Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  When the driver and the other youths have washed the outside and the inside of the truck, she sets them to work in the living room: sweeping, dusting, and cleaning it. Watching them as they shift the settees and other furniture, she wonders if they have ever lifted anything heavier than their AK-47s. To while away the time pleasantly as they work, she puts on the CD player, and out comes blaring some Somali music, actually a song of her own composition, the CD cut privately in a back-alley studio in Toronto. The words and the voice-over are both hers, set to music by a Jamaican friend of Maimouna’s. Maybe they recognize the voice, because they all stop working and stare at her in doe-eyed fascination. She becomes self-conscious, realizing that this is the first time she is listening to her own words and voice on a CD. In the context, she thinks that maybe she needs to do more work on it, tightening it here and there, strengthening the weaker parts, in short re-recording everything before releasing it. Thinking, “Not too bad, though,” she lets them hear it several times.

  In the song, a boy—the voice is that of Dalmar—says, “When is a man a man?”

  A woman’s voice, Cambara’s, replies, “A man is a man when he can work like a man, hardy, dedicated, mindful that he uses his strength to serve the good of the community.”

  Eerily, her heart almost misses a beat, as she assumes that she has had a distinct glimpse of a boy wearing familiar clothes, a boy who reminds her of her son, and who is now standing in the entrance to the living room, dressed in his trousers and shirt. For an instant, Cambara feels dislocated from her surroundings, and then she remembers that she is the one who has presented SilkHair with the clothes, which fit him perfectly. When it dawns on her that she does not like the song anymore, she turns the CD off, then walks over to where SilkHair is and, beaming with delight, says to him, “Well done.” Then things begin to take a bad turn.

  Call it what you like: jealousy, because one of their number, the youngest, whom they could bully with impunity until earlier today, has been luckier than they, having charmed The Woman; call it in character or reverting to type, because you could not expect the youths to act as normally as others might. Whatever the case, one of the youths, bearing the nickname LongEars, who earlier bullied SilkHair, has found his tongue. He speaks loud enough for everyone to hear, now that the music is off, and everyone is invidiously focusing on Cambara hugging and welcoming SilkHair.

  “We are not servants,” LongEars announces. “We are Security.” LongEars mispronounces the word, replacing the c in “Security” with a g. He continues, “We don’t carry settees, we don’t mop floors; we are Segurity. Not only that, we are men, and cleaning is a woman’s job, and we won’t do it.”

  In the uneasy silence that follows, Cambara and SilkHair stand apart, watching, warily waiting. She looks around, not knowing what to do and wondering whether to say something that will put things in perspective. She feels there is time yet for someone to calm things down. She also senses that if any of the other youths come forward and talk in support of LongEars, then you can be sure the mutineers will win the day. She prays that someone older and with more authority—she can mean only the driver, and she looks hopefully in his direction—might gamble on shoring up her plans, propping them with his own words of endorsement. But the driver remains not only silent but also noncommittal in his body language. She is about ready to take a walk away from it all when the driver clears his throat to attract attention and then enters the fray.

  He addresses his words to LongEars, his voice level, calm, unafraid. The driver says, “I am older, and I remember the years when everybody had a job. I was a driver; someone was a cleaner; another was a clerk; another was a head of department; whether he qualified for the job or not, there was a president of the country; and we had a government. Most important, we had peace. You have no memories of any of this; I do. You are not Security; you know it, and I know it. We are members of a nation of losers, of clans warring, of youths without schooling, of women continuously harangued. We are a people living in abnormal times.”

  In the silence, Cambara, her heart warmed, can now see the sun boldly shining through. SilkHair and almost all the other youths stand motionless, listening attentively to the driver’s words with more attentiveness than they have ever imagined possible. LongEars seems alone, as lifeless as the tongue of a mute.

