Between her giggles, Deqo picks up on a commotion near the window. She wriggles from underneath the bed and pushes the curtain aside.
Four men chase a lone, suited figure. ‘Stop where you are!’
‘I’m innocent! I swear on my faith,’ the fugitive shouts, but continues to run.
‘Shoot!’ orders the captain and the soldiers obey.
Deqo watches as the bullets hit his back, twisting him into one wild pose and then another. His legs propel him a good distance before he falls to his knees by the villa gate.
‘Swear on your faith now, dead man!’ exclaims a soldier.
Deqo regards his death with the same detachment she does the television show. She has no comprehension of why these grown men are tormenting each other and is grateful for the glass separating her from them.
Returning to the programme she watches the exploits of Sheikh Sharif and his wife impassively until a singer takes the stage. She recognises the songs from the cassettes Nasra used to play, but this woman makes them sadder and slower. Deqo fetches an overripe banana and a packet of lollipops from the kitchen and watches the rest of the variety show until only white snow cascades over the screen. She sleeps with the television on, bathed in blue light and shushed by white noise.
A truck takes Filsan and Tall Abdi to the hospital, along with the bodies of Roble, Short Abdi, Abbas, Samatar and the nameless driver. The floor of the van is awash with blood, mainly from the driver’s neck where a section of shrapnel from the rocket has nearly severed his head. Roble is flat on his back, staring up at the moon, which is as bright as he had predicted. The rush of adrenaline has left Filsan and she now feels the gunshot wound in her hip; she squeezes her trousers and blood oozes between her fingers.
Chains clang as the gate to the main hospital creaks open for them; an orderly in blue helps her down from the back while Tall Abdi is stretchered out. He fought the battle with a chunk of muscle blown out of his abdomen, but now wails like a child, pleading for help from God, from the doctors, from his mother. Filsan holds onto the orderly as the van trundles to the morgue, her heart imploding as if primed with dynamite. She shakes her head in disbelief, wishing for a way to rewind time by just half an hour to change this ending.
‘Come on, come on, it’s not safe out here,’ the orderly warns.
He leads her to the emergency ward. They have to pick their way carefully through the beds and the casualties on the floor with assorted tubes attached to them. A pink-uniformed nurse directs them to a stained bed in the corner with a curtain around it for privacy. The middle-aged woman brusquely sends the orderly away and tells Filsan to lie down, then whips the curtain closed with a noise like knives being sharpened and asks what’s wrong with her.
‘My hip,’ she winces.
The nurse yanks down Filsan’s trousers and underwear and prods the swollen wound with her bare hands. ‘It’s just a surface injury.’
‘Please, let me have something for the pain.’
‘What can you give me in return?’
‘Check my trouser pocket.’
The nurse roots through all the pockets until she locates the roll of small shilling notes; she counts out the money with bloody fingers and then tucks the whole lot into her waistband. ‘I’ll get you something,’ she whispers.
If this is how they treat the living, what must they be doing to the dead in the morgue? she thinks. Were greedy hands searching through Roble’s clothes already? Would they steal the watch he was proud of or rip the silver tooth from his mouth? The certainty that they would nauseates her. There is nothing to cover her body with so she tries to tug her trousers up, but collapses back, preferring the exposure of the unkempt thicket of hair below her stomach to the corkscrew-like pain drilling through her pelvis.
The doctor comes, his face partly hidden behind a mask like an Arab girl’s, his coat dyed brown with dried blood. He stitches the wound quickly. He doesn’t seem to see her nakedness and works mechanically without word or eye contact. At the end, the nurse bandages the wound and gives her painkillers and a soiled blanket to sleep under.
The ward is loud and bright all night. More injured soldiers arrive and some depart, carried out unceremoniously to make room for the living. The provincial hospital only has one operating theatre, so procedures usually done under general anaesthetic are now attempted under local right there in the ward. Wrapping a pillow around her head doesn’t soften the screams and hollering from men losing an arm or foot a few feet away. At about four in the morning, still wide awake and feeling almost deranged, Filsan calls for water, and calls again, and calls again. She pulls open the curtain around her bed and squints against the fluorescent light. The doctor, surrounded by all the nurses, is arguing with Lieutenant Hashi.
