The Orchard of Lost Souls

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘What have you done with the rest of the money?’ Kawsar asks, examining the change the girl has slapped onto the bed.

  ‘That’s all of it,’ Nurto pants. Her cheeks are flushed and her clothes pungent after chasing her friends around the market.

  ‘You think that my mind is gone rather than my hip?’

  Nurto ignores the comment and stomps towards the kitchen.

  ‘I’m talking to you. Come here now or I’ll send you back to that tin shack you come from.’

  Nurto reappears at the door.

  ‘How much was the kilo of rice?’ Kawsar continues, training her eyes on the girl.

  ‘One thousand shillings,’ comes the defiant reply.

  ‘And the tomatoes?’

  ‘One hundred and fifty shillings.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since they got more expensive.’

  Kawsar reaches for the leather sandal sitting unused next to her bed and holds it aloft.

  ‘One month ago a bag of tomatoes cost eighty shillings and now you expect me to believe the same dried-up tomatoes are a hundred and fifty?’

  ‘Believe what you like. I was lucky to even buy the rice before it was sold out. People were fighting over the last few bags, punching and kicking each other. God above knows that I am telling the truth.’

  ‘God knows that you’re a cheating, ungrateful, untrustworthy liar.’

  ‘What would you know? You’re just a . . . a . . . smelly old woman.’

  Kawsar throws the sandal but Nurto makes a show of not flinching and contemptuously tidies up the basket of wool and half-finished knitting it tips over.

  Nurto’s presence in her home has long lost the pleasure of novelty and is instead suffocating. This is her life now, no orchards, no family, no movement. She is just a stomach to be filled and a backside to be wiped, and these daily contests with the maid are one of the few things that remind her that she is still alive. Her mind spins between what is lost and what remains. The bungalow is often filled with sea-silence like a giant shell, her days empty, clear of appointment or duty. Instead of helping Dahabo at her market stall or looking after Zahra’s children she watches Nurto like a spectre. She has become one with the bed; from a two-legged creature she has grown four metal feet, the mattress moulded to her flesh, its springs entwined with her ribs. Trapped within a skin within a bed within a house, only her two peeping eyes feel mobile, alive; they flutter about the room, settling hesitantly on her dusty possessions, the mysterious bundles and packages that litter the nests of old women. The urge to preserve, store and shroud her possessions had manifested itself quietly; she cannot remember when she began collecting the flakes at the bottom of the spice tin, the too-short-to-knit-with lengths of wool and the dried-up medals of soap, yet everywhere she looks rests another knot of plastic or cloth hiding the detritus of her existence. All has been condensed into tight bundles, her fifty-something years of town life – the papers, the gold, the money, the photographs, letters and cassettes – can be packed up, carried away on the back of a camel and blown away or destroyed in a rainstorm. Her bungalow with no heir will slump into old age and crumble back into the sand, her life of solidity and bureaucracy and acquisition leaving less of a print than the circles scorched into the desert by long dead nomads.

  It is time for the weekly wash. A metal basin of lukewarm, soapy water and a facecloth are the extent of her bath, but Kawsar makes Nurto light an urn of crystallised incense to fragrance the room. It is a good day to feel water on the skin; there has been a thunderstorm, jagged spears of lightning impaling the sky through the window, the thunder as enveloping and threatening as an angry father and the rain as sibilant and soft as a mother’s comforting words. The air pregnant with moisture as the drought finally lifts. It is a day to sit in cosy, expensive smoke and be lulled by the music of the sleepy, sodden town just outside the walls. She has taken a few painkillers just to savour this mood that glides her back to her childhood. Her mother used to wash her in the backyard with the fat, warm raindrops of the Gu season gathered into a barrel and poured from the tin cup in her mother’s hand. Her mother’s spare hand held Kawsar’s thin upper arm tightly while she splashed and giggled in the tight circle around her feet, her curly hair slick and cloying against her back. This was around the same time she’d had the gudniin. Dahabo had had hers first, disappearing for two weeks before reappearing in new clothes and shoes, a purse dangling from her bangled arm. ‘How’d you get them?’ Kawsar asked, her mouth dropping.

