They sail through the last urban checkpoint and leave the messy, compacted town to shrink and disappear in the rear-view mirror. A rim of light is developing all around them, as blotchy and bright as over-exposed film, the horizon broken up by lopsided pyramids of granite.
She has seen a landscape like this only once before, as a fourteen-year-old on her way to Dhusamareb during the Somali Literacy Campaign. ‘Haddaad taqaan bar, haddaanad aqoon baro. If you know it, teach it, if you don’t know it, learn it’ had been the slogan, all the schools, colleges, universities emptied of students and professors for seven months so they could be sent to fight against illiteracy in every town, village and encampment. Radio Mogadishu broadcasters described the conflict in the most passionate terms: the weapons were pens, books, chalks and blackboards, the heroes simple teachers and teenagers who gallantly battled ignorance throughout the country. Filsan had set out from Twenty-first October Square in Mogadishu during Eid in August 1974. The President had delivered a magnificent speech and she could still recite parts of it: ‘The battle you engage in with your forces has more honour than the ordinary one, and has more value than anything you have known.’ He was right; if she could go back to that time she would. She missed living with the blacksmith’s family, teaching in the mornings and late afternoons, learning country songs and dances from the daughters, sitting by the stream at dusk, drinking milk straight from the cow. The whole campaign had been paid for by civilian donations, and even as a fourteen-year-old she had been treated with respect because she could read and they couldn’t. She wrote down the poems of old men in the new Somali script and they folded her scribblings and tucked them into their clothes like talismans. It was a dreamtime – they were full of love for the country and one another; now there seemed to be only rebels and thieves and soldiers fighting each other. She felt that she was the only one to still believe in that old Somalia, the one she grew up with.
The tarmac road ends abruptly and the truck slows to deal with the stony, broken track. In the south of the country there would be ostriches, antelopes, occasional lions or leopards, but here the only wildlife to pass them has been an old tortoise dawdling by the side of the road. It is a barren landscape, hard and dull, made for nothing other than mischief. There are no signs or obvious landmarks; the driver seems to know by intuition which forks in the road to take.
Filsan asks how people navigate on moonless nights in these desolate areas, and he points to the sky. ‘Maybe God tells them or they still know the old maps of the stars and find their way like that.’
Her own ancestors were merchants on her father’s side and sorghum farmers on her mother’s, sedate accumulators of land and wealth; she has no family history of crossing deserts or camel caravans. It seems as if this wild terrain had determined the character of the people or had attracted like-minded spirits to dwell upon it. As the lorry approaches the border with Ethiopia it begins to climb slowly but steadily, the air fresh and scented by the yellow flowers of gum arabic trees. A young shepherd hides behind a thicket of acacia trees as the convoy passes, his small figure just visible between the scrubby crowns, his black-headed sheep grazing across a vast distance.
Filsan turns back as Lieutenant Afrah calls for attention.
‘We are approaching our objective and I demand that each of you act according to the training you have received. We do not expect to engage the enemy today but as always maintain vigilance; we will conduct brief house-to-house searches and if you find villagers with arms, bring both weapons and offenders to me. The explosives crew are in the last truck of the convoy and are experts. It should take no more than half an hour to destroy the reservoirs. We want a smooth, calm operation. We will be in constant contact with Birjeeh by radio; anything out of the ordinary must be reported to me. Do a final check of your weapons now.’
It is a tuulo, barely even a village: a few beehive-shaped dwellings with old cloth hanging over their entrances, a teashop with kettles resting on open fires, one solitary stone building with a tin roof, goats, stray children, a cleared space under a tall tree for religious lessons and clan meetings. Filsan feels that she has stepped back in time, that she is staring at a scene that has hardly changed in centuries: bedu women peer out of their aqals, their attention fixed on her, on her trousers in particular – this alien, this neither male nor female curiosity in their midst. In her eyes they are just as peculiar: short, hunched, toothless, like children prematurely wizened.
The elders have been summoned and Filsan remembers her role in this theatre. She steps forward to intercept the three men, but they ignore her and continue on their sticks and bandy legs to a conscript behind.
