“Please take it. You look like a skeleton. And I am truly not hungry.” It was true that Josh, tall and lanky to begin with, was showing the effects of the short rations more than the other adults.
“You can’t possibly not be hungry! We’re all hungry!” Josh eyed the meal Amit had only picked around the edges of, his frustration shouted directly at the plate containing an ounce or two each of beans and squash and half a small potato.
Akisni bestirred herself from the torpor that overtook them all nowadays, as the evenings grew colder and the prairie winds were a huge animal tackling the side of the house. “Are you really not hungry, Amit?”
“No, I’m fine.” He brushed off her concern.
“Are you having any trouble swallowing?” She put her hands up to touch his neck, and he gently held her wrists away.
“Akisni. I. Am. Fine.”
She dropped her hands, but for the next few weeks, her eyes never left his face and hands at mealtimes. Finally, one night she cornered him alone when he was in the kitchen on cleanup duty. “Amit, you don’t look well. You’re pale.”
He smiled. “How can I be pale? I’m Indian. My skin is like mahogany. I’m darker than anybody here but LaDwon, Juni, and Augusta.”
“Very funny. Your color is off, then. You’re ashen. Your hair is dropping…”
“That happens to us older men.”
Undissuaded, she went on, “And then I noticed this.” She put her hand out before he could stop her and took a firm but gentle hold on a lump in the side of his throat, her fingers’ pinch blocked by the thickness of an egg.
“Amit. Can you even swallow solid food any more?”
His eyes flickered through fury, indignation, terror, relief, and sorrow, the tiny muscles around them betraying the emotional kaleidoscope he was not permitting himself to feel. He put his hand over hers. He shook his head. “I can only suck the juices out, now, and let them trickle down my throat.”
Her healer’s fingers followed the lymph node chain up under his chin and down into his shoulder. She looked at him questioningly.
“Don’t say it.” His voice was even raspier than the hoarseness she had been too absorbed in her aching stomach to notice until now. “And please, don’t tell the others. It will be obvious pretty soon.”
Akisni wordlessly took her hand off his neck. She enveloped him in a hug and held him while silent tears ran down his face.
Josh was the next one to realize. He was in his usual place, cuddled under a feather duvet with Jessica, the two of them rousing occasionally from their dullness to exchange brief, longing looks before sinking back into the sluggish torpor of semi-starvation.
He’d just watched Ozark latch on to her breast with more than academic (but less than immediate) interest, and it made him think of how Amit had been feeding Jessica and Sheila all the time. He looked at his friend’s profile in the lamplight and took note, for the first time, of the thickness that he’d not seen before, and of the way Amit—who Josh had always razzed for buttoning his shirts all the way up—was leaving the top button open. He watched his best friend take one of the scraps of cloth he used for snot rags and spit something dark into it. And he knew.
If You Build It…
Hawa was always rigid, her neck muscles bunched and her eyes darting. She had been through so much already. Suzanne wished she could erase whatever it was that Musa had done to her. Failing that, she wished she could stop the other girls and women from asking her about it all the time. But she didn’t even know what they were saying to her most of the time because of the language barrier, so she felt helpless to do much. Hawa did enjoy helping to care for little Jo, and Suzanne thought that probably helped.
Jomana was perched on Hawa’s hip in a fabric sling wrap one day. Suzanne and Hawa walked home from the well. Suzanne pulled a handcart full of water skins. Jomana was blubbering, and Hawa was popping her hand on the baby’s lips, making the little girl squeal with glee. Suzanne laughed, too.
Then Hawa froze. Suzanne followed her gaze and saw an older man wearing the loose pants and tunic of an Afar, his hair butter-dressed. His gile hanging from the thick belt at his waist. He held out his arms, which broke Hawa’s immobility. She pressed Jomana into Suzanne’s arms and ran to him, shouting, “Aba! Aba!”
