Kira and I broke up again in Spring 2007. It would be easier for me if she just stayed away for good. That being said, we still hung out from time to time hoping to preserve some semblance of a friendship.
I was with Kira and her friend Tina one night, I gave one of their mutual friends a ride home in my BMW. Kira had a license, but she was always too scared to drive. Tina, on the other hand, was always eager to grab the wheel. Tina and I were joking around, and Kira thought that we were enjoying ourselves a little too much for her taste.
“You have more fun with Tina than you do with me, and I get jealous, Sleiman,” she said. Then she started hitting me and saying that she didn’t want me to hang out with Tina anymore.
I was pissed. “You know what, Kira? If this is the way it’s gonna be, then I don’t think we should be hanging out anymore!”
She started crying, and when I dropped her off, she was still crying.
Almost exactly a month later, Kira called me again. This time, I was in the hospital, doped up on morphine after being shot four times.
At four o’clock in the afternoon on September 5, 2007, I was sitting at the Italian restaurant in the shopping mall Field’s in Copenhagen with twelve other high-ranking or elite members of the Bekir Boys. Despite the hatred, internal power struggles, the distrust, and the jealousy, the Bekir Boys finally agreed it was time to make peace with all of their enemies, us included.
The so-called Bekir Boys finally wanted to cease their conflicts with Ishøj, Taastrupgaard, and Black Cobra and sought freedom from Bekir’s regime. Bekir wasn’t there to protest or scare the others into changing their minds, as he was out of the country and none of his representatives were at the table either.
While the general public and the police knew them as the Bekir Boys largely due to the press and the local media, they never used that name to describe themselves because Bekir was hardly ever there when they conducted their daily business. Unfortunately, even though Bekir wasn’t physically present, his spirit still hovered over the group.
We felt it was time that Bekir decided if he wanted peace or to end it once and for all with Samir and his family, and Black Cobra. The rest of us were tired of the conflict. The cops were after us, we were losing our lives, our money, our cars, everything. I had lost my business and my house and the whole life I had built for myself. I had lost all of that to the group. It was time to put an end to it. It was time to live.
I wasn’t as close as I used to be with my old friends Erion, Argon, Jamil, Baasim, and Omar. I began to run around with two other guys from the crew called Pepe and Lefty instead. We thought the war with Black Cobra had lasted so long that we had almost forgotten how it had even begun. We were very inspired by General Sun Tzu and his thoughts on the art of war. Especially the part about how, if you fight an enemy for too long, both grow accustomed to each other’s methods. So, if you fight the same enemy for too long, you start to adjust to each other’s strategies and then nobody wins.
The younger guys who had entered the group also refused to just adopt this war. I was the only one left from the old guard. The rest of the group I was rolling with most of the time were newcomers.
A rumor was spreading around town. Supposedly, it was a guy they called The Mexican who had started it. The Mexican was close to Black Cobra, and he claimed that Bekir and my brother-in-law Karim had made peace with Black Cobra without telling the rest of the Bekir Boys. If that were true, it could be considered treason and possibly shatter the newly recovered harmony between us. In order to find out if there was any shred of truth to this rumor, I spent a couple of weeks searching for The Mexican.
When we left the restaurant, we found out that The Mexican happened to be working out at the shopping mall’s gym, and I went in to have a word with him. I asked him to join me outside.
“Why should I come outside? I’m way outnumbered,” The Mexican said.
“I just want to talk to you. Just me and you. Forget about the other guys. I’ll be the only one talking to you,” I said.
When The Mexican agreed to come out, I asked him the question that everything hinged on: “Did you tell people that Bekir and Karim made peace with Black Cobra behind our backs?”
“That’s what I heard,” he shot back.
“Who told you?” I asked.
“Samir.”
I paused for a minute before continuing with my line of questioning. “I don’t fuckin’ believe that. Can you point out Bekir and Karim?”
The Mexican had no idea who Karim was, nor did he know Bekir personally. He was only repeating what he was supposedly told by Samir to anyone else who would listen.
“If you don’t even know who they are, how can you know if they made peace?”
The Mexican didn’t answer the question.
“You need to mind your own business,” I told him. I was getting frustrated at the thought that everything we were trying to build might fall apart due to the gossip of a nobody, so The Mexican and I started fighting.
