Black Mamba Boy (22 page)

He stood up with a roar. “Soobah! Come out,” he yelled. Only a child would play like this, he thought. He stood stiffly, chest out ready to fight. A hand waved out from behind a tree, but Jama didn’t move.

A man in white Somali robes came out into the open and smiled. He looked familiar. Jama squinted at the face, trying to place it.

“What do you want?” Jama shouted over.

“Don’t you recognize me?” With a sad smile the dark figure beckoned for Jama to follow. Jama picked up a jagged rock and followed the apparition; they didn’t talk.

It took Jama a long time before he accepted who had that dancing stride, those long fingers that clicked gently with every step, that face that carried the blueprint of his own. “Father, it’s too late,” Jama said.

Guure led Jama away from soldiers, crocodiles, leopards, to sanctuary; it was all he ever would do for his son. Jama cried when the apparition disappeared near a burnt-out village, and he searched amid the scorched tukuls, stepped over cold ashes, spilled pots, and lost shoes. He entered the skeleton of a hut, only to jerk back at the sight of a young child cowering in the corner. Jama turned to run away from this village of ghosts
but the young boy ran after him, grasping at his shorts. Jama stopped and looked at the boy, whose ribs hung out, the skin on his old-man face loose and his eyes like two large moons, he was definitely alive. Jama opened his knapsack, retrieved flour and his water flask, stoked up a fire, and began to prepare bread. While he worked, the child stuck to his side. He had finished the water in the flask, and now silently watched the bread take form. Jama felt no warmth emanate from him. As soon as the bread was cooked, the boy grabbed it from the fire.

He could not have been older than seven. Jama shook his head and asked, “Why are you here?” The boy was still laboriously eating the bread.

“I am waiting for my family to come back.”

Jama had not seen civilians for days. “They won’t come back,” he said flatly, holding out his hand for the boy.

“What is your name?” Jama asked as the boy put his small cold hand in his grip.

“Awate,” he replied.

“Come with me, Awate, I’ll take you somewhere safe,” Jama said, unable to leave this small human spirit in the dead village that his father had led him to. Awate knew of a town nearby and directed Jama as he carried him on his back, holding him too tightly around the neck. Awate had been playing in the woods when bombs had fallen on the village, and had run back to his tukul to find his mother and brothers gone; he had been alone for days and he clung now like a leech to Jama’s skin.

Jama and Awate fled into the lowlands around the Gash River. In a few days they had left behind the rubble and burnt vehicles and reached the date palms of Tessenei. British soldiers had taken control of Italian East Africa, so Jama threw away his
army papers before lining up at the checkpoint. Jama went to the river, bathed his feet, closed his eyes, and rested on the quiet bank. He tied weights to the images of corpses, burning men, and lost eyes lodged in his mind, and plunged them to the bottom of the river.

Jama waited a long time for Abdi, hoping that he would come around the bend one day, a little dusty, a little thirsty, but otherwise well. Sometimes casualties were brought to Tessenei on stretchers after stepping on mines or triggering booby traps. Jama would rush out of the shop to see the victim’s face but they were always high-cheekboned Eritreans. Jama wanted to search for Abdi, but the countryside was now a battleground for militias and shifta bandits. Shidane’s grave was a meeting place for robbers who gathered under his shade to share their loot. Jama wondered if Shidane’s ghost had called them to him, his spirit sitting beside them in delight as they counted and plotted. After bandits attacked Hakim’s shop, shoving their pistols into Jama’s face and grabbing sacks of grain and money, Jama remonstrated with Shidane, and they never returned. Ordinary Eritreans were also in a rebellious mood now that Italian power had been revealed as nothing more than a
magician’s trick. Every man and boy had a pistol, rifle, or grenade. When Italian prisoners of war passed through Tessenei they hid their faces from the men they had tortured and the women they had raped. Even after the carnage at Keren, the ascendancy of the European was jealously guarded by the British, who pampered the Italians and protected them from any vengeance. When bandits attacked Italian villas or shops, British troops conducted house-to-house searches until weapons and suspects were handed over.