‘This is an order from the highest level. You have no choice.’
The doctor raises his hands in disbelief and walks out.
‘Coward!’ spits Hashi after him. ‘The job falls on you then, nurses. Do your duty.’ He beckons a group into the ward. Ten uniformed high-school students in handcuffs shuffle past, flanked by four policemen, and he orders them to follow the nurses into an ante-room.
Birds chirp in the trees outside but her thirst keeps her from sleep. Filsan waits for the nurses to reappear but they don’t. Eventually, the orderly who had brought her in slouches into the ward and she taps on the metal bedframe to get his attention. She gets a good look at him this time: a bald man in his thirties, with an obsequious, fearful expression on his face. He checks over his shoulder before bending down and putting a hand on her upper arm. ‘What’s wrong, cousin?’
Gesturing to her throat, she manages to croak, ‘Water.’
He rubs her shoulder in an intimate way that she doesn’t like. ‘I’ll get it for you but you need to wait.’
‘Why?’
‘They are doing something sensitive in the room.’
‘You cannot even get a glass of water?’
‘No, no, no. I don’t want to see it.’
‘See what?’ she says, exasperated.
‘The children, they are bleeding.’
‘They’re donating blood, that’s all.’ Filsan wonders at the ignorance of the man. ‘You don’t need to worry.’
‘No! They are being bled dry. The soldier said they should be used like taps.’
‘Hashi?’
‘That one.’
‘Like taps? So they die?’
‘That is the plan.’
A squabble between stray dogs wakes Deqo. They growl menacingly and she rubs her eyes and yawns loudly in frustration. She will fill a bucket of cold water, disperse the hounds and then return to sleep. Water sloshes over the lip of the bucket and onto the courtyard but there is still enough to give them a shock. Head down, biting her lip, two hands straining around the thin handle, she doesn’t notice the vultures perched on the roof until a shadow swoops over her. It drops something near her feet and she glances down. A leaf? A wrinkled piece of leather? She picks it up curiously. A human ear. She throws it and the bucket down and bolts back to the veranda. The vultures swoop and circle before settling on the mango tree. She has never seen so many in one place, the branches of the tree sag and bob under the weight of them.
A muscular white dog with brown patches enters the gate, droplets of blood hanging like dew from the hairs of its muzzle, and sniffs the track leading to the house. Deqo grasps the broom resting against the wall and charges it.
‘Bax! Out! Out!’ she yells, shoving the bristles of the brush into the dog’s pink nose.
He stops in his tracks, yelping a few times, before padding out into the street. She pursues him and throws a few rocks at his rear. ‘Stay out.’
Then she spots the fugitive: torn, bloodied, but still smart in his suit and tie. She hits the broom against the wall until the pack leave their feast. She avoids his face and focuses on the shiny black loafers on his feet, decorated with a gold link chain. Wedding shoes, she thinks. The dogs growl their impatience
but keep at bay. His rotund stomach bulges against his shirt burtons and already there is a smell, sweet and repugnant at the same time. Deqo pulls the shoes off his feet – they are too good to waste – places them against the wall and then begins to dig a hole in the sandy earth with the handle of her broom. The dogs watch curiously but don’t interfere. She will never be able to dig a hole deep enough to prevent them getting to him, but she can at least give him the dignity of a burial. About two foot down she gives up and kneels down to rest. Her eyes accidentally fall on his face as he slumps forward. The dogs have ripped away his nose and exposed the bone underneath his left cheek. The ear is gone too. The undamaged part of his face is that of a wealthy forty-something with unlined, pale skin, the kind of man who has recently returned from overseas to find a wife or maybe build an ostentatious villa near his mother with the money he has saved.
