North of Dawn

by Nuruddin Farah

  When it comes to sex, Naciim has been a sharp-eyed witness from an early age, when, while living in the refugee camp, his mother would go nightclubbing and return home late, smelling of cigarette smoke and beer. The body tent she wore over her party clothes served the purpose of concealing the truth from those who might encounter her on her way to meet up with various men in cars, who always parked a distance away from their shack. If he or Saafi fussed and his mother tried to comfort them, delaying her, the man would often tap on the window impatiently, return to his car and wait until she joined him. On occasion, she would wait to leave until Naciim and Saafi had fallen asleep. He remembers many fretful nights wondering when she would return.

  The way Naciim now understands it, in order to survive and bring up her two children as a single mother, she has always held back the truth of who she is from everyone, save a few of her closest female friends, particularly Arla, who now lives in Copenhagen and with whom he’s overheard his mother speaking on the phone quite often since their arrival. Compared to other Somali women at the refugee camp, Arla was fun and wild. He will forever remember the stories she told him, which unfailingly fired his imagination as a boy.

  At least some of his mother’s caution is justified, Naciim thinks. After all, Saafi probably never would have been attacked if it weren’t for his mother having taken a white man as one of her lovers, which so enraged a group of vigilante youths that they determined to teach her a lesson. Half a dozen waylaid Saafi one night on her way home and raped her. This horror has provided him with a deep insight into the workings of men’s minds, just as it has turned Saafi into an anxious girl, wary of all men.

  “Fine.” Saafi sighs. “I’ll change her. But you take these girls back to the living room.” Glad to be spared the unpleasant task, he leads the two girls at her side away. But before he can deposit them with his mother, he hears a knock on the front door. “Who is it?” he calls. A young male voice he is familiar with replies, “It is me, Edvart.”

  Naciim can’t help remembering that he has let Edvart and his other playmates down by not turning up this afternoon as agreed. Disappointed that he couldn’t join his friends to play soccer, because his mother wouldn’t allow it, his heart is now heavy and his hesitation obvious. Still, he opens the door and then comes face to face with Edvart, who is clutching a ball and wearing his soccer boots. The sight of his friend kitted out for the game lifts his spirits. He and his friend quickly fall into rapt conversation, unmindful of what is happening around them, including that two little girls have squeezed out the half-open door, one crawling all the way to the lift.

  Waliya, suddenly aware of the missing girls, moves fast, nearly colliding with the boys on her way out the door, and snatches the girl sitting by the lift and brings her in, gesturing for the other child to follow her. She prepares to close the door, but catches a glimpse of the two boys still engaged in their talk. Her stomach turns, and then, sick with rage, she shouts at Naciim in Somali. Before he’s fully aware of it, she shoos Edvart away, rudely pushing him in the chest and closing the door in his face. Then she grabs Naciim by the wrist, forcibly pulling him until they are in her bedroom. She turns to face him in an apparent fury and makes as if to strike him, before taking a deep breath, actively trying to calm herself. Her voice hard and severe, angry that he wasn’t watching the kids as they wriggled out, she says, “What am I to do with you, punish you?”

  “Mum, please let me explain.”

  “I’ve told you many times. I don’t want your non-Muslim friends in my house. Everything an infidel touches is haram.” She goes on, “And I’ve told you not to go to their homes or eat their foods. I know you’ve disobeyed and done that. Saafi has said so. Why do you continue going against my instructions?”

  “Mum, you do not understand.”

  “You are saying I am stupid?”

  “I am doing no such thing, Mum,” he says.

  “You will cause us nothing but ruin.”

  “Why won’t you let me explain?”

  “How many times have you been to your Norwegian friends’ homes and eaten their haram food? Just tell me.”

  “I’ve been to Edvart’s only the one time.”

  “And you’ve eaten there?”

  “Eaten out of politeness, Mum.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “Chicken, not pork.”

  “I don’t want you to do that ever again.”

  “His mother was nice and she welcomed me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She treated me well, as a human being.”

  “Get out of my sight, before I change my mind and give you the smack you deserve.”

  Naciim, in a rage now, says, “Why do you have to be so rude to my friend? Why chase him as if he were a stray dog with rabies? Why can’t you welcome him nicely, the way his mother welcomes me?”

  “Because he is unwelcome in my home.”

  “Remember, Mum, this is his country.”

  “What are you saying to me?”

  He turns on his heels and is about to walk away, when, more agitated than he can remember seeing her in a long while, Waliya grabs his wrist. For a moment he worries that she really will give him a beating. But she struggles for self-control, and eventually regains composure, releasing him. “Why did you open the door?” she asks, her voice more measured.

  “I had no idea it would be him.”

  “What if one of the babies got hurt?”

  “I said I’m sorry.” After a long pause, he says, “Can I go?”

  * * *

  Naciim takes refuge in the toilet, where he hopes to have a quiet moment of reflection. No sooner has he bolted the door from the inside and readied to pull down his trousers than there is a quick, insistent rapping on the door—his mother, demanding that he come out because a child needs to use the bathroom. Annoyed, but determined not to enter into a new argument, he pulls up his trousers, exits the bathroom, and scoots past his mother without speaking a word.

