The Orchard of Lost Souls

by Nadifa Mohamed

  ‘Poor Maryam.’

  Nurto shakes her head but doesn’t reply.

  Take this.’ Kawsar removes a roll of notes from under her pillow.

  Nurto kisses the back of Kawsar’s hand as she takes the money. No tears come to their eyes. She wedges a chair under the handle of the front door, picks up her canvas bag full of clothes and toiletries, and leaves through the back door in the kitchen. Kawsar knows that she is brave enough to climb over the high orchard wall. She regrets the shards of glass she has embedded along the top to deter thieves. Nurto, bleeding or not, will have to creep through the bushes and farms beside the ditch until she reaches her family’s shack in north Hargeisa.

  The tanks start to fire, a blast of heat accompanies every mortar. Kawsar puts her fingers in her ears but the rattle penetrates her skull. A plume of dust billows in from the windows, carpeting everything in plaster and sand. Kawsar stretches a hand over the jug but still the water is contaminated.

  The tanks blow their way down the street cloaked in a white pall of smoke. Kawsar props herself up on her elbows and looks through the side window. Her neighbours try to flee, hidden in a haze of cement dust, but bright sandals and dresses give them away and the soldiers drop to their knees and shoot at the ghostly figures. Overhead there is the groan of a plane’s engines and then sweeping down from the direction of the airport she sees a MIG with the Somali flag on each of its wings. Kawsar feels the air swarm about her and steal the breath from her lungs as missiles peel off the clanging tin roofs of the neighbourhood.

  She collapses back onto the bed and pulls a blanket over her face, fearing that a bomb will explode through her roof in a matter of seconds. Both she and Guryo Samo have reached the end of their time; the soldiers will return the street to the desert, unplug the stars, shoot the dogs and extinguish the sun in a well.

  FILSAN

  Filsan spends her days in Hargeisa but the nights in the city she misses so much that she wakes with its spicy marine scent in her hair. Mogadishu the beautiful – your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean – you are missed, her dreams seem to say The memories cleave to her ribs like barnacles. She feels an exile but doesn’t understand what keeps her here: ambition, a desire for change, a need to escape from her father – it doesn’t seem enough to make her stay away.

  Filsan is alone, untouched, forgotten. She opens her eyes with her hand on her stomach, imagining the hand is someone else’s. There is no use shaving her underarms, legs or privates because there is no one to see them; only her own fingertips run along her thighs. Once upon a time men had called for her and made their intentions known to her father, but he had ridiculed them, and she too had nothing but contempt for their preening flattery; they had no interest or knowledge of her as a human being, just that she was his daughter. She wanted someone who wouldn’t ask his permission but would strip him down to the old, insignificant man that he was, who would just take her away, but it was becoming too late for anyone to want to spirit her anywhere; things like that happened to seventeen-year-old girls, not women with frown lines deepening on their foreheads.

  Filsan rises and takes her uniform from the peg on the door; she is up ten minutes before the alarm but doesn’t want to remain with her thoughts, simultaneously mulling over everything and nothing. She pulls her tunic over her head and her trousers over her legs. A quick visit to the bathroom and then she is beside the stove in the communal kitchen, the wall above her blackened with soot, the smell of meat and ghee still in the air from the previous night. Water boils in her saucepan, tea leaves, cardamom pods and cloves shivering on the surface; as it’s about to bubble over she grabs the handle and pours just enough to fill her enamel cup. She tips in three spoonfuls of sugar and then washes and dries her saucepan before locking it away in her cupboard. She is naturally untrusting, but has become obsessive about securing her possessions in these barracks; the other women have no shame in stealing underwear from the clothesline, dishes from the kitchen, and soap from the sink. Their rations are reduced not by rats in the storeroom but by fellow soldiers who cut into the rice sacks or tap holes into the vats of oil. Filsan wishes she could report the culprits, but they are hidden behind a culture of venality; in the local police stations wealthy prisoners are allowed to ‘rent’ a cell, paying the guards to let them spend their days free and only returning at night for a snooze. They have no concern for the country or the revolution; it is simply a case of what they can get for themselves.

