I Am Zlatan Read online

  But then, after this latest thing with Sanela, she was crying again, and I fled from it. I stayed outside, running around, or I played football. Not that I was the most balanced kid, or the most promising. I was just one of the snot-nosed kids who kicked a ball, worse than that actually. I’d have incredible outbursts. I headbutted people and screamed at my teammates. Still, I had football. It was my thing, and I played all the time, down in the courtyard, on the pitch, during breaks. We went to the Värner Rydén School then, Sanela in Year Five and me in Year Three, and there wasn’t exactly any doubt about which one of us was better behaved! Sanela had to grow up fast and become like a second mother to Keki, and look after the family when our sisters took off. She took on an incredible amount of responsibility. She behaved. She was not the girl who got called into the headmaster’s office for a telling off, and that’s why I started to worry straight away when the message came. We both had to go in to see the headmaster. Well, if it had been only me who got sent in, that would have been normal, absolutely routine. But now it was me and Sanela. Had somebody died? What was it about?

  My stomach started to hurt, and we walked down the school corridor. It must have been late autumn or winter. I felt worried. But when we went in, Dad was sitting there with the headmaster, and I was happy. Dad usually meant fun times. But this was no fun. Everything was tense and formal, and I started to get the creeps. To be honest, I didn’t really understand much of it, just that it was about Mum and Dad and it wasn’t good, not at all. Now I know. Many years later, as I’ve been working on this book, the pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place.

  In November of 1990, Social Services had conducted their investigation, and Dad had got custody of both Sanela and me. The environment at Mum’s was regarded as unsuitable, not really because of her, I’ve got to say. There was other stuff, but it was a major thing, being judged unfit by the world, and Mum was absolutely devastated. So she was going to lose us? It was a disaster. She cried and cried and sure, she’d hit us with wooden spoons and boxed our ears and didn’t listen to us, and she’d had bad luck with men and nothing worked out and all that. But she loved her kids. She’d just grown up with the cards stacked against her, and I think Dad realised that. He went over to her place that afternoon:

  “I don’t want you to lose them, Jurka,” he told her.

  But he demanded she shaped up, and Dad is not one for kidding around in those kinds of situations. I’m sure he said some harsh things. “If things don’t improve, you’ll never see those kids again,” and stuff like that. I don’t know exactly what happened. But Sanela lived at Dad’s place for a few weeks, and I stayed with Mum, in spite of everything. That wasn’t a good solution. Sanela didn’t like it at Dad’s. She and I discovered him asleep on the floor, and there were beer cans and bottles on the table. “Dad, wake up! Wake up!” But he carried on sleeping. It was strange, I thought. Like, why is he doing that? We didn’t know what to do, but we wanted to help him. Maybe he was cold? We covered him with bath towels and blankets so he’d be warm. Otherwise, I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on. Presumably, Sanela understood more. She’d noticed how his moods changed and how he would fly into a rage and howl like a bear, and I think that frightened her. And she was missing her little brother. She wanted to go back to Mum, whereas it was the opposite for me. I missed Dad, and on one of those evenings I phoned him up. I’m sure I sounded desperate. It was lonely without Sanela.

  “I don’t want to be here. I want to live with you.”

  “Come over here,” he said. “I’ll send a taxi.”

  There were more investigations by Social Services, and in March 1991 Mum got custody of Sanela, and Dad got me. We were split up, my sister and me, but we’ve always stuck together – or to put it more accurately, we’ve had our ups and downs. But basically we’re really close. Today Sanela is a hairdresser, and sometimes people come to her salon and say, “My God, you look so much like Zlatan!” and she always replies, “Bullshit, it’s him who’s like me.” She’s awesome. But neither one of us has had it easy. My dad, efik, had moved out of Rosengård to a nicer place at Värnhemstorget in Malmö, and you can tell that he’s got a big heart – he’d be prepared to die for us. But things didn’t turn out the way I imagined. I knew him as the weekend dad who bought burgers and ice creams.