  Before she can stop him, he leaves the apartment and takes the lift down to the ground floor, not knowing where he is headed. He walks to the park in the neighborhood, sits down on a bench and, his head between his hands, revisits the afternoon’s events. When he recalls how rude his mother was to Edvart, chasing him out of the apartment as if he were a tramp, merely because his friend is not a Muslim, he decides that her attitude is no different from that of the neo-Nazis, those nativist skinheads so violently opposed to foreigners in their midst.

  When he thinks of Edvart hastily retreating, the image comes to him of a dog departing with its tail between its legs, and he regrets that he did nothing in defense of his friend. What does this say about him? Did he act this way because he lacks self-confidence? When he considers his mother’s inexcusable behavior alongside the fact that he is a Mahram, the man among the women, then surely he can come to no other conclusion but that he has failed.

  His sense of annoyance palpable, he whips out his mobile phone, a gift from Mugdi, and dials Edvart’s number. When Edvart answers, Naciim’s right hand, which is holding the phone, shakes and his voice is rich with unvented anger.

  “Where are you?” Edvart asks.

  “I am in the park, sitting on a bench.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. On a bench facing the fountain.”

  “Stay where you are and I’ll come to you.”

  “I am sorry about what happened.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” says Edvart.

  Naciim looks up from his phone and catches a glimpse of a ball rolling toward him, kicked by a small boy, and nearby a grown man who must be the boy’s father. He kicks the ball back to the boy, who, in turn, kicks it to his father, and his father passes it to Naciim. As the kickabout develops, Naciim volunteers to chase the ball every time the little boy kicks it astr
ay. Soon the boy’s breathing becomes heavy and he breaks out in a sweat, before tiring completely, prompting the father to suggest they sit and rest a bit. Turning to Naciim, he asks, “Do you live around here?”

  Naciim points in the general direction of his apartment building and says, “I live with my mother and sister, and we are new to Norway.”

  The little boy tugs at his father’s trousers and fusses until his father lifts him up and seats him on his lap.

  “You speak well, no accent at all.”

  “We’ve been here for a little more than six months now.”

  The little boy starts to fidget and whine once more, already restless. The man says something to his son, who makes a grumbling sound.

  “Maybe he is hungry,” Naciim says.

  “Hungry and tired,” agrees the man. He fumbles in his shoulder bag and brings out a bottle that the boy devours as soon as it is put in his mouth. Soon enough, the child closes his eyes and falls asleep.

  Normally not given to begrudging people anything, Naciim finds himself overwhelmed with envy and bitterness at the tender scene. Envy, because he did not have as kind and caring a father as this when he was the boy’s age. Bitterness, because while his mother was out partying, it was often left to the neighbors in the refugee camp to care for him and his sister. And while she no longer leaves them for such unsavory nighttime activity nowadays, he is more and more convinced that his mother is somehow colluding with Zubair and the imam, whom he suspects of unsavory radical religious politics, trading one questionable activity for another.

  Yet as he sits listening to the boy’s gentle snore, he reminds himself not to let anger overtake him. He knows he has already endured much more than most of his Norwegian friends, who have lived in comfort all their lives, never suffering the kind of displacement to which he has become accustomed, born in one country, brought up in another as a refugee, and now thrust into a third, a newcomer once more. As shameful as it is to admit, there is a part of him that would prefer it if his mother quit Norway, since she is clearly so uncomfortable here, and only alienates herself more from others. Perhaps he could move in with Mugdi and Gacalo—he is certain they would welcome him.

  Edvart’s voice calling hello shakes Naciim out of his thoughts, while also awakening the sleeping boy. The boy, thrilled at the new arrival—and the second ball Edvart has brought with him—wiggles off the bench, grabs the ball at his father’s feet, kicks Edvart’s ball hard ahead of himself, and runs after it. Edvart chases the ball and the boy, who is elated for a few moments, but soon comes to a stop, searching for his father in the far distance before bursting into tears. His father rushes to comfort him, reclaims the ball, picks up his son, and departs.

  Naciim and Edvart kick their ball around and eventually transition into a competitive dribbling routine. When they have played to exhaustion, they sit on the bench to catch their breath. Naciim leans forward, fingers in the shape of a steeple, pauses for a moment, then speaks, his voice deep. “I know I said this over the phone, but I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. I am very sorry about what my mother did.”

  “Please, don’t give it another moment’s worry.”

  “She was rude,” says Naciim.

  “We are never responsible for what our parents say or do,” Edvart says, patting his friend on the shoulder. “Mine embarrass me, too, and you know it. My father can be snotty, and often says terrible things about blacks, and makes even worse comments about Muslims.”

  “Your mum was nice, though,” says Naciim.

  “She’s certainly easier to be around than my father,” Edvart agrees. “And she likes you. Do you want to come home with me tonight? My father is away so it will just be us.”

