Black Mamba Boy

by Nadifa Mohamed

  When the women had eaten, they began clapping and singing, and Bethlehem taught Jama the dances, flinging her beaded hair from side to side.

  “Wah! Wah! Dance, little Somali!” the women exclaimed, surprised that a foreigner could dance so well.

  Jama lost himself to the rhythm, Bethlehem’s flushed face right next to his, her breath all over him. He danced with his girl until the hyenas started howling.

  A procession of sisters, cousins, and aunts led Bethlehem to Jama’s tukul. She would live there until he came back, her own woman. Bethlehem had brought a bundle from her home, and as soon as her crying relatives had left, she unpacked and began to redecorate Jama’s dusty room. She made the tukul beautiful, with bright embroidered cloths covering the floor, straw baskets on the walls, and amber and silver necklaces hanging from a hook next to a chipped mirror. Jama watched his wife and wondered if she, too, would be taken from him.

  “What are you thinking about, husband?” Bethlehem asked, holding his face between her palms.

  “If you will ever leave me,” Jama replied.

  “No, never, and I will never let you leave me, either.” Bethlehem put her hand on his heart. “This is mine now, your heart is my dowry, understand?”

  Bethlehem held Jama to her, and he rested his head against her shoulder. He had not been embraced in so long, his flesh had become accustomed only to pain, but now she stroked his scars, kissed his face, brought life and heat back to his cold body. He wrapped his arms around her waist, ran his trembling hand up her narrow back, walking his fingertips over each of her vertebrae.

  Bethlehem giggled nervously and pushed him away. “Why don’t I cut this too-long hair of yours? I am meant to be the one with the big hair, aren’t I?”

  Jama nodded and grabbed his rababa, singing wedding songs while she scrambled around in her bag. Bethlehem had come prepared with a large pair of scissors, and she hacked away at his hair until he looked like the young man who had stolen her heart in her father’s shop.

  “There, you are beautiful again,” sighed Bethlehem.

  Jama laughed. “You think I’m beautiful?”

  “You are the most beautiful man in Gerset! And maybe even in all of Eritrea. My sisters are so jealous that I captured you.”

  “Ya salam! What flattery!”

  “By Mary, it is the truth. I will never let you escape from me.”

  “And I will never let you escape from me, I will bury my heart under your feet. Come, let me show you something.”

  Jama led Bethlehem outside the tukul. The landscape was lit by a full moon, Gerset serene and hopeful, a night breeze rustling through the trees. “You see that star up there, the flickering one? Every night before you go to sleep I want you to look up at it and send me a kiss, and wherever I am, I will also look for it and send you a kiss. Don’t forget, Bethlehem, don’t stop until I get back.”

  “I won’t forget,” said Bethlehem, squeezing his waist.

  “Let’s go back inside,” Jama said, taking her hand. She followed him through the low entrance and with a big breath blew out the candle.

  SUDAN, EGYPT, AND PALESTINE, DECEMBER 1946

  The train cut through nowhere, hurtling past virgin desert. It was British-made and inferior to the gliding Italian railway from Asmara, thrown down in haste by soldiers who were hurrying to avenge the assassination of Gordon by the dervishes. Jama had hitched a ride on the back of a camel to Kassala train station, quiet and morose the whole way. Leaving the tukul at dawn, Bethlehem’s hair sprawled over his old mat, he had knelt down and stroked her sleeping face, trying to burn her features into his memory. He could only put his faith in the stars, that they would bring him back to her.

  Jama had never paid attention to the route Somalis took to Egypt. They were broke, hungry men who passed through Tessenei on their way to Sudan, and most could not speak Arabic and were perpetually lost. Now he strained to remember what the more mature ones had said. “Iskandriya? Sandriya? What was the name of that place?”

  He spoke to his neighbors on the train but they were all Sudanese traders returning home to Khartoum who knew nothing of Egypt; they cut him off as he tried to make conversation, and talked among themselves. Jama looked through the wire mesh that covered the windows and stared at the barren, treeless wilderness beyond the tracks. He bought roasted sesame from hawkers at a small station, and embarrassed by the arcs of sweat spreading under his arms, on his back, and in his groin, remained by the train. When his legs grew tired he returned to his carriage. The leather stuck to his skin and he discreetly undid the buttons on his shirt as he nestled back into his seat.

