The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  He should also hand over £5 quickly to Doc Madison for the lodging room in Davis Street, before it slips through his fingers and the codger gets on his back. The rest he will spend on the boys and Laura, treat them now that he has paid off the court fine. It had been a mistake, that last time – not just theft but sacrilege on the charge sheet – he had taken things too far, and it had turned them all against him. The shoes piled up outside the zawiya on Fridays seemed to be fair game – you could come with one pair and leave with another, with no real bother – but the zakat money was truly haram. He can’t ask any of them for nothing now, apart from Berlin.

  Passing the cinema, he looks up to see what pictures they have on: Double Dynamite. Still. And Quo Vadis and The African Queen as the new releases. He will watch Quo Vadis, but turns his nose up at The African Queen. He spends too much of his money on the pictures; it’s one of his chief vices but also his school. Where else could he learn so much about this place he’s decided to call home? Its dreams, its history and its myths? In that dark, flea-ridden hall he’s learnt how to romance girls, how to talk real English, and examined how his neighbours see themselves and how they see him. Films have made him realize it’s hopeless to expect the Adamsdown biddies to change their ways; they’ll only ever see him like one of those grimy coolies in loincloths, or jungle savages, shrieking before their quick, unmourned deaths – or at best, a tight-lipped houseboy proudly taking punishment in place of his white master. It makes him marvel that Laura was able to ignore all that shit and see him as a man like any other. Was it because her family, with its hunger, cussing and bitter wisdom, was not like the rich, chattering ones shown in the pictures? She is part of the servant class, he knows that now, who might just as easily stamp a black man into the dirt as offer him a hand up like a brother. Whatever it was, the navy money in his pocket had certainly helped.

  Mahmood stumbles over a loose cobblestone and corrects his balance self-consciously, looking left and right. He is paranoid that his steps look strange, flat-footed; his shoes are a size too big, to allow room for the painful corns on his feet. You cannot look like prey here. You cannot show weakness or your days are numbered, like those of the Somali drunk the police beat to death last year. Mahmood had learnt to do the black man’s walk early on in Cardiff: to walk with his shoulders high, his elbows pointed out, his feet sliding slowly over the ground, his chin buried deep in his collar and his hat low over his face, to give nothing away apart from his masculinity, a human silhouette in motion. Even now, he flinches when passing gangs of Welshmen when they’ve been at the boozer on rugby days; everything might seem calm, normal, when suddenly a fist comes into his face as hard as concrete, the shock of it knocking all words out of his head. The laughter as they pass on, the attacker giddy and loud with self-congratulation, the shame hotter than a furnace. Other black sailors keep a knife or razor in a pocket, but for him the risks are too high. The police know him by name, they might search for a stolen watch and find the razor or knife – and then what? Two years for an offensive weapon. Instead, he has perfected not being seen. He knows people call him ‘the Ghost’ and it satisfies him; it helps with the work and reminds him of the characters in the American comic books he picks up for his eldest boy:

  Absorbing Man

  Black Bolt

  Chronomancer.

  It’s late by the time Mahmood reaches Berlin’s; he had gone home to change, ignoring Doc’s calls for rent, before darting out again in a three-piece suit and dark overcoat. Berlin brings out his self-doubt; he always looks so polished, like Cary Grant or some other star. Smoothing his moustache down, Mahmood pushes the heavy black door. Calypso music fills the room and somehow makes it feel busier. There are only a few customers on this Monday night: students in black turtlenecks sitting on stools, a white couple dancing awkwardly beside the jukebox, their hips moving in an uncoordinated staccato. Berlin is standing fixed behind the bar, his arms stretched out either side of him, hands clenching the counter, his head bowed. Lost in this revelry, it takes him a moment to notice Mahmood settling into the bar stool in front of him; he finally lifts his head and his distant-seeming hazel eyes settle ambivalently on him. His face is reminiscent of a shark’s – a hammerhead – with his flat skull and wide, dark lips. He is handsome but in a dangerous, bloodless way. He never loses himself or allows people to lose themselves in him. Mahmood knows that he abandoned a daughter in New York and a son in Borama; he speaks of them easily, but with no guilt or regret. He likes this lack of emotion from Berlin. It means you can tell him anything, and it is like speaking to a wall: no shock, no moralizing, no pity or disgust. Berlin has low expectations and a worldly acceptance of even the greatest tragedies. His own father had been murdered before his eyes in a raid on his clan by the dervishes, and watching that dagger run across his father’s throat must have taught Berlin not to cling too hard to life.