She grabs the man on the right by the arm. ‘Jaalle, it is me you need to speak with.’
He is a thin, wiry man but he shakes her off with surprising force. Filsan pursues, not willing to ask for anyone’s assistance in dealing with him; she wants to drag him back by the long tufts of grey hair skirting his bald pate and make him kneel at her feet. She catches up with him and shoves the barrel of her gun in the small of his back. ‘Stop!’
He freezes and turns slowly to face her.
She withdraws the rifle but holds it tightly, still aimed in his direction.
‘We want to speak to the commander. What reason have you got to come here? What wrong have we committed?’ His eyes are clouded with glaucoma, his ears as large as a desert fox’s.
‘My commander has delegated me to speak with you. We are here with the full authority of the revolutionary government. There is strong evidence that you have been assisting the outlawed National Freedom Movement, and to prevent further collaboration the berkeds surrounding this settlement will be destroyed.’ Filsan speaks in a rush, not stopping to breathe. ‘You are still entitled to use your traditional drop wells and will be supplied with supplementary water once a month by the local government.’
Another elder steps forward, wagging his rough-hewn cane at her. He is a broad man with henna-dyed hair and he expects her to take a step back; she doesn’t. ‘Those berkeds are our personal property, we paid for the materials, built them, we maintain them . . .’
The whole village seems to have crowded around Filsan. The other soldiers have disappeared into the shacks.
‘This is government land,’ Filsan raises her voice and gestures to the expanse beyond them, ‘and you do not even deny that you use the berkeds to support the terrorists.’
The third elder, younger than the other two and still possessing a full head of black hair, joins the conversation. ‘Jaalle,’ he says mockingly, ‘we use those berkeds to water our camels, our goats and sheep, to perform ablutions before prayers, for a cup of tea in the mornings. We have nothing to spare for anything else. We are in the middle of a long drought; do you think we would give water to rebels?’
As he speaks, a huge plume of water, mud and stone flies into the sky to the west of the village. Detonations every three minutes radiate around the village, the bellow of the dynamite echoing against the limestone hills. The villagers run towards the explosions, the elders in the lead, children yelping in excitement and fear behind them.
Filsan pursues and catches up with the crowd just as Lieutenant Afrah orders the final detonation. The rectangular cement walls of the nearest berked have been blown into fragments that jut out like headstones from the mud.
The destruction silences the elders but she can sense their anger in the same way she had learnt to read her father’s: the set of their jaws, the tension in their shoulders, their bodies angled away from the subject of their hate.
The commandos begin to filter into view, smiling and relaxed, unconcerned by the reaction of the villagers. These kinds of raids are welcome to them, bringing minimal risk and potential loot. Filsan pants after her chase and presses her palm against the stitch in her ribs. The villagers are rooted to the soil, their heads turning from crater to crater, false rain dripping from the acacias. She marches towards the elders, intending to explain the n
ecessity of the action, the benefits they could enjoy if they only shunned the rebels, the projects that they might partake in to diversify the local economy.
The red-haired elder swivels at her approach and swings his cane at her face. She doesn’t notice her finger squeeze the trigger of her rifle as her whole body recoils from the blow. The knock of the rifle against her chest surprises her, as does the sudden pop of bullets. When the elder falls back onto his behind she assumes that he has lost his balance trying to strike her, until points of blood spring up over his shirt, turning the white cloth a red that darkens before her eyes. Then the two other elders drop to the ground, their open eyes still watching her. Movements at the periphery of her vision blur so she does not recognise the grey shadows as her comrades advancing on the prostrate men.
‘Hold fire!’ shouts Lieutenant Afrah.
Filsan looks down at her feet and sees bronzed beetles scuttling over them; she presses one boot on the other, and the beetles are stilled, transformed into empty bullet shells.
The elders are slumped over each other like drunks; a howl sweeps over the plain as first one woman and then another and another rushes to the dead and dying bodies.
Filsan tries to step forward but her boots feel cemented down.
Lieutenant Afrah aims his Kalashnikov at the young men in the crowd. ‘Get back! Back! Back!’
