Don't Tell Me You're Afraid

by Giuseppe Catozzella

  I looked at him, not knowing what to do. I didn’t want to leave him there alone, but I knew we needed help.

  The skinny one kept waving his hand in the air as if to dry it and wipe away the teeth marks; rather than getting back at Alì for the bite, he smiled, his expression ominous. Then he said: “Hey, this Darod is gutsy.”

  The fat one stopped scratching himself, nodded, and with the same hand smoothed back a strand of hair.

  “You’ve got balls, Darod,” he said. “Who’s your father?”

  “It’s none of your business who my father is, fatso,” Alì replied.

  “Well, if we can’t talk with whoever should have taught you good manners, then we’ll have to take you in the jeep. . . .” They came up and grabbed him under his arms. Alì tried to shake them off, but there were two of them and they were bigger than him.

  “Maybe some of the adults might like to teach you good manners, Darod. And to be smarter. It’s not smart to bite someone who’s carrying a gun. . . .”

  While Alì continued to struggle and I stood there petrified, a third man got out of the jeep.

  In the dim light you could see that he was much taller than them; he must have been older, but he too had no beard. Maybe he was still young. Maybe he was reasonable.

  He approached us and told the two to release the Darod. “Let him go. Get in the jeep. I’ll take care of him.”

  Alì and I turned to that shadow. We had recognized the voice.

  Together we looked up at his face.

  He was maybe five yards away from us. The streetlamp gave off little light, but the icy green eyes that flashed, though clouded by the same strange watery film as those of the two kids, were his.

  Ahmed.

  Nassir’s friend, with whom Hodan was secretly in love.

  The two boys muttered something and reluctantly let Alì go.

  When they reached the jeep, Ahmed said in a soft, low voice, so he wouldn’t be heard by his companions: “Be careful, you two. Going out alone is dangerous.”

  Then he turned on his heel and signaled the driver to restart the engine.

  Before jumping into the jeep bed, as the vehicle was already moving, he stared at Alì with an ominous expression. A split second that seemed like an eternity.

  The green eyes glinted in the moonlight. That look made my blood run cold. A mixture of pleasure and promise. It was not a challenge, just an air of insidious alliance.

  Then, as slowly as it had arrived, the Al-Shabaab soldiers’ jeep moved off again.

  I was shaking like a leaf. Alì, instead, was all worked up. “Damn fundamentalists! That’s all we needed in this city; it’s not enough that we have all those other armed groups!” he burst out.

  Such inspection checks could happen, of course, but it was better to hear about them from other people’s stories. I went over to hug him and try to calm him down, but he pushed me away.

  “I’m okay. Leave me alone. Those filthy extremists didn’t do a thing to me,” he muttered without even looking at me, staring at the ground.

  “Those two had something about their eyes that seemed unnatural. . . .” I said.

  “Of course. They were all high on khat,” Alì replied.

  A pause.

  “What’s khat?”

  “It’s that filthy narcotic that Al-Shabaab gives its soldiers.”

  “They get high and then go around shooting?”

  “No. It’s so that they will then go around shooting that they give it to them. They offer it to the young ones, so they’ll become addicted.”

  “They seemed lost, as if they were possessed by an evil spirit,” I said to myself, hoping the feeling would quickly pass.

  As if he’d been lost in thought, Alì came back. “That fat one kept scratching his ass.”

  “He must have had ticks in his briefs, never mind the new clothes.” I smiled.

  “Yeah, in fact, that shitty ass of his must have been full of ticks. . . .” he said, laughing. He turned to look off toward the spot where the jeep had been stopped shortly before, as if to make sure that it was really gone.

  I took his hand and this time he didn’t pull away.

  Slowly we made our way back home, spouting one silly thing after another. We went all the way without ever mentioning Ahmed.

  In the courtyard Hooyo, sitting on a chair, was still stirring, bent over the steaming pot heated by the brazier. She had covered her hair with a white veil, which she avoided wearing at home when she wasn’t cooking.

  Seen from the entrance, the skin of her face—illuminated by the moon and firelight and beaded with drops of moisture from the steam—seemed very smooth. Firm and shiny like the rind of a watermelon at noon.

  Just for a change, that night we ate rice and vegetables.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE NEXT MORNING we ran the race.

  The gathering place was at the national monument at eleven o’clock; the sun was almost at its peak and it was hot as hades.

  The course wound through the streets of the city to the stadium: Once we entered it, we would run a lap around the field, then cross the finish line.

  There were three hundred of us. For twelve months it was all I’d been waiting for: Week after week, day after day, I had mentally retraced every meter, every curve; I had imagined every moment of the race, picturing myself entering the stadium and at the finish.

  Still, last night’s encounter with Ahmed, along with Alì’s mood, had had an effect on me too.

  So I wasn’t able to give what I could have. I tried to keep to the edge of the group, I did everything I’d planned to do, but something inside me didn’t respond as I had expected. A part of my brain kept thinking about the glitter of those icy green eyes when they looked at Alì.

  A year. I had spent a year training and I wasn’t able to give my best. I would never forgive myself.

