Nomad (8 page)

I wondered if I had been “good.” Duty was the most basic virtue I was indoctrinated with as a child. But I knew the answer. It was clear to me that from the perspective of my upbringing, by her own standards, I had failed my mother.

It was difficult to contain the flood of nostalgia that overwhelmed me after my father died. My memory, mysteriously, marks the colors of places for me, so that recalling even just those colors can be soothing. My mind still harks back to colors, long after forgetting the stories and the streets and even the people.

I remember the off-white sand in front of our house in Mogadishu and the blue of the cloudless sky, the houses painted white with shutters that were sometimes blue but mainly green, a whole spectrum of weather-beaten green paints. The bougainvillea were an explosion of purple, pink, crimson, and all the shades in between, in the bright, hot, and unrelenting sun. I remember the yellow-green of the papaya tree and the brown blotches on the flanks of the white goats, and how you could tell them from sheep, even across a great distance, because the sheep’s heads were black and their bodies white. I remember the
cobalt blue of my first school uniform and the yellow of the shirts of the boys who terrified me. The bright colors of the shawls and draped garments worn by the women and the darker hues of gray and green of the sarongs worn by the men are as fresh in my mind as if I had seen them only yesterday. I remember the stark palette of grays, whites, and blacks in Saudi Arabia, then the suddenly clanging, clashing colors when we moved to Kenya. My memories of Holland are a series of dim but lovely harmonies, muted cream-colored stone and mild green fields and gray skies.

In the weeks and months that followed my father’s death, it was the season that in America they so poetically call fall. Outside my window in the house I was visiting in upstate New York, tall trees, which I was told were oaks and maples, filled the landscape. Almost as I watched them, their large leaves seemed to shift color, some maroon, some yellow and red. Then they fell so that the ground became a vast, beautiful carpet, embroidered with designs in gold, brown, and deep oxblood.

The sky is of a different blue in America, not as sharply bright as the one above Mogadishu and not as dim and gray as the sky above Leiden. I yearned for the warmth of a fireplace where I could stare at the flames that so resemble the beauty outdoors, where I could warm my toes and think about what it would be like if I were still encircled by my family.

When my sister Haweya died in 1998 I wanted to die too. I felt that all the compromise solutions that I had patched together to enable me to negotiate a successful life in a modern country alongside the ancient values we had been taught made me a worthless, spineless person. I thought that the best of us had been taken, and that I didn’t deserve life if she could not have it.

When my father died I did not so much miss him as I missed the illusion of certainty, the childish feeling that I was beloved. I longed for a structured, stable life, one in which my goals and the behavior required of me were consistent. In a way, I understood fully what Sahra and others saw in religion, which is the chance to be like a child again, protected, taken by the arm and told what is right and what is wrong, what to do and what not to do—to take a break from thinking.

*    *    *

I felt remorse at my alienation from Sahra and the rest of my family. Sahra may be downtrodden from an objective standpoint (or, at any rate, from mine), but she doesn’t feel that way. She has a daughter and a husband; she is protected from loneliness. She
belongs
. She has the certainty, the strength, the clear goals that stem from belief. She was with my father through his old age and death. I was not.

I was thirty-eight years old and I was only beginning to truly understand why people want to belong somewhere, and to understand how difficult it is to sever all ties with the culture and religion in which you are born. Outwardly I was a success. People wrote articles about me, they asked me what books I was reading and what I thought of Barack Obama. My speeches received standing ovations. But my personal life was a mess. I had escaped from my family and gone to Europe because I hadn’t wanted to be trapped in marriage to a virtual stranger I didn’t like. Now, in America, I felt rootless, lost. To be a nomad, always wandering, had always sounded romantic. In practice, to be homeless and living out of a suitcase was a little foretaste of hell.

I stared at the black-and-white photograph of my grandmother that hangs on my living-room wall. I felt a stab of pain and avoided her piercing eyes, but her words had jabbed their way into my mind:
The world outside the clan is rough, and you are alone in it
.

Ma told me that my brother Mahad, who lived in Nairobi, was badgering her for my phone number. She hadn’t given it to him. She warned me that if she did, he would ask me to help him get a visa to Europe or America, and she begged me not to do it. She had a terrible fear of losing him to the infidel countries, which, in her mind, had driven Haweya to madness and death, and me to far worse: to apostasy, immorality, immortal doom. The West had taken her daughters, and Mahad was all she had left. She asked me to send him money so that he could come live with her in northern Somalia.

