from Radio Yerevan
(Radio Yerevan)
by Zara Uzun Kjellner
Translated by Nichola Smalley
Serra came to Berlin for the nights and the music, but she feels lost in the city. Jila plays by the motorway in Yetmis bes and thinks about Stockholm and the dragon in Tantolunden. Emine’s daughters tell each other savage stories, and before long Sanliurfa has grown too small for their imaginings. From Bochum, Zerya tries to get in touch with Serra, her sister, who seems to have disappeared in Berlin. Their mother repeatedly calls a German call centre in Turkey, convinced that the boy she talks to could help her find her daughter, but Sirwan and his friends would rather meet at Starbucks and plot their escape.
Flickering screens, spotlights sweeping across nightclub interiors. The ether is overflowing with jingles and lonely cries...
Tantolunden, Stockholm, Sweden
In Tantolunden the great dragon breathes fire night and day. The smoke coils around the open mouth. Late one night someone is leaning against the dragon, falling asleep and waking from the moon and the cold. Then the sun rises and the children return with their loud shrieks. They all want to climb up on the dragon’s back and they cling to the big beast as time careens around them, their parents grow older and their child’s legs grow fast. One day, one of them is gone and no one notices. After a while it’s like Jila was never there.
[...]
Bochum, Germany
It’s not that Zerya doesn’t miss her sister, of course she misses her sister, she just doesn’t know what this forest smell that comes out of Hans’s mouth has to do with Serra, this smell that seems to pull her into herself, that resembles nothing she’s ever known before and makes her want to lie beside him always, breathing, half-sleeping, half-dreaming, half-thinking about the assorted things that pass through her mind, things to do with their future, with Bochum and the forest beyond it that seems to have stuck to Hans, making him smell so fresh all the time. Zerya has begun to think that Hans’s rosy cheeks must be hereditary, that it would be almost a crime not to pass his rosy cheeks on, so she climbs up onto him, waking him; he too is half-asleep but he wakes, holds on to her, and she’s still in her dream, can barely see him because the dream of him is so strong, so all-encompassing and monumental, and when she’s done she slides back down onto her side again, lays her head back on his chest and it’s as though time is bendy and elastic: as long as they are in bed it will never end. After a while she hears Hans’s breathing grow deeper, he is sleeping heavily, out for the count. She lies beside him, her pulse still high, and it’s then that Serra finds her way into her thoughts. The only thing that helps is having Hans inside her constantly. As soon as he withdraws, up she pops, her absent sister.
Several months have passed and the Bochum they came to no longer exists.
Zerya has changed but Serra wasn’t capable of changing in the way Germany wanted them to change. Serra refused to wear less make-up, refused to smile at strangers or show an interest in the cathedral at the centre of the city or the gigs at the student bar. Serra refused to do any of the things demanded of her and now she’s disappeared. Zerya goes through those final days in her head, something she’s done so many times the thought patterns are already laid out like a map and she can simply move around in those hours. At four p.m. on the seventh of January when Serra stopped answering the phone, the call was still going through – later it wouldn’t, but at that point the call was still being placed and Zerya thought that Serra must be out on one of those endless walks she always took, in the little wood she insisted on calling ‘enormous’ and had being trying to drag Zerya along to ever since they came, the one that led down to the big lake that never seemed to freeze properly despite the raw cold that was so different to the cold at home. Or, she had thought to begin with, Serra was sitting bent over her phone in one of Bochum’s awful cafes. She’d told Serra about the nicer place by the university plenty of times, but Serra insisted on going to the dive where the taxi drivers and the old men of the neighbourhood went. Zerya pictured the dark hair hanging over her face, the green eyes locked on the screen, her breathing the same as it used to be when she was a child, halting, as though she was experiencing such a powerful sensation that she forgot to fill her lungs with air, then suddenly inhaling so deeply it sounded like she’d been about to asphyxiate. Zerya imagined Serra sitting, listening to the brain-dead music she’d started listening to after her years in Istanbul. Zerya has tried to get her out, told her she has to, that it’s not on, the way she doesn’t make the slightest effort, that it was as though Zerya’s own efforts to blend in at university lost momentum with Serra doing nothing but mope around. Their plan to leave everything and move to Germany required them both to do their best to be Germans, but if Serra refused, she might as well go back. If she didn’t find herself a job in the next three months, she’d have to go back anyway, but Zerya had her exchange and the university. She had all these new students with names like Hans, Dieter, Line and other completely impossible combinations of letters, sleek names pronounced at the very front of one’s mouth, but however hard she tried, a gurgle always found its way in. Those first evenings, she and Serra had sat on the mattress and laughed so hard they could barely draw breath at German and Germans. But during the day she didn’t know what Serra got up to. She herself went to the glass buildings for her classes. She had lectures and presentations and when, at the end of the first week in college, Line had told her about a party that was happening, Zerya had been intending to invite Serra but she wasn’t at home and so, after calling and calling, she’d given up and gone alone.
