The schoolchildren are tightly packed onto the bridge, a shifting mass of blue, pink and khaki. She looks towards the north side of the bridge and sees red beret soldiers lined up across the road. Deqo finds them attractive: she likes the dark bottle-green of their uniforms, the gold on their epaulettes, the jaunty angle of their famous hats; she even likes the silver pistols that hang like jewellery from their hips.
The schoolchildren are silent, nervous, and when a whistle blows they scream and run back in the direction they came. The lean, tall soldiers pull out batons and chase the children. Deqo is caught in the melee and joins the stampede to avoid getting trampled. She feels like a sheep being herded into an enclosure. Hands grab her and push past, some almost dragging her down, but there is nowhere to escape to, the south side of the bridge blocked by another line of soldiers. The schoolchildren fall over each other trying to avoid the rigid, stinging batons. Their fists are now open in surrender, held aloft as if in promise of good behaviour.
Deqo trips over a boy and falls at the feet of a soldier; he grasps her dress in one hand and the boy’s arm in the other and drags them over to a massive lorry waiting beside the road. The bed of the truck is so high the soldier has to let the boy go to throw Deqo into it with both hands; the boy follows and then other captive students. Reaching for the soldier’s hand, Deqo tries to plead with him to let her go but he slaps her in the mouth. The taste of blood on her tongue, she looks around in shock at the flying skirts and limbs, as more and more children are forced into the vehicle. Black netting covers the side but that is the only difference between it and livestock trucks. An older boy with long ringlets down his neck tears a hole in the netting and clambers out the side, and other brave ones follow him. Deqo peers down at the distant ground, too afraid to try.
The vehicle is soon full of clamouring schoolchildren pressing against her on all sides. A girl sits next to her, crying open-mouthed, choking on her sobs. Deqo can feel the girl’s bones and flesh grinding against her own as the truck’s engine starts and they roar across the uneven road. Even in this teeming truck the girl smells fresh, her skin and uniform so scrubbed with soap that her perspiration has the heady, detergent scent that wafts out of the dhobi-houses.
‘Don’t cry,’ says Deqo, placing a hand on the girl’s arm.
‘Don’t touch me!’ she shouts, pushing Deqo away.
An older pink-shirted girl throws her arm proprietorially over the crying girl’s shoulders and kisses her head. ‘Shush, shush, Waris, I’m with you.’
Deqo turns her head away and purses her lips. I don’t owe you anything, she thinks. In fact I should be angry with you for causing trouble, stupid girl. She doesn’t understand why the schoolchildren and soldiers keep fighting. They all have food, all have homes and parents, what is there to squabble over? They should go to the refugee camp and see what life is like there. She covers her feet with her hands, ashamed by her dusty, long-nailed toes, the calloused, scaly skin, her red cotton smock fraying at every hem. Pulling her knees together she draws away from the boys sitting nearby. They do not hold their bodies as far away from her as they do the schoolgirls, she notices; there is barely an inch between her and any of the boys’ limbs. They always nudge her in the street too, making her feel small and grubby. There isn’t any dhobi-smell about them, only musk as sharp as vinegar that rubs onto her skin as they fall against her with the truck’s tortuous drive.
The truck dips into one last pothole and then stops, the engine still trembling under the hood. To her right is the central police station, the first place she saw in Hargeisa after the stadium. A red beret pulls down the lip of the truck bed and ushers out the children. Ordinary policemen in white shirts lead them to the station, holding two in each hand by their shirt collars.
Finally it is Deqo’s turn and she recoils as the red beret reaches for her; he is like a figure in a bad dream, silent, cruel and persistent. She squeals in pain as his vice-like hands grasp her ankle, another hand moves to her thigh and he yanks her out. Her body is not her own, she thinks; it is a shell they are trying to break open. A policeman with his trousers belted over his fat gut and his flies half done up swears at the prisoners, slapping the back of Deqo’s legs with a flat, hard palm and wrangling her arms behind her back. Holding her wrists and those of the fragrant girl’s in one hand he marches them through the haze of dust that the struggling protestors have kicked up and ascends the tall, rain-stained concrete steps into the police station.
