Sometimes It Snows In America

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Sometimes It Snows In America Page 24

by Marisa Labozzetta

“You figure what out?”

  “Who had called you. It was a trick. Your family’s enemies. They tried to get you to go to Somalia.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about call?”

  “Because we thought it best for your safety. We didn’t want you to get caught up in the trap. Besides, Fatma, we didn’t know how to get in touch with you anyway. You only called us once.” There was chastisement in her tone.

  Mary Ellen must have lied about the phone call, made the whole thing up for a little evening entertainment. That was the only thing Fatma could think of. It was not only highly improbable that Somali enemies would have bothered to track her down in America, it was absurd that they would have been so intent on killing her that they would lure her back to Somalia. It would have been even more unlikely that they had known she was heading for Kenya. Maybe the call had been some sort of prank from an American Fatma might have confided in while she was at Shelby or over a bottle of vodka at the Royal Lion. Maybe Elsa Martinez was up to some new trick. However, one year after the call had been made to Haven House, on a humid day in July, Fatma removed a brown letter-sized envelope from her mailbox in the foyer of her building.

  The return address read: Friend: Ibrahim, 197 Middle St., London. The postmark was also from London. She carried the envelope up to her place and opened it with a kitchen knife, trying not to damage it. She read carefully and slowly, her hands shaking with every word. Dear Mommy, it began. Hussein had found her! she thought, nearly delirious with joy. But as she read on she realized the letter had been written neither in England nor Saudi Arabia; it had originated in Somalia with Ayasha’s son Kareem. Ayasha had known her life was at stake and tried to make plans for her son. That’s why she had looked for Fatma so many years before.

  I write you because my mommy your sister Ayasha tell me you are my mother if she die. My American mother. I work for photographer. There is no much work now, only making false passports. Somali passports are no worth nothing. I learn English in the underground school since to study English is forbade. I hope you like my English although I know I make many errors.

  It is very terrible here. There is no more house. We live in tents and cardboard boxes. My father and mother die. Cousin Abdul die too. They kill them. They hurt many more. Many uncles shot dead or paralyzed.

  Mommy, I want come to America and live with you. I want study computers at university. America has much opportunities.

  Please to send me money when you can. I will save until there is enough for me come to America. I will give also to Father chief of family for everyone. Please, Mommy. Help me.

  I hope you like photos. I hope my friend Ibrahim reach

  England and send letter.

  Your son,

  Kareem Muhammad

  There was a small passport-size picture of Kareem (he had written his name on the back). He was a good-looking young man who resembled his Bantu father more than Ayasha. The rest were four-by-sixes: one of Father, one of Ayasha, one of four of Fatma’s other sisters, and three of their children artfully posed under a canopy of sticks and blankets, some seated, others reclining on their sides, propped up on their elbows, heads resting in hands. They were smiling, trying hard to look happy, but their faces told another story. Suffering had aged them – like all the other members of her family – far beyond the natural passage of time, and they appeared much older than they should have.

  Sarah and Fatma went to a Barakaat office in downtown Boston. Mr. Abdul Kiran was pleasant enough, a middle-aged man with a graying beard and moustache who wore a black suit, a gold striped tie, and a large gold ring. He would, he assured Fatma, find her family, and whatever money she gave him would be in the hands of her family’s father, Uncle Abdullah, within hours. Mr. Kiran kept his word. A week later she received a call from Kareem, to whom she had passed her phone number through the Barakaat officer. Though they spoke less than a minute, Kareem was delirious with gratitude. Fatma began to send money regularly to Father – one hundred dollars a month – her entire salar y from Sundr y Undies. It would have been nice to buy some new clothes for herself instead of depending on hand-me-downs and the Salvation Army. Nevertheless, she was thrilled to be able to do something for her family. She heard a wise man say on the radio that injustice was not what people do to other people, but what people were not doing about it themselves.

