The Orchard of Lost Souls

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘I heard you on the radio. I didn’t know you had met the President,’ Captain Yasin’s voice startles her.

  ‘It was a long time ago and there is no reason for you to know.’

  Filsan opens a window to clear the room of the Captain’s cigarette smoke and stands idly for a moment watching the wind shake desiccated leaves into the yard.

  ‘You want to come to Saba’ad with me?’ Captain Yasin asks. ‘I’m going to check on the state of the militia there, see if there are more than five of them this time. I have to write another report.’

  A report I will end up writing, thinks Filsan as she sinks into her chair.

  ‘Come on, it will be good for you to see them.’

  ‘What about these files?’

  ‘They’re not going to walk away, are they?’ Yasin pulls her up from her chair. ‘Come on. It’s an order.’

  Filsan scribbles a note on her desk with her whereabouts and follows him to the jeep.

  Saba’ad is twenty miles north-east of Hargeisa. The largest of five refugee camps in the north-western region, it has grown and established itself as a kind of satellite town and stretches as far as the eye can see. Twenty thousand Somalis from the Ogaden region of Ethiopia scratch out a living here, having first fled the fighting between seventy-seven and seventy-eight and then the subsequent famines in Ogaden.

  The camp’s residents live in a mish-mash of dwellings scrabbled together from donated tarpaulin, acacia twigs, old cloth and scavenged metal. Dust blows up in large gusts from the eroded, denuded landscape. Filsan covers her nose and eyes against the sand and keeps close to Captain Yasin. At different points of the camp various charities maintain schools, clinics, community centres; German, Irish and American aid workers mark out their own fiefdoms with flags and acronym-heavy placards. Looking down on the camp brings home just how great Somalia’s humiliation was in the war; these people have land, homes and farms just a few miles away, but subsist here on gruel. At one point in September 1977, ninety percent of the Ogaden was in Somali government hands, and the violence it took to turn them back from their ancestral lands was so great the nation has still not recovered and maybe never will; the war stripped the government of troops, hardware and the support of the Soviets.

  Captain Yasin had told the militia leader to meet him by the burial ground to the west of the camp and the men are waiting, around fifty or so, squatting between the rocks placed to mark graves. The fighters are ragged teenagers in sarongs and vests; they are armed with long sticks and wear sandals made of tyre rubber. They rise as Captain Yasin and Filsan climb towards them.

  ‘Is this all of you?’ Captain Yasin asks.

  The militia leader is tall and skeletal, a green cap obscuring his eyes. ‘No, we have more but they are tending what animals they still have.’ His voice is grainy, dry.

  ‘This is Corporal Adan Ali, she will be working with you too.’

  They squint in Filsan’s direction.

  ‘We need to know how many of you there are before we can arrange proper weapons.’

  ‘When we have our weapons then we will come out into the open. Not before.’ The leader scrapes pictures into the sand as he speaks: straight lines, suns, hills, curved horns. ‘We are waiting for you to tell us what you want from us.’

  The teenagers watch Filsan with benign interest, their arms draped over each other’s shoulders; they have the lean limbs of marathon runners but are penned into this prison of sand and rock.

  ‘You must gather as many men as possible. Organise them. Discipline them so that you can work alongside us in keeping this country together,’ Captain Yasin replies.

  ‘It will happen.’ The leader hawks and spits into his drawing. ‘What will you give us for the time being? And when are you going to help us get our own lands back?’

  The teenagers lean forward to hear the response.

  ‘Be patient. We will set aside more rations for you, but there is little we can do until we receive all the hardware we need.’

  Filsan looks up quizzically.

  The leader nods defeatedly. ‘We will just wait then. The Ogaden is going nowhere.’

  ‘Within the month you will have rifles, RPGs, transport. This girl will make sure of that,’ he gestures to Filsan.

  She doesn’t understand what he is referring to. Why would they give RPGs to these refugees when Somalia already has one of the largest armies in Africa? What is he promising these men, and why? She wonders if he has drawn her into weapon smuggling or some kind of conspiracy. She imagines what her father would say if she were court-martialled over something so squalid. Turning on her heels she abandons the gathering and traces the route back to the jeep. Captain Yasin is soon beside her but she speeds on, ignoring him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ He pulls her arm back.

  ‘Let me go!’ She wrenches it free, not caring that he is her superior.

  ‘Wait, Filsan! What’s the problem?’

  ‘I will report you! You can commit whatever crimes you like but you won’t take me down with you.’

  ‘What crimes?’

  ‘Don’t think I’m stupid. I may be a woman but I can’t be fooled so easily.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Filsan stops abruptly and lowers her voice, ‘You are selling arms.’

  He bends back with laughter. ‘You’re crazy! Selling arms? To them? And what would they pay me in?’

  ‘So why are they receiving rocket-propelled grenades meant for the army?’

