The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  This long episode fractured the relationship between the Haji and Mahmood’s father. If there wasn’t a distinction in how they perceived their place in the world before, it was now bold and written in red. Although never declared a kuffar, Hussein felt there was a mark on his back, and the curt ‘salaam’ of the Haji as he passed by the shop always seemed to be followed with some muffled invective. The District Commissioner finally granted the transport licence and Hussein resigned his post as judge with relief. He died of a heart attack two dry seasons later, after enjoying more than his fair share of years and wealth, and with five sons to branch out and strengthen the family name. Those sons had diligently washed and wrapped his body in a single white shroud, and borne him on their shoulders to his final abode under an acacia, resting his left cheek on the mummifying, mica-flecked soil before the shovels went to work. His place in society affirmed by the large crowd at his burial, the Salat al-Janazah was led by the Haji himself.

  The Haji had courted the brothers one by one, from eldest to youngest, turning a honeyed af-minshaar on them. He offered unsolicited advice on everything, from new merchandise arriving in Berbera, to talented lorry mechanics, popular cuts of fabric and eligible girls they might want to marry. He had learnt to smile again after his defeat over capital punishment, but his grin seemed barbed to Mahmood, the row of gold teeth out-flashing the decayed rest. He was a renewed man, engaged in a campaign of propaganda and quiet resistance against the British. There was no need for skirmishes; nomads held nothing more important than their camels, and all he had to do was shed doubt over the safety of locust bait and veterinary injections. A Public Works official would set locust bait, and a young child or woman would scatter it away from the well. If the Haji thought he could win this war of attrition, he was strengthened by the occasional suicides of colonial officials with nothing but alcohol, destitute women and servants for company, in missions strewn throughout the desolate hinterland.

  If, as it seemed, it was true that the British hated their lives in Somaliland, it would go some way in explaining just how quickly they abandoned the protectorate in ’41, when the Italians invaded from their colony in the south. Taking their Indians with them, it was as if the British had busted out from a jail. Life became difficult as the Royal Navy blockaded the coastal ports, what with the family shop relying on overpriced fruit and vegetables trucked in from Gabiley and Arabsiyo to keep customers coming. The Italians had their own plantations near the Shebelle and Juba rivers and big-time traders in Mogadishu to provision their troops, so the brothers ended up buying stock illegally from La Forza rather than selling anything to them. They were the first to sell spaghetti and macaroni in Hargeisa but the regular customers, unsure of how to prepare the stiff pasta, fed it to their goats in disgust and never returned to purchase more.

  The Haji, distraught that his wish for the British to leave had been granted so abruptly and bewilderingly, led the brothers every day for duhr prayers at Sheikh Madar’s masjid. The swollen, expectant congregation waited for some instruction on how to deal with these new infidels, but he had no answer, no plan. Fate had ambushed him.

  For Mahmood, the absolute stillness of the town, and therefore the whole world, was terrifying, he seemed to be the only thing moving or growing in it. He was finally taller than his mother, and as he approached his teenage years the first shoots of wiry hair in his armpits and on his chin had begun to appear. Not quite a man yet but certainly not a child, he bristled at the low regard his elder brothers held for him. Never would he be the one to make decisions. Never could he say ‘let’s sell this instead of that’, or ‘employ him instead of the other’. He was the ‘soo qaado taas’ man, the fetch-it boy. No better than Ebado, who was now in her unhappy twenties and in frustrated love with Hashi. After a relative rush of activity in the morning, the town settled into a sunbaked, soundless, cud-chewing torpor: the rough roads empty apart from black and white goats, the air so static that if one leaf or blossom was stirred from a tree, Mahmood could follow its entire slow, swaying descent to earth. He had a feeling that he could scream at the top of his lungs and no one would hear him.