  The course was the usual one; Alì and I had run it a thousand times. The streets had been cleared of the few cars that normally traveled them and knots of vendors were gathered along the entire length of Jamaral Daud, selling water or refreshing juices, bananas and chocolate bars for a few shillings. With its trash cleared away, the avenue was unrecognizable.

  Had it been any other day, I could have won.

  But no. I came in eighth.

  Alì finished one hundred and forty-ninth.

  “You’re better at biting than running,” I teased him afterward. He had also ended up in a pool of excrement: an open sewer. Realizing that he was behind, he had cut through a side street where trash and feces were dumped at night, ever since a bomb had ruptured the sewer system built by the Italians. The cesspool that day had spread over the entire width of the street. Alì had thought it was shallow but found himself in it up to his calves. Still, he had gained a lot of ground.

  At home that night we celebrated.

  Hooyo cooked kebabs of lamb tripe and entrails, which I was crazy about. Kirisho mirish, a spicy meat and rice dish, along with sweet sesame paste, was my favorite. We were happy; Aabe told a lot of jokes and made us all laugh.

  Alì, on the other hand, ashamed of the stench that stuck to him, didn’t even want to come out of his room. His brother Nassir had made him wash before going in, and afterward he refused to come out.

  Every so often, when Said or Nassir called out, teasing him about the stink, Alì shouted something from the room, sniveling woefully. At that point we all chimed in.

  “Leave me alone!” he yelled from his self-imposed isolation.

  “Go on, come out and eat, Stinko!” Nassir kept at him, knowing he was making him even angrier.

  “No, I’m never eating with you again,” Alì shouted.

  “May a thousand pounds of sewage fall on your head,” Said piped up, and we all laughed uproariously. Alì didn’t answer.

 
; Something was bothering him.

  The fact that Ahmed was one of the fundamentalists’ militiamen had affected him deeply.

  I’d told him that my brother Said was right not to trust Ahmed, but Alì had replied that Nassir was very close to Ahmed, so he couldn’t be bad.

  Since that day, however, his eyes would suddenly cloud over with sadness now and then.

  I’d try to make him laugh, but he would soon lapse back into his reflections.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  After that night, for several weeks he began to spend more and more time up in the eucalyptus. If we played griir, he got confused about the number of pebbles and lost; and he had always beaten all of us. When we played hide and seek, he always hid in the same places, and if someone pointed it out to him, he paid no attention. He didn’t care about winning.

  He stayed up in his dumb eucalyptus, thinking about who knows what.

  I didn’t recognize him anymore.

  One afternoon, out of the blue, he told me that he was going to stop running and that he would become my coach.

  “Why the heck should you be my coach?” I asked him as I laced up my shoes.

  “You’re faster than me. It’s pointless for me to keep trying. I don’t have an aptitude for running; I have to face it. But you do.” He was nibbling an ear of corn that Hooyo had cooked the night before.

  “And that’s why you’ve decided to be my coach?”

  “Every athlete has a coach. If I can’t be an athlete, then I want to be a coach.”

  “So if I win I’ll owe it all to you. . . .” I teased.

  “No,” he replied seriously, “it’s because you need someone to train you. You can’t do it alone.” A pause. I raised my head and looked at him.

  “Can’t do what?” I asked.

  “You can’t become a champion.”

  We were eight years old.

  As usual, I didn’t answer him. But from that day on I had a coach.

  I might have lost a playmate on account of Ahmed, though I didn’t want to admit it. But I had found myself.

  After that day I turned into what I had always wanted to be: an athlete.

  All thanks to Alì, without his even realizing it.

  I hugged him tightly and we went out to run in the wind on that afternoon of boundless joy.

  CHAPTER 5

  THEN, on a morning like any other, which gave no sign of what was about to happen, while Hodan and I were still asleep, Aabe went out as usual with Yassin to go to work in the Xamar Weyne district.

  The area was a distance away but very busy, full of people coming and going, an ideal place to do business. Hundreds and hundreds of vendors hawked their products to passersby from large and small stalls in every color of the rainbow. This was the Xamar Weyne market, a raucous madhouse where the sellers were almost as numerous as the buyers. Cotton, linen, sweaters, charcoal, American jeans, shoes, fruit, sandals, vegetables, incense, spices, chocolate . . . Each one peddled his specialty.

  Yassin was two years younger than Aabe and even taller, over six feet. He looked older, though: He had more wrinkles around his eyes and on his brow, and his eyes always seemed sad. Hooyo said it was because he had suffered so much over the loss of his wife, the beautiful Yasmin, Alì’s mother, who had died of cancer when we were two years old. There was a framed photograph of her on a dresser in their room, and every time I went in there I was taken aback by how beautiful Yasmin was. The broad forehead, the big, elongated eyes, the same full lips that Alì had.

  Every morning Aabe and Yassin left the house at five and didn’t come home until around six in the evening, at sunset. They had two large stalls, Aabe’s for clothes and Yassin’s for vegetables.