Flinging the broom to the ground, Deqo grabs his leather belt and attempts to drag him to the edge of the pit. It is like hauling stone; she tugs again at the belt but the rigid body won’t shift. Stepping over him, she pushes his bullet-pierced back with her hands and then her feet; it is like the games she and Anab used to play in Saba’ad, play fights where one attacked and the other rolled up in a ball and resisted. Giggling a little, imagining that he is just pretending to be dead, she pushes his bottom. It is no good; he was at least twice her weight while alive and now has the dull burden of death on top of him. Deqo has learnt to be persistent though; there is no problem that she can’t find a solution to within her own limited means. She stalks around him, wondering how best to take him the few inches to his grave. If she could only lift his torso she could use his weight to flip him. Taking hold of the broom she slides it under his side and then levers it up; he moves slowly, slowly, slowly and then rolls onto his stomach. She tries again and this time he tumbles into the grave.
Sweating and with a stench of rotting flesh on her hands, she brushes great armfuls of fine sand over him, concealing first his face, then his torso and finally his long legs. It is done. She tears a cluster of flowers from the pink bougainvillea and plants it over his head. ‘There you go,’ she exclaims.
The children’s bodies are brought out of the anteroom in twos. A hand drops off the trolley as lifeless and yellow as an autumn leaf. Filsan watches mesmerised as the nurses go in and out of the bleeding room with barely a flicker of reaction. They hold scarlet bags of blood in their fingers – apparently destined for the operating theatre – and go around the ward with smiles for the patients. Follow orders. Follow orders. Follow orders. That is the code they have been brought up under and it endures until the burden of guilt cracks the spine. Her father would probably explain their actions as the necessities of war, but to her they seem like the cannibals of old tales: totally ordinary yet irrevocably depraved.
The orderly returns with a glass of water.
‘Has it finished in there?’ She gestures with her head to the anteroom.
‘One more to go.’
She gulps from the glass.
‘May Allah have mercy on their souls,’ he says, before pushing his squeaky trolley away.
She doesn’t know if he is referring to the students or the nurses.
Her mind travels to that last child beyond the unvarnished wooden door of the nurses’ station. At that age she was planning on becoming a pilot for the Somali national airline, a fanciful dream that never got off the ground but which had felt real and possible and irreplaceable at the time. Her father was under too much suspicion to influence the aviation professors by the time she was old enough to apply for university. She imagines the needle going into the student’s slim arm, the thick maroon blood seeping out of it, slowly, painlessly but lethally. When will they realise that life is leaving them? That for all the incandescence and noise of their short existence, death is wrapping its tendrils around them?
Filsan is both attracted to and repulsed by what is happening in that room. Is she brave enough to offer herself instead of that teenager? Or should she just submit to a future of growing grey hairs seated next to her father in their matching armchairs? The decision is made for her when the door jolts open and the last corpse is carried out in the arms of an orderly; it is a girl, her long, black plait swinging and bouncing beneath her, her wrists free of shackles, the expression on her face calm and beatific.
Filsan edges off the bed; the pills have subdued her pain enough to let her keep pace behind the orderly.
Time to leave, Deqo thinks. She does not fear death itself, but the idea of her body being eaten by the city’s scavengers chases her from the comfortable solitude she has enjoyed so blithely. People – both danger and sanctuary is to be found amongst people. The new-found possessions she can’t leave behind – the shoes, dresses, cans of food, compact mirror – she bundles into a scarf and knots up, away from jealous eyes. It is time to return to Saba’ad, to the lumpy porridge, dust and interminable waiting.
She tidies the various messes she has made, bidding farewell to each room and respectfully closing the doors. The vultures have left the mango tree but, on reaching the road, she sees two of them standing on the uncovered knees of the man she buried; the dogs must have unearthed his bottom half and then abandoned him, and now the birds pick vigorously at his thighs. Deqo trudges in the opposite direction.
The street is full of militiamen, dressed half in whodead and half in camouflage wear, stripping the homes as professionally as removal men: three short men carry a huge wardrobe on their heads to a nearby lorry, while a boy wrenches the corrugated tin roof off a samosa stall.
