A lorry pulls up to block the far end of the street and some of the captives are led to it, heads bowed, arms twisted behind their backs. A woman bars the entrance of her bungalow with her body, but two soldiers throw her out of the way and drag a boy out by his long hair. The woman trots behind, pleading for his release: ‘Let him go, he is all I have, he is too young for conscription, let him go, walaalo.’
Deqo stands on the outskirts of this scene, enveloped by dust and holding her arms protectively over her chest; she is reminded of the slaughter of animals during Eid at the camp, when nomads arrived with sheep and goats and sold them to the wealthier families, the animals separated violently, bellowing. She enters the empty store, takes a packet of sugar from a shelf and leaves the money in its place before fleeing to Nasra’s house. The women are at the door when she reaches the bungalow; they peer up the street. Stalin has a smirk on her face but the others look anxious.
‘It’s the second time this month. What do they want with all these kids?’ China shouts.
‘Cannibals, they want to eat the fruit of our wombs,’ replies Karl Marx.
‘Look at them run! Wasn’t that the bastard who threw a rock at my window? Not so tough now, is he?’
Nasra chews the corner of her headscarf and doesn’t join the conversation; she places a hand gently on Deqo’s back and leads her into the house.
Deqo stands in the gloom of the bathroom and shivers as cold water pours out of the bucket above her head.
‘Scrub your hair,’ demands Nasra.
Thick lather drops into her eyes and sits on her neck; the shampoo smells so good that Deqo keeps stopping to take deep inhalations.
‘You’ll look beautiful by the time I’ve finished with you.’
‘Where are the soldiers going to take those boys?’ Deqo asks with her eyes closed.
‘To the south, to train for the military.’ Nasra fills another bucket from the tap and throws it over Deqo.
‘Don’t they want to become soldiers?’
‘No! Why should they? This government isn’t on their side.’
‘But the President cares about us, he is our father.’
Nasra laughs. ‘Well, that is what the songs say, but I don’t think that is the truth. You learn that in Saba’ad?’
Deqo nods and shows off the dance that Milgo taught her, her feet squeaking against the wet floor.
‘Steady yourself, that dance won’t win you any friends here.’
Nasra slides her hand up and down Deqo’s bare back, washing away the last trail of lather.
Stalin appears and leans against the doorframe. ‘You have your work cut out with this bedu. Look at her chicken legs – and she’s not even circumcised!’
Deqo cups her hands around her privates; it had felt natural being bathed by Nasra, as if she was an older sister or mother, but the way Stalin looks at her makes her shrink. The woman’s eyes pick her apart and seem to say, ‘Look at you, no one loved you enough to even circumcise you; you’re wild and dirty.’
‘You don’t have anywhere better to be, Stalin?’ Nasra says dismissively.
‘Not now, no. I’ve got a knife if you want me to cut it off, hey Deqo?’
Deqo edges away from her, her legs pressed tightly together.
‘You think you looked any better when you arrived? You were followed by fleas wherever you went. Get out of here!’ Nasra scatters water at her.
‘If you’re not careful, I will sell her from under your nose,’ Stalin retorts before retreating.
‘What did she mean by that?’ Deqo asks, her eyes to the ground.
‘Nothing, she’s just a fool and jealous that you’re better looking than her.’ She cups Deqo’s face and squeezes her cheeks playfully. ‘Don’t let her bother you. I am your protector now and no one gets the better of me.’
Just as the curfew is about to bite, Deqo is stirring a lamb stew that Nasra has put on the stove when someone bangs at the main door.
‘Open it!’ shouts Nasra from her room.
Deqo finds Rabbit, the old drunk from the ditch, swaying on their doorstep. He pushes into the house and without looking at her makes a clumsy beeline for China’s room. ‘My darling, habibti, it is your friend here,’ he croons, beating his yellowed palm on the splintered wood.
‘Who told you to come here?’ China bellows, pushing the door open and shoving his shoulder.
‘My love, you have two things I want, let me have just one and I’ll be on my way.’
