Beyond Babylon

by Igiaba Scego

  “Hey, little girl, I know you, where you going so fast?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Everyone goes somewhere. Going nowhere’s not possible.”

  The little girl considered this. And, truthfully, she didn’t know where she was headed. “You’re right. I don’t know where I’m going.”

  “I know where I’m going,” the boy said proudly. “Soon I’m going to Italy to visit my father.”

  “Your father lives that far away?”

  “My father, little girl, is from that far. He’s Italian. He’s beautiful like the sun, he has hair like the sun and glass eyes. Kind of like mine, but his are see-through glass, you can see into his soul. My father’s name is Alessandro and he’s waiting for me. When he sees me, he’ll smother me with kisses and presents. Then I’ll become an important man, understand? You can do that over there. Not like here. Here you’re nothing. You roll over in the sand. You crawl. I don’t want to crawl.”

  The little girl looked at the boy. She didn’t know his name, she knew only that he’d brawled with her brothers. She did notice, though, that he was light-skinned. Could he have been one of the mission—those half-blood bastards people whispered about from time to time? Ugly people, the mission, they said in passing. You couldn’t trust them, they had the invader’s blood; they were primed for betrayal. That’s why her brothers fought them, because you couldn’t trust their kind, they had the blood of too many people mixed within them. And mixtures, everyone knows, are explosive. They do damage. But to Maryam, this mission, this half-blood, was kind. He was amusing and spoke quickly. Sometimes he inserted strange sounds between his words like some kind of baboon. A baboon that favored white.

  “I don’t like Italians,” Maryam said.

  She recounted the incident with her father, about Graziani’s southern front and the accidental shot.

  “The Italians gave your father money. You should be grateful for what you have now. It doesn’t look like your family is against the Italians anyway. Seems to me your Aunt Salado was in love with one of them.”

  In love? The little girl ran. She left the boy without saying goodbye. In love? With an Italian? Auntie Salado? Did Italians even know how to love? If they did, why did they allow her good father to die so senselessly on Graziani’s southern front?

  No, Auntie Salado was a spinster. She couldn’t love an Italian. She was a spinster, a spinster, a spinster. That’s what everyone said about her. She didn’t like men and people knew she preferred helping her sisters with children. In love with an Italian who was transparent like glass? The Italians Maryam saw on the street terrified her. Their skin was flushed red and oozed liquids. Everyone said these weren’t the ones that came before, they weren’t rulers—they were helping them become free. Not everyone agreed on this point. Cousin Hibado, for one, didn’t agree at all. She said the Somali Youth League would liberate them soon and that those dirty Italians didn’t have good intentions. She said the AFIS, the Italian Trusteeship Administration, was a nasty trick. In Maryam’s eyes the trusteeship was a huge blunder on the Italians’ part, the ones helping them become free. She agreed with Cousin Hibado. No one helps you become free, you either are or you aren’t. Some things you can’t learn, you simply feel. The adults told her as much. Except Hibado, who told her the exact opposite. She’d been taught that since she was small, she had to believe the adults. Which adult was right? She couldn’t make heads or tails of anything anymore. Adults said too many things, all of them confusing. She felt dazed. Howa Rosario hadn’t come along yet to bring light into her life and explain that it is often the young who truly understand the way the world works. She didn’t yet have her most special friend. She was still rather lonely running behind the falcons. It was the fifties. Soon they would be freed.

  The water in the pot boiled, oil in the frying pan. Auntie Salado in front of the burjiko like a captain at the wheel. Auntie Salado at the burjiko was fast. She pirouetted like a firefly, spreading a pleasant fragrance that no one was immune to.

  Chaos in the Middle East, guerilla warfare on the frontier. Guerilla warfare of ideas, chaos of emotions. Serene Auntie Salado in front of the burjiko, encased in her aromas. Maryam Laamane short of breath. Chasing falcons was strenuous.

