The children laughed louder and shook the tree, making Jama sway and lose his grip on his perch. “Hey, bastard, come down, come down from the tree and find your father,” they sang, Ayan in the lead, with a cruel, gappy-toothed leer on her face.
Jama waved his leg at that smile, hoping to smash the rest of her teeth in. “Who are you calling a bastard? You little turds, I bet you know all about bastards with your slutty mothers!” he shouted, drawing gasps from the women near him.
“Hey, Jinnow, come and get this boy of yours, such a vile
mouth, you would think he was a Midgaan, not an Aji. No wonder he was thrown into the streets,” said a long-faced woman.
Jinnow, startled and ashamed, charged over to Jama and dragged him down. “Don’t do that, Jama! Don’t drag down your mother’s name.” She pointed toward her room and Jama slunk away.
Inside the aqal, Jama cried and cried, for his mother, for himself, for his lost father, for Shidane and Abdi, and it released something knotted up and tight within his soul; he felt the storm leave his mind.
Jinnow spent her days tending her date palms, selling fruit in the market near the dry riverbed that bisected the town, or weaving endless mats, while Jama appeared and disappeared throughout the day. With the men away grazing the camels, Jama spent his days on the streets to avoid the harsh chatter of the compound women who treated him like a fly buzzing around the room, swatting him away when they wanted to talk dirty. Their faces a bright cruel yellow from beauty masks of powdered turmeric, they dragged one another into corners, hands cupped around mouths, and in loud whispers languidly assassinated reputations. They drew shoes in fights as quickly as cowboys drew pistols.
Clutching her brown, spindly fingers against the wall of the compound, Ayan would peer over and watch as Jama disappeared down the road. Ayan was the daughter of one of the younger wives in the compound and lived in a smaller room away from Jinnow. Jama would stone her every time she approached him, so now she just satisfied herself with staring at him from a distance, crossing and uncrossing her eyes, flapping her upturned eyelids at him. As a girl she was rarely allowed
out, and Jama’s bad reputation within the compound and filthy mouth had slowly begun to win her admiration. She hoped to stare him into friendship but he had too long a memory for that and was still planning a revenge for the time she dared call him bastard. Jama slyly observed her daily routine of housework, child-minding, and standing around, one leg scratching the back of the other, and plotted her downfall. Ayan’s mother was a tall, shrewish woman with a missing front tooth, a neglected third wife who beat her children down with words and blows. In front of her mother, Ayan was a well-behaved, hardworking child but in private she was a gang leader and vicious fighter. Her troupe of scraggly infants would gather behind her after lunchtime and prowl around the compound, catching lizards by the tail, spying on older children and going through their belongings. If challenged, the younger children would take flight while Ayan fought the angry object of their snooping. Scratches and cuts formed patterns on her skin like the tattoos on a Maori warrior, her young face knocked into a jagged adult shape by the fists of her mother and cousins. Jama had no possessions to filch or secrets to hide, but to Ayan he presented an enigma, a strange, silent boy who had returned from a foreign land.
Jama would sometimes see Ayan in the evening as the women gathered around the paraffin lamp to tell stories. Tales about the horrors some women were made to suffer at the hands of men, about the secret lovers some women kept, or about Dhegdheer, who killed young women and ate their breasts. Ayan would regularly be mocked as “dirty” and “loose” by the women and older children for being uncircumcised, she had been feverish with chicken pox when the Midgaan woman had made all the girls halal with her razor, and now her head drooped down in shame. Her stupid mistakes would also be recounted;
she had once tried to open a lock with her finger and instead got it stuck.
“I thought that is how people open locks!” Ayan wailed.
“Served you right, that was Allah’s reward for your snooping,” rejoiced her mother. Jama’s favorite stories were about his grandmother Ubah, who traveled on her own as far as the Ogaden desert to trade skins, incense, and other luxuries despite having a rich husband. “What a woman. Ubah was a queen and my best friend,” Jinnow would sigh. All the storytellers claimed to have seen shape-shifters, nomads who at night turned into animals and looked for human prey in town, disappearing before daybreak and the first call to prayer. Ayan’s eyes would form frightened wide circles in the orange light, and Jama could see her trying to nestle next to her mother and getting pushed irritably away. Jama hoped that one of these shape-shifters would snatch Ayan away and take her out into the pitch-black night where shadows slipped in and out of alleys in which hyenas stalked alongside packs of wild dogs, hunting lone men together, ripping out the tendons from their fleeing ankles as they tried to run for their lives, their helpless screams piercing the cloistered night.
