The Orchard of Lost Souls

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘Near where I met Farah . . .’

  ‘What did you say?’ Maryam bends down to hear.

  ‘Nothing,’ she replies, closing her eyes.

  She had first seen Farah while dawdling home from the Women’s Technical School with Dahabo. It was a languid, dry season day, her shadow huge and black behind her, and they were teasing each other as they held hands. A lunatic was on the run from the mental hospital, weaving his sticky web of insanity over the town. Kawsar always imagined him as a man-spider who had clambered out of the English asylum they’d trapped him in and sailed back to Somaliland on driftwood. The girls passed telegraph poles in which his teeth marks were visible, his hundred white incisors imprinted onto the fresh black paint. Kawsar had heard at college that devil voices pursued the madman through the telegraph wires, his mind burnt up by the fire in their words. At every junction policemen lay in wait for him before he killed again. A tall, young policeman was standing with a red-haired Englishman at the crossroads ahead. There was no main road in south Hargeisa then, just a track tramped down by camel caravans, and the girls crossed to the other side so the men would not come too close. Dust hung in the air between them, lit gold and orange by the weary sun, and she accidentally caught the eye of the Somali policeman as she watched it glitter.

  ‘We’re here, eddo. I’ll get help from the hotel.’ Maryam crawls out of the car. She returns moments later with a crowd of men, their silhouettes black against the sun, their voices and hands indistinguishable, innumerable.

  Each holds a scrap of the blanket and Kawsar believes for a moment that this is her funeral, that they will wrap her in this blanket and grasp handfuls of sand to throw over her, burying her wide-eyed and pliant.

  ‘This way, this way,’ Maryam leads them to Kawsar’s bungalow.

  A break in the men’s bodies reveals a slice of October Road: children in their scruffy playclothes watch the hullabaloo with quizzical expressions.

  ‘Just here.’ Maryam bangs the metal gate with her fist.

  Kawsar expects to see Dahabo but the door is opened by a stranger, a young girl in men’s clothing.

  ‘Let us through,’ orders Maryam.

  Kawsar and the girl’s eyes meet as they pass, suspicion reflected in both.

  Kawsar is propelled through the hallway and into the bedroom, which smells peculiar – a sharp cocktail of sweets and cheap perfume – and falls onto the bed with a soft thud.

  The bedroom is dark, gauzy blue. At the end of a shaft of moonlight is the girl, asleep under a thin sheet on the floor. Her ribcage rises softly under the covers, a small, beautiful quiver of animated air. Nobody else has slept overnight under this roof since Hodan died. Kawsar’s pulse quickens. She is excited to have someone to watch, to hear in the background; she will share this space that she has roamed alone for so long.

  The next morning the girl wakes Kawsar by wiping a wet cloth over her face and neck as she lies in bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ stutters Kawsar.

  ‘I was told to bathe you.’

  ‘Are you an undertaker preparing me for burial? Can’t you wait until I am awake?’

  ‘I thought I would save time.’

  ‘That is not the way to save time.’ Kawsar snatches the cloth from her hand. ‘What is your name, who are you?’

  ‘Nurto, I am a cousin of Maryam’s. I am here to look after you.’

  She is a tall girl, all legs and arms, with a sharp, belligerent face atop a thin neck.

  ‘You will only stay with me if I’m happy with your work.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do now?’

  ‘Go to the market, there is no food in the house.’

  Nurto leaves for the suuq and does not return for hours.

  It is strange to think that Nurto will be the one to find her lifeless one day. What will she do – scream, say a prayer, or quickly throw a sheet over the stiff, wide-eyed corpse? For some reason this imagined scene makes Kawsar laugh – the perfect revenge of the old on the thoughtlessly young.

  A loud bang heralds Nurto’s return and Kawsar listens as the girl goes straight past the bedroom to the kitchen and unloads the basket into crates on the floor. Later, she pushes open the bedroom door with her foot, her skinny legs in black corduroy trousers, and enters carrying a tray.

  She has bought the things she desires with the shopping money: pastries, halwa, biscuits, and now makes a show of presenting them to Kawsar on a tray, as if she could want these things.

  There is a knock at the door and Nurto rushes to open it. Maryam pops her head into the room. She kisses Kawsar’s cheek and feels her forehead.