The man took his daughter in his wiry arms, closing his eyes as he embraced her. Suzanne brushed a tear from her eye, seeing the joy on his face. Hawa took her father’s hand and led him to Suzanne, who extended a hand and introduced herself. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it and introduced himself as Esayas.
Hawa took Jo again and the group walked to the compound. Hawa bounced along, smiling up at her daddy, and Jo and Suzanne caught the mood. They walked cheerfully into the kitchen. Meala was standing next to Li at the counter, chopping vegetables. She looked warily at Esayas at first, but the man melted into a corner and watched the others pour water into the big pot on the wood-fired stove to begin cooking the cassava and seabutter for the evening meal.
The group sat together in the main hall, Li and Meala side-by-side as usual. Esayas and Suzanne sat on the other side of the low table, and Jo sat on Suzanne’s knee, somewhat restrained by the sling. Li had learned a little Afar, and Meala’s English continued to improve, so they managed to have something resembling a fitful conversation.
It turned out that Hawa’s mother had angrily divorced Esayas after she perceived as his weakness in failing to protect his daughter’s honor. She and a number of the women—wives and healers and single maidens of the village—had taken up residence in a separate village with the Yemeni imam, Abdullah, who was intent on creating a Salafi Muslim movement throughout northeastern Africa, extending the reach of the fundamentalist theosophy which had been striving to spread outwards from Saudi Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the Persian Gulf, in the time Before.
Neither Li nor Suzanne had known that there were many types of Islam; the Afar people and many other Africans called themselves Muslims, but their heritage reached back much further than the time of Prophet Mohammed, to the time of the pyramids, and their culture was a veneer of monotheism laid on top of the deep, deep traditions of polytheistic animism.
This is why it had always rankled the women of the Afar to have a male muezzin singing from the tower. In their tradition, music was an activity reserved for women. It was taboo for a married man to even touch a musical instrument. Esayas smiled when he heard the compound’s calls to prayer in a woman’s ringing voice. All the women crouched on brightly-dyed and hand-woven cloths and faced the north for prayer. He made a remark to Meala, who translated, “He remembers his grandmother singing like this. It is the Afar way.”
Over the next few weeks, more men of Hawa and Esayas’s village and other surrounding Afar groups began to show up. More women joined the group, too—mostly Afar from the Danakil lands of Eritrea and Djibouti, but some Somali women, somewhat taller and lighter-skinned, speaking no Afar. They spoke among themselves in Somali and communicated with the Afar women mostly in Arabic or French.
Suzanne had never been in such a cosmopolitan, polyglot group before. The way that people took care to use respectful gestures and body language with one another when they did not share a common language enlightened her. She noticed Jomana was picking up this fluency of nonverbal communication at the same time she acquired a few words of multiple languages.
That is not to say there was no conflict. The Somalis were Sunni Muslims and had their own clan and legal system, called Xeer, a 1400-year-old set of principles, agreements and ideas known as xissi adkaaday. This traditional code conflicted with some of the Afar traditions, and the dictates of the varied waves of Muslim theology complicated matters even further. The Somalis and the Afars of Djibouti had fought bitterly at various times in history, the last as recently as 1991, and there was much bigotry and resentment to be overcome.
The single women of the Afar tribes who had fled infibulation, and a few married mothers who had fled with their intact
daughters, remained the core group at the compound. Several complete families that separated from the villages made their way to the compound just as Esayas had. The villages were being regimented by Sheik Abdullah’s regime, with its strict hijab and obedience for women and rigid adherence to business and prayer customs for men. The married couples with their children set up the time-honored traditional shelters seen throughout the drier parts of Africa, made of stucco and light timber, or yurt-like nomadic homes within a radius of three miles or so on the northern side of the compound. The Somalis did the same on the south side.
