The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘I’m not going anywhere. The devil looks after his own,’ Mahmood smiles.

  ‘Doqon iyo malaggiisa lama kala reeb karo, a fool and his fate can never be parted,’ sighs Berlin. ‘Off you go then, roohi, I need to close up.’

  As Mahmood slides off the stool and reaches for his hat, Berlin abruptly turns and thumps a palm to his forehead. ‘You see how I’m getting old? Telling you stories from a thousand years ago but forgetting to give you this.’ He pulls out a blue airmail envelope from the jumble of papers inside a small drawer.

  Mahmood Hussein Mattan, c/o Berlin Milk Bar, Cardiff reads the neat, blue writing. A five-shilling monochrome stamp with the dead King’s face and a map of British Somaliland makes clear the sender.

  Mahmood sits down heavily again. ‘Hooyo,’ he sighs defeatedly.

  ‘Mothers always catch you, even if you run to the ends of the earth,’ Berlin laughs. ‘You want me to read it for you?’

  Mahmood waves a hand in acquiescence. Neither he nor his mother can read or write but somehow she still finds a way to pour her words into his ears across all that space and time. He can picture her sitting in line for one of the scribes near the Public Works Office, her rough-hewn stool holding up her fragile bones, her long robes somehow falling just a millimetre above the dusty ground strewn with eucalyptus leaves. The memory of her is like a boulder on his back and he slumps forward on the bar, hiding his face.

  ‘Shall I do her voice?’

  ‘You want me to stick a knife in your back?’

  Berlin chuckles but then clears his throat, rips the thin envelope open, and intones.

  ‘My lastborn, my heart, my knees, my liver, the final blessing of my womb, I pray for you five times a day, I plead with God that he may show you his most merciful face. I bless you. I bless you. I bless you. Say ameen. I have consulted the fortune-teller and he tells me that you are safe and that your three beautiful boys are in good health, and their mother too. Ameen. Ameen. I have seen more sailors from Cardiff in Hargeisa than I can count on two hands and they tell me you move regularly. May Allah still your feet and give you comfort until he reunites you with me. When will the boys be grown enough to see my old face? Not that there is any beauty in it but there are blessings to be found in the company of the aged. I do not know how much more of my allotted time I have ahead of me but I will fast and pray until the last breath. My son, do not forget your deen, I am an unschooled woman but that is cilmi I can pass on with certainty; there is no harbour or shelter apart from Allah. Never forget that. Your brothers send their greetings and wish me to tell you that they have put in a bid to win the first cinema concession in Hargeisa. I do not know if it will be granted to them, or to one of those cut-throats on the other side of the ditch, but if you have anything to contribute, manshallah, otherwise I will tell them it is impossible. Some of these sailors return with such good fortune, son, and I hope that one day it will be you stepping out of a car with your suitcases and children and happy wife.

  Now, nabadgelyo iyo safar salaama.

  Your mother.’

  Berlin folds the letter and pushes it under Mahmood’s nose. ‘Some men may call themselves poets but your mother is the real article.’

  ‘She uses words like arrows.’

  ‘Poetry is war, what else you expect?’

  ‘A truce.’

  ‘You really don’t want it?’

  ‘No, you keep it.’

  Berlin rubs his thumb along the crease of the letter before pocketing it. ‘You’ll know one day … when your mother is under the earth, and no one prays, weeps or cares for you in the same way. Then you’ll warm your heart with letters like this.’

  ‘Until that day, then …’ Mahmood says, pulling the brim of his felt hat over his forehead.

