City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  On Friday 10 May, Kheyro went looking for a goat that had somehow escaped from the little thorn hut in which she kept them penned. Her wandering took her to Bosnia and she was walking down the main street when a man rushed out of a tin-walled restaurant holding a pistol. By the side of the road, a police reservist in uniform was sitting on a stool clutching the fresh bundle of khat he had just bought. Kheyro heard a shot, then she saw the policeman falling down, his AK-47 clattering to the ground that was already pooling red. Blood pumped down in hot spurts from three bullet wounds in the man’s head and neck. Everybody ran. Kheyro bolted for home. She was shocked that the face of the young gunman – not more than twenty-three or -four, she thought – was open, not covered. Back at the restaurant, another man appeared and snatched the policeman’s rifle from the ground. When the crowd turned on the men, he levelled the weapon at them and the attackers managed to run away.

  They didn’t get far. The wave of shootings was affecting business and a crowd from the market chased after them. As they tore down the street towards Lagdera the attackers split up, one aiming for the playing fields and the other heading straight ahead. By the car wash, one of the boys was grabbed. The other one had a trail of pursuers. A man working at the car wash watched as a ring rapidly formed around the killer. People came with rocks, another with a panga, a machete.

  ‘He’s the one!’ somebody shouted to a woman brandishing a metal bar. ‘He’s the one that shot your relative!’ Men were holding the attacker and she brought the metal bar down on his head. Blood came. The crowd started roaring. Then another man aimed at his neck with a panga. Within fifteen minutes, the man was dying on the ground. The crowd got hold of his two legs and dragged him through the streets, some shouting and cheering. Thirty minutes later the body was discarded, lifeless and sandy in the road. Somewhere on the playing field, the mob caught up with the other kid too.

  The camp was shocked but jubilant. People smiled with the news of the twin lynchings and looked a little drunk, sated, perhaps, with revenge. But not Maryam. She had been looking for a final straw. Now she had it.

  The cinema where Guled watched football in the evenings was a wooden structure with a UNHCR relief tarpaulin for walls and steel sheets for a roof. Inside was a huge flat screen TV and narrow benches dug into the sand. The football team charged the young men of the area a few shillings to come and watch the games to raise money for their strip. The block leader had promised a ‘uniform’ if they campaigned for her in the elections but she hadn’t kept her word. The cinema was on the corner of the main street in Hawa Jube and tacked above the door was a sign in black paint: ‘MAN UNITED’.

  Later that evening, Guled was outside chatting to his friends in the team. They were excited. Manchester United was unreachable at the top of the English Premier League, and at the penultimate game of the season against Swansea that weekend, they were expected to lift the trophy. Sir Alex Ferguson had announced his retirement two days earlier. ‘I don’t think Man U will ever have another like Sir Alex, we are expecting a big loss,’ Guled was saying when in bowled Maryam.

  ‘I am going. You’d better come to the house,’ she said. Guled looked at her in surprise; their previous discussions had never concluded in a decision. Embarrassed, he left his friends and followed his wife the short distance home, with each step the inevitable quarrel getting closer. There, the kids were asleep on the bed in the one-room mud hut. All her possessions were packed as well as some of his: the family’s cooking utensils, blankets and the children’s clothes. In the single remaining sheet and the mosquito net above the bed, Guled could read that she was serious.

  ‘I’ve had enough!’ she said. His argument centred on the children; that it would be unfair to separate them from their father.

  ‘Life will be better for them in Mogadishu,’ she said. ‘You see what happened today?’ she added referring to the lynching. ‘There’s no security here.’

