Don't Tell Me You're Afraid

by Giuseppe Catozzella

  In any case, if Alì and I always pretended that the war didn’t exist, it’s because we were the children of Yusuf Omar, my father, and Yassin Ahmed, Alì’s father. They too have been friends since the day they were born, and they too grew up together in the village of Jazeera, south of the city. They attended the same school and their fathers also worked together, in the period of the Italian colonists. Together our two fathers learned some proverbs in that language from their two fathers. Non fare oggi quello che puoi fare domani, “Don’t do today what you can do tomorrow.” And Tutto il mondo è paese, “The world is the same wherever you go.”

  Aiutati che Dio t’aiuta, “God helps those who help themselves.”

  Another saying they learned from them is Cascassero sulla tua testa mille chili di merda molle molle, “May a thousand pounds of runny shit fall on your head,” with all its variants, which was a phrase their fathers’ Italian boss always used to say, back when they worked at the port, unloading containers. One day a container packed with manure had suddenly opened up and the boss had been inundated by that “rain” from above. Since then things had gone very well for him, but even so he’d started using that expression whenever he felt like swearing.

  Another proverb said, Siamo tutti figli della stessa patria, “We’re all children of the same country.” This one is a favorite of Aabe and Yassin: best friends whom nothing will ever come between.

  Like us.

  “Can anything ever break us apart?” Alì and I wondered on those sweltering, brutally hot afternoons when he helped me climb the eucalyptus and we took shelter in the coolness of the leaves for half a day, talking about the future. Staying up there in the eucalyptus was wonderful; in place of the real world, we concocted one in which only we two and our dreams existed.

  “No!” we told each other in turn. And then we made the gesture swearing to be blood brothers: We kissed our linked index fingers in front of our mouths twice, reversing right and left. Nothing and no one could come between us. We would have bet anything, even our lives.

  But that eucalyptus was also Alì’s favorite spot where he went to hide by himself. For example, in the afternoon when he didn’t want to learn to read.

  Although Hodan was five years older than me, in fact, every morning she and I went to school together, to the Madrasa Musjma Institute, a district comprising primary, middle, and secondary classes. Alì didn’t come with us; his father never had the money to allow him to study. He attended first grade at the public institution, but then the school was destroyed by a grenade and he hasn’t gone back since then. After that unhappy day classes were held outdoors, and it wasn’t easy to find teachers willing to risk a bomb on their heads.

  The only way to learn was to enroll at the private school. Our father was able to afford it for a few years, thanks to many sacrifices, whereas since the beginning of the war Yassin has always had trouble selling his fruit and vegetables.

  In Mogadishu it was said that few people wanted to buy from a filthy Darod.

  Alì has always been touchy about the fact that we knew how to read and write. It made him feel inferior. His clan was in effect viewed that way in our neighborhood, and that was one of the things that proved it.

  Every now and then we tried to teach him the letters of the alphabet, but after a while we gave up.

  “Alì, try to focus,” Hodan told him; she’s always had a tendency to act like a schoolmarm, a little mother.

  He tried hard, but it was too difficult. Learning to read was a long process; you couldn’t attempt it in the afternoon, sitting in the courtyard at a small table that Aabe and Yassin used for playing cards, under a sun that was still hot and made you want only to have fun. The only one who experienced anything like fun was Hodan, who played the teacher and made me and Alì be her pupils. I was always the good student, and he was the one who didn’t pay attention.

  “I can’t,” Alì would say. “It’s too hard. Besides, I don’t care about learning! Being able to read is useless!”

  I had to play the part of the schoolmate who wanted to help him; otherwise Hodan would get mad. “Come on, Alì. It’s not so difficult; even I learned how. Look, these are the vowels: a, e, i, o . . .” I tried to encourage him.

  He’d run away. It was hopeless. He’d stick it out for ten minutes until Hodan, at the beginning of the class, started reading a passage from a book. When it was his turn to try to read, he made up any excuse to disappear. Those times, when Hodan insisted and made him angry, Alì would climb the eucalyptus and stay there.