  After turning the sign on the door, Berlin perches on a stool and lights a cigarette, his silhouette appearing and disappearing with the flashing jukebox lights. The floor is mopped, the till emptied and the coffee machine cleaned, just enough time to savour a last cigarette before Lou begins hollering for him to come to bed. He tries to empty his mind but thoughts gallop up and down – bills that need to be paid, a court summons for street gambling, a memory of his long-dead mother’s incense suddenly as strong as the cigarette smoke, another of his American daughter’s downturned infant mouth. He rises and opens the drawer behind the bar; pulls out an old postcard of the Empire State Building in a blizzard, postmarked ten Decembers ago. Taiaiake had written a short message in block capitals on the reverse, wishing him a good new year and telling him that he thinks he saw Lucille in a playground in Boerum Hill, and that she looked well and was climbing the frame as well as any steelworker. The postcard has been in the drawer since it arrived, Berlin thinking that any day now he will reply but somehow never managing to do it. Brooklyn is lost to the past, to the man he had been before the Johnson-Reed Act had cleansed America of men like him. He struggles to keep old worlds alive; friends, lovers, even children seem to deliquesce when he turns his back, appearing in fragments in his dreams and quiet moments to stake their claim on him.

  Mahmood stands on Davis Street, looking up through the torn net on the sash window as his family prepares for bed. She stands, spare and angular, with Mervyn on her hip, rocking back and forth to soothe him, her brown hair aglow under the orange lampshade. Her mother is beside her and they converse in their abrupt, hand-waving fashion. Omar and David are in their vests and underpants, jumping on the bed and making a mess. If he were to walk in there, they would clamber all over him, like monkeys in a tree, laughing like maniacs while their mother tried to incinerate him with her eyes. She was, is, a formidable foe, able to argue that dark is light and light is dark, and so furious with him that she would unleash Old Testament plagues if she could.

  He had failed. That pane of glass between them expressed the distance that had grown imperceptibly but undeniably in their five years of marriage. He knew – no, maybe not knew, but felt, yes, felt – that she was going with another man. He thought he had seen her coming out of the picture house with a black fella, a light-skinned man with a thin moustache; he hadn’t seen the girl’s face, that’s true, couldn’t keep up with them, but she had the same build and hair colour as Laura. She had changed so much over the last five years: hips, a little bit on top too. She wasn’t a plank-bodied young girl any more, but the tongue had remained, and could lacerate any man’s pride faster than a cat o’ nine tails. The first time they had met had been in a café in town, her hair drizzled with rain, her skin not far off the colour of the marble counter. Her foolish sister was sleeping outside the furriers so she could be the first to buy a fake mink or chinchilla when the sale started in the morning. Laura had ordered a couple of teas when she felt him staring at her. Her seaweed-green eyes flashed a glance at him and then back to the clasp of her purse. He hadn’t known what to say, his English was still engine-room basic then, but he didn’t want her to leave without even trying to get her attention. He liked her red hat, the way her hair curved around her jaw, the hardness of her nose above her soft, pink lips, the way she wore her cheap, oversized clothes with style. Eventually, with a croak, he asked, ‘You wanna come pictures?’ She would tease him about this long after, imitating his accent and awkward invite, but she had agreed to the date, and three months later they were married. They had kept the courtship quiet. She only told her sister, and he didn’t bother telling the other Somalis at all – what for? Just for them to say that she would leave him broken and shoeless? Or that she would turn around one day and call him a dirty nigger? Or that she wouldn’t know how to look after his children and would feed them pork and choke them on boiled potatoes?

  On their wedding day, he had taken a detour to buy a white carnation for the lapel of his brown suit and had arrived at the registry office to find Laura red-eyed and stiff-necked. Her grandmother had come limping down from the Valleys to put a halt to the wedding but it hadn’t worked, so she sat on a wooden chair at the back of the room, read
ing her Bible and hollering ‘Lord have mercy on our souls’ throughout the ceremony. It had been too quick and messy, in hindsight, he should have gone to visit her parents to show them that he wasn’t some cannibal who had a pot waiting for their daughter, he should have bought her a ring and given her more money to tide her over while he went to sea. He thinks that, deep down, she has never forgiven him for leaving directly after the hasty consummation – in a borrowed bed – of their vows, or for spending eight months away, jumping from Kenya to Ceylon to Malaysia to Australia and back again. The most lucrative signing of his life but, man, had it cost him something too.

