that she is a slum rat, dirt.

She just keeps moving on and when later that same night she stops searching, hands and forehead bloody, you are standing nearby, looking out over the ocean. You don’t see the blood, you see only the woman, and soon thereafter the woman throwing herself off.

¶ Late summer one Friday night in a city half obscured by skyscrapers, and half left to the desert and the near-saturated yellow that rolls in and lays itself upon the streets and lawns like a hand, the cigarette vendors dust off their carts though nothing helps but rain, and in the bushes that frame the parks from north to south, something pale green unfurls where once were flowers and red berries to be sucked on and spat out.

This is a place you haven’t been before even though you’ve often wanted to visit, and when you finally walk these streets it’s as a tourist, no matter how many times you speak the language that you’ve known since childhood or ask the hotel staff how it’s going, picking up a newspaper where you slowly get up to speed and then relay what you’ve read to your co-workers within earshot.

On the corniche rises the buzz of men in suits with a woman at their side and along the main road rose vendors are waiting all in a row; you have strayed from your co-workers to get a little air – baby needs a walk you said with your hand on your belly – and when you pass the entrance to the restaurant, the children draw near and greet you; they ask if you’d like to buy the bracelet they’re holding out or would you prefer a pot holder crocheted with yarn and bottle caps? You crouch down to get a better look at the children, answering yes and thank you and putting the bracelet on and the pot holder in your bag. You give them the banknotes you’ve taken out, then continue across the corniche.

As you turn to face the sky and the sea a single unbounded darkness you spot her.

The woman is standing on the other side of the railing body bent forward almost one with the cliffs and the sea, looking out to where no horizon and no moon makes itself known; when she turns around and looks at or past you, you follow her gaze along the large road over to the grill kiosks and jewellery vendors and see, as she does, the street lamps white and yellow down by the harbour and the beach.

It’s cooling down – you can feel it and so does the woman standing there with her shirt wide open, letting the ocean breeze beat against her bare chest and the bleeding cuts across her stomach; she wants to kick off her trousers but doesn’t know how, to pull the girl’s shawl tighter around her neck even though she can’t.

From this night on the children she has left behind in her search for the Missing One, the children to whom she has never quite returned, will sleep closer together and curled up more tightly and above them in the day the sun will by turns be blinding or cold and white – she knows this.

She knows that the water from the bathroom taps will wane and stay cold the whole winter through and their paraffin lamp will more frequently be blown out by the wind in the alley; she knows that the blankets with their tears small and large will no longer keep them warm and the palm fronds the children fill their arms with across the road won’t have a chance to dry in the damp and fog that arrive in autumn like a steady rain.

Not before the morning, when the sun again hits the walls and the roofs and sweeps across the children’s feet numbed and blue, will the children let go of each other and once again begin to make their way out of and away from the alley; only after the light as white and unbearable as before bears down on the earth and on the children’s bodies – awaiting that which will never return – will the children strike out and slowly wander off, leaving that alley.

I hope the woman thinks as her hands clutch the railing more tightly and she sees the sky and sea, a single vast home to which she longs to return – I hope the children will one day take the other children’s hands and go elsewhere she says and starts listing the names of her remaining children so the sky and sea won’t forget them like they forgot and abandoned the Missing One.

Take care of my Pearl and teach her to ride a bike properly she says as her foot skids on the rocks – let Minna learn everything about the stars and galaxies – she likes that – and give Mo a hard ball that no one else has yet had the chance to kick the woman says and falls silent.

That’s all – that’s all she hopes for before you see her throw herself off and then nothing more – then only the dark of night and the sea breeze and the bars and the food, then you and the child in your belly and the woman’s bag left on one of the benches white-painted and worn, placed where the ocean view is hidden by the restaurants enormous along the corniche.

Later you take it – you take the bag with you and give the waiters one of the flyers you find, but keep the soap a stump at most from the depths of her bag; you show them the picture of the girl wearing shorts and a sweater and turn around, you don’t wave goodbye and don’t say okay when your co-workers call out, Good night, see you tomorrow, take care now.

In the hospital bed you will try to remember if on that night you were tired or happy and if you were wearing the green or black velvet dress you’d packed; you’ll try to remember if you felt the child kicking as you stood for what felt like an eternity on the corniche and if the woman was tall or short, if her hair was the same colour as yours and if it was on you that she fixed her gaze when she turned around and saw the many tourists, made up of people like you, ever flowing back and forth, as if the lot of you were one with the strip of bars bright and the street lamps ornate along the corniche.