“Samir told me, I swear on my mother’s grave,” he said.
“Come on, Sleiman! Cut it out!” some of the others shouted and pulled me away before I did something I might regret later.
The Mexican ran out of the mall, and I decided not to follow him, as I had already said my piece. I just wanted to go home to Askerød. The others in the group advised against it because, having gone after The Mexican, it was highly probable that a counterattack would be waiting for me if I went back. I didn’t care about the consequences ’cause as far as I saw it, I had done it for the group. I felt like I was fighting for something.
Against everyone’s advice, I drove back home to Askerød. Later, I was standing in the parking lot, contemplating my next move, when I spotted Kira’s car, but I didn’t see her around anywhere. I was a bit disappointed, so in order to salvage my night, I borrowed a James Bond DVD from one of the neighborhood kids. It was Die Another Day.
I walked home, and when I stepped into my apartment, my little sister Alaa was visiting from Århus. Our mother asked me to stay awhile. “Let’s have tea. It’s been a long time since we had tea and cheese,” she said.
Back when we were a real family, eating my mother’s homemade cheese was one of my favorite things in the world. My night has turned around after all, I thought to myself. “All right, let’s do it.”
I barely had time to sit down before the phone rang. It was a girl named Maja. The two of us used to have a thing, but I, of course, screwed her over. She was salty that I had chosen Kira over her. I was afraid she wanted to hang, but instead, Maja asked me if she could borrow cash. I said yes and agreed to bring her the money.
She was standing in the parking lot by the clubhouse where the Bekir Boys usually hung out. When I came down, two of her girlfriends were with her. Now Maja had changed her mind, and she wanted to buy weed from me. I didn’t have any on me, so I gave her the address of another dealer. Then the two other girls got in their car, peeled out, and left Maja behind. There was something strange about the whole meeting, and I asked Maja what the hell was going on.
“Where are your friends going? Aren’t you going with them?”
She glanced over my shoulder. “Are those your friends over there? Do you know them?”
I turned around to see whom she was referring to. From the heart of Askerød, roughly twenty-five guys came running toward me. Maja had been a diversion to lure me out in the open, and she could’ve been sent by a number of people I was presently at odds with.
Five minutes later, I was lying on the ground in front of the clubhouse, smoking a cigarette like Solid Snake, covered in blood after being shot four times. I was surrounded by paramedics who were feverishly working on me and telling me to put my cigarette out. Then my phone rang. I picked up. It was Kira.
A paramedic leaned over me, trying to find the bullet in my stomach. No luck. He wanted to give me laughing gas to relieve the pain, but I declined.
“You’re an idiot,” the paramedic said. At that point, however, he must have realized that I was going to survive because he couldn’t help laughing at the title of the DVD with the bullet holes in it: Die Another Day. He thought it was fuckin’ hilarious.
The place was swarming with doctors. They checked the reflexes in my legs and toes to determine if the bullets had left me paralyzed, but my limbs were functioning just fine. I was freezing, though. Later, they moved me to a warmer room.”
I always thought there was a price to be paid for the life I led. I had proven my loyalty. I had come close to killing in the name of the group, and now I had almost died for it. I was always on the front line, but I had never been shot or severely injured before this night.
Some people suspected that I was secretly on Black Cobra’s side or that I had an alliance with one of the biker gangs. At least, that was the rumor that was circulating. Others suspected me of making a killing doing business on my own without including the group. After this, how could you possibly question my loyalty?
Kira kept calling, but I didn’t feel like talking to her. Later, the police came in to question me. “Who shot you?” they asked.
“I don’t know who shot me. I didn’t see. They all looked like dwarves, and they were wearing masks.”
“You’re lying, Sleiman. You’re full of shit. We know who it was, and we know it was Black Cobra. We have wiretaps.”
“Well, then do your job. I can’t help you.”
“Who shot you?” the police asked again.
I gave my same answer: “It was a dwarf!”
The police left the hospital, but the next day, the criminal investigation department returned. “Who shot you?” they asked.
“A group of dwarves wearing masks,” I responded. Stick to the story.