A group of soldiers corner the youths and force them back to the cleared space at the centre of the threadbare settlement. Filsan notices how thin their calves are for the first time, just shafts of bone below their frayed sarongs. They are hustled away, hands on the back of their afros, to squat in the sun until the soldiers depart.
An old woman pulls the wives off the corpses and shrouds the men’s faces under a shawl; she says nothing, but turns to Filsan and points a finger, whether to lay blame, mark her out for retribution or curse her, she cannot decipher.
‘Get in the truck, Jaalle, we will secure the area,’ Lieutenant Afrah orders.
Filsan peers down at her distant boots. ‘But I can’t move.’
Afrah clicks his fingers and a conscript no older than fifteen comes to his side. ‘Escort her back to the truck.’
The conscript takes her elbow gently, like he would his grandmother, and leads her forward as she stumbles over the broken ground.
‘You did well, Jaalle,’ he keeps repeating in her ear as they trek the half-mile back to the vehicles.
‘But what happened? Who killed them?’ she whispers.
In the dark cocoon of her room Filsan watches scenes from the day flash across her mind: three corpses hitchhiking back to Hargeisa with her, the smeared viscera of flies wiped back and forth over the windshield, a line of vultures silhouetted against the midday sun, the quick untruthful briefing to Major Adow back at Birjeeh, the soldiers gathered around her in the canteen describing their own killings, the smack smack smack of the typewriter as she wrote a report of the operation in Salahley.
The alarm clock buzzes angrily at four a.m., drowning out the soft hiss of rain from the yard. Filsan slaps the contraption off and curls up to enjoy the warmth of the narrow bed.
She notices her heart pounding under her crossed arms; it thuds as if she has been fleeing something or someone, yet she is safe, barely awake, in the comfort of her own room. Disquieted, she rises and washes in the communal wet room, the cold water tightening the skin of her breasts and scattering large goose pimples over her arms.
The washroom smells foul, the one small window in the wall not enough to dry the damp walls or remove the stink of the blocked toilets: twisted hairpins, broken combs, rusty razors, stained underwear all gather abandoned behind the door. Girls who had been trained to clean their homes from an early age rebelled, became slovens, leaving the mess for someone else to worry about while pampered Filsan finds herself obsessing over dirty floors and full sinks. There is no point reporting the lazy private assigned to cleaning duties as no one would care enough about the women’s quarters to discipline her. She ekes out a tiny amount of the imported shampoo she had bought in Mogadishu and scrubs her scalp with her fingernails.
Swirling thoughts in her skull refuse to coalesce and she scratches harder and harder to uncover the cause of the continued hammering within her ribs. As she bends down to rinse her hair under the tap, she begins to cry, unstoppable tears that sting her eyes. The thoughts that had buzzed around each other now fuse and spell out m-o-n-s-t-e-r in glowing letters across the blackness of her mind. The letters dance and mock her. She is in every way a monster and the weight of that recognition weakens her knees and bows her head; in prayer pose she rests her cheek against the slimy floor and lets the flowing water rush over her.
Slowly Filsan’s heartbeat quietens, the word dims, she hears footsteps in the corridor, knocks on the door. Prising her body from the cement, she turns the tap off and wraps a towel around her body before grabbing her nightdress and shampoo and scuttling back to her room. In the corridor she is forced to squeeze past a girl waving and blowing kisses to her lover in the yard. Filsan glances through the window and catches the man tucking his shirt into his trousers and waving back. Her modern father had spared her, but this girl and the others are probably all circumcised, and yet keep lovers as if it is their prerogative. It was only her who listened to the rules, who feared breaking them – no one told her it was fine to steal or fuck or kill as long as it was kept quiet. She had taken every lesson so seriously, absorbed them in her heart, desperate for a pat on the head, and now she is unsuited for the real world, a freak.