  ‘If you want to go, go alone,’ said Guled. ‘Just leave the kids.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘If I go there, my life is at risk,’ he pleaded. Their voices rose. They stepped outside so as not to wake the kids, but they woke up anyway. So did the neighbours. They came now, through the dark with smoky kerosene lamps and the roving beam of a torch; their nose for drama alerted. Guled stopped shouting; he sensed the danger in numbers. Stools were brought, a meeting called to order, cases were made for and against but Guled’s trump card, the true reason he feared returning to Mogadishu, he could not play in public. He had managed to keep his past with al-Shabaab a secret; if he revealed it now, he’d be ostracized by his neighbours and at risk from al-Shabaab. With only half the picture, the neighbours made their ruling.

  ‘Let her go with the kids,’ they said. ‘She’s tired of life here.’ Guled had been outnumbered.

  There was no vehicle traveling to Mogadishu the next day, so Maryam had to sleep another night in the hated camp. But on the Sunday, the day of the match against Swansea, Guled shouldered children and luggage to the truck stage in Lagdera. All along the main sandy road from Hawa Jube, the silence sat cold and hard between them; they had not spoken since Friday night. Guled wanted to break it, but then his pride boiled up. ‘She disobeyed me!’ he said to himself, ‘why should I talk to her?’ The next minute, he thought of jumping on the truck with her, but then he remembered the men in black who were at the other end, waiting for him.

  The truck was an ancient, once yellow, Fiat. It was what the refugees called ‘anda meeley’ – the long bottom. It had no brakes and no windscreen and the shell of the engine was open to the sky. The cab was upholstered in plastic linoleum and the steering wheel had rags tied around the inner steel core. To travel up there was expensive; Maryam had no money for that. She was travelling economy class, in the bed of the truck in the back with about 80 others, women and children mostly, huddled among the cargo – hundred-gallon plastic water tanks, mattresses and suitcases piled up. Jerrycans were tied to the back. The fare for her and the kids was 5,000 shillings ($45) of which, to his shame, Guled had not contributed one shilling. The family had outstanding credit of 2,000 shillings ($22) at the shop in their block; they had survived on borrowed milk and sugar for too long and so the neighbours had rallied round. To get a higher credit rating they would have needed remittances from the West, and with Maryam’s mother’s departure, they had lost their connection there. ‘Lack of economics’ was the reason he was losing his family; that was what Guled told himself as he passed the luggage wordlessly up into the back of the truck and the little girl, Sadr, crying.

  Guled’s daughter, who had arrived in the camp in Maryam’s womb, was three days past her second birthday and with the few words she had, she made her protest. ‘Abo, Abo, Abo,’ she cried, ‘Dada, Dada, Dada.’ She didn’t want to leave him. Her voice tore a hole in Guled’s chest. He felt like crying but the crowded stage of other families bidding people farewell inspired some self-control until the truck departed. The first half of the match at Old Trafford was already under way; all his friends would be in the cinema for this historic moment: Manchester United’s twentieth league title and Sir Alex Ferguson’s thirteenth. Guled was wearing his plastic Manchester United wristband along with jeans and his favourite button-down shirt in preparation for the match but the game was far from his mind.

  When the engine finally roared into life at four p.m. and the carcass of a lorry gave a jolt as it went into gear, Maryam leaned over the side of the truck bed and spoke to him at last. ‘Keep on playing football,’ she said. ‘We have gone.’ Beside her, standing on her little legs, tiny fists beating the rusted steel, Sadr howled, ‘Abo Abo Abo,’ until the truck bounced away over the dusty maidan, turning left at the telecoms tower, and he could hear her no more.

  ∗

  Guled walked back down the sandy street towards Hawa Jube and the cinema, his brain barely functioning, turbid with thoughts, his feet almost walking themselves. ‘If we had money,’ he thought to himself. ‘If I get
money, she might enjoy life with me again … even in Mogadishu she cannot work, because of the C-sections.’ He tried to deflect the blame for their situation where she had placed it: on his shoulders. It was also a way of directing his thoughts away from where they naturally went: to worrying about her. It was three days on the truck to Mogadishu, open to the elements and to the random sparks of the war. If she was here with the kids, at least he knew how she was doing. ‘We shared the same plate,’ he said in his mind, over and over. If she had a problem now she was on her own.

