I exchanged a few words with a couple of girls, but I couldn’t get too distracted. I was there to win, not to chat. I kept looking around; I couldn’t help it. Everything was new to me. It was my first time in the north, my first real race.
I was surely the youngest. No one would have bet a shilling on me.
After a while, when my impatience had reached its peak, I took the path of least resistance. I lay down on the grass and waited for time to pass. Surrounded by that sweet, enveloping scent.
Until the moment came.
My opponents didn’t seem very intimidating. They were older than me, but they didn’t have the fervent eyes of real athletes. Right away I had the feeling that I could come in first.
In a little less than two hours I won the two qualifying rounds in the heats, one after the other.
Before I knew it, I found myself in the final, with a lot less breath, a great deal of pain in my quadriceps, and two races behind me. One in the hundred meters and one in the two hundred.
The first-place finishers from each heat were admitted to the final.
The first of the finals was the two hundred meters. My legs were stiff as boards from the overexertion; I was twice as exhausted as the others because I was the only one to run both races.
But that only made me more driven. If I had come this far, I might even win.
I bent over the starting blocks and at the signal took off like a rocket, my eyes only on the finish line.
In my head, as always, were the voices of Aabe and Alì, shouting at me to run.
And I ran.
I crossed the finish line first.
It was a huge thrill, the greatest feeling of liberation.
Number one.
I was the fastest runner of my country in the two hundred meters. Something that I was barely able to absorb.
I didn’t have much time to let it sink in, however. In ten minutes the hundred-meter final, the most important race, would be run.
The spectators in the stands began to make themselves heard for the first time. Some shouted, cheering us on.
As we headed for the starting blocks, the girl in the lane next to mine pointed to a small group of people in the stands who were trying to get my attention. When I looked over, they began clapping and rooting for me. I had fans.
I raised my arm and waved at them.
When the starting gun went off, I again heard only the voices of Aabe and Alì in my head. Run, little warrior. Run and smile at the finish line!
I burned those hundred meters like I’d never done before.
The girls to my right and to my left were slower than I was; instantly I was two steps ahead of them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that there was only one runner, in the first lane, who was even with me. In the last ten meters I poured out everything that had brought me to that track.
The strain and effort, the training, the commitment, the fears and frustrations that I’d experienced for at least seven years. I looked back at Mogadishu like a cage from which I had finally been able to escape and run free.
And I won. Again.
When I reached the finish, I felt like a cricket that for weeks has been prevented from jumping, caught and kept in a box, as kids do in Mogadishu. They keep it in their pocket; then, after days, they release it, and the cricket jumps a long distance. They have jumping contests for crickets that have been penned up, and they bet on them. I felt like one of those confined crickets. I kept jumping left and right; I could have reached the sky. And the beauty of it was that we were in Hargeysa, there was no war, there were no Al-Shabaab men.
Here, at last, I could jump and celebrate in peace.
And I could smile too.
I smiled at everyone and I shook hands with those who came up to meet me. If Alì had seen me, he would have been so happy he’d have cried like a little girl. I hadn’t seen him in six months, and in my heart I dedicated the victory to him, to my coach. To the one who had made me become an athlete. And who was my best friend.
That day was the first time I saw my official times, posted in large letters on an electronic scoreboard: 15.83 for the hundred meter, and 32.77 for the two hundred.
There was still a lot of room for improvement, but I had won. I was the fastest woman in my country.
And I had earned the right to run in the race to be held in Djibouti three months from now. My first international competition.
On the trip back I slept for twenty hours straight. We left in the evening and would not arrive until the following evening. I never opened my eyes, not even once; I didn’t even get out of the bus to go to the bathroom.
I had my two medals around my neck, safely tucked under my T-shirt, where I still wore the bib with 78, my lucky number.
Only for the first hour did I feel like a bomb about to explode. An elderly lady sitting beside me was trying to read a book by the dim light that filtered through the window, and I felt the irresistible urge to tell her everything that had happened to me, minute by minute. Every so often I tried to start a conversation. There was no way; she never raised her eyes from those pages.
Afterward I began to crumble. I hadn’t slept in two days and I plunged into a deep, deep sleep. I fell asleep with my hand over the medals, grasping the jacket of my tracksuit.
At the bus station in Mogadishu, everything was the same as I had left it. For me centuries had passed; I had traveled to the other side of the world and had become someone else. Yet in a flash I found myself back where I’d started, as if nothing had happened: the usual troubled faces, sunken and anxious, the usual rifles over the shoulders, the usual stained, crumpled uniforms, salvaged from who knows where.
Outside the station Aabe was waiting for me.
There was no need for me to say anything; he read it all on my face. I leaped at him, arms around his neck, and covered him with kisses.
On the way back I was obsessed by the idea of running into Al-Shabaab patrols. I used the technique that Hodan had taught me as a little girl, which I had later taught Alì: invisibility. It had always worked. Except for the time with the two boys and Ahmed. It was simple: If you think you’re invisible, Hodan had told me, then you really become invisible. It was the way we went around the city; it was the secret that we’d always used, even Alì and I when we went running at curfew or when we ventured out to the beach when we were little.
