The Orchard of Lost Souls

by Nadifa Mohamed

  It would have been different if Hodan had been a more aggressive child, one who could turn her anger and pain outwards towards others. In the playground at Hodan’s school the boys wore steel-capped shoes and before class they would gather into a knot and kick each other’s shins, the winner being the boy who survived the longest in the fray. It was not unusual for eleven- and twelve-year-olds to settle a squabble with a razorblade secreted under their sleeve. The teachers could whip, kick and punch their students as much as they pleased, but if they went too far then a parent would come in and square off with them. Violence was an article of faith nowadays, accepted and rewarded at every level; there wasn’t room for the gentle or thoughtful. Just amongst her neighbours, Kawsar witnessed toddlers being pushed into fights by their older siblings; Hodan was once jumped by a group of girls for no other reason than they envied her new shoes. She ran home with a tear in her shirt, her hair ripped out of its braids, a bleeding scratch from her nose to her cheek, but what upset her most was the state of her exercise books, which had been torn and stamped upon. She didn’t want Kawsar to replace the books or find the girls’ mothers so that they would be punished, she just shook with grief for her once immaculate books; there was no vengeance in her, but that magnanimity was perceived as weakness, as bloodlessness by adults and children alike. She was ‘cowardly’, ‘not right’, they said. Dahabo had tried to teach her how to argue, to cuss, to fight, because Kawsar was just as meek as her daughter. Dahabo cuffed and teased Hodan to fire a reaction but it didn’t work, the girl just hid behind her mother and waited for Dahabo to leave her alone. When she did succumb to violence it was against herself.

  Nurto returns after washing the dishes and doesn’t mention the protest; instead she sits calmly on her mattress and pores over photographs in an Indian magazine given to her by the market trader. She examines the hair, eyebrows, make-up and henna of the actresses under the glow of the feynuus, furrowing her eyebrows as if hard at work, wondering how she can recreate these looks with her sparse equipment. She tears out the pages with the most beautiful women in the magazines and keeps them under her pillow, as if she hopes their splendour will seep into her as she sleeps, her dreams probably tinted red and gold like the pictures.

  A new moon has just been born, fragile and slender in its nursery of stars, and Kawsar gazes at it as she whispers a prayer for Hodan’s soul.

  She remains awake long after Nurto has turned off the lamp and fallen asleep. She only succumbs to drowsiness when she hears Maryam English’s children leaving for school at seven, the crunch of their sandals loud in her ears, their reddish hair gliding past her windowsill. Kawsar falls asleep with her cheek bathed in a ray of sunlight.

  The front door swings on its hinges; Kawsar likes it open for a quarter of an hour in the morning, to sweep the fetid smell of her bandages and old breath from the room. The wound from the compound fracture of her hip is still festering, itching away under the cotton gauze, and she scratches it with the end of her caday, the tooth stick bumping over glossy, stitched skin. In quiet moments like these she often feels her heart skip a beat as she remembers the soldier’s distant eyes as she beat her to the floor.

  ‘You can’t hurt me,’ she says repeatedly, her breathing slowly returning to normal.

  The strip of street life visible from her bed is dreamlike, rushing past like film spinning wildly from its spool: dogs, goats, infants with bare bottoms, the speechless extras of life appearing within the frame of the door and then deliquescing into the world beyond.

  From the window opposite the video hall she sometimes hears the older neighbourhood children talking in hushed voices, and in secondhand whodead clothes their younger siblings re-enact the dramas that their parents try to hide from them. Kawsar once – in her upright days – had watched as a girl in overalls arrested a cowboy, while a bridesmaid and diminutive nurse barked orders at her, sticks pointed in place of guns. They watch videos for ten shillings in Zahra’s little cinema and come pouring out afterwards, imitating the flourishes and facial acrobatics of Amitabh Bachchan or throwing karate moves stolen from Bruce Lee. She can hear them now, scuff-kneed boys and girls organising the rescue of uncles from Mandera prison, planning heists of Midland bank so their parents can pay their taxes, and swearing vengeance against the policemen who ransack their homes. The NFM is full of the older versions of these children, leaving town hidden in the boots of cars when sticks can no longer stand in for guns. The whole country has ceased to make sense to Kawsar – policewomen have become torturers, veterinarians doctors, teachers spies and children armed rebels.