  They are still friendly, in a sense, go for the occasional walk, and he is still welcome to visit when he wants. But they had nearly done it, nearly confounded all the doomsayers. Who else had breached a white home like that? Walking in through the front door with a suitcase and a smile. Laura had made that happen. There could be no denying the force that lay within her sleek, lithe body. She was a gangster. Closing the door to the box room they shared, and knowing everyone could hear. It made him love her even more. Meeting her father at night on the landing, both of them in their shorts, was the worst thing about living there; he looked like he wanted nothing more than to push him down the stairs. But even he had relented in the end, finding boiler work for Mahmood, and telling Laura that she had made her bed and had better lie in it when she’d said she wanted a divorce last summer.

  THREE

  Saddex

  ‘Oh, would you look at this one!’

  ‘What? Show me.’

  Diana opens the newspaper wider and swivels to show her older sister.

  DIVORCE GIVEN TO WOMAN WHO FOUND HUSBAND IN LINGERIE.

  ‘The silly beggar!’

  ‘I don’t know why people get married if they make such a lark of it, I really don’t,’ Violet says, her eyes rushing greedily through the print.

  ‘Listen to this bit, close your ears, Gracie! The lingerie was a combination of the wife’s undergarments and those bought especially by the husband.’

  ‘Oh, the shame of it, how could he do it to her?’

  ‘And this bit … she had become suspicious when her top drawer grew emptier and emptier.’ Diana unleashes her cackle, making Grace drop her knife in alarm. ‘Take the paper, I know how much you love these stories.’ She flaps the Echo towards Violet and picks up her knife and fork.

  ‘I don’t love them but they don’t half make me glad that I never married.’

  ‘Well, you know you’ve picked a wrong ’un when you land up in the Echo.’

  ‘Do you think any of our men are getting up to these sorts of tricks?’ Violet whispers, holding the newspaper between herself and Grace.

  Diana raises her eyebrows. ‘I’d put money on it. Men are men are men. There’s no end to the tomfoolery they get up to.’

  ‘Even the frum?’

  ‘Especially them! I might trust a religious woman but I never trust a religious man. They’re just better at hiding it all, if you ask me.’

  ‘But Ben wasn’t like that, was he?’

  ‘No, but he was a saint. Sentimental to the hilt too, wasn’t able to keep secrets or lies for long, a funny one like that.’

  ‘This one is even worse … a woman, this time! She’s asking for a divorce even though she’d moved her husband into a shed in the garden and brought the lodger into the marital bed. The judge threw out her petition for desertion and told her she’d done the deserting. Cheeky mare.’

  ‘The chutzpah of that one.’

  ‘Oh no … another gelignite robbery in London. A diamond mounter’s in Mayfair, no sign of forced entry but blew open the safe and stole thirty thousand pounds, sixth attack by this gang in twelve months.’

  ‘I know where your mind’s going, Violet. What would a gang like that want with the chickenfeed in our safe? It wouldn’t even pay for dinner at the Savoy.’

  ‘Or a local outfit to get the same idea? You think gelignite is so hard to come by, so close to the war? There’ll be stashes of it all across the country.’

  ‘Your mind is like a submarine, there’s no depth of paranoia it can’t reach.’

  Violet turns her head slowly to give her sister a contemptuous look. ‘And you’re naïve, this world is only getting worse, you can either ignore it or do what you can to protect yourself.’

  ‘The last thing I am is naïve. I just choose not to dwell on knife-wielding maniacs, jelly gangs and every imaginable catastrophe, but on happier things. Speaking of which … Purim!’

  Grace’s head flips up from her plate and she seems to reanimate after a long silence. ‘Mam, will you teach me how to line dance? And did you get the velvet for the skirt? Aunty Violet has already made me the crown.’

  ‘Not yet, I’ve been looking for purple but so far only found red or blue. Don’t worry, I’ll get it in time, and I’ve kept enough sugar back so that we can have three cakes at least, made with real eggs too, from Mrs Llewellyn.’

  ‘You’ll look better than the real Queen, I bet.’ Violet smiles.

  ‘I hope so! Sarah is going as a queen too, and I want to look better than her.’