  He walked all over, depriving his brothers of his servitude. From Nasa Hablood to the livestock market, from the police station to the Public Works Office, from the white district back to the native quarter, from his father’s rock-marked grave to Sheikh Madar’s tomb. He pressed on. The intense heat of that dry season kept even the roughest street boys inside. The town’s women and girls had already gone into hiding, in fear of Italian troops, and the few men he passed appeared lost in their own concerns or reveries. When he heard laughter one day, accompanied by strange hooting-tooting music that assaulted his ears, he followed it to its source. His pursuit ended at the threshold of a mud-brick makhayad, hidden behind the warehouse of a Parsi sugar trader from Bombay. With the crunch of spilt sugar between his toes, Mahmood crept away from the door and the uproarious men sprawled on tatty divans set out along the four walls. His retreat was slowed by his fascination with the horned machine that the toots and hoots seemed to be spitting out from.

  ‘Who is this little one poking his nose into our affairs?’ a reclining man with a henna-bright beard asked the others, on catching sight of Mahmood. ‘Kaalay! Come!’ he ordered, reaching his hand out as if to pluck him from a vine. ‘You got a message for one of us, boy?’

  In the murk of the earthen room, clouds of tobacco smoke billowed and drifted from gurgling shisha pipes, obscuring which leg belonged to which torso and which face belonged to which body. It was a warehouse of men, piled up indolently on top of each other.

  ‘I’ve seen him. You’re one of Hussein’s boys, sax?’ asked a young man with a Western-style hat askew on his head and a blue macawis wrapped around his narrow waist.

  ‘I am.’

  Senseless laughter.

  Mahmood’s pride, already weighty and adult-sized, was bruised. ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  ‘Nothing, boy, Hussein was a good man, Allah oo naxaristo. We are just silly men who find humour in everything. Get out of that hellish sun and sit with us. Take this.’ He proffered the metal snakehead of the shisha to Mahmood, and then extricated himself from the other bodies to fiddle with the twirling disc atop the music player.

  Holding the shisha pipe nervously in his hand and seeing no place for him in the throng, Mahmood sat in the doorway and folded his long legs beneath him.

  With the burst of another hooting-tooting song, the young man reclaimed the pipe from Mahmood and kicked away the legs in his path until he was safely in possession of a few inches of divan. ‘What’s your name, Ibn Hussein?’

  ‘Mahmood.’

  Smiling broadly and switching to smooth English, he placed a hand over his heart and, with eyes dramatically lowered, announced, ‘And I remain your humble servant, Berlin.’

  That’s how they met and how Mahmood fell in love with Berlin. A love platonic and pure, for sure, but weighted by the close scrutiny the boy put the man under. His bearing, his ideas, his silences, his insults, his desires, his hates, Mahmood would have scribbled them all down if he could write, but instead he memorized them and brought them home like birds caught in his snare. He prowled around the doorway of the tea house, his ear attuned to the sound of Berlin’s voice over the din of the others. Seamen. Sailors. Merchant Marines. Stokers. Firemen. Trimmers. Badmarin. They called themselves many things but he quickly understood that they were men of the sea, men of the world. As he lurked around the edges of the makhayad, protecting his place within their confessional by passing this to one and fetching that for another, he picked up fragments of their histories, their mythologies.

  Ainashe, a convalescent sailor with oily, stained bandages on both forearms, was recuperating after his ship went down off the coast of Malaya. Every hour, with wild eyes, he would go over the details of the torpedo attack. How it struck the engine room during his brother’s shift, while he was on deck taking the air before his own four-hour watch
began. The spume of boiling water that splashed his face as the steel deck erupted beneath him. Feeling a touch on his neck as he sank deeper into the water, he flailed his arms behind him, fearing a shark was circling for a good position to bite off his head. ‘Christ! I’m only trying to help,’ shouted the First Mate, as the stoker swore in Somali, pleading with God for a different death. ‘Come here! Hold on to this, pal.’ The old Scottish bastard passed him a half-broken crate and helped him find some stability before swimming away to look for other survivors. Bobbing up and down, his broken arms struggling to carry his weight, he felt the flutter of surfacing corpses before he caught sight of them. They came up one by one, like dancers entering a ring, as smooth and limbless as sea cows. Of all the bodies with heads there were only enough eyes, noses, mouths and ears to form one complete face. Surrounded by this school of monsters, Ainashe kicked out until he recognized the scar on one ribcage, a long yellow river of a scar that his brother had earned in a bar fight in New York. Shivering, Ainashe pulled his brother’s naked torso to him and spoke encouraging, babyish words to the space where his handsome head should have been. All gone. All gone. Ainashe’s makhayad audience just tutted sympathetically, sighed ‘sabar iyo imaan’ and then returned pitilessly to whatever joke or tall story he had interrupted.