  His eucalyptus. His favorite spot.

  One afternoon, after arguing with his brother Nassir, he climbed up to the top and stayed there for almost two days. No one was able to get him to come down; no one else could climb all the way up there. Nassir tried every way he could to persuade him, but there was no way. Alì came down only the second night, weakened by hunger.

  After that we started calling him “monkey.” Only a monkey like him could make it up there to the top. He’d rather be called that than learn how to read.

  Anyway, Alì always acted uppity, but he was slower than me, even if he was a boy. He was stronger—if we fought he beat me—but he was slower.

  When he wanted to make me angry, he said I was a wiilo, a tomboy, and that was the only reason I ran so fast. He said I was a boy who’d been born in the body of a girl, that I was a know-it-all snot nose just like the boys, and that when I got big I’d grow whiskers like his father, Aabe Yassin. I knew it; there was no need for him to tell me: I knew I was a tomboy and that when people saw me running without veils, without the qamar and the hijab, wearing only shorts and a T-shirt bigger than I was, since I was thinner than an olive branch, they thought that I was not a perfect daughter of the Koran.

  But in the evening, after supper, when the adults enjoyed making us compete in the courtyard for a scoop of sweet sesame paste or a chocolate angero, a crepe, I showed him. The courtyard was the center of life for all families; with the war it was best to leave the house as infrequently as possible.

  After Hooyo Dahabo, with the help of my sisters, had cooked supper for everyone on the burgico, the brazier as big as a whole cow, and after we had finished eating what there was—usually bread and vegetables or rice and potatoes, and every once in a while a little meat—Aabe Yusuf and Aabe Yassin prepared the track for us.

  Our older brothers and sisters cheered while Alì and I, posed like champions, bent over at the starting line, crouching down with our hands on the ground. We even had starting blocks, which Aabe had built by taking apart two wooden watermelon crates.

  For the lines that marked the lanes, Said and Nassir, our older brothers, had to drag their feet from the end of the courtyard to the earthen wall, about thirty meters, outlining a turnaround and tracing a course back to the starting point.

  I always won.

  Alì hated me, but in the end I almost always shared the thing I love most in the world, my sweet sesame, with him—there’s nothing I love more than sweet sesame paste. But first I’d make him promise not to call me wiilo anymore. If he agreed, I gave him half.

  On those summer evenings, when the air finally cooled down a little, after the races Hodan and I would play shentral. Those were beautiful, relaxing days, when we all forgot about the war. Shentral was played by drawing a bell on the ground and then writing the numbers one to nine in it. You tossed a pebble and it had to land on the bell. Our brothers were playing griir instead, sitting on the ground and making stones fly between their hands.

  Every now and then on those drawn-out, breezy evenings, Ahmed, a friend of Alì’s big brother Nassir, would join us. Ahmed was seventeen, like Nassir and Said. To me and Alì he seemed very grown up, and to me and Hodan he looked handsome and unattainable. Ahmed had an olive complexion and light eyes, uncommon in Somalia; those green eyes gleamed in the moonlight and made his gaze seem all the more bold.

>   Once we asked him why his eyes were different from everyone else’s; he made the gesture of having sex—one hand forming a circle while his index finger moved in and out—and told us that his grandfather must be one of the Italians who had fooled around with the black girls. Nassir and Alì burst out laughing. Not my brother Said; he gave him his usual stern look and shook his head.

  Said didn’t get along well with Ahmed, unlike Nassir, who idolized him. Maybe he saw him as a rival because of his friendship with Nassir, or maybe he just didn’t like him; he always had misgivings about him, saying that there was something in those light eyes that he didn’t trust. Alì never got too close to Ahmed either. He often stared at him, studying him, but he kept away from him. Usually, when Hodan and I played shentral, Alì stayed near his father and Aabe, who argued every night at cards, staring at Ahmed cautiously from a distance.

