The Orchard of Lost Souls (15 page)

Dahabo, Maryam, Fadumo, Raage the greengrocer, Zahra, Umar Farey these are her occasional visitors. She knows maybe hundreds more though they do not come; people hide behind the excuse of
curfews but their hearts have hardened, they cannot bring themselves to care about yet another misfortunate when they are already so overburdened. Women are running their families because the
streets have been emptied of men; those not working abroad are in prison or have been grabbed off the street and conscripted into the army. If Farah were still alive he would be like the others
– hiding in his house, meek, prematurely wizened, like a woman in a harem. Nurto reported that the old
askaris
who used to gather around Raage’s
dukaan
at five p.m.
and wind their West End watches by the dings of the BBC broadcast have been banished, and the BBC banned in all public spaces. The regime doesn’t just want to black out the city but to
silence it.

Kawsar’s heart wavers between recrimination and understanding. Times have changed so deeply; life had been cheap, easy and slow-paced, but now it is cheap in another way, certainly not
easy and the hours of darkness have been stolen and made dangerous. People are made to scuttle about in the daytime, trying to live full lives in half their allotted time. The shops are bare as the
subsidised rice and flour have disappeared to allow the government to obtain more foreign loans; instead of home-grown maize and sorghum, sacks of USAID donations smuggled in from the refugee camps
are on sale in the market at ridiculous prices.

Nurto shoves a chipped enamel bowl into Kawsar’s hands. Inside is her daily meal: chopped tomatoes, onions, coriander, chillies drenched in lemon juice and bulked up with the boiled rice
that the girl insists on. ‘I don’t want anyone saying that I’m not feeding you,’ she says, raising an eyebrow accusingly.

Kawsar does not want the rice; it dilutes the intense, sharp flavours that feed her memories. Chillies she had first eaten in a restaurant in Mogadishu that Farah had taken her to. She had
planted a lemon tree in their new police residence in Salahley and added home-grown coriander to every one of his dishes because he loved it so much. She craves tart flavours that suck emotion out
of her; even her tea is over-spiced with ginger, cinnamon, cardamom – just like the concoctions she had made while breastfeeding. She doesn’t want food that prolongs her life; she only
wants to sustain her soul while it remains in her body.

‘I’m going to a wedding now, I’ll be back in a few hours,’ Nurto says, placing a glass of water on the bedside table.

‘A wedding? At this time?’

‘Yes, the curfew, remember. We have to be in by seven.’

Kawsar rolls her eyes to the sky. ‘Oh, I remember.’

Nurto’s face is hidden as she struggles to squeeze into a black sequinned top and emerald trousers that balloon out at the hips and taper in at her bony ankles. They are
whodead,
that she has bought from the
suuq.
The rumour goes that foreign corpses are stripped down and the garments they breathed their last in are sold in the local markets.

‘I wouldn’t be attracting anyone’s eyes to legs like those,’ laughs Kawsar. ‘A man wants a woman with sturdy ankles, not those scrawny
minjayow
.’

‘Do you want anything from outside?’

‘No, just don’t break your ankles on those ridiculous shoes, there isn’t room for another invalid here.’ Nurto has slipped into her wooden platforms and is clomping her
way to the door, trying not to hold her arms out for balance.

‘Nabadgelyo
,’ shouts Nurto before banging the door behind her.

‘Silly girl.’ Kawsar laughs, but her smile withers when she catches sight of her reflection in the mirror. It looks as if a coconut has been coddled in many blankets, her face a
blinking blurry smudge in the dingy room, her once thick black hair now as short and fine as a baby’s. It had nearly all fallen out after Farah’s death and now just grows in white
patches over her scalp. She pulls a blanket over her eyes.

Kawsar opens one eye. Hodan is asleep beside her, sealed-eyed, puffy lipped, damp hair flattened against the pillow, her drool seeping onto her hand and thin snores
whistling through the gap in her front teeth. Kawsar wipes the saliva away and pulls her child against her chest. The light through the window is the skin of a golden apple. In a moment Hodan will
stir awake and look cantankerously from the floor to the ceiling and across to the window, trying to place herself, her soul settling back into its tight frame. The siesta sky framed in the window
is pink and mauve in places with thin slivers of cloud stretched languidly across it, their edges metallic from the low rays of the copper sun. If only it could be spread out, cut-up and stitched,
she would make a quilt from it for Hodan to spread over her on cold, dark nights in the cemetery.