  Her life was confined within narrow parameters. Anything social revolved around Haven House, or an outing with Sarah, or an occasional cup of coffee with a neighbor in her building. There wasn’t much she desired anymore; she was content with little, and afraid to allow herself too much freedom. No, she was better off with little money at this point. And a hundred dollars was more like thousands to her people. Besides, she was too busy to go out spending money. She had things to do: a future to plan for, preparations to make for the arrival of her new son.

  Sarah helped her sign up for an apartment in a low-income building in town. There was no way two people could survive in her efficiency. The waiting list was long, she was told – maybe a year. She could wait. There would be an investigation into her character as a tenant in her present building. Fine. She had nothing to hide. In fact, she got along quite well with the manager, who liked to chat with her as she came and went. She was one of the “good” tenants, he said. One of the respectable and quiet ones who didn’t give him trouble, like others who dealt drugs and pimped. Everything was going smoothly until September eleventh of that fall, when Arab terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon.

  *

  “It’s here,” Fatma told Sarah, horrified. “What?”

  “Greed.” “What greed?” “For power.”

  Fatma was staring, seemingly at nothing, but she was seeing so much – the end of her life in America, the end of this countr y.

  “Does the manager of your building know you’re part Saudi?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes.”

  She frowned.

  The next time Sarah and Fatma went to Boston, they found the Barakaat office closed. “They’re gone,” a jeweler next door said. “Closed up by the government. The lousy Arabs were funneling money to that terrorist in Afghanistan. Stinking Arabs.”

  “But they get my money in Somalia,” Fatma told Sarah.

  “But maybe they didn’t receive it all,” Sarah said warily, seeming distant for the first time, as though for a moment she shared the jeweler’s sentiments. Fatma almost felt she couldn’t blame her.

  “We’ll find another way,” Sarah said when she dropped Fatma off at home. “Fatma, be careful. Willowsville is a good community, an open-minded community. But in times like this ... Just be careful.”

  *

  She went by the name Kornmeyer. She wore western clothes. She did not attend a mosque. She spoke to few people, and even when she did, most had no idea of where she had come from. There were, however, aside from her landlord, others who knew of her Arab ancestry. There were the restaurateurs who swept the sidewalks in front of their Middle Eastern cafés that day with long shameful faces, the fearful faces worn when one of your own is found out to be a criminal. Faces that told how even fellow Arabs had begun to regard one another with a certain suspicion. Fatma began to wire funds through a Moneygram office in Rockfield. Kareem called her every second Tuesday of the month, and she gave him the code they had told her he needed in order to pick up the money. There was little time for conversation, except for a few words on the state of Father’s health, which was declining daily. By the end of December the United States military had all but exhausted bin Laden’s potential hiding places in Afghanistan. They assumed he had slipped into a bordering nation or possibly back to Somalia, where he had fought against the Americans nearly ten years before.

  *

  When her red phone on the wobbly wrought-iron stand rang, she could sense the urgency in the ring, and she knew that something very bad had happened.

  “He’s gone!” Kamilah cried hysterically. “He’s g
one! Hussein has run away! He left a note saying he wants to be an American like his father. You must do something. You must help me.”

  Oh, sister, this is what happens when you squeeze the sand too tightly.

  “Please, Fatma, he is only fifteen – ” The connection was breaking up.

  “I’ll try. I will call you tomorrow, Kamilah,” Fatma shouted into the receiver. “We will find him.”

  There was only one other person who shared this responsibility. One person whose duty it was to right a terrible wrong. He had offered to help her find their son not so long ago. Now she prayed that Daniel had the courage to keep his word.

  Daniel set aside ever ything and worked day and night. It took several days of telephoning, one call leading to another within the State Department and various senators’ offices, until he received word from a senior staff person in the Department of Defense. His son had been found hiding in the storage room of a hangar at the U.S. air command center in Prince Sultan Air Base, and was being hand delivered to his home three hundred and eighty miles away.

  “He hitched the whole damn way,” Daniel told a relieved Fatma. “Takes after his mother. Call Kamilah after tomorrow. He’ll be home by then.”

