Farah had returned late in the afternoon. He glanced towards the bed but didn’t ask what had happened; he sat in his chair in silence and read a newspaper while she pretended to sleep with her face to the wall. He warmed up a beef stew bought from the dirty men’s café he frequented and placed a bowl beside her. His fingers grazed her upper arm. ‘Kawsar, you should eat to replace the blood you lost, you need iron,’ he said, trying to turn her face to him.
She pulled back, mumbled something, the smell of the stew made her stomach turn. Her own raw flesh had so recently been cut up; she could imagine it diced, tenderised and seasoned. She recognised the dense smell of abattoirs on her stiff, floral-patterned sheets. Farah kept his distance but the room was thick with green-eyed flies. A pad of cotton between her thighs oozed with dark, blackened blood and once every few hours Farah tentatively reached in and replaced the pad, rushing away with it and washing his hands for a long time in the bathroom, his fingers reeking of antiseptic when he returned. He must compare her to other women, she told herself, clean women who delivered healthy, thick-jowled babies one after the other and jumped to their feet within a few hours to cook the next meal. The spectre of a second wife seemed more real with every miscarriage and stillborn. His relations must be whispering words into his ear, pointing to beautiful, young girls with ripe breasts and wide hips and saying, ‘Why not? Why not?’ Why not, indeed. Maybe she could help with the teenager’s child – bathe it, sit with it while she went to the suuq with friends, stroke its fat cheeks when it whimpered in sleep.
After Hodan had died and been buried in the formal, desolate cemetery in town she had turned maniacally to her orchard, forcing life into every spare inch of it, her nails broken and lined with dirt, the knees of her dirics stained brown. She had planted every flower she could name and taken cuttings from some that she couldn’t, had helped herself to the gardens that the English had once established; neighbours brought her seeds instead of mourning gifts thinking she was unduly concerned with supporting herself in her old age, only for them to marvel at the ripe, swollen fruit rotting where it fell. Her orchard was a spot of colour visible from the sky; it perfumed the winds of the jiilaal and sent its scent from house to house on October Road. When she had begun weeding, digging, sowing, watering beyond her own land and into the trash-strewn roadside bordering her house, Dahabo had pulled her inside, sat her on the bed and told her it was time to stop.
Even now a perimeter of fire-red flowers rings her exterior walls, reminding her of that time. Her orchard has become a mark on the local map, the canopied alleyway beside it a place for late-night romantic assignations. It marks the central point of Guryo Samo, the heart from which arterial roads lead away to the extremities of the neighbourhood. What mysterious animals must be nosing through its undergrowth at this hour, she wonders; she has never seen it this late and feels a sudden stab at the realisation that she never will. She could wake Nurto up and demand that she carry her over but there would be no pleasure then; it needed solitude and unhurried time to watch the night-blooming flowers quietly yawn, and for the rustle of the grass to be heard over the owls, dogs and cicadas. She would wait until all those delights could be felt in her bones through the earth.
The rains had spit their last and now it was time for the jiilaal, the harsh dry season that lasts from December until March. It only sends sand devils through the streets in Hargeisa, but for the nomads it is a time of thirst and suffering. Nineteen eighty-seven fades to a close and the new year slides in, as grey and lifeless as the censored comedies on the radio. Each night Kawsar prays that Oodweyne is dead before the dawn and that her own leaf then gently drops too. But each morning he is still alive, unaffected by old age or her curses.
It is weeks since she last saw Dahabo, but she still stubbornly ignores her knocks on the door when she turns up at the bungalow. She hears Dahabo’s voice sometimes from the courtyard when she waylays Nurto on her return from the market and they whisper conspiratorially about her, Nurto occasionally sneaking things out to her and denying it afterwards. It is easier to not see her again than to see and touch and speak with her knowing she will soon be gone. The prophesied siege of the town is yet to come but Nurto reports that Dahabo has closed her shop in the market and sold her home. Kawsar feels more jealousy and possessiveness towards Dahabo than she ever did towards her husband; she wants to be able to walk around the market with her again, holding hands and leading each other safely across the roads. If that cannot be then she will cause Dahabo as much pain as she can for deserting her.
She has sent Nurto to the market to have new clothes made and while waiting for her return Kawsar stares at her hands, wondering why it has been so long since she put them to work. She might still knit, sew or weave to occupy the minutes, hours, days, weeks and months she still has left. Closing her eyes she imagines taking a square of indigo calico and with silver thread in tent stitch creating a nightscape with an almost full moon at its centre obscured by the shadows of clouds. She is startled from her musing by a cacophonous rush of voices and feet from the street, hears Maryam English calling out, ‘Get back here now . . . Fine then, wait and see what happens to you when you get back!’
The stampede fades away and Kawsar raises her body up to the window above her head and shouts, ‘Maryam, why are you hollering?’
A moment’s pause and then Maryam pushes open the door looking dishevelled and aggrieved. ‘My stupid son has run off with the others.’
‘Where to?’