Now I used it for me and Aabe. So that the bubble of invisibility might protect us from everything and everyone forever and ever.
It was past eleven when we got home. Everyone had already eaten, but they had kept a plate of kirisho mirish and sweet sesame cakes for me.
Hooyo, crying as usual, said she was proud of me. Even Hodan joined in with Hooyo’s tears, and my other brothers and sisters came up with a song in my honor.
That evening, the night of the victory, everything was perfect.
I was transformed.
For the first time I felt grown up, like an adult. On top of that, I knew I was a champion, and buried somewhere in the pit of my stomach was the conviction that one day I would win the Olympics. And that when that day came, I would indeed lead the resurgence of Muslim women.
I watched my siblings sing as if I were in a bubble of silence. I could see their mouths moving, but I couldn’t hear their voices.
The absence of Alì, his brothers, and Aabe Yassin was palpable. Maybe that’s why my family was more emotional than usual.
Alì, my coach, wasn’t there, and for the first time in my life I wept inconsolably.
Hodan and Hooyo thought I was crying for joy over the victory. No, that night in the courtyard, in front of my entire family celebrating in my honor, I cried because I had grown up and because I missed Alì. The one person in the world who had devoted himself to training me so that I might win the race that I had won that day. And who didn’t even
know it.
Before going to sleep I hung the two medals on a nail in the wall beside the mattress. Next to Mo Farah’s face.
Who knows, maybe even Mo could see them.
From Europe, from London. From far, far away.
Who knows, maybe he might decide to send me a note of encouragement for what was to come, for the upcoming race in Djibouti, for instance.
Then, before I dropped off to sleep, Hodan’s velvet voice sang me a wonderful, glorious victory song.
CHAPTER 15
A MONTH LATER, with the unconditional finality with which everything had now started happening in my life, Aabe left us forever. With the swiftness and inevitability with which events were taking place, my guiding light was also gone. One moment everything was as it always was. And the next moment nothing was the same anymore. As of that day, darkness fell.
That morning, as he often did, Aabe had gone to the Bakara market to meet a few friends and do some shopping. Someone, his face concealed, came up behind him and shot him. Just like that, for no reason. An act that only took a moment. Of no consequence to any onlooker, inconspicuous amid all the frenzied hawking and shouting. Given the general indifference, the shadowy figure slipped away without even causing a stir. No one made a move; very few had even noticed.
Bakara was the most dangerous place in the city. Packed with people coming and going at all hours hunting for items to buy and sell, hoping to make a profit or just waste time. Every corner brimming with color—blue, green, red, yellow, white, black—the colors of the fabrics, the spices, the fruits and vegetables. And above all teeming with hands, legs, feet, faces, eyes darting rapidly from this to that, the reek, the odors, the ooze. Littered with spit, banana peels, apple cores, watermelon rinds, the remains of apricots and peaches. That’s Bakara, a hellhole. Because it was so congested, it had always been the most unsafe place.
But until that day it had been the place where other people died. The site of deaths that no one cared about.
The clans’ militiamen, or Al-Shabaab’s men, might place a bomb inside a shopping bag slung over a woman’s back. One would drop the bomb in as he passed by. Then, from a distance away, another one pressed a button. And boom.
Twenty people in one fell swoop. Or thirty.
Children, women, elderly people.
No one gave a damn about it. Activity around the corpses stopped just long enough for everything to go back to normal. It was always someone else who died, someone else who left parents, children, relatives, and friends.
That day, however, that “someone else” suddenly touched us, and death took on its full significance.
That day it was Aabe Yusuf.
Our father.
Gone.
Forever.
After that night Hodan and I no longer slept on our mattresses but in the big bed with Hooyo. Aabe’s body had been laid out on a wooden table covered with a cloth, on view in the courtyard for twenty-four hours, for the public to pay its respects. Our mother spent nearly the entire time standing there welcoming the people who came, her hand in the hand of her dead husband. I, however, didn’t even look at him. I wanted to keep my memory of him intact forever.
Said couldn’t stop crying while Hodan entered into a silence that she broke only at night, in bed.
She slept between me and Hooyo and sang us to sleep with hymns that accompanied Aabe’s Journey, songs that spoke to us with his voice, as if he were with us and were telling us that it was all the fault of the warlords and fundamentalists that he had left us alone. She sang clenching her fists.
We lay hand in hand staring at the ceiling, Hodan in the middle with one hand in mine and the other in Hooyo’s, and as she sang in that strained voice she almost crushed our knuckles.
When we buried him, there was a stream of people with us. Everyone introduced himself as Aabe’s best friend.
Aabe was gone and, like it or not, life had to go on.
His absence in the smallest everyday actions plunged me into a state of furious rage that intensified rather than destroyed my urge to run and to win. What’s more, it made me invincible and unassailable. Nothing could ever hurt me anymore. They had already taken Aabe from me; no one could ever again find fault with what I did.
