They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears by Johannes Anyuru

Author:Johannes Anyuru
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Published: 2019-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

A power station made of giant metal discs piled high into towers and a number of drab brick buildings sunk into the last of the snow in the industrial area flew past the train window.

I went through my notes about the man I was on my way to meet, rereading the questions I wanted to ask and thinking about how to begin. I was having a hard time concentrating, the thumping of the rails was lulling and I’d been up all night. After a while I put my headphones on and shut my eyes.

A man was calling into a local American radio station. He sounded confused and disjointed, a black man going by his voice, maybe middle-aged, with a whiff of mental illness. He was talking about a group of children. They’d knocked on his front door one night, but ran away when he opened up, and later in the night they’d stood outside his bedroom window, peering in. Distressed, he said their eyes were like black holes leading to nothing.

I was listening to an audio file Isra had sent me. I’d started collecting testimonies about time travel and multiple dimensions, in an attempt to get an overview of the state the girl from Tundra was in.

I slipped between sleep and waking.

The radio host let the man talk, asking questions every now and again. The man claimed the children had asked for shelter from the cold and he’d let them in, only to be forced to “travel through time”:

“Each time it happens I lose part of myself.” His voice, which was nearly overwhelmed by the quivering frequency and atmospheric disruptions, sounded terrified—as if the children with the empty eyes were in the room in which he was speaking. “I had a family. But I’m lost in time now,” he said. “I’ve lost them to time. I couldn’t tell you what they look like anymore.”

The conversation stopped. I slowly opened my eyes. Drifts of timber behind a fence. Logging machinery, claws and arms resting on the frosty earth.

The girl in the clinic claimed her consciousness had been sent back in time and somehow landed in Annika Isagel’s apathetic body at al-Mima. For some reason she hadn’t just gone back in time, but sideways, to our world, which was different from the one she’d left behind: in her world Amin’s sister hadn’t died, as had happened here. So she’d come here to take the sister’s place, but also to stop the attack at Hondo’s. This was just about as clearly as I understood her delusions. I wondered what it was in the human soul that surfaced as an idea about stepping in and out of time, as if moving between rooms in a house. Some sort of dream about nothing being definitive. Outside, post office terminals, roundabouts, and open fields passed by. Do I dare stay in this country? I wasn’t just an origin seeking its future on the Western world’s screens. I was carrying shards of another world, different grammar in which I ordered space and time.

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