  ‘How is Nurto behaving?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Kawsar says curtly. ‘Take a seat.’

  ‘I can’t stay right now. I just wanted to give you these.’ She pulls a packet from her alligator-skin handbag. Her mother in East London has sent powerful painkillers and Maryam reads the instructions aloud, carefully and slowly struggling to translate terms such as ‘hypertension’ and ‘water retention’. But as soon as Maryam follows Nurto into the kitchen, Kawsar takes six of the pills and waits expectantly for the girdle of pain to release a fraction.

  In the afternoon light her room looks institutional, with just a single iron bed, a metal chair, a bare light bulb and two large wardrobes full of clothes she never wears and never will again. Above the bed hangs her art: the fine, abstract textiles she has hand-loomed herself, woven straw hangings she bought in Juba, her wedding photo in a frame she painted in the blue and white of the Somali flag with crescent moons and irregular exploding stars. The only ostentatious thing she dares exhibit is a silver necklace covered in coins and amber beads that her jeweller grandfather made for her wedding day. She hopes that it is too old-fashioned for the policemen who shop for their wives and daughters in the homes they raid. It dangles over the handle of the larger wardrobe, its gentle tinkling reminding her daily of the magic in her grandfather’s fingers.

  She closes her eyes and imagines the street beyond her walls: the sandy lanes the colour of threshed wheat, everything else splashed with blue – the indigo gates to the bungalows, their turquoise compound walls, their navy water barrels rusting in the yards – the drought has made her neighbours paint themselves underwater, succour against despair. The desirable modern stone bungalows built by teachers, civil servants and engineers are now dependent on donkey carts for their water supply. She feels as though she has made this street, has claimed it single-handedly from the colony of baboons that had lived in the juniper forest that stood near here, her bungalow once a besieged fort in hostile territory, her washing torn and orchard raided.

  When she had arrived with Farah in sixty-eight it had been at the outer edges of Hargeisa, the air fresh, the land cheap, distant enough from her mother’s house in Dhumbuluq for her to feel free but close enough to visit each day. They had bought a large plot of land, expecting to raise a brood of children, but it didn’t happen. Instead her neighbours gathered around her slowly, incrementally, like coral around a shipwreck, creating a new suburb. They used her well before building their own, gathered on her doorstep in the evenings and called for her help when delivering their babies. These clanspeople and the strangers they had married were her family.

  She remembers standing inside Raage’s dukaan; it is like a doll’s house, sunlight glinting off tin cans as bright as mirrors. In there Kawsar always felt she had regressed to childhood, holding her mother’s money in her palm, the sweets and chocolates on the counter filling her eyes. The simple square structure of corrugated tin is packed to the last inch with everything a housewife might need: soap powder in cellophane twists, fresh bread rolls, matches, toy guns and sweets for well-behaved children, plastic hoses to beat misbehaving ones. Raage planted behind the wooden counter – tall, gruff, with weary, drooping shoulders. He arrived in seventy-two at the age of fifteen or sixteen, selling milk for his divorced mother, and slowly built a shop from his earnings. He works robotically now, exc
hanging the same short pleasantries with each customer, the little radio beside him constantly tuned to the BBC World Service. He performs his dawn prayers in the shop and is still there late at night, fussing over details like a bird over its nest. The only variance is on Fridays when he wears a skullcap over his prematurely smooth head and closes for half an hour to pray at the mosque. A scrappy beard, long at the chin but threadbare along his jaw, has appeared on his face making him look mystical and wise.

  ‘Everything well, Raage?’ Kawsar would say.

  ‘Manshallah, praise God.’

  ‘Business good?’

  ‘As good as it needs to be.’

  ‘Nabadgelyo.’

  ‘Nabaddiino.’

  Words simple as bird song passed between them.

  Kawsar could have done most of her shopping with Raage, but had still preferred to trek into town every day, to feel the buzz of town life against her skin.

