Don't Tell Me You're Afraid

by Giuseppe Catozzella

  I ate in five minutes and spent the rest of the time playing. Hide and seek, for instance. There weren’t many places to hide, so you had to use your wits. Sometimes I sat down on the ground with a group of girls who were eating or talking in the yard, hoping to go unnoticed. Or I’d duck behind the trunk of an acacia. Or behind the big trash bin. Or behind the teachers, who laughed when we crouched under their garbasar, shawls. Anyway, even when they discovered me, I was always the fastest to reach the back wall of the courtyard.

  In the afternoon Hodan and I returned home knowing that we had spent the day usefully. Aabe always told us: “Mangiate la zuppa finché è calda. Eat the soup while it’s hot!” Another one of his Italian proverbs. Try to take pleasure in school. Think of it as a privilege, not as something boring. Enjoy it while the money lasts, because with the war we live from day to day.

  When it was time for Hodan and me to part, at the corner of avenue Jamaral Daud, there were tears. Hers and mine, every day.

  It didn’t matter that we would see each other the next morning: We didn’t want to be separated. In fact, we made up a thousand excuses to stay together.

  Once in a while I went to hear her sing with the Shamsudiin Band. There were about a dozen musicians who met three afternoons a week in a large concert hall, or what was left of it, in the area of the old port, near the sea.

  To get there you had to turn onto a street from which, for a stretch, you could see the shore on the horizon between the houses.

  Sometimes we did everything we could not to look in that direction. But there were days when it was too painful, days when the sun shone brightly in a blue sky and a fresh wind blew in from offshore. It was especially hard for Hodan, who had gone swimming and played in the sand as a child, and remembered how exquisite it was.

  On those days, if we were happy or carefree, one of us would simply say: “Should we look at it?”

  The other always answered yes. Then we would duck into a space between the houses so we wouldn’t risk bumping into some militiamen, and we’d stay there gazing at the sea for an hour. We never even thought about venturing out onto the sand, as I used to do with Alì when I was little.

  We squatted there in a narrow gap between two houses, staring at the horizon, and didn’t breathe a word, our garbasar trailing in the fine white dust.

  The sun’s play on the waves made our thoughts soar. There was no need for words. At those moments everything was exactly as it should be; we didn’t ask for anything more, for anything to change. Just to be together forever like that.

  Going to hear Hodan sing was fabulous. Behind the platform where the group played hung a well-known Somali proverb—or maybe it was well known only to me, because Hodan was always repeating it to me: Durbaab garabkaga ha kugu jiro ama gacalgaaga ha kuu rumo, which means “Let the music play; all we need is music.” It was her motto and her reason for being.

  Hodan sat on a chair in the center of the group, marking the rhythm by tapping her fingers, palms joined; every so often she clapped her palms in a sacab, a stronger beat that served to mark a pause for the other members. Behind her were the players of the shareero, a kind of lyre, and the kaban, a lute, then all the others with drums and the shambal, two pieces of wood with a hole in the middle; beside her was someone who played the gobeys, a somewhat strange flute. There was also someone playing the koor, the bell that a camel wears around its neck; at first this made me laugh, because it seemed like such a simple instrument that even a camel could play it—there was no need for a man.

  When she was able to sing her songs, Hodan was transformed.

  Her face relaxed. As soon as she started a tune, she let the music of her own voice carry her away, closing her eyes and smiling with an ecstatic expression.

  When I told her that on the way home, she got embarrassed. “You look like you’re in ecstasy when you sing. Like you’re having an orgasm,” I said, just to make her blush.

  “Don’t be silly. You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” she replied, turning her face away because she knew she’d turned red.

  “Of course I do. Alì tells me all about what it’s like to have sex! His friend Nurud says he already did it once and that women make funny faces when they’re in ecstasy, as if they were praying to Allah and Allah suddenly answered their prayer.”

  “Well, tell Alì that his friend doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “They’re the same faces you make when you sing!”

  “I don’t make faces when I sing!” Hodan got angry and said that from then on she would sing with her back to the audience or with a paper bag over her head.

  The rehearsals usually went on for two or three hours, and after a while I got bored. At that point I’d go to the back of the room and do some stretches, since at that time Alì was insisting that I develop the muscles of my legs, which to me, skinny as I was, always seemed to be stretched to the breaking point.

  CHAPTER 9

  SINCE HODAN HAD GONE, almost every night Alì came and played with me on the empty mattress.

  Often he ended up falling asleep, then waking up suddenly and crossing the courtyard to go back to sleep in the room he shared with his father and brothers.

  At first he consoled me over Hodan’s absence.

  As soon as we finished eating, rather than stay outside in the courtyard and play as we had always done, we went into the bedroom and, in the moonlight, with the ferus turned off, we talked until my brothers and sisters came in. We talked mainly about the future, as we had when we were little and used to spend our afternoons in the eucalyptus tree. But we were older now, I could tell by Alì’s hands, which seemed huge to me. Alì saw me as a champion hailed around the world; he said that someday people from all corners of the globe would travel kilometers just to meet me, to have their picture taken with me and shake my hand. I laughed and couldn’t imagine such a thing. I said that if that were so, I would feel guilty: Traveling all that way just to meet me didn’t make sense. Then he grabbed my hand with those long, bony fingers of his, shook it, and said: “Can you picture all those people who’ll want to shake your hand, like I’m doing now?”