“Listen up, Sleiman. We just want to put an end to this conflict. It started with you, and now it’s going to end with you,” the cop said.
I remained consistent. “They were dwarves!”
I obeyed the code of the streets. I didn’t want to involve the police, but I had no intention of backing down either. That morning, I had been an advocate of peace. By the time the night was over, things had changed.
All through the night, Kira kept calling me. She desperately wanted to visit, but I refused to talk to her. When she finally managed to get through, her voice broke as soon as she heard my name. I was hurt because in all the time we had been together, I had never heard Kira cry straight from the heart. She had lied to me and said that she wanted to have kids with me while she was secretly on the pill. Now suddenly, she was saying all the things I had always longed to hear. She wanted to move in with me. She wanted to have kids with me. She wasn’t gonna let her parents control her anymore. I almost cried as well. Was that what it took? Did I have to almost die before she realized that I was good enough for her?
“Oh, so now that I’m almost dead, you want kids,” I said, and once again, I was an asshole.
Then she said, “Shut up, you big idiot! I’m coming to visit you at the hospital.”
Kira did come, and for probably the first time, we had something resembling a healthy, adult relationship. She bathed me, pushed me around in my wheelchair, and told me how much she loved me. It was the polar opposite of our previous chaotic dynamic.
Even with Kira by my side while I was on the mend, I was aching to go to war. I didn’t even care if it cost me my life this time. I was discharged from the hospital prematurely because I wanted to go home to Askerød and show everyone I was still alive. In the war I was about to enter, there was no room for Kira. While I loved her more than anything, I also began to wonder if it wasn’t better to let her go so that she could live her own life. I began to question if the life I was living was the right one for her.
When I was discharged from the hospital, Kira followed me to my apartment. Later that night, she was walking home, but she was afraid to go alone, so we talked on the phone the entire way.
“Sleiman, I’m coming over tomorrow, and then I want to talk about our life together. The people you call friends are not your friends, and what you call a life is no life,” she told me.
Kira came over the next day and helped me down the stairs so that I could go for a walk around Askerød. After we hobbled around the block for a while, she helped me up the stairs to my apartment. We talked about how she had always been torn between me and her family. If she chose me, she lost them, and if she chose them, she lost me. She told me she was ready now. Somehow, she was going to make it all work. I began to wonder if she was really serious about wanting to finally settle down, and I started to get worried. There’s no place for love in war.
The next day, Kira was supposed to compete in a dance competition in Slovenia, but for the first time, she was willing to cancel. “You need me,” she said.
I insisted that she go. I made her think that when she finally returned, we would become a real couple. If there’s one thing I regret, it’s not telling her that I was sorry for being cruel to her. It was a terrible goodbye. A goodbye filled with grief because it felt like she knew what I was doing. For many years, I had treated her like a substitute for Anna.
The next day, Kira went to Slovenia. She texted me constantly, hoping to receive passionate and loving texts in return. They were never reciprocated, but she kept sending them, nonetheless. I texted her back, but there was no passion in my messages. When she got to Slovenia, she called me up. I promised to call and write her, but I didn’t. I was already sowing the seeds of war. I was walking around the block to prove to everyone that I was still alive.
After two days with no correspondence from me, Kira called and said, “Sleiman! Don’t tell my parents that you’re the one who got shot because I told them that it wasn’t you. If they find out it was you, they’re never gonna let me come back to you.”
I promised her I wouldn’t tell. Immediately after I hung up the phone, I called her mother. I told her that I was the one who had been shot and that Kira shouldn’t come back to me because it was too dangerous. I said, “Susanne, make sure she doesn’t come back to me. I promise you I won’t contact her again. Just make sure she never contacts me.”
Kira’s mother was grateful that I cared enough to be honest with her. “Thank you, Sleiman. I’m really sorry you were shot, but it means the world to me that you’re doing this.”
That was the first time I felt like Kira’s mother thought I was a good man. Her parents had always told me, “We don’t wish you harm, and we want you to have a happy life. Just not with our daughter.”
Later that day, Kira called me up again. “You’re a bastard, Sleiman! You’ve killed us, and we’ll never get back together.”
It was over. I no longer needed to worry about Kira. I could focus on the coming war. The final stage of the game had just begun.