  Dahabo put the purse carefully on the step and quickly looked over her shoulder; she grabbed the corners of her skirt and flicked it up at the front, her bangles giving a little flourish as if to say, ‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’

  Kawsar’s eyes widened at the half-healed wound where Dahabo’s shame had been. ‘Does it hurt?’ She wanted to ask to see it again but their mothers might appear suddenly.

  ‘When I kaaji it stings.’

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘My cousins came in from the miyi and they did us all together. Today is the first time we have been allowed to walk, we had our legs bound for days and days.’

  Kawsar reached to touch the bangles; their glitter came off on her sweaty, jealous fingers.

  ‘You should get done too,’ Dahabo chirruped, but there was no need, there was no way Kawsar would allow herself to be left behind, be called dirty names and left out of games. If it was Dahabo’s time then it was hers too.

  That very night she gathered close to her mother and told her she wanted to be made halal like Dahabo.

  ‘But you are a year younger than her and smaller too. You are not ready, Kawsar.’

  Younger, smaller maybe, but Kawsar as the only child of a widow was not used to being denied, and by the morning she had forced her will on her mother. Within the fortnight a middle-aged woman appeared at the front door with her circumcision kit.

  ‘Kawsar, Kawsar.’ Nurto shakes her leg.

  ‘Yes?’ she says with a start.

  Nurto squeezes excess water from the small towel and slaps it into Kawsar’s hand; this is the signal for her to wash between her legs.

  Nurto turns her back to the bed and picks up the basin to refill it in the kitchen.

  Kawsar’s hand slips down past the sprigs of grey hair that have grown sparse with a lifetime of shaving and runs over the smooth shield of skin that lies over her genitals. She scrubs at the scar tissue and slack flesh, hoping to erase the musty smell she fears clings to her for most of the week. She bears no kindness to this part of her body, it has brought her nothing but pain and disappointment, and if she could scour it away she would feel no regret. It sometimes seems as if that cutter, looking around that finely furnished room, at the thick mattress Kawsar reclined on and at the rips in her own garments, had decided to play a trick on her. Maybe she had stitched the opening completely closed or cut too deeply or even planted thorns in her womb to make it barren. She certainly appeared to have been diminished in some respect that day, while Dahabo and the other girls recovered from their circumcisions stronger than before. Whichever bitter old sorceress devised this practice back in pagan times must have convinced the others that this was the way to winnow the strong from the weak; that girls who could not survive this were not worth the milk it took to raise them. If a few managed to hobble along, neither dead nor properly alive, well, they could be suffered as long as they didn’t get in the way This philosophy had given generations of women – kept like Russian dolls one within the other – the same hardness, the same ability to not look back to whoever was left behind until eventually it was them who dallied at the rear.

  Nurto returns with the basin, the hardness visible in her brow too. Kawsar drops the cloth to the floor and lets the girl scrub her back with a splayed brush. It feels good as the numb skin rushes back to life, but the brush soon approaches the two bedsores standing pink and proud above her buttocks.

  That’s enough,’ she says, sucking in ai
r through her teeth.

  Nurto rubs her dry with a towel stiff with detergent and then helps her into fresh, incense-infused clothes.

  It isn’t the cleanliness she is used to – patches of her skin have not touched any water at all – but it is enough to make her feel human again; soap, warm water, and the touch of another’s hand has that power now.