  Now we were supposed to share our everyday lives, and I noticed immediately that his flat was bare. Something was missing, maybe a woman. There was a TV, a sofa, a bookcase, two beds. But nothing extra, nothing pleasant, and there were beer cans on the tables and rubbish on the floor, and on the occasions when he would get an impulse and do some wallpapering, like, only one wall would get done. “I’ll do the rest tomorrow!” But it never happened, and we moved house often, never managing to settle down. But things were bare in another sense.

  Dad was a property caretaker who worked terrible shifts, and when he came home in his handyman’s dungarees with all the pockets with screwdrivers and stuff, he would sit down by the phone or the TV and didn’t want to be disturbed. He was in his own little world, and he would often put his headphones on and listen to Yugoslavian folk music. He’s mad about Yugo music. He’s recorded a few cassettes of himself. He’s a real entertainer when he’s in the mood. But most of the time he was in his own little world, and if my mates phoned, he would hiss at them: “Don’t phone here!”

  I wasn’t allowed to bring my friends home, and if they’d phoned me, Dad wouldn’t tell me. The phone was not for me, and I didn’t really have anyone to talk to there at home – well, I did, if there was something serious, Dad was there for me. Then he would do anything at all, go out into town in his cocky way and try to sort everything out.

  He had a way of walking that made people go like: Who the hell is that? But where ordinary things were concerned, like what had happened at school or on the football pitch or with my friends, he wasn’t interested in that, and I had to talk to myself or go out. Of course, Sapko, my half-brother, lived with us for the first while, and I talked to him sometimes. He must have been about 17 then. But I don’t remember much about it, and it wasn’t long before Dad kicked him out. They’d had some terrible rows. That’s another sad thing, of course, and then it was just Dad and me left. We were each alone in our own corner, you could say, because the strange thing was that he didn’t have any friends round either. He would sit on his own and drink. There was no company. But above all, there was nothing in the fridge.

  I stayed out all the time, playing football and riding round on stolen bikes, and I’d often come home hungry as a wolf. I’d fling open the cupboard doors and think, please, please, let there be something there! But no, nothing, just the usual: milk, butter, a loaf of bread and on good days some juice – multivitamin juice drink in the four-litre carton from the Middle Eastern shop because it was the cheapest – and then beer of course, Pripps Blå and Carlsberg, six-packs with those plastic rings around the cans. Sometimes there was nothing but lager, and my stomach growled. That’s a pain I’ll never forget. Just ask Helena! The fridge should be full up, I’m always telling her. I’ll never shake that. Recently my lad, Vincent, was crying because he didn’t get his pasta, when the noodles were already cooking. The kid was screaming because his food wasn’t ready fast enough, and I felt like bellowing: If you only knew how good you’ve got it!

  I could search through every drawer, every nook and cranny for a single piece of pasta or a meatball. I would fill up on toasted sandwiches. I could scoff an entire loaf of bread, or else I would go over to Mum’s. She didn’t always exactly welcome me with open arms. It was more like, what the hell, is Zlatan coming as well? Doesn’t efik feed him? And sometimes she’d give me an earful: D’you think we’re made of money? You’re going to eat us out of the house! But still, we helped each other, and over at Dad’s I started waging a little war on the beer. I poured some of it out – not all of it, because that would have been too obvious, but some.

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bsp; He rarely noticed anything. There was beer everywhere, on the tables and shelves, and I would often put the empty cans in big black binbags and take them in to collect the deposit. I got 50 öre a can. Even so, sometimes I’d scrape together 50 or 100 kronor. That was a lot of cans, and I was happy to have the money. But of course it was no fun, and like all kids in that sort of situation I learned to notice exactly what mood he was in. I knew exactly when it wasn’t worth talking to him. The day after he’d been drinking, things would be fairly quiet. The second day it was worse. In some cases he could ignite like a flash. Other times he was incredibly generous. Gave me 500 kronor, just like that. In those days I collected football cards. You got a piece of chewing gum and three photo cards in a little pack. Oh boy, which guys will I get? I would wonder. Maybe Maradona? Most of the time I’d be disappointed, especially when they were just boring Swedish stars I didn’t know anything about. One day he came home with a whole box. That was like a big party, and I tore them all open and got a bunch of cool Brazilians, and sometimes we’d watch TV together and chat. Those times were as good as anything.