  “Auntie, habaryar, there’s a boy that says you were in love with an Italian.” As soon as she said it, Maryam bit her tongue. She should’ve greeted her first, settled in. Maryam felt like she’d made a huge mistake. Maybe she should’ve waited to eat first. The smell was so good! Now she risked losing it. Auntie Salado had made meat and rice. You could smell it from afar. Every Thursday night she made meat and rice, both at once, because the day after was Good Friday and it was only right to mark that day with a little cheer. She also smelled potatoes and carrots. Then, alongside that, distant but powerful, was green coconut bisbas. Ooh, coconut, what paradise! She liked its sweet aftertaste of crystal and sand. She would forfeit the coconut because of her irreverent tongue. Surely Auntie Salado would get angry and tell her it wasn’t good for little girls to talk about adult things. God’s angels, the ones everyone carries on their shoulders, the ones that record our sins, would sew her mouth shut because she, Maryam Laamane, was a bad girl. That the angels would sew her mouth shut didn’t matter to her so much, but losing the wonderful food did. She would regret it, mostly because of the coconut. “Ah, my stupid big mouth,” the girl whimpered. She made a penitent face to try and move that marble-hard relative to pity.

  Auntie Salado looked at her from where she stood. She did nothing else for a while. She didn’t comment on what was said. She looked at her and that was all. Her face betrayed no emotion. Then she returned to the food frying over the fire. She couldn’t burn it. The girl sat on a gember and awaited her punishment. She couldn’t leave as if nothing had happened. She had to wait for her aunt to get angry and tell her decisively, “No dinner. Go to bed.” So she waited on the gember. Out of boredom, Maryam twiddled her thumbs. Soon she had enough of that and started watching the flaky ceiling. There was a lizard and an orange butterfly. They were dancing. The lizard wheeled around the butterfly. The latter had no fear. It orbited, challenging the lizard, which didn’t even want to do it harm. Maryam wondered whether they would marry after their dance.

  “Hey, little girl, what are you looking at?”

  “Don’t you think that lizard is gorgeous, Auntie?”

  “Yes, you’re right. I think it’s because it’s searching for something to make it warm inside.”

  “Why, because it’s cold?”

  “Yes, all reptiles are cold. Like us, dear. Men and women, we’re also cold if we don’t find heat somewhere.”

  “The lizard is looking for heat in the butterfly?”

  “Right now, yes, dear, don’t you see how it’s spinning?”

  “Will it find it there?” the girl asked skeptically.

  “No. The heat is inside its own stomach. The butterfly has no heat to give, it will die in a few hours. When the lizard learns how to warm itself, then it will also know how to love. It won’t dance that agonizing dance anymore.”

  The girl watched her auntie. She was very tall. She had a shaash on her head, like a bride, though she’d never been one. It sat lopsided and precarious. A stunning spiced aroma rose from the burjiko. It was freezing inside the lizard’s stomach. And inside her auntie’s?

  Little Maryam placed an ear to her auntie’s stomach. She burned herself. Her auntie was warm, boiling.

  Days later, Cousin Hibado dragged the girl and old woman onto the city streets. “You can’t stay at home and watch. You two have to step into history as well.”

  Maryam found Cousin Hibado sort of curious with her white dresses and black belts. Politics was constantly on her mind.

  “We’ll free ourselves. You’ll see. We’ll free ourselves. Even if these apologists for the Italians still want to be slaves, the people are no longer with them. From now on, they believe in those of us with the League.”

  The fa
mily was in awe of that enthusiastic girl. She put her feet on the table and shouted verses to her soon-to-be homeland, free and united Somalia.

  Those years were fleeting. After the war that ravaged the world on account of the piggish North, the South had decided that it was no longer the era of slavery and that it could live differently. Certainly it could be said that the piggish North had tired of colonialism, that by then it no longer benefited them to own and support their territories in the South directly, that there were more frugal ways of controlling and taking advantage of the people. After the great war, the second one, the piggish North told the poor South: “Do whatever you like, we won’t stop you.” But it wasn’t really like that. The North still decided who got to be free, when, and by what means. Somalia was to be supervised, it had been decided. Not all Somalis agreed. There was the League. There were people like Cousin Hibado.

