Kawsar feels a misplaced pride while admiring her maid; it is a rare luxury to be able to hand over the run of a kitchen to a poor child and watch them blossom. ‘You look good, that is all I wanted to say.’
Nurto’s face contorts; she was primed for another verbal assault, had steeled and armed herself for it, her shoulders and feet squared. ‘You think so?’ she asks after a moment. ‘How have I changed?’
‘You look like a gashaanti now, your skin is glowing, your hair has grown, you have curves when before you were like a tree in the jiilaal. You smell better too,’ Kawsar smiles.
Nurto smirks. ‘And you think I would go to all that trouble for a Singhe-Singhe market trader? I have my sights set further than that.’
‘Oh! Tell me more.’
Nurto laughs, This American wants to take my picture. He says people would pay to put me in magazines.’
Kawsar raises her eyebrow, remembering the lewd photographs taken of Somali girls by Italians in Mogadishu. ‘Naayaa, guard yourself, I will not have people saying that you were corrupted while in my care. Say your ashahaado and protect your shame.’
Nurto’s face falls, she was wrong to have lowered her shield, ‘It’s not like that, he just wants to help me. He says that another Somali girl is famous in New York and Paris just for walking and showing off the clothes.’
‘New York, my rear end. Don’t let yourself be beguiled. When I was young Italians would put naïve girls in their dirty photos and films.’
‘So what? Is that worse than being a servant all your life with someone calling you every name they can think of? As if they own you?’
‘The way I was brought up there was no shame in clean, Islamic work of any kind. All a girl has of any value whether she is born to a suldaan or a pauper is her reputation, don’t be simple-minded enough to throw that away.’
‘To hell with reputations!’ Nurto flicks her rope of hair over her shoulder, dives onto her mattress and buries her nose in a magazine with a blonde covergirl; unable to read the words, she studies it photo by photo.
The sun breaks through the leaden, grumbling clouds and slips through the barred windows, stitching cross-hatches of light and shadow across her bedspread and feet. Kawsar wriggles her toes and scratches her soles with their horn-like nails. She has asked Nurto to make her a whole thermos today; she is in the mood to listen to music and sip sweet spiced tea with condensed milk. The boulder pressing down on her chest has lifted a little, allowing her to take deeper breaths without wincing; she stretches her neck to the left and holds it there before stretching to the right. She can feel the tips of her fingers and toes again, her scalp tingles; she has not taken a painkiller for more than twelve hours and her body feels like a city coming back to life after a long night. She clicks the radio on – it is set to Radio Mogadishu in case of a police raid, and the station relays a live performance by the Waaberi national troupe in Khartoum.
Nurto is on her mattress, concentrating on the large dressmaking scissors in her grip. Kawsar has never noticed the girl’s left-handedness before; maybe it is part of the reason she seems so awkward, as if she is taking life on from the wrong angle. She is hacking old cotton dresses of Kawsar’s into rectangular pieces to fold up and use as sanitary pads; the older woman had noticed a damp red flower blooming on the back of Nurto’s thin diric and offered her the long-unused clothes. She had also pointed out other garments, some of them of expensive cloth and unworn, that Nurto could take to wear, but she didn’t want them, even wrinkling her nose as she rummaged dismissively through them.
Kawsar pours out her first cup; the bones in her back creak as she bends over, but it feels good in a strange way. ‘I can teach you how to sew properly, if you want,’ she offers, blowing steam and milkskin gently to and fro.
Nurto leaves a long pause before answering, ‘I don’t think I’ll be any good at it.’
‘Who is to say what anyone will be good at until they try?’
‘Well, you for one. You tell me I’m a bad cook, that I can’t clean, that I leave soap powder in the laundry, that I’ve killed your plants. I’m not going to give you one more thing to criticise me for.’
Kawsar laughs. ‘I am just trying to challenge you, make you pay more notice to how you work. What is it that you want to do in your life, anyway? Carry on as a maid?’
Nurto lets out a snort of derision.
‘Get married? Herd goats? Set up a trucking company?’
Nurto raises an eyebrow.
‘What will it be then?’
‘I told you, I am going to move abroad and become a fashion model.’
‘Why don’t you take advantage more while you’re here – buy vats of ghee and stick your fingers in and lick them until your jowls and belly and buttocks vibrate with every step?’
Nurto laughs and Kawsar smiles in triumph; it is hard to make this girl lose her scowl.
