by Igiaba Scego
That day, that distant day in an unfamiliar past, Maryam’s esophagus brought up the partially dissolved remains of her breakfast—rusk and gin. Was she perhaps like those pigeons? Bulimic and bedraggled? Did she still have dreams? Once, her roads were oriented toward the prayer of Termini. She saw the billboards and dreamed of going back to the start of her journey, in Wardhiigley, her peaceable neighborhood in northern Mogadishu. She dreamed of return, a return with no more promises of departure. That way she wouldn’t delude herself again.
It had been a while since Maryam stopped going to see the Termini billboards. She no longer wished to dream the impossible. But her heart knew the station was there, close. She felt it in her blood. She was only ignoring it to survive, yet Termini Station was like a magnet, and sooner or later it charmed its admirers. It was always lurking. How long had it been since she’d gone? Right…since she’d stopped getting wasted on gin first thing in the morning.
Howa was worth the effort. She’d been her best friend, and now she was dead. Maryam and the community had buried her two days ago. Just two days. It was for her sake, then, that Maryam returned to the station. She’d faced her fears for Howa. The hospital had told her Howa was dead. In her wallet, Howa carried a little note that said “In an emergency call Zuhra Laamane or Maryam Laamane” and, beneath that, had their home and mobile numbers. Zuhra, her beloved daughter, like her, was very meticulous. That’s why she’d slipped that note in Howa’s wallet. She knew Howa’s head wasn’t where it once was and she often pursued distant phantoms, so she’d also included their home addresses in case she got lost. The hospital was straightforward with Maryam. They told her to come to San Giovanni immediately. She did. The word “immediately” frightened her to no small degree. Once there, they told her the news: her friend Howa, her best and only friend Howa, was dead, defunct, finished. She’d fallen from the No. 8 tram. Her right foot had slipped, her head whipped back, cracked. Then came the grim reaper.
Maryam, stunned, looked at the doctor who was giving her the news. She was waiting to hear her say, “We did all we could” or “She didn’t suffer long.” They always said that on TV. Instead, the doctor said nothing. She couldn’t tell lies. They brought her a body, not a person. So the doctor, a blonde forty-five-year-old, said nothing. Truth be told, she did say one thing, but Maryam could no longer remember what it was. It was something trite. When she saw the face on Howa’s cadaver, she wasn’t shocked—it closely resembled hers in life. Her crooked nose overshadowed everything else. It was still eccentric. Within a few hours, her nose would change. It would decompose with everything else. But for a little longer she’d remain as Maryam remembered her from a lifetime ago.
On the day of the funeral, Maryam Laamane timorously boarded the train. The cars were empty. The people of Rome had allowed themselves an unexpected jaunt to the sea. Thursday, a weekday, a day of work and stress. But it was summer. An exception to the rules was permitted, a momentary craze. One didn’t have to go far to sin. To Ostia, Fregene, Lido dei Pini. The sand was dirty, the sea a tad opaque. What did it matter? It was beautiful just the way it was. The girls were blooming and the men were happy. There was an economic crisis—people were sad by default—but the sun baked beachgoers’ skin and people longed to fall in love. The crisis could wait until winter. Now there was sun. Hormones hurtled down highways. The women exposed their stomachs, the men bared their chests. Those who, out of decency, did not wish to show their bodies took on the colors of the rainbow. Fluttering objects, Spanish fans, broadsheets, the hems of scarves. Drops of sweat pearled tired faces and mascara trickled in streams from translucent eyes.
Maryam sat her bulky self down. Peacefully, she began thinking about her affairs. She had to buy beeswax to send to Nura. Her cousin had recommended it often, saying, “Here in Manchester they sell this lousy oil that doesn’t protect your skin. I need beeswax for my wrinkles. Send it—that no good Skandar looks at too many skirts for my taste.” Maryam promised: “Of course, I won’t forget it.” Once she put down the receiver, she had a good laugh at Nura’s expense. Even with seventy years under her belt, that old shrew still worried that her Skandar would chase girls. “He’s eighty years old!” she’d tell her, but it was useless. Jealousy had no logic, Nura’s much less.
Until the end, Maryam had hoped she wouldn’t have to go to the station and that she could simply show up at the entrance to Prima Porta.