  “If you think of it the way I do, this lady is a godsend,” the driver goes on. “She has been with us for a couple of hours, and look at what she has achieved. In less than a day. Look at Agoon,” he says, and they all turn to SilkHair, several of the youths nodding in agreement with the driver. “If she can bring about such positive change in the short time she has had with us, imagine what it will be like when she has been with us for much longer. My brothers, let’s all resume working, for there is time yet for us to save ourselves. There is hope yet for us to regain peace.”

  A youth known to be an ally of LongEars has something to say. The driver encourages him to get it off his chest. “But this has always been a woman’s job, cleaning, not a man’s job.”

  The driver has an answer. “Because women are doing men’s jobs. That is why. They are raising the young family and keeping the house and keeping it united, protected from hunger and death. And since women are doing our jobs, it follows that we must do theirs, doesn’t it?”

  She hears someone clapping and then sees the heads of several of the youths turning toward her, then away to the driver. LongEars storms out in anger. Cambara wonders if he may have gone to join forces with Zaak. Pray, what is Zaak up to?

  To set an example, the driver is the first to get back on his knees, mopping, washing, and assisting another youth. She works together with SilkHair to remove the accumulated grit from a corner where two walls meet and where someone spilled a drink with high sugar content. It’s just as well, she observes to herself, that they’ve dislodged a clan of ants that have set up their base of operation for several months. They all join in the general banter, teasing each other amicably. She takes the opportunity to remind them that even though they are half her age, they cannot haul the furniture back and forth without fuss or complaint. She challenges the remaining two bullies who were nasty to SilkHair to help her pick up the two two-seater settees. She discovers that neither has any idea how to lift his side of a settee off the floor without doing his back in. Then she tells them, “Forget it,” and does it with SilkHair after explaining to him how to position his body.

  All eyes swarm to her, as if she were a bee soon after the season’s flowers have blossomed into pollen of welcome seeds. Thanks to the driver, she has stung every one of them, and they are besotted not so much with her as they are with the idea of her or the idea of what she can do for them. She hopes that the driver has helped them relax into what they are doing and into relishing the sweetness of their labor. Her skin bristling, her body serves her as a radar trap in which she catches their admiring eyes as they stray away from the work they are engaged in and zoom in on her. She is relieved that the driver has spoken, saving her from caving in under the pressure of making difficult choices. Now she has two allies, SilkHair and the driver: the one because she has stuck her neck out for him and then presented him with clothes; the other because he has gone out on a limb for her and set a precedent.

  She believes that the youths have gotten to know her far better than they have Zaak, with whom they chew qaat and whom they see as a boss, because he never dirties his hands, never bothers about house cleaning or cooking. She reasons that since all her involvements with men have been on a one-to-one basis and since this has proven to be unsuccessful, it is her wish to build a bridge of some kind of rapport with so many men all at the same time, something that she hopes she is going to be good at, as an artist. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of watching audiences lapping up the heartfelt intimacies of an actor at her best, when the audience might confuse who she is in real life and what makes her tick, move, love, and hate with the character she is just portraying.

>   She thinks that SilkHair looks more grown-up than when he went into the bathroom. No longer in tatters, smelly, or dirty, he has become the envy of every youth who is there. Cambara assumes that in their eyes she deserves their high praise, especially after the driver has added his word to support her action. She hopes she will have become a person to befriend, not the new boss on the block. This nervy awareness puts a proud spring in her stride and a grin blemishing the corner of her mouth.

  Someone asks, “Where is Zaak?”

  Cambara couldn’t care less where he is and does not want to talk about him. Instead, she wraps her arms around SilkHair, and together they walk to where the driver is giving the final touches to a spot he has just cleaned.

  She asks, “What about lunch?”

  “Chicken,” SilkHair announces.

  He strikes her as a poseur, and she is amused.

  “A good idea,” the driver comments.

  A door in Cambara’s head opens. She puts her hand in her slacks pockets, bringing out five U.S. dollars in singles, which she hands over to the driver, whom she asks to take two or three youths, including SilkHair, to the open-air market and to buy chicken and vegetables sufficient to feed everybody. SilkHair’s eyes anchor their new cast in the bay of self-confidence.