My grief was so great that I did not fear the worst. Often as I ran, I found myself crying like mad. When I came home and he wasn’t sitting in the courtyard, I burst into sobs. In the evening, after dinner, we missed his deep voice and his jokes. Said tried, but the void seemed even more painful.
In those days and weeks I felt an obligation to complete what I had started in the name of the invincibility that Aabe had bestowed on me. Sometimes as I ran, my mind wandering on its own, I caught myself imagining the most absurd, unthinkable things: that Aabe had been taken from us just to allow me to run freely, protected by his death, which had brought vengeance to our family.
But as soon as I stopped and pulled myself together, I realized that I was just being foolish.
The world had lost its colors, its scents, its sounds. From that day on, everything was dulled, murky, like the wax of Alì’s face that morning. It was as if I had entered an endless tunnel, the space between its walls barely wider than me, and all I could do was run, run as fast as I could, looking for a way out.
And in fact, during the two months before the race in Djibouti, I ran to the point of collapse.
Each time I trained I heard in my head the words that Aabe had told me the morning of my first big race: You’re a little warrior running for freedom, whose efforts alone will redeem an entire people.
Those words pushed me to the extreme.
I trained in the courtyard with the weights; then at night I would sneak away to the CONS stadium, covered by the burka, and practice starts, sprints, lunges, reps. I felt invincible. Every day I would go on like that, six, seven, eight hours straight.
Until I collapsed on the ground, exhausted. Without Alì to grip my wrists and pull me back up.
So usually I sprawled on the patchy grass of the soccer field and lay there for minutes at a time, gazing at the sky.
I liked to picture myself from up above, from where Aabe was looking down on me, like a point in the center of a huge rectangle.
There was only the grass prickling my back, the cool, fresh evening air, the sky full of stars, my heavy breathing, and myself.
After a while everything became silent, my body began to unwind, my legs and back relaxed, my breath settled down.
Then I would take a deep breath and hold it for a while; I’d discovered that the effort kept the tears from coming. I stayed like that for as long as I could, my cheeks puffed out like a carp, so filled with air they nearly burst.
Until it was time to come back to earth, to get up and put on that horrible black garment that covered me from head to toe.
And return home, slowly, breathing through my nose and trying to keep my head empty of any thoughts.
May a thousand pounds of putrid shit fall on your heads and bury you forever.
CHAPTER 16
ONE DAY WHEN I came home from school, there was a man talking with Hooyo in the courtyard who claimed to be from the Olympic Committee. Somewhat balding, with broad shoulders that spoke of a lean, athletic physique.
He was wearing a suit and tie, which immediately made me mistrustful, because only bridegrooms, politicians, and businessmen dressed that way. But then he told me that he knew about my win in Hargeysa and that Abdi Bile himself, the great champion from the eighties, would be glad to meet me.
“Okay, but when?” I asked.
“Right away, if you’d like,” he replied calmly as he adjusted his tie. “By the way, I haven’t yet introduced myself. I am Xassan. Xassan Abdullahi.”
I looked at Hooyo and Hodan, who nodded yes without speaking. I could go if I wanted to. Hodan, however, would come with me.<
br />
“We’re only too pleased to have your sister come as well,” the man said in his equable way. “Let’s go. I have the car parked down the street.” He seemed like a British gentleman or like someone who had traveled a lot in his youth or had lived abroad a great deal.
Hodan and I looked at each other. For the first time in our lives we would ride in a car!
We left the courtyard and the man led us to the car. It was a red Honda sedan. He opened the back door and we got in. It was very cold inside, because of the air-conditioning. It felt like being surrounded by ice. Then too the black leather seats made a crackling noise every time we moved. Seen through the windows of the car, the city looked different, both smaller and more impoverished. The people along the streets whom I had seen a million times seemed even more like good-for-nothing idlers.
We arrived in twenty minutes or so. It was the first time I had set foot in the headquarters of the National Olympic Committee.
Inside there were men and boys, some wearing the tracksuit of Somalia’s national team, others dressed stylishly like Xassan. He went into a room, politely telling us to wait for him outside. On the walls were lots of photographs of athletes. Hodan and I kept looking around, feeling ill at ease.
As we lingered in the hall, a young man wearing Somalia’s blue tracksuit came up and showed us to a place where we could sit down. It was a small room with more photographs. After a while, another man appeared at the door: white hair, jacket and tie, and a pleasant face. Hodan and I were as awkward as two little girls on the first day of school.
“Let’s go to my office,” he said with a big smile, motioning us out.
We entered the office and were seated in two black leather chairs in front of his desk. A nameplate on the door read DR. DURAN FARAH, VICE PRESIDENT. Along the walls, shelves held numerous trophies. He took a box of chocolates out of a drawer and offered them to us. I’m not a sweets lover, except for sesame paste, but Hodan is, and she took two. After asking us how we were and exchanging a few words with me, he said they knew that I’d won an important race and they thought they could try to make me into a real athlete.
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