I wondered what complex and conflicting emotions Mahad felt when he heard that Abeh had died. When my little sister Haweya and I were small, our brother seemed to us to have the key to a privileged connection with our father. When Abeh had languished in a prison in Mogadishu, Mahad had visited him. Ma always took her eldest son to places she would never allow her daughters to venture to.

Then Abeh escaped, and we girls were at last allowed to participate in the adventure. We fled Somalia and moved to Saudi Arabia when Mahad was ten, I was eight, and Haweya six and a half. In Saudi Arabia we would at last meet our father, ma said. But when we begged Mahad for details about Abeh, he assumed a pompous, professorial tone and described a figure of mythical proportions: hugely tall, infinitely strong, impossibly understanding and good.

I wondered out loud whether Abeh walked or floated. Mahad said I was foolish. Mahad always told me how foolish I was. He used the word
doqon
—“gullible, dupe”—and it hurt. But I was too excited by the prospect of meeting Abeh to dwell for too long on bad feelings.

“Oh, Mahad,” little Haweya interrupted, “will he lift me up on his neck, like our uncle?”

“He might,” Mahad replied. “Come here, little one, let me lift you on my neck.” He bent down, and clumsy Haweya clambered onto his back, tugging his hair. Mahad began yelling.

Ma came in; we were making too much noise, again. The two-bedroom flat in Mecca was hot, far too hot, and too small for us. We were used to a house in Mogadishu, with a yard to run in and a talal tree to climb. Ma was afraid that we would annoy the neighbors so much that we’d be evicted from the apartment. She used to order Mahad to take charge of his younger sisters and keep us quiet. Now Haweya had pulled his hair a little too hard and
he
was making the noise. She let him have it. “You’re letting me down again,” she cried. “I am on my own. Must I look for food to keep you from howling at night, or must I keep you from behaving like animals? You tell me.”

Mahad entreated, “But she pulled my hair.”

“How did she reach your head?” Ma snapped.

“She wanted to know if Abeh would put her on his neck.”

Ma screamed as if there was fire throughout the building, “You
wa’al
bastard child. All three of you are cursed—monsters, cursed! I hope death finds you in lumps. May the ancestors tear you to pieces!”

Mahad, his voice shrill and desperate, pleaded, “Ma, this one wanted to know if Abeh walks on air and this one wanted to climb on my neck. What do you want me to do?”

Kicking off her shoe, Ma hurled it at his head and raced toward him menacingly. “What I want from you is to be a man, you traitor. I want you to be a man. You are such a weakling, defeated by two girls! How will you ever stand up to men? How will you wrestle? How will you honor your forefathers, fight a lion, earn your share of she-camels? It is my tragedy, my unfortunate fate that I have but one son and he is incapable of even keeping his sisters under control. How will you ever lead an army? Control a battalion? Rule a people? You can’t manage two little girls—what are you good for?”

Mahad ran off to the bathroom, fighting tears.

Neither Mahad nor Haweya nor I had ever seen a lion. I had seen camels, also cows, goats, sheep, lizards, and a reptile called
abbeso
that terrified me into such a fit that to this day the thought of it keeps
me from looking up what it might be called in English. But I certainly didn’t know the difference between he-camels and she-camels. Mahad may have had an inkling, but I doubt that he ever got close enough to a camel to tell its sex.

For a rare moment I felt grateful to be a girl. I would never have to wrestle lions, real or imagined.

Mahad, having more freedom than we did, was exposed to all sorts of adventures, but he also had to face much worse trials than we did. In Saudi Arabia the law requires women to hide and never step outside without being escorted by a male guardian. Our mother leaned on Mahad, her ten-year-old, to act as that legal male guardian for her whenever our father was away, which turned out to be most of the time. She indulged him with luxuries she would not have wasted on girls, but she also ordered him to take responsibility not only for his behavior but also for Haweya’s and mine. He acted as Ma’s interpreter from Arabic, which we learned in school, to Somali. He was expected to decipher the world for her, to protect her and us, though he was only ten. Sometimes he heard the Saudi men say lewd and ugly things to Sometimes they called her
abda
(slave) and other times
aswad
(black). Mahad would pretend not to hear them; he never translated those words.