  A heavy rain shower pelts at the windows, distracting Kawsar from her thoughts; the beacon of a police car maintaining the curfew spreads a thin yolk-yellow light into her room. Cold, violent rainstorms have a contradictory effect on Kawsar – they bring warmth, a sense of fullness and wellbeing, the memory of Farah’s palm stretched over the beating heart of her womb. Those shuttered green colony days of their youth have seeped into her flesh: the tin roof clattering above them, the wind whispering through its grooves, and Farah sleeping beside her on the low divan bed, his wandering hand pinned down by her petticoat’s waistband. Kawsar remembers tugging his arm closer, moulding his body around hers and watching him through half-closed eyes on those mornings or afternoons that he refused to travel through the yellow sludge to his office. She never loved him more than in those dazes, when they seemed nothing less than twins curled up within the same skin, their limbs so entwined that she could not feel where his flesh ended and hers began or separate her scent from his. Hours passed in sleep so cavernous, so voluptuous that she knew how drunks felt as they slipped into unconsciousness by the roadside, a secret smile on their lips. When Farah finally began to stir, the rain spent to a tepid, half-hearted spray, there would be the separation, the readjustment of limbs, hair, and clothes as he became the husband and she the wife. But now, the only thing to be distilled from those hundreds of mornings and afternoons was the heat of an absent hand on an old, empty womb.

  It is Friday, cleaning out the house day. All over the neighbourhood, all over the town, all over the country, rugs and mats are thrashed, windows opened and rooms dusted, floors washed and scrubbed, bed linen stamped on in wide basins, squeezed and hung out on bushes and washing lines, only to be brought in a couple of hours later bone dry, smelling of the sun and thick with pollen. Nurto has Friday afternoons to herself and Kawsar fears another long day watching the door, secretly hoping and fearing that someone will visit, her loneliness bearing knee-sharp on her chest. Her ears follow the footsteps on the street outside, her pulse quickening if they pause nearby. Once Maryam English’s nanny goat had butted open the door, frightening Kawsar who thought that the soldiers had returned for her. The huge, horned animal looked around the room in surprise, chewing simple-mindedly on a mulch of grass, her hooves like castanets on the cement. ‘Shoo, Shoo!’ Kawsar had shouted, flinging her arms, at which the animal had obeyed, turning around and walking calmly away as if she agreed that there was no point wasting her time on an old woman.

  Dahabo, Maryam, Fadumo, Raage the greengrocer, Zahra, Umar Farey these are her occasional visitors. She knows maybe hundreds more though they do not come; people hide behind the excuse of curfews but their hearts have hardened, they cannot bring themselves to care about yet another misfortunate when they are already so overburdened. Women are running their families because the streets have been emptied of men; those not working abroad are in prison or have been grabbed off the street and conscripted into the army. If Farah were still alive he would be like the others – hiding in his house, meek, prematurely wizened, like a woman in a harem. Nurto reported that the old askaris who used to gather around Raage’s dukaan at five p.m. and wind their West End watches by the dings of the BBC broadcast have been banished, and the BBC banned in all public spaces. The regime doesn’t just want to black out the city but to silence it.

  Kawsar’s heart wavers between recrimination and understanding. Times have changed so deeply; life had been cheap, easy and slow-paced, but now it is cheap in another way, certainly not easy and the hours of darkness have been stolen and made dangerous. People are made to scuttle about in the daytime, trying to live full lives in half their allotted time. The shops are bare as the subsidised rice and flour have disappeared to allow the government to obtain more foreign loans; instead of home-grown maize and sorghum, sacks of USAID donations smuggled in from the refugee camps are on sale in the market at ridiculous prices.

  Nurto shoves a chipped enamel bowl into Kawsar’s hands. Inside is her daily meal: chopped tomatoes, onions, coriander, chillies drenched in lemon juice and bulked up with the boiled rice that the girl insists on. ‘I don’t want anyone saying that I’m not feeding you,’ she says, raising an eyebrow accusingly.

  Kawsar does not want the rice; it dilutes the intense, sharp flavours that feed her memories. Chillies she had first eaten in a restaurant in Mogadishu that Farah had taken her to. She had planted a lemon tree in their new police residence in Salahley and added home-grown coriander to every one of his dishes because he loved it so much. She craves tart flavours that suck emotion out of her; even her tea is over-spiced with ginger, cinnamon, cardamom – just like the concoctions she had made while breastfeeding. She doesn’t want food that prolongs her life; she only wants to sustain her soul while it remains in her body.

  ‘I’m going to a wedding now, I’ll be back in a few hours,’ Nurto says, placing a glass of water on the bedside table.

