Freeman's

by John Freeman

  It’s late by the time Mahmood reaches Berlin’s, after going home to change, ignoring Doc’s calls for rent, and darting out again in a three-piece suit and dark overcoat. Berlin brings out his self-doubt; he always looks so polished, like Cary Grant. Smoothing his moustache down, Mahmood pushes the heavy black door. Calypso music fills the room and somehow makes it seem busier. There are only a few customers on this Monday night, students in black turtlenecks against the bar, a white couple dancing awkwardly beside the jukebox, their hips moving in an uncoordinated staccato. Berlin is standing fixed behind the bar, his arms stretched on either side of him, clenching the counter, his head bowed. Lost in this reverie, he takes a moment to notice Mahmood settling into the bar stool in front of him; he finally lifts his head and his distant-seeming hazel eyes settle ambivalently on him. His face is reminiscent of a shark’s, a hammerhead, with his flat skull and wide, dark lips. He is handsome but in a dangerous, bloodless way; he never loses himself or allows people to lose themselves to him. Mahmood knows that he abandoned a daughter in New York and a son in Borama; he speaks of them easily but with no guilt or regret. Mahmood likes this lack of emotionality from Berlin; it means you can tell him anything and it is like speaking to a wall: no shock, no moralizing, no pity or disgust. Berlin has low expectations and is indifferent to even the greatest tragedies; his own father was murdered before his eyes in a raid on his clan by the dervishes, and watching that dagger run across his father’s throat must have turned Berlin’s heart to tin.

  ‘So the wind has blown you in again?’ he asks in Somali.

  ‘The wind has blown money into my pockets, sahib.’ Mahmood drops a handful of coins onto the bar. ‘Get me a pasty and a black coffee.’

  ‘Good day at the races?’

  ‘Not bad at all.’

  ‘You missed some action earlier tonight. The police found a couple of Chinese sailors running opium from a lodging house on Angelina Street. Using it themselves, too, so they were walking on noodle legs to the police car, them and this little bebopper from the university. It gave the reefer boys a laugh to see the police busy with someone else.’ ‘The Chinamen are good at keeping their secrets. Someone must have told.’

  ‘Like they said in the war, the walls have ears, nothing is secret for long in this old whore of a bay.’

  Mahmood finishes with his pasty after a couple of bites; it’s greasy and stale, but luckily his stomach has become a small, easily satisfied thing. On the ships he could eat whatever was put in front of him and go back for more; now he eats just enough to trick his mind into thinking he’s had a meal.

  ‘You think that new Somali from Gabiley is telling tales to the police? Something about him smells bad to me.’

  ‘Who, Samatar? You got the wrong fella there. His knees start knocking if he even sees a police car. Not cut out to be an informer.’

  ‘Grass,’ Mahmood says, unconvinced, rolling the word in his mouth like a lost tooth. He hates grasses even more than coppers. You can be sitting down with a man, playing poker or warming your hands on a mug of tea, and the next thing you know everything you said is repeated back to you in the police station; no matter how much trash you were talking or how tipsy you were, it goes down against you. You deny and the police grab your neck and say they know it’s so.

  ‘I know an informer when I see one and he ain’t it,’ Berlin repeats. He is quieter when away from the others; he doesn’t need to get up on a stepladder and perform the role of bossman, the man who made it, the man who beat it all. It’s getting late and he’s burning down like an old wick, wiping the counter in slow, deliberate circles, rubbing his eyes. Despite the gleaming black hair and straight back, he is in his fifties and age is starting to catch up with him; he no longer attends the rent parties and makes excuses to stay at home on weekends.

  ‘You’re still set against going back to sea?’ he asks abruptly. ‘Might be good for you to let it all cool down, give the Sheikh time to forget.’

  ‘No, I want to see my boys.’

  ‘From across the street with a pair of binoculars?’

  ‘Better than across an ocean or two,’ Mahmood replies, curling his lip.