  At every stop he stuck his head out the door, looked around, and asked boarding passengers, “Egypt?” Most sullenly shook their heads and hurried past him to find a seat. Hours later, after people had performed afternoon, sunset, and evening prayers in the cramped carriage, a man who had journeyed with Jama from Kassala called out, “You need to get off here for the train to Egypt.” Jama thanked him and raced off, holding his father’s suitcase tightly under his arm. Crowds were walking toward the station, where uniformed policemen stopped and searched them. Jama had never needed identification before, he had no paper saying who he was and where he belonged, but from now on, his abtiris would not be enough to prove his identity. In this society you were nobody unless you had been anointed with a stamp by a bureaucrat. Fearful of the policemen, he skipped down from the platform before it entered the Wadi Halfa terminal, ran around the station, and followed the curve of a great lake into Egypt. Jama walked all night, the water in the lake as black and glossy as tar, the surface occasionally rippled by a fish struggling free from a hook. Only somnolent fishermen noticed him hurrying by with a nervy step. He did not see any policemen as he crossed the border, so he stopped to rest, falling asleep by a brick dam spanning the width of the Nile. When he reached Aswan station, with its proud waving flags and severe columns, he quickly bought another ticket to take him north before a policeman emerged. The train from Aswan terminated in Cairo, and after a three-day journey on hard wooden benches he was dismayed to learn that he needed another train to take him to the great port of Al-Iskanderiya.

  Nausea crawled up his throat as the train trundled past the tanneries on the fringes of Alexandria; the smell of dead flesh hanging in the air was exactly like that of the battlefields of Keren. Jama suddenly felt certain that the train would be bombed and go up in a terrible conflagration like the Italian supply trains. Sweat poured down his face and neck, while his heart pounded in irregular beats. Even after the train had slid along the bright blue sea and screeched into the station, Jama sat slumped in the seat like a feverish man, waiting for the panic to subside. He had thrown himself headlong into an intimidating, alien land and began to regret the distance he had put between himself and Bethlehem.

  With days of sweat, sand, and dirt on him, Jama first went to the washroom and cleaned himself, scrubbing his shirt in a porcelain sink, the first he had ever used. The wet shirt clinging to him, Jama drifted out into the city, his slight body pushed around by the crushing mass of people outside the station. Jama gazed bedu-like at the beautiful buildings, at their fancy glass windows and colorful tiled façades, and floated along with the cool sea breeze toward the port. Huge cargo ships were gathered together, sounding their deep-throated horns again and again; he would later find out they were celebrating the Ferengi Christmas, earlier and shorter than Bethlehem’s. As Jama sat on a bench, tired beyond the point of sleep, a Somali boy approached and introduced himself. The street lamps gave his black Indian hair a strange reddish tint. Jama could barely make out what he was saying, he hadn’t heard Somali for months, but he followed him deliriously. Liban led him back to the fifth-floor apartment he shared with seventeen other Somali migrants and offered him a mattress for the night. Liban showed him the damp washroom and then disappeared to speak with his roommates. From the windows Jama could see over a swath of Alexandria, and as dusk fell, lights appeared magically as fa
r as the eye could see, buzzing in the hot dark like a swarm of fireflies. He finally found Bethlehem’s star and sleepily sent a kiss to it. He grabbed a mattress, pushed the suitcase under his head and kept hold of it as he slept.

  In the morning Liban took Jama around their neighborhood. The apartment was in the Street of Seven Girls, a street of rioters and pimps, notorious for the men, women, and children for sale behind its doors. Sailors, policemen, and local Ferengi merchants lurked lustfully in doorways. Alexandria was like the ancient harlot mother of Aden and Djibouti, who had grown rich and now put on airs and graces, but in dank, cobwebbed corners her truest colors were revealed. Jama watched the Arabs smoking shishas, the promenading Frenchwomen, the African waiters and doormen, Greek merchants, Jewish rabbis all moving in their orbits, creating a twentieth-century Babel. A tram scuttled past and Liban pulled Jama on board. From it they saw the heights and depths of Alexandria. Ships were lined up along the dock, more ships than Jama could remember ever seeing in Aden. Liban dragged him off the tram near a seaman’s store on the eastern harbor, where he pretended to be a sailor to buy a fivepenny box of cigarettes and encouraged Jama to do the same.