‘They don’t like women like that over there. They like them my size with small chests, long legs and no fat whatsoever. They are not like the stupid men here who want Asha Big Legs huffing and puffing into their beds.’
‘Your photographer told you that, did he?’ replies Kawsar doubtfully.
‘Yes, but it’s obvious anyway I read the magazines.’
‘Read?’
‘Look at, then, same thing. The pictures speak for themselves. Why are you always going on as if you are some kind of professor from Laafole University, anyway?’
‘I’m no professor, I am as unlettered as a child, but I just can’t stand misplaced pride.’
‘It’s not misplaced. I will learn to read, I will make something of my life. You old women take pride in your ignorance – that is what I call misplaced.’
Kawsar is calm, she has got into a bad habit of riling Nurto, but it has an irresistible, cathartic effect on her. ‘I am a simple woman with no shame or regrets,’ she lies. ‘I have lived a blameless life.’
‘Blameless and pointless,’ Nurto spits.
The words cut deeper than Kawsar expects. She shifts away a little, as if dodging a thrown object; she has been felled by her own arrow.
‘Just leave me alone.’ She turns her back on Nurto and faces the wall, the familiar chips and cracks in the plaster filling her vision once again. ‘You would never dare to speak to me like that if my husband was around,’ she says softly.
‘And you wouldn’t dare taunt me like you do if my family had money.’
The girl is like a cobra, so quick to jump to the offensive. She is right about her own situation and Kawsar feels a begrudging envy that she can fight so viciously for herself. It had taken her a long time to see power and powerlessness so clearly.
They do not speak for the rest of the day The room darkens around Kawsar, the snips of the scissors eventually cease and they clatter to the ground. Their music brings back the memory of her college: the pads of her fingers sore with needle punctures, the ache of her hand after cutting through fabric for hours, the pretty quilts and hangings and skirts she made faster than anyone else.
A child runs a metal cup along the bars of the window but Kawsar doesn’t look. Unknown children have begun to peek in; they are tentative, unsure if the rumours of a witch who never leaves her house are true. They catcall through the bars and run away, spit and throw pebbles at the window. They are reincarnations of all the children who are begotten to harass old women, a fresh regiment of them born in every generation to extinguish the will to live in the already despairing; yet they are condemned in their own way, to always be eight years old with big, new teeth cramming their mouths, their hearts brimming with confused spite and fear. She does not believe they are her neighbours’ children – they could not have turned against her so easily; they have to be children from other quarters, who do their mischief far from home and run away before their mothers miss them.
She remembers the widow in rags who lived in a wooden shack behind her childhood home, her garrulousness in spite of the isolation in which she lived, the
little boys who taunted and threw stones at her, thinking the muttering was a sign of madness or possession. The only thing that possessed her and now Kawsar are memories, scenes from infancy to the last few days rising up unbidden.
‘Naayaa, Kawsar, let us in!’ Dahabo bangs the door.
‘Open it!’ Kawsar calls quickly to Nurto in the kitchen.
Nurto speeds to the front, her hands covered in tomato flesh, her bare feet making a slapping, sliding noise. She flings the door open and spins back to the kitchen, stubbornly avoiding Kawsar’s eyes.
Dahabo bends down to kiss Kawsar’s forehead. ‘Look at all these papers in your window.’ Dahabo points above her head.
‘They are offerings, prayers. Don’t you know that I am the local saint.’ There are maybe fifteen chewing gum and lollipop papers rolled thin and prodded through the wire mesh as if her room is a saint’s shrine.
‘Little scoundrels! They have nearly torn the damn thing apart!’
‘Let them have their fun.’
Dahabo pulls out those wrappers she can reach. ‘You know that the curfew has been brought forward to four in the afternoon now, while it is still bright outside?’
‘When did they say that?’
‘Yesterday, announced it in the market before we shut up.’
‘And what reason did they give?’
Dahabo scrunches up the papers in her hand. ‘From what people are saying in the suuq it looks like the NFM will be attacking the cities before the month is out.’
‘That is just talk, people have been saying it for years.’
Dahabo sits on the edge of the bed. ‘No, Kawsar, it’s different now. There are rebels rising against him in every region. If he goes down he will take the country with him, he’ll want all of us buried alongside him, like one of those pharaohs in the Kitab. My daughters are panicked, they want to get their children out,’ she says quietly. ‘Jawahir’s husband has arranged visas for us all to join him in Jeddah.’