Kawsar wakes to find the room dark and stars brightening through the iron bars of the window above her bed. There are a few wispy clouds trailing across the sky, the night
breeze cooler than usual, playfully rifling through the prescriptions on the table. She pulls the blankets up to her chin, closes her eyes and breathes in the jasmine, honeysuckle, moonflowers and
the desert flower wahara-waalis that she had planted long ago in the orchard behind her bungalow. This is the only contact that she has with her precious orchard now – the frail caress of its
scent when the wind is blowing in the right direction. The pomegranate, guava and papaya trees are left to Nurto’s crude mercy; Kawsar knows that she will only throw a bucket of dirty water
at the gasping roots. Maryam reports that the tomatoes have withered, the green chillies yellowed, the okra been consumed by lizards. Only the trees have survived. Her spirit is tied up in those
trees; she feels her roots contracting as they die.

Nurto has been seduced by an Indian trader, thinks Kawsar. New, musky perfumes come from the girl and she spends a mysterious amount of time in the washroom, the slosh of water
and the smell of soap penetrating the bedroom. The
Singhe-Singhes
are an accursedly lustful lot with their winking, kohl-smudged eyes and rough, turmeric-stained hands groping at girls in
the
suuq.
Their women had left along with the British at Independence in 1960, departing as swiftly as they had arrived in one big throng like birds, jewel-hued saris flying behind them
like tail feathers. The husbands – fabric merchants,
suuq-wallahs
and civil servants – who remained in the Indian Line quarter, play cricket on the bare, cracked earth and
chase Somali girls with the tirelessness of tomcats.

‘Whose benefit is all this for? A trader?’ Kawsar asks, as Nurto skips across the cement floor, leaving thin, wet footprints.

‘Can’t I even wash without you making a fuss?’ Her hair is a damp rope untwining against her left breast; she squeezes the end and wipes her hand on her leaf-printed
diric.
She is filling out, blooming into womanhood, hips, breasts and bottom grown full with
halwa
and dates.

Kawsar feels a misplaced pride while admiring her maid; it is a rare luxury to be able to hand over the run of a kitchen to a poor child and watch them blossom. ‘You look good, that is all
I wanted to say.’

Nurto’s face contorts; she was primed for another verbal assault, had steeled and armed herself for it, her shoulders and feet squared. ‘You think so?’ she asks after a moment.
‘How have I changed?’

‘You look like a
gashaanti
now, your skin is glowing, your hair has grown, you have curves when before you were like a tree in the
jiilaal.
You smell better too,’
Kawsar smiles.

Nurto smirks. ‘And you think I would go to all that trouble for a
Singhe-Singhe
market trader? I have my sights set further than that.’

‘Oh! Tell me more.’

Nurto laughs, This American wants to take my picture. He says people would pay to put me in magazines.’

Kawsar raises her eyebrow, remembering the lewd photographs taken of Somali girls by Italians in Mogadishu.
‘Naayaa,
guard yourself, I will not have people saying that you were
corrupted while in my care. Say your
ashahaado
and protect your shame.’

Nurto’s face falls, she was wrong to have lowered her shield, ‘It’s not like
that,
he just wants to help me. He says that another Somali girl is famous in New York and
Paris just for walking and showing off the clothes.’

‘New York
,
my rear end. Don’t let yourself be beguiled. When I was young Italians would put naïve girls in their dirty photos and films.’

‘So what? Is that worse than being a servant all your life with someone calling you every name they can think of? As if they own you?’

‘The way I was brought up there was no shame in clean, Islamic work of any kind. All a girl has of any value whether she is born to a
suldaan
or a pauper is her reputation,
don’t be simple-minded enough to throw that away.’

‘To hell with reputations!’ Nurto flicks her rope of hair over her shoulder, dives onto her mattress and buries her nose in a magazine with a blonde covergirl; unable to read the
words, she studies it photo by photo.

