The Orchard of Lost Souls (14 page)

‘What a man! Imagine what he would do to the idiot police now.’

‘I was there in the cemetery. I saw his dead body. His hair white with sand, he wore a light yellow shirt and there were three red wounds in his chest. Here, here and here . . .’
Kawsar points to imaginary holes in her own chest. ‘His eyes were open, looking up at me, and I bent down and closed them.’

‘
Maskiin,
poor man.’

‘I was angry with myself afterwards. I thought that touching a dead body so close to my wedding would bring bad luck.’

‘Nonsense. It surprises me that I have never touched a corpse, even after all these years.’

‘I have touched too many. Maybe I should never have approached that first one.’

Dahabo visits her every day at noon, when the streets are at their hottest and the shops close for lunch and midday prayers. When Maryam English and Fadumo can join they eat
communally with the radio on in the background and sift through the rumours spreading across Hargeisa – the government is going to shut down the schools, or is going to put chemicals in the
water supply to make the population more docile, or is already planning to demolish all the cities and villages in the north-west – Kawsar only believes what the BBC Somali Service broadcasts
from London report, they are far enough away to not succumb to the propaganda or hysteria. In the brief time that Farah had been chief of police in seventy-six he had warned that the government was
capable of anything; it saw the country as a blank canvas that it could paint in whatever likeness it wanted. The police, army and bureaucrats were just the brushes they used. He lasted a few
months before he was told to take early retirement. The police service had purged all of those who challenged the government’s edicts and now no outrage was inconceivable. Oodweyne’s
proclamations were becoming more menacing; his nickname ‘Big Voice’ was intended to mock his radio interludes but the words he spoke in that deep percussive drawl were increasing in
violence and hubris. He wanted all citizens to know that no one would get the better of him; that it would take death to unseat him.

The weeks after Kawsar’s return from hospital float by in an opiate-induced torpor. She dozes as much as she can and spends the rest of her time alternately bickering
with Nurto and brooding. She can bear the girl’s messiness, the rough way she runs a wet cloth over her in the mornings, but she cannot bear watching her leave every day to do the same
circuit that she has done for the last forty years. Cocooned within a tight wrapping of petticoat,
diric,
jumper and blankets, her skin pale and clammy, Kawsar feels like an enormous,
delicate silkworm cloistered from the sun. If only damp wings could unfurl from her back and bear her away. Instead, there are bedsores. When Nurto returns after the shops have closed at one the
never-ending conversation starts again.

‘What have you done with the rest of the money?’ Kawsar asks, examining the change the girl has slapped onto the bed.

‘That’s all of it,’ Nurto pants. Her cheeks are flushed and her clothes pungent after chasing her friends around the market.

‘You think that my mind is gone rather than my hip?’

Nurto ignores the comment and stomps towards the kitchen.

‘I’m talking to you. Come here now or I’ll send you back to that tin shack you come from.’

Nurto reappears at the door.

‘How much was the kilo of rice?’ Kawsar continues, training her eyes on the girl.

‘One thousand shillings,’ comes the defiant reply.

‘And the tomatoes?’

‘One hundred and fifty shillings.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since they got more expensive.’

Kawsar reaches for the leather sandal sitting unused next to her bed and holds it aloft.

‘One month ago a bag of tomatoes cost eighty shillings and now you expect me to believe the same dried-up tomatoes are a hundred and fifty?’

‘Believe what you like. I was lucky to even buy the rice before it was sold out. People were fighting over the last few bags, punching and kicking each other. God above knows that I am
telling the truth.’

‘God knows that you’re a cheating, ungrateful, untrustworthy liar.’

‘What would you know? You’re just a . . . a . . . smelly old woman.’

Kawsar throws the sandal but Nurto makes a show of not flinching and contemptuously tidies up the basket of wool and half-finished knitting it tips over.