  The driver picks up the trace of worry entering Cambara’s eyes when she notices that the kitchen is not clean enough to cook in. The driver takes three of the youths, whom she presumes to be closer to him, aside, and they speak in low voices. They volunteer to finish the job, mop the floor, clean out the cupboards and the surfaces, as Cambara goes up to have a shower.

  Then the driver says, “Let’s go get the food.”

  After yet another cold shower, for which she is better prepared, Cambara comes down to ready the kitchen in time for the youths’ imminent return from the errand to the open-air market. In her effort to do so, she opens the lower and upper cupboards, the storeroom, the pantry, and every drawer with functioning runners and, to her great dismay, finds the shelves not dusted as well as she might like. Moreover, she can see that although the youths have washed the cooking implements, they have not rinsed them in hot water, or properly. Not a single utensil or piece of crockery is of top quality. The wood of the cupboards is cracked, damaged, or warped; the soap too dry to be of use, or moldy. The more she gets to know of the state of disrepair of the kitchen and of the foul condition that it is in, despite the attempt on the part of the youths to clean it, the more she thinks of herself as a frontierswoman come to reclaim these men from their primitive condition. But she decides to keep her vow to the youths and cook for them in appreciation of their collaboration, certain that it will make a good impression on their thinking. She wants to leave the scene of their encounter in a more improved fettle than the one in which she has found it. Maybe then she may win over their hearts and minds—even if only briefly—to her triad of society: work, honest living, and peace. She is aware that in the views of someone like Zaak, she is being naive. So be it.

  Like a rodent nosing an edible bit of food out of a spot difficult to access, she prises open the cupboards, the drawers, and the sideboards in order to ascertain what is in them. There is, overall, a basic lack: of cooking oil, of sharp knives or knife sharpeners, cutting boards, of butter that has not gone rancid, of sieves and swabs, of detergents, disinfectants, and serviceable sponges; of mops with enough pieces of string or cloth attached to the handle. Nor are there washing-up facilities, clean dishcloths, usable hand or paper towels, or wooden spoons and other implements necessary to provide a decent meal for a dozen persons. The pots are of the wrong shape or are of midget size, too small for her purposes. What there is in the way of cutlery points to the house’s multiple occupancy through the years: comparable to the cutlery of variously married households, the plates not matching, the forks and the spoons likewise.

  She tries to make do with what there is. She mixes soap powder with water, lathering it up, and eventually decides to use the facecloths as dishcloths. It takes her a long time to wash and then wipe the drain board, on which she plans to dry the pots and dishes.

  Scarcely has she done that when she hears a sound, which, at first, she mistakes for a door with creaky hinges being forcibly opened. She is waiting for evidence of Zaak’s presence nearby when she identifies the noise as being that of a chicken clucking. She cranes her head to have a glimpse of the scene before her and sees SilkHair carrying three live chickens, their heads down, their necks stretched and struggling, wings opening outward and wrestling, their legs tied together with string. Trailing behind him are a couple of the other youths, nerves strained. They are bearing baskets on their heads, their steps hesitant, slow, and exhausted.

  She thinks disaster, remembering that she has never killed a chicken in all her years. Neither before she left the country, when there were servants who performed those chores, nor in Toronto, where she bought them ready to go into the oven. She wonders what she must do if the men are too untutored in the art of slaughtering chickens. After all, it does require some training or at least a type of guts to kill to eat. It will be no problem to boil their feathers off and then cook them, if someone hands them over, dead. Her mind is running fast through these and her other inadequacies when SilkHair joins her in the kitchen. He puts down the chickens in a corner on the floor and instructs the others to deposit their basket loads likewise. Just as the other youths make themselves scarce—returning, most likely, to their qaat-chewing—SilkHair crowns his sense of achievement by consulting a piece of paper, his tongue running off the price of potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, carrots, live chickens, washing-up liquid, metal brush, et cetera, first in Somali shillings, then in their dollar equivalent. Then he gives her wads of change in the local currency.

