Deqo nods. Falling asleep in a warm kitchen with the smell of proper food in her nostrils is good enough for her.
‘We all like to cook for ourselves but you might be asked to help chop or watch over dishes. When you’re not cleaning stay within earshot in case we need you to run an errand.’
That night, as Deqo huddles in the kitchen, imagining her barrel in the ditch empty and miserable without her, she hears men’s voices. She jumps up to peer out of the doorframe. All of the doors to the women’s rooms are thrown open and light spills onto the courtyard.
‘Stay away from me!’ a young girl shouts from the hallway. ‘Oof! I don’t want you anywhere near me, you cannibal.’
Deqo guesses that it is Stalin.
An older man appears, carrying a leather bag into Karl Marx’s room. He looks back, smirking, as Stalin continues to pour curses onto his head. He enters the room without knocking and then the glowing strip of light underneath Karl Marx’s door is extinguished.
All through the night Deqo is woken by slamming doors, raised voices and other more mysterious sounds. She feels more anxiety here than in the ditch, but also insatiable curiosity. She suspects the origins of her own story lie in a place like this, that it is time to uncover the facts of her birth. Her eyes remain wide in the dark, her ears attuned to every little squeak, her dreams evaporating like mist. It had been far easier to sleep in the ditch, where it was too dark to see and so quiet at times that she could hear the blood rushing through her veins.
The morning comes, bright and demanding, just as Deqo is falling asleep. She resists its call for as long as possible before realising just how late it is. She eats the canjeero that someone has placed beside her on a tin plate and washes her face and arms under the weak flow of the courtyard tap, unsure if she is allowed in the bathroom.
Shaking her arms dry, she peeps into Stalin’s open door and, finding it empty, grabs a cloth from the kitchen to start work. To her it is just an excuse to touch interesting things; she has no idea how to clean the various jars, instruments and trinkets scattered around the room, but she enjoys handling them, turning them around in the light and imagining their use. Eventually her attention turns to the mattress on the floor with its sheets entwined into floral ropes; she shakes them out, smoothes them back over the bed just as she has seen the nurses do in the hospital, and then lifts the striped pillow. She does a double take at the sight of the butcher’s knife hidden beneath it. She doesn’t touch but leans over to take a closer look: the blade is a long, wide slice of silver, the black handle has grooves moulded into it so that it can easily fit into a hand, and around the point where metal meets plastic is a dark stain that might be rust or old blood.
‘Get out of here, thief!’ a girl shouts before pushing past Deqo and grabbing the knife, pointing it at her face. ‘Who told you that you could enter my room?’
Deqo raises her hands in terror and points to the courtyard. ‘Nasra,’ she stutters.
‘Nasra! Did you bring this street kid into the house?’ the girl yells.
Nasra joins them in the tiny room and pushes the knife away from Deqo. ‘Stalin, what are you thinking? I said she could work here. You can’t just stick a knife in every stranger’s face.’ She sighs. ‘Didn’t you see her asleep in the kitchen?’
‘I went out to buy my breakfast.’ Stalin looks Deqo up and down. ‘You shown her to anyone yet?’
Nasra glares at Stalin before ushering Deqo out of the room. ‘Go to Karl Marx’s room, she won’t say anything to you.’
Nasra closes the door and stays behind with Stalin.
Deqo looks over her shoulder. Still trembling slightly, she decides to stay out of Stalin’s room in future and leave her to clean it on her own. Stalin is the opposite of Nasra: stocky, muscular, stern-faced, her hair pulled back from her face and pomaded – she looks ready to beat someone to a pulp. What did she mean about showing me to someone, wonders Deqo. I am not a wild animal, there is nothing to see.
She crosses the yard to Karl Marx’s room and knocks before entering. It takes a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, but when they do she sees Karl Marx on her back with her palms on her chest. Deqo stands beside the door, unsure if the shape on the bed is breathing or not.
‘Come in, I’m not dead. Not yet anyway,’ Karl Marx says without opening her eyes.
‘I have come to clean your room.’ Deqo holds back the sneeze tickling her nose.
Karl Marx doesn’t move a muscle; her profiled face is sharp and pale against the blue wall. ‘Clean it then.’ Her words seem to come out through her large ears or thin nostrils as her lips do not move.