  Still with her eyes closed, she turns back from the shop and stands in front of Umar Farey’s hotel, the windows are tinted green and always shut, and shadows flit behind the decorative masonry on its roof. He built the hotel using his police pension in seventy-six, the same year he lost four of his fingers to a stray dog. It had been frequented by Somalis returning from jobs overseas, sailors and oil workers mostly, and Farah would spend his evenings over there talking politics. Between seventy-eight and eighty-one the hotel made the neighbourhood lively with weddings and the reappearance of long-lost men. But then in eighty-one the tone of the place changed; there was no joy just congregations with furrowed brows gathered to lament the ever worsening situation. First the doctors in Hargeisa hospital were arrested for trying to improve conditions for their patients, then the student demonstrations broke out following their death sentences, and finally the National Freedom Movement, formed by Somalis living in London, began military action to remove the dictatorship. Since then the hotel has cast an ominous pall over the street. Unsubtle spies pace its perimeter by day and return at night to drag guests away at gunpoint; it has become a secretive place from which you can almost hear the ticking of a bomb.

  Soon after Maryam leaves, Dahabo comes bustling into the house, another covered basket thrust in front of her. She dumps the basket on the metal chair near the bed, the frayed rattan seat flimsy under the weight.

  ‘Can you pass me the glass of water?’

  ‘Forget water, you need milk to build you up.’ Dahabo whips the cloth off the basket. The first item she reaches for is a plastic yellow can, made to carry petrol but now used by nomads to sell camel’s milk in town. ‘Start with this. I have cow’s, sheep’s and goat’s in here too.’ She pours the thin milk into her black thermos cup and hands it to Kawsar.

  Kawsar sniffs it before putting her mouth to the cup. She is incredibly thirsty but hates camel’s milk; it is so acidic, frothy, it rises back up her throat as she drinks.

  ‘Ka laac! Drink it all up!’

  ‘I’m trying to.’ Kawsar sips at the last few terrible drops before holding the cup upside down in front of her friend.

  ‘You infant, come here.’ Dahabo wipes away the milk’s froth from Kawsar’s upper lip with the back of her hand.

  ‘Ah, your poor children, you have a hard hand.’ Kawsar’s skin stings from the touch. She has yet to see her reflection but the bruises are still tender.

  ‘It’s soft when it needs to be.’

  ‘That doctor from Russia, Hassan Luugweyne’s son, said I have a broken hip and pelvis.’

  ‘May Allah break his pelvis, hips and legs. What does he know? I will take you to Musa, he will mould your bones back together again. Remember when my Waris fell from that hill and all those fools said she would die? Who but Musa Bone-setter would have known how to bring her back?’

  ‘We’ll see, but this pain is killing me.’

  Dahabo returns to her basket, piled up with apples, bananas, dates and anonymous bottles and flasks, ‘In here is something that will help with the pain but it is very strong. Don’t eat too much of it, understand?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s special, don’t ask too many questions, it will work, trust me.’

  ‘Give it here.’

  A harmless-looking bark in a plastic bag falls into Kawsar’s hand.

  ‘Just chew a couple of pieces at a time.’

  Kawsar complies. The bark is soft in her mouth; it has been smoked and tastes faintly of cinnamon. She can imagine the dirt on it as it dissolves on her tongue.

  ‘Rest now. I’ll be back tomorrow . . .’

  ‘Bismillah, don’t make a fuss. Go and attend to your family.’

  ‘Keep an eye on that basket, there are thieves everywhere, and remember to eat.’ Dahabo tilts her head to the kitchen where Nurto is clattering the dishes as she washes them. ‘See you tomorrow. I’ll want to hear what kind of dream you have.’ She bends down, the tassel of her prayer beads tickling Kawsar’s neck, and kisses her three times, her lips dry and rough against her cheeks.

  Kawsar is barefoot alone in a cemetery with boulders marking the graves. Her arms are numb and immobile. She knows not to turn around; there is something monstrous behind her, its bristling shadow cast over the ground. Her breath won’t come, her legs are too heavy to move, the thing is licking the back of her neck. The shadow is a sharp black now, eight legs that spread from one corner to the other, with a bisected head looming over. Two legs embrace her, squeezing her breasts down and lifting her gently into the air. She sways with the creature’s movement; its grip is tender, paternal almost, except for the constant movement of one leg over her body. It is taking her away into the anonymous shrub outside town. She is carried over thorn bushes, acacia trees laced with armo creepers and termite mounds to a desert she knows only from ghost stories.

  ‘Gaallo-laaye!’ shouts Dahabo triumphantly, slapping her palms onto her thighs.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I should have known his spirit would never rest quietly, a hard life followed by a hard death.’