  “No, but thank you for the invitation. I will go to my grandparents’.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tomorrow morning, the seventeenth of May, Norway will be aflutter with flags bearing blue crosses outlined in white on a red background, the colors borrowed from the French tricolor, seen as a symbol of liberty. Throngs will be out in the streets to watch the children’s parades celebrating the 1814 signing of the constitution. Naciim can hardly contain his excitement. His friend Edvart has earned the honor of carrying his school’s official banner in the parade, and he will be followed by half a dozen older students carrying flags, with a marching band hard on their heels. Then hundreds of younger children will follow behind, waving miniature flags to the older students’ full-size ones. The bystanders, mainly adults dressed in bunad, or traditional costumes, will line the streets, watching the marchers pass and taking delight in listening to the celebratory songs and to the whistling, drumming, and shaking of rattles.

  But Naciim’s eagerness for tomorrow’s festivities is tempered by the fury he feels at his mother and the way she mocked him for preparing to join the Constitution Day celebrations. She practically forced him out of the house with taunts meant not only to wound his pride but also to question his very identity—for how could he now consider himself a Somali, or even a Muslim, his mother demanded. It has taken him more than ten minutes’ ride on the Metro from Groenland to Vigeland Park, plus a five-minute walk to reach this bench where he decides to sit until he has calmed his nerves. He does not wish anyone, least of all Mugdi and Gacalo, whom he will join later, to see him in such bad spirits on a day that he wishes to mark with respect.

  When he feels more relaxed, he unknots the carrier bag containing three Norwegian flags he bought the day before from the money Mugdi gave him and which he hid from his mother under the mattress. He brings them out now and unfurls them, proud of his forethought. However he will admit to having made a mistake in allowing his mother to see even one of them—and more specifically, the flag’s emblem which she views as a Christian cross—to shred in the first place. After all, he knew she would utter anathemas before throwing a fit and tearing it to pieces—and accuse him once again of “un-Islamic” leanings. He would then refuse to admit he had done anything wrong, and after barely a few minutes, they would be locked once more in battle, dredging up quarrelsome scenes from the recent past, and on it would go, until he left the apartment. Even as he tries to calm himself, he can’t help replaying this latest fight in his mind.

  “No cross in my house,” she said. Then Naciim argued that he did not see it as a cross, but as the symbol of Norway, the country that has hosted them in their hour of need. “Besides, we must give every country’s flag respect, whether the country is small or large, whether the flag depicts a cross, a crescent and a sword, or Arabic script.”

  “It is a cross and no matter what you say, you won’t convince me to respect this symbol of Christianity,” she insisted, adding, “Give it here.”

  He refused.

  “Give me this Christian thing.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Give it now, before Allah curses us.”

  “Why do you people forbid every kind of fun?” It took all his self-control not to speak the blasphemous thoughts invading his mind.

  Saafi, who seldom entered the fray, came out of her room at this point. His sister’s silent presence distracted him for an instant and before he knew it, his mother had snatched the flags out of his grasp. “There,” she said in a triumphant tone. Deflated, he watched her cut up the flags until they were no more than fragments of red, white, and indigo blue. But he was not completely dispirited because he knew he had three more flags concealed under the mattress. To save these from potential destruction, he snuck away when his mother was absorbed in her prayers, grabbed the flags, hastily packed a bag with his favorite clothes, and fled the apartment. He’ll stash the flags and his clothes at Mugdi and Gacalo’s house and pick them up early the following morning, so he may take his place in the line of his flag-waving classmates.

  Significantly more relaxed, Naciim rises to his feet. There is a natural spring to his gait and he is convinced he will regain his happiness t
he instant he claps eyes on Mugdi and Gacalo. He is uncertain, though, if he will share with them the details of what his mother has done.

  He knocks softly on Mugdi and Gacalo’s door, which prompts Mugdi to shout, in muffled Norwegian, “Who is there?”

  Naciim mumbles an answer, his voice betraying anxiety. Mugdi opens the door and instantly knows that the boy is in a world of trouble the moment his eyes meet Naciim’s.

  He lets him in without a word.

  After a few moments’ silence, Naciim staring at the floor, his head hanging, Mugdi says, “Out with it. Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “There is,” says Naciim.

  “Go on, then.”

  He listens as the boy relays the afternoon’s events, pausing every so often as if to weigh his words, proof that he has given much thought to what he is retelling. He shows Mugdi the spare flags and explains his plan to arrive at the school early and stand as close as he can to his friend Edvart.

  “Where will your starting point be tomorrow? If you leave from home, there is no guarantee that your mother will allow you to join in the celebrations.”

  “There must be a way,” says Naciim. “What if I leave the flags and my clothes here, and fetch them tomorrow morning before the parade starts?”

  “That would be one way,” says Mugdi, “although there is an easier solution.”

  The boy looks embarrassed and says, “I’d hate to inconvenience you.”

  “How are you going to inconvenience us?”

  “I want you to remain blameless.”

  It amuses the old man that Naciim wants to keep Mugdi and Gacalo out of Waliya’s bad books, when Mugdi does not doubt that they are already inscribed there, for such indefensible acts as allowing her son to question the principles of the faith, and exposing him to Norwegian culture.