Deqo takes the cloth and sweeps a layer of dust off the windowsill, but it is inhibiting having another person in the room. Karl Marx begins to shift, flinging her legs to the side of the bed and yawning loudly. Deqo glances at the woman’s skeletal naked body, her protruding collarbones forming a yoke around her neck, bleeding sores crisscrossing the skin on her meagre thighs. Deqo examines her discreetly and sees a woman who should be in hospital. Karl Marx grabs a corner of the bedclothes and dabs at the blood on her legs; she is unperturbed by her appearance and slowly rises, showing the two triangular bones of her buttocks as she retrieves a diric from the floor.
Deqo feels a lump in her throat and hums softly to distract herself.
‘You one of Nasra’s?’
‘Haa, yes.’
‘You selling?’
‘Selling what?’
‘The thing between your legs.’
Deqo takes a minute to decipher what could be worth selling or even possible to sell between her legs. ‘No! I clean and run errands only,’ she says hurriedly. She imagines Karl Marx doing what the goats and stray dogs do when they mount each other and is disgusted. That is what makes a whore a whore, she realises, and her eyes widen.
Karl Marx sits down heavily and looks at Deqo with lowered eyes. ‘I was your age when I started this.’
Deqo cannot see what anyone would want with Karl Marx; she looks like she has TB, typhoid, and every kind of sickness going. In Saba’ad people would have run from her.
‘Look at me,’ she says.
Deqo stops and looks her squarely in the face.
‘How old do you think I am?’
There are already white hairs on her head, her breasts beneath the sheer diric hang down to her navel; she is far into old age in Deqo’s estimation.
‘Go on, say it.’
‘Fifty? Fifty-five?’
Karl Marx laughs, revealing broken khat-stained teeth. ‘You little bitch! Take twenty off that and you’re close.’
Deqo smiles in return, not believing her words but too polite to challenge them. ‘Why are you called Karl Marx?’ she asks.
‘Because I have shared and shared and shared until there is nothing left to give.’ She clutches at her bosom and sighs.
‘What about Stalin and China?’
‘Stalin is named after Jaalle Stalin of the Russians for her brutality, and China is a favourite of the coolies. Nasra doesn’t want a name.’ Her attention turns to the store of white medicine boxes on the floor, and while Deqo straightens the bed she crunches tablet after tablet in her mouth.
‘What will your name be?’
‘My name is Deqo, I don’t want it to change,’ she says firmly. If Nasra didn’t need a new name to live here then nor would she.
‘Wash those clothes for me, would you?’ Karl Marx points to a pile by the door.
Deqo hesitates, unsure if laundry is one of her duties, then decides to ingratiate herself with Karl Marx; it can’t hurt to have another ally against Stalin within the house. She picks up the laundry and leaves.
Deqo drops Karl Marx’s clothes into a basin in the courtyard and then scrubs them under the tap with a green soap; the trickle of water is so slow that she leaves the basin and attempts to finish the rooms before returning. After knocking three times on China’s door and not receiving a reply Deqo pads across to Nasra’s
room, where incense burns in a white clay urn. Nasra has just had a shower and her hair is wrapped in a towel away from her long neck. The skin above her knees and elbows is paler than the rest and mottled with small moles that rush over her chest and thighs; she rubs a milk-white cream on her body with a rough motion, kneading the flesh between her fingers and pulling it away from the bone.
‘Take some.’ Nasra holds out the bottle.
Deqo squirts a tiny amount into her palm and returns the bottle. The scent of the lotion, the razorblade and the myriad jars of perfume on the dresser seem to express the metamorphosis from little girl to woman, the necessary grooming and management demanded by a body grown large and wild. She rubs her hands together and puts them to her nose, the lotion’s scent is overwhelmed by soap, charcoal, bread and sweat.
Nasra rips the towels from her head and body and stands in all her splendour before the wardrobe. Deqo averts her eyes, but the difference between Nasra’s solid thighs and backside and Karl Marx’s makes her want to look again and check how a grown woman is meant to be; to see how many changes her own body will undertake.
‘You slept well?’ Nasra flicks through the folded piles spilling out of the wardrobe.