In the dingy, dark corridor a young guard sits on a metal chair to the right. He looks at the passing schoolchildren with big, melancholic eyes. ‘Help me,’ she mouths as she skids over the green-tiled floor, but he doesn’t shift, just cradles his gun with long, large-knuckled fingers, veins twisting under his smooth skin. Deqo feels as if she is treading water, pulled into a current she can’t escape.
The schoolchildren are led through to the cells, the girls put into one communal cell and the boys pushed deeper into the station. Deqo’s wrists burn where the big-bellied policeman has been squeezing them and she shakes them in the air to cool. A few steps into the cell she is overcome by the stench of excrement. Older prisoners have to sit up and move to make room for the protestors and complain loudly at the intrusion. Four young women with their hair in thick plaits huddle together along the back wall. One of the large women kicks at them and shouts, ‘Roohi, move it’; they obey and she spreads out her rush mat in the small space they had shared.
Some of the schoolgirls start snivelling again as they look around the cell. Deqo rolls her eyes at them; she feels superior to these naive, sheltered girls who protest while knowing nothing of what the real world is like. They cannot appreciate the roof above that will keep them dry the bodies that will keep them warm, the dripping tap in the corner that will quench their thirst. The women and girls shift constantly trying to stand as far from the waste bucket as possible. Every breath Deqo takes is shallow and cautious; this smell sends her back to the refugee camp and the cholera outbreak that ended Anab’s life and nearly her own, both of them falling asleep but only one of them waking up. In the ditch she has at least become accustomed to space and the fresh scent of trees.
Some of the prisoners look comfortably at home. One young woman is breastfeeding her baby and charting, her legs stretched out. Her friend is dressed gorgeously in pink and silver, with black hair dyed gold at the tips. They seem untouched by the situation around them. In contrast, the girls with the plaits appear to have been in the cell for weeks. One of them is barefoot, her trousers blood-stained near the crotch, another has small, circular scorches all over her bare arms. All of them are emaciated, their hips like metal frames under loose trousers, their necks long and drawn, their dark-lashed eyes sunken into black holes. Policewomen in navy uniforms pass by the cell bars, their trousers tight across their backsides. Deqo wonders what the girls have done to be treated so badly and if she will be kept inside with them. Looking between them and the pretty women, she manoeuvres closer to the pretty ones to see if their good luck will spread to her.
‘. . . that he is free, that the last child wasn’t even his own,’ the one with gold-dipped hair is saying.
‘You believe him?’ replies the mother.
‘No, but what can I do? I have been bitten by love.’
‘Well, bite it back,’ she laughs.
Deqo laughs too and they look up suspiciously.
‘Didn’t anyone tell you it’s rude to eavesdrop?’
Deqo smiles apologetically.
‘Let her be, she’s not doing any harm. What are you doing here? You stole?’
Deqo shakes her head violently. ‘I don’t know, ask these people,’ she gesticulates dismissively towards the students, ‘they put me in trouble.’
‘Is that so?’ she smiles. ‘What is your name?’
‘Deqo. What’s yours?’
‘Nasra, and this is China and her son Nuh.’
‘Why are you in here?’
The women lo
ok to each other and chuckle.
‘It is part of our job,’ Nasra answers coyly.
The policewoman has a neat beret perched to the side of her pinned-up hair and possesses a strange combination of femininity and menace.
‘Which one of you is Waris Abdiweli Geedi?’ she calls in a harsh voice.
The fragrant girl pushes past the others and presents herself before the policewoman, who beckons her out of the cell with a henna-painted finger before locking the door again. The prisoners ease into the small space the girl has left behind. To Deqo’s amusement, fragrant girl does not so much as look back at those she has left behind; the girl who had thrown her arm over her in the truck is left to stand there, head hanging. Deqo is pleased: when arrogant people like that are are forced to see how little they really matter she feels a small charge of satisfaction.