China reaches into the pockets of his grey trousers and pulls out the empty white lining. ‘Do I look like the Red Cross to you? I don’t service beggars or accept them in my house.’
‘Just give me a swig of whisky, then.’ He holds out his hands and cocks his head to the side. ‘I was a good customer when I had money, you know I was. I might even be that dear boy’s father.’
‘In your dreams.’ China grabs Rabbit’s padded shoulders and lifts him off his toes. ‘As if you have anything in you apart from disease and alcohol. You have nothing to do with my child!’
Nasra enters the courtyard with a smile on her face and then Stalin and Karl Marx join the audience.
‘Beat the fool!’ shouts Stalin.
‘You still owe me a hundred shillings.’ Karl Marx bends down and takes the bartered shoes off the man’s feet. ‘I’m keeping these till I get my money.’
They are like cats with a mouse, Deqo thinks, batting him around for pleasure.
‘Ladies, I am a poor man, I give when I can. You should have mercy on me.’
‘This isn’t a place for mercy, you know that, Rabbit,’ Nasra says, winking conspiratorially at Deqo. ‘The world hasn’t done us any favours, why should we help you?’
‘I’m not like the others, I have never hurt you. Don’t humiliate a helpless old man!’ He sounds pitiful, on the verge of tears.
Deqo giggles guiltily; it’s true he hadn’t hurt her, but it’s exciting to see him dangling in the air, being taught a lesson in respect by these women.
Stalin kicks him in the backside and then they all pounce on him.
‘Throw out the trash,’ they shout together.
While Deqo holds the door open, they each take a limb and carry him out, swinging his body a few times before slinging him into the street.
‘A curse on all your heads,’ he shouts as he hits the dirt with a thud. Deqo closes the door on him.
The women slap each other’s backs and seem more joyful than Deqo has seen them so far; it feels as if it is not just Rabbit that has been expelled, but some tension or cloud has been lifted too. They laugh and laugh until they are bent over and weak.
‘Poor man!’ wheezes Karl Marx.
Deqo leans against Nasra and wraps her arms tentatively around her waist, beaming too.
Just as Deqo has become accustomed to the heavy drum of rain on the corrugated tin lullabying her to sleep, the rain season comes to an abrupt end. A whistling draught replaces the leak of water from the rusted roof as jiilaal winds try their best to sneak into the bungalow. Nasra stuffs the holes with cloth when Deqo complains of the cold and leaves the stove burning a little later into the evening. The shrieking wind reminds Deqo of the hardships the jiilaal would bring to Saba’ad: red, infected eyes from the grit, old people perishing from the night chill, fights between the refugees over water. It was a time of forbearance and endless waiting. The only good thing it brought was deep, cloudless skies. She remembers clambering up the barred window onto the flat roof of the orphanage with Anab and watching the camp settle into sleep. If there was enough moonlight they could see pale mountains in the distance and beneath them a swathe of the camp. Everything crisp and clean, the sky blue-black and the stars like a thousand kind eyes watching over the forgotten people, smoke from cooking fires spiralling up like prayers. She feels a pang for that view, for that moment in life when Anab was beside her and the world they knew was calm and peaceful; there is no way to reclaim it even if she returns to Saba’ad.
&nb
sp; The routines of the house have become familiar to Deqo and she knows which customer is for which woman: the younger, smartly dressed men go to Nasra, the middle-aged husbands hiding their faces behind sunglasses to Stalin, the drunks and gangster types to China, and the humble workers to Karl Marx. Nasra complains that there are only one or two customers willing to brave the curfew most nights and they are China’s type rather than hers. Once upon a time they had journalists, and businessmen with dollars in their pockets, she said, rather than hawkers, drunkards and criminals.
The last night of the year arrives and the only male voices to be heard in the house are from the radios; it is too cold, dark and blustery for even the drunks. The evening passes glumly with Deqo sitting on Nasra’s bed, watching her rearrange the room; she moves the furniture from one place to another and throws out many of her possessions because she claims to be bored with them. She leaves the pile in the hallway for Deqo to pick over and then throws herself face down on the bed.
