The man steps further into the kitchen and bends down over Deqo; he smiles and reveals two gold canines. ‘Pretty girl,’ he says, catching her nose between his tobacco-stained fingers.
‘You’re in perfect health, aren’t you, Deqo?’ Nasra gently pulls him away from her.
Deqo nods shyly.
‘Let’s talk in my room,’ Nasra says, leading the visitor out of the kitchen.
‘Oh, you’re set for the chopping board, little one,’ chuckles China.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ll soon find out.’ China takes Nuh from her and walks back to her room with a flask of tea.
Deqo shoves the chick into her skirt pocket and stands beside Nasra’s door, but she cannot hear the conversation no matter how hard she presses her ear to the wall. Deqo goes back to the kitchen, telling herself to not be so suspicious; Nasra wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.
The new year brings new customers – soldiers and plenty of them; the man who jumped into the courtyard returns nearly every night and brings his comrades with him. The house of women has become the house of men, and even Stalin seems humbled. Unhindered by the curfew, they arrive at midnight and leave before dawn, but by that time the bungalow is in chaos, with displaced cups and glasses everywhere, broken plates thrown into the kitchen, cigarette butts and empty bottles littering the courtyard, washing pulled from the line and trampled, urine all over the toilet floor.
The women sleep all day, exhausted, while Deqo cleans. The old customers do not come, afraid of the soldiers, and she misses their neatness. It is hard to sleep when there is music all night and footsteps a few inches from her head, but it is their voices that really bother her: why do men speak so loudly? They shout rather than talk and laugh like the world needs to know they are laughing. She covers her ears while they boast about how the city is theirs, how they can do what they like and no one says anything, and as if to prove that, one of the young conscripts likes to run into the kitchen, pull up her skirt and then escape while the others guffaw. They declare each week that planes and artillery and bulldozers are on their way to Hargeisa, but Deqo never sees them. The chick, now named Malab after her honey-coloured new feathers, has also come under threat from a strange young soldier with a shaven head, who tries to stamp on her if she leaves the safety of the kitchen.
The presence of the soldiers has made the neighbours even more hostile than before and the front door is streaked with goat shit. Deqo begins to cover her head and a little of her face when she heads for the market after Stalin is caught by local women and beaten with brooms. They are angry that their husbands and sons have been taken away and some had come to the house earlier to plead with Nasra to find out from the soldiers where their loved ones had gone. She had refused. It was Nasra they were after, Stalin said when she staggered in, bruised and limping, but the neighbours would send a message through any of them.
After the dry season ends, Karl Marx packs a suitcase and leaves one night without bidding farewell to any of them. Nasra, China and Stalin remain behind but are subdued; they take what they want from Karl Marx’s room and continue to play act with the soldiers, laughing dryly at their jokes and dancing strangely with them in the dark courtyard.
Nasra is glassy-eyed and drinks from China’s bottles; she looks through Deqo when she tries to talk to her, her words slurred and incoherent. She has lost weight despite the money she is drawing from the soldiers. Deqo asks why she doesn’t send some of them away if they are upsetting her, but Nasra pushes her away and tells her to leave her alone.
The air warms up as the months pass but little rain falls; the one tree in the courtyard is desiccated, and even the plastic vine Nasra decorated it with is bleached and brittle. Only Malab thrives in the bungalow, growing fat on the corn Deqo feeds her; everyone else is tired and fragile. None of the women cook anymore; there is just bread, fruit and biscuits to eat and Deqo can feel her wrist bones again.
On her way to the suuq she often passes children tied by the feet to a barrel or stake outside their home. They stand for hours as punishment for some misdemeanour, staring at her with absent eyes, rubbing the places where they have been whipped or beaten. Everyone is angry – even the sky is grey and motionless; there doesn’t seem to be space for anything but silence and obedience. A new checkpoint is set up at the top of the road and she recognises some of the soldiers from the night visits; they let her through easily while others are stopped and searched. The market is bare and each item is sold at a new, higher price every time she goes there. Many of the traders have disappeared altogether and there are large dark spaces where their stalls used to be. The animal seller has departed along with his tortoise and antelope.