  But other days he was drunk. I have horrible images in my mind, and when I got a bit older, I’d get into rows with him. I didn’t back down like my brother. I’d tell him, “You drink too much, Dad,” and we had huge fights, completely senseless sometimes, to be honest. I’d argue even though I could see that he’d just scream back, “I’ll kick you out,” and stuff like that. But I wanted to show that I could stick up for myself, and sometimes the noise was unbearable.

  But he never laid a hand on me, not once. Well, one time he picked me up six feet in the air and chucked me onto the bed, only because I’d been mean to Sanela, the apple of his eye. Basically he was the nicest person in the world, and I understand now that he hadn’t had it easy. “He drinks to drown his sorrows,” my brother said, and that might not have been the whole truth. But the war hit him really hard.

  The war was an odd thing altogether. I was never allowed to find out anything about it. I was shielded. Everybody tried really hard. I didn’t even understand why Mum and my sisters dressed in black. It was completely incomprehensible, like a sudden fad. But it was Grandma who had died in a bombing raid in Croatia, and they were all in mourning – everybody but me, who wasn’t allowed to know and would never care whether people were Serbs or Bosnians or whatever. But my dad had it worst.

  He came from Bijelina in Bosnia. He’d been a bricklayer down there, and his whole family and all his old friends lived in that town, and suddenly all hell had broken loose. Bijelina was being raped, more or less, and it was no wonder he started calling himself a Muslim again, not at all. The Serbs invaded the town and executed hundreds of Muslims. I think he knew a lot of them, and his entire extended family was forced to flee. The whole population of Bijelina was replaced, with Serbs moving into the empty houses, including into Dad’s old place. Somebody else just went in and took over the house, and I can totally understand that he had no time for me, when he would sit all evening waiting for the TV news or a phone call from down there. The war consumed him, and he became obsessed with monitoring the course of events. He sat on his own and drank and mourned and listened to his Yugo music, and I made sure I stayed outdoors or headed over to Mum’s. Mum’s was another world.

  At Dad’s it was just me and him. At Mum’s it was a three-ring circus. People came and went, and there were loud voices and noises. Mum had moved five stories up in the same street, at Cronmans Väg 5A, to the floor above Auntie Hanife, or Hanna as I called her. Keki, Sanela and I were really close. We made a pact. But there was a load of shit going on at Mum’s as well. My half-sister was getting deeper into drugs, and Mum would jump every time the phone rang or there was a knock at the door – like, please, no. Haven’t we had enough disasters? What now? She grew old before her time, and completely fanatical against any type of illegal substances. Not long ago at all, I mean these days, she rang me up, absolutely hysterical: “There’s drugs in the fridge.”

  “My God, drugs!” I got worked up as well. Like, not again. I rang Keki, really aggressive: “What the hell, there are drugs in Mum’s fridge!” He didn’t get what was going on, but then a light went on. It was snus – Swedish chewing tobacco – she was talking about.

  “Take it easy, Mum, it’s only snus.”

  “Same shit,” she said.

  Those years had really left their mark on her, and I’m sure we ought to have been nicer in those days. But we hadn’t learnt things like that. We only knew how to be tough. My half-sister with the drug problem had moved out early on, and was in and out of treatment clinics, but always went back on the shit. Finally, Mum broke off contact with her, or it was a mutual thing. I don’t really know all the background information. It was really tough anyway, but that’s a character trait in our family. We’re dramatic and hold grudges and say things like, “I never want to see you again!”

  Anyway, I remember one time when I was visiting my sister with the drugs in her own little apartment. It might have been my birthday. I think it was. She had bought some presents. She was kind, even with everything else. But then I was about to head to the toilet, and she leapt up and stopped me. No, no, she yelled, running in and clearing up in there. I could tell something was wrong, like there was some secret. There was a lot of stuff like that. But like I said, they kept that away from me, and I had my own stuff, my bikes and my football, and my dreams about Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali. I wanted to be like them.