  The cinema was crammed with bodies. Guled made it in time for the second half but the problem with the family ‘overwhelmed the love’ he had for Manchester United. Three minutes from time, Rio Ferdinand smashed home a corner from Van Persie to win the match and Guled smiled shyly as his friends rubbed his head – he was known in the team as ‘Van Persie’, for they were both the striker and top goalscorer for their respective teams. When Sir Alex lifted the Premier League trophy, 200 young men in the cinema went wild, jumping on the chairs and screaming at the tin roof but Guled just sat there, a ghost in the maelstrom. Two of his friends, noticing, asked him what was wrong and he told them. They tried to be kind: ‘This is part of the world,’ said one.

  Normally, Guled stayed up til midnight chatting with his friends at the cinema but tonight, on what was supposed to be the climax of the season, he went home to bed, early.

  ‘Has Maryam gone?’ the neighbours called through the fence. He ignored them. He knew they knew. It was, he thought, just female fitna, ill will. As he lay down in the hut now stripped bare of their family things, his mind turned over. They had only one phone, and it was with him, encased in a plastic Manchester United cover. He could not call her. In any case he had no money to call; phoning Somalia was expensive. He wondered where they were. The territory was treacherous: the frontline through Afmadow, Jilib, Barawe and Merka crisscrossed the road north.

  Wednesday was his turn at the food distribution. Still he had not heard from them. He was getting more and more anxious. Through the warehouses he went with his single ration card and the family one with the photos of Maryam and the children for a family size 3. At each window and each cup of extra rice, flour and oil, his heart ached a little more. He kept looking at the chubby black-and-white photos on the ration card of his little boy and girl.

  On the fourth day, Thursday, a Somali number flashed on his phone. He begged money from his friends and called back. Maryam had borrowed the phone from the driver of the truck.

  ‘Why are you not yet there? What happened?’ Guled’s voice was full of crisis.

  ‘We are on the way from Bu’ale,’ Maryam said before the phone went dead. He kept trying to call back but nothing. One time the driver answered and said, ‘I am busy driving, stop calling.’ Bu’ale was only just beyond Afmadow, still far from Mogadishu. His mind and heart raced ahead of each other and the fragile calm he had worked hard to construct collapsed.

  Auntie was kind. She knew he needed money to call and she gave him more and more work on the khat stall, selling the drug. The stall was a low bivouac made of sticks and sacking, next to the cinema. Although a convenient and lucrative spot, trade was slow. The sugar wars meant the loaders and the drivers and even the police, the people whose income depended on the smuggling, had no cash.

  A week after Maryam had gone and worried sick, he was minding the khat stall during a break from watching the final match of the season, Manchester United against West Bromwich Albion. A crowd of about thirty men dressed in white turbans with tails and white jellabas approached. He knew who they were, he had seen the ‘tabliq’, the religious messengers who evangelized in the camp, before: they were peaceful, spiritual people, conservative but not violent like al-Shabaab. But they had never spoken to him directly.

  ‘What you are doing is wrong,’ they said, referring to the selling of the khat. ‘Come, let us pray together.’ Guled got up and followed them. They went then into the cinema and repeated their message. ‘It’s time for prayer,’ they told the soccer fans. But the rows of eager boys on the wooden benches, eyes glued to the screen, didn’t move. Football was the only thing they were fanatical about: the match was nearing the close and West Brom were about to be relegated. When the tabliq gave up and left, Guled mingled with the fans inside the cinema and then returned to selling khat.

  The next day Maryam finally called. The journey had been longer than expected but they were fine, at home, living back with her mother. Maryam did not apologize. When Guled asked her why she had left, she just said, ‘Life there is hard. Here there are relatives to assist.’ It was true. ‘And here you can work, not like in Dadaab. Why don’t you come and work and look after your children?’

  ‘The security there is not good for me, you know that.’ Guled was angry.

