Ambaro whispered in his ear, “What are you doing here, Goode? This isn’t a playground, what do you want?”
Jama stood in front of her, legs entangled like a flamingo’s. “I dunno, I was bored . . . do you have any change?” He hadn’t been thinking of money but now he was too embarrassed to say he just wanted to see her.
“Keleb! You come to my place of work to hassle me for money? You think of no one but yourself and may Allah curse you for it, get out now before the mukhadim sees you!”
Jama turned on his heels and ran out the door. He hid behind the warehouse but Ambaro found him, her rough dry hands pulled him against her. Her dress smelled of incense and coffee. He let his tears soak through to her skin.
“Goode, Goode, please, you’re a big boy, what have I done to you? Tell me? Tell me? Look at the life I’m living, can’t you
take pity on me?” Ambaro asked softly. She pulled his arms up and dragged him to a low wall facing the sea. “Do you know why I call you Goode?”
“No,” lied Jama, hungry to hear of the time when he had a real family.
“When I was pregnant with you I grew incredibly large, my stomach stuck out like you wouldn’t believe, people warned me that a young girl of seventeen would die giving birth to such a child, that you would tear my insides out, but I was happy, at peace, I knew I was expecting someone special. Following camels around is terrible work and I got slower and slower. I was often separated from my father’s large caravan and would hobble with my swollen ankles until I caught up with the family. But maybe in the eighth month, I was so exhausted I had to stop even though I had lost sight of the last camel. There was an ancient acacia in a savanna called Gumburaha Banka, and I sat under the old tree to rest in the little shade it provided. I sat and listened to my heavy breath fall and rise, rise and fall. I was wearing a nomad’s guntiino and the side of my stomach was exposed to the sun and breeze. Then suddenly I felt a smooth hand caress my back and move toward my belly button, I looked down in shock, and hoogayey! There was not a hand but a huge mamba curling around my belly. I was scared its heavy body would crush you, so I didn’t move even one inch, but it stopped and laid its devilishly wise face against you and listened to your thumping heartbeat. All three of us were joined like that for what seemed like a lifetime until, having decided something, the snake flexed its sinews and slipped down my body, and with a flick of its tail it disappeared into the sand. I wanted to name you Goode, meaning Black Mamba, but your father just laughed at me; he liked Jama because it was his best friend’s name. But when you slithered out
with your beautiful dark skin and your smell of earth, I knew what your name was meant to be. I kept it as my special name for you.”
Jama melted in the warmth of his mother’s words and he felt the liquid gold of love in his veins. He was silent, not wanting to break the spell between them, and she carried on.
“I know I’m tough on you, sometimes too tough, but do you know why I ask things of you? Things that you don’t understand are good for you? It’s because I have such high hopes, you are my good luck baby, you were born to be somebody, Goode. Do you know the year you were born became known as the year of the worm? Fat worms poked their noses out of the earth during the rainy season and came out to consume the grass, the trees, even our straw houses, until, finished, they suddenly disappeared. Everyone thought it was a sign of the end but the elders said they had seen it before and it was barako, as the rains would be plentiful afterward and our camels would breed fantastically. One old woman, Kissimee, told me that as my child would be born in the thick of that plague he would have the most beautiful luck, as if he had been born with the protection of all the saints, and he would see the four corners of the world. I believed her because no one knew that woman to ever make a false prophecy.”
Despite the beauty of her words, Jama felt his mother threading pearl after pearl of expectation into a noose that would sit loosely around his neck, ready for her to hang him one day. He pulled in close to her for an embrace and she wrapped her golden brown arms around his mahogany back, rubbing her fingers along his sharp spine.
“Let’s go back home to Hargeisa, hooyo.”
“One day, when we have enough to go back with,” she said with a kiss on his head. Untying a knot at the bottom of her
dress, she pulled out a paisa coin and gave it to Jama. “See you back on the roof.”
“Yes, hooyo,” Jama replied and stood up to go.
Grabbing his hand, his mother looked up at him. “God protect you, Goode.”