‘What I wouldn’t do to leave this place!’ she says, squeezing a pink cushion into her eyes.
Deqo lightly strokes the back of her hair.
‘Who would have said my life would come to this? I’m clever, you know. I’m not a drunk like China or illiterate like Karl Marx. I could have been someone. Once you do this it’s like you can never get out, never be anything else. I go outside and people look at me as if I’m a ghost walking around in the daytime.’
‘Is that why you don’t leave the bungalow much?’
‘That and I feel as if I have nothing left out there. Why am I even telling you this?’ She drops her head onto the quilt and then brings it up again. ‘I don’t feel like a real person. I have no family, no friends, no husband, no children. Every day I open my eyes and wonder why I should bother getting up, or eating, or earning another shilling. No one would miss me, in fact my mother would be happy to hear that I have died, she would clap her hands and say that her shame has been lifted.’
Nasra hides her face and sobs, and with wide, anxious eyes Deqo sits up. ‘I would miss you, Nasra,’ she says hurriedly, parting her back.
Nasra doesn’t reply and Deqo understands that she is not enough for Nasra, not by a long way.
The first day of 1988 is bright and blue-skied, the street outside littered with leaves and broken twigs blown about the previous night. Deqo holds a hundred shillings tightly in her right hand, a gift from Nasra to celebrate the arrival of the new year and to maybe apologise for her tears. The little girl who danced with her in the rain is sitting with her mother on a large cement step, resting her face on her knuckles; Deqo waves in greeting but when the girl raises her hand her mother yanks it down. The wiry woman narrows her eyes at her. ‘Keep walking,’ she shouts. Deqo holds up her head and marches on, but her stomach does a small flip as Nasra’s words return to her; she doesn’t want to become another daytime ghost.
Looking down at her freshly painted red toenails and the clean, lotioned skin of her feet, Deqo sees no reason for anyone to look down on her. She looks good in her mind, better than she ever has before. Her cheeks have filled out and the constant headache she used to have from hunger has gone, but she also feels heavier, slower and less sharp-witted now that she doesn’t have to graft for every little morsel. She feels as though she is in disguise: dressed in Nasra’s hand-me-down green skirt and white shirt, she wonders if anyone will recognise her at the market or if she will pass for one of the plump and carefree local girls.
Deqo veers off to the left to explore an open area she hasn’t noticed before; there are scrubby bushes in a sandpit and boys kicking a rag ball. Deqo and Anab had sometimes joined the footballers near the wide, empty riverbed beside Saba’ad; for no obvious reason some matches would just grow until maybe a hundred players gathered, creating a gravelly pitch that stretched for a mile in each direction. More makeshift balls would have to be made from rags tied up with shoestring when the others crumbled under the stampede of toddlers and teenagers, girls and boys – the girls often just picking up a ball in their hands and running to the goal because they couldn’t understand why they shouldn’t. On those afternoons, when the girls abandoned their buuls and chores and the camp was veiled by the dust they kicked up, Deqo had run and run and leapt for the golden sun, a bright medal just beyond her reach.
After watching the boys kick the scrappy ball around listlessly for a few minutes, Deqo skirts the sandpit and strolls up to a crossroad with four tracks leading away from it. She chooses one randomly and passes the giant power station, the Pepsi factory with rows of trucks parked outside, and then after another patch of scrubland there is the ditch, full of trash and spirit bottles, and a rope bridge to the other side of town. Looking down on the ditch from the swaying bridge, it is hard to believe that she once spent her nights there; it is a wild, dark jungle, a no-man’s-land full of threat and danger, her barrel probably full of snakes or scorpions by now. It is the kind of place where human skeletons might sink into the soil undisturbed and unmourned. She is a different girl now to the one who had sought shelter in that wasteland; she must have outgrown and abandoned some kind of shell or cocoon there.