“Are you out of your mind, Mary? We have many suras to read, and we have to do it together, on the bus.”
“Where does the bus leave from, sister?” Maryam asked timidly, despite already knowing the answer.
“Where do you think it leaves from, dummy? From the stascinka, yeah?”
She’d figured as much. Somalis always met at the stascinka, at Termini, the crux of all roads. They congregated at Amici Bar or at Anna’s or track 7 or at the Somali restaurant. There were many places to meet at the station, too many.
“If you get there first look for Fardosa, they’ll give you your cappuccino with foam.” And so, between suras, coffee, memories, thoughts, she buried her best friend Howa Rosario.
Then, in an instant, she plummeted into her present. Alone at home. The same nonsense on TV. A restless boredom made her chest pound. Under different circumstances, she’d have picked up the phone and arranged to meet Howa. Together they would’ve spoken of good times when Xamar—Mogadishu—was passionate, beautiful, and sensual. They’d have talked about their youth and dreams and the bad times, too, when Siad Barre seized power and decided, as if in a vile game of chess, to sacrifice all his pawns, all the Somalis. “Wasn’t it awful the way people died under Siad Barre, Howa?” After Siad, dying was even worse. But Howa was dead, so there was no one to call, no one she really wanted to talk to. Actually, no, there was someone. Her daughter Zuhra. But it was difficult recounting these things to Zuhra. It was hard explaining her failures as a mother. The gin. Her flight to freedom. Zuhra’s father. The fear that had skinned her alive for years.
Talking to Zuhra was difficult.
She’d only been able to do so once, with gestures. It was March 20, 1994. Zuhra had come home with a package. “Marco gave it to me.” Marco was a boy she liked and studied with. Maryam had seen him once. He had untidy hair and a goatee. He was a little short and walked like an orangutan, but she had to admit he had a certain charm when he moved his eyes, concealed by folds of white skin. Marco had made something for Zuhra. Meanwhile she, the mother, had forgotten. Birthdays were nothing special to her. In Somalia they were only celebrated for children, not adults.
“I’ll open it tomorrow,” the girl said.
“Why not now?”
“I don’t want to get upset.”
Sometimes Maryam couldn’t understand her daughter. A gift was opened immediately, not resisted or preserved. One was supposed to consume and absorb. But Zuhra overthought things, and in this way she was exactly like her father, Elias, that reckless man who Maryam missed like air itself.
“Hooyo, can you tell me one thing?”
“Yes, dear?” Maryam’s voice shook. She felt guilty for forgetting her daughter’s birthday. That godless gaal creation drove her crazy.
“Did you ever enjoy making love with men…with dad? Did you have fun?”
Maryam felt a piece of herself detach. She wasn’t expecting that question. She had no words. Or, she had one in mind, but her daughter beat her to it.
“Don’t say eeb, please don’t say that word…don’t just say ‘shame.’ Please, Mom, I need you to answer me.”
She knew her daughter needed it.
Was it for Marco? No, it wasn’t for him. It was for something they both feared.
She was about to speak when blood began gushing from the television screen. Red, hot, innocent.
The two women were hypnotized. The blood sullied everything: the camera, people nearby, and the blonde hair of a woman, Ilaria, their Ilaria Alpi. For months she’d been reporting on a foundering Somalia. Maryam
and Zuhra watched, transfixed by the little screen, to make sense of the dismaying images. The blood was their problem too, especially theirs. Every breath was stifled. Every word interrupted. Every thought blocked. There was only the screen filled with Ilaria’s bloodied hair.
It was March 20, 1994. It was her daughter Zuhra’s birthday. She’d forgotten to give her a present. Birthdays were for infidels, and on the screen a woman was dying. Zuhra had a ponytail, beautiful and frothy. Maryam looked at her. She reminded her, God knows why, of Sam Cooke and his sweet alligator demeanor. The beauty of her ponytail distracted her from the blood contrail swelling on the screen. Confusion everywhere. Her daughter was born under the Pisces sign. Astrological statistics said she would be a dreamer. But she, her Zuhra, dreamed with her feet on the ground. She was the daughter of wary dreamers. The strip of blood on the screen was becoming a boundless puddle.
