a gun clapped their hands over their ears. A thin haze spread around them, carrying the acrid and almost arousing smell of burnt gunpowder, airborne dust, and a hint of something metallic.
The intensity dropped a notch, to a persistent ta-ta-ta of firing. Some wanted to learn something, others just to shoot. Although they stood at only thirty meters, many shots landed in the dirt in front of the targets.
“Did I hit?”
“Not even close.”
Then things grew calmer. The most enthusiastic had emptied their magazines, pressing their triggers in disbelief a few extra times before lowering their weapons. The sergeant who’d volunteered to lead the shooting was trying to say something, but he was constantly interrupted by those who had bullets left. A few still flinched with every shot they fired.
There was silence for a while. In some of the paper soldiers, light shone through the holes of the hits.
“Should we check the targets?” asked one soldier.
“Of course,” said Hansson.
“There isn’t a single hole in the one mine shot at,” said another soldier. “Can you believe it?”
“I bet your barrel is warped,” the man next to him joked. He got no answer.
“Well then,” said the sergeant, “all weapons down, while we check the targets.”
Most went to see how they’d done, though a few lacked the energy to walk the thirty meters.
In the next round, the pace was slower. Most of the Djiboutians were still anxious, but the khat and the heat had their effect. There was a kind of low-key disorder: scattered shots and then suddenly one shooter managed to switch to automatic fire and get off a good round. One Swede winced and covered his head; others just looked at their watches.
They could have stopped right there.
But the sergeant was feeling ambitious. “We’ll mark again, and then a final round. Don’t we have a little ammunition left?” He got no response. Mr. Nazir looked at Slunga, silently asking to end things. But now it was Slunga who pretended not to see.
“Well then,” said Hansson. “One more time.”
“All weapons down,” the sergeant reminded them.
Half the men went up to the cardboard figures. One of the Africans smiled broadly and pointed to his sweet spot. All his shots were clustered in the chest of the paper soldier. He shouted to the others in Somali. “Rambo-man,” someone said back.
“It’s always like this,” said a Swede. “They can, if they want to.”
“Sure, one by one,” replied someone.
“Put the tape on.”
“I don’t want to do this, I want a beer.”
“Tape!”
They spread out to put black patches over the holes.
A bang.
Everyone at the shooting range jumped, looking around in fear, even those who’d stayed lazily in the back with their weapons. It took several seconds before they realized that a shot had been fired.
“No!”
One man’s shadow missing in the afternoon sun.
Lieutenant Per-Erik Slunga lay flat and motionless on his stomach. The dry sand soaked up the blood that streamed from his head.
Ernst Grip suffered from insomnia. He never got to bed before midnight. He’d sworn to himself that he’d turn in at a reasonable hour, but then when it came time to get ready, a bad feeling would come over him, or else he’d just sit there. Right there, until the clock said past two in the morning, the hours sifting away like sand. Simply gone. So it was, night after night. Up for work the next morning, no more than four or five hours of sleep in the bank. At the end of the week, he wasn’t all there. Everything felt fuzzy. He ate badly and often had headaches. The world was just something that went on outside the thick glass that surrounded him. And so it had been, for almost a year.
Or more accurately, since June 5 of the past year. It was at about eleven in the evening when Benjamin Hayden had died. Around eleven—it was always hard to decide which was the last breath, when there was barely any breathing at all. To Grip, Benjamin had only ever been Ben. It was just them in the room. For more than two days, the vigil had gone on. Hour after hour, Grip had struggled with his conflicting emotions, from his powerful desire to keep Ben with him, to the hope that he would finally let go. Hours of silent tears, comforting words—both for the dying and for himself—along with small confessions and the desire for forgiveness for any wrongs that still gnawed at him.
From Ben, in return, came nothing more than barely perceptible breathing. He’d gotten dehydrated and thin as a thousand-year-old mummy over the past few months. Watching his decline and hearing his sighs had been painful for Grip. Those last weeks, when he barely stuck out from the sheets, had been disturbing. It was more than just the idea of a corpse, it was the tangible presence of death. He saw his own impotence in Ben’s withered figure. There was not the slightest thing he could do to reverse the direction. Death would triumph and told him so. Powerlessness was a condition Ernst Grip despised, as much in himself as in others. Being a victim. And here, there were two. When he thought about it, he told himself that he wanted to remember the way Ben had been before, and that this was his understandable excuse for looking in the other direction the next time the body was exposed. But even though he was ashamed, he turned away.
For there were still traces of life in Ben: in the heat of his hand, in the squinting, brief glances that occasionally rose out of the fog of death. As long as he was able to look up, he saw Grip. He stared Ernst Grip straight in the eye. Seven years they’d been together, seven years to a greater or lesser extent defined by his illness. Ben belonged to the group of gay men who’d held on long enough for the dramatic arrival of antiretroviral drugs in 1996. But by the time help finally arrived, the disease had already made deep inroads. The virus wasn’t defeated, though Ben’s decline was less steep. In the last year, he’d been in and out of hospitals, at first just a few days at a time, and then, toward the end, he couldn’t stay in the apartment in Chelsea more than an occasional long weekend. They went from the joy of a life together to a split in their roles. One who was dying, the other who looked on—and who had to deal with everything that life involved.
Grip yo-yoed between Stockholm and New York. Torn between the desire to take care of and to be with, and the need to work all the overtime he could get in order to pay the bills of his dying lover in Manhattan. For despite it all, Ben wanted to have health care, good doctors always nearby. He’d endured it for so many years, survived so many of his friends, not always out of love of life as much as his all-consuming fear of death. It was fear that had kept Ben alive. But the stream of hospital bills was also an excuse.
Grip’s trips to Stockholm weren’t just about duty and money; they became a way for him to breathe. Not just to be there for someone else, watching and standing by, but to be himself. Himself. To work, to take something on, to do some good. To hear people laugh at a clumsy joke, to get angry with someone without having