She’d got to the party early with Line, who said it was important to be there early, before people got drunk, and Zerya couldn’t help wondering what happened later, what the biblical figures of the Ruhr University might get up to after nightfall. Line with her blonde hair. Jürgen with his ice-blue eyes. Thran with his small hands. Zerya couldn’t imagine any of them even slightly drunk. It was their seriousness, the way they nodded, affirming each other the whole time. As soon as anyone in the group spoke, the others fell silent. They were constantly seeking eye contact, and during those first days, she sometimes struggled to speak. It was the searing look in their eyes. She wished she could say, ‘stop staring at me’, but instead she just tried to formulate sentences in flawless German and whenever anyone asked her about Kurdistan she just changed the subject.
When they got to the party at the appointed time, the house was empty, the bowls of crisps on the tables untouched, and the bottles still cold. They were given glasses of sweet sekt and they settled on the sofa. The host, whose name Zerya didn’t catch, was dressed in a big dress that concealed her entirely and was emblazoned with zebra stripes that criss-crossed her abdomen and made her look like an animal puffing out its chest. She’d created a jungle in her home, the weeds growing across her walls and ceiling. Ivy half-covered one window and there were pots of various sizes everywhere, which made it hard to move through the room. Zerya tried to talk to a guy whose German was quiet and unintelligible, but she did so from behind a fern. She tried lip-reading, but however she arranged her body, the green fronds got in the way. In the end she gave up, excused herself and went out onto the balcony for a smoke. The sky was clear and full of stars, and just like everywhere in Bochum, it smelled of forest and petrol and cleaning fluid. She stood there a while, just breathing, but was interrupted by a low, masculine voice. ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ he asked in a German that seemed to issue from the forest, deep and clear. She turned around, nodded and smiled, and Hans smiled, and they stood there in the dark darkness and smiled.
[...]
It’s impossible to leave the bed. He strokes her hair and calls her Prinzessin. To begin with, he touched her cautiously, as though he were afraid of going to far, but with time he has become more forceful, harder, and Zerya imagines the blood flowing through his body, fresh blood full of oxygen, bright red. She fantasises about the big organs in his body, all working together; Hans’s muscular physique without the slightest flaw, everything in perfect harmony, and she’s read about the Third Reich, the genocide, eugenics, skull measurements. She’s read about the crimes against humanity and though it isn’t Hans’s fault, it was with men like Hans that Hitler wanted to build his Reich and sometimes when they sleep together Zerya starts drifting off into these images. Hans becomes the executioner, he is pure strength and she lets herself get sucked in, lets him open her up. She wants to be completely and utterly filled with Hans, she has found her way in, soon she’ll be in there, soon, all the way inside Germany. And that’s why it takes a long time before she starts to worry about Serra in earnest. It’s only after a week has passed that she contacts Serra’s German phone network to find out whether they can trace her phone. It’s their mother Xelat’s idea. Serra is always on her phone, so of course it has to be possible to track her down, but when she calls they just say sorry, ‘es tut mir leid’, it’s illegal to share that kind of information. The line keeps breaking up and she can hardly hear anything. It sounds like the person on the other end of the line is very far away, so in the end she gives up, and hangs up, and flows back into Hans again.