  He pulls her close. ‘Because that is what the government wants. We can’t talk about this here.’ He takes her arm again and marches her to the car. ‘Get in the jeep,’ he orders. ‘I can’t tell you everything but I will tell you what I know.’

  They drive away from Saba’ad in silence and only when they have reached the long, empty road to Hargeisa does Captain Yasin feel comfortable talking. ‘The government has decided that the situation as it stands is untenable. If the NFM continue to attack a village here, a battalion there, other clan militias will become emboldened and soon we will be fighting on twenty fronts.’

  Filsan has never seen him so serious before. She watches his sharp profile and feels that old desire for him creeping up on her.

  ‘They – all of the leadership in Mogadishu and Hargeisa too – have decided that there has to be a change.’

  ‘What kind of change?’

  ‘An end to it all. The whole population has to be resettled to stop the terrorists taking over.’

  ‘Empty Hargeisa?’

  ‘All the towns – Hargeisa, Burao, Berbera – anywhere the NFM might gather.’ He wipes sweat from his upper lip with his wrist.

  ‘When will this happen?’

  ‘Not confirmed.’

  It seems unbelievable, too final, but it might be an improvement on this constant, draining game. The local population could live more freely in an area controlled by the government; it is an extreme solution but these are extreme times.

  ‘How do you know about it?’

  Captain Yasin smiles. ‘Ahh, don’t you know that I am in the inner circle?’

  ‘When will the rest of us be told?’

  ‘When it is absolutely necessary, and Filsan, please, you cannot tell anyone about this or we will both end up in jail.’ He holds her gaze in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Don’t insult me. I am not some market gossip. I take my work more seriously than anyone else in the office.’

  ‘I know that,’ he nods. ‘That’s why I told you.’

  On returning to her room, Filsan is overwhelmed by the urge to put things in order. She remakes her bed, pulling the corners tight, sweeps the linoleum floor and wipes a cloth over it, tidies away the dirty clothes piled on the chair, dusts the windowsill till it is free of dead mosquitoes, collects the cassettes littered under her bed and shoves them in a drawer, jumps up onto the bed and polishes the bare light bulb and, finally, opens the window and sprays a few squirts of perfume onto her bedclothes.<
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  She emerges from her frenzy a little calmer but still restless. Thoughts fight for attention. She feels giddy, spun around; for so long she has wanted something to happen to her, anything that would penetrate the film that separates her from the outside world, and now event follows event in a flood, leaving her bobbing along with waves tight around her chest.

  The pile of books beside her bed – academic treatises on counter-insurgency and a hardback copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince – demand her attention. The Machiavelli book was a leaving present from her father; she picks it up, wipes the dust from the renaissance portrait on the cover and opens it. It makes her smile that her father has autographed it as if he wrote the five-hundred-year-old book. No dedication, no message, just the flourish of his signature on the title page. He had handed it to her wrapped in the plastic airmail package it arrived in and told her that it articulated all she needed to know about people. She has not read it but places it beside her pillow as a kind of holy book, a totem of her old life. She is still unwilling to find out what terrible secrets about humanity it contains and puts it back. She wants to read something dry, neutral, technical, and hopes The Primary Manual on Counter-insurgency will focus her mind.

  She turns on the bedside lamp. The densely packed words and convoluted diagrams hurt her eyes, but she forces herself to read its sentences again and again. Small boxes introduce examples of the theories put forward by Mao, Marshal Bugeaud and others. She enjoys these histories – every known human problem and conflict seems to have antecedents, however ancient or distant; modern communists were emulating biblical acts of vengeance.

  The book helps, her thoughts less disordered now. Captain Yasin sinks to the bottom of her concerns. She detests what women become when men enter their lives. Love seems to make fools of women infinitely more than it does men; in university the girls let their boyfriends copy their homework and sat morosely in the canteen deciphering the merest comment or act, cheapening and changing themselves, throwing away their futures to marry men who would become little more than taxi drivers. Filsan suspects that she is too rational to truly love someone; it embarrasses her just to see canoodling couples – it is as if they have had lobotomies – but if the opportunity presents itself to slip into a relationship with Captain Yasin, she won’t refuse it. She tries to avoid the term ‘last chance’, but it is there in her mind unbidden.

  She moves the Machiavelli book off the bed and a piece of paper flutters out, a blue-lined page from a notebook. She picks it up off the floor and recognises her own handwriting. ‘Dear Hooyo,’ it begins – she had written it on the bus to Hargeisa, in the hope that now she was living her own independent life away from her father she could start again with her mother – ‘I have been promoted to a new position in Hargeisa and am looking forward to seeing how people live in the North.’

  Filsan cringes at her words; she can imagine her mother laughing at them and shouting, ‘Who does she think cares?’