She avoids the checkpoints she can and talks her way through the ones she can’t. Her derelict condition is enough to convince the soldiers she is who she says she is. A few teashops and cafés are still open to cater to the military, but otherwise everywhere is deserted. She loses track of where she is in relation to the ditch and looks around for anything that might guide her out of the city, before wandering into a pretty neighbourhood with goats bleating plaintively in the yards.
The sun has passed its zenith and Deqo feels sweat trickling down her temples. She leans against a bungalow and notices an orchard opposite with tall fruit trees waving to her over the glass-crested wall. There is a low, wooden gate. She jumps up and climbs over. It is like being back in the ditch but tidier and sweeter smelling. The ground is littered with pomegranates, tamarinds and papayas. She fills her skirt and then sits in the shade under a tree to eat a wrinkled yellow papaya, spirting the slimy black seeds as far as she can. Someone has put hard labour into this orchard; there are no scrubby, unused patches or broken hoses and scrap metal piled up in a corner. Weaverbirds sing in the nests above her head and trumpet-headed flowers blow within arm’s reach.
Curious and emboldened by the peace of the orchard, she creeps towards the small, blue-painted bungalow and peers through a crack in the back door into a dark, empty hallway. The bars on the kitchen window are designed to keep out a burglar but are wide enough for her; she drops her bundle to the ground and crawls in, dropping feet first into a hillock of saucepans.
A clatter in the kitchen, a pot lid maybe, dancing like a cymbal before making its peace with the earth; Kawsar swivels her head towards the half-closed kitchen entrance.
‘Come on, I’m ready,’ she says with a voice that doesn’t sound like her own.
The kitchen door swings gently, tauntingly, but no one appears. She had once found a thief in her kitchen and held him tight as he tried to escape out the back; she fought with him and is eager to face the soldiers now.
‘Soobax! Come out!’ she yells.
Still nothing stirs. Kawsar grabs her glass and throws it with all her strength at the kitchen door. The glass shatters against the door handle, rainbows flaring as the shards tinkle to the floor.
A hunched figure emerges as if lured out by the yellows, reds and blues that Kawsar has conjured up. It is a small and indistinct shape. A girl with frayed plaits and a blood red smock holding her hands
behind her back as if on parade.
‘Hodan?’ She is angry this time, fed up with her child torturing her.
The girl’s face is downturned, her chin pressed into her neck, a fan of black eyelashes hiding her eyes. She doesn’t evanesce this time.
‘Answer me,’ demands Kawsar, her heart beating harder. She searches the girl for injuries but there aren’t any; she is only playing dumb.
‘Get out of my house if you’re not going to speak.’ Kawsar points a stern finger towards the front door.
The girl doesn’t reply or shift an inch. Her feet are bare and dusty, her long legs sprout like weeds between cracked paving, but her resemblance to Hodan is certain: the heart-shaped face, the dimples, the reed-like body all belong to her child.
‘Watch your feet on the glass,’ Kawsar says, her tone softening.
The girl stretches her toes, shifts her balance, but stays rooted to the same spot. Her smock is torn in places along the side.
Kawsar takes a deep breath. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘I just want to rest.’ The voice is not Hodan’s; it’s deeper and wearier.
‘Rest then.’ Kawsar waves a hand in the direction of Nurto’s mattress.
The girl treads over to the divan and tucks her legs slowly underneath her, shyly pushing her skirt down between her knees as she crosses them. She chews her bottom lip nervously like Kawsar used to as a child.
‘What is your name?’
‘Deqo.’
‘Where have you come from?’
‘The ditch,’ she says, deciding that the old woman would prefer to hear that than Saba’ad.
‘Where is your family?’
‘It’s just me.’ The girl meets her eyes.
Kawsar feels a charge when she hears those words.
‘How do I know you are not here to steal from me?’
Deqo shrugs her shoulders, suddenly surly and tired of the questions. She picks at the dirt underneath her fingernails.
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 23