  ‘Gaallo-laaye?’

  ‘How can you forget him? He brought you and your beloved together, didn’t he? It all makes sense that he would come back to you, but may Allah keep him in his grave.’ Dahabo reaches into the basket and brings out two apples, peeling them into a bowl on her lap.

  ‘I don’t know who you are talking about . . .’

  ‘You are a fool to forget.’ Dahabo jabs her hand into Kawsar’s face. ‘He was that man who had all of Hargeisa scared when we were little girls. He thought he was a spider.’

  ‘You mean Mohamed Ismail?’

  ‘Na’am! That was his real name but everyone called him Gaallo-laaye, the whiteman-slayer, because he shot five Englishmen dead in a drinking den while living there. They put him in a madhouse then sent him back here. One day he goes crazy again and starts shooting everyone up.’ Dahabo pretends to shoot Kawsar with her finger.

  ‘I remember, I remember.’

  ‘What kind of spider did he think carries pistols? We shouldn’t talk about the afflicted, but remember when he was finally cornered in the cemetery and everyone came out to see his battle with the police? He was throwing rocks, firing his gun, running from boulder to boulder. I swear it looked like he had grown extra arms and legs, and he was such a beautiful man to look at, so long-limbed and open-faced. I find madmen the most handsome, wallahi.’

  Dahabo offers the bowl of apple slices and Kawsar fills her palm with a few slivers.

  ‘You have a jinn inside you that makes you say these things.’

  ‘Why? There is no shame in it. They are part of God’s creation too, aren’t they? They are men in every way; it’s just that their eyes are open to the things we can’t see.’

  Kawsar’s pain is tamed by Dahabo’s presence but is still coiled tightly around her like a sleeping serpent. ‘Mohamed Ismail,’ she repeats softly.

  ‘What a man! Imagine what he would do to the idiot police now.’

  ‘I was there in the cemetery. I s
aw his dead body. His hair white with sand, he wore a light yellow shirt and there were three red wounds in his chest. Here, here and here . . .’ Kawsar points to imaginary holes in her own chest. ‘His eyes were open, looking up at me, and I bent down and closed them.’

  ‘Maskiin, poor man.’

  ‘I was angry with myself afterwards. I thought that touching a dead body so close to my wedding would bring bad luck.’

  ‘Nonsense. It surprises me that I have never touched a corpse, even after all these years.’

  ‘I have touched too many. Maybe I should never have approached that first one.’

  Dahabo visits her every day at noon, when the streets are at their hottest and the shops close for lunch and midday prayers. When Maryam English and Fadumo can join they eat communally with the radio on in the background and sift through the rumours spreading across Hargeisa – the government is going to shut down the schools, or is going to put chemicals in the water supply to make the population more docile, or is already planning to demolish all the cities and villages in the north-west – Kawsar only believes what the BBC Somali Service broadcasts from London report, they are far enough away to not succumb to the propaganda or hysteria. In the brief time that Farah had been chief of police in seventy-six he had warned that the government was capable of anything; it saw the country as a blank canvas that it could paint in whatever likeness it wanted. The police, army and bureaucrats were just the brushes they used. He lasted a few months before he was told to take early retirement. The police service had purged all of those who challenged the government’s edicts and now no outrage was inconceivable. Oodweyne’s proclamations were becoming more menacing; his nickname ‘Big Voice’ was intended to mock his radio interludes but the words he spoke in that deep percussive drawl were increasing in violence and hubris. He wanted all citizens to know that no one would get the better of him; that it would take death to unseat him.

  The weeks after Kawsar’s return from hospital float by in an opiate-induced torpor. She dozes as much as she can and spends the rest of her time alternately bickering with Nurto and brooding. She can bear the girl’s messiness, the rough way she runs a wet cloth over her in the mornings, but she cannot bear watching her leave every day to do the same circuit that she has done for the last forty years. Cocooned within a tight wrapping of petticoat, diric, jumper and blankets, her skin pale and clammy, Kawsar feels like an enormous, delicate silkworm cloistered from the sun. If only damp wings could unfurl from her back and bear her away. Instead, there are bedsores. When Nurto returns after the shops have closed at one the never-ending conversation starts again.