  ‘I have been thinking about you a lot and wondering if it is not time that we changed the way we behave towards each other. I know that you have not had an easy life and that you believe I have but that is not the case. In my own way I have suffered and paid the price for you and Aabbo’s divorce.’ The note ends there, just as the recriminations would have started. Filsan remembers tucking it away in the book to finish at a calmer time. She grabs a pencil from her drawer and rests the note on her textbook; she treats it like an exercise, listing the pertinent points first:

  • You married Aabbo out of your own volition.

  • You decided to leave him for another man.

  • You have done nothing with your life but live off one husband after another.

  • You should not be surprised that I take after my father when you are the one who left me to him.

  • I am ready to forgive you.

  • I want a mother who I can sit with and talk to in a nice way.

  • I will help your children with their education.

  • When I am with you I don’t want to talk about Aabbo.

  • When I am with you I don’t want to talk about the past at all.

  It has been four years since they last met. Filsan had caught a bus to the Wardhigley district. Nothing had changed. The house was still filthy, crammed full of the fruits of two failed marriages and the most current one. Filsan could feel crumbs underneath her on the chair, surfaces were sticky to the touch, and children drooled over her knees and hands. It disturbed her to see her own reflection – older, fatter, but still recognisably her – living in these conditions. After placing a glass of carbonated orange and a saucer of biscuits in front of her, her mother had retreated to the kitchen with a neighbour, but her voice carried through: ‘His hostage looks at me exactly the way he did’; ‘You would think she would come here with money at least’; ‘She doesn’t look like the marrying kind, face like a shoe.’

  ‘His hostage’, that is what her mother had always called her. Filsan’s father had only given her mother a divorce on the condition that she left Filsan to him, for him. She had accepted his condition, but from then on the child had become their Ogaden, their little piece of disputed earth. Deputations of clan elders visited one house and then another to negotiate access, to encourage compromise, to drink tea and pontificate. Filsan’s father did not budge: from the time Filsan was five to when she turned thirteen, she was his alone. But as she got older and began to grow into her mother’s face and body, he started to send her away for days to that messy, mud brick house. The way he looked at her hardened, he stopped embracing her, became impatient with her hovering around. She stopped being his and became nobody’s.

  She scribbles over the points; it is easier to leave her mother to the past, that wound is mostly healed and there is nothing to gain by picking at it.

  The next morning there is a gold-wrapped sweet on her desk. Captain Yasin keeps his head down, tapping at a typewriter, his fingers stiff and awkward. Filsan hides her smile and takes her seat, resisting the urge to ask him what has brought him to work so punctually. She has consciously not applied any make-up or changed a single thing about her appearance. If he wants her he will have to take her without embellishment or artifice. She peeks surreptitiously at the top of his head and the bald spot germinating on the crown; the gold sweet is infantile but touches her nevertheless.

  ‘I’ve got bad news for you,’ he says.

  She looks at him directly.

  ‘Leave is cancelled. The rebels shot down a plane over the border last night; they have found ground-to-air missiles from somewhere.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  He shrugs his shoulders. ‘The end is nigh.’

  Captain Yasin leaves for lunch alone, but at the close of the day, when her fingers sting from the impact of the typewriter keys, he mooches over to her desk and asks what she plans to do with her evening.

  ‘Read, Captain.’

  ‘Poor girl, is that the extent of your life?’

  Filsan sits rigidly. ‘I am not here for fun. I want to make something of my life.’

  ‘Life is to be enjoyed.’

  ‘For layabouts and street boys, maybe.’

  ‘No, for you and for me too. Let me take you out to dinner.’

  Filsan’s eyes sweep down to her hands. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t know? Are your books really more interesting than me?’

  ‘I have work to do.’

  ‘A s do I. Let’s discuss it over a meal.’

  Captain Yasin waits under an electricity pole a hundred yards from the barracks. He appears thin and angular in a white shirt that glows fluorescent in the dim light. She has changed into a pair of flared jeans and a loose red tunic with a shawl over her shoulders. They meet awkwardly and shake hands under the light of a nearby tea stall, her hand tiny in his.

  ‘Roble, pleased to meet you,’ he smiles. It is the first time he has told her his name.

  ‘Filsan, likewise.’

 
Walking beside him, Filsan feels a static charge as if the cables above are lightly electrifying them; it surprises her how good it feels to stand beside a man and know that he has picked her ahead of all the other women.

  Roble leads the way with his hands in his pockets and makes small talk about the restaurants he likes, the hotels that serve alcohol, the best places to meet senior officials.

  Filsan nods politely and wonders if he has heard about her incident with Haaruun. She knows that news of it has spread through the stares and nudges in her direction, but hopes dearly that it has somehow missed his attention.

  He draws her away from the road as a truck passes perilously close; the curfew is imminent and civilian vehicles rush to their destinations despite the derelict condition of the road.

  They turn right at a checkpoint, he raising a hand in greeting to the group of soldiers behind the barrier, and enter the Lake Victoria, an open-air restaurant with tame wildlife roaming the grounds.