Maryam sighs. ‘To the theatre. The Guddi called all the neighbours to come and watch the trial of some poor men the soldiers captured.’
‘It’s the theatre now, is it?’
Maryam laughs derisively. ‘Well, I guess we are all just actors and all of this a stage. I don’t know about you but I wear these torn clothes as costumes and drop false tears into my eyes when I weep.’
Kawsar smiles. ‘And when there is no audience I get up and dance to the radio.’
‘We all know about that.’ Maryam points a finger in mock castigation.
‘Do we know the men?’
‘No, I didn’t recognise the names, but maybe they’re actors too, playing their parts.’
‘I hope for their sake they are.’
‘I’m going to go on a protest tomorrow with the students.’ Nurto breaks the silence later in the evening with this declaration. ‘To make them stop the executions at Birjeeh.’
‘You are not going, Nurto. I forbid it.’
‘I’ll go whether you like it or not.’
Kawsar points her cup at her. ‘If you go there tomorrow, don’t bother coming back. I will ask Maryam to pack up your things and leave them outside.’
‘How can you say that? I am trying to help!’
‘You don’t know the danger you are putting yourself in. I do, and while you are under my roof I am your guardian, whether you like it or not,’ Kawsar says vehemently, spilling hot tea onto her thighs.
‘Everything I do is wrong in your eyes, it’s like you want the ground to eat me up or something.’
‘That’s not true, Nurto. If I didn’t care I would let you go. Just trust me when I say I know more about this than you, I have learnt bitterly what can happen.’
Kawsar turns over the sequence of events that had led Hodan from the classroom to the graveyard, unsure which portion if any to divulge to Nurto. ‘Am I not proof enough of what they are capable of?’ she says eventually, leaving her pain undisturbed.
Nurto shrugs, aloof, and then takes the dirty dishes to the kitchen.
Kawsar rests her cup on the bedside table and rubs the wet stain on her blanket with a shawl. It was strange now to think that this bland little bungalow had once seen so much drama, that life with Hodan towards the end was like a Hindi film, full of fateful misunderstandings and tragedy. The first scene would have been that last morning of normality in February 1982, when Hodan left for school in her pink uniform and Kawsar watched her walk alone down the wintry stre
et to Guryo Samo Middle School. The fact that the Hargeisa hospital doctors were about to be sentenced at the courthouse that day had meant little to her; her mind was preoccupied with errands she needed to run before her daughter came home for lunch at noon. When Kawsar had returned from the market with new school shoes under her arm she had found all of her neighbours on the street in a knot. They were talking loudly and incoherently hands on hips, until Maryam shouted to her, ‘They have sentenced all the doctors to death and now the students have gone wild.’ Kawsar shook her head in disbelief – there must have been some misunderstanding or exaggeration. How could they execute ten doctors for organising a clean-up of the hospital? At most they would be fired for making their superiors appear inefficient. As the morning progressed the news from her neighbours got steadily worse: protestors had been shot and killed near the courthouse; hundreds of schoolchildren were abandoning their classrooms and massing outside the police station to throw stones; soldiers were being drafted in to support the police.
Kawsar left her half-peeled vegetables in a basin and marched to the school to bring Hodan home. The single-storey building was deserted, the teachers’ canes redundant in their hands. ‘She has gone with the other rebels,’ her teacher kept saying, but Kawsar checked all the classrooms expecting to find Hodan reading quietly by herself. By the time she reached the town centre it was hard to see any students in the crush of anguished relatives, the police station gate was shut and a barricade of soldiers pushed the crowd back with sticks. Later, much later in the afternoon, she heard that the girls were all locked up inside the police station while the boys had been taken to the military headquarters, Birjeeh.
The police station gates remained closed all day and night, and the parents were not allowed to see the children or bring food. The anger on the policemen’s faces, spirting as they yelled at them to go away, made Kawsar wonder what they were doing to the girls behind the walls. Kawsar staggered home in tears, dragged away by Dahabo whose children had all left school years before. ‘I don’t blame them. We adults have been too docile,’ she had said. ‘You should be proud of her, Kawsar.’ But there was nothing to be proud of. Kawsar knew that Hodan wasn’t interested in politics; she must have followed her classmates to change how they saw her – the old woman’s daughter who was never allowed to play outside.
For the three nights Hodan was in prison Kawsar did not sleep. She rose at dawn to wait outside the prison gates as one by one girls were released into their mothers’ arms, and as she walked home alone each day at sunset, she would hand the bowl of cold iskukaris in her arms to a beggar. Her life had no shape without her daughter. She waited obediently outside the station, craning her neck over the barbed wire to try to see through the narrow windows.
Eventually, Hodan was spat out, looking no better than a street girl, her face filthy, her hair matted, her uniform grimy. Kawsar hailed a taxi and bundled her in before anyone could take her away again. Hodan hid her head in her mother’s lap and didn’t utter a word. She rushed into the shower at home, not bothering to heat the water on the stove, and then fell asleep in the bed they shared. Kawsar crept in beside her, slid the sheets gently away and checked her body for injuries. There were small bruises on her thighs, four on each leg the size and shape of grapes; she replaced the sheets and squeezed her into her arms, hoping against hope that what she feared hadn’t happened.
