North of Dawn

by Nuruddin Farah

  She is appalled. “Is that Mugdi’s idea of fun? Men of venerable age mingling with scantily dressed women? What does Gacalo think of this?”

  “This is Norway, Mum. Not Saudi Arabia.”

  “I wish we had never come here.”

  Naciim is not surprised that he does not recognize any of the women who appear to have taken up residence in the apartment. His closeness to Gacalo, Timiro, and Mugdi, so precious in his life, has set him more and more apart. He has stayed on the periphery of his mother’s concerns and she his.

  There’s a knock on his bedroom door and he opens it to find a very large, sweaty woman with no top teeth, carrying a plate covered with a lid, presumably his breakfast. She says something he does not instantly comprehend on account of her heavy accent, but which he interprets to mean, “Here is your breakfast.”

  He decides to ask why the women are here, since he is sure there is more that his mother is not telling him. Years ago, when Saafi was raped, his mother moved her to Arla’s house, where several women took turns caring for her. Naciim only found out what happened to his sister because another woman, a total stranger, told him. Later, when he was older, he confronted his mother about it, who merely responded, “It’s in bad taste for a brother to inquire about his sister’s private matters.”

  He asks the woman, “Why are you all here? Is it really just to commiserate with my mother?”

  “Your mother is my younger brother Zubair’s wife,” the woman says. “Several of us, her new in-laws, have come to celebrate her marriage to Zubair and to get to know her. It all happened in such haste.”

  Then the woman departs, leaving Naciim agape at her words. He feels suddenly feverish, and the smell of the food reminds him of nothing so much as an out-of-order toilet at a soccer stadium. He is considering what to do when his mother appears. She says, “Why haven’t you eaten the breakfast my sister-in-law made for you? That’s right, she shared with me what she told you.”

  “How can this happen without my knowing?”

  “When did you last show interest in my affairs? Or bother to share my life or ask how I am doing? You were always off with your Norwegian friends, or with Mugdi, Timiro, and Gacalo, as if you were their son, not mine.”

  “Even so, how could you not let me know? When did this even take place?”

  “We married a day before he was taken,” she says. A trace of a smile on her lips, she continues, “Still, we are family, bound by blood and loyalty. And Zubair, who has been unjustly detained, accused of terrorism of which he knows nothing, is your stepdad now.”

  Naciim pauses, intending to say that he knows he has spent more time with his mates and Grandpa Mugdi and Grandma Gacalo than he has with his mother, but it was because of the kindness they have shown to him. But he keeps silent, knowing it will only upset her if he speaks his thoughts. He is about to speak when the woman who brought him his breakfast says to his mother, “Please come urgently.”

  He takes the opportunity to slip out of the apartment, ready to share the disheartening news with Saafi, Gacalo, and Mugdi. As he heads for the bus stop, he calls Mugdi, saying, “You’ll be surprised to hear what I have to tell you.”

  Saafi is not shocked, as she claims to have had intimations of her mother and Zubair’s affair.

  “With both of you out of the house, Saafi with us and you, Naciim, at school from morning until late afternoon, the two no doubt had all the time in the world to meet, mate, and make their secret plans,” says Mugdi.

  “What’s wrong with her? What are we to do?” asks Naciim.

  “There is nothing to give you worry,” says Mugdi. “We would love for you both to think of this home as your home for as long as you need.”

  Saafi and Naciim exchange happy looks before she goes over to the old man and prepares to hug him. Just as she embraces Mugdi, Gacalo walks in. She catches Naciim’s eye and the two smile. It is the first time that Saafi has come into welcome physical contact with any man since her rape, evidence that she has changed.

