The Orchard of Lost Souls (23 page)

Filsan sits heavily on the low bed as another cramp squeezes her abdomen. Her body is ripping itself from her control, trying to get away from her, or so it seems.

She had felt a similar sense of disintegration before, when she was just fifteen and growing timidly into this womanly body. Her cousins, Rahma and Idil, were visiting for the second time from
Washington D.C. along with her diplomat uncle, Abukor. While their fathers went from one hotel bar to another, they traipsed along Mogadishu’s wide boulevards, avoiding the grasping hands of
Vespa-riding bachelors and the dangerously driven Beetles and Fiat Unos of the voluptuous import/export ladies who sweet-talk lucrative trade licences from government officials. The sisters would
scream as Filsan rushed them, arms linked, through the chaotic, beeping traffic circling the Ahmed Gurey roundabout, towards the beach, where they might paddle fully clothed or sit on the
seaweed-strewn white sand licking runny ice cream from their fingers. She watched as Rahma and Idil made friends with four lanky boys playing football near the surf. It didn’t matter how
badly they spoke Somali, the girls’ flared jeans, red lips and cocky expressions were enough to get the boys crowding around. They met them day after day from then on, Filsan slowly relaxing
in their boisterous, play-fighting company.

One boy, Abdurahman, with glasses and thick, lamblike curls caught her attention by asking what books she liked reading; she didn’t expect him to know of
Eugene Onegin, The Master and
Margarita
or
Slaughterhouse-Five,
but he nodded approvingly and asked if she knew that Pushkin was part Ethiopian. One afternoon they left the beach for Dervish Park to watch a
government rally; they could hear the chanting and drums as they walked down Via Makka Al-Mukarama, and she fell in step with Abdurahman. He lent her his sunglasses when he noticed her squinting
against the bright sunlight and she swept her hidden gaze over the bronze silhouette of Mohamed Abdullah Hassan on his horse, over the tall, weeping trees pulled away like theatre curtains by the
sea breeze, and over the wasp-waisted boy beside her with the face that came from somewhere distant and exotic. Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party banners drifted from poles at the entrance to
the park. Filsan was at the highest point of the sand hills that separated the coast from the main town, beside the whitewashed Hotel Bulsho, with which she shared a view over the antique,
lightless lighthouse and the ancient district of Hamar Weyne, founded a thousand years before by long-bearded Arab and Persian traders. She felt like the song by Magool, ‘Shimbiryahow’
– languid, soaring and free:
‘Oh bird, do you fly? Do you follow the wind?’
She heard the question in her mind and answered ‘I will.’ A carnival was already
in full swing: men juggling with red and green peppers, fake woollen lion manes around their faces; drummers pounding goatskin drums and making bizarre, head-jerking expressions at the crowd of
teenagers and university students; girls in traditional red-check wraps swinging their hips from side to side and sweetly singing revolutionary songs. She lost her cousins and the other boys in the
scrum and reached out for Abdurahman’s arm before he disappeared too. She pinched the cloth of his shirt between thumb and forefinger and held on loosely like that. There were more banners
above their heads, written messily in blue paint, declaring ‘Death to tribalism’, ‘Comrades not enemies’ and ‘A new dawn’.

A bearded party member with a megaphone spelt out the new philosophy: you don’t ask what clan anyone is from, you do not talk about high-class or low-class tribes, you do not give
advantages to those related to you. He was preaching to the converted; the boys had not asked about the girls’ clan and nor would it occur to the girls to care about the boys’, that was
for old-timers and losers. The music died down apart from a drum roll and then, just as Filsan reached the centre of the huddle, an effigy made from scraps of cloth stuffed with grass, bearing
‘tribalism’ on a sign around its neck, was strung up over a tree branch, a real noose around its fraying neck.

‘Burn it! Burn it! Burn it!’ the audience chanted.

While the activists dithered, a long arm reached out from within the crowd and held a lighter to the effigy’s foot. It went up in a burst, scattering burning confetti over their heads.

Filsan squealed and ducked away as the incandescent flakes landed over her bare skin. Abdurahman threw his shoulder over her arm and ran with her back to the entrance, holding her close in the
stampede. Rahma and Idil ran past laughing. Filsan reached into the flow of bodies like a fisherman and caught Idil’s wrist.

‘Man, this country’s crazy!’

‘
Ramshackle
is the word,’ corrected Rahma.

‘How can you guys live like this?’