  She drinks the tea immediately its heat scorching her throat in a way she finds pleasant. This is the entirety of her breakfast. She has never been taught to cook; her father preferred her to concentrate on her studies and leave the domestic work to the maids, but now she wishes that she could rustle something up rather than depending on take-out food. Looking around the dark kitchen and hearing the gurgle of her stomach, Filsan feels like an orphaned child rather than just a motherless one. Back home, her housekeeper Intisaar would have covered the dining table with a vinyl sheet decorated with small yellow flowers and laid out a flask of black tea, a jug of orange juice, a fruit salad of mangoes, papayas and bananas, a plateful of laxoox hidden under a domed fly guard, and if her father had requested it the night before, scrambled eggs and lamb kidneys.

  The other women – there are about fifty all together in the barracks – drift into the kitchen while Filsan nurses her empty cup and gazes at the view beyond the window, a bare yard crisscrossed by poles and clotheslines in the foreground with the two domes of the central mosque behind. Breezeblocks abandoned when the nearly completed hotel was commandeered by the military form another kind of barracks for cooing pigeons beneath the window. She ignores her comrades as they ignore her, but what would she say to them if she could? She would tell them that she has never been good at making friends, that Intisaar’s children had seemed kind but had not been allowed inside the house by her father, that the neighbourhood kids had scorned her, that she found it easier to talk to her father’s friends, that her face was closed because she didn’t know how to open it. Silence takes the place of all those words and her loneliness remains as dense and close as a shadow.

  She rinses her cup, locks it away and returns to her room to make the bed before departing for the offices of the Mobile Military Court. The scheduled assignment to the Regional Security Council had vanished the minute she had been thrown out of Haaruun’s car, and instead she was told to investigate returned sailors and café owners suspected of anti-revolutionary activities. She hears laughter from the kitchen as she turns the handle to her room and knows it is aimed at her; it is hard to tell whether her comrades find it ridiculous that she would reject Haaruun, or if it were just funny to them that anyone would want her.

  As she enters and bends down to pick up a sock, she is overwhelmed by an urge to wail, her blood suddenly darkening with self-loathing, with anger that her life should be so small and inconsequential, that this two-metre-by-two-metre cell should be the span of her world. Her father had locked her away, had told her she wouldn’t regret the decisions he had made for her, that she would be a new kind of woman with the same abilities and opportunities as any man, but instead she lives the celibate, sterile, quiet existence of a nun, growing nothing but grey hairs. All her life she has been left to gather dust, as unseen as a picture on the wall, and to wail and roar and strike out sometimes seems the only way she will ever be heard.

  The offices of the Mobile Military Court are in an old colonial complex. The brick chimney jutting out from one of the rooftops is something she had not seen in Mogadishu, where the weather was never less than sultry; here the wind is so cold and fierce at times that it is not hard to imagine an Englishman dozing by a fire with a long-haired dog at his feet. In her Spartan office there are just two desks, one for Captain Yasin and a small, scratched one for her, Corporal Adan Ali. Th
ey co-ordinate a string of bureaus across north-western Somalia which, since the fierce NFM rebel attacks on Sheikh and Burao were put down in 1984, have jurisdiction over civilians as well as military personnel. On her desk is a multi-coloured pile of reports, warrants and court transcripts; her eyes are immediately drawn to the two green documents that represent two more death sentences handed down by Colonel Magan, court prosecutor and judge. The Colonel works in an adjacent building and rarely visits them, but his brutality comes across clearly in the red-inked words he leaves on the margins of her transcripts: ‘He is a buffoon and liar’; ‘Why haven’t we got rid of this one yet?’; or more commonly ‘Track down his friends’. He has already sent more to their deaths this year than the National Security Service or Regional Security Council. It is like sitting in the middle of a spider’s web, pulling in tendrils to see where flies have been caught, everyone related by clan or by marriage, one rebel leading to dozens more and requiring more ink for her typewriter.