  ‘So the wind has blown you in again?’ he asks in Somali.

  ‘The wind has blown money into my pockets, sahib.’ Mahmood drops a handful of coins on to the bar. ‘Get me a pasty and a black coffee.’

  ‘Good day at the races?’

  ‘Not bad at all.’

  ‘You missed some action tonight. The police found a couple of Chinese sailors running opium from a lodging house on Angelina Street. Using it themselves, too, so they were walking on noodle legs to the police car, them and this little bebopper from the university. It gave the reefer boys a laugh to see the police busy with someone else.’

  ‘The Chinamen are good at keeping their secrets. Someone must have told.’

  ‘Like they said in the war, the walls have ears. Nothing is secret for long in this whore of a bay.’

  Mahmood finishes with his pasty after just a couple of bites. It’s greasy and stale, but luckily his stomach has become a small, easily satisfied thing. On the ships he could throw down whatever was put in front of him and go back for more, now he eats just enough to trick his mind into thinking he’s had a meal.

  ‘You think that new Somali from Gabiley is telling tales to the police? Something about him smells bad to me.’

  ‘Who? Samatar? You got the wrong fella there. His knees start knocking if he even sees a police car. Wrong man to be an informer.’

  ‘Grass,’ Mahmood says, unconvinced, rolling the word in his mouth like a lost tooth. He hates grasses even more than coppers. You can be sitting down with a man, playing poker or warming your hands on a mug of tea, and the next thing you know everything you said is repeated back to you in the police station; no matter how much trash you were talking, or how tipsy you were, it goes down against you. You deny it and the police grab your neck and say they know it’s so.

  ‘I know an informer when I see one and he ain’t it,’ Berlin repeats. He is quieter when away from the others; he doesn’t need to get up on a stepladder and perform the role of bossman, the man who made it, the man who beat it all. It’s getting late and he’s burning down like an old wick; wiping the counter in slow, deliberate circles, rubbing his eyes. Despite the gleaming black hair and straight back, he is in his fifties and age is starting to catch up with him; he no longer attends the rent parties, and makes excuses to stay at home on weekends.

  His gaze fixes somewhere over Mahmood’s shoulder and his eyes track someone or something.

  ‘What is it?’ Mahmood asks, turning around.

  ‘Just that Jamaican bastard, Cover. That carpenter who stabbed Hersi last year, just over there by the jukebox it was. If anyone is an informer it’ll be him.’

  Mahmood squints at the small figure walking along the opposite side of Sophia Street. Doesn’t look like the kind of man who could give trouble; his arms swing as he walks and the pipe in his mouth sends neat puffs up into the cold air.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘He cut Hersi three times with a razor and then stuck him with a broken bottle.’

  ‘Why?’

  Berlin lifts his hands to the sky. ‘He hates Somalis?
Who knows? Hersi was nearly killed, he was in hospital drinking one blood transfusion after the next, but listen, the Jamaican go to court and get off scot-free, a pat on the back and home to bed. He’s never coming back in here. Informer.’ Berlin looks like he wants to spit the word.

  ‘These West Indians hate us for no reason. That snake landlord of mine always wishing me harm.’

  ‘The ships are where the troubles start, and then they follow us on to land. All of us fighting over crumbs. You are a fool to live there. You need to stay with your own people. That Cover will end up in jail one day, but not before he kills somebody.’

  The carpenter disappears from view.

  ‘You’re still set against going back to sea?’ Berlin asks abruptly. ‘Might be good for you to let all that noise about the zawiya cool down, give the sheikh time to forget.’

  ‘Why should I? I want to keep seeing my boys.’

  ‘From across the street with a pair of binoculars?’

  ‘Better than across an ocean or two,’ Mahmood replies, curling his lip.