  ‘She don’t want you bringing money in or what? You can’t take these young girls so seriously. They go to the pictures and think marriage is going to be one long song and dance number. All kissy kissy lovey dovey. What, she’s twenty? Twenty-one? What does she know of what a father needs to do? You don’t want your sons to see you out of work and broke all the time.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m broke?’ Mahmood jumps from his stool and slams his pocketbook on the table. ‘Look inside, you call that broke? I live better than those sailors with their Salvation Army coats and fingerless gloves.’

  Berlin rolls his eyes and slides the pocketbook back towards Mahmood.

  ‘You stay in Cardiff until the last trumpet call. It’s not my concern. You want another coffee, big man?’

  Mahmood nods and wipes his hand over his brow. His heart is racing and he can’t explain why he fears that he will just end up boarding a ship soon, like a zombie, unable to keep his promise to his sons. Behaving like all the others, just floating debris.

  ‘You’re a gambler, you know that sometime you have to let fate take over.’ The coffee machine hisses and steams as the last drops fall into the white cup. ‘Did I tell what happened to me when I went to New York in 1919?’ Berlin asks, smiling.

  Mahmood shrugs.

  ‘I went there from Barry Docks. I did good service in the merchant navy during the Great War. I thought I was some sort of hero with my chest puffed up and my medals shining. The ship spat out its cargo in New York and then went into dry docking, so I head off with my pay burning a hole in my pocket. I see all these beautiful coloured girls in furs, stockings cut low on their calves, ribbons in their slick hair and I say what! What have I been doing stuck inside boiler rooms with grimy men? I have wasted my whole life already! The girls were from the south of the country, they tell me to go to Harlem, that all the swellest, most giddy-up places are there and that it’s a Negroes’ paradise. I say take me there now. We ride a taxi because I want to show off and we stop at a diner to feed. The food is all their food, pig this and pig that, but I find something to chew on, and one of the girls she’s a real doll, face made for kissing and she’s leaning into me and laughing and I lean back and laugh too, kekeke, showing all my teeth and I’ve forgotten all about any ship or curfew or anything. I hadn’t been near a woman in months . . . The girls are singing for me and ordering more and more and they see friends passing and call them in and I’m still leaning and laughing. We finish up and they say, there’s a party! Let’s go! Louis will be there and Fats and rich ofays with good scotch whisky. I pay for everyone and we take another taxi as my girl say’s her feet hurt, and we go to this party and I don’t see Louis or Fats but there’s low light, swinging music, sharp drink. I’m getting woozy, I lose my girl in the crowd and it looks like people are dancing on top of me, like I’m falling through the floor. I can take my booze, you know that, and I’m wondering what kind of American drink is this that makes me lose my head. I wanna find my girl and hold onto her feet and so I crawl through the crowd thinking I’ll recognize her red shoes but I can’t and in the end they drag me out of the party. I wake up in the street and you know what? Those girls had picked me clean. Nothing but my seaman’s card in my pocketbook, drugged then cleaned me out. I drifted downtown, close to the port but too ashamed to show myself to the captain, all of these deep holes in the ground I’m trying not to fall into, where they’re building this new block and that new skyscraper. I sit sorry for myself looking out over the water, holding my head, when someone push me from behind. I jump to my feet thinking it’s time to fight. The man laugh and I say whatcha laughing at? My fists up already. You don’t know me? Why should I know you? Hamburg oh five he says. I step back and think it can’t be. He pretends to pull back an arrow and shoot me and his name hits me instead. Taiaiake.’


  Mahmood feels like he is back in dugsi, watching his qu’ranic teacher pace back and forth, the stories washing over him in great waves. ‘Who was he?’

  Berlin’s eyes glint and he pauses to throw an espresso down his throat before starting again.

  ‘We’ll have to go right back to nineteen oh five. To Hamburg, Deutschland. Me and one hundred other Somalis crossing sea and land because we were told there was good work in Europe.’