The market has been her salvation, its noise and smells and rough interactions have kept her human, and she reaches it with relief, clasping the treasure in her hand more tightly. She has never had a hundred shillings before and has to fight the desire to hide it from herself for a rainy day, but Nasra made her promise to buy something frivolous with it. The spot where she had sold stolen fruit is hidden behind the large backs of several middle-aged market women. Children swarm around her newly long legs – pallid glue sniffers, shoeshines, pickpockets, religious students in long white robes and prayer caps, street sweepers – there are enough of them to populate a small town of their own, with hierarchies, feuds and alliances to match anything the adults can muster.
No one recognises her, her transformation complete; who would believe it is the same Deqo who used to sleep in a rusty barrel? She catches her reflection in a mirror hanging up in a clothes stall and sees a girl with neatly pinned up hair holding her nose imperiously high.
Nothing grabs her attention enough to part her from the hundred shillings until she reaches a corner stall with animals. The trader, sitting on a stool with a white lamb cradled in his arms, has dark, pitted skin and oily straight hair and smiles a generous smile as she approaches. A tortoise crawls lethargically around his feet, tied by a leg to the stool, various birds squawk and flap inside cramped cages, and in the depths of the stall she can see a small brown-mottled fawn sat on its haunches. Deqo quietly kneels beside it and the fawn looks at her with terrified, wet eyes.
‘How much?’ Deqo asks the trader.
He scratches his jaw before answering, ‘Give me five hundred.’
She runs a hand over the animal’s back; it trembles with each rapid heartbeat. It should be with its mother. ‘I only have a hundred.’
‘Oh, forget it, then.’ He turns back to the street and spits.
‘What do you feed it?’
‘Cow’s milk. Why don’t you ask your mother for more money if you like it so much?’
‘I don’t have a mother.’ She scratches the fawn under its chin and its ears flick in response.
‘Or your father then. Or . . .’ He drags a straw basket over to his stool and tips it so she can see inside; a flurry of yellow chicks fall over each other and chirp in alarm. ‘You can have one of those for a hundred. Pick one.’
Deqo pats the fawn on its head and then examines the chicken orphanage. She pities their fragility; it would be easy to crush one in her palm. She sticks her hand in and strokes the downy chest of one flailing on its back. The first two years of her own life had been spent in the overcrowded cots that contained the camp’s youngest orphans, where they were left to clamber over each other and poke curious fingers into unguarded eyes. Somehow she had emerged from that cage and learnt to walk and talk and feed herself.
‘I’ll take her. And when I
have enough money I’ll come back for the deer,’ she says resolutely.
He mock salutes her and takes the money. ‘I’ll be waiting for you!’
Deqo walks back to the house slowly, tickling her face with the chick’s fuzz; she hopes that it will one day grow into a proud, bright-plumed hen, the matriarch of her own ever-expanding brood.
China steps over Deqo to set the kettle on the charcoal burner; she harrumphs and makes indistinct complaints aimed either at Deqo or the baby tied to her back. The boy’s face is squashed hard against China’s back; it looks uncomfortable but he doesn’t whimper. Deqo is half grateful, half envious that she has never been carried like that. The chick is on her lap, walking up and down the length of her thighs.
‘I thought you were meant to work in this house, not just sit there with that thing and eat our food?’
‘I have finished the cleaning, China. Is there anything else you would like me to do?’ she replies calmly.
‘Well, take this weight off my back for a start.’ She unwraps the boy and dumps him into Deqo’s arms.
Nuh’s arms flop to the side of his body; he smells as strongly of alcohol as his mother and seems drunk too, his eyes half closed and motionless. She looks up sourly at China. Why did you get to keep your child when you can’t even care for him? she thinks.
‘Deqo!’ Nasra exclaims. A tall man with a wooden cane stands behind her in the courtyard. ‘You’re back. Is that what you bought?’ She points to the new chick. ‘Have you named it?’
Deqo shakes her head. ‘I’m still deciding.’
‘Does that child belong to her?’ the man asks. He lifts his sunglasses up to look at her more closely, muttering something into Nasra’s ear.
‘Of course not, that is China’s son.’
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 8