Somali or Afar, any girl or woman wanting to flee infibulation was welcomed in the main residence. The women, empowered by their summary execution of the pedophile imam Musa, and further emboldened by their successful takeover of the mosque and revival of the ancient cult of Nefertiri, made sure that any parent, fiancé, or the midwife herself who tried to abscond with a girl to infibulate her, was pounded with stout poles until giving up. Some girls were brought in by their fathers—men who, like Esayas, did not want to see their daughters suffer in sex and childbirth, as their wives had. Some were mother-child pairs, mothers with daughters at their breasts, fleeing mothers-in-law or husbands who wanted to cut their newborn girls.
At the same time, the population included a normal segment of teenaged boys and young men. Seeing their prospects of love and marriage dwindling by the day, these men grew angrier.
The end result, after a few months, was a village of women under low-level siege. As they went about their business—drawing and carrying water, traveling to the market on trading days, harvesting wild fruits, herbs, or seabutter—they had to be constantly on the alert.
They took to carrying their staffs with them, and a few had jile knives taken from brothers or uncles when they ran. Musa had kept a few trusty old Kalashnikov rifles and newer M4s and QBZ-95s from the US and Chinese bases, and the women carried them in rotation. Suzanne, ever a logistics soldier, fretted over their limited ammunition supply. Most of the women probably couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, and there was not enough reserve ammo for them to practice. She made sure they at least knew basic safe handling practices, and had fired the weapons at least once before taking the guns on patrols.
At any time, though, they had to be prepared to fend off small raiding groups targeting recently arriving women and girls. These were fewer in number, usually targeting runaway family members, and ignoring anyone else.
The most problematic threats were the young men. Testosterone-addled as young men anywhere, they clustered in groups and egged each other on with feats of daring. At first, their raids on the young women were easily dissuaded by a few shots in the air, but over time, they grew bolder and more determined.
“I hear uncut women are sex maniacs!” they would bawl to one another, tagging behind a small group of maidens.
“I hear they can’t get enough dick!” One would slide in close and pinch or pat a buttock, or yank a headscarf. When the girls turned their weapons on them, they’d all dance away from the poles and cudgels, shrieking when shots rang out and vanishing into the bushes. Every so often, a girl would hit one of them, and the group would strut off, undisturbed by the screaming. Then the harassment would stop for a while—only to gradually ramp up again as they forgot their comrade’s wound.
Bilqis had emerged as the de facto leader, always making the noonday Dhuhr call to prayer herself, though she left the other four prayer calls to women she anointed, “muezzin of Nefertiri.” After dinner and before the evening ‘Isha prayer, she would preside over a meeting to discuss the days’ productivity and problems and to plan for the next day and the future. Sometimes these meetings were brief check-ins; other times, they went on long into the night, until they stopped making sense and had to table the agenda for the morrow.
The day came when they could not overlook the man problem any more. A group of six girls and young women, ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, had been carrying baskets and poles to a stand of pistachio trees. They were part of an orchard someone had planted Before, which had been abandoned in the upheavals of the machine sickness, and only rediscovered with its first biennial fruiting.
The sun was warm, and many several of the girls were shirtless. One of the girls, Amene, carried a Chinese QBZ-95 rifle slung across her back. The girls could never agree later how many youths had been in the gang which sprang upon them. Some said no more than eight or nine, but others insisted there were twice as many. But they all agreed that the boys were fast and purposeful—unlike earlier assaults and harassment, which had been almost playful by comparison. They all had jiles drawn, and two of them had small rifles or carbines, which they did not fire.
Amene was the only one who fired. She acted swiftly when the attack began, but by the time she had aimed and readied the rifle, all she could do was fire two low bursts at the boys’ retreating backs. They ran off, following the one slinging Mona across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Mona shrieked, thrashed, punched, and spit, her braids and beads rattling. The guy carrying her was uncommonly large, and she could not prevail.
The four other girls remaining picked themselves up from the dirt and gave chase, but they stopped after less than a minute. The young men were far ahead of them and could turn and ambush. They checked their bruises and scrapes and walked home to the compound with empty baskets.