‘Yes,’ Deqo replies enthusiastically, despite the fact she barely closed her eyes.
‘Good. Maybe you will stay with us then.’ Nasra dresses, choosing her clothes carefully. ‘You have to tell me if you need anything. I want you fat and happy, understood? I want you to be my little girl.’
‘Yes, Nasra,’ Deqo smiles broadly.
‘Have you ever seen the sea?’
‘Never.’
‘I will take you to Berbera one day, to see my family.’
‘What’s it like there?’
‘The same as Hargeisa but with the sea next to it, and fishermen selling their catch on the beach and Yemenis touting qudar, a kind of date drink, and my mother with her scissors cutting my hair every month.’ Nasra smiles.
She turns on the stereo and then changes the cassette, searching through tape after tape, declaring the provenance of each as if she is a radio presenter: Indian, Arabic, Congolese and American. Deqo cannot tell them apart but likes them all; the room suddenly feels crowded and animated by invisible musicians, singers and dancers. Nasra finds a Somali song and then settles back on the unmade bed, a photo album in her hands. She flicks through it; the photographs have the texture of distant, half-forgotten memories behind the opaque paper and Nasra’s smile fades.
Deqo looks over her shoulder at the images: barefooted young girls playing in the surf, a hard-faced matriarch glowering in front of a savannah studio backdrop, a thin, wild-haired man standing proudly in front of a white boat.
‘Who is that?’ Deqo jabs a finger at the photo.
Nasra wipes away the greasy mark left on the film before answering, ‘My father.’
‘Is he a fisherman?’
‘He was.’ She turns the page quickly and skims through the other photographs without really seeming to see them.
‘I don’t know who or what my father was,’ Deqo says with a nervous giggle. She tries to place an arm on Nasra’s shoulder and then thinks better of it.
‘You’re from the camps, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Saba’ad.’
‘Well, he was probably a poor nomad then, and your mother a long-haired sultan’s daughter from a village by a river, and they met and ran away together for love and had you. Is that right?’ Nasra jumps from the bed and shoves the album in a drawer.
Deqo almost purrs with delight; Nasra’s story fills her with light and warmth. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ she wants to shout, but she just swings her arms instead.
The truth is so brutal in contrast. She has no knowledge at all of where the rest of her family are; there are no stories passed on by cousins, no villages to return to, no genealogy to pass on if she ever has children of her own. She is like a sapling growing out of the bare earth while others are branches on old, established trees. Her teenage mother had a mark on her neck the shape of a crescent moon and dots burnt into her chest like an old woman, Nurse Doreen had said. That was all the description she had. No face, no body, just burnt dots and a crescent moon to remember a mother by.
‘Who has flooded this damn place?’ shouts Stalin from the courtyard.
‘Oh no,’ whispers Deqo and rushes back to finish the laundry.
As the courtyard shifts from blue to indigo to black, Deqo picks dirt from under her fingernails and feels the bones of the house cracking as it eases into the night. Soon each corner of the house is lit by paraffin lamps, and she falls into a light sleep that dulls the noise around her but doesn’t silence it: footsteps, clicking locks, laughter, faint music, discussion, bed springs, silence. The smell of tobacco wafts over from Nasra’s room to the kitchen.
It is late when Deqo hears a rapping on the back door, insistent bursts every ten seconds. She scrambles to her feet and places her ear close to the door. She peeps through the keyhole and sees a waste ground where rubbish is dumped and charcoal made. She is frightened at the thought of letting that darkness in.
‘Who is it?’ she demands with more courage than she feels.
‘Open up! I’m here for Nasra,’ a deep, male voice replies.
‘I am not allowed to let anyone in.’
He kicks the door. ‘Either let me in or I will find my own way.’
‘I can’t let you in!’ Deqo jams her shoulder against the door.
Silence, and then the scrape of feet up the wall and over the corrugated tin roof. Deqo ducks down as if he might fall on top of her. Within moments a huge man in a long overcoat leaps down into the courtyard. Deqo can just pick out his nose and sneering lips under the shadow of a military beret pulled low over his forehead. He straightens his knees and disappears towards Nasra’s room and Deqo hears Nasra’s door lock just as he reaches it; she hides in the hallway as first Stalin then China pop their heads out of their rooms.
