The Orchard of Lost Souls (12 page)

‘Can’t I come with you?’ She reaches out.

Nasra pushes her hands away. ‘No, that would be too much trouble for me. You stay, you can take my room, you can have all of my things while I am gone.’ Her eyes don’t meet
Deqo’s but flit around from one corner to another, and her hands tremble slightly as she throws garments from the bed towards her wardrobe. ‘You’ll be fine, Deqo. Mustafa is a
good man,’ she says, but her voice cracks unconvincingly.

She watches mutely as Nasra wanders the room, stuffing documents and random belongings into her handbag: red nail varnish, tweezers, comb.

A car horn sounds outside the bungalow.

‘But Nasra . . .’

‘But nothing! I have to go, stop nagging me.’ She yanks her shawl over her head and rushes to the hall, dragging the heavy suitcase with both hands she reaches the front door and
slams it shut behind her.

Deqo’s attention turns to Mustafa. He raises an eyebrow at her. ‘Let her go, what do you need her for?’

‘When will she come back?’ Deqo says, holding back her tears.

‘Come sit down with me.’ He stubs out his cigarette on a dirty dish, puts an arm around her shoulder and leads her to the bed. ‘You’ve grown since the last time I saw
you. That’s the thing about little girls, you change every day.’

Deqo shrugs his arm away but he grabs the back of her dress and drags her to sit. ‘Come on now, don’t be like that. We can start off in a good way or you can thrash around and make
it worse than it needs to be.’

‘I don’t want you! Get off me!’ she cries, twisting away from him.

‘Deqo!’

She bristles at the sound of her name in his mouth.

‘Watch her leave if you want.’ He points to the window with one hand while still holding her dress in the other.

Deqo clambers over the bed and catches a flash of Nasra darting from the boot of the white vehicle to the passenger door. She disappears behind the tinted glass, the engine revs and with a blast
of saxophones and drums from the stereo she is gone.

Mustafa lets go of her and leans back on his arms. ‘I will take better care of you than she ever did.’

Deqo cups her face in her hands and tears flow onto her palms. She feels her strength seeping out of her and into the soft, rumpled bed. Mustafa’s presence encompasses her; his breath, his
sprawling flesh, his silent menace.

She takes her hands away from her eyes and checks the distance to the door. Her legs are folded under her while his dangle over the side of the bed.

‘How much did Nasra tell you about what she does?’ he asks, scratching his stubble.

Deqo shakes her head but doesn’t reply.

‘Don’t look like your world’s caved in, good girls like you are usually the most popular, you’ll make a fine living.’

Deqo bolts for the door before he has finished speaking but he grabs her ankle and wrestles her to the floor.

As she screams he covers her mouth with his hand; his fingers taste of tobacco and ghee. Deqo bites down on them until she tastes blood, but he rips his hand away and punches her mouth.

‘China! Stalin!’ she cries.

‘They won’t help you!’ he sneers.

He pulls her skirt up; she is not wearing knickers because she had washed the two pairs that she owns in the morning.

She sees a black stiletto on the floor and reaches for it while he is trying to prise open her legs. He doesn’t see it coming as she forces the heel into his eye. He is thrown back in
pain. She pitches the shoe to the side then escapes from the room.

She runs blindly into the street, her pulse pounding in her temples. She heads instinctively for the market, past the first checkpoint and into a deep throng of shoppers. She navigates around
the dawdling figures, clawing her way through until a flat-bed truck parked horizontally across the entrance to the market stops her flight.

The crowd is transfixed by the sight of three dead bodies on the bed of the truck: three old men in red-checked sarongs, brown bloodstains like bibs on their white shirts, camel leather sandals
on their feet, a nomad’s
hangol
staff beside one of them. Around each of their necks is a board with ‘NFM’ written on it in red ink. The soldiers seated around the bodies
look like hunters posing with the wild animals they have caught, an element of embarrassment on their faces at the wizened, toothless specimens they have found. One of them adjusts the position of
the head nearest to him with his dusty boot.

No one says a word, neither soldiers nor spectators, it is a silent lesson; a blizzard of flies hovering over the truck makes the only sound. Already the corpses are beginning to turn in the
heat; their faces have ceased to have any kind of spirit in them, just slack skin over bones.