  The seaside postcard is peeling away from the side of the cabinet; the tape attaching it to the varnished rosewood has become yellow and desiccated. It is so familiar that she sees only its shapes and colours: the fat man and the thin girl, the bag spilling out gold coins, the speech bubble hanging between them. Her father had placed it there, tickled in some way by its casual contempt for men like him, pawnbrokers and moneylenders. She hated it, but to remove it was to also remove the fingerprint he had left imprisoned between the tape and the glossy blue card, and the sound of his laughter puffing out in spurts from his scarred lungs. These precious relics are necessary to remind her that the shop isn’t a prison but a sanctuary, teeming with markers of her life and those of her family. She pulls a bolt of expensive white taffeta towards her, and remembers her father saying softly how much he’d like to cut into it for her wedding dress, but like her it had remained untouched, leaning against the wall with the other premium fabrics. She unwraps the cellophane packaging and examines its condition; the silk is slightly brittle and lighter at the edges, and has a smell of damp that has been absorbed from the walls, but no holes, thankfully. It was another one of her father’s impulse buys, to satisfy his eye for beauty rather than to put money in the till. She rubs the fabric between her fingers and considers making Gracie’s Purim dress from it; better than letting it all go to waste, she thinks. Their customers have no money for these fancy goods. She opens one of the tiny drawers in the haberdashery cabinet and finds mismatching glass beads, mother-of-pearl buttons, paillettes and ribbons. She could stitch a pretty, embellished bodice from cheap navy velour and then just use the taffeta for a full skirt. It would have made her father smile to see Grace dressed so lavishly, when he dressed in the same tweed trousers and waistcoat day in day out, and darned his long johns until they were a patchwork. They were not the type of people to treat themselves; only baby Diana had learnt the art of dressing well, a consequence of a childhood spent in hand-me-downs, no doubt. It’s another six days until Purim, she will have enough time on the weekend to complete the dress and surprise her niece with a pair of enamel bangles.

  A tram rattles along Bute Street and sends a small thud of air against the glass windows. One large pane is original Victorian glass that pitches a distorted reflection on the wall as the sun sets. The other pane had to be replaced in ’47 when a soldier threw a brick into the shop, avenging, in his mind, two British soldiers who had been hanged by the Irgun in Palestine. The fool clearly not realizing that one of the soldiers was a Jew himself. It had been even worse for the Rosenbergs, in Manchester. The pubs had shut on that bank holiday due to a beer shortage, and some hooligans had used the pictures of the dead Tommies on the front of the newspapers as an excuse to tear up as many Jewish shops as they could find on Cheetham Hill. The shock of their own glass shattering that summer night remains
with Violet; her nerves tuned up and jangling at any unexpected bang or crash. She hates closing time, when the street fills with male cries, the sound of bottles smashing and curses as fights break out between the sailors, dockers and trawlermen.

  This patch of earth, reclaimed from marshland and still liquid, deep beneath the foundations, is all the sanctuary they have. The damp, however, crawling up all the buildings, nibbling at them, warns that they don’t belong here either; that one day the sea will take back their home.

  It never seems to stop raining and tonight it’s heavier than usual, rivulets of it sloshing down on to the pavement from the sodden shop awning. She looks through the glass door and a taxi drives past, its windscreen wipers scraping back and forth; inside are a well-dressed couple, kissing passionately, eyes squeezed shut. She opens the door and stands in the fresh air for a moment; even in this weather a gang of Maltese sailors stand outside their lodging house, talking loudly. Down the street Mr Zussen is leaning out of his pawnbroker’s, peering worriedly at the overflowing drain in front of his shop. He looks like a character from the Bible, a long white beard hanging down to his navel, his tall, nervous, rumpless body seemingly centuries old, his hangdog face usually looking out impassively – decade in, decade out – from his glass service hatch. She loves him and all the characters she has grown up with, loves their solidity and earthiness. The wind picks up and blows, wet and cold, against her cheeks. Another day over, she whispers to herself, and then shuts the door.

  Looking at her wristwatch, she sees the minute hand shiver towards 8 p.m., and just as she is about to lock the five locks, two young women in flashy make-up step in out of the rain.

  ‘A devil of a night! And I’ve only gone and left my brolly at home. Can we pop in for a second, Miss Volacki?’

  Violet recognizes them both. Café girls. All peroxide and rouge. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t, not with the Closing Act and all, but quickly, come in, come in.’