  Nurto is in the bathroom; the price of her not attending the student protest is that she has a free morning, and so far she has used it to paint her nails and apply henna to her hair.

  The four walls of Kawsar’s bedroom seem to close in a little each day. Holes in the roof let rainwater trail down the blue paint leaving ghostly tears, as if the room is mourning all the deaths it has witnessed. First, her mother had curled up into a small ball of pain and within days of moving from her own bungalow had become mute and helpless, dying with her eyes clenched as if she had wished it herself. Farah, at an august fifty-five years of age, had died within hours of complaining of chest pain, too quickly for the doctor to finish his shift at the hospital and attend to him; sweat pouring from his face and back, he clenched at his heart and arm and begged for water, cup after cup. Hodan had witnessed these deaths, her huge eyes picturing every detail as she hovered around Kawsar’s legs, intermittently squeezing them as if to say ‘be strong, Hooyo, be strong’. Kawsar had been strong but then her child had taken a knife and cored her.

  The shock when Kawsar woke to an empty house and couldn’t find Hodan in the orchard or courtyard was melded with relief that she had remembered a world existed beyond their walls. She waited happily until lunchtime for Hodan to return, expecting her to have left for the market to buy the day’s supplies. When the sun passed its zenith and began to drop, Kawsar’s mood sank with it. She asked the neighbours if they had seen her but they were ignorant of her whereabouts; she ran to Dahabo’s stall to see if Hodan had visited her but left disappointed. Returning home, she opened the wardrobe to discover a holdall had disappeared along with some of Hodan’s clothes, and she realised that the falling night would find her alone in the house. Dahabo escorted her to the police station that same evening to report Hodan as missing, all the while assuring her that her daughter would be home by morning. Throughout that clear, full-moon night Kawsar had waited, ears pricked for footsteps, until the sun lit up neon lights in the slats of the shutters.

  Hodan did not return for ninety-two days. She did not tell Kawsar or anyone else where she had been or what she had seen, but two weeks later she took a can of gasoline and a box of matches into the bathroom and set herself on fire. The image of her bald head, marbled skin, and grinning, skeletal face has never left Kawsar. It was with anger that she had buried that husk when those accursed fluttering eyelids had finally stilled. What sin had she committed to deserve such punishment? Even if Hodan had become a whore selling her body in the street the humiliation could not have been greater. It was years later that Kawsar had learnt young girls were doing this to themselves nowadays, torching themselves in washrooms and courtyards before their lives had even begun.

  She had given away all of Hodan’s clothes and possessions, and most of the gold jewellery that Kawsar had collected for her marriage was sold and the money given to the orphanage. The sheets that still smelt of her body lotion were thrown out and replaced. The anger dissipated slowly over months but never left, burning under her like a bed of coals.

  Kawsar wakes slowly from her drug-induced slumber and listens for Nurto’s movements to fix the time of day. There is silence until Nurto slams open the door from orchard to kitchen and dumps the shopping on the floor. Kawsar listens to her footsteps rushing to the wet room and then the roar of water and banging pipes as the water tank empties into the tap. Appearing later wrapp
ed in a towel and dripping water from her nose and ears, Nurto shivers uncontrollably.

  ‘Wrap yourself properly.’ Kawsar throws a blanket to her.

  Nurto scrunches the blanket in her hands and holds it to her chest ‘They . . .’ she says through chartering teeth.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The soldiers . . . to see . . . so everyone could see them.’

  ‘What do you mean? Who hurt you?’ Kawsar shouts, already imagining Nurto stripped naked in the street.

  ‘Not me, not me. Nomads.’

  Kawsar falls back on her pillow slightly. ‘In town?’