Deqo feels herself retreating into the past. Memories of Anab alive are eaten up by images of her dead, the quiet penetrated by her cries, the heat and then the cold of her skin as the cholera emptied her, now washing over Deqo in waves. What had made the life seep out of her body but not Deqo’s? Had she just wanted to return to her mother enough to leave her little doll body behind and vanish from the earth?
Carrying a string bag of papayas and oranges, Deqo opens the door and sees a wide pink suitcase in the hallway. The door to Nasra’s room is ajar and she peeks in. The floor is covered with clothes and shoes and Nasra picks through them in a panic and stuffs them into a shoulder bag.
Deqo continues to the kitchen before Nasra can shout at her. Malab scuttles excitedly beneath her feet, pecking at her bare toes; she is almost fully grown and her sharp beak stings. Deqo pushes the hen away and begins to peel an orange when Nasra calls her name.
The old man with the sunglasses is smoking behind the door while Nasra stands in the middle of the room, dressed in black and wearing a headscarf. She holds her arms out and gestures for Deqo to come closer.
‘Little one, I have to leave for a while. I need to go to Ethiopia to find a new job, but you won’t be alone, Mustafa is here to look after you. You have to do what he says, OK? He will keep you safe.’
‘Can’t I come with you?’ She reaches out.
Nasra pushes her hands away. ‘No, that would be too much trouble for me. You stay, you can take my room, you can have all of my things while I am gone.’ Her eyes don’t meet Deqo’s but flit around from one corner to another, and her hands tremble slightly as she throws garments from the bed towards her wardrobe. ‘You’ll be fine, Deqo. Mustafa is a good man,’ she says, but her voice cracks unconvincingly.
She watches mutely as Nasra wanders the room, stuffing documents and random belongings into her handbag: red nail varnish, tweezers, comb.
A car horn sounds outside the bungalow.
‘But Nasra . . .’
‘But nothing! I have to go, stop nagging me.’ She yanks her shawl over her head and rushes to the hall, dragging the heavy suitcase with both hands she reaches the front door and slams it shut behind her.
Deqo’s attention turns to Mustafa. He raises an eyebrow at her. ‘Let her go, what do you need her for?’
‘When will she come back?’ Deqo says, holding back her tears.
‘Come sit down with me.’ He stubs out his cigarette on a dirty dish, puts an arm around her shoulder and leads her to the bed. ‘You’ve grown since the last time I saw you. That’s the thing about little girls, you change every day.’
Deqo shrugs his arm away but he grabs the back of her dress and drags her to sit. ‘Come on now, don’t be like that. We can start off in a good way or you can thrash around and make it worse than it needs to be.’
‘I don’t want you! Get off me!’ she cries, twisting away from him.
‘Deqo!’
She bristles at the sound of her name in his mouth.
‘Watch her leave if you want.’ He points to the window with one hand while still holding her dress in the other.
Deqo clambers over the bed and catches a flash of Nasra darting from the boot of the white vehicle to the passenger door. She disappears behind the tinted glass, the engine revs and with a bla
st of saxophones and drums from the stereo she is gone.
Mustafa lets go of her and leans back on his arms. ‘I will take better care of you than she ever did.’
Deqo cups her face in her hands and tears flow onto her palms. She feels her strength seeping out of her and into the soft, rumpled bed. Mustafa’s presence encompasses her; his breath, his sprawling flesh, his silent menace.
She takes her hands away from her eyes and checks the distance to the door. Her legs are folded under her while his dangle over the side of the bed.
‘How much did Nasra tell you about what she does?’ he asks, scratching his stubble.
Deqo shakes her head but doesn’t reply.
‘Don’t look like your world’s caved in, good girls like you are usually the most popular, you’ll make a fine living.’
Deqo bolts for the door before he has finished speaking but he grabs her ankle and wrestles her to the floor.
As she screams he covers her mouth with his hand; his fingers taste of tobacco and ghee. Deqo bites down on them until she tastes blood, but he rips his hand away and punches her mouth.