Inside the green, wailing walls of the hospital there are too many annoyances: the clumsy cleaner clanking her heavy metal bucket against the cement floor, the feuding nurses
who never come when they are called and the self-pitying amputee who never stops calling them. Kawsar can tell there is a
miri-miri
tree outside the window by the constant chirruping of
tiny
yaryaro
birds; the din of their
‘jiiq, jiiq, jiiq’
call and rustling feathers is so dizzying – as if there are mice scurrying through her head – that
she hopes they will take flight with the tree and eat its seeds someplace else. In her aluminium bed, its rank mattress so thin she feels the bars of the base against her back, Kawsar pulls the
nylon sheet over her head and hides from the visitors tramping through the ward. She concentrates on facing the pain that girdles her. It is a complex agony: a pulsing, electric high-note over
something messier and deeper – similar to the post-childbirth sensation that her bones and flesh had been ground down to mush. She is not able to sit up, stretch, turn over or even shift
without a crackle of pain rushing through her nerves. She is taut, her jaw clenched tight, the breath held in her lungs, the tendons in her neck rigid, trying to anticipate this pain before it
engulfs her in its swell.

‘Broken hip. Broken pelvis,’ the doctor declares, but she doesn’t trust him; he has spent no more than three minutes examining her, his eyes misted over with other thoughts. He
seems to feel that her time is rightfully up, that her leaf is about to fall.

‘Can you not operate?’

There is annoyance in the doctor’s voice, ‘You’re too old, your bones would not stand up to it. Osteoporosis. The hospital is short of equipment for surgery anyway. I think all
we can do is make sure the pain is under control.’

‘But will I walk again?’

Kawsar’s eyes have been fixed on the ceiling throughout the whole exchange.

There is no reply from him and a few seconds later he walks out of the ward with a nurse a few steps behind.

When she wakes later in the afternoon, she sees Dahabo glaring down at her. She lightly touches Kawsar’s bruised face. ‘Look at you.’

‘How the mighty have fallen. She beat me like a disobedient donkey.’ Kawsar smiles wanly, one of her eyes swollen and the left side of her vision blurred. ‘I’m surprised
she didn’t kill me.’

‘
Joow,
you are made of leather and bitterness, nothing can kill you. But if I could get my hands on her, I would skin her alive and make a handbag out of her hide.’ Dahabo
squeezes the pillow in demonstration of her anger.

‘She is a child of her time.’

‘No, it is the other way around: those with sick hearts have made the time what it is, and what did you think you were doing anyway? Rushing away from us at the stadium like that? Did you
lose your mind?’

‘Maybe. Hodan must have got it from somewhere.’

‘Kawsar. You have got to stop blaming yourself. No one can derail a person from their fate. She was loved more than any child I know, including my own.’

Dahabo’s voice never drops from the volume it takes to yell across a street.

‘Shush, Dahabo, can you not speak in a normal voice?’ Kawsar hisses. She doesn’t want the ancient woman in the bed beside her to overhear.

‘To hell with them, Kawsar, listen to me. You could not have done more for her. You bought the pills you were meant to, had the imam read her the Qu’ran, you kept her out of that
place.’ She gestures through the window to the hospital madhouse. ‘What else? What else could you have done? Or I? Or anyone?’

‘I know. I know. Let’s not go over this again,’ Kawsar says quietly.

Dahabo clutches her shoulder. ‘You are old now and fragile, you have to be kinder to yourself.’

‘I want it to all end, Dahabo. Is that wrong?’

‘No, but your time will come, as will mine. Wait. You can’t throw yourself in danger, breaking a hip here, an arm there. Leaving me with another mouth to feed.’ She reaches
down to pick up a basket. ‘I’ve put a few meals in here. I want the plates cleared, do you understand me?’

‘I can’t . . .’ Kawsar feels guilty eating into Dahabo’s hard-earned income while hidden under her own mattress at home there are hundreds and thousands of shillings.

‘You will. Maryam and Raage will come to collect you tomorrow. Don’t fight anyone in that time if you can help it.’

Maryam and Raage arrive early in the morning to collect her, before the rush at his store. ‘Don’t forget the basket, it’s Dahabo’s,’ points Kawsar
from the trolley, ‘check under the bed too, I might have dropped something.’