  She is an office worker within the military, neither noticed nor commended by the gold-braided men above her, and it galls her that despite two years of enlistment in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps and five years working for the green-uniformed enforcers of the regime, the Victory Pioneers, her chief tasks are still those of a secretary. Had her father been dreaming or lying when he told her that she would make the ground shake in Hargeisa? Had he been drunk? Or just desperate to remove her from Mogadishu in case the suspicion around him became something more tangible and sinister? In the notes sent from the agents to her desk she sees how difficult it is to interpret someone’s actions, intentions, words; if she had to create a dossier on her own unknowable father, where would she even begin? He had shown her both tenderness and contempt, cruelty and honour, a glimpse of the world through the bars of his love. She sees him now pacing the flat roof of their three-storey villa in Mogadishu, a strip of the Indian Ocean visible between two slender minarets, watching over the neighbourhood with binoculars, scanning east and west for the spies he believes watch him.

  Captain Yasin arrives, tall and elegant in his black beret. With just the two of them in the office she cannot help but watch him all day: his regular strolls around the office and into the corridor, the private calls he makes on the only telephone line in their department, the menthol cigarette butts slowly filling his dark glass ashtray, the tin of mints he rattles absent-mindedly when frowning over some problem.

  Filsan stands up and salutes him but he smiles and holds up his hands, palms outward.

  ‘Now don’t get too excited, Miss Corporal, but I spoke to Major Adow a few days ago and he asked me if I could recommend a persuasive graduate to go on a mission to educate those troublesome nomads at the border. I looked high and low and then I remembered you, crouched over your little desk. Such efficiency! Such honesty!’

  Filsan looks up at him with both contempt and desire.

  ‘To Birjeeh with you, on the double!’ He points dramatically to the door and she laughs despite herself. His eyes track her as she leaves the room with an interest she doesn’t find unwelcome.

  Birjeeh Military HQ has the unexpected presence of an enchanted castle perched on a barren hill, partially hidden behind high crenellated walls with watchtowers; the wide arched entrance only needs a portcullis and moat to finish the picture. Filsan has escorted prisoners to the concrete armoury that now functions as a detention room, but can imagine long-forgotten prisoners with scraggly beards hidden in secret underground cells.

  The logistics officer, Lieutenant Hashi, ushers her to the Major’s office with a scowl on his tight, fox-like face, already aggravated by something.

  The room is crowded with thirty muscular commandos from the locally garrisoned 26th Infantry Division. They stand in a crescent shape around Major Adow, but between their bodies she can see snatches of the brown, khaki and gold of his jacket, a black pen held between his fingers like a wand.

  ‘Come closer, Comrades,’ he says before standing up. Filsan notices that his height remains the same.

  Lieutenant Hashi unrolls a map and pins its corners to the felt board behind the desk. It shows the north-western region of Somalia in minute detail: waterholes, reservoirs, dry riverbeds, dirt tracks. There are three blue circles on the map over villages near the Ethiopian border; enclosing the blue circles are red semi-circles.

  Major Adow points his pen at each blue circle and names it in turn. ‘Salahley, Baha Dhamal, Ina Guuhaa. We have solid intelligence that NFM rebels are fed, watered and sheltered in these villages. Ever since the secessionists moved their headquarters from London to Ethiopia they have been getting bolder and bolder, and it is places like these that allow them to think they stand a chance in hell of defeating us.’

  Filsan stands at armpit height to the soldiers; she finds herself enjoying their smell, the musk of their sweat mixed with hair and gun oil.

  Lieutenant Hashi catches her gaze, his bloodshot stare intended to intimidate her, but it is nothing in comparison to her father’s.

  ‘You are charged with demolishing the water reservoirs of Salahley. They have been building one every year for more than ten years now and have given some over to the rebels to use. Corporal Adan Ali! Where are you, my girl?’ Major Adow shouts.

  Filsan pushes forward until she is a metre away from the desk.