  ‘They dumped eight dead men down by the market, I saw one with intestines hanging out of a hole in his stomach.’ Nurto looks bilious and huddles on her mattress.

  ‘Did no one come to claim the bodies?’

  Nurto shakes her head.

  Kawsar can imagine the discussions of the wives and mothers of the nomads as they seek out the whereabouts of their loved ones, asking first the neighbours, then acquaintances and eventually the police. But what distances must those women contend with? Their little homes surrounded by nothing but mountains and rocks, each reer a planet of its own. She used to meet the men on the minibus to the suuq, carefully counting out the shillings of their discounted fare while exuding a pride that the townsmen had lost. The old turbaned men were often straight-backed and hawk-faced, with robes that fell off their delicate bones; they hadn’t had to contend with the Guddi or curfew or forced parades, but now the regime had turned its attention to them too.

  ‘Have a rest, let it pass from your mind,’ Kawsar soothes. Each day there is another outrage and it frightens her to see Nurto’s reaction.

  After an hour Kawsar sends Nurto to Zahra’s video hall to watch a Hindi film and to take her mind off what she has seen. She sits propped up in bed and cools herself with a black lacquered fan that Farah had given her once, strands of her fine hair stirring in its draught. The air outside is heavy, still, static with compressed electricity. The Gu rains are approaching, belatedly making their way from the rainforests of Congo over the highlands of Ethiopia to fall on the parched, burnt land of Somalia. The sun up beyond the mauve clouds is hidden away but its heat is still capable of drawing sweat from the creases in Kawsar’s skin.

  The rainstorms so far have been half-hearted, rushing away just as they start; when the real rains come they are relentless, pouring through the roof and flooding the streets until it appears as though the bungalows are at sea. They are a manifestation of a year’s worth of prayers, a deluge of nomad’s wishes. Only such a violent country could deserve such violent rain; it doesn’t dapple against waxy leaves, it churns up the earth like artillery destroying roads in a few hours. Children are sometimes swept along with the torrent, their bodies found miles away alongside drowned cows and mangled bicycles. From desperate drought to desperate flood, it seems as if Somalis can only expect disaster.

  The flood she had seen in the far south in the sixties had seemed like divine punishment: water deep enough to submerge palm trees, minarets, telegraph poles, and within it swam crocodiles, water snakes, whole families of disgruntled hippos. She recalls standing on Farah’s Land Rover on a hill looking down on villages where maybe only one or two straw roofs were above the water, men, women, children marooned on them. All across the agricultural areas fed by the Juba and Shebelle the scene was repeated, a year’s harvest rotting underneath the invisible soil. It was the first time the young country had needed to beg the former colonial rulers, and since then the government hasn’t stopped asking; from floods to famines to tractors and x-ray machines, prayer mats turned to the west and knees bent in supplication.

  Ever since the Italians and British had gone, the country had seemed besieged by difficulties, whether natural, economic or political. The Europeans must have left a bone-deep curse as they were departing, raising long-dead jinns like Oodweyne in their wake to turn everything to sand and waste. Kawsar remembers meeting him briefly in Mogadishu while he was still a junior officer and Farah was deputy district commissioner of Baidoa, and he had been completely ordinary no sense of promise or even malice about him, balding at a young age – that was the only thing she noticed about him. How time plays its jokes. It raises dwarves and hobbles giants – how else could Farah be in the ground and Oodweyne on a throne? He had slipped into power almost unseen following the assassination of the last elected president and his voice when it appeared on the radio was always ominous to her; it took her back to those five days in sixty-nine after the President had been shot dead by his bodyguard and Radio Hargeisa broadcasted Qu’ranic recitations non-stop, the schools and offices closed in mourning while she recovered in bed from one of her miscarriages.