  Mahmood listens as he continues, tells how he was recruited by a Somali dalaal who scouted across the Habr Awal territory and the Garhajis and Warsangeli for people willing to go with him. He was a boy with no father and when he heard so many of his clanspeople were going away there was no way his mother could hold him back. Their cattle had died, they couldn’t go near their old wells because of the dervishes so the camels had only a couple of weeks in them, there was nothing his mother could give him. There they were: the decrepit, the just born, the wadaads and the weavers, the suldaan and his servants, the potters and the poets, all on a dhow to Aden. The dalaal sweet-talked them into believing the Deutsch were so impressed by what they’d heard about the brave Somalis that they demanded to see them in the flesh; all they had to do was show them their way of life and the Deutsch would pad their pockets with gold. Beneath them in the dhow were saddles, looms, spears, shields, prayer mats, baskets, prayer boards, headrests, cooking pots, dismantled aqals, all that they had. The minute they arrived in Hamburg docks there was a photographer waiting for them. His flash exploding made the babies cry.

  ‘We met the big boss Hagenbeck,’ Berlin says, ‘and he took us back to his mansion and told us to make up our camp in his long green garden. I fell asleep on the grass while watching the women tie the frames together and when I woke up small pale faces were peering through the fence, giggling and whispering to each other. I took a fright at these white-haired little jinns and ran into one of the assembled aqals and stayed there while more and more Europeans arrived to stare at us.’

  ‘Astaghfirullah,’ says Mahmood laughing, ‘it’s still the same when you pass the railway bridge.’

  ‘No, this was something else . . . They were not looking the way you would at a stranger whose features or clothes are foreign to you. They looked in doubt of our real existence. Their eyes like this . . .’ Berlin stretches his upper and lower lids wide open, ‘watching every movement we made. They looked at us as if we were creatures of their imagination, as if they might be hallucinating altogether.’

  ‘So what about that man in New York?’

  ‘I’m coming to him! We stayed in that garden for a few days and in the end we saw more white faces than leaves on the trees. We were ambushed but told to live normally, as if back in Africa. Africa? Where is that? I asked. I had never heard of the place. We had a hidden area to do our business but what did we find? Deutsch boys my age, and men who should have known better, climbing up trees to watch us as we do it. When Hagenbeck told us to pack up we said, ‘Subhanallah’ and did it gratefully, but we were not going home, no, we were going on tour. We walked to the train station with our spectators running behind us, touching our skin to see if the black came off on their hands, pulling the hair of the children, grabbing anything we dropped and stealing it. Savages. There was a special train waiting for us and on the platform there were zebras, elephants, monkeys, Asians, Africans, Red Indians, Australians gathered together as if on Judgement Day. We were part of some kind of carnival, pulled together from every corner of the earth to be exhibited in Berlin. They counted us as we boarded the train to make sure no one had got lost but inside there was complete chaos. A confusion of languages, half-naked people, and screaming children. I pushed through, looking for a seat, leaving the other Somalis behind, until I finally found a quiet carriage. Sitting around me were men with only a strip of hair running down their heads and in front of me a fella around my age with a bow and arrow in his hands. I wrapped my three metres of cotton closer around my shoulders and sat up, real tough, hardening my eyes, but the boy smiled and held his palm out to me and I took it.’

  ‘He was the one who found you in New York?’

  ‘That’s right, Taiaiake, a Mohawk from Canada, a friend and ally. We did everything together in Berlin, we sat side by side as they measured every inch—and I mean every inch—of our bodies, took pictures of us sitting and standing up, looking this way and that, poured plaster onto our faces so they could keep casts of us. It was something else! We felt like kings. We competed against each other in the games they put on and stared as the girls walked past for the beauty contest. Lord. We didn’t realize then that they saw us as little different to the elephants and zebras on parade. Later he went to America and took to the sky, and I took to the sea. There wasn’t land anywhere that we could call our own and live well.’

  ‘So you think I should take to the sky or sea?’

  ‘You’re a man of the sea, aren’t you? You shouldn’t cling to this piece of flint they call a country—warm yourself up beside a nice furnace somewhere in the Indian Ocean and come back with a clean slate and money in your pocket.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere. The devil looks after his own.’ Mahmood smiles.

  ‘Doqon iyo malagisa lama kala reebi karo. A fool and his fate are never parted,’ sighs Berlin. ‘Off you go then, roohi, I need to close up.’