  Then Gacalo shares with them the new intelligence she has gathered from reading the Somali websites. “According to one of the outlets, the Norwegian antiterror unit is accusing Zubair of serving as a liaison for Bin Laden’s associate Mohamed Atef, aka Abu Hafs, that Egyptian tasked with the job of training men how to down helicopters in 1993. Zubair apparently served as his liaison and interpreter. And the terror unit has the documents to prove this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  six months later, Anders Behring Breivik, a native Norwegian, after a lengthy planning process, first detonated a bomb close to the Norwegian premier’s office in the center of Oslo, in which eight people lost their lives, before heading to the wooded island of Utøya, where the young acolytes of the country’s governing Labor Party were attending youth camp, and proceeded to mow down sixty-nine more, most of them teenagers.

  One of the dead was Mouna: charming, exuberant, barely eighteen, soccer-playing Mouna, Himmo’s daughter, loved deeply by all who knew her, especially Naciim. He mourns her intensely, his sense of grief knowing no bounds—his survivor’s guilt more traumatic than the sorrow he felt when his stepfather died. He wonders if he has done something to lose two people whom he loved profoundly. Mouna’s younger sister and brother are equally devastated, the girl weepy, the boy, having withdrawn into absolute silence, sitting swaddled in indescribable sorrow. For company they have Mouna’s close friends, who have come to comfort them.

  Mouna is buried in Høybråten, in a Muslim funeral ceremony attended by, among others, the prime minister of Norway and his wife. Commiserating with Himmo, the premier stresses that as a parent, he feels her pain and knows her loss. Naciim and Saafi huddle together, distraught. Saafi’s cheeks are wet with tears, her lips astir with Koranic verses, as Naciim stares blankly at Mouna’s coffin, draped with the flags of Somalia and Norway. Afterward, at Himmo’s apartment, Mugdi thinks of the ill-timed scene he has just translated from Giants in the Earth, in which a mother, Kari, goes insane with grief over the death of her son, Paul, whom she and her husband were forced to bury in a makeshift coffin on the prairie, without so much as a proper service to bless his departed soul. In her desperate desire to give her son a proper burial, the mother urges everyone to hunt for and exhume Paul’s corpse to place it in a better coffin. A search party is dispatched, only to return saying the coffin is empty.

  At the first opportunity presented to her, before Gacalo greets another flood of mourners, Saafi asks if Gacalo has managed to arrange another session with Qumman, the therapist. Gacalo looks at Saafi and straightaway can tell that Mouna’s death has affected the girl keenly.

  “You like Qumman, don’t you?” says Gacalo.

  “She listens in the way wise people do.”

  “And you talk, is that right?”

  “I talk in the way fools talk.”

  Himmo and Mugdi stand in a corner of the living room, Himmo’s face streaked with tears and her voice gruff. “Evil sleeps until a wicked monster wakes it up, but once awakened, it stirs into deadly action and there is no safe place to hide; everyone is vulnerable and at risk,” she says. She pauses, and then adds, “We are caught between a small group of Nazi-inspired vigilantes and a small group of radical jihadis claiming to belong to a purer strain of Islam. And my precious daughter was forced to pay the price. I say, ‘A plague on both their houses.’”

  As Himmo gazes fixedly past him, Mugdi thinks that, because of the ongoing ideology-driven violent confrontations between the anti-immigrant hard right and the radical jihadists, everybody becomes a collateral casualty and there is no safe refuge anywhere and we are all doomed.

  Every few minutes more mourners arrive, Somali and Norwegian alike, some of them Himmo’s friends from work, others classmates of Mouna’s, and yet more acquaintances and neighbors.

  Mugdi stands aside as they stream past to say a prayer or speak word
s of commiseration to Himmo, bowing to hug and kiss her, some more inconsolable than others. He observes that Himmo’s large eyes, which are charcoal-dark and set wide apart, subject their surroundings to a thorough search, as if she is keen to know who among her friends has shown up and who has not. Mugdi’s memory takes him back to when he and Gacalo first met up with Himmo, in Europe. She was pregnant with Mouna and her marriage to the father was already shaky. Mugdi and Gacalo offered their support and advice, though Himmo, a woman of dignity, made it clear she would not rush into any hasty decision, but would consider separation or divorce only if there was no possibility of the two of them reconciling their differences. “I don’t like the idea, if I can help it, of raising a child in Europe as a single mother,” she said. In the end, she and her husband eventually went their different ways.