[...]
Call Centre, Diyarbakır, Turkey
From the open window of a tower block on the edge of Diyarbakır city centre German phrases and loud laughter can be heard. It’s impossible to get the combinations of words right. Sirwan feels like the language is slipping through his fingers all the time. He sits with the phone, mechanically answering the German customers who call with questions. He says, ‘Entschuldigen Sie’, and quickly hangs up when a woman gets too confrontational. Someone in Cologne has forgotten to pay their bill, so their phone has been cut off. The conversations are supposed to last at least a minute, you can say absolutely anything in less than a minute, since German is built up of an assortment of more or less impossible words and compounds. Any mistake can be rectified; they have manuals with all the instructions and directives. After a minute the calls are approved. The call centre control unit records all their conversations – anything under sixty seconds is poor customer service. The bosses are in Germany but occasionally they choose one employee who they allow to climb another rung up the ladder, becoming responsible for ensuring that the rest of the team keep to the time limits and, more importantly, speak German without exception. Today it’s Zin who moves self-importantly through the room, keeping tabs on her colleagues. Zin ensures that not a word, not a breath, not even a laugh, sounds Turkish, or, god forbid, Kurdish. It’s a German call centre in Turkey with German customers. No one calling from Germany wants to hear the motorway that runs beneath them out towards the Tigris and the Euphrates. Sirwan is careful not to say words he’s unfamiliar with and he practices his pronunciation until every syllable is perfect. He repeats ‘Entschuldigen Sie bitte, Danke für Ihren Anruf, was kann ich für Sie tun, Bitte haben sie etwas Geduld,’ over and over again. There’s a manual of phrases that everyone follows and that they had to study during their first days working there. They recited the sentences aloud to each other, calling each other and drilling the words into their heads as though it were a matter of life and death. It’s all about precision. If you can keep the German words in your mouth long enough, Germany starts spreading through your system. No one in the call centre answers as ‘Sirwan’ or ‘Ibrahim’ or ‘Bernal’, they answer as ‘Conrad’, ‘Ben’, or if they really want to go all the way, ‘Dieter’.
A woman calls from Baden-Baden and shouts down the phone, a man on his deathbed in Cologne wants to be sure his phone contract will be cancelled within three months. The customers are absorbed in their phone quandaries, repayments that continue to be debited despite the phone having long since been lost. The most common customers are the ones who’ve realised angrily that they’ve been paying for several years for a phone they left in a bar or dropped in a river or that just disappeared somewhere, never to be seen again. At lunchtime they go up to the roof to smoke as usual. Their cigarette packets balance on the thin railing. Sirwan tells them about a woman in Bochum who just won’t go away. She calls over and over, saying she needs help getting through to a phone number in Germany. She needs to know where the phone is – her sister has disappeared, can anyone help her? Is it possible to trace the phone through them? They laugh out loud: a hayalet in Germany, that’s a novelty. A ghost who refuses to be caught. Sorry Madam, Entschuldigung, we can’t help you. We’re a call centre, not the police. Zerya is obstinate, she keeps ringing. Sirwan keeps putting the phone down.
Radio Yerevan
Nirstedt/litteratur 2025. ISBN (9789189759992 hardcover edition and 9789189964006 e-book).
Foreign Rights: contact the author directly.
We are grateful for the publisher's permission to publish this excerpt.
Zara Uzun Kjellner lives in Stockholm. Her second novel, En ny gud (A New God, 2022), a violent chamber piece, was received with critical acclaim. Radio Yerevan is her follow-up.
Nichola Smalley is a translator of Swedish and Norwegian literature – the winner of the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She holds a PhD in the use of slang in contemporary Swedish and English literature.