She returns to the courtyard and crouches to spy through the window into Nasra’s room. Deqo’s eyes and ears strain to take in as much of this drama as she can, her face creeping upwards, her nose jabbing the glass. The man towers over Nasra; he hasn’t removed either coat or hat but paces around her as she stands erect in just a red satin underskirt pulled up to cover her breasts, a cigarette burning between her fingers. They don’t speak or touch. Nasra catches sight of Deqo’s eyes in the window and slams her palm against the glass.
Deqo rushes back to the kitchen, ashamed to be caught spying, and throws the blanket over her head; she balls up her hands and digs her nail into her flesh, angry that she has made Nasra angry. She doesn’t cry but sits with her back to the wall feeling bereft. Nasra doesn’t come and eventually she hears the man leave through the back door. She spends another sleepless night in the kitchen, her sense of safety breached, waiting for more giants to jump over the wall and appear right before her in the middle of the night, with guns, or knives, or with nothing but their strong hands to squeeze the life out of her.
Deqo wakes late to footsteps all around her. The charcoal stove burns a few inches from her feet and Stalin kicks her leg to move her out of the way.
‘Deqo, get us some sugar from the shop,’ Nasra asks, as she fans the fire and takes a bundle of notes from her brassiere.
Picking up her caday from the mat, still bleary-eyed, Deqo stumbles out into the street, brushing her teeth while she walks. She is met by a cacophony of crowing cockerels, braying donkeys resisting their harnesses, young boys play fighting in school uniforms, women shaking buckets of feed at their goats, and the drumbeat of adolescent girls beating carpets with sticks. She stops to watch a cat suckle the kittens mewling around her and then continues onto the corner shop feeling content with her new place in the world.
In the camp it was as if each day brought a new threat – maybe a fire, or flooding, a new outbreak of illness, or someone would die inexplicably; life was just a tightrope to be walked pigeon-toed. Deqo and Anab w
ould imitate the German doctors in the camp by checking each other’s pulses, feeling their foreheads for fevers, and knocking sticks against their joints; they made a joke of it but the fear of falling sick was always there. Of the children in the orphanage, five had already died, three from disease and two in a violent clash between different clans. She remembers the tubes of reed matting they had been wrapped in before burial, the rolls so narrow and small they resembled cigarettes.
During the fighting that killed the two boys, the aid workers were sent away for a few days, and it had occurred to Deqo then that they belonged somewhere else, that this camp was just one of many camps they had seen, that their real homes were far away, safe and rich. Nurse Doreen was the only one to stay behind. She was like a mule, tireless and uncomplaining; the harder it was in the camp, the more excited she seemed. She had tried to describe her childhood in Ireland to Anab and Deqo; she had a pony, she said, and cows, and it rained nearly every day she could remember, and it wasn’t the kind of rain people looked forward to here but a hard, cold, stinging one that made her grandmother’s bones ache. Deqo had liked playing with Nurse Doreen’s long, grey-streaked hair as she spoke and imagining it the tail of her own horse; Nurse Doreen had liked Deqo to place her cool fingers on the red, burnt skin of her shoulders where it refused to go brown like the rest of her arms. Nurse Doreen was good, was goodness; she gave that word meaning in a way few people did.
Deqo feels a pang of longing for the woman her life had once orbited around. She wonders how the Guddi will explain her disappearance to Nurse Doreen. They will probably just scratch her name off the register and give no explanation; no one dares challenge them, least of all the aid workers who have to do what they are told by the armed policemen who bounce around the camp in jeeps.
Just a few paces from the corrugated-tin store, Deqo’s attention turns away from the blue sky criss-crossed with vapour trails to the street, and the blur of flared jeans, afros and tight shirts as dozens of young men and boys pelt past her. They are pursued by soldiers in various vehicles. As the street narrows the soldiers disembark and chase on foot, jumping on their quarry as they scramble up walls and seek shelter in the rambling confusion of yards and alleyways. A young boy inside the store creeps out of the back of the structure and hides inside a derelict goat pen nearby. It is like a huge, furious game of hide and seek that Deqo is excluded from, one reserved just for boys.
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 7