Kawsar doesn’t trust her ears and asks her to repeat what she just said; again that ‘us’ lands on her like a small incendiary. ‘Why do you have to go?’ Kawsar asks, almost dumbfounded.
Dahabo turns her face to meet Kawsar’s eyes. ‘What would be left of me without them?’
Kawsar will not let her go without a fight, without laying claim. She will scream, scatter her possessions on the floor and rend her garments. ‘And what will be left of me without you?’
Dahabo holds Kawsar tenderly by the chin. ‘Come with us. Leave this box prison behind and come with us. You are my family too.’
Kawsar imagines the one-bedroom flat in Jeddah, the mattresses stowed against the wall during the day, the mess and rush of children, arguments between three or four generations echoing from the kitchen. She cannot spend her last months as silent and unwelcome as a toad in an outhouse, looking out on all of that.
‘Can’t I just have you, Dahabo?’
‘You have me, but what can I do?’
‘Stay. Don’t let anyone chase you out.’
Dahabo exhales and sinks down deeper into the mattress. ‘Remember Asiya from college?’
‘What of her?’ Kawsar remembers the girl she had bullied in class, a bundle of bad teeth, bad hair, bad clothes who had encroached on their friendship.
‘Not one of her children remain with her, either dead, missing, in jail or with the NFM. We will all be like that soon.’
‘I am already like that, Dahabo. Don’t ask me to sympathise with her.’
‘I am afraid. I am afraid to wake up in the morning, to think about what will happen next week, next month, next year. I feel frayed, I cannot hold myself together anymore.’ She beats her heart with four fingers.
‘I will hold you together, come live with me. I will tell Nurto to leave.’
‘My children,’ Dahabo says firmly before putting her shoes on. ‘I can’t be separated from them.’
They look at each other long and hard before Dahabo silently leaves the bungalow.
‘Stupid. Stupid. Old. Woman.’ Kawsar hits the heel of her fist against her head with every word. She doesn’t recognise the person she is becoming: an old crone who can’t admit that her time is over, that children and grandchildren must come first. What was she thinking? Demanding that Dahabo stay behind with her, two old women counting each other’s grey hairs, is that what she wants? Shameless and unnatural, that’s all it is. Next, when she hears laughter behind her back, will she be placing curses? Casting evil eyes? Wishing misfortune on those that deny her or have their families around them? So this is how old women become witches – just one or two tragedies and green poison pours out of them.
Kawsar takes one reptilian breath an hour, the distant sun beating down on her head, her yellow eyes swivelling in the hollows of her skull, cold brown blood curdling in the dry furrows of her veins. She has lost count of how many pills she has pushed down her gullet, but it is enough to mute the pain, enough to strip her vision of its loud Technicolor until her room appears monochromatic and brooding through the thin slits of her pupils. She presses her palms into her eyelids and replaces the torpor of her life with shooting amber stars and exploding electric galaxies. She learnt to do this as an indolent little girl, whiling away dead time by voyaging through the quiet, almost-black world behind her eyes. She has not aged much as a soul, still thinks too much, loses herself to dreams and nightmares, her body hiding – no, trapping – what is real and eternal about her, that pinprick of invisible light in this dark shroud of hers. She is doomed to beat about, fluttering against her skin, desperate for release into the world, as frantic as a firefly in a child’s jar.
Release. That is all she has ever wanted. At one point she thought she had found it. Sitting on the low branch of a strange tree along the River Juba, crocodiles’ eyes peering at her over the scum of the water, twenty-foot palm trees alive with a chorus of black-tailed monkeys, hippos yawning downstream, and thousands of butterflies emerging from cocoons above her head, their creased purple wings stirring the afternoon air, Kawsar could feel light streaming through her. She was open, skinless, born to witness this everlasting moment. Farah had searched the car for his camera, tried to name the butterflies, to explain their presence on this particular tree, but she had covered his mouth and told him just to watch, to feel; she wanted them to be as mute and ecstatic as those newborn butterflies.
Kawsar’s eyelids unstick and light filters through her stubby lashes. It might be sunrise or four in the afternoon, unmoored in the undulating waves of time she just opens her eyes and accepts what she is told.
Nurto leans over the bed. ‘Dahabo brought these things for you.’ She places the basket beside Kawsar on the bed.
‘Why didn’t she wake me?’
Nurto shrugs and turns back to the kitchen.
‘Listen when I’m talking to you, you little whore.’
Nurto stops short at the insult and slides her eyes back towards Kawsar, the rest of her body immobile.
