The Demon of Dakar aka The Demon from Dakar

Thirty-Five

Eva Willman chuckled to herself. In front of her on the table lay at least one hundred flyers. She already regretted having promised Helen to circulate them. The text was too aggressive in Eva’s opinion, too stark and bordering on schmaltz. Eva had little patience for the sentimental while Helen liked to lay it on thick.

“But this is about our children,” Helen said, when Eva objected to one of the phrases.

“But this one, Helen,” Eva said and read aloud: “‘… drug dealers are like predators who destroy our children, luring them into the marsh.’”

“So?” Helen said. “If some bastard came here and threw our kids in the Stordammen to drown them we would stop him, wouldn’t we?”

Stordammen was a lake with a swampy shoreline, encircled by a belt of reeds, located in the woods just south of the residential area.

“We haven’t fully come to terms with what is happening,” Helen went on. “These are our children they have targeted. One should line them up against a wall, these damn pushers-no, that would be too kind-one should-”

“You are not allowed to say that at the meeting,” Eva interrupted.

Helen smiled.

“Do you think I’m completely crazy? I am going to be exceedingly calm and dignified. You can talk instead, if you like.”

There was a note of both derision and indignation in Helen’s voice.

Helen had booked the old post office. That turned out to be a good choice because it was centrally located and, above all, everyone knew where it was. A good friend of hers had printed up the flyers at work. Helen had also organized coffee and cake through the congregation and invited the police to talk about drugs.

Eva had suggested they invite some politicians but Helen had dismissed the idea with a snort.

“We’re going to have to tackle this ourselves,” she said. “If those clowns took their jobs seriously, surely the schools wouldn’t be the way they are. Soon there will only be one school counselor per district. And there should be a community center worthy of the name, at the very least.”

Helen continued to list the things she thought the politicians should do. Nothing came as news, and the more Helen talked the more tired Eva felt.

Eva started in her own courtyard, walking from building to building and taping the yellow flyers to the doors. Then she continued on through the area, down toward the ICA grocery store and the pizzeria.

She met several people she knew outside the store. She was slightly ashamed of the flyers with their silly phrases, but everytime she received some encouragment she felt more comfortable.

“I’m glad someone is doing something sensible for once,” said a mother she recognized from the soccer practices.

Maybe we could post a large advertisement outside the store, she thought, and went inside to talk to the manager, returning with something close to a promise.

She knew that the rumor would quickly spread in Sävja and Bergsbrunna that Patrik and Hugo’s mother was running around with flyers like some kind of Jehovah’s Witness, and she wondered what her boys would say. They would be embarrassed, Eva felt sure about that. But, emboldened by the praise, she went by the nursery school on the way home, went in and talked to some of the staff, and was allowed to post flyers there as well.

Eva called Helen as soon as she got home.

“Wonderful,” she said. “It’s perfect that the flyers are yellow. And an other thing, I got Mossa’s mother to translate it into Arabic. She’s going to print it out. Do you think we need it in Kurdish? What does that boy in fifth grade speak? Is it Iranian?”

“Yes, Ali’s family is from Teheran.”

“If we don’t get all the svartskallar to attend, it won’t work. Then it will be like in France.”

Eva did not protest her choice of words-svartskallar was a derogatory word for immigrants-and did not ask what Helen knew about France. She had probably seen a documentary on television.

Eva promised to speak to the Iranian family, who had a boy in the fifth grade, and they finished the call. She sank exhausted into the sofa. On the floor in front of her was the magazine she had been reading the other night. She picked it up and leafed through to the article about the yacht off the coast of South America, and she realized that she had never swum in anything saltier than the brackish Baltic seawater, had never taken in a really salty gulp of water.

She tried to imagine heat and sandy beach. Tropical warmth and fine, white grains under bare feet, and she smiled to herself. She knew it was only a dream and that she would never be able to afford to travel farther than the Canary Islands, if even that. For the past two years she had saved four thousand six hundred kronor in a special account. Last fall there had been almost seven thousand, but before Christmas she had been forced to withdraw several thousand.

Her only hope was a Triss lottery win. Together with Helen, she bought a ticket every week, but so far the yield had been thin, some fifty kronor and, once, a thousand kronor. They had celebrated with a bottle of wine.

She wanted to travel with Patrik and Hugo. It felt urgent because soon they would be too old to want to accompany her. It pained her that she could not offer them more of the good life. They heard about classmates who traveled both on winter and summer vacations, and once the usually so loyal Hugo had let it slip out that it was unfair that they could not go farther than to Värmland.

But now the outlook was somewhat better. Donald had mentioned something about needing more staff in the kitchen, someone who managed the dishes. Right now it was the waitstaff that had to take care of loading the dishwasher and supplying the bar with glasses, but in view of the fact that the number of guests was increasing and that Eva was unused to the work, it was stressful. Perhaps she would be able to work a few extra nights a month and put away a little money?

She was due at work soon. She smiled, happened to think about Donald and his resistance to the union. Maybe she should put Helen on him.

Despite her reservations about her friend’s antidrug campaign, she felt strengthened. You could say what you wanted about Helen, and there were many who did, but she had a fantastic ability to make things happen, even if Eva was not getting her hopes up about the meeting at the old post office. There would most likely not be the turnout that Helen expected. To relocate a garbage room in your own courtyard was entirely different from altering county politics and fighting drugs.