  The surprise she had felt on the sixth day when at nine a.m. a jaunty announcement declared a military coup and a new name for the country, the Somali Democratic Republic, had never left her but lay at the bottom of all the other bewildering events that succeeded it: the imprisonment of the Prime Minister, the abolishment of both parliament and constitution, the takeover of the country by the Supreme Revolutionary Council with Oodweyne as its chairman. Farah had been one of the few to voice his opposition; he called the new leaders ‘cuckoos’ and cut off contact with friends who said they preferred military rule to the chaos of democracy. Kawsar, a typical woman in Farah’s eyes, just wanted peace and for the situation to be as stable as possible.

  The junta introduced a Somali alphabet, organised volunteers to build schools, hospitals, roads, repair the stadium in Hargeisa, told people to forget their clan names and call each other comrade. Then they lost the war and revealed their true nature. She wishes she could speak to Farah and tell him, ‘You were right, I admit it, they’re intolerable,’ but that would mean him seeing how everything had fallen apart in his absence: Hodan gone, his wife old and crippled, the house dirty and decayed, his old friends either dead, in jail or lost to qat and alcohol. The resistance that he had called for was now led by children, and in the lapsed time the regime had grown such deep roots, like the weeds in the ditch, that she feared everything would have to be torn up to remove it.

  The signal from Radio NFM is suddenly stronger, the voices crisp in the night air; no longer are they ghosts speaking from a world beyond, their snappy Hargeisa accents clear and confident. Kawsar turns down the volume until they are barely audible. Nurto is dressed in one of Kawsar’s old floral nightgowns, a chaste long-sleeved thing that becomes completely transparent when the light is behind it; Farah had bought it for Kawsar and she imagines his eyes consuming her body the way hers now consume Nurto’s.

  There is a different atmosphere at night now; they are like roommates rather than mistress and servant. Comfortable in each other’s smells and habits, they don’t turn their backs on one another anymore. They foray into small intimacies, nibbling away at the distance that yawns between their ages and circumstances. What Kawsar really wants to know is if Nurto has any plans to marry soon. The girl seems ready, has the small pimples that teenage girls get when their bodies are ripe for love, her sighs at night heavy with lonesomeness.

  ‘Did you hear any more from your American friend?’ Kawsar asks after the radio programme has slipped into static, empty air.

  ‘No, he is at Saba’ad taking pictures of the refugees. I haven’t seen him in weeks.’

  ‘Are you interested in him?’

  Nurto turns her face away. ‘I don’t think he is serious.’

  ‘He will return to his own country, you shouldn’t let him get under your skin, you are better off with someone of your own culture and language.’

  ‘What was your husband like?’

  ‘Clever, tall, stubborn, honest, always trying to learn something . . .’

  Nurto cuts her off. ‘Was he rich?’

  ‘He worked hard and became rich, those wardrobes are full of the clothes he bought me.’

  ‘Hmm. That’s the kind of life I want.’

  ‘It’s certainly good for a
while, but shopping is not enough to build a life on.’

  ‘Those women in the suuq with maids behind them carrying their bags seem happy to me.’

  ‘Of course, you expect them to tell you about their jealousy of a second wife or their worry that they will never deliver a son for their husbands.’

  ‘That can all happen if you’re as poor as mud. I’d rather have worries like that with cash in my pocket than have ten sons and nothing to give them but black tea.’

  ‘Be careful what you say, God is always listening and he will test you.’

  ‘Let him test me with money, that’s a test I will happily take.’

  ‘Did you only have black tea at home?’

  ‘Sometimes, when Mother was sick. It got better when we were pulled out of school and each had jobs.’

  Kawsar has never known that kind of life. The only hunger pangs she felt were self-inflicted, when her mind turned away from food to focus on other concerns; she enjoyed the pleasurable light-headedness she found in an empty stomach, but maybe half of that pleasure was knowing that a fully stocked kitchen was only a few steps away. From childhood onwards her meals appeared each day at the same time to demand her attention and she fought stubbornly against their tyranny. She ate what she wanted and only when she wanted it. When street boys begged at her mother’s door, she would thrust her plate out and offer them the contents as if she could live on air alone.