One by one the schoolgirls are called, bailed out and hustled home by their fathers, mothers, uncles and elder brothers. They are released before the boys to protect them from shame; the shame that grows and widens with their breasts and hips and follows them like an unwanted friend. Deqo has long been aware of how the soft flesh of her body is a liability; the first word she remembers learning is ‘shame’. The only education she received from the women in the camp concerned how to keep this shame at bay: don’t sit with your legs open, don’t touch your privates, don’t play with boys. The avoidance of shame seems to be at the heart of everything in a girl’s life. There is at least a chance in this women-only cell to put shame aside for a while and flop down without wondering who might see her legs or who might grab her while she sleeps. She finds a space near an elderly destitute woman on a rush mat.
‘Get me a cup of water,’ the woman croaks.
Deqo looks at the reclining figure, so old and self-important. ‘Get it yourself.’
The woman sighs. Deqo notices that she is missing all of her front teeth. The woman nudges her with her foot. ‘Go on, my sweet, just get me some water, I have an axe slicing through my head.’ She makes kissing noises to cajole her.
Deqo tuts and rises to her feet; she will ask for water for herself too, fill up her stomach a bit. She waits by the bars; she can hear the policewoman talking at the end of the corridor.
‘Jaalle, Jaalle! Comrade, Comrade!’ Deqo cries out.
No answer.
‘Comrade Policewoman with the hennaed fingers and black koofiyaad, we need cups here.’
The policewoman approaches and pushes a tin cup through the bars. ‘Don’t try and be funny here, little girl.’
‘I wasn’t trying to be funny, I just wanted water.’
‘Aren’t you too young to be selling yourself? Or have you been stealing?’
‘No! I haven’t done anything, honestly. They mistook me for a protestor.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘From Saba’ad.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I work in the market. I never steal, never!’
The policewoman’s face softens a little; she tilts her head to the side and looks over to her colleague.
‘Luul, this refugee girl is here by mistake; she was pulled in with all those protestors this morning.’
The other policewoman comes to join her. She is tall and flat-chested, unable to fill out her uniform like her friend.
She pulls a face. ‘Let her out, we’re not going to get anything for her.’
‘True, she’s a waste of bread,’ laughs the policewoman with the henna on her fingers.
The door chimes open once again and Deqo runs to the old woman on the mat to hand over the cup before stepping out into the corridor of freedom.
‘See you another time, Deqo,’ Nasra calls out.
Deqo waves back.
The policewomen walk on each side of her in silence.
‘Jaalle, when will that woman be released?’ asks Deqo, before being led out of the station.
‘Never you mind, you should stay away from women like that, they will drag you down into their nasty ways. Stay away, you hear?’ She adjusts the beret on her head.
‘Is she a . . .’ Deqo hesitates at that powerful word that has plagued her throughout her short life.
‘A whore? Absolutely, and much else besides.’
Deqo marches back to the ditch with her eyes to the ground, deep in thought. She still has time to collect fruit from the farms and reach the market before it closes for lunch. Her legs propel her forward robotically but her mind is whirring with memories from Saba’ad, stirred up by her encounter with Nasra and China in the cell. ‘Whore’s child, whore’s child, whore’s child!’ That’s what the other children in the camp had yelled at her for as long as she could recall, but she hadn’t known what a whore was; it sounded bad, like a cannibal or a witch or a type of jinn, but no adult would describe what made a whore a whore and the children didn’t seem to know much more than she did. She was born of sin, they said, the bastard of a loose woman. From the children’s story her nativity went like this: a young woman arrived in the camp alone and by foot, heavily pregnant and with feet torn to shreds by thorns. The nurses at the clinic bandaged her feet and let her wait for the child to be delivered. She refused to give her name or her husband’s, and when Deqo was born she abandoned her own child without naming her either. Deqo had been named a year later by the nurses when she climbed out of the metal cot the orphans were kept in and began disappearing; Deqo-wareego was her full name, ‘wandering Deqo’, and she had learnt that the one thing she could do that the other camp children couldn’t was drift as far as she liked. She belonged to the wind and the tracks in the dirt rather than to any other person; no watchful mother would come after her shouting her name in every direction.