Returning to her room, it appears more cell-like than ever, a criminal’s lair more than a soldier’s quarters. A small oval mirror on the opposite wall traps her reflection. The white of her towel, the brown of her skin, the black of her hair form abstract shapes; she is anonymous, innocent, just a human silhouette. Filsan steps closer, the nightdress and shampoo still clenched in her wet arms. The face of her mother stares back, cold and strange, the face that her father can’t stomach looking at. He doesn’t understand that she didn’t choose to look like that woman; the high forehead, the wide-set eyes, the small nose and chin were imposed on her. She dislikes looking at her face as much as he does. If she had had a decent mother she would not be here, nearly thirty years old, unloved and unlovable, wishing the mirror would crack into a thousand pieces.
Filsan sits heavily on the low bed as another cramp squeezes her abdomen. Her body is ripping itself from her control, trying to get away from her, or so it seems.
She had felt a similar sense of disintegration before, when she was just fifteen and growing timidly into this womanly body. Her cousins, Rahma and Idil, were visiting for the second time from Washington D.C. along with her diplomat uncle, Abukor. While their fathers went from one hotel bar to another, they traipsed along Mogadishu’s wide boulevards, avoiding the grasping hands of Vespa-riding bachelors and the dangerously driven Beetles and Fiat Unos of the voluptuous import/export ladies who sweet-talk lucrative trade licences from government officials. The sisters would scream as Filsan rushed them, arms linked, through the chaotic, beeping traffic circling the Ahmed Gurey roundabout, towards the beach, where they might paddle fully clothed or sit on the seaweed-strewn white sand licking runny ice cream from their fingers. She watched as Rahma and Idil made friends with four lanky boys playing football near the surf. It didn’t matter how badly they spoke Somali, the girls’ flared jeans, red lips and cocky expressions were enough to get the boys crowding around. They met them day after day from then on, Filsan slowly relaxing in their boisterous, play-fighting company.
One boy, Abdurahman, with glasses and thick, lamblike curls caught her attention by asking what books she liked reading; she didn’t expect him to know of Eugene Onegin, The Master and Margarita or Slaughterhouse-Five, but he nodded approvingly and asked if she knew that Pushkin was part Ethiopian. One afternoon they left the beach for Dervish Park to watch a government rally; they could hear the chanting and drums as they walked down Via Makk
a Al-Mukarama, and she fell in step with Abdurahman. He lent her his sunglasses when he noticed her squinting against the bright sunlight and she swept her hidden gaze over the bronze silhouette of Mohamed Abdullah Hassan on his horse, over the tall, weeping trees pulled away like theatre curtains by the sea breeze, and over the wasp-waisted boy beside her with the face that came from somewhere distant and exotic. Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party banners drifted from poles at the entrance to the park. Filsan was at the highest point of the sand hills that separated the coast from the main town, beside the whitewashed Hotel Bulsho, with which she shared a view over the antique, lightless lighthouse and the ancient district of Hamar Weyne, founded a thousand years before by long-bearded Arab and Persian traders. She felt like the song by Magool, ‘Shimbiryahow’ – languid, soaring and free: ‘Oh bird, do you fly? Do you follow the wind?’ She heard the question in her mind and answered ‘I will.’ A carnival was already in full swing: men juggling with red and green peppers, fake woollen lion manes around their faces; drummers pounding goatskin drums and making bizarre, head-jerking expressions at the crowd of teenagers and university students; girls in traditional red-check wraps swinging their hips from side to side and sweetly singing revolutionary songs. She lost her cousins and the other boys in the scrum and reached out for Abdurahman’s arm before he disappeared too. She pinched the cloth of his shirt between thumb and forefinger and held on loosely like that. There were more banners above their heads, written messily in blue paint, declaring ‘Death to tribalism’, ‘Comrades not enemies’ and ‘A new dawn’.
A bearded party member with a megaphone spelt out the new philosophy: you don’t ask what clan anyone is from, you do not talk about high-class or low-class tribes, you do not give advantages to those related to you. He was preaching to the converted; the boys had not asked about the girls’ clan and nor would it occur to the girls to care about the boys’, that was for old-timers and losers. The music died down apart from a drum roll and then, just as Filsan reached the centre of the huddle, an effigy made from scraps of cloth stuffed with grass, bearing ‘tribalism’ on a sign around its neck, was strung up over a tree branch, a real noose around its fraying neck.
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 17