  “Thank you, Daniel.”

  “Thank you, for not letting me forget.”

  Kamilah was so grateful to Fatma and Daniel that she agreed that when Hussein turned twenty-one, she would let him come to the States for a visit. If he chose to stay longer, she would not stand in his way. After all, he would be a man then.

  “Do you know who I am?” Fatma asked him. “Yes.”

  “And do you understand?” She wanted to know if he forgave her, but it was too much of a burden to place on a boy who had never even laid eyes on her, or at least not that he remembered. And if he said no? After all, she had never forgiven her own mother for giving her up. But he seemed wise, this stranger whose voice she found higher-pitched than she would have imagined, cracking at times, still making its way from childhood to manhood.

  “My mother told me that it was not your fault. Can I call you

  Mother also?”

  “Of course.” She stilled the quivering in her throat. She would be strong for her son. But she could not slow the beating of her heart. She had waited what seemed like a lifetime for this moment, and now she wanted to end the conversation. It was too much too fast for both of them. They must go slowly, like children learning how to walk, step by step, conversation by conversation.

  “Mother,” he asked before they hung up, “does it snow where you live in America?”

  “Yes, Hussein. Sometimes it snows.”

  *

  She hasn’t sent money to Kareem in months: the United States has stopped all funds destined for Somalia for fear that they might be supporting the terrorist movement. She’s been told by message services that there is no contacting Somalia at the moment. There is no more phone system. There is nothing. Even if she could find a way to send help, in all honesty, she is afraid to contact her family for fear that she will appear to be suspicious. She has come a long way from prison, and has no intention of returning. Even Sarah is afraid to contact Fatma’s family for her; no one is above suspicion now. Fatma wrote to Kareem’s friend Ibrahim but received no response – nor was her letter returned. What happened to Ibrahim? Was he questioned and was he now in prison in Cuba? Was he in fact connected with the terrorist movement? Is Father alive? She swallowed her pride and wrote to the famous Jamila, asking if she could somehow, through England, get money to Somalia. But Jamila had never been really interested in their father’s other children. She sent Fatma a check for a thousand dollars. Fatma was going to send it back, but reminded herself that pride was what had got her into so much trouble in the first place. Jamila had come to see her; she had tried, and it was more than Fatma, ever jealous of Jamila, had ever done. Fatma sent Jamila a note of thanks and had Sarah deposit the thousand dollars in the savings account Fatma opened for when her sons come.

  Fatma fears for Somalia and her family more than ever. Would a country that cannot bear any more self-destruction harbor a terrorist leader? To what end? For what gain? But she has seen madness before. She herself has been mad. And she has learned that prejudice and lust for power drives people to lose their minds and do the unthinkable. They are the same, she and Somalia: dried-up battlefields of self-destruction, starving territories raped by power-hungry beasts, bodies unable to rest in peace.

  Some people who knew Fatma in Rockfield still expect her to be bad. Those who have never known her think she’s a drug addict because she lives in the welfare house. At least she assumes that’s what they’re guessing when they meet in the elevator. Fatma doesn’t return their looks; she might give herself away. It’s the hardest thing to be honest. People like her never told the truth. It’s not that she lied much – she wasn’t raised to lie. She was, however, raised to keep silent.

  Fatma imagined that, when she left Haven House, all her problems would disappear. But she gets frustrated. After all these years of having people tell her what to do, now she is by herself, and it gets lonely. Some days she’s afraid to go out. She doesn’t know who her friends really are; she doesn’t know whom she’ll run into. She is an addict. She is an alcoholic. She closes her eyes when she passes a bar. At times she gets this urge, and everything she sees and hears and smells seems to trigger it. Some days she really doesn’t care. She tries not to think too much. She reads. She walks. She continues to study English. Every now and then she calls Miss Wilma and says, “Tell me what to do.” “You’re on your own now, you have to make your own decisions,” Miss Wilma says. But she’s afraid she’ll make the wrong decisions. She’s been sober for three years and eight months, but she can still taste the liquor and feel the high – and the beatings. She’s become as delicate as life, which, she has always known, can shatter at any moment. She treads lightly through that life, like glass walking on glass.