Ilaria, a lacerated shirt, a body wilted upon itself, a stringless puppet.
The puppet was torn apart like a quartered ox. Men around her in their husgunti, desperate faces, shaking thighs. The eyes of mother and daughter were glued to the pretty puppet’s face, the face of dying Ilaria. They wanted to rush over to her and retie the strings so she could stand and laugh again. “Ilaria, what’s happening to Ilaria?” Maryam Laamane asked. Zuhra stood and moved toward her mother. For a moment, an impassioned hug brought the two women together.
That was when Sam Cooke played again in Maryam’s head. She and Elias had danced to him on one of the nights he pretended to court her. The truth was that she was courting him, but theirs was an old-fashioned Somalia, the sixties were almost over and women had to play the game without arousing suspicion. Her Elias resembled Sam Cooke in some ways. They were so similar in their bewildered childishness and reptilian lust. Maryam was so wrapped up in her past that she hardly realized her daughter’s firm hug was increasingly desperate.
Maryam was still staggered by Zuhra’s question. What should she have told her? Did she have to explain how she lived in the sixties? How beautiful she’d been back then? That was when Kwame Nkrumah was saying, Africa must unite, the years when all Africans believed that anything was possible. Maryam Laamane had been so beautiful in the sixties. Is that what she should have told Zuhra? Right then, in that moment? Yes, in that very moment, she couldn’t waste time. She’d already lost plenty with that sad girl.
When she was pregnant with Zuhra, a bell went off in her head, a shiver under her arms. At first it frightened her. Elias caressed one of her cheeks and whispered, “It’s the dream in your head.” Then, kissing her softly, “It’s embracing you.” When Elias entered her, it hurt the first few times. He told her, “They will take that jewel from us and throw it away.” She didn’t understand. Then he said that inside every woman were bountiful jewels of varying size. God had placed the most precious gem between women’s thighs. “And we, my friend, do you know what we do?” Maryam Laamane knew the answer. They’d already cut her below and sutured everything. The first time she peed afterward it hurt severely. In the West the experts called it female genital mutilation. She only knew that it caused great pain and that she’d never get her clitoris back. She knew the gem’s fate: buried or tossed in the trash. But the night Zuhra became real, through Elias, Maryam felt a yearning, something she liked.
She liked many things about Elias. Chiefly, his smell. He tasted of bittersweet green mango. She wanted to bite him all over. She wanted to sleep on top of him. When he entered her, she felt his weight, saw his contentedness. But she didn’t know what to do. Should she have laughed? Clenched her fists? Cried? Then that evening, her underarms, the tip of her thumb. It was like in that Sam Cooke song when he said, They’re twistin’, twistin’, everybody’s feelin’ great. It was the dream embracing her. That girl who, when she came out, hadn’t known love like she deserved. The gin’s fault, and Siad Barre, and her head, which didn’t know what direction to take her in. That day was different. It had been some time since she’d come back, healed perhaps, waiting only for that moment to arrive. But Ilaria Alpi was dying. Maryam decided then that she would respond to her daughter’s question once things were calmer.
Now, however, Howa Rosario was dead. Perhaps she didn’t have much time either. She couldn’t have known. She didn’t want to take a chance. And so that afternoon, Maryam Laamane took out a recorder to tell her story and give her answers. Her daughter, Zuhra, would appreciate the attempt. Maybe Howa Rosario would, too. The story was hers as well, after all.
THE FATHER
I was conceived. And I conceive. I am son and father. But I am a failed son, a failed father. They told me: “You must tell your story so as not to lose it or yourself.” It happened on a phone call from a distant place that I once knew. The voice spoke to me and I simply listened. I heard other things. A note of harsh resentment in a once crystalline voice. I thought: she’s growing old as well. I hadn’t suffered her resentment; I’d left before I could. A scatterbrained deserter with a lurid, soiled conscience. I wasn’t needed anymore, so what was I to do? Remain and live in unchecked failure? Maybe I should have, but it takes balls to fail and withstand it. I didn’t have enough, not even the two I was guaranteed. I abandoned the voice. In fact, I abandoned many. “Assalamu aleikum, brother,” the voice thundered. Or so it seemed to me, because that is what I felt beating inside my chest. Though, in truth, the voice was very calm, as always.