Mrs. Islaweyne had a problem with her unwanted houseguest, and she didn’t inconvenience herself by concealing it; rather, in the mother’s long absences she went for the cub. When she realized in her lengthy sickly sweet interrogations that Jama would never speak badly of Ambaro or let slip embarrassing secrets, she volunteered her own criticisms. “What kind of woman leaves her child alone to roam the streets every day?” and “I’m not surprised Somalis have a bad reputation, the way some of these newcomers dress, all naked arms, with their udders hanging out the sides.” The resentment was mutual, and Ambaro and Jama mocked her behind her back. When Ambaro saw Mrs. Islaweyne wrapping her nikaab around her face, she would raise an eyebrow and sing in a bittersweet voice, “
Dhegdheer, Dhegdheero, yaa ku daawaan?
Witch, oh witch, who will admire you?”
Dhegdheer was a strange, vain woman, with short plump limbs always oiled from head to toe, her eyebrows drawn on thickly with kohl, a fat, hairy mole on her cheek blending into a luxurious mustache, small, swollen feet squeezed into shoes that Ambaro could never afford. Sometimes Dhegdheer would appear on their roof, glaring at them for no particular reason, marking her territory, and when she returned downstairs, Jama would copy her signature waddle and squint to perfection. “Go eat yourself, witch!” he shouted when she was safely out of earshot.
“The one thing that woman is good at is breeding, she must
have a highway between her legs, she gives birth to litters of two and three as if she were a stray bitch,” Ambaro would say, and she was right, Jama had counted eight children but behind every door there seemed to be more sleeping or crying. The older Islaweyne boys went to school and chattered away in Arabic, even at home. Jama had learned a rough street Arabic which they mocked, mimicking his bad grammar and slang in slow, imbecilic voices. Although ZamZam was not the most alluring of girls, Dhegdheer had her eye on one of the wealthy Somali men who imported livestock from Berbera and wanted her daughter to appear a delicate flower, cultivated in the most refined setting. Jama heard Dhegdheer complaining to her husband that Ambaro and her guttersnipe son lowered the honor of their family. “How can we be first class when we have people like that in our own home?”
Mr. Islaweyne grunted and waved her away, but it was clear to Jama that his place in the home was precarious. As Jama spent more time on the streets to avoid Dhegdheer and her sons, the more their complaints about him increased.
“Kinsi said she saw him stealing from the suq.”
“Khadar, next door, said that he hangs around the Camel mukhbazar joking with hashish smokers.”
Jama joked with the hashish smokers because he knew his powerlessness and did not want to argue or make enemies. He did not have brothers, cousins, or a father to protect him like the other children. He had recently befriended Shidane and Abdi, who were kind and generous, but friendships between boys of different clans tended to form and collapse as quickly as nomad’s tents, never lasting.
In the apartment, the cold war between the women was thawing and simmering in the summer heat. Ambaro, tired and frustrated after work, became more combative. She used the
kitchen at the same time as Dhegdheer, helped herself to more flour and ghee, picked out whichever glass was clean instead of the ones set aside for them, and left the laundry waiting for days at a time. Even with Jama she was like a kettle whistling to the boil: one day she wanted him to work, another day to attend school, another day to stay on the roof and keep away from those market boys, and yet another day she didn’t want to see him ever again. Jama at first tried to soothe her, massaging away all the knots in her body with his keen, sprightly fingers, but soon even his touch irritated her and he left her, to spend the nights with Shidane and Abdi. He returned every few days to wash, eat a little, and check on his mother, until one evening he came in to find Ambaro and Dhegdheer in the kitchen, bosoms nearly touching, nails and teeth bared, ready to pounce on each other. From what he could tell through the shouts of “Slut born of sluts!” and “Hussy!” Dhegdheer was ordering his mother out of the kitchen, and she was cursing and standing her ground, looking ready to spit in Dhegdheer’s face. Jama grabbed his mother’s arm and tried to pull her away. Dhegdheer’s sons, older and stronger than Jama, slunk into the kitchen, unable to ignore the shouting women any longer. Ambaro and Dhegdheer were now grappling with each other, pushing and shoving among the steaming pots, and Jama hustled the pans off the fire and put them out of harm’s way. Ambaro was younger, stronger, and a better fighter than the housebound Dhegdheer, and she pushed the older woman into a corner.
“Soobah, soobah, come on,” jeered Ambaro.
Dhegdheer’s oldest son grabbed hold of Ambaro and jostled her onto the floor.
“Stop that shameful behavior,” he squeaked in his breaking voice.