It would be an understatement to call Mahad’s relationship with Abeh troubled. But from the instant Abeh finally arrived in Saudi Arabia, my father adored me, indulged me, forgave me my mistakes, cuddled me and stroked my hair. He let Haweya climb on his neck, tug his hair, and sprint back and forth in the tiny flat, screaming the ancient battle cries that our grandmother had taught us. Abeh’s attitude to Mahad was just the opposite of this indulgence. He showed little physical affection. He ordered Mahad to stand up and raise his chin and look him in the eye. He expected Mahad to be impeccable in manners, in dress, in prayers, in helping Ma.

Mahad could never fill Abeh’s shoes. When he failed to meet our father’s lofty and often vague demands, Abeh would glare at him. Abeh humiliated Mahad and often slapped him across the face.

When we moved to the Saudi capital, Riyadh, one of my father’s relatives came to visit us. He drove a white Toyota pickup. He left his
key in the ignition to greet my parents before seeking a parking space. When we saw him coming into the house with extended arms, Mahad slipped past him and ran to the pickup. He started the engine and hit the accelerator, then the brake, knocking his head on the steering wheel. The car responded to Mahad’s handling with screeching noises that attracted the attention of the adults, who were engaged in elaborate exchanges of greetings. Ma stepped outside without her black
hijab
and screamed in shock. She yelled that Mahad had hit his head. My father strode out of the house, opened the door of the truck, pulled Mahad out, lifted him with both hands, and threw him on the ground. Then he kicked Mahad. He removed his belt with one clean swing and started lashing my brother, now helpless on the ground.

As always when Abeh hit Mahad, Ma threw herself at our father, screaming curses, begging Allah to make him barren, and appealing to our ancestors to paralyze him. She started beating my father on his back and shoulders, first using her hands, then throwing her shoes at him. Father hurled a few words of contempt at Mahad—something about honor—and then went back into the house to attend to his relative.

Mahad was writhing in pain, doubly humiliated because not only we, the girls, were watching, but so were the little boys from the neighboring homes. He did all he could not to cry, then gave up and howled like an animal.

Every evening Abeh would order us to wash, brush our teeth, put on our nightclothes, pray, and go to bed. Haweya and I would usually obey, but Mahad used this routine to try Abeh’s patience in silent mutiny. He would go into the bathroom, lock the door, and stay in there for hours. My mother would listen for the sound of running water and hear none. No one knew what Mahad did in there, but he would not turn on the shower. Meanwhile our bedtime was being delayed. Ma would stop my father from breaking down the door. After what seemed like hours, Mahad would emerge as dry as when he went in, dressed just as before. My father and mother would argue loudly; Ma would call my father names, and Abeh would retaliate by calling Mahad names. They were disgraceful names: comparing Mahad to a girl, calling him a coward, threatening to whip him with the belt, saying he was not his son.

Sometimes, just before prayer time, if Abeh was home he would spit at Mahad, “You filthy boy—or maybe I should call you a girl—did you do your ablutions?”

Mahad would look down and press out of his lips, “Yes, Father.”

Abeh would shout, “Look at me, look me in the eye!”

Mahad would turn up his chin, find a spot on my father’s forehead, and glare.

“Did you do your ablutions?” Father would growl. Ma would position herself between her son and her husband.

“Yes, Father,” Mahad would say, his voice trembling.

“But you are dry. Where is the wetness?”

“I dry fast,” Mahad would stammer.

Abeh would raise his voice: “Liar! Liar! Little, filthy liar, you will never be a man. You don’t have what it takes. Get away from me! Right behind your mother’s skirt—that’s where you belong.”

Mahad’s tears would glide out of his eyes and down his cheeks. He would stand and watch my father turn away and leave the room. The next morning Abeh would shake Mahad awake and drag him to the bathroom sink, where he would tower over him as Mahad did his ablutions. Or Abeh would demonstrate how to go about it quickly. Wash your hands, clean your mouth by gargling three times, then your nose. Abeh cupped his hand, filled it with water, and carried it quickly to his nostrils, then inhaled deeply—an act that, when Mahad tried it, had him sputtering, coughing and sneezing like a drowning lamb.