  After turning the sign on the door, Berlin perches on a stool and lights a cigarette, his silhouette appearing and disappearing with the flashing jukebox lights. The floor is mopped, the till emptied, and the coffee machine cleaned; there’s just enough time to savour a last Player before Flo begins hollering for him to come to bed. He tries to empty his mind but thoughts gallop up and down—bills that need to be paid, a court summons for street gambling, a memory of his long-dead mother’s perfume suddenly as strong as the cigarette smoke, another of his daughter’s downturned infant mouth. He rises and opens a drawer behind the bar, pulling out an old postcard of the Empire State Building in a blizzard, postmarked two Decembers ago. Taiaiake had written a short message in block capitals on the reverse, wishing him a good New Year and telling him that he thought he saw Lucille in a playground in Boerum Hill, and that she looked well and was climbing the monkey bars as well as any steelworker. The postcard has been in the drawer since it arrived, Berlin thinking that any day now he will reply but somehow never managing to. He struggles to keep old worlds alive; friends, lovers, even children seem to deliquesce when he turns his back, appearing in fragments in his dreams and quiet moments to claim their stake on him.

  Solmaz Sharif is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, and most recently a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her first collection of poems, Look, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. She is currently a lecturer at Stanford University.

  Beauty

  SOLMAZ SHARIF

  Frugal musicality is how Kristeva described depression’s speech

  Cleaning out the sink drain

  The melted cheese

  The soggy muesli

  My life can pass like this

  Waiting for beauty

  Tomorrow—I say

  A life is a thing you have to start

  The fridge is a thing with weak magnets, a little sweaty on the inside

  A bag of shriveled lime

  Arugula frozen then thawed then frozen again, still sealed

  I haven’t touched anyone in a year

  You asked for beauty, and one morning, a small blue eggshell on the stoop, shattered open, its contents gone

  Likely eaten

  M asked if I’ve ever made a choice to live and why

  I lied the way you lie to the suicidal

  A few times, I said—not Most days

  Most mornings

  No, not morning

  Morning I am still new

  Still possible, I’m still possibly

  Usually by 3:00

  When grandmother died, she hadn’t been called beautiful in at least half a
century

  Is never described as such

  Her fallen stockings, the way she spit, thwack of the meat cleaver, the little bones she sucked clean and piled on her plate, not really looking at anyone, and certainly not me

  Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, will be published by Viking (United States/Canada), Atlantic (UK), and Foksal (Poland) in 2018.

  America Is Not the Heart

  ELAINE CASTILLO

  It’ll take you a long time to talk about martial law, and you’ll never talk about it with anyone who lived through it with you. But for now, you don’t go to the rallies, you don’t join the student protests; you go silent or change the subject when someone at your table in the canteen brings it up. The fear in you predates Marcos, predates dictatorships—at least, the ones that come in the shape of a single person. No one would ever mistake you for an intellectual or an aktibista; most of the time, you don’t even really understand what people are saying when they talk about the news. Reading written Tagalog has always been difficult for you, even though you’ve gotten more or less fluent with everyday speech. But things like old kundiman from the thirties and forties where half the words for love are words you’ve never heard in your life, or the complicated dialogue in some new movie where all the characters except for the yaya come from Manila, things like newspapers—they still send you into dizzy spells. So you stay away.

  But there’s no staying away from this: dread’s in every pore, every breath, every blink. Martial law means curfew at nine o’clock, it means streets empty except for military jeeps, it means classes that once had fifty pupils are now classes that have forty-eight, maybe forty-six. You and your other nursing student friends at the University of Pangasinan stay together through it all, eating all your meals together in the canteen even though some girls have taken to eating alone in their dorm rooms, sometimes playing music if they have a record player, Bread’s “Make It with You” crooning all the way down the dorm corridor. In the canteen, there are some girls who just start weeping into their plates, right there in front of everyone; maybe because one of their relatives has been taken, maybe just from the fear alone, stretching all of you wire-taut. Sometimes you’re one of the weeping girls—but you never weep in public; you do it only in your own bed, face smashed into the pillow so the tears absorb right back into the skin, the puffiness of your face in the morning the only sign of your labors. No one knows if you’ll even graduate, if there will even be a university left when this is all over, if it’ll ever be over. Then, a year into martial law, you hear about your cousin Tato.