  “Where are you dragging us off to, Hibado? Where are you taking us? Where are you taking this little girl and old woman?”

  “We’re going to demonstrate and protest for our freedom. For the rights of bodies and souls. That’s where I’m taking the little girl and old woman.”

  The streets were full of people packed along the curbs like stockfish. Or schoolchildren. Men and women workers. The people. They stood, waiting on the roadsides. For what? The Italian Trusteeship Administration. That was what would govern them for ten years and teach these ignorant Somalis democracy, so it was decreed in a faraway country. In New York. In a palace made entirely of glass.

  Everyone was lining the streets. The Italian administrator was about to arrive. They had to welcome him. The administrator arrived by car, looking out the windows. He saw nothing but the people’s backs. Asses and backs, necks and hair. He saw only the rear, never the front. The people turned and faced the other way as he passed. They were rejecting him.

  Hibado squeezed the hands of the little girl and the old woman. Maryam understood that this wasn’t a game, but an adult matter, perhaps the history that Hibado was always going on about.

  On their way home, her auntie told her about the Italian. It was not a nice story because the Italian never made her laugh.

  “Elias made me laugh a lot,” Maryam told her daughter, who didn’t know that she would be the future owner of those cassettes. That said, the woman pressed the stop button. That was enough for one day.

  THE FATHER

  It had been a long time since the rain fell that hard.

  My old soccer field was covered in green. My old field—I scored so many goals there. Your sister’s mother was a goalkeeper when she was younger. She also played on a field like this. She was from Buenos Aires. Beautiful, exceedingly so, but she didn’t know it. I loved her very much. We kept one another company during a terrible period. I do hope your sister is like her, at least somewhat, with her grit if nothing else. And you, Zuhra, are you like Maryam? She didn’t love soccer, she liked to go to the movies. She went crazy for them. She was only a girl when I married her. She spoke to me for hours of cowboys and long-braided Indians, the Indians that she loved and who were called alibesten in Somalia. I never understood why. Now my old soccer field is full of little kids with AK-47s, their cheeks packed with that hallucinogen they all chew, that damned qat. It was different when I played there. We were carefree. Now the children have empty stares. Occasionally, though, when there’s a brief respite from the war, rarely, someone brings an old deflated ball. I watch them make a few passes. Sometimes they’re pretty good.

  The world turned its back on these kids, but behind the world’s back they still play, unaware of having already grown up.

  Who knows if they dream of making a goal like Maradona’s at the Mexican World Cup in ’86 and holding a trophy in the air. Eleven touches of the ball. Eleven magical touches, starting from midfield and going straight to the goal. The older kids are trying it, eleven touches aren’t much. Their adversaries fall like bowling pins. The cup is close, poverty far away.

  They dream behind the world’s back. Even I, old now and worn, maybe I dream, too.

  The fields are green and we wait for a carnival that will not come. Perhaps it will come and take us away with its festiveness. It gets dark early in the neighborhood. The elderly sing an old ditty and I prepare to revisit our past again.

  Elias was born in Mogadishu, or Xamar, as Somalis like to call it. Xamar is an Arabic name, deriving from ahmar, meaning “red.”

  The name was serendipitous. His mother, Famey, didn’t even have a chance to give it to him. She never saw him. She died before hearing his first wail. She was brain dead. Body intact, but the brain dead. The name, his aunts said, was given to him by his father. On the day he was born, they recalled. No one remembers, though, what the hell the weather was like. Aunt Nadifa maintains that there was a powerful wind, Aunt Zahra spoke of a battering rain, while Aunt Mariam remembers an intolerable heat. Only Aunt Binti shrugs and says, “I don’t have time to recall such a silly thing.”

  Majid wasn’t present at the birth. Everyone said he’d changed with marriage. They’d noticed the strange crease around his mouth and the eyes that permanently looked elsewhere.