Jama’s life was no different from that of the goats tied up in the compound, staring blankly as they chewed on peelings. He was just a lump of dull clay that no one wanted to mold or breathe life into, he was not sent to school, not sent out with the camels, only told “Fetch this” and “Get out!” The wives made a show of exchanging glances and locking their rooms if he was nearby; they were all like Mrs. Islaweyne in their pettiness. The only comfort he found was at night in Jinnow’s aqal, when Jama would allow her to tuck him in under the thin sheets and
wait for her to start talking about his parents. With his eyes tightly closed, Jama would listen to Jinnow describe how his father leapt out one night in the desert and with a flaming torch scared away hyenas that were stalking the family camels, how his mother had run away as a child and got as far as the sea before she was brought home. Jinnow remembered them at their best, young and brave before hunger, disappointment, and illness brought them low.
She recited old gabays to make him laugh: “Life in this world allows one man to grow prosperous, while another sinks into obscurity and is made ridiculous; a man passing through the evil influence of red Mars is feebler than a newborn lamb punched on the nose.”
Jinnow told Jama one night, “I know you are sick of milk. You think you are a man already but don’t hurry to that, Jama, the world of men is cruel and unforgiving. Don’t listen to those fools in the courtyard, you are not an orphan, you have a father, a perfectly good father who will return.”
“Why hasn’t he come to collect me, then? What’s he waiting for?”
“We are all servants of our fate, he will come when he can. Hopefully he has made a good life for you both somewhere.”
“What’s wrong with here? This is where we belong.”
“Your father has too much music in his soul for this kind of life. Your mother did too, but she tried hard to drown it out. Life here is too hard, everyone is peering over the horizon, but one day, inshallah, you will also see how wide the world is.”
“But where is my father?”
“Far, far away, in a town called Gederaf in Sudan, beyond Ogaden, beyond Djibouti, many months’ walk, son. I heard that he was fighting in Abyssinia but now it seems he is in Sudan trying to become a driver again.”
“Can I go to him?”
“Allah, how could I let you do that? I owe it your mother to make sure you don’t come to any harm. She is watching me, I feel her here”—Jinnow placed her hand on her stomach—“she is like a light there, you understand, son? Your mother, Kahawaris . . . sometimes the dead are more alive than the living; no one really dies, not while there are people who remember and cherish them.”
Jama was ready to explode, cooped up in the compound, he needed a job so that he could add to his mother’s money and find his father. He scoured the barren town for places to work, but shops and homes operated on the most basic level of survival and there was no room for such luxuries as paid servants. The market consisted of a handful of women laying out dying fruits and withered vegetables on dusty cloths in the sand, sitting in the sun gossiping, collecting their meager income in their laps. The market brought everyone together to trade, all of Hargeisa’s Aji clans—the Eidegalle, Habr Yunis, Habr Awal, Arrab—emerged from the wire perimeters that the British had built around their encampments to keep them apart. The eating houses were the haunts of Hargeisa’s men, who were offered only two dishes whatever their wealth, boiled rice with either boiled goat or camel. The cook would serve as waiter and dishwasher as well and would earn a pittance for all three jobs. Children and young men mobbed them for the leftovers, pushing the smaller ones out of their way. Men chewed qat constantly to stave away the nagging hunger in their stomachs, so they wouldn’t succumb mentally to it, wouldn’t humiliate themselves. Late in the afternoon, the steps of the Habr Awal warehouses were clogged with men talking over one another,
laughing, and composing epigrams, but later as the qat left their bloodstreams they became morose, reclining like statues as the town darkened around them. Even with qat, the fear of hunger determined every decision, where to go, what to do, who to be. Destitute nomads would come in from the countryside and sit under trees, too exhausted to move any farther. If it was a Monday and they could drag themselves to the white offices of the Sha’ab in the southwest of town, the district commissioner would hear their appeals, and bestow four annas on the most deserving.