  They shrugged off the weight of Ainashe’s misery and insanity with an ease that at first shocked Mahmood but then felt right and manly. Through their uproarious laughter, their theatrical disgust, poetic insults and vast worldliness he learnt more than he ever had before. The central philosophy of the makhayad school of thought was that this didn’t have to be the sum total of his life: this vista, this horizon, this language, these rules, these taboos, this food, these women, these laws, these neighbours, these enemies. These were heretical, pulse-quickening ideas, but they slowly made a disciple of him. Berlin, in particular, had fashioned a heart of smooth marble, his blood cooler than that of a dead man. He was about to marry in Borama, to please his mother. A girl chosen by his mother, a girl he hadn’t met and would probably never see again. He said it would just need a fine rubdown of his heart to put the whole thing behind him.

  When the British returned with reinforcements, six months after they had evacuated the colony, they pushed the Italians back into their own empire and returned to the familiar toing and froing with the Somali clans. With South African, Indian and East African troops to supply, the British Army became the spendthrift customer the family shop had always wanted. They had earned enough by the end of ’41 to purchase a second-hand three-ton Bedford lorry to add to the small fleet, and their mother started dropping hints that maybe it would add a little prestige to the family name to send Mahmood away to boarding school. Protesting that they would turn him Christian, make him eat pork and teach him to look down on his illiterate brothers, Mahmood resisted hard. They could send him away but not to Amoud or any other prison-school, let him go to Kenya or Tanganyika, where he could buy stock to send to Hargeisa. He’d only heard of Kenya and Tanganyika from the sailors but they had sold him on slow-blinking, dark-lipped Swahili girls, extravagantly tall and deeply upholstered beds, and ancient, cosmopolitan ports. To his amazement his eldest brother agreed – whether it was to separate him from the delinquent sailors or to toughen him up, he didn’t pry – but the thirteen-year-old was to try his own luck as a man. Mahmood would go to Garissa, in the Somali-inhabited north of Kenya, to stay with a clansman, and then the brothers would send a lorry to collect prearranged orders for the shop.

  Mahmood had absconded from Garissa within the month, contemptuous of its squat, dusty buildings and tedious familiarity. He dictated a telegram home from the Central Post Office in stentorious Nairobi and then pushed on to the promised amusements of Mombasa. He laboured as a porter, unloading dockside dhows and passenger launches, and then found employment with a scholarly Somali merchant based in Zanzibar. He worked behind the counter of the merchant’s jewellery and fabric shop in Stone Town and pined after the girls who came into the dim, coral-stone bazaar. Omani girls lost within black buibuis, long-plaited Banyali and Sikh brides, grape-skinned Waswahili flirts with pierced septums. He caressed fingers as he squeezed rings past stubborn joints, and shook with nervy excitement as he tied heavy necklaces around their sweat-creased necks. The world felt far away from the serpentine alleys of Stone Town and he passed a whole year without telling his family where he was. It comforted him to know that he was beyond their orbit. He had nightmares in which his mother, with her albatross love and supernatural acquaintance, came hobbling after him, tracking the high arch of his footsteps and turning up at the bazaar. Her sad, black-rimmed gaze more painful than he could say.