  ‘She don’t want you bringing money in, or what? You can’t take these young girls so seriously. They go to the pictures and think marriage is going to be one long song-and-dance number. All kissy-kissy, lovey-dovey. What, she’s twenty? Twenty-one? What does she know of what a father needs to do? You don’t want your sons to see you out of work and broke all the time.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m broke?’ Mahmood jumps from his stool and slams his pocketbook on the table. ‘Look inside, you call that broke? I live better than those sailors with their Salvation Army coats and fingerless gloves.’

  Berlin rolls his eyes and slides the pocketbook back towards Mahmood. ‘You stay in Cardiff until the last trumpet call. It’s not my concern. You want another coffee, big man?’

  Mahmood nods and wipes his hand over his brow. His heart is racing and he can’t explain why he fears that he will end up boarding a ship soon, unable to keep his promise to his sons. Behaving like all the others do, just floating debris with no ties anywhere.

  ‘You’re a gambler, you know that sometimes you just have to let fate take over.’ The coffee machine hisses and steams as the last drops fall into the white cup. ‘Did I tell what happened to me when I went to New York, in 1919?’ Berlin asks, smiling.

  Mahmood shrugs.

  ‘I went there from Barry Docks, had done good service in the merchant navy during the Great War, was still a young boy but felt that I was some sort of hero with my chest puffed up and my moustache just coming in. The ship spat out its cargo in New York and then went into dry dock, so I march off with my pay burning a hole in my pocket. I see all these beautiful coloured girls in furs, stockings cut low on their calves, ribbons in their slick hair, and I say what! What have I been doing stuck inside boiler rooms with stinking men? I have wasted my whole life already! The girls were from the south of the country, they tell me to go to Harlem, that all the swellest, most giddy-up places are there and that it’s a Negroes’ paradise. I say take me there now. We ride a taxi because I want to show off and we stop at a diner to feed. The food is all their food – pig this and pig that – but I find something to chew on, and one of the girls she’s a real doll, face made for kissing, and she’s leaning into me and laughing and I lean back and laugh too, kekeke, showing all my teeth, and I have forgotten all about any ship or curfew or anything. I hadn’t been near a woman in months … and the girls are singing for me and ordering more and more and they see friends passing and call them in, and I’m still leaning and laughing. We finish up and they say, there’s a party! Let’s go! Louis will be there and Fats and rich ofays with good smuggled whisky. I pay for everyone and we take another taxi, as my girl says her feet hurt, and we go to this party on Lexington and I don’t see Louis or Fats but there’s low light, swinging music, sharp drink. I’m getting woozy, I lose my girl in the crowd and it looks like people are dancing on top of me, like I’m falling through the floor. I can take my booze, you know that, and I’m wondering what kind of American drink is this that makes me lose my head. I wanna find my girl and hold on to her feet, and so I crawl through the crowd, thinking I’ll recognize her red shoes, but I can’t and in the end they drag me out of the party. I wake up in the street, and you know what? Those girls had picked me clean – nothing but my seaman’s card in my pocketbook – drugged then cleaned me out. I drifted downtown, close to the port but too ashamed to show myself to the captain, all of these deep holes in the ground where they’re building this new block and that new skyscraper. I sit, sorry for myself, looking out over the water, holding my head, when someone push me from behind. I jump to my feet, thinking it’s time to fight. The man laugh and I say whatcha laughing at? My fists up already. You don’t know me? Why should I know you? Hamburg ’05, he says. I step back and think it can’t be, he pretends to pull back an arrow and shoot me and his name hits me instead. Taiaiake.’

  Mahmood feels like he is back in dugsi, watching his Qur’anic teacher pace back and forth, the stories washing over him in great waves. ‘Who was he?’

  Berlin’s eyes glint and he pauses to throw an espresso down his throat before starting again.

