An excerpt from Event Horizon
by Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel
(Book*hug Press)
ON EARTH IN a place like any other, where a gridded city reached for the sea with wide beaches that sometimes repelled the sea and sometimes invited it in, a greengrocer stood bent over herself and the fruit she’d harvested, polishing tomato after tomato to a gleam on her shirt. She picked flies out of the pile of romaine lettuce beside the tomatoes and cleared the weeds and blossoms from the coriander.
Morning, a town square. A buzz rose from the place, lush and soft, and around the streets, the blossoming jasmine burst into scent, asserting itself. Under the trees cats lay in clusters and along the avenues waiters would soon be serving white tourists their first cups of coffee and later glasses of red wine, on the beach some would eagerly undress and dive in, and through the schoolyards the bells would soon resound.
Shortly the square would fill with older folks who’d finished their morning tea but had yet to start on lunch. Wearing flimsy sun visors and tops in pale colours, they would cross the square, greeting the greengrocer at her stand, taking a seat on the park benches to the right of the library and each taking out their own crumpled pack of cigarettes. While they were sneaking a smoke in the shade of the cherry trees, occasionally exchanging a few words, the greengrocer would step forward with a peach for each of them and accept a bunch of cigarettes in return. She’d smoke two right away and say, Thank you, bye, slowly return to her stand and look out over the square.
Night and the night’s starry sky longed for by the greengrocer was still far off—another ten hours at the stand and then an hour or so of cleaning and after that the walk home. She would pull her cart down the cobbled streets to the buildings almost in ruins and to the blue door which, for want of anything else, she’d closed with a hook; from there she would manoeuvre the cart as best she could down the long, narrow corridor and once within the courtyard park it against a wall and sit. Eventually she’d muster the energy to kick off the shoes she’d been wearing all day and fold out the mattress she’d hidden from the early summer rain that sometimes surprised the city in the afternoon, stopping as suddenly as it started. She would lie on her back in the middle of the courtyard and gaze at the starry sky vast and endlessly beautiful.
On the floor above, close enough for the girl to catch the plums the greengrocer tossed up to her, a family had once lived. After the roof collapsed one morning, just as the children had finished packing their school bags and were ready to go, the family decided to move two blocks over to another condemned building almost as nice as any other building, almost as clean and orderly. Our rent will go up quite a bit, but we’ll just have to grit our teeth, said the mother, looking up from her packing. We can’t live like this, afraid of walls caving in, what kind of life is that? The two of us will have to work twice as much, but if we shut off the electricity and hot water, we’ll manage. Won’t you be moving too, the mother had asked, hoping for a yes. The greengrocer, who was unpacking her cart at the time, had nodded kindly and taken the mother in her arms, filled a bag from what remained on the cart and followed the family through the streets to the new building almost as good as any proper building and almost as orderly. As for the greengrocer, she was happy that the hot weather would soon be on its way and that the night’s sleep would be pleasant once more. At night she dreamed of the sea and during the day she longed for the night and the starry sky, and was happy for the vision of the night and the starry sky, even when she could not bring herself to conjure them.
She wrote in her notebook that she was happy that even this late in life the apparition of night brought joy and longing to her body, that feelings such as joy and longing still had a place in her broken body. My body, she wrote, is in disrepair. But now the apparition of night is here and now it is playing within me as joy; now as the morning sun is sweeping across the city and has the cafés carrying out chairs and tablecloths and now as the waiters line up lunch menus and chill aperitifs.
In the mornings where the vegetable stand stood, its back to the tailor’s, first the taxi drivers passed by and then those who’d travelled from far to work construction. The greengrocer greeted them all and sat down on a stool, kept hidden behind baskets of sweet cherries and apples and which she’d occasionally take out to rest her swollen legs on, dark veins already apparent. From time to time, she would get up to dip a towel in the fountain’s warm water to cool her neck with, then would return to her seat and go back to stacking the fruit and vegetables.
The mother once greengrocer was a year or so younger than Essa but older than Milde would ever get to be; she knew the Outskirts well but couldn’t have imagined that Milde from the Outskirts would be crossing the square on this morning.
Back when she was a greengrocer she’d stood at the foot of the Outskirts many times and was invited in, drank tea with the mothers and children and talked to them about the uprising, said she thought that the uprising was brave and correct and something had to be done about the situation—that the only person who’d had the courage to talk about it all had been Milde and it was still incomprehensible that her punishment had been so grave, so harsh. A seventeen-year-old, a child who’d spoken like a thousand leaders during her own trial! No, it wasn’t right, she’d only said and done what no one else had dared, isn’t that right? Had she not lent her voice to all who for years had kept their mouths shut out of fear? Had she not said what needed to be said, about how we’ve been treated and how one day it must end?
The mothers had nodded and tried to remember Milde’s face just before she had to leave for the cave, and the children who’d sat tensely at their sides listening to the greengrocer had looked at their mothers and waited for more. Afterwards the greengrocer was given more tea and her own private tour of the homes, each one of thin but sturdy metal walls worn by a love she couldn’t describe at the time because she had yet to experience it. She’d stepped out of one of the homes, glass of tea in hand, and sat with her back against the cool metal wall, feeling welcome somewhere for the first time in a very long time, and then and there decided to stay the night.
The greengrocer had only seen Milde in the photos and newspaper clippings that Essa always carried with her and couldn’t possibly have recognized her. The uprising had taken place eleven years ago and besides, these eyes weren’t what they should have been, cloudy and misty and not one bit as sharp as they should have been.
The greengrocer hadn’t recognized Milde on that morning and later couldn’t forgive herself for it. Shortly after Milde’s departure for the black hole called the Mass, the greengrocer left the city, packed what little she could carry and moved in with Essa at the heart of the Outskirts.
On that morning, the greengrocer had gotten up from her stool, done the weighing and taken payment, put out and put away, occasionally exchanging a few words with acquaintances who raised their hands in greeting as they passed by. It was going to be a hot day, you could tell, and billowing in the slender shadows of the trees that framed the square to the east and west, the cigarette smoke continued to rise among the cherry blossoms soon fallen to the ground, lingering there like fog or haze. Still morning, one of the older folks would set their book in someone else’s hands and stub out their cigarette against the sole of their shoe — another would wipe their forehead with their visor then put it back on.
Today the buzz in the square was loud and the greengrocer would later recall that the whole square had been awake.
Excerpted from Event Horizon by Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel © 2026. Used with permission of Book*Hug Press.
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BALSAM KARAM is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author and librarian and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed novel, Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize and won the Smaland Literature Festival’s Migrant Prize. Her second novel, The Singularity, originally published in Sweden in 2021, was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature, the August Prize, and Svenska Dagbladet’s Literature Prize. Her third novel, Mörk materia – en kärleksroman (Dark Matter – A Love Story), was published in Sweden in 2025.
SASKIA VOGEL is the author of Permission (2019) and the translator of more than two dozen Swedish-language books. She was awarded the Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature for her writing. For her translations, she was awarded the George Bernard Shaw Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, among other nominations. Part of her time as Princeton’s Translator in Residence was devoted to translating Balsam Karam. From Los Angeles, she now lives in Berlin.
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