Three evenings, he could do that. He of all people did not want to miss out on being part of the council’s integration work. He stood up to go; he had to get to football practice.
Lene had drawn up a list of those she thought would work well together. Simon would be paired with three different people, one each evening. A boy from Somalia, a boy from Afghanistan and a girl from Ethiopia.
A few days later she rang him again.
‘Could you just drop in with your tax details?’ she said.
‘Tax details?’ exclaimed Simon. ‘Am I getting paid for this?’
It was a great job, in fact. Not very much homework was done, though.
‘How can I get to know some Norwegian girls?’ was one of the first things Mehdi asked him.
‘Well, it’s like this…’ said Simon with a smile. The three hours passed in a flash.
Mehdi turned up faithfully to every Monday-evening session. The two boys were the same age, born only a few months apart. Simon into his family of teachers in Kirkenes, Mehdi into a farming family in Wardak Province, Afghanistan.
His grandfather had been a major tribal leader in the wide circle round the old king Zahir Shah, who was deposed in a communist-supported coup in 1973. That was the start of the family’s downfall. The next catastrophe was the Soviet invasion of 1979, which led to the killing of 1.5 million Afghans.
In 1992, the year Mehdi was born, civil war broke out between warlords hungry for power. After four years the men with the black turbans were the victors. Mehdi came from the Hazara people; the Taliban showed no mercy to the Hazaras and engaged in ethnic cleansing of towns and villages.
Like most people in Wardak, Mehdi’s parents could neither read nor write. They kept animals, but much of their grazing land was taken from them by the Taliban. Mehdi and his brother were sent to the madrasah while their four sisters were kept at home.
‘When you can read, people respect you,’ Mehdi’s father told him. ‘Read and grow wise.’ At school they had their heads filled first and foremost with religion. The teachers were an extended arm of the Taliban.
The boys learned about the godless foreigners who had occupied their country. The foreigners wanted to destroy Afghan culture, to crush Islam. ‘In Europe, the women go about half naked,’ they were told.
But Mehdi did not entirely trust his teachers. He had grown up with stories of what the Pashtuns had done to his people in the past. They wanted to be rid of the Hazaras and took their land, he had heard. He also knew that in earlier times people in the region had worshipped Buddha. He had heard that the Taliban had blown up two enormous thousand-year-old Buddha statues in the neighbouring province of Bamyan because they were naked. They wanted to destroy everything that was not in line with the true teaching of Islam.
Just before Mehdi’s ninth birthday, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Barely a month after the terrorist attack, America began its bombing raids on his country. The Taliban fled from Wardak Province to Pakistan and the Hazaras could hold up their heads once more. But within a few years the Islamists were trickling back and inciting the people to resist the Western occupiers. They started recruiting soldiers from among the local farmers to fight the international forces. From 2008 onwards Wardak Province was again under de facto Taliban control. The men with the black turbans advanced across the country. They came to recruit Mehdi and his brother. Their father refused. But he knew that if they had come once, they would always come back. How long could he go on refusing?
He sold land and cattle.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘Go to Europe. Find a better life than the one we have here. War could break out again, any time now. In Europe, there’s no war,’ his father said. ‘People are given everything they need there, you can go to school, you get books… it’s a democracy there.’
It was a word Mehdi had heard many times on the radio. But he had no idea what it meant.
Before long the two brothers were sitting on the back of a truck on their way to Kabul. From there, they took a bus to the border with Pakistan. Then they walked, drove and took to the saddle, reaching Iran, Turkey, Greece…
‘Don’t talk to anyone on the trip,’ their father had impressed on them. ‘Don’t make friends with anyone before you get there.’
Mehdi told his story to Simon in dribs and drabs over the course of the year.
Squeezed under the driver’s seat of a long-distance lorry, he had finally reached Oslo.
‘It is a big place with nice cars, lots of girls and beautiful buildings like the Oslo City shopping centre,’ Mehdi told Simon. ‘The thing I longed to see was what the women looked like,’ he smiled. His dreams had been of discos, ladies and dancing.
For a couple of weeks they were in paradise. But in November 2009, when Mehdi was seventeen, the brothers were sent to an asylum centre in Finnsnes, a small place north of Salangen.
It was dark and dismal. They felt trapped. Both suffered from severe depression and regretted having ever made the journey. At least in Afghanistan there was sun.
The brothers were in perpetual conflict with the staff and sabotaged the centre’s usual procedures. They were meant to keep their room clean and scrub the corridor once a week. They refused to do so. At home, their mother and sisters had done all the cleaning. It was beneath their dignity; it was humiliating.
Mehdi’s brother threw down the scrubbing brush and emptied a bucket of water over a female assistant at the centre. Was she going to stand there watching him scrub the floor? Why couldn’t she do it herself?
It was all unfair and so bloody stupid. But whenever they rang their parents, they told them how great everything was, what a nice place they lived in, how much they had learned at school. They wanted their parents to believe their money had been well spent.
Eventually the elder brother was sent south and Mehdi got a place at the asylum centre in Salangen. Life seemed less of a trial. Even if it was not like hanging out in Oslo City and watching the girls, maybe things would still work out for him up here in the north.
But, ‘The Norwegian girls are scared of me,’ Mehdi complained.
Simon advised him to go easy. Let things take their time.
Easy enough for him to say. From Monday to Monday he disappeared out of Mehdi’s life to all his other activities: to conferences, duties and tasks, football practice, skiing and ski jumping, his family and girlfriend. While Mehdi waited for Simon from 9 p.m. each Monday to 6 p.m. the following Monday.
For Simon it was a job, for Mehdi it was clutching at straws.
After the last homework session of the summer, Simon took him along to Millionfisken, the annual festival where you could win a million kroner if you caught a fish of a certain size, decided by Lloyd’s of London. Nobody had ever won the million.
‘If I hold hands with someone, does it mean she’s my girlfriend?’ asked Mehdi. Simon just laughed.
‘How many beers will I have to drink before my head feels hot?’ Mehdi went on.
‘I reckon you’ll have to find that out for yourself,’ answered Simon.
After four beers, Mehdi was pinching girls’ bottoms, pointing at Simon and grinning.
‘Not like that Mehdi. Not like that!’ Simon shook his head. But Mehdi did not hear. It was the first time since he came to Salangen that he just felt happy, thoroughly happy. He was a young guy at a festival and he didn’t want to be anywhere else. He felt so cool being with Simon. So cool and hot and happy.
‘Don’t make friends with anyone before you get there,’ his father had said.
Well, now he was there.