  One large Norwegian woman, whom Himmo knows only vaguely, kneels down before her and says, “I can’t believe this is happening in my country; that such a monster has taken the life of your lovely, lovely daughter. How can that be?”

  Himmo is calm as she says, “I wish I knew why, madam. And he didn’t kill only my daughter, he murdered many other beloved teenagers as well.”

  “We’ve never properly met,” the woman confesses, “but I live across the way. Over the years, I’ve exchanged a few words with your daughter. My son, who is her age, had a crush on her but being shy, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her. Now he is distraught and so are we all, every member of our family.”

  Then Himmo and the woman weep in unison, with the line of mourners lengthening, until Gacalo appears and takes the neighbor by the arm, leading her to the kitchen.

  Mugdi is now face-to-face with Birgitta, who asks, “How does Himmo manage to look so dignified, given the circumstances? I couldn’t do it.”

  “There is honesty to her dignity,” he says. “That is what sets her apart from many others.”

  He has always believed that the key to understanding Himmo, as a woman and a human being, is in understanding her marked commitment to her children’s well-being, her absolute devotion to her career, and her insistence that her future depends on her own hard work and her efforts as a Somali-Norwegian. “She told me once that, out of gratitude to the kindness shown to her here, she can no longer think of herself as Somali without also thinking that she is Norwegian. And she raised her daughter that way, to embrace her hyphenated identity.”

  “I remember how I loved Mouna’s warmhearted smile on the occasion I met her at your home,” Birgitta says.

  There are heavy bags under her eyes; she appears to have barely slept. Johan, who has wandered over to join them, thinks it is indeed a miracle that his wife can talk at all without bursting into tears. “Look at what this monster of a murderer has turned us into!” she exclaims. “He has made us lose touch with our Norwegianness! Nor can we any longer lay claim to our sense of innocence.”

  “Us innocent? Where have you been, my darling?” Johan says. “This hate has always been here. Even the so-called Progressive Party has expressed visceral hate of liberals, immigrants, and Muslims. We’ve always seen ourselves as uniquely generous to the immigrants we have hosted, to whom we’ve been kind and welcoming. The fact is, there is no truth to the claims we make.”

  Mugdi remembers how panicked he felt when word went out that a radical Islamist was on the rampage, only for everyone to be proven wrong—that it was instead one of their own.

  Birgitta, fired up, says, “No doubt it was a most terrible day. But here is another element of my grief. Why is this tragedy being compared to those that have taken place elsewhere in the world, when those countries are in no way similar to Norway in terms of population size or history?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Johan asks.

  “This tragedy is not our September eleventh, as some Norwegian journalists have said,” she replies. “After all, the differences between the US and Norway are clear to everyone. For one thing, the perpetrators of September eleventh were foreign to the US, whereas the monster that perpetrated these crimes is one of us. Why, he even claimed to be beholden to Odin, the pre-Christian Viking deity!”

  Gacalo, who has been managing the kitchen, preparing meals and hot drinks with several other women, turns up carrying a tray with tea, coffee, and glasses of water. She hands it over to Naciim, who has stayed close by the elders, listening to their conversation as if he were attending a lecture at a college. Johan, Mugdi, and Birgitta help themselves to drinks, then Mugdi says to Johan, “Earlier, you wanted to talk to us about Norwegians losing their innocence in one fell swoop?”

  “I didn’t say that exactly,” says Johan.

  “Well, what did you mean by Norway never being innocent?”

  “We in Scandinavia are under the impression that we lost our innocence when we began hosting hordes of immigrants. Personally, I trace our loss of innocence back to our response to the presence of the first foreigners among us, the Jews, whom we did not welcome as we should have. Instead we deported them, handing them over to the Nazis and certain death. And how many deaths of dark-skinned immigrants at the hands of neo-Nazi skinheads never even merited a thorough investigation or punishment? We as a nation have no problem focusing on what we view as an Islamist threat, when in my view, the much more serious menace is the presence of right-wing, neo-Nazi groups. That’s what poses a real risk to our continued existence and peace. In case today wasn’t enough of an indication.”