  *

  She’s made a new friend, a Somali woman. Her name is

  Halima, the same name as her old friend in Mombasa. The manager of her building introduced them. He’s like Nick only inside out: a man with a rough and unkempt exterior and a kind and gentle heart. Halima is a visiting nurse who comes to see one of Fatma’s neighbors. The manager recognized her accent and asked where she was from. When she told him Somalia, he asked for her phone number and gave it to Fatma. Fatma called her on her own, taking the chance that Halima would not want to meet. But they meet often now, and they have coffee. They speak Somali. Fatma thinks that meeting a person like Halima when she first arrived in America – someone who knew where she had come from, someone who had come from the same place – would have made all the difference. You can live without a brother but not without a friend, Somalis say. Halima recommended a tea that soothes Fatma as effectively as the pills. She’s not so groggy and is rarely bruised in the morning; she even finds her pillow in the same place she put it the night before. The cigarettes are fewer. Sarah says she looks better too, and Fatma believes her: people don’t stare at her when she’s alert and smiling. And if she has a bad night, she knows that in the morning life will start all over again. Every morning – every second – is Monday morning.

  More Somalis are coming to the area too – the Bantus. They were the first to suffer when civil war broke out in Somalia, robbed and murdered by warring clan members. Although many fled to Kenya, they are still not safe, living in filthy refugee camps, young girls being raped by Kenyan guards or other refugees. An American relief group wants to bring them to Rockfield because it has many vacant apartments and cheap rent. They want to establish a Newcomer Center, an apartment complex where they can settle and be helped to adjust and find work. They’ll need a lot of volunteers, and Fatma intends to help. So does Halima. They’ll teach them to manage the day-to-day business that they themselves had to learn – the messy parts of living here. Fatma knows how the Bantu have existed, in mud huts, cooking over wood fires. It will be truly s
hocking for them to come to the United States, even worse than it was for Fatma. She’ll teach them to use a stove and to cook foods they have never seen, to go shopping, to adjust to the weather. They’ll be happy to have someone they can speak Somali to, happy to have a friend.

  The September 11 attacks slowed down the process of bringing the Bantu to Rockfield, but it’s moving more quickly now. As soon as the city council votes on it, they’ll come. They say that people in Rockfield don’t want them, that there aren’t enough jobs and too many people on welfare already, that the Bantu will only bring more Somalis and that there is enough racial violence in the city. Kenya doesn’t want them either, nor do Mozambique and Tanzania, their countries of origin. The Bantu only want what everyone else wants: for their children to be safe, and a better life.

  Fatma thinks that maybe she’ll be able to give a little money too to the Bantu people. She’s thought about calling Pia and using some of the money she earns to fix her face, but the funny thing is, it doesn’t bother her much anymore. Besides, it’s not bad to have reminders – like the chronic pain in her back, like the eye that sometimes tears – of how far she’s come.

  They trust her to open and close Sundry Undies. Sarah trusts her to be alone in her home. Miss Wilma trusts her to watch over the women at Haven House when she’s gone. And their trust has given Fatma the confidence to trust in herself and in her choices. She is better able to decide who in America is a friend and who is not. She’s learning to peek through a body’s window, to put her nose to the pane and zoom in beyond all the looks – all the talk – and discover bits of truth, plain as day, lying on the mantle of the soul, hanging on its walls. She doesn’t know when she’ll face the world again with the boldness that convinced Daniel to buy the penny house. Or trust a man once more in that special way. She can’t imagine. She doesn’t ever want to be owned by a man or country or devil again. She grows lighter by the day. One autumn morning she’ll feel so airy that the breeze will come from behind and lift her up and carry her, like a bright red leaf, above the golden treetops, and she’ll look down on Willowsville, and her Mombasa eye will weep with joy.

 

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