Nurto’s presence in her home has long lost the pleasure of novelty and is instead suffocating. This is her life now, no orchards, no family, no movement. She is just a stomach to be filled
and a backside to be wiped, and these daily contests with the maid are one of the few things that remind her that she is still alive. Her mind spins between what is lost and what remains. The
bungalow is often filled with sea-silence like a giant shell, her days empty, clear of appointment or duty. Instead of helping Dahabo at her market stall or looking after Zahra’s children she
watches Nurto like a spectre. She has become one with the bed; from a two-legged creature she has grown four metal feet, the mattress moulded to her flesh, its springs entwined with her ribs.
Trapped within a skin within a bed within a house, only her two peeping eyes feel mobile, alive; they flutter about the room, settling hesitantly on her dusty possessions, the mysterious bundles
and packages that litter the nests of old women. The urge to preserve, store and shroud her possessions had manifested itself quietly; she cannot remember when she began collecting the flakes at
the bottom of the spice tin, the too-short-to-knit-with lengths of wool and the dried-up medals of soap, yet everywhere she looks rests another knot of plastic or cloth hiding the detritus of her
existence. All has been condensed into tight bundles, her fifty-something years of town life – the papers, the gold, the money, the photographs, letters and cassettes – can be packed
up, carried away on the back of a camel and blown away or destroyed in a rainstorm. Her bungalow with no heir will slump into old age and crumble back into the sand, her life of solidity and
bureaucracy and acquisition leaving less of a print than the circles scorched into the desert by long dead nomads.

It is time for the weekly wash. A metal basin of lukewarm, soapy water and a facecloth are the extent of her bath, but Kawsar makes Nurto light an urn of crystallised incense
to fragrance the room. It is a good day to feel water on the skin; there has been a thunderstorm, jagged spears of lightning impaling the sky through the window, the thunder as enveloping and
threatening as an angry father and the rain as sibilant and soft as a mother’s comforting words. The air pregnant with moisture as the drought finally lifts. It is a day to sit in cosy,
expensive smoke and be lulled by the music of the sleepy, sodden town just outside the walls. She has taken a few painkillers just to savour this mood that glides her back to her childhood. Her
mother used to wash her in the backyard with the fat, warm raindrops of the
Gu
season gathered into a barrel and poured from the tin cup in her mother’s hand. Her mother’s
spare hand held Kawsar’s thin upper arm tightly while she splashed and giggled in the tight circle around her feet, her curly hair slick and cloying against her back. This was around the same
time she’d had the
gudniin.
Dahabo had had hers first, disappearing for two weeks before reappearing in new clothes and shoes, a purse dangling from her bangled arm.
‘How’d you get them?’ Kawsar asked, her mouth dropping.

Dahabo put the purse carefully on the step and quickly looked over her shoulder; she grabbed the corners of her skirt and flicked it up at the front, her bangles giving a little flourish as if
to say, ‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’

Kawsar’s eyes widened at the half-healed wound where Dahabo’s shame had been. ‘Does it hurt?’ She wanted to ask to see it again but their mothers might appear
suddenly.

‘When I
kaaji
it stings.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘My cousins came in from the
miyi
and they did us all together. Today is the first time we have been allowed to walk, we had our legs bound for days and days.’

Kawsar reached to touch the bangles; their glitter came off on her sweaty, jealous fingers.

‘You should get done too,’ Dahabo chirruped, but there was no need, there was no way Kawsar would allow herself to be left behind, be called dirty names and left out of games. If it
was Dahabo’s time then it was hers too.

That very night she gathered close to her mother and told her she wanted to be made
halal
like Dahabo.

‘But you are a year younger than her and smaller too. You are not ready, Kawsar.’

Younger, smaller maybe, but Kawsar as the only child of a widow was not used to being denied, and by the morning she had forced her will on her mother. Within the fortnight a middle-aged woman
appeared at the front door with her circumcision kit.

‘Kawsar, Kawsar.’ Nurto shakes her leg.

‘Yes?’ she says with a start.

Nurto squeezes excess water from the small towel and slaps it into Kawsar’s hand; this is the signal for her to wash between her legs.

Nurto turns her back to the bed and picks up the basin to refill it in the kitchen.