  ‘It is your duty to communicate our anger and ensure that it is understood that further punitive measures can and will be enforced. We need an educated comrade who can articulate the principles of the revolution. That’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Major,’ replies Filsan quickly.

  ‘They will have water trucked in monthly and they can use their traditional wells.’

  ‘I will tell them, sir.’

  ‘The exact date and time of the operation will be confirmed by Lieutenant Hashi. Baha Dhamal and Ina Guuhaa will be dealt with by the Fourth and Eighteenth Sectors simultaneously. Are there any questions?’

  The soldiers shift nervously but don’t reply. Filsan has an urge to speak but fears appearing too arrogant. She clears her throat and all faces turn to her. ‘Will we be taking prisoners?’ she almost whispers.

  Major Adow smiles broadly, the same kind of smile he would give a dog riding a bicycle. ‘Good question, Jaalle. We have yet to confirm that detail but well done for speaking up.’

  Filsan sees the other soldiers smiling condescendingly, even though they were too cowardly to raise their own voices.

  Hashi gestures to his watch and Major Adow nods. ‘Comrades, let us end this meeting.’ He raises his fist in the air and bellows, ‘Victory for the Party. Victory for the National Army. Death and defeat to the rebels.’

  Filsan shouts the slogan in unison with the other soldiers, pumping her fist in the air.

  Filsan’s eyes snap open. Damp sheets twist themselves around her legs. Fragments of songs circle her mind, love songs that she knows the surface meaning of but not the deepdown; in the pitch black they sound taunting and nightmarish. The Salahley operation will be her first in the field, the first time she has left Hargeisa since arriving, and excitement prevents her closing her eyes for long. She is living a soldier’s life while her father sits in front of the television watching Egyptian soap operas.

  The call comes two days later. They are scheduled to leave Hargeisa at five in the morning and arrive in Salahley by nine if they drive at full speed. The truck will pick them up at Birjeeh and then head for the west. Filsan had hoped that her period would wait until after the operation, but as if to spite her it comes early blanching her face and nearly doubling her over with cramps. She gulps back black tea after black tea and avoids eating anything that might worsen her nausea, but by the morning of the attack she is curled up, sobbing at how diminished she feels. Taking a deep breath she unfurls her limbs and forces herself through her morning routine. She arrives at Birjeeh before the others, the sky still dark but birds flapping and shaking each other awake in the branches. The compound looks even more impos
ing now, its walls blending into the darkness beyond to form a citadel of ether and stone.

  The unit of thirty men and Filsan leave Birjeeh in a convoy of four large trucks of the type the locals call ‘the fates’ because of their involvement in dozens of fatal traffic accidents. Filsan rides in the passenger seat of the first truck, the pain in her abdomen and back lulled by the gentle reverberations of the engine. The driver had held out his arm as she struggled to clamber into the tall vehicle, but apart from that there is no exchange between them.

  ‘Morning, Corporal.’ Lieutenant Afrah twists his neck into the cab from the bench behind.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’ Filsan salutes awkwardly. The Lieutenant has the strange-coloured eyes that some Somalis possess, brown around the pupil with a thick halo of blue as if he is going blind.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ He smiles and reveals the sweet gap between his teeth.

  ‘No, I just want to do a decent job.’

  ‘It will be easy, in and out before the engine’s even cooled. I have a rifle here for you, an FAL automatic. The recoil isn’t so bad on them, better for you than the Kalashnikov Major Adow said you have had arms training?’

  ‘With the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, but that was some time ago. I don’t know . . .’

  ‘You won’t need it; it will just be a deterrent if there are any troublemakers in the village.’

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant.’ Filsan takes it from him; the stock is relatively short while the barrel scrapes the roof of the lorry. She holds it across her chest with the strap over her back; she never hit the targets well during practice in Mogadishu but it feels good to hold a rifle again; a gun makes a soldier even out of a woman.

  She presses the cold butt against her stomach and leans back, eavesdropping on the muttered conversation between two commandos just behind her. They are talking about a woman one of them has had sex with in a way that makes the woman sound like some kind of animal he has caught and killed.