  He, however, was not going to stay in Somalia. He told me he was going to do what Mo Farah had done. As soon as he was a little bigger, because you couldn’t make the Journey, as everyone called it, when you were eleven. It was too dangerous. He would go all the way to the uppermost part of Europe; for sure he wouldn’t stop at Italy or Greece.

  Like Mo, he would go straight to England.

  As he spoke, he stared at the photograph on the wall with a faraway look. A friend of his brother’s who had made the Journey had told him that in the countries of northern Europe, if you were a refugee fleeing from war they gave you a house and a stipend. But for Alì England was still the land of opportunity and besides, he said, it wasn’t as cold as in Finland or Sweden, where you could freeze to death when you went out shopping.

  We always said the same things. Talking about our future reassured us; it made us feel good. Not just because we could occasionally hear the firing of nearby mortars from outside. No, it was just talking about it that mattered.

  Alì loved to talk, and I loved listening to him. We loved the way the story had evolved since the first time it had come out of his mouth, the way it had settled on the things that he or I liked best. It was reassuring to know how it would end; it was a nice way to spend our evenings. Not quite like Hodan’s sweet voice, but almost. During those weeks, those months, Alì and I shared everything we had, generous and unafraid: We exchanged dreams.

  And then there were times when we fought, when he said that someday, as a champion, I would want to leave my country. He could say anything, but not that. I knew that someday things would change, and I was sure that I would play an important role in that change. But Alì said that in the end I would give in, that I too would go to England and, like Mo Far
ah, I would run wearing the jersey of the country ruled by the queen. With that jersey I would win the Olympics.

  He did it to infuriate me, and he succeeded. When he said that I would marry Mo and that we would be the most famous sports couple in the world, I tried not to lose my temper, but I couldn’t help it. I slapped him. He laughed and slapped me back. Then he pushed me on my back on the mattress, grabbed both of my arms, climbed astride me, pinned my wrists under his knees, and tickled me until I begged for mercy with tears in my eyes, imploring him to stop.

  “Only if you admit that someday you’ll leave Somalia and marry Mo Farah,” he said as he continued tickling me to death.

  “No!” I yelled.

  “Then I won’t stop!”

  At that point I couldn’t take it anymore and I gave in. “Okay, okay, all right, you win. . . . I’ll leave the country . . .”

  “You’ll leave the country and . . . ?”

  “I’ll leave the country and . . . I’ll marry Mo Farah,” I gasped.

  “You see? I was right!”

  Then we burst out laughing and made up. Every now and then one of the adults, hearing our screams, stuck his head inside. Seeing us play, he said something we didn’t even hear and quietly went back to where he’d come from.

  As we lay side by side, Alì sometimes began singing. I had told him that I liked it when Hodan sang, and to tease me he started wailing in falsetto, his voice pitched artificially high like a girl’s. But he was so out of tune that most times we started hitting each other and tickling again.

  When we were together, Alì went back to being the way he’d always been. Only when he was with me did the melancholy that now always clouded his eyes fade.

  I was worried about him.

  I had tried many times to ask him what was wrong. I’d tried to talk about Ahmed, who hadn’t been seen at our house since the night I’d won the annual race; I reminded him of the encounter that long-ago evening when Ahmed had protected us from the two fundamentalist kids. But Alì never responded.

  Just raising the subject made him darken even more. So he won and we didn’t talk about it.

  We never talked about it, for two whole years.

  CHAPTER 10

  BY DAY, HOWEVER, every day for two years Alì continued to be my coach. He had gone to the city’s old library and borrowed all the training manuals he could find. For months, every afternoon in the courtyard he forced me to read them to him. As a result, we also succeeded where we had failed a long time ago: Thanks to his passion for racing and training, Alì learned to read.

  He always said that whereas the heart was the engine and breath the gasoline, the muscles were the pistons, and they had to be strong, resilient, and responsive.

  In the courtyard in the afternoon or late at night, when the others were already in their rooms, he made me do reps, thirty-meter sprints, from one side to the other at maximum speed. As many as a hundred in a row. I started from the back wall and sprinted to the entrance wall. Then I turned around and did the same thing in reverse. Again and again, until I collapsed on the ground, utterly spent.

  “Enough, please,” I begged him, exhausted, drenched with sweat.

  “Samia, do you remember the first rule? Don’t complain and do everything I tell you,” Alì said, sitting in the shadows on the wicker chair Aabe used in the evening. I hated him.

  “No. I said enough. I’m ready to drop.” I tried to move him to pity by throwing myself on the ground and pretending I was about to pass out.

  At that point Alì made me get up, with the dust stuck all over me, and do another ten reps. Finally, a lap all around to cool down.