The sun breaks through the leaden, grumbling clouds and slips through the barred windows, stitching cross-hatches of light and shadow across her bedspread and feet. Kawsar
wriggles her toes and scratches her soles with their horn-like nails. She has asked Nurto to make her a whole thermos today; she is in the mood to listen to music and sip sweet spiced tea with
condensed milk. The boulder pressing down on her chest has lifted a little, allowing her to take deeper breaths without wincing; she stretches her neck to the left and holds it there before
stretching to the right. She can feel the tips of her fingers and toes again, her scalp tingles; she has not taken a painkiller for more than twelve hours and her body feels like a city coming back
to life after a long night. She clicks the radio on – it is set to Radio Mogadishu in case of a police raid, and the station relays a live performance by the Waaberi national troupe in
Khartoum.

Nurto is on her mattress, concentrating on the large dressmaking scissors in her grip. Kawsar has never noticed the girl’s left-handedness before; maybe it is part of the reason she seems
so awkward, as if she is taking life on from the wrong angle. She is hacking old cotton dresses of Kawsar’s into rectangular pieces to fold up and use as sanitary pads; the older woman had
noticed a damp red flower blooming on the back of Nurto’s thin
diric
and offered her the long-unused clothes. She had also pointed out other garments, some of them of expensive cloth
and unworn, that Nurto could take to wear, but she didn’t want them, even wrinkling her nose as she rummaged dismissively through them.

Kawsar pours out her first cup; the bones in her back creak as she bends over, but it feels good in a strange way. ‘I can teach you how to sew properly, if you want,’ she offers,
blowing steam and milkskin gently to and fro.

Nurto leaves a long pause before answering, ‘I don’t think I’ll be any good at it.’

‘Who is to say what anyone will be good at until they try?’

‘Well, you for one. You tell me I’m a bad cook, that I can’t clean, that I leave soap powder in the laundry, that I’ve killed your plants. I’m not going to give you
one more thing to criticise me for.’

Kawsar laughs. ‘I am just trying to challenge you, make you pay more notice to how you work. What is it that you want to do in your life, anyway? Carry on as a maid?’

Nurto lets out a snort of derision.

‘Get married? Herd goats? Set up a trucking company?’

Nurto raises an eyebrow.

‘What will it be then?’

‘I told you, I am going to move abroad and become a fashion model.’

‘Why don’t you take advantage more while you’re here – buy vats of ghee and stick your fingers in and lick them until your jowls and belly and buttocks vibrate with every
step?’

Nurto laughs and Kawsar smiles in triumph; it is hard to make this girl lose her scowl.

‘They don’t like women like that over there. They like them my size with small chests, long legs and no fat whatsoever. They are not like the stupid men here who want Asha Big Legs
huffing and puffing into their beds.’

‘Your photographer told you that, did he?’ replies Kawsar doubtfully.

‘Yes, but it’s obvious anyway I read the magazines.’

‘
Read?
’

‘Look at, then, same thing. The pictures speak for themselves. Why are you always going on as if you are some kind of professor from Laafole University, anyway?’

‘I’m no professor, I am as unlettered as a child, but I just can’t stand misplaced pride.’

‘It’s not misplaced. I will learn to read, I will make something of my life. You old women take pride in your ignorance – that is what I call misplaced.’

Kawsar is calm, she has got into a bad habit of riling Nurto, but it has an irresistible, cathartic effect on her. ‘I am a simple woman with no shame or regrets,’ she lies. ‘I
have lived a blameless life.’

‘Blameless and pointless,’ Nurto spits.

The words cut deeper than Kawsar expects. She shifts away a little, as if dodging a thrown object; she has been felled by her own arrow.

‘Just leave me alone.’ She turns her back on Nurto and faces the wall, the familiar chips and cracks in the plaster filling her vision once again. ‘You would never dare to
speak to me like that if my husband was around,’ she says softly.

‘And you wouldn’t dare taunt me like you do if my family had money.’

The girl is like a cobra, so quick to jump to the offensive. She is right about her own situation and Kawsar feels a begrudging envy that she can fight so viciously for herself. It had taken her
a long time to see power and powerlessness so clearly.

They do not speak for the rest of the day The room darkens around Kawsar, the snips of the scissors eventually cease and they clatter to the ground. Their music brings back the
memory of her college: the pads of her fingers sore with needle punctures, the ache of her hand after cutting through fabric for hours, the pretty quilts and hangings and skirts she made faster
than anyone else.