Kawsar’s hand slips down past the sprigs of grey hair that have grown sparse with a lifetime of shaving and runs over the smooth shield of skin that lies over her genitals. She scrubs at
the scar tissue and slack flesh, hoping to erase the musty smell she fears clings to her for most of the week. She bears no kindness to this part of her body, it has brought her nothing but pain
and disappointment, and if she could scour it away she would feel no regret. It sometimes seems as if that cutter, looking around that finely furnished room, at the thick mattress Kawsar reclined
on and at the rips in her own garments, had decided to play a trick on her. Maybe she had stitched the opening completely closed or cut too deeply or even planted thorns in her womb to make it
barren. She certainly appeared to have been diminished in some respect that day, while Dahabo and the other girls recovered from their circumcisions stronger than before. Whichever bitter old
sorceress devised this practice back in pagan times must have convinced the others that this was the way to winnow the strong from the weak; that girls who could not survive this were not worth the
milk it took to raise them. If a few managed to hobble along, neither dead nor properly alive, well, they could be suffered as long as they didn’t get in the way This philosophy had given
generations of women – kept like Russian dolls one within the other – the same hardness, the same ability to not look back to whoever was left behind until eventually it was them who
dallied at the rear.

Nurto returns with the basin, the hardness visible in her brow too. Kawsar drops the cloth to the floor and lets the girl scrub her back with a splayed brush. It feels good as the numb skin
rushes back to life, but the brush soon approaches the two bedsores standing pink and proud above her buttocks.

That’s enough,’ she says, sucking in air through her teeth.

Nurto rubs her dry with a towel stiff with detergent and then helps her into fresh, incense-infused clothes.

It isn’t the cleanliness she is used to – patches of her skin have not touched any water at all – but it is enough to make her feel human again; soap, warm water, and the touch
of another’s hand has that power now.

A heavy rain shower pelts at the windows, distracting Kawsar from her thoughts; the beacon of a police car maintaining the curfew spreads a thin yolk-yellow light into her
room. Cold, violent rainstorms have a contradictory effect on Kawsar – they bring warmth, a sense of fullness and wellbeing, the memory of Farah’s palm stretched over the beating heart
of her womb. Those shuttered green colony days of their youth have seeped into her flesh: the tin roof clattering above them, the wind whispering through its grooves, and Farah sleeping beside her
on the low divan bed, his wandering hand pinned down by her petticoat’s waistband. Kawsar remembers tugging his arm closer, moulding his body around hers and watching him through half-closed
eyes on those mornings or afternoons that he refused to travel through the yellow sludge to his office. She never loved him more than in those dazes, when they seemed nothing less than twins curled
up within the same skin, their limbs so entwined that she could not feel where his flesh ended and hers began or separate her scent from his. Hours passed in sleep so cavernous, so voluptuous that
she knew how drunks felt as they slipped into unconsciousness by the roadside, a secret smile on their lips. When Farah finally began to stir, the rain spent to a tepid, half-hearted spray, there
would be the separation, the readjustment of limbs, hair, and clothes as he became the husband and she the wife. But now, the only thing to be distilled from those hundreds of mornings and
afternoons was the heat of an absent hand on an old, empty womb.

It is Friday, cleaning out the house day. All over the neighbourhood, all over the town, all over the country, rugs and mats are thrashed, windows opened and rooms dusted,
floors washed and scrubbed, bed linen stamped on in wide basins, squeezed and hung out on bushes and washing lines, only to be brought in a couple of hours later bone dry, smelling of the sun and
thick with pollen. Nurto has Friday afternoons to herself and Kawsar fears another long day watching the door, secretly hoping and fearing that someone will visit, her loneliness bearing knee-sharp
on her chest. Her ears follow the footsteps on the street outside, her pulse quickening if they pause nearby. Once Maryam English’s nanny goat had butted open the door, frightening Kawsar who
thought that the soldiers had returned for her. The huge, horned animal looked around the room in surprise, chewing simple-mindedly on a mulch of grass, her hooves like castanets on the cement.
‘Shoo, Shoo!’ Kawsar had shouted, flinging her arms, at which the animal had obeyed, turning around and walking calmly away as if she agreed that there was no point wasting her time on
an old woman.