  Dad had a brother back in former Yugoslavia. His name was Sabahudin, but he was called Sapko and my older brother was named after him. Sabahudin was a boxer – a real talent. He fought for the Radnički boxing club in the town of Kragujevac and won the Yugoslavian championship with his club and was selected for the national team. But in 1967 when he was newly married, and only twenty-three, he went swimming in the Neretva River where there were strong currents and stuff, and I think he had a defect in his heart or lungs. He was pulled under water and drowned, and you can just imagine. That was a hard blow for the family, and after that Dad became something of a fanatic. He had all the big matches recorded on video, and it wasn’t just Sabahudin on those videocassettes, but Ali, Foreman and Tyson, and then all the Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies as well.

  That’s what we would watch when we were hanging out in front of the TV. Swedish TV was nothing to write home about. It just didn’t register. I was 20 years old before I saw my first Swedish film, and I didn’t have a clue about any Swedish heroes or sporting figures, like Ingemar Stenmark or anybody. But Ali, I knew! What a legend! He did things his own way, no matter what people said. He didn’t make excuses, and I’ve never forgotten that. That guy was cool. That’s the way I wanted to be, and I imitated some of his things, like “I am the greatest”. You needed to have a tough attitude in Rosengård, and if you heard anybody talking trash – the worst was to be called a pussy – you couldn’t back down.

  But most of the time we didn’t have any rows. You don’t shit on your own doorstep, as we used to say. It was more a matter of us in Rosengård against everybody else. I was there, watching and yelling at those racists who march every year on the 30th of November to commemorate the death of Sweden’s King Charles XII, the ‘warrior king’. And once at the Malmö Festival, I saw a whole mob of blokes from Rosengård, like two hundred of them, going after one guy. That didn’t look too great, if I’m honest. But because they were blokes from my estate I went over to join in with them, and I don’t think that guy was feeling too clever afterwards. We were cocky and wild, all of us. But sometimes it wasn’t that easy to be tough.

  When Dad and I lived by the Stenkula school I would often stay round at Mum’s till late, and then I would have to walk home through a dark tunnel that passes under a major road. A number of years earlier my dad had got mugged and badly beaten up there, and he ended up in hospital with a collapsed lung. I often thought about that, even though I didn’t want to, of
course. The more I repressed it, the more it would surface, and in the same area there was a railway line and a highway. There’s also an ugly alleyway and a few bushes and two lamp-posts: one just before the tunnel and one right after. Otherwise it was dark, with really bad vibes. So the lamp-posts became my landmarks. I would run like a madman between them with my heart pounding, thinking, “I bet there’s some dodgy guys standing inside there, like the ones who attacked Dad.” The whole time I’d be thinking frantically, if I just run fast enough it’ll be all right, and I always came home out of breath, not a bit like Muhammad Ali.

  Another time Dad took Sanela and me to go swimming at Arlöv, and afterwards I was at a friend’s place. When I was about to leave, it started raining. It was pouring down, and I cycled home like an idiot in the rain and stumbled in, completely soaked. We were living in Zenitgatan then, some distance from Rosengård, and I was in a bad way. I was shaking and had pains in my stomach. I was in incredible pain. I couldn’t move. I lay curled up in bed. I threw up. I had a seizure. I was freaking out.

  Dad came in, and of course, he is the way he is, and his fridge was empty and he drank too much. But when it really comes down to it, there’s no one like him, and he phoned for a taxi and picked me up in the only position I could lie in, sort of like a little prawn, and he carried me down to the car. I was as light as a feather in those days. Dad was big and strong and completely beside himself: he was a lion again and he yelled at the driver – it was a woman: “He’s my boy, he is everything to me, to hell with the Highway Code, I’ll pay the fines, I’ll sort it with the police,” and the woman, she did as he said. She ran two red lights and we made it to the children’s ward at Malmö General Hospital. The whole situation had become acute, as I understand it. I was going to have an injection in my back, and Dad had heard some crap about people who had been paralysed by that kind of thing, and I guess he really tore into the staff. He would go on a rampage through the whole city if anything went wrong.