Jama lived a simple existence in Hakim’s shop, quietly watching the world pass by, everyday routines, miracles, and tragedies filling his days. He felt no joy or misery, just a deep yearning for all the things he had lost. The war was over but it had taken everything with it, and reduced his world to an oasis of peace surrounded by a scorched wasteland. Former askaris came to the store and made chitchat with him, some drank too much, some pretended to have forgotten all about the war but still there was the never-ending inventory of lost souls. “So-and-so died of shrapnel wounds”; “Tall Mohamed was hanged”; “Hassan was ambushed by shifta”; “Samatar went missing.” Jama could not stop listening even though he was sick of death; he wanted life in its purest form, like birds had, not this stunted thing that the askaris endured. Jama asked the men to look out for Abdi and to tell him that Jama Guure was waiting for him in Tessenei, but Abdi had disappeared, flown away on invisible wings.

Jama listened to the neighbor’s cockerel sound its alarm, its crowing muffled by the other morning sounds, buckets of water sloshing, fires crackling, men and women greeting one another, mules braying, babies crying. Hawa, an old woman wrapped in red cotton, came limping into the store. She heaved and panted, on her back a sack of chickpeas, and her muscular arms threw the heavy load at Jama’s feet.

“Good peas, the best I’ve grown in a while. I’ll want a special gift from you, my little Somali,” she said, holding out her hand.

“If I were the boss, you could have anything in the shop, aunty.”

Hawa waited for Jama to weigh the sack and hand over her payment of sugar. He was always generous, giving an extra spoonful to his regulars. Hawa tweaked his cheek and placed the packet under her arm. It would take another hour for her to walk back to Gerset and her home in the Kunama settlement. The sky was clouded over, threatening a downpour.

“Stay here, Hawa, wait for it to come and go,” said Jama, lighting a cigarette, phosphorus and tobacco sharp in his nose.

Hawa trundled back to him, closing her eyes to breathe in the smoke. “Give me one, you naughty Somali, or I will report you to the boss.”

Jama broke the cigarette in half and gave her the lit end. “It’s the last one,” he said apologetically.

He thrust the other half behind his ear and checked for rotten fruit in the piles delivered by local farmers that morning. Most of the bananas and oranges were stunted little specimens, bruised and misshapen. He removed the ones that were overripe and shared them with Hawa. As they ate, the rain began, the first real downpour of the rainy season, and the wind blew in, spraying them with water. Awate came running in on his way home from the schoolhouse. He was drenched, his thin clothes plastered to his body.

“Jama, I came top in my class today. Teacher said if I carry on like this, he will send me to his brother’s big school in Kassala.”

Hawa ululated and smoke escaped in spirals from her mouth.

“Manshallah, Awate, you will go to Kassala, but dry yourself, you don’t want to get sick,” Jama admonished.

Awate lived near the shop with a distant aunt of his father’s but he visited Jama every day to grab sweets and share his achievements. His face had filled out and he looked nothing like the wraith Jama had found.

Hakim, the shopkeeper, at first kept a close eye on Jama—“I’ve had boys work for me and rob me blind, my rule is any thieves get a taste of my switch”—but he never had to use it on Jama and soon left him in charge when he went to buy stock fifty miles away in Kassala. Although he had the largest store for miles, with villages nearby supplying him with sorghum, millet, maize, and sesame, Hakim was not a natural capitalist, constantly giving his spoiled children money from the day’s takings and keeping the best meat for his family. Jama sometimes thought Hakim had a shop only so that he could have an endless supply of delicacies to shove into his small, wet mouth.

Tessenei was a hub of international trade: loot from the homes of Italian colonists was traded for goods from Egypt, and askaris sold their Italian weapons to Abyssinian shifta. Kunama farmers and taciturn Takaruri hunters exchanged their produce for cloth, coffee, and sugar, the Sudanese presiding over this mercantile frenzy like referees at a wrestling match. They opened caravanserai and bazaars and sold their sizzling kebabs at every corner. Jama was known to them and everyone else as the little Somali who could speak many languages. Jama picked up Kunama from Hawa and would translate for the rural women in disputes with Hakim over the quality of their vegetables or the extent of their debts. All kinds of people came to the shop. Once, a man burst in, carrying a spear and shield, wearing the lion skin
of an Amhara warrior, only to shout, “Waryaa inanyow!” to Jama. He was no Amhara but a full-blooded Somali, a Habr Yunis man from around Hargeisa who had ended up in Abyssinia and fought against the Italians. He took off the sweaty lion pelt and chatted with Jama about the desert, camels, and his plan to join the Royal Navy in Egypt. Before sunset he picked up his mane, spear, and shield and disappeared toward Sudan.