  ‘The security here is adequate,’ she said. But Guled didn’t trust her assessment. He had been spending the little proceeds from khat on calling the friends he used to drive with in Mogadishu: was it like people said, improving? The reports from his friends were not conclusive; people said different things on different days. There were still regular explosions and suicide attacks by al-Shabaab. But it was little better in Dadaab, and this was Maryam’s point. The night before, there had been a major attack, although he didn’t mention it. ‘Mogadishu has come to Ifo,’ people said. Guled was torn, in turmoil. Or, as he put it, ‘I was stuck in fifty-fifty’. The decision to make the journey back again was, like the one to flee, an uncertain leap of faith; like letting go of one leaky life raft to reach for another.

  He had one photo of Maryam on the ration card and one other with her holding the baby boy, taken on his phone a month before they left. It was a blurry image but among the pixels you could make out Maryam’s unsmiling impassive face. Guled looked at it often. And at the others on his phone: the screensaver of Wayne Rooney doing a reverse kick, a bedroom furnished in Man U decor (bedspread, pillow and counterpane) and the whole team of Manchester United in action shots, with extra photos of Van Persie. He added some new ones too, copied from his friends: soft porn pictures of Arab women in alluring poses and some of female underwear models, all white.

  Some weeks later, Maryam sent fresh photographs with an acquaintance on a vehicle from Mogadishu. Guled thought it might have been a kind of blackmail, tempting him back. With them gone, Ifo became again temporary, a transitional place. His mind began to wander: where could he be free to work? Maybe Tanzania, South Africa, across the sea even? But every journey began with money. And in Ifo there was no prospect of that.

  The photos showed the baby boy in a new outfit, eyes rimmed with pencil, and the girl, Sadr, against a background of multicoloured Parisian streets in a pink head-dress with a curly wig and blue and white frilly dress holding a golden ball: he kept both on the packing case next to his bed. They were the only personal touch apart from the bare orange mud walls, the blue mosquito net and the single square of foam for a mattress on the floor. Without Maryam’s things and the children’s clothes, and without the hope of money to oil his dreams of escape, the mud hut that had been their family home now resembled a cell. At night, when he went to sleep, Guled put the photos of his children on the pillow next to his head. He slept a little better that way.

  30

  The Night Watchmen

  In a way, Guled thought, it was lucky Maryam left when she did. The sugar wars were coming to a head. The tempo of the attacks in the camp was increasing and the climax came on 23 May with an attack on the night watchmen of Bosnia.

  That night, Kheyro and her sisters woke with a jump. The noise seemed to be right outside their hut. They held their breath. Kheyro counted the shots. Ten. Afterwards, the sisters lay awake on their mat together listening to every little night-time scratch until morning. Even the whine of an insect triggered fear.

  At dawn, Kheyro’s mother took the goats to the herder at the corner of their block. The camp was fresh with the news of the shooting. Rukia returned breathless. ‘Th
e gunshots we were hearing last night, three people were killed and one injured,’ she reported. ‘Two of them are our relatives, Ero and his son!’ The news crushed the household. The boy had just come from Ethiopia and Ero was a kind and gentle man whom the family knew well. Kheyro phoned Handicap International to inform them that she would not be coming to work that day, a day off for which she would not be paid, and accompanied her mother to the hospital.

  The green-and-white buildings of the hospital rang with the commotion of neighbours, relatives, onlookers and police. Several women wailed in a courtyard. Ero, the cousin of Rukia and Kheyro’s sort-of-uncle, was in the ward with a doctor; he had been shot in the shoulder. His son was in a different room – the morgue – and they were not allowed to see the body. Kheyro remembered his face, a bright boy of twenty, come from the Somali region of Ethiopia, Ogaden, to study in Dadaab. ‘He had a nice character,’ she said. The doctors were preparing to take Ero to Garissa for an X-ray but Rukia and Kheyro managed to reach his bedside through the throng before he left and he told them what had happened.