  Some nights, after griir or playing ball, Ahmed and Said ended up scuffling, sometimes joking around and other times for real, and Aabe and Yassin would have to pull them apart. Once Said punched Ahmed so hard that blood spurted from his nose and stained his white T-shirt. He looked like he’d been hurt badly.

  After a while Aabe made them shake hands, and the next night, as if nothing had happened, they were friends again.

  One of the nicest things about those summer nights, however, was Hodan singing.

  Often, after Hooyo and we girls had finished washing the pots, we would all sit in a circle for hours, listening to her velvety voice transform familiar tunes.

  Aabe and Yassin sat smoking, their languid eyes turned to the sky, and I wondered what a big, handsome man like Aabe could be asking the stars. Every now and then my sisters and I and Hooyo, moved by Hodan’s words, would wipe our eyes and noses with our handkerchiefs; the older brothers and Ahmed sat in the dust, arms hugging their legs, staring at the ground.

  Once in a while Ahmed looked up, and those icy green eyes flashed in the moonlight; he seemed to want to defy the moon. When he did that I turned my head away and brought my focus back to the face of Hodan, who, seated in the center, her eyes half closed, went on singing songs about peace and freedom.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NIGHT BEFORE the annual race, before our fathers came home from work, Alì and I did a forbidden thing: We ventured out to run.

  It was six o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was low on the horizon, and the smell of the sea drifted right into the courtyard. Driven by a fresh breeze that was redolent with aromas beginning to rise from the braziers of the neighboring houses, the sea’s scent had seeped in and drawn us to it. There were only a few hours left before the race and we wanted to stretch our muscles and lengthen our strides. We felt a need to, like two real athletes.

  Often the militia decided to have the curfew begin in the hours preceding Friday. That evening, in fact, no gunshots could be heard. Then too there was a full moon, enough light that it wasn’t too risky.

  We wouldn’t go very far.

  We set off with the idea of going around the block, as far as avenue Jamaral Daud, turning around at the national monument, then heading back.

  Twenty, twenty-five minutes in all.

  Alì had told me to put on the veils, but I hadn’t listened to him. Hooyo—who was bent over a steaming pot, cooking, wrapped in the gauzy white veils she wore around the house—hadn’t even noticed that we were going out. Nor had Hodan, inside the room with our other sisters.

  Making as little noise as possible, we sneaked under the red curtain covering the opening in the boundary wall, sure that no one would spot us.

  The war didn’t scare us; it was our “big sister.”

  Often, when mortar strikes or machine-gun shots were heard, Alì and his friends Amir and Nurud would go up close to the militiamen to see how they fired. They crept up ever so slowly and hid behind a car or around the corner of a house and watched. The sound of rifles, of machine guns, excited them. When they came back to the courtyard, they talked a mile a minute, and I stood there gaping, listening to them; talking over one another, each of them wanted to tell me about a detail that he thought only he had seen. Their eyes were lit up, fiery as the opening of a rifle barrel.

  Anyway, that night we ran for about twenty minutes. The air was cool and we didn’t get sweaty like during the day. That was the hour I liked; everything had slowed down, the day was drawing to a close, and instead of the afternoon’s blinding sunlight a suspended glow hovered in the air, the sun’s rays bouncing everywhere, reflecting off every particle of dust, but lower, more restful.

  We were already on our way back, not too far from home, when we were forced to stop. Suddenly, at the end of a deserted alley, a jeep carrying fundamentalist militiamen appeared.

  They were neither Hawiye nor Abgal nor Darod but members of Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group.

  Ethnicity in this case had nothing to do with it. They were militants backed by extremists of Al-Qaeda who were doing everything they could to seize power, taking advantage of the divisions among the clans.

  The Al-Shabaab men were recognizable from a distance by their long beards and dark jackets. Unlike the clans’ militiamen, who usually wore camouflage jackets they’d recovered from some market or obtained secondhand from the Ethiopian army, the soldiers of Al-Shabaab wore real uniforms, new ones, which made them look like rich warlords.