The morning after her release, over a breakfast of liver and canjeero, Kawsar edged the conversation to what had happened to Hodan inside the station.
‘Nothing,’ Hodan said, not looking up from her plate.
‘Nothing at all? Didn’t they interrogate you?’ Kawsar kept her voice soft, on the right side of curious.
‘Just a few questions, not much . . .’ She seemed to stuff her mouth to stop the words.
‘They were furious with us for even waiting outside. I was scared for you.’
Hodan left the plate half-finished and washed her hands clean.
‘Have a rest today, you can return to school tomorrow.’
‘I’m not going back to school.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want to see any of them.’
‘But they all went through it too . . .’
‘Leave me, Hooyo, leave me be,’ she snapped, before hiding in the bathroom.
After a week’s absence the teacher came to speak to Hodan but she refused to see him. He then sent around three girls from the class who brought her a tin of halwa, and they conversed secretly in the orchard and tore the sweet slab apart with their fingers, while Kawsar strained her ears from the kitchen. She couldn’t gather anything from the few intelligible words she heard, but watching their backs through the kitchen, she noticed how small Hodan was in comparison to the other girls, how much her birdlike spine had stooped from reading too many books. Ethiopian bombers were still flying over Hargeisa, reminding the government and population that they had lost the war even years after it had ended, and she called the girls inside in case one appeared, as if the bungalow might save them.
The girls left without having convinced Hodan to return to class. Kawsar watched her daughter wash her sticky hands again and again in the bathroom and felt all language leave her. The relationship between them, which had been so intimate and supple, was now brittle. From the minute Hodan was born Kawsar had breathed in her scent as if it was the air that kept her alive. Her beauty and fragility made something contract inside her mother. Kawsar had been jealous of Farah when she watched Hodan on his knee, following the sentences on the page that he was reading with her finger. It felt as if he was stealing time from her but when Farah passed just after Hodan’s ninth birthday Kawsar proudly watched her take his place in the chair and carry on reading his books. Mother and daughter had always communicated through touches and kisses and slept huddled in the same bed, but had lost that easy communion in a single moment. If she said the word they had both left unspoken it seemed as if everything would break, that the pretence of calm would be eternally lost, that shame would replace everything else in their lives. Hodan simply refused to leave the house and Kawsar acquiesced rather than force the words from her lips.
The first sign of Hodan’s illness had been the silent speech, like prayers spoken under the breath but disconnected from any purpose. Not a simple bismallah before taking the first bite of a meal or an ashahaado at bedtime, but long, hurried sentences that seemed full of dread, her eyes squeezed shut as if she was making gut-deep declarations of innocence or blood-soaked oaths. Kawsar pretended not to notice, but her eyes slid away from the stitching in her hand or from her ironing to her daughter, huddled in a corner as distant as the furthest, coldest star in the sky. Then came her questions, always smelling faintly of accusation, her eyes now wide open, as watchful as an owl’s. Not even the smallest twitch or reaction could escape her notice and she paid greater attention to these involuntary movements than the words that she seemed to believe were all lies anyway. Some of Hodan’s questions seemed benign, banal: she just wanted to know why Kawsar had waited so long before having a child. But no answer seemed to satisfy and the question would be rephrased and repeated the next day, the next week, the next month.
Then came the obsessive cleaning, her hands scrubbed until the skin began to blister and peel. Kawsar would lay out a plate and spoon before lunch and Hodan would wash both again before she ate with them – that is while she still shared cutlery with her mother, before that dawn-blue tin bowl appeared with a separate spoon to go with it. The little girl who was weaned on meat softened in her mother’s mouth now seemed disgusted by her touch, but remained too pampered to cook for herself, the charcoal stove too cumbersome for her to bother with.
Kawsar accepted it all, pretended not to see when Hodan hit her own temple with a furious fist as if trying to knock difficult thoughts out of her head. Her first concern had been to protect Hodan from predatory boys, those stray dogs that could sniff out vulnerability from the other side of town. She was gr
owing into her body faster than she was developing in her mind. Kawsar began to understand why those Arab women in Mogadishu covered their daughters all in black with only a slit for the eyes; it could serve as a chrysalis until their girls were ready for the heat of men’s eyes. Hodan still seemed too young; her breasts looked ridiculous on her narrow chest, and she had the brown-glazed teeth of a child who couldn’t keep their fingers out of the biscuit tin. It would take another decade for her to appear anything like a grown woman, but still boys in uniform lingered outside the bungalow gate after school trying to watch Hodan through the windows. One day Kawsar lost her composure and threw a shoe at one of those dogs, aimed the wedged sole at his face, hoping to blind the scoundrel, and he in return had thrown a stone back at her, hitting her in the ribs. That was the beginning of the end, the transition from control to anarchy, from hope to despair, from decency to shame.
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 13