She’d gotten my number from Hagi Nur, who does business with the Chinese. He got rich, doesn’t know what to do with all his money, and he still lives like a beggar. Hagi Nur, a con man like all merchants. But I liked that he could always take a joke. He used to live like me. We reminisced about how the women in Mogadishu batted their sweet eyes at us and how we were sprightly, young, with every muscle in its proper place. It was once a great thing to be young in Mogadishu. It seemed that anything was possible, that anything could happen from one moment to the next. But now all the young people want to flee. Sixteen long years of accursed war. Oh, merciful Allah, redeem us. Unrelenting shooting eviscerates us. We are all like moldering corpses. There is no longer sweetness in girls’ eyes. The girls are afraid in Mogadishu. And they are afraid in Kismayo, in Merca, in Barawa.
The young people dream of the West: polished palaces, throngs of people, opportunities. They don’t imagine that life can be challenging there. If you warn them and say, “It’s not like you think, child,” they laugh in your face. “What do I have to lose, Granddad?” And you, Granddad, you don’t know what to say or how to say it. They tell you: “Better to go through the desert than rot in the grip of terror.” They leave through Khartoum and Nairobi, they cross the Sahara and then those in Libya and Tunisia try their luck in broken-down boats that will take them toward the gateway to the sun. The prim Mahmud calls it that, Bab-al-Shams: Gateway to the Sun. For him the West is hurreyya, freedom, the sun. He is only eighteen years old. He wants to realize his dream and become a doctor to heal himself and others. He knows death bides its time in the desert, and that people drink their urine and make pacts with sheitan, the wretched red devil. He knows this, but he wishes to leave all the same. He is an adventurer, as are the others. Hagi Nur and I were part of the fortunate generation. Yes, we’ve been hurt and disappointed, we were cowards and bad men, but at least we can say our youth was plated in gold. We cavorted in ignorance on the streets of Shebelle, our eyes glazed over, our throats savoring life.
The voice told me my daughter was now a woman. I have two daughters. I only know the other one’s name. Sometimes I dream of them together. The voice said I must tell my story to these girls, especially the one I had with her. And the other? How would I find her? “Don’t worry about it,” she told me. “Just do it.” I hadn’t heard that voice for almost twenty-five years, possibly more. We loved each other once. We were husband and wife. I wondered if any of that fondness was still there. I wanted to ask her, but the connection was bad, there was crackling now and then, she was growing fainter. And if I’m hone
st, I was ashamed. I hadn’t conducted myself properly with that voice, that woman. I said to her: “Yes, I’ll tell my story. I’ll record it like you’re doing and I’ll speak Somali slowly.” Our daughter, she informed me, doesn’t understand it well. “It’s time she knew her father,” she said.
“It’s time.” And for an eternity I repeated her words in my mind. She promised she would give me a photo of Zuhra. “She’s very beautiful,” Maryam Laamane told me, “like the photos of your mother.” She’s very beautiful, she said. I repeated this as well, over and over again. “But, Elias, she doesn’t know it. That’s why you have to tell her your story, because beauty without history is mute.”
Now I’m sitting here in front of a Chinese gadget Hagi Nur got for me. A red tape recorder. It’s the latest kind. He showed me which buttons to press and I picked it up fast. I’m not completely senile. “When you first start you’ll feel foolish talking to yourself, but just remember you’re doing it for her. That will get you through.” And she was right, it has helped me.
Yet how does one begin to tell a story? From the beginning, I think, with the protagonist. But am I the protagonist, or simply the last link in a perplexing chain? And what is the beginning of an individual? It isn’t very clear to me. His birth? Or perhaps something that precedes it? Hagi Nur has a theory, he told me as we were sipping our spiced tea the other evening at his house. “Our beginning is the beginning of those who came before us,” he said, “and those after us.” Listening to Hagi Nur, I realized that life is a circle, a continuous beginning and end. No movement is precise, we cannot quantify, define, specify. The beginning is the sum of all our beginnings, the subtraction of past beginnings. The beginning is utter chaos, in short. So, my Zuhra, to make it easier, I will tell you how I was conceived. And if one day I must meet your sister, I will tell her also.
