Published on April 5, 2026
Years after spending three weeks in a refugee camp in Sweden, a Bosnian police detective learns the true identity of the camp’s gatekeeper of clothing.
We arrived at five a.m. in front of a building that reminded me of a miniature airplane hangar, the morning thick with mist, snaking its heavy, brooding tendrils through the pine forest that ensconced the camp. The dew smelled like the earth waking up.
Though it was barely a minute after five o’clock, many were already there. of it, they must have come even earlier. Big sister said: two hundred people at least. All strangers to us, all strangers to each other, grouped together at the intersection of purely coincidental itineraries forced upon people fleeing a war. Seen through the mist, the bodies waiting to be chosen looked like zombies risen from the underworld.
All of us wanted to change our clothes. All of us needed pretty much everything: shoes, pants, shirts, socks, underwear, jackets. Mama, big sister, and I had worn the same clothes for four months. Mama kept saying it would be our turn very soon, with a sadness on her face that pulled her tired eyes even farther down her worn cheeks, a sadness as forcefully unseen as remembered (many years later) by a ten-year-old. I prayed and made wishes, using the few words I remembered from the two times I’d visited the mosque for Bajram, not knowing what the words meant. “Alahu ekber.” “Bismilaihrahmanirahim.” Please give me a Bulls jersey, Reebok pumps, Nike jacket, and so on. Big sister called me a retard. Mama slapped her and told her to act like a big sister.
Days went by. On the day we were chosen, we had waited two weeks. At that point, we were showing up out of some abstract duty, like when people would show up to mosque or church back home even though they didn’t believe God ever intended to bestow them with any special grace.
Our clothes were stinky, worn out, coming apart, pathetic. But the clothes didn’t bother me the most. It was sleeping in the tent. There was the cold. It was September, and yet in the mornings it felt like the winters back home. I could see my own breath when I exhaled, in September! I pretended I was smoking. Big sister called me a retard again, this time without Mama’s presence. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable to sleep on the hard mattresses on the hard ground.
Worse than this were the sounds coming from the other tents at night. I heard snoring that made the ground tremble (quickly exposed as coming from Mustafa, a fat single guy in his fifties, quieter than a church mouse when not sleeping). I heard screams from men and from women. I heard joking, laughing. I heard arguments, fighting. I heard babies and young children crying. And I thought: Amazing how this doesn’t wake big sister and Mama up. I covered my ears with the palms of my hands as hard as I could, but it didn’t work.
There were too many of us arriving too quickly, so the government had to put a few of us close to an army firing range, which also happened to be close to a Swedish air force base. The worst was the artillery fire and the low-flying fighter jets. Alen, who used to be a pilot in Yugoslavia, said it was the JAS Gripen, “Sweden’s military airplane, named after a mythical flying beast.” The first few times we heard the artillery and the planes, people went crazy. Some got hurt simply of their bodies and running into something or throwing themselves down violently. Some tried to escape into the forest, until someone else, more measured in the moment, ran after them to tell them it’s just drills. Mama didn’t freak out like the others did. She never freaked out. “Sometimes you just draw the shortest straw,” she said and shrugged her shoulders.
As we approached the waiting zone, we could hear that the shouting, pitiful as always, had already started. A sea of raised hands rose and fell in wild waves of desperation. They reminded me of people drowning, waving their terrified arms for the rescue boat to save them. I thought of the Titanic. Arms, voices, bodies blended together. “Me pick me pick me I’ve a ba here over here we’ve been in the same clothes for four months I beg you I’ve waited every day for over a week!” Not one of us spoke Swedish, so all this came out in Bosnian.
The imploring arms and begging words were directed at the raised podium beyond the high fence separating the waiting zone from the entrance zone. Directed at him: Lasse. Lasse with blond hair like a coarse brush. Lasse with the leather jacket that came up just over the belt of his Levi’s, the kind we fantasized about owning in Yugoslavia. Lasse with the shiny black cowboy boots. Fucking Lasse.
Lasse whistled. He nodded. He laughed. Occasionally, he sneered. Sometimes he snarled. He would point at the chosen ones, the ones he blessed with entrance to the magazine. At most eight per day, big sister and I counted.
Next to Lasse stood Zara, his assistant. She was recently taken from the flock to facilitate communication, to act as his translator—or so she said in the only announcement from the podium she ever made. All the other times she just stood there, chewing bubble gum.
In the canteen over breakfast one day (on the menu: juice, too sweet; flavorless corn flakes; some kind of meat; potatoes boiled to undead versions of themselves; watery milk; bread that fell apart at the slightest touch), I
Related News
- I knew one thing for certain: the protagonist had to be a woman: Ankita Mukhopadhyay
- Canadian billionaire Kevin O’Leary says a good thing about AI layoffs is: Everybody said you have to be an engineer, but now you can be …
- Football, Phones, and Predictions: How Betting Became Part of Matchday in Ghana
- 6 assailants hacked RSS worker to death in Kerala's Palakkad
- Seven Telangana students die by suicide after intermediate exam results
- The retail afterlife: How surplus goods find new value at ‘binz’ stores