‘China! Stalin!’ she cries.
‘They won’t help you!’ he sneers.
He pulls her skirt up; she is not wearing knickers because she had washed the two pairs that she owns in the morning.
She sees a black stiletto on the floor and reaches for it while he is trying to prise open her legs. He doesn’t see it coming as she forces the heel into his eye. He is thrown back in pain. She pitches the shoe to the side then escapes from the room.
She runs blindly into the street, her pulse pounding in her temples. She heads instinctively for the market, past the first checkpoint and into a deep throng of shoppers. She navigates around the dawdling figures, clawing her way through until a flat-bed truck parked horizontally across the entrance to the market stops her flight.
The crowd is transfixed by the sight of three dead bodies on the bed of the truck: three old men in red-checked sarongs, brown bloodstains like bibs on their white shirts, camel leather sandals on their feet, a nomad’s hangol staff beside one of them. Around each of their necks is a board with ‘NFM’ written on it in red ink. The soldiers seated around the bodies look like hunters posing with the wild animals they have caught, an element of embarrassment on their faces at the wizened, toothless specimens they have found. One of them adjusts the position of the head nearest to him with his dusty boot.
No one says a word, neither soldiers nor spectators, it is a silent lesson; a blizzard of flies hovering over the truck makes the only sound. Already the corpses are beginning to turn in the heat; their faces have ceased to have any kind of spirit in them, just slack skin over bones.
KAWSAR
Inside the green, wailing walls of the hospital there are too many annoyances: the clumsy cleaner clanking her heavy metal bucket against the cement floor, the feuding nurses who never come when they are called and the self-pitying amputee who never stops calling them. Kawsar can tell there is a miri-miri tree outside the window by the constant chirruping of tiny yaryaro birds; the din of their ‘jiiq, jiiq, jiiq’ call and rustling feathers is so dizzying – as if there are mice scurrying through her head – that she hopes they will take flight with the tree and eat its seeds someplace else. In her aluminium bed, its rank mattress so thin she feels the bars of the base against her back, Kawsar pulls the nylon sheet over her head and hides from the visitors tramping through the ward. She concentrates on facing the pain that girdles her. It is a complex agony: a pulsing, electric high-note over something messier and deeper – similar to the post-childbirth sensation that her bones and flesh had been ground down to mush. She is not able to sit up, stretch, turn over or even shift without a crackle of pain rushing through her nerves. She is taut, her jaw clenched tight, the breath held in her lungs, the tendons in her neck rigid, trying to anticipate this pain before it engulfs her in its swell.
‘Broken hip. Broken pelvis,’ the doctor declares, but she doesn’t trust him; he has spent no more than three minutes examining her, his eyes misted over with other thoughts. He seems to feel that her time is rightfully up, that her leaf is about to fall.
‘Can you not operate?’
There is annoyance in the doctor’s voice, ‘You’re too old, your bones would not stand up to it. Osteoporosis. The hospital is short of equipment for surgery anyway. I think all we can do is make sure the pain is under control.’
‘But will I walk again?’
Kawsar’s eyes have been fixed on the ceiling throughout the whole exchange.
There is no reply from him and a few seconds later he walks out of the ward with a nurse a few steps behind.
When she wakes later in the afternoon, she sees Dahabo glaring down at her. She lightly touches Kawsar’s bruised face. ‘Look at you.’
‘How the mighty have fallen. She beat me like a disobedient donkey.’ Kawsar smiles wanly, one of her eyes swollen and the left side of her vision blurred. ‘I’m surprised she didn’t kill me.’
‘Joow, you are made of leather and bitterness, nothing can kill you. But if I could get my hands on her, I would skin her alive and make a handbag out of her hide.’ Dahabo squeezes the pillow in demonstration of her anger.
‘She is a child of her time.’
‘No, it is the other way around: those with sick hearts have made the time what it is, and what did you think you were doing anyway? Rushing away from us at the stadium like that? Did you lose your mind?’
‘Maybe. Hodan must have got it from somewhere.’
‘Kawsar. You have got to stop blaming yourself. No one can derail a person from their fate. She was loved more than any child I know, including my own.’