‘Take this rubbish back to the kitchen.’ Kawsar grabs the basket and skims it across the floor, upsetting its contents – dates and mincemeat set in ghee – over the dusty cement.
‘Have you lost your mind, old woman? Throwing good food over the floor for me to sweep up. You think I’m your slave or something?’ Nurto snatches one of the handles, shoves the basket against her hip and slams the door behind her.
‘Bitch,’ Kawsar spits out.
Behind that green door she doesn’t see Nurto but Dahabo.
It is such a distant thing to do; as if they barely know each other she has left a basket and skulked away. This behaviour from a woman whose birthing sheets she had washed and who had washed hers in return. What next? They would need to make appointments to take tea like the English women used to. The old Dahabo would have nudged her awake or sat on the bed and just started talking. What good was a basket without conversation? Had she become a beggar overnight? What need of alms had she who had once had Dahabo’s own mother as a s
ervant in her family home?
Kawsar’s face flushes with anger. The saliva in her mouth is bitter and cleaves to her gullet; she finishes the water left in the cup on the bedside table.
She wants to throw herself out of the bed and bar the door, nailing planks across it until it is impassable, a warning and rebuke to those who pity her, who dare mistake her for a beggar, a destitute, a woman without name or reputation.
Darkness spreads over her eyes like black oil. She has woken up with tears running greasily down her cheeks, her head tense as if she has been crying for a long time but with no recollection of why. Nurto has left the paraffin feynuus on and the room stinks of the burnt wick. How many homes have burned down just because of simple mistakes like that?
Nurto snuffles against her pillow, muttering incomprehensible but defensive-sounding words. She argues and bristles even in her dreams, thinks Kawsar. The silhouettes of great moths flit through the room, beating against the mosquito screens on the windows like prisoners; they are eerie creatures that search for light just so they can immolate themselves with it. On full-moon nights when everything is bathed in bluish-white light and even the leaves on the trees are clearly outlined, the face of the moon is obscured by millions of flying specks, jostling with each other as if they are in a race to reach the heavens; they have a hunger, a single-mindedness that approaches devotion, reminding her of the sura in the Qu’ran that compares Allah to a lamp and his worshippers to moths. Maybe the fabled tree on the moon is the moths’ destination and the bright light is just to mark their route; that singular tree grows a leaf with every birth and when it drops so does the life attached to it. Her own leaf must be hanging by the most fragile of strands that even the beat of a moth’s wings would be enough to break its hold.
In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her. She never picked the fruit that fell from them, believing it a kind of cannibalism, but out of those soft, unshaped figures had grown tall, strong, tough-barked trees that blossomed and called birds to their branches and clambered out over the orchard walls to the world beyond. The infants in the orchard all had names, the genders sometimes distinguishable and sometimes imagined. The largest of them was Ibrahim, a nearly perfect boy with pale hair thick on his curved, rubbery limbs. Seven whole months he had survived in her harsh womb. He was tired, with wrinkles furrowed deep across his brow, and she thought she had seen him take one deep, resigned breath in her arms before he put down his clubbed hands and surrendered the fight. It had been difficult to bury him; he had toes, fingernails, a good head of hair, puffy eyes that clearly would have taken the shape of her own. Farah was hostile towards the shrouded bundle; he refused to look, refused to touch. Kawsar remained in bed with him snuggled against her breast while Farah called for a doctor to stem the blood flowing from her. By the time the Italian obstetrician had appeared at the door, she was drained yellow, her clammy skin as cold as the child’s, so disconnected from her senses that she dropped her legs open without a murmur and revealed everything to the foreigner. He prodded and cut and stitched while Ibrahim appeared to snooze open-mouthed beside her. When the Italian went to examine him she refused and pressed him against her breast, her nails breaking through his skin. She remembers hearing wails and screams but she herself was silent. Two days later, while Farah was out, and when the gloss of blood and fluid had dried into Ibrahim’s hair and his lips had set to a dark grey colour, Kawsar gathered the stained sheets around her waist and padded to the yard in bare feet. She clawed the earth with her hands, her nails split and shredded by the gritty soil, only stopping when she had created a narrow, two-foot deep trench. She filled a bucket from the kitchen tap and washed Ibrahim clean, let him remain in the multi-hued blanket she had knitted, and then laid him gently down. She read the prayer for the dead and then gently smoothed the earth over the blanket; it took a long time for the purple and red and pink squares to disappear under the brown earth.
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 12