  As if running away from these dreams, he fled one day to the mainland, to Dar es Salaam. With luck pouring over him like gold, he quickly found a position with another Somali, Bibi Zahra, a Barwani widow from Mogadishu. He had told her that his brothers owned four lorries, and for her that was enough reason to hand over the keys to her white Morris Minor. With a quick prayer Mahmood got behind the broad thin wheel of the car and realized he was too short to see far beyond the bonnet. The widow passed him her valise to sit on but when he started the engine, its rough cough startled him and he yanked out the key, afraid he had broken something. With her shouting encouragement from the backseat and pointing out the switches and gears she had seen her previous chauffeur make use of, they made slow but sure progress to her white, jasmine-entwined bungalow. From the widow, Bibi Zahra, he learnt the art of indolence; her days passed in a molten routine of beautification, dining and promenading. She chattered more than the birds in the large, palm-shaded garden and pulled the servants and gatekeepers into the vortex of her own languid timekeeping. Mahmood could sleep as late as he wanted, knowing that she had probably only drifted into sleep as the sun was rising. He never saw the sahib she spent all day preparing for, but he heard him and saw a broad shadow pass across the draped windows. Childless, she filled the house with a clutter of servants, trying to replicate the small, noisy home of her childhood in the narrow alleys of Hamarweyne. Pulled between the ease of the widow’s home and the sense that he was slipping back into resentful boyhood, Mahmood began to overeat, chopping and washing for the cook who, in return, let him pick at the fried breads and spicy stews the widow had taught him to make.

  There was a girl in the household, a tight-braided Swahili girl named Kamara who appeared twice a week to wash the widow’s clothes and bedding, and she became the metronome by which Mahmood measured his days. He had four positions that he could take to monitor her from in the three hours she spent at the bungalow: polishing the car as she arrived in the morning, at the kitchen hut door as she filled basin after basin from a standpipe in the garden, at the smoky window as she pumped her little feet into the sudsy water a few inches away, and finally under the jacaranda tree as she pinned up broad white sheets and expensive clothes. He didn’t speak a word to her, but catching sight of Mahmood’s surly, lovelorn looks, the greying cook took to singing ‘Nashindwa na mali sina, we ningekuoa malaika’, and patting his empty pockets when she neared the kitchen. It was true Mahmood had no money, he was kept in such comfort that the widow thought there was no need to deplete her precious inheritance in handing over paper or metal. What kind of bride price would a dhobi girl want? He had no idea. All he could offer were secret drives in the car and greasy snacks from the kitchen.

  He mulled over his predicament, silently watching a silent girl, until many months later he noticed the oblong mound under her shift dress, the impertinent point of her distended belly button. Eyes wide, he scrambled up from under the jacaranda and walked out to the car with tears in his eyes. He felt like a beggar ogling a half-eaten plate. He cursed her while his inner consciousness berated him for thinking he had any claim on her. He was as wretched as the gaudy fat eunuchs that came to the bazaar in Stone Town, haughtily spending their master’s money as if it was their own, talking of weddings and women as if they had ever had one. He did
n’t want to have to play with himself like some madman or monkey, but the situation was very bleak indeed. He stuffed his mouth, drove the widow from shop to shop, and went to bed every night with good but frustrated intentions.

  One day, parked outside the Post Office, as Bibi Zahra telephoned her sister in Mogadishu, a stranger thumped the glass window and jolted Mahmood from his nap. ‘You!’ smiled a young man, his face sweaty and bright above his white button-up shirt.

  Mahmood frowned and rolled down the window to tell him to go to hell. ‘Is this your car? How much you pay me for it?’ he barked.

  ‘Don’t get sharp with me. I know who you are, Mattan. Your people have been looking for you everywhere, street boy.’

  Mahmood blinked rapidly, squeezed the wheel tighter and felt for the accelerator with his foot. ‘What do you mean?’ he said weakly.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ the man scoffed. ‘Your mother is asking every merchant, sailor or soldier in Africa and Aden if they have seen you, even if it’s your rotting, stinking body. You have the police on your back? Why did you run from your family? Allah will get you for it. No one ever taught you that heaven lies under the feet of your mother, yaa?’

  ‘I’m working, I’m going to send money to them,’ Mahmood lied, his voice high and childish.

  He could smell Bibi Zahra’s heavy perfume before he could see her.

  ‘What is the matter, Mahmood?’

  ‘He’s been caught.’

  ‘Caught? By you? What has he done?’ she screamed, turning back and forth between them.