Dahabo’s voice never drops from the volume it takes to yell across a street.
‘Shush, Dahabo, can you not speak in a normal voice?’ Kawsar hisses. She doesn’t want the ancient woman in the bed beside her to overhear.
‘To hell with them, Kawsar, listen to me. You could not have done more for her. You bought the pills you were meant to, had the imam read her the Qu’ran, you kept her out of that place.’ She gestures through the window to the hospital madhouse. ‘What else? What else could you have done? Or I? Or anyone?’
‘I know. I know. Let’s not go over this again,’ Kawsar says quietly.
Dahabo clutches her shoulder. ‘You are old now and fragile, you have to be kinder to yourself.’
‘I want it to all end, Dahabo. Is that wrong?’
‘No, but your time will come, as will mine. Wait. You can’t throw yourself in danger, breaking a hip here, an arm there. Leaving me with another mouth to feed.’ She reaches down to pick up a basket. ‘I’ve put a few meals in here. I want the plates cleared, do you understand me?’
‘I can’t . . .’ Kawsar feels guilty eating into Dahabo’s hard-earned income while hidden under her own mattress at home there are hundreds and thousands of shillings.
‘You will. Maryam and Raage will come to collect you tomorrow. Don’t fight anyone in that time if you can help it.’
Maryam and Raage arrive early in the morning to collect her, before the rush at his store. ‘Don’t forget the basket, it’s Dahabo’s,’ points Kawsar from the trolley, ‘check under the bed too, I might have dropped something.’
‘Yes, eddo,’ Maryam bends down to check, ‘nothing.’
‘Good, let’s roohi then.’
Raage takes the lower end of the trolley and pulls it out of the ward.
They roll along the uneven, grey-tiled corridor, past queues waiting outside the TB clinic and paediatric wards. The strangers stare at her, grateful for a momentary diversion from the endless waiting. They stare most at Maryam; she was born and raised in Hargeisa, but the long nose she has inherited from her English mother points her back to Europe. With her wisps of yellow hair and light brown skin she has always made Kawsar think of a plastic doll that has been left out too long in the sun.
Kawsar has not visited the hospital
since Hodan’s death and does not remember being brought in from the jail. She is in the main, low building left over from the British; the maternity and other small wards are scattered around it, and hidden beyond a high barbed-wire wall is the psycho-social unit. The morgue is a more recent extension, built to cope with the victims of Ethiopian bombing sorties over the city. The hospital is falling into ruin, the inside walls are cracked, the plaster peeling, creepers snaking their way through the windows.
An orderly in a khaki jumpsuit stops them at the main entrance. ‘You cannot take the trolley beyond this point,’ he says, grabbing hold of the rail above Kawsar’s head.
‘We are just taking her to the car. She can’t walk,’ Maryam argues, trying to pull the trolley with her.
‘Leave it here, don’t you have ears?’
‘You put a donkey in uniform and see what happens,’ Maryam shouts back.
‘What? Should I call the police? You can tell them what you think about donkeys and uniforms.’
‘To hell with you.’
‘Let’s go, Maryam, quickly please,’ Kawsar begs.
‘Ko, labah, sadeh, one, two, three . . .’ Maryam and Raage pick up the thick woollen blanket underneath her and lift Kawsar into the air. Neither is strong and they struggle to walk without losing grip of the blanket, but they persevere until she is safely manoeuvred into the long, grimy boot of the red Toyota.
Raage starts the engine and drives out of the hospital grounds. ‘Go as slowly as you can,’ orders Maryam.
Kawsar does not hear if Raage replies; there is a sudden numbness to her senses from the painkillers, a cushioned distance between her and the rest of the world. She looks through the dust-haloed back window, streaked with the scum of dead flies, at the passing trees bowing down to her and fluttering their green fans.
Kawsar seems to float a few precious inches as the car dips into potholes and weaves around ditches. ‘Where are we?’ she asks, disorientated.
‘Going past the old women’s college, our college,’ smiles Maryam, squeezing her hand.
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 9