  There were eight men in the truck bed, the barrels of their machine guns sticking up from behind their backs like metal antennas.

  The jeep was moving very slowly when one of the bearded men turned his head toward us and saw us coming.

  Two harmless little specks, tired and sweaty.

  A half-naked little Abgal girl and a Darod boy with a flat nose and ebony black skin.

  The man banged his fist on the roof of the cab, and the jeep stopped. Everything happened in a few seconds. Two militiamen jumped down and came toward us.

  They were short and had no beards.

  Only when they got close did we realize why: They were young boys, twelve, maybe eleven years old. Sporting rifles bigger than they were over their shoulders. At that time it was rumored that Al-Shabaab had started recruiting children to teach them about holy war. In return, they guaranteed the parents that their children would receive an education, learn Arabic and the laws of the Koran, be fed three meals a day, and sleep in decent housing, with a real bed and all the comforts that almost no one could afford anymore. Those two must be new recruits.

  The closer they came, looking at me disapprovingly, the more aware I became of how I was dressed: shorts and a T-shirt. Damn it! The veils. And Alì was Darod, one of the clans the fundamentalists hated the most because they considered them inferior, a clan of niggers, as they said, while we Abgal had lighter, amber-colored skin and features more closely resembling those of the Arabs, from whom the Al-Shabaab extremists liked to think they were descended.

  They stopped about twenty paces from us.

  “What are you two doing out and about at this hour?” said the shorter, chubbier one of the two, in his nicely ironed black shirt and creased dark trousers. In our minds a nearly perfect outfit like that pertained only to Europe or America. We were used to dressing any old way, in hand-me-down clothes. Only a few adults loved to parade around on Fridays, in the square by the parliament or along the seaside promenade, wearing the same pants and jackets they’d worn during the years of peace.

  “We’re training for the race tomorrow,” Alì replied, looking boldly at him, unafraid. The questions were routine. Though it had never happened to us, there were numerous stories of similar incidents going around; there was nothing to fear from those questions.

  The two burst out laughing, the fat one scratching his behind with one hand. Then they took a few steps forward, and the solitary streetlight lit up their faces. Their eyes were watery and bloodshot.

  “So you’re both athletes. . . .”
the fat one said after a pause, his tone ironic as he started laughing again.

  “Right,” Alì replied. “We’re training for the annual race. . . .”

  At that point, the other one, a lanky kid with a long scar on his forehead and eyes that looked possessed, yelled: “Shut up, Darod! Don’t even open your mouth. I could take you away, you know, and no one would say a word about it. Maybe your father would even be happy if you came with us. At least you’d have some decent clothes to wear.” They burst out laughing again like little children, while the chubby one continued scratching his backside.

  Alì lowered his eyes and looked at himself. He wore a T-shirt riddled with holes and food stains, which had been his brother Nassir’s, and a pair of shorts way too big for him, held up at the waist by a string. On his feet were a holey pair of moccasins that his father, Yassin, had salvaged somewhere, who knows how many years ago.

  Out of the corner of my eye I sensed movement.

  Alì was shaking like a drum skin. He was sobbing silently out of anger and shame. I turned around and saw a tear, just one, roll down his cheek.

  Like a predator sniffing around a wounded animal, the skinny one with the scar came five or six steps closer. He wore a men’s cologne with a penetrating odor, like Acqua di Colonia, but too strong; it hung in the air around us.

  “You’re just a dirty little Darod,” he said. “Remember that. You’re just a filthy Darod.”

  Alì didn’t answer. I was scared.

  Then Scarface came up to me and grabbed me by the arm. “And maybe we’ll take your little friend away. That’ll teach her to dress like a wiilo. What do you think you are, huh? A boy?”

  I tried to wriggle free, but he kept a tight grip on me, like claws. He tried to drag me, but I resisted, digging my heels into the ground.

  All of a sudden Alì exploded and, like a cat, pounced on the kid’s hand and bit it. Scarface let go of my arm and Alì gave me a shove, shouting at me to run home.