  “Surely we would be naive if we didn’t pay attention to both these radical groups?” says Birgitta.

  “In Sweden, a man known as ‘the laserman,’ as he favored a gun with a laser sight, shot eleven immigrants between 1991 and 1992, though he killed only one, because he was a terrible marksman. His first victim was an Eritrean. He believed that by shooting them, he would chase many thousands more out of Sweden. And do you know what the laserman, who is now rotting in jail with a life sentence, and Breivik have in common?”

  Mugdi says, “No, what?”

  “We are too slow to square up to the threat of right-wing xenophobes who enjoy the backing of nativists who look to the past, not the multicultural, globalist present. The world has moved on but they haven’t, and they will do anything for us to remain backward.”

  After a while, Birgitta observes that Himmo is sitting by herself and she suggests that the three of them join her. As they do so, Himmo says, “You’ve all been kind. Thanks.”

  “We’ll miss Mouna, all of us,” Mugdi says.

  Birgitta and Johan nod their heads in agreement and Birgitta pats Himmo on the shoulder.

  Himmo says, “Like many others, I was fooled into assuming that once we’d settled in Norway, a land famous for its peacefulness, our young would not precede us into their graves in the way so many of the young do in Somalia’s ongoing civil war.” Angrily gesticulating as she speaks, she strikes the glass of water closest to her, upsetting it over herself. As if nothing has happened, she continues, “Alas, we’ve become victims of the very evil we strove so hard to avoid by leaving our homeland and taking refuge here. We thought that by fleeing Somalia when we did, our lives would be spared and our triumph complete.”

  Mugdi is aware that he will be viewed as an insensitive fool if he asks her whether she knows that she has lost a daughter but gained her new nation’s empathy; that her name and that of her daughter have now entered the country’s history. Instead, he says, “We have no words to express our sorrow when the unexpected happens.”

  “Even though it feels good to receive so much empathy from almost all quarters, the undeniable fact is that no amount of empathy can bring my daughter back.”

  “But of course.”

  “As a mother, I’m resigned to hearing the stuttering rattle of the madman’s assault rifle firing his shots into his innocent victims for as long as I live. And this is happening everywhere. As we try to recover from what happened on
the island, you hear of a school in Sweden being attacked by a Nazi helmet–wearing, sword-brandishing lunatic.” Himmo suppresses a yawn as Mugdi and the others shift in their seats. Himmo is much too polite to tell them to go home, though plainly she is exhausted. Finally Mugdi says, “Folks, time to disperse.”

  Before leaving for home, Gacalo and Mugdi ask Naciim and Saafi if they want to stay behind or go home with them. Saafi says, “I’ll be more useful to Auntie Himmo if I don’t go.”

  Naciim is still so disconsolate he can’t speak.

  As it’s now rush hour, the sidewalks are clogged with commuters and so they walk in single file to the Metro. On the train, Gacalo sits, the wells of her eyes filling with tears, which she dabs with her wet handkerchief. Mugdi remains standing, looking in his wife’s direction every now and then. There are so many things they might say to each other, but neither speaks. It is tradition in Somalia when a woman gives birth or there is a death in a family for those near and dear to provide companionship and helping hands. This is why Gacalo will shower, change, and then return to Himmo’s, she explains to Naciim. “Death, especially the death of one so young, empties a house of energy, deprives every member living in it of his or her strength.”

  Mugdi says, “How Himmo will miss Mouna. Do you know what she once said to me? Out of all her children, Mouna was the one who gave her life shape.”

  “It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a mother to make peace with the death of her eighteen-year-old daughter,” says Gacalo.

  When they reach their house, Gacalo gives a furtive look at her watch. “I’ll just pack a bag and then call a taxi.”

  “But we just arrived. Aren’t you going to have a shower at least?” Mugdi says.

  “I don’t want to leave her for long,” Gacalo says.