  “I hope you will never have to work as hard as I do, my little Samia,” Aabe, exhausted, always told me when I was little, before saying good night to me in the evening. I loved having him there close to me: Those moments were magical for me. I would lose myself in the scent of his aftershave and I was happy; I felt safe. Even his clothes had a smell. It was the smell of Aabe’s clothes after a long day’s work; I would have recognized it among thousands.

  “If you can do it, so can I,” I told him.

  “I’m doing it so that you won’t have to.”

  “Aabe,” I said once after thinking about it for a while, “how come you never complain about what you do? Omar Sheikh, our landlord, is always complaining about everything. Whenever he’s here he spends all his time telling us about his hard luck.”

  “Complaining only makes you keep doing what you don’t like,” Aabe answered in his deep voice, as he ran a hand through his flowing black hair. He had always worn his hair long. Hooyo teased him, saying he acted like a woman and that’s why he didn’t have a beard either. “Beards are for fundamentalists,” he would tell her. “If you really don’t like something, you just need to change it, my little Samia. I love my work, and I love it because I do it for you. This makes me happy.”

  I stopped to think a little, then asked him: “Papa, aren’t you ever afraid of the war?”

  He turned serious. “You must never say you’re afraid, my Samia. Never. Otherwise the things you’re afraid of will seem big and they’ll think they can beat you.”

  That morning he and Yassin left together, as always. They had just crossed Jamaral Daud, right beyond the parliament, and had stopped at their friend Taageere’s bar, a wooden shack in a small alley, to drink a shaat and shoot the breeze before work, as they did every day.

  Suddenly, however, they heard gunshots.

  A hundred yards away, from behind a six-story building, four or five Hawiye militiamen, affiliated with us Abgal, had appeared. They were looking for a Darod who, according to them, had stolen something, and they were shouting that he must have fled in that direction.

  One of them spotted Yassin standing with Aabe in front of the bar and pointed him out to the others, and they all started running toward him.

  Aabe and Yassin didn’t even have time to think.

  When the soldiers came closer, Alì’s father realized what was about to happen and instinctively started to run away.

  It all happened in an instant.

  As soon as Yassin turned his back, one of the men opened fire, followed immediately by the others.

  Aabe lunged to knock Yassin to the ground, clear of the barrage of bullets that had already riddled the wall a few inches from there.

  Later they told us that Taageere stood there the whole time as if frozen, the two glasses of shaat in his hands, poised in midair.

  Meanwhile, the gunfire was over as quickly as it had erupted.

  The soldiers shouted something and, satisfied, disappeared around the corner as swiftly as they had materialized.

  Aabe and Yassin turned, relieved, thinking they had come through it safely.

  But when they tried to get up, they realized what had happened. Taageere was white as a sheet.

  Aabe had been shot in his right foot.

  He hadn’t even been aware of it.

  The blood had already formed a small pool.

  Friendly fire had struck an Abgal in place of a Darod.

  • • •

  HODAN COMPOSED HER SONGS and then sang them.

  She had a beautiful voice, like velvet. It was a little husky and low but at the same time clear enough to reach the highest notes. When she sang, her smooth, round, porcelain-doll face wore an astonished expression, as if she were always about to reveal something. I adored her. I wanted to be like her, to have her beauty, her voice. Besides that, the veils never looked as good on any other girl as they did on Hodan. The bright colors, yellow, red, and orange, lit up her face like a sudden blaze in a dense forest.

  To mark the rhythm she would join her palms and tap her fingers together, like a shell in the Indian Ocean that continuously
opens and shuts, following a steady tempo.

  She sang in the traditional buraanbur form, though blended with more modern music, in the style of her musical group, the Shamsudiin Band.

  She composed her songs in our room, alone, or while we kids were in bed, with the ferus lit, waiting to fall asleep, enjoying the last laughs of the day.

  At some point, every night, Hodan withdrew, pulled out her little notebook, and began writing. She wrote about all kinds of subjects, about what made her suffer and about what gave her joy.

  I watched her closely, studying her smallest gestures. She and I, in fact, had always slept next to each other, ever since I was born, when she had just turned five. Our mattresses were placed at right angles along the side of the room nearest the door, just inside the entrance. And since birth I’d gotten used to falling asleep with her voice in my ears, growing slowly softer and softer, until fading off into a whisper.

  Maybe that’s why I always slept well and why, as everyone said, I was confident about what would happen tomorrow, thinking it would be better than today. It was because of Hodan’s voice, which had accompanied me to sleep since I was born.

  “I’ve given all my optimism to you,” she’d tell me.

  Unlike me, Hodan was always worried; she always had something on her mind. She found peace only in the evening, when the ferus was turned off and she could go on whispering her songs about the war, about our family, about the future, about running, about Alì, about our father being shot, about the children we would one day have.

  We always fell asleep hand in hand, our heads touching. As I held her hand, I felt her grip gradually loosen and become more gentle. And I realized that she relaxed as she sang.

  I knew I was her first audience, and it filled me with pride. I felt she gauged her songs by my smiles; though the themes varied widely, they all spoke of one thing: the importance of freedom and the power of dreams.

  On the night Aabe was injured, while he was in the hospital recovering from surgery, Hodan composed a song that compared him to a great winged horse.