Seeing his mother lying on the floor, Jama without any thought picked up a pan of boiling soup and slung the steaming liquid in the boys’ direction. The soup fell short of their bodies but cascaded over their bare feet. Dhegdheer was beside herself. “Hoogayey waan balanbalay, my precious boys, beerkay! My own livers,” she keened. “May Allah cut you up into pieces, Jama, and throw you to the wild dogs.” Dhegdheer picked up a long butcher’s knife and began sharpening it. While Ambaro tried to wrench it out of her hands, Jama darted beneath their legs and escaped from the apartment.
Shidane and Abdi slapped Jama on the back when he told them he was never going back to the Islaweyne house. Aden was a huge, dangerous playground for market boys and Shidane knew all of the secret nooks, crevices, holes, and storerooms that made up its unseen map. Together they could avoid older boys who would rob or beat them. Each morning they ambushed donkey carts to steal bread and woven baskets of honey, Jama and Shidane wrestling the young Arab drivers down while Abdi carried away what they needed. It was only when they became a gang that Jama realized Abdi was nearly deaf, he would put his ear right up to your mouth to compensate and hold your hands while he listened.
As they sat on their rooftop, watching the setting sun turn the pools of water in the ancient tanks into infant stars, Jama and Abdi snuggled under an old sheet. Shidane laughed at their canoodling and they laughed at his big ears.
“No wonder your poor uncle is so deaf!
You
have taken enough ears for both of you,” said Jama, grabbing hold of Shidane’s flapping ears.
“You can talk!” exclaimed Shidane in response, pointing at Jama’s big white teeth. “Look at those tusks in your mouth! You could pull down a tree with them.”
“You wish you had teeth like mine, rabbit ears. With a lucky gap like this in my teeth, you wait and see how rich I become. You would die for my teeth, admit it.” Jama displayed his teeth for them to envy.
Ambaro had spent days holding her breath when Jama had disappeared, while Dhegdheer took quiet satisfaction from her pain. Mr. Islaweyne had allowed Ambaro to move into a tiny room in the apartment until he found another clansman or woman to take her in; he did not want to earn a bad name by throwing her out on the streets. Ambaro searched for Jama in dark, filthy alleys late at night, long after her twelve-hour shift had finished she was still looking, she went to his old haunts, asked around with the other market boys but they kept the stony silence of secret police when adults penetrated their world. She had no friends among the coffee women, and unlike the other Somali women she met at the water faucet or bought pastries from in the street, their troubles gushing forth at every opportunity, her anguish stayed locked up within her chest without release. Her pride would not allow her to broadcast her woes, her life would not become honey for gossips, who “Allah-ed” and bit their lips in front of her and laughed behind her back. She continued her late-night search on her own; Jama disappeared regularly but Ambaro had a panicky feeling that this time he would not come back. Her daughter, Kahawaris, began appearing in her dreams, and she hated dreaming of the dead.
Unlike the Somali hawkers, coffee cleaners, beggars, or dancers who often abandoned four- and five-year-old boys on the street when their fathers absconded, she had guarded Jama as best as she could, and thought day and night, How can I
keep my baby safe? They had come to Aden expecting an El Dorado where even the beggars wore gold but instead it was a dirty and dangerous place, heaving with strangers and their vices.
Jama was the only family she had or wanted; she had not seen the rest since leaving for Aden. Ambaro had grown up in the care of her aunt after her mother, Ubah, died of smallpox. Izra’il, the angel of death, had barged through Ubah’s door fourteen times to spirit away her legion of children with diarrhea, petty accidents, coughs that had wracked tiny rib cages. Ubah had left one live child, a heartbroken, sickly little girl who haunted her grave, waiting for the Day of Judgment to arrive and restore her mother to her. Smallpox had laid its hand on Ambaro’s body but she had survived, wearing her scars as proof of her mother’s ghostly protection. As she grew older, Ambaro became a lean, silent young woman, beyond the jurisdiction of her father’s other wives; she wandered far away with the family goats and sheep. Grief for her mother and lost brothers and sisters kept her detached from the other members of the family, who feared her and worried that misfortune might lead her to perform some evil witchcraft on them. Ambaro’s eyes were too deep, too full of misery to be trustworthy. It was only Jinnow, the levelheaded matriarch of the family, who showed her any affection. Jinnow had delivered Ambaro into the world as a baby, whispering the call to prayer in the small shell of her ear. Jinnow had held the baby up to her mother, rubbed the blood off the child and revealed the brown birthmark on her cheek that earned her the old-fashioned name Ambaro.