  “We can sell these for six pennies to the soldiers and clerks in Midan Saad Zaghloul,” Liban whispered. “Enough to buy bread and pay for the room.”

  Although small and immature-looking, Liban was a wily, knowledgeable guide: he had been in Alexandria for a year waiting to join the Royal Navy and was cynical about Jama’s chances.

  “The British army is based in Port Said, why don’t you come with me and see if we can find work there?” Liban asked. “We’ve been given fake army papers by a man who’s just collected his passport at the British consulate. We’ll find work in Port Said, wallaahi.” Jama was adamant he would stay and try his luck with the merchant navy.

  “You don’t have a chance, brother, it’s nearly impossible to get a passport, and you can’t get a navy job without it,” said Liban, shaking his head.

  As they spent the day together, Jama learned that Liban was Yibir, but that in Alexandria, Somalis of all clans fell upon one another for news, companionship, and help. Liban had left Somaliland because of hunger and to escape the harassment his family suffered. Even now his British passport was held up in Hargeisa because no elder would claim a Yibir as part of his clan and the Yibir were forbidden by the British from appointing an aqil of their own. In Egypt, Ajis would share cups with Liban, eat with him, befriend him because there was no one to judge them, but their acceptance was a vapor that would burn away under a Somali sun. A Yibir wore the name of his clan like a yellow star, it marked him as low, dirty, despicable. A Yibir learned from infancy that he had nothing to be proud of, no suldaans to boast about, no herds of camels, no battalions of fighters. In a land of scarcity and superstition, myths were hard currency, and rather than claiming a Sharif, a descendant of the prophet, as their first father, the Yibros had a pagan, an African magician who believed he could defeat the Muslim missionaries. For this heresy they had been cursed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, to work leather and metal while the Ajis roamed with their noble camels. Even when Ajis wiped their hands after touching him, Liban had learned to avert his gaze, to pretend that it was natural for them to believe he could contaminate them, but the farther he fled from Somaliland, the less his Yibirness mattered. In Egypt all the Somalis wore the same yellow star; their black skin taught the Ajis what it was to be despised.

  More Somalis from the apartment gathered in the square, emerging from Shari El-Eskandar el-Akbar. They greeted Liban and shook Jama’s hand. All had cigarette packs in their hands, hawking them all day in the sun, tiring their bodies so they could sleep soundly at night. Underneath them, on the ground floor, was a cabaret club, and music pulsed through the floors of their cramped apartment. Jama sometimes poked his head into the cabaret, where a dancer called Sabreen had befriended him, a beautiful Punjabi with large brown eyes and suggestive lips whom he called Hindiyyadi, the Indian girl. Jama’s chief pleasure in Alexandria was to creep down at night and watch through the alley window as Sabreen danced cobralike from the depths of a large basket, cavorting and jiggling in the shisha smoke. Soon Liban began watching her, and then the other Somalis, until Sabreen had a dedicated following of Somali alley cats peering in through the window.

  Jama joined in with the daily routine of Liban and the others, buying cheap cigarettes at the dock and selling them for a penny profit to pay for the room. He boasted of his life in Gerset to all and sundry, his shop, his farm, his twenty employees, his beautiful wife. The Somalis humored him but made alcohol-guzzling gestures behind his back. He slipped out alone one day to change his inheritance into Egyptian pounds and never mentioned it to Liban or the others, worried that they would ask to borrow a share or even steal away with it in the night. He had to shred the prayers that had protected the Adeni notes for so long, collecting all the sacred wisps of paper and stuffing them into his trouser pocket.

  On the façades of the cinemas were film posters, blown-up images of sleek men and their smoldering dames snarling down on the mortals beneath them. Jama stared up at the actors, wondering what they had done to achieve such glory; the posters drew his gaze more than the statues and grand buildings. He had never seen a film but concocted his own stories from the pictures: that one is fighting the rich man for the woman, this one wants revenge but doesn’t have the courage to grasp it. He grew a pencil mustache like the film men, so that he looked like a matinee idol playing the role of a man down on his luck. One day he borrowed a black jacket and a white shirt, combed his hair neatly to the side, and had his photograph taken in a cheap studio. He stared for a long time at the man in the photograph. He had the same expression as the film men, but his black eyes betrayed him; they were looking ever so slightly up at the sky, waiting for the stars to take mercy on him. Jama took the strange image and thrust it into the clerk’s face at the British consulate. “Give me a passport,” he demanded in Arabic.