That night, Bilqis laid the problem out for them: “Men are the problem. They have always been the problem. We Afar women are famous for our fierceness, but women do not rape; women do not make war. For ten thousand years, men have been in charge. It is time to go back to the days of Neftertiri and Cleopatra. It is time to rediscover the wisdom of Makeda and forget the boasting of Menelek. It is time to put men in their place.”
Etagegnehu stood up. “My sister Gobena was married by tradition to our mother’s brother’s son. The wedding was happy. We danced all day. But when the couple went into the marriage hut, only her husband came out alive. He could not penetrate her where she was infibulated, so he took a jile and cut her where she was sealed. While he was taking her virginity, she bled to death. It is men who cannot restrain themselves. Why is it women who are punished for their lack of control?”
The talk went on. Every member of the convocation had a story of brutality to tell. Fury fed on rage, until the anger took on a spirit of its own. Bilqis steered the conversation back to concrete proposals; the women contributed ideas. When their attention flagged, she would prompt another girl to tell how she’d lost someone she loved to the bloody razor blade or the birthing bed when scarring prevented passage or entry. The women would begin to weep and scowl, and their urgency to find solutions would be rekindled.
Li and Esayas were not expected to attend this meeting, and they slept through it. Late in the night, though, Meala slipped into Li’s curtained chamber. She lay down next to him and whispered to wake him. “Li. You must go now. It will not be safe for you in the morning.”
Li came slowly to consciousness, realizing that his dream of Meala’s ripening body next to his was real. He put an arm around her upper back to pull her closer. Then awareness of her words penetrated his mind. Her breasts, customarily uncovered in the way of Afar women, were now pressed against his chest. Instead of kissing her as he wanted to, he pressed his lips to her ear and whispered, “What’s happening?”
“They’re angry at all men. You’re not safe. You must leave now.”
Li’s eyes opened wider and his heart picked up its pace. With regret, he released Meala from his embrace and sat up, shaking his head a little to clear it. He rose as Meala slipped out of the room. He clothed himself in his waist wrap and loose shirt. He had nothing to take but a change of clothes, which were quickly bundled and tied over his back. He grabbed his staff, put a small folding knife that had survived the shipwreck in his pocket, and stepped out into the hall, looking around for Meala.
She came towards him with a solemn, confused five-year-old boy holdi
ng her hand.
“What’s this? I can’t take care of a child!” Li hissed.
The child shrank back, clinging to Meala’s leg.
“Oh, Li,” Meala said. She edged closer to him, pouting. “If you don’t take Atikem, who will keep him safe?” She batted her eyes.
Amused and enchanted by her clumsy attempt at charming him, reminded that by her people’s standards she was a woman, Li shook his head, but stole a kiss from Meala. He realized with a pang that he might not get another chance to kiss her. “I’m going to try to make the Chinese army base. If they have drone fighters, they must have supplies too.”
Atikem shrank away from him, but he was already gone—barefoot and moving at a light jog.
#
The next morning, Hawa took her morning tea and a cup to share into her father’s sleeping area, as was their habit. But as she approached, she heard voices raised in anger: several women surrounded her father, who stood naked in the hallway. The women held cudgels and were threatening him.
He spied Hawa. “There is my jewel. I will leave once I have told her goodbye,” he told the girls. “Come and say goodbye to your father!”
She came up to him, the women letting her pass, and offered him his cup of red tea. He took it from her and set it down on a nearby table. Then he put his arms around her and said, “I will see you again soon, little one. For now, I must go.”
“But Aba! I liked having you here!”
“I know, but you must let your aunties care for you now. I will be back.” He released her with a squeeze on her little shoulders. She waved sadly as he strode calmly away from the women.
She went to the children’s dormitory and saw Bilqis walking among them with some of her trusted aides.
Bilqis looked at each sleeping child briefly and then moved on. Finally, she stopped. “This one.” She pointed to Atikem.
One of the women nudged the five-year-old boy with her toe and he sat up, blinking, and rubbed his eyes. “Come with us.” He stumbled to his feet. The women took his hands and led him past Hawa, pressed to the doorframe. She followed quietly.
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