  “Ah, marriage changes the spirit. Look at how serious Majid has become. No, he’s no longer a boy now.”

  All the remarks sounded the same. The words used most often were responsible, wise, conscientious, and adult. In everyone’s eyes, Majid was no longer a boy. Goodbye to the crying, the thrills, the fistfights, the laughs. People knew Majid didn’t laugh anymore. His lips were hardly ever upturned, and rarely did he show teeth. The few times he did, it was Famey who made him do it.

  Famey… She never lost her will to live. When the Italian and German troops left them suffering and humiliated in the sand, she took his hands between her own and let them rest on her bloody garments. He couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “Cousin, I am not a man anymore.”

  “You’ll be my man if that’s what you want, if you want me.”

  She taught him to love her again one day at a time, without asking for anything in return. Merely a smile every once in a while. Famey felt sharp pains in her lower abdomen. At night she saw those white men’s eyes. “The last one was so small.” The little rapist vomited milk on her. Sometimes she would wake in a sweat. Then she would look at Majid, and every night he’d remember that she was the strong one. He didn’t know about her nightmares, and he couldn’t have consoled her anyway. He felt injured in his humanity and dignity. Maybe he could’ve run a hand through her hair, as one does with a child. But no, Majid couldn’t even do that. After two years of chaste marriage, Famey said to him one night, “We have to.” He understood, and they made love as if it were the world’s cruelest torture. Rain decided to visit Mogadishu and owls beset the night with tireless verses. He couldn’t imagine how to approach that generous woman’s body. He got on top of her because it seemed natural to him. He struggled. He held onto her breasts and hurt her. She didn’t get wet and he didn’t have an erection. They stopped. She caressed his forehead. “We’ll try again tomorrow.” Every night he grabbed onto her breasts and every night he hurt her. No wetness, no erection. Famey was exhausted. They had to have a child but they didn’t have the strength. They had to, so as not to give rise to rumors. People noted the unsteady progress of their marriage. They had to make a child. They had to do it together. “One day we’ll get better,” Famey said to herself.

  One day. It seemed so far away, though.

  During those two years in Mogadishu, she learned how to be a seamstress and her husband found work as a cook in an Italian household. It was difficult for them to see men with pale skin. Each time, their faces cracked with fear. Their hands shook as their horror resurfaced. Famey felt her stomach swell and fill with gas. For days afterward, she couldn’t eat anything. They only learned later that not all men with pale skin were dangerous.

  In Mogadishu, Famey also saw her beloved jalopies again. They thrilled her at first, especially the smoke an
d horns. Then she began getting used to them and they no longer seemed like such extraordinary things.

  It was Mogadishu’s colors she found extraordinary. The city was engulfed in white, an immense expanse of complexes as white as snow, like Famey had never seen. The white prevented the sun’s heat from entering the homes, someone explained to her. It was a sort of protection from the tremendous equatorial swelter. So different from the brown huts they carried on their backs in the bush. The nomads never had houses. In the bush, they made a provisional space. That space was their house for a little while. They moved their huts, prayed to God, and ate whatever they could find. Then another drought and a new place to seek out and explore. Very different from her city of fishermen, made of a duller white. In Brava, the waves dirtied everything when they moved. In the big city everything was fixed, stable. People found houses in precise locations and didn’t move.

  In the big city, she and her husband lived with an aunt and a multitude of people from their qabila. They had a lovely room, and she put a wicker mat and two chairs inside. One day her husband brought netting and a mattress. “Lugale told me you’re supposed to sleep on this. Lugale said we should no longer sleep like the bush people by the sea, we’re city folk now.” She didn’t like the bed that much. The hard wicker mat felt more real. On that so-called mattress they bobbed like a camel’s tongue. She felt strange on it. She did like the bed’s color, though. It was flame red. Mogadishans loved colors very much, maybe because they lived perennially in white houses. Women and men surrounded themselves with green, azure, pink, fuchsia. She herself bought a chromatic shaash to match the masses.