Jama spent two years working for Hakim without pay; he traded his labor for something to eat and somewhere to sleep. On that coffee-scented floor he became a man, his arms and legs no longer able to fit comfortably in his nook beneath the counter; he felt like an elephant trapped in a goat pen. At night he thought about trying his luck somewhere else. Hakim was often kind but he was also a grouchy merchant who muttered complaints under his thick walrus mustache. When Jama finally made up his mind to leave, Hakim threw his big hands in the air and said frantically, “Haven’t I been good to you? What more could you want?” Hakim reached into his pocket and gave Jama exactly two pounds for his seven hundred and thirty days of toil. Awate cried when Jama told him he would be leaving and held on to his long legs to slow him down, but Jama pried him off. “I’ll be back, Awate. You can be my coolie when I open a store,” he promised.

Jama explored the local villages, looking for one isolated and poor enough to lack a Sudanese stall. It was a bleak journey. Roads were still blocked by burnt-out tanks, minefields were hidden under weeds, and bones jutted from shallow graves. Jama found Focka nestled in a lush valley; it was a tiny village with barely twenty families who trekked two hours to Tessenei for textiles, medicines, paraffin. When the little Somali came to visit and spoke of his plans, they nearly nailed him to a stake to stop him escaping. Among the matriarchal Kunamas, women
like Ambaro, Jinnow, and Awrala were everywhere, bossing him about, giving him unwanted advice on how to build his stall, teasing him about his exotic looks, his thin girly face, and wavy hair. He had emerged from the underworld into this land of Amazons. The villagers were excited to have a foreigner in their midst, and Jama’s stall, made from torn-down Italian billboards and covered with palm fronds, became the talking shop, tavern, and in the evenings, dancehall. Young men, tired and sweaty, would come in from the fields and untangle their muscles in wacky dances they named the pissing dog, the hungry chicken, the rutting ram, all the while getting limp on honey mead and running up large debts at Jama’s stall. The elders would occasionally perform epic sagas about their ancient queens who had come to Eritrea as nomads and been seduced by this fertile land.

To satisfy his customers’ desires and avoid the high British taxes, Jama would hire a camel and take the risky night route through the desert between Tessenei and Kassala. He cherished these expeditions, his pale clothes glowing in the moonshine and sand grains glinting like diamonds in his path, and he felt like he had gone back in time to when his own ancestors sought out new lands. The white-hot stars were so bright they nearly burned him, and the moonlit dunes would undulate and swim as he was rocked into somnolence on the camel’s back. Jama would be jolted awake when he heard the laughs of hyenas following him, the snap of their jaws as they bit at the camel’s long thin legs. Smugglers were a delicacy to local hyenas, and on this long isolated stretch if a smuggler was thrown off his startled camel he would have no hope of rescue; they would pounce and leave nothing behind.

With smuggled Sudanese cigarettes hidden under his clothes, Jama would return triumphantly to the village. He was
never caught by the Sudanese police. The crunch of a policeman’s footstep or his smoker’s cough carried for miles on the desert air, and if Jama heard anything he would find another smuggler’s track. With these nocturnal journeys Jama doubled his takings. He expanded the stall until secondhand shoes hung from their laces above his head, paraffin lamps glowered like squat policemen at his side, and homemade perfumes, oily love potions, wafted out of scavenged glass bottles. Everything Jama sold brought the glamour of the outside world to Focka. Under the eternal woods of overgrown baobabs and fragrant tamarinds, a village was being shaken out of a daydream. The magic of oil and coal made life easier, faster, dirtier, and Jama’s stall offered as much of the outside world as he could carry. When the harvest was brought in, people gasped at the lewd fecundity of the earth. Carrots long and rampant jumped out of the soil, red saucy tomatoes pouted from their vines. Emerald, citrine, and ruby peppers shone from dowdy wicker baskets, and the lambs, the lambs, shouting and boasting all the way to market. Women carried baskets full of eggs as big as fists on their heads to Tessenei. Focka, only Focka had been blessed, and the rest of the villages in the Kunama country revealed sullen sacks of gnarled vegetables and sour fruit at market. The people were angry. The farmers of Focka were keeping the lucky Somali to themselves. Women met in all the villages; hushed secret midnight conferences took place.