  To strengthen my arm muscles, he’d made weights out of tin cans or plastic bottles he’d found in the street or at the Bakara market by filling them with sand. He liked going to the market; he loved being in crowded places with thousands of people all talking at the same time and scurrying around, jostling and shoving, bumping into one another like busy ants. I, on the other hand, didn’t like it at all. Not just because of the crowds, which I hated, and the reek of sweaty armpits that collected under the blue plastic awnings hung over the stalls to protect them from the scorching sun, but also because Bakara scared me. Not only was it the biggest market, but it was also the area of the city where most terrorist attacks occurred. Killers from the clans, as well as Al-Shabaab extremists, liked having all those people together.

  I never wanted to go, whereas Alì, who wasn’t afraid of anything, found a thousand excuses to go back there.

  As a result, he’d come up with the idea of the weights.

  There were thirty-three-centiliter cans of Coca-Cola, half-liter bottles, one-and-a-half-liter bottles, and two-liter ones. All filled with sand from the beach.

  For my legs he’d instead used four pieces of wood to build a kind of small scaffold on which he hung different weights, depending on the exercise I had to perform. He made me sit on a chair and put that contraption on my thigh, asking me to lift it. Or, with me standing, he placed it on my ankle, which I had to raise to my thigh. The weights were very heavy. My scrawny little legs had to make a tremendous effort. We went on like that until I begged for mercy and he, moved to compassion, let me stop.

  That we did all this when we were thirteen years old seems incredible. Yet that’s what we did.

  In spite of this, even though we were so close, on one of the worst days of my life I betrayed Alì.

  I did it out of fear, but I still betrayed him.

  That day Alì hadn’t kept time for me, because he’d had to go help his father at work. His brother Nassir, who usually went with Aabe Yassin, wasn’t around that day.

  I stealthily slipped out and ran a little lap around the block. I was on my way back home, in a narrow street with three abandoned houses, when—right about halfway—I spotted a guy with his back against the wall, staring at the ground.

  He wore dark glasses and one of those black shirts the extremists wear, but he was unarmed: no machine gun, no rifle.

  I tried to act like it was nothing.

  When I passed him, he called to me in a soft, almost alluring voice. Maybe I was tired of running, but that’s how that voice sounded to me.

  “Samia.”

  I turned around and looked at him. I didn’t know him.

  How did he know my name? I turned around again and kept going.

  “Samia, stop! Don’t worry, I’m a friend.”

  Never trust anyone: Aabe had taught us that the very day we were born. I tried to continue, but the guy spoke again.

  “Stop. I just need to ask you something.”

  He was tall and thin, with broad shoulders. Dark skin. A mass of tangled black hair and the fundamentalists’ long beard covering his face.

  He moved away from the wall and took a step toward me.

  “Where’s your friend?” Now the tone was sharp, peremptory.

  “What friend?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

  “The one who’s always with you, day and night.”

  I was scared. He’d picked that time and place because he knew that at that hour it was unlikely that anyone would come by; those who worked were at work, and the alley was deserted.

  “I don’t have a friend. I’m always with my sister,” I replied after a slight hesitation.

  “Don’t pull my leg. I know very well that Alì is your friend. I know everything. I just want to know where he is,” he said in a harsh voice as he moved toward me.

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “You’re an athlete, Samia, right? You like running, don’t you?” His tone had turned threatening. He was just a few steps away now. Up close he was even taller than he’d seemed before, his shoulders even broader and more powerful. The sun reflected off the dark glasses in two luminous points.

  “Yes, I’m an athlete,” I rep
lied in a trembling voice.

  The guy stuck his right hand behind his back, under his belt, and suddenly pulled out a long knife.

  I took a step back, ending up with my heels against the wall behind me. I glanced around but saw nobody; the doorways of the houses were deserted.

  He reached out his arm, pointing the blade at my left leg, then came even closer. He was way too big for me to be able to do anything.

  I was petrified. Even if I’d wanted to move, my limbs did not respond to my commands.

  “And an athlete needs both legs to run, right?”

  I was shaking, terrified; I didn’t know what to say. “Yes, both of them . . .” I stammered.

  “So if you don’t want to lose one, tell me where Alì is. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt him. I just want to talk to him. I want to know where he is and have a little chat with him.”

  “But I don’t know where Alì is.”

  “And I think you do know.” He took another step forward until he was right in front of me. “Well . . . ?” The blade of the knife was now in contact with my skin; I felt it red hot on my knee, sharp.

  “I don’t know where Alì is. . . .”

  He pressed slightly and the blade scratched my skin; immediately a line of blood welled up above the kneecap. His other hand squeezed below my neck, pinning me against the wall, his face just inches from mine. I smelled the scent of his cologne and I saw my distorted face reflected in his lenses.

  “You don’t know. . . .” He kept increasing the pressure. “Then again, do you know what a blade does when it sinks deep into the flesh? First it cuts the tendon, then the muscle, and finally the bone.”

  At that moment he jerked the blade away and with the same hand, not letting go of the knife, pulled off his glasses and placed them on his head.

  I recognized him then. His bloodshot, dilated eyes, so close to mine. Green as emeralds. It had been three years since I’d seen him, and he had become a man. By now he must be twenty.