  Jama was asked to give his name, his address in Alexandria, his birth date, which he made up, his clan and the name of his clan’s aqil, and was told haughtily that he would be double-checked by the authorities in Hargeisa. He hesitated before handing over his photograph. He was the first in his family to have this paper twin made. He wanted people in centuries to come to point at the picture and say, “This is Jama Guure Mohamed, and he walked this earth.” He believed he would never die if his face survived him.

  “It could take months, Jama, if they ever get back to you. Look at me; I have been waiting nearly a year,” Liban said as they left the office. “Let’s try our luck in Port Said in the meantime.” Jama nodded noncommittally and they sat by the duck pond in the municipal park.

  Like Aden, cosmopolitan Alexandria was not an easy place for poor Africans. People looked through them as if through vapor or stared at their bodies dissectingly, commenting on their teeth, noses, backsides. Alexandria belonged to the pashas who walked down streets cleaned for them, past doors held open for them, into hotels and shops where people quivered and fluttered around them.

  After enduring three months in Alexandria, Jama was running out of money and patience. On a sultry morning, after a fretful sleepless night, he shook Liban awake. He had ten shillings left of the money his mother’s sweat had given him, and he wanted something honorable to grow out of it, not this sleazy vagrant life. “Come on, then, let’s get out of this stinking place and try our luck in Port Said,” he told Liban.

  Jama had no desire to join another army but needed to escape from the poverty of Alexandria. He spent every day dwelling on the bitterness Bethlehem would feel if he returned to Gerset empty-handed, having wasted the little money on which they could have built a life. He avoided the sailors returning to Somaliland through Eritrea, not wanting them to report back his poverty; he believed that Bethlehem would prefer happy dreams to gloomy reality. The apartment was a depressing place now, as many of the other Somalis had left for Port Said or Ha
ifa, and those left behind were doomed to return to unemployment in Somaliland. Liban and Jama set off on foot for Port Said, eager to spare the remains of their money. They followed the Mediterranean coastline east for more than a hundred miles, passing through the outskirts of many small towns, but when they reached Damietta, two Egyptians in tarbooshes approached them, blocking their path. The plainclothes police officers demanded the Somalis’ papers. Liban proffered his fakes, while Jama left his hand-me-down papers in his shoe. The Egyptian took Liban’s certificates and gave them a cursory appraisal.

  “This is shit,” sneered one of them. “You’re not Egyptian. I can tell by your faces that you’re damned Somalis.”

  “Chief, we were just going to Port Said, to look for work, chief, that’s all,” Liban pleaded.

  At the mention of Port Said the police officers pulled themselves up, stuck their chests out pugnaciously.

  “Working for the British, eh? I see, Gamel, we have found two British spies in our country, think of that.”

  “Let’s take them to the station, Naseer, they will turn their arses inside out.” On the spot, Jama and Liban were handcuffed together and marched into the industrial town. The locals jeered and spat at the detainees, and now and again one of the policemen would shove them from behind as they were made to walk in the road among the donkey carts and horse carriages. A crowd of street boys followed their progress after the excitement of Jama catching his shirt in the harness of a horse carriage and being dragged along beside it.

  The police station was a grim place, alternately full of shouts and moans and tense silences. They were put in a room next to the main entrance, an armed policeman keeping guard. The handcuffs were taken off them and Jama’s suitcase was taken away for inspection. He let it go sullenly, and they sat down on the cement floor to await their fate. Jama was called out first for questioning, and they sat him on a broken wooden chair and stared him down. The chief policeman was fat and clean-shaven, his thinning hair stood up in a black fuzz over his head, and the dark bags under his eyes gave him a threatening look, but when he spoke his voice was even and dispassionate. “How did you get here?” “What do you want in Egypt?” “Where did your friend get the fake document?”