  “Well done,” she says. “I am impressed.” Moved, she ruffles his silky hair, almost taking the liberty to hug him and then kiss him.

  Expansive joy shines in his eyes. As he gazes into hers, her pupils are set ablaze with memories of her son. She turns her head away as though in obedience to a secret command that tells her not to weep but to rejoice.

  Then something happens for which no one is ready. One of the birds kicks one leg free, and when SilkHair rushes to hold her, she kicks harder and harder until she releases her second leg and jumps out of his grasp, clucking, screeching, and crying, as chickens that know that their time has come, do. Cambara watches, determined not to intervene or help him in any way, because she wants to know what stuff he is made of, how patient and resourceful he is, and whether he will tire easily and give up, throwing his hands up in the air.

  He makes a wise move. He stands in the doorway, blocking the exit, then bends down, almost crouching, clucking over the bird’s attempts to flee, admonishing her for embarrassing him, now snapping his fingers to go to him, now keeping his hands ahead of him, in readiness to accept her into his grasp, if not to pounce on her and take a good hold of her. He is silent; everything still, everything serious. Cambara watches as SilkHair waits, the sound he is making putting her in mind of the noise that some of the men who ply water in plastic jerry cans on the backs of donkeys utter in part to encourage their beasts of burden to move at a faster speed. No sooner has he turned round, seeking Cambara’s approval, than the hen slips past his outstretched hands, out of the kitchen, and through his splayed legs.

  Whereupon he chases the chicken into the living room and out, then past the kitchen, the bird half flying, half trotting, body atilt because of half-folded wings. Suddenly the chicken stops to look over a shoulder, eyes alert, and he pursues her into a corner to trap her. The chicken lifts her scrawny body up in time to fly above his head, mischievously clucking but only after securing safe escape.

  The footloose chicken and the clamor in the kitchen in addition to the hubbub created by the youths who join SilkHair in the chase draw the driver out of the toolshed and bring Zaak out of his sulk, or is it sleep—Cambara cannot tell when she sees him.

  “Have you gone
mad?” Zaak asks her.

  She runs past Zaak without bothering to answer his question. She tells herself that the youths stalking their lunch is, to her mind, more of a welcome relief than the thought of them running after their human victims to shoot or kill them. Excited by the chase, SilkHair is shouting loudly as he continues to pursue the chicken. Once the din reaches the back garden, LongEars comes out of the shed, cheeks swollen with his chewing and gun at the ready. Cambara has the calm to notice what LongEars wants to do, and she shouts to him, “Don’t shoot.”

  The words have barely traveled the distance separating her from SilkHair and the chicken he is going after with fervor and is about to catch, having already bent down to do so, when she hears the gunshot, two bullets on the trot, the second one hitting its target and wounding it, feathers flying zigzag toward the ground. A hoarse cry emerges from the depth of SilkHair’s viscera. Cambara has a tenuous comprehension of what it means to be powerless in the face of brute force. She stands stock still, feeling like someone opening her eyes to the engulfing darkness and coming to see an indescribable betrayal in the action of those around her. She goes over to where SilkHair is crouched, furiously weeping, as though mourning the death of a beloved pet. She lets him leave the chicken where it has fallen and walks past Zaak and the youths, who are all staring, into the kitchen—to prepare the other chickens.

  Alone with SilkHair, she suggests that he swing each of the remaining birds as disc throwers do, making several full circles. Just when the first one has become disoriented and he is about to put it on the draining board in the kitchen, LongEars presents himself and offers to slaughter both birds, which he does with the efficiency of an assistant chef whose primary job it is to do so. One sudden swat, and the chicken is as good as dead and Cambara is ready to pour boiling water over it to help remove its feathers. She uses her Swiss penknife to quiet the thrashing of the second chicken, which is struggling animatedly. The rest proves to be as easy as one, two, three.