At first she had believed her mother was a jinn who had changed into a human for only a short while and then had to change back, but she was always too cold to have had a mother made of fire. Then she thought her mother may have been blown away by a typhoon, but too many older orphans said they had seen her walk away on her own two feet. Finally she decided that her mother, this ‘whore’ they talked about, was not like other women who lived and died beside their children, but another kind altogether, who knew that her child would be clothed and fed, just not by herself, like a bird who lays her egg in another’s nest.
So Deqo had grown up thinking herself a cuckoo amongst the other camp children, whose parents were all refugees from the fighting and famine that had engulfed eastern Ethiopia from the seventies into the eighties; some were Somali, some were Oromo, but they all had their families or even just their family names and clans to help them. Deqo deeply wishes she had a second and third name; she won’t be greedy and ask God for a whole abtiris of seventeen names or anything, just two more would allow her to puff out her chest and announce her existence to people. When she was too young to know better she had taken the name Deqo Red Cross because that was the name of the clinic she lived in, but the frowns on the white-uniformed nurses’ faces let her know it wouldn’t do as a replacement name. She lived as just Deqo, or sometimes Deqo-wareego when the nurses shouted at her, and waited for her prayers to be answered.
When Anab Hirsi Marfan came into the orphanage at around six years old, head shaved for lice and wild with grief, Deqo was charged with looking after her. When she ran away to the burial ground Deqo was in close pursuit, nervously waiting and watching while the little bat-eared girl beat her hands on the mound of earth covering her mother. The older graves were marked with rocks, planks of wood, or thorny acacia branches, but the newer ones were unadorned, rolling up the hill in a wave. The cemetery resembled the vegetable plot between the clinic and orphanage, pregnant with plantings that would never grow, watered with nothing but tears. Anab shovelled her hands into the dirt as if she was trying to dig up her mother or bury herself; eventually she tired, defeated, and laid her face down on top of the grave. Deqo had then approached and stretched out her hand; Anab took it, her fingers bleeding, and sloped back with her to the o
rphanage.
Deqo took ownership of Anab from that day, sleeping and eating beside her in the large tent that housed fifty-two orphans and strays. Every day she and Anab ate canjeero for breakfast, played beside the standpipe where the earth was damp and malleable, followed funeral processions to the cemetery, had an afternoon nap and then played shaax with mud counters before the unchanging supper of rice and beans and lights out. Lying in the dark, whispering and tittering, Anab called her Deqo-wareego Hirsi Marfan; they were new-found sisters, thrown together like leaves in a storm.
The myriad buildings that Deqo is slowly learning the names and purposes of appear in the edges of her vision as she steps into the pitted road. The library for keeping books to learn from, the museum for interesting objects from the past, the schools in which children are corralled and tamed, the hotels for wayfarers with money in their pockets – the existence of all these places brings pleasure, despite her belief that as a refugee she is not welcome inside.
In the weeks since her arrival in Hargeisa she has learnt something every day just from observing the life around her. In the first few days she slept in the market, led there by electric lights and children’s voices. She huddled rigidly under the stalls with a few girls and many, many boys fighting and sniffing all night from little bags that gave them leaky noses. She left there and found a concrete area in front of a warehouse that was swept clean and raised above the dust of the street. She found a little sleep there until one night a pack of stray, short-haired dogs found her, growling and barking as she hid her face in her hands. They drew the attention of the watchman who frightened them away and then banished her too. She had then stayed a week outside the police station, hoping for their protection against boys and strays, but instead there was the constant disruption of police cars, of foot patrols and military vehicles sweeping up and down the road. Eventually, she had gravitated closer and closer to the ditch, lured by its quiet thicket and isolation, to the point where she is now perfectly comfortable sleeping within its deep darkness, unafraid and undisturbed, unless it rains and a deep chill enters her bones.
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 5