‘This is your country too.’ Filsan exchanged a knowing look with Abdurahman. The girls seemed to be constantly disparaging something: ‘Look at that
naaasty
man eating
with his
naaasty
hands’; ‘look at that
naaasty
bread sitting on that counter’; ‘you expect me to sit on that
naaasty
hole?’ Everything was
so
‘naaasty’,
and sometimes so
najaas,
if they felt like speaking Somali. They turned the flowery written English she learned at school into a harsh language only
intended for criticism.

‘Hey! Sharmarke, Farhan, Zakariya, we’re here,’ Abdurahman shouted to his friends.

They joined together in a group of seven and headed back to the street. It was already four in the afternoon and Filsan wanted to return home to Casa Populare, put her feet up and read one of
Rahma’s stupid romance novels before dinner.

‘We can’t go back yet,’ wailed Idil. ‘We sit in every goddamn night. I’m bored, Filsan, bored!’

‘We have to be home before it gets dark,’ Filsan replied softly.

‘They are never home before late and there is still
two hours
until it gets dark,’ she spat.

‘As you please.’ Filsan held her hands up in submission.

‘Let’s go to the cinema, there is one nearby in Ceel Gaab, we’ll catch a film and walk you home before it gets dark.’ Abdurahman ushered them in front of him before
rolling his eyes at Rahma and Idil’s backs.

They followed Via Makka Al-Mukarama down to Ceel Gaab, covered their noses against the dark clouds of exhaust fumes at the bus terminal, crossed the old Italian square and stopped for a moment
as a funk band – bass guitar, lead guitar, organ, saxophone, drum set and male vocalist – jammed in a storeroom open to the street.

‘Now
this
is what I want to see. Africa gone funky, baby,’ shouted Idil, clicking her fingers and twisting her hips.

‘We are not all so hopeless then?’ Abdurahman asked teasingly.

‘Not every last one, no,’ she replied flatly.

They reached the Ceel Gaab cinema, sandwiched between an Indian jewellers and an Italian café with an extravagant espresso machine on the counter. A street urchin lurked by the entrance
and pulled at their clothes until they bought a few bags of roasted peanuts from him.

‘I hope there is a Kirk Dabagalaas film showing, Kirk Dabagalaas burns the other actors off the screen,’ Abdurahman said, and immediately Filsan knew what her cousins would do.

While Idil fell into a burst of hysterics, Rahma dropped her chin, looked at him over her eyebrows and repeated ‘Kirk Daba-ga-laas?’ in disgust.

Filsan thought she could see beads of sweat rise along Abdurahman’s hairline. ‘That is his name.’

‘His name is Kirk
DOUGLAS,
not Dabagalaas, DOUGLAS.’

‘Who cares, Idil? Who CARES! Why don’t you stop pretending you’re American for once? You were born in the same hospital as me, weren’t you?’ Filsan was centimetres
away from her cousin’s shocked face.

The sisters went silent then and stayed far away from Filsan as they climbed up to the wooden balcony seats. A revolutionary song played before the feature, and Filsan and the boys stood and
sang, ‘This blessed government, this blessed work . . .’ while Idil and Rahma chewed their peanuts. It wasn’t even an American film in the end but a Chinese picture, in which an
imperial spy was caught by bandits in a distant province and forced to fight his way back to the Forbidden City. Filsan enjoyed the first half but then felt the time drag. She adjusted
Abdurahman’s watch to the light and saw it was already past six; it would be nightfall in a few minutes. She fidgeted in her seat, afraid the sisters would not come with her if she got up to
leave, so she forced herself to wait, no longer paying attention to the film, just hearing the violent sound-effects as she looked yearningly at the exit.

The lights finally came on at ten past seven and she hurried to the door and down the steps to the street. The sky was black and moonless, the palm trees lit up like giant pineapples in the
square.

‘Let’s hurry,’ she shouted to Rahma and Idil, as they hauled their feet out of the cinema.

‘Don’t worry, we will see you home.’Abdurahman gestured towards the bus station, where ten-seater Fiat buses waited for customers.

They left the centre of town in an old bus that had most of the stuffing exploding out of the chairs. A teenage conductor with three missing fingers squeezed around their legs to collect the
five-shilling fare in his good hand. Filsan watched the city through plastic flower-garlanded windows; as they approached the suburbs the roads were sandy and the villas modern, sharp-edged,
protected by club-carrying watchmen at their gates.