‘Yes,
eddo
,’ Maryam bends down to check, ‘nothing.’

‘Good, let’s
roohi
then.’

Raage takes the lower end of the trolley and pulls it out of the ward.

They roll along the uneven, grey-tiled corridor, past queues waiting outside the TB clinic and paediatric wards. The strangers stare at her, grateful for a momentary diversion from the endless
waiting. They stare most at Maryam; she was born and raised in Hargeisa, but the long nose she has inherited from her English mother points her back to Europe. With her wisps of yellow hair and
light brown skin she has always made Kawsar think of a plastic doll that has been left out too long in the sun.

Kawsar has not visited the hospital since Hodan’s death and does not remember being brought in from the jail. She is in the main, low building left over from the British; the maternity and
other small wards are scattered around it, and hidden beyond a high barbed-wire wall is the psycho-social unit. The morgue is a more recent extension, built to cope with the victims of Ethiopian
bombing sorties over the city. The hospital is falling into ruin, the inside walls are cracked, the plaster peeling, creepers snaking their way through the windows.

An orderly in a khaki jumpsuit stops them at the main entrance. ‘You cannot take the trolley beyond this point,’ he says, grabbing hold of the rail above Kawsar’s head.

‘We are just taking her to the car. She can’t walk,’ Maryam argues, trying to pull the trolley with her.

‘Leave it here, don’t you have ears?’

‘You put a donkey in uniform and see what happens,’ Maryam shouts back.

‘What? Should I call the police? You can tell them what you think about donkeys and uniforms.’

‘To hell with you.’

‘Let’s go, Maryam, quickly please,’ Kawsar begs.

‘Ko, labah, sadeh,
one, two, three . . .’ Maryam and Raage pick up the thick woollen blanket underneath her and lift Kawsar into the air. Neither is strong and they struggle
to walk without losing grip of the blanket, but they persevere until she is safely manoeuvred into the long, grimy boot of the red Toyota.

Raage starts the engine and drives out of the hospital grounds. ‘Go as slowly as you can,’ orders Maryam.

Kawsar does not hear if Raage replies; there is a sudden numbness to her senses from the painkillers, a cushioned distance between her and the rest of the world. She looks through the
dust-haloed back window, streaked with the scum of dead flies, at the passing trees bowing down to her and fluttering their green fans.

Kawsar seems to float a few precious inches as the car dips into potholes and weaves around ditches. ‘Where are we?’ she asks, disorientated.

‘Going past the old women’s college, our college,’ smiles Maryam, squeezing her hand.

‘Near where I met Farah . . .’

‘What did you say?’ Maryam bends down to hear.

‘Nothing,’ she replies, closing her eyes.

She had first seen Farah while dawdling home from the Women’s Technical School with Dahabo. It was a languid, dry season day, her shadow huge and black behind her,
and they were teasing each other as they held hands. A lunatic was on the run from the mental hospital, weaving his sticky web of insanity over the town. Kawsar always imagined him as a man-spider
who had clambered out of the English asylum they’d trapped him in and sailed back to Somaliland on driftwood. The girls passed telegraph poles in which his teeth marks were visible, his
hundred white incisors imprinted onto the fresh black paint. Kawsar had heard at college that devil voices pursued the madman through the telegraph wires, his mind burnt up by the fire in their
words. At every junction policemen lay in wait for him before he killed again. A tall, young policeman was standing with a red-haired Englishman at the crossroads ahead. There was no main road in
south Hargeisa then, just a track tramped down by camel caravans, and the girls crossed to the other side so the men would not come too close. Dust hung in the air between them, lit gold and orange
by the weary sun, and she accidentally caught the eye of the Somali policeman as she watched it glitter.

‘We’re here,
eddo.
I’ll get help from the hotel.’ Maryam crawls out of the car. She returns moments later with a crowd of men, their
silhouettes black against the sun, their voices and hands indistinguishable, innumerable.

Each holds a scrap of the blanket and Kawsar believes for a moment that this is her funeral, that they will wrap her in this blanket and grasp handfuls of sand to throw over her, burying her
wide-eyed and pliant.

‘This way, this way,’ Maryam leads them to Kawsar’s bungalow.

A break in the men’s bodies reveals a slice of October Road: children in their scruffy playclothes watch the hullabaloo with quizzical expressions.