  ‘We’ll have to go right back to nineteen-oh-five. To Hamburg, Deutschland. Me and a hundred others crossing sea and land because we were told there was good work in Europe. Recruited by a Somali dalaal who scouted across the Habr Awal territory and the Garhajis and Warsangeli for people like us willing to go with him. I was a boy with no father and when I heard so many of my clanspeople were going away there was no way my old mother could hold me back. Our cattle had died, we couldn’t go near our old wells because of the dervishes so the camels had only a couple of weeks in them, there was nothing she could give me. There we were: the decrepit, the just born, the wadaads and the weavers, the suldaan and his servants, the potter and the poets, all on a dhow to Aden. The dalaal gave us all this sweet talk, that the Deutsch were so impressed when they heard about the brave Somalis that they demanded to see us in the flesh, all we had to do was show them our way of life and they would pad our pockets with gold. Beneath us in the dhow we had everything – our saddles, spears, prayer mats, headrests, cooking pots, all that we had! The minute we arrive in Hamburg there is a photographer waiting for us on the docks. His flash exploding and making the babies cry. We met the big boss, Hagenbeck, and he takes us back to his mansion and tells us to make up our camp in his long green garden. I fell asleep on the grass while watching the women tie the wooden frames together and when I woke up small white faces were peering through the fence, giggling and whispering to each other. I took a fright at these white-haired little jinns and ran into one of the completed aqals and stayed there while more and more gaallo arrived to stare at us.’

  ‘Astaghfirullah,’ laughs Mahmood, ‘it’s still the same when you cross the railway bridge.’

  ‘No … no, this was something else, they were not looking the way you would at a stranger, because their features or clothes are strange to you, they looked in doubt of our real existence, wallahi. Their eyes like this …’ Berlin stretches his upper and lower lids wide open, ‘watching every movement we made. They looked at us as if we were creatures of their imagination, as if they might be hallucinating altogether.’

  ‘So what about that man in New York?’

  ‘I’m coming to him! We stay in that garden for a few days and in the end we can see more white faces than leaves on the trees. We are ambushed but told to live normally, as if back in Africa. Africa? Where is that? I ask. I had never heard of the place. We had a hidden area to do our business, but what do we find? Deutsch boys my age, and men who should have known better, climbing up trees to watch us as we did it. When Hagenbeck tells us to pack up we say “subhanallah” and do it gratefully, but we are not going home, no, we are going on tour. We walked to the train station with our enemies running behind us, touching our skin to see if the black come off on their hand, pulling the hair of the children, grabbing anything we d
rop and stealing it. Savages. There’s a special train waiting for us and on the platform there are zebras, elephants, monkeys, Asians, Africans, Native Americans, Australians gathered together as if on Judgement Day. We were part of some kind of carnival, pulled together from every corner of the earth, to be exhibited in Berlin. They counted us on to the train to make sure no one had got lost, but inside there was complete chaos. A madhouse of languages, half-naked people, and screaming children. I pushed through, looking for a seat, leaving the other Somalis behind, until I finally found a quiet carriage. Sitting around me were men with only a strip of hair running down their heads, and in front of me a fella around my age with a bow and arrow in his hands. I wrapped my three metres of cotton closer around my shoulders and sat up, real tough, hardening my eyes, but the boy smiles and holds his palm out to me, and I take it.’

  ‘He was the one who found you in New York?’

  ‘That’s right, Taiaiake, a Mohawk from Canada. We did everything together in Berlin, we sat side by side as they measured every inch, and I mean every inch, of our bodies, took pictures of us sitting and standing up, looking this way and that, poured plaster on to our faces so they could keep casts of us. It was unlike anything else! We felt like kings. We competed against each other in the games they put on and stared as the girls walked past for the beauty contest. Allah, we didn’t realize then that they saw us as little different to the elephants and zebras on parade. Some of the Inuit died there and the Germans took their bodies, boiled off the flesh and put them on display in a museum. You couldn’t even die in peace. Later, Taiaiake went to America and took to the sky to dance along steel girders, and me to the sea. There wasn’t land anywhere that we could call our own and live well.’

  ‘So you think I should take to the sky or sea?’

  ‘You’re a man of the sea, aren’t you? You shouldn’t cling to this piece of flint they call a country. Warm yourself up beside a nice furnace somewhere in the Indian Ocean and come back with a clean slate and money in your pocket.’