‘Would you like to visit Hamar Weyne tomorrow? I can take you and your cousins to the market, there is a good Yemeni Café where we can sit and have a juice . . .’

She didn’t turn her face from the window. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘She is too hard, leave it,’ Sharmarke whispered.

‘Here!’ shouted Filsan as they passed the Coca-Cola advert near her corner of Casa Populare.

The bus screeched to a stop and the whole group disembarked. Filsan turned to Abdurahman, ‘It’s fine, you can leave us here.’

‘We’ll just walk you up a little further,’ he said, following her.

He was trying to be polite but Filsan was in enough trouble already without risking her father seeing them with a gang of boys.

She saw him then, or at least his silhouette, lit up by the veranda light as he stood in the street. The shadow he cast on the ground was huge and terrifying.

‘Please . . . just stay here.’ Filsan waved Abdurahman back and walked the last ten metres to the house as if she were a mountaineer battling Arctic winds and altitude sickness; she
felt the blood drain from her head to her ankles, and heard nothing but the scrape of her feet on the sand.

It was almost a release when the first blow came, a backhanded slap to the side of her head that pulled out the Minnie Mouse clips her cousins had bought her. She heard their screams from far
behind.

She was limp, like a doll, as he took her arm and threw her up the steps to the veranda.

‘Throw the devil off your back, Adan,’ called her uncle from the doorway. ‘Let the girl go.’

‘
Aabbo,
stop him!’ one of the girls shouted.

‘She did nothing wrong!’ a boy’s voice yelled.

Filsan couldn’t tell them apart anymore, her senses were shrouded, as if parts of her mind were shutting down, faculty by faculty.

Uncle Abukor tried to pull her away from her father’s grip but he shouldered him out of the way.

Rahma and Idil were inside the house now too, all five of them struggling in the narrow hallway. Intisaar watched from the kitchen door, her eyes wide as she wiped her hands repeatedly on a
cloth.

Her father’s hand was wrapped in her hair. ‘Where have you been?’ His spittle landed on her neck as he shook her head from side to side. ‘Is it time for you to follow in
your mother’s footsteps? I shouldn’t have kept you! You scorpion, you whore, you don’t deserve to carry my name or my father’s. You were going to bring those boys, those
dogs into my house? You thought while your uncle was here that you could do what you liked? Idiot! I should throw you out! Let you live in the gutter with your filthy mother.’

Filsan saw her uncle’s podgy little hands trying to beat back her father, his brown shoes doing a desperate shuffle on the tiles, but it was no use; he had to ride out his rage, it was
worse if it was truncated.

She saw a glimpse of Rahma and Idil clinging to each other by the wall, their mouths twisted as they howled; they looked ridiculous.

His blows were losing their force and he turned to sharp slaps instead, his untrimmed nails sometimes catching her skin. ‘Get up to your room,’ he panted and pushed her up the
stairs. ‘Intisaar! Check her underwear. If you find anything pack her bags and put her out.’

Filsan scampered up the stairs like an animal on her hands and knees and crawled into her dark room, too afraid to switch the light on. Intisaar’s heavy steps followed her upstairs,
boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom, in time with her pounding heart.

The door creaked open and before Intisaar had to say anything, Filsan reached under her pleated skirt, pulled off her high-waisted cotton underpants and scrunched them with trembling fingers
into her housekeeper’s outstretched palm.

‘Oh, what a life,’ Intisaar sighed before closing the door.

It was two days before her bedroom door was unlocked and she hadn’t moved from the crouched place she had found on the floor. When she finally stood up her eyes darkened and her knees gave
way. Intisaar hooked her under the arms, kicking away the untouched plates of yoghurt-soaked rice she had made for her, and guided her to the bathroom where she gently washed her bruised body. The
house was silent; her uncle and cousins had moved out to the Al-Uruuba Hotel in protest, Intisaar said, and Filsan was relieved she wouldn’t have to see their faces again or deal with their
pity.

Waiting for her on the desk at the Mobile Military Court office is an envelope embossed with the governmental crest. She opens it delicately and slips out the card. It is from
the propaganda office instructing her to go to Radio Hargeisa where she will be interviewed. Major Adow must have informed them about the Salahley raid. Filsan throws the card onto the desk; she
has waited so long to be noticed but now wants to hide in the corner, slip into the darkness with the cockroaches. They expect her at the radio station at three p.m.