  ‘A wedding? At this time?’

  ‘Yes, the curfew, remember. We have to be in by seven.’

  Kawsar rolls her eyes to the sky. ‘Oh, I remember.’

  Nurto’s face is hidden as she struggles to squeeze into a black sequinned top and emerald trousers that balloon out at the hips and taper in at her bony ankles. They are whodead, that she has bought from the suuq. The rumour goes that foreign corpses are stripped down and the garments they breathed their last in are sold in the local markets.

  ‘I wouldn’t be attracting anyone’s eyes to legs like those,’ laughs Kawsar. ‘A man wants a woman with sturdy ankles, not those scrawny minjayow.’

  ‘Do you want anything from outside?’

  ‘No, just don’t break your ankles on those ridiculous shoes, there isn’t room for another invalid here.’ Nurto has slipped into her wooden platforms and is clomping her way to the door, trying not to hold her arms out for balance.

  ‘Nabadgelyo,’ shouts Nurto before banging the door behind her.

  ‘Silly girl.’ Kawsar laughs, but her smile withers when she catches sight of her reflection in the mirror. It looks as if a coconut has been coddled in many blankets, her face a blinking blurry smudge in the dingy room, her once thick black hair now as short and fine as a baby’s. It had nearly all fallen out after Farah’s death and now just grows in white patches over her scalp. She pulls a blanket over her eyes.

  Kawsar opens one eye. Hodan is asleep beside her, sealed-eyed, puffy lipped, damp hair flattened against the pillow, her drool seeping onto her hand and thin snores whistling through the gap in her front teeth. Kawsar wipes the saliva away and pulls her child against her chest. The light through the window is the skin of a golden apple. In a moment Hodan will stir awake and look cantankerously from the floor to the ceiling and across to the window, trying to place herself, her soul settling back into its tight frame. The siesta sky framed in the window is pink and mauve in places with thin slivers of cloud stretched languidly across it, their edges metallic from the low rays of the copper sun. If only it could be spread out, cut-up and stitched, she would make a quilt from it for Hodan to spread over her on cold, dark nights in the cemetery.

  Kawsar wakes to find the room dark and stars brightening through the iron bars of the window above her bed. There are a few wispy clouds trailing across the sky, the night breeze cooler than usual, playfully rifling through the prescriptions on the table. She pulls the blankets up to her chin, closes her eyes and breathes in the jasmine, honeysuckle, moonflowers and the desert flower wahara-waalis that she had planted long ago in the orchard behind her bungalow. This is the only contact that she has with her precious orchard now – the frail caress of its scent when the wind is b
lowing in the right direction. The pomegranate, guava and papaya trees are left to Nurto’s crude mercy; Kawsar knows that she will only throw a bucket of dirty water at the gasping roots. Maryam reports that the tomatoes have withered, the green chillies yellowed, the okra been consumed by lizards. Only the trees have survived. Her spirit is tied up in those trees; she feels her roots contracting as they die.

  Nurto has been seduced by an Indian trader, thinks Kawsar. New, musky perfumes come from the girl and she spends a mysterious amount of time in the washroom, the slosh of water and the smell of soap penetrating the bedroom. The Singhe-Singhes are an accursedly lustful lot with their winking, kohl-smudged eyes and rough, turmeric-stained hands groping at girls in the suuq. Their women had left along with the British at Independence in 1960, departing as swiftly as they had arrived in one big throng like birds, jewel-hued saris flying behind them like tail feathers. The husbands – fabric merchants, suuq-wallahs and civil servants – who remained in the Indian Line quarter, play cricket on the bare, cracked earth and chase Somali girls with the tirelessness of tomcats.

  ‘Whose benefit is all this for? A trader?’ Kawsar asks, as Nurto skips across the cement floor, leaving thin, wet footprints.

  ‘Can’t I even wash without you making a fuss?’ Her hair is a damp rope untwining against her left breast; she squeezes the end and wipes her hand on her leaf-printed diric. She is filling out, blooming into womanhood, hips, breasts and bottom grown full with halwa and dates.