Jama thought himself tough but the youth of Hargeisa were desert-hardened, belligerent brawlers, uninterested in small talk with strangers, and the boys his age just wanted to sing and dance with the market girls. Not finding any companionship inside the compound or outside, Jama retreated deep into himself and made his mind his playground, fantasizing all day about the father he had somehow lost. Conjuring his father was a pleasure: his strong muscles, gold rings and watches, nice shoes, thick hair, expensive clothes could all be refashioned on a whim, he said and did only what Jama wanted without the intrusion of reality. The fact that his father was alive made him everything Jama could want, while seeing his mother in his mind’s eye was agonizing; he could recall the way she smelled before dying, the sweat running down her temples, the fear she was trying to mask from him.
Jama had seen young boys working in the slaughterhouse, ferrying the carcasses of freshly killed animals to the eating houses and market. He watched the couriers, their necks awkwardly bent by the weight on their shoulders, their feet frantically shuffling forward, propelling whirlwinds of sand up their legs.
The work was hard and dirty, but Jama resolved to get money by whatever means necessary.
He woke up early one morning, the sky gray and the air still cool, and snuck out of the room, Jinnow’s snores chasing after him. A hyena-rich darkness covered the town and Jama could feel jinns and half-men at his back stalking the alleys, making the hairs on his neck stand on end. He sped to the slaughterhouse, the cries of camels and sheep growing in volume as he got closer, and he summoned up an image of his father: tall, strong, elegant in uniform, a smile playing on his dark lips. The slaughterhouse was empty of people; only the penned-up animals, waiting since nightfall for their deaths to come, acknowledged him, fixing their pleading eyes on him, sticking their flaring nostrils into the air. Jama felt the impending bloodshed sizzle in the air and rubbed down the tiny hairs on his lower spine as they nervously stood up, as if they were frightened conscripts standing to attention before a bloodied old general. He paced up and down, avoiding the eyes of the animals, turning his back to them, counting the stars as they one by one bowed and left the stage. As the sun rose, more tiny figures emerged from the dawn horizon, approaching Jama with hostile eyes. Jama looked around with satisfaction as he realized that he was among the tallest of the motley crew of boys that had formed, waiting for the butchers to come and make their selection from them. With the same swift appraisal of strength and value that they had for livestock, the butchers would pick their couriers for the day. The Midgaan and Yibir boys, those too young to understand that they would never be chosen, were insulted out of the lineup: “Get out of here, you dirty shit, go and clean some latrines!” They moved away, forming a separate line, silent and enraged. The oldest porters were camel
herders who had been possessed by jinns in the haunted desert and were now forbidden from approaching the camels. The smallest were barely five years old, bewildered little children who had been dumped in Hargeisa by nomad fathers keen to toughen them up. They had been ripped from their mother’s arms and now slept huddled in groups on the street. Hungry and lonely, they followed older children wherever they went, their fathers occasionally visiting to ask, “So, how much have you made?”
The butchers arrived already smelling of blood, and with an impatient slap on the shoulder and a grunt they pushed out of the line the boys they would employ that day. Jama was one of the straight-backed chosen few. The unlucky ones slunk away to their mats or patches of dirt and prepared to sleep away the day and its insidious hunger pangs. Jama walked toward the killing ground but hung back, hoping to avoid seeing the actual slaughters. A man shouted, “Hey you! Whatever your name is! Come here!”
Jama turned around and saw a broad, bare-chested man kneeling over a dead camel, still holding on to its reins as if it could make an escape.
“Jama, my name is Jama, uncle.”
“Whatever. Come and take this carcass over to the Berlin eating house for me. Wait here while I prepare it.” Jama stood back and waited as the butcher took his cleaver and cut off the neck and legs, removed the skin from the camel’s torso and emptied it of heart, stomach, intestines, and other organs that only the poorest Somalis ate. The carnage shocked Jama, its efficiency and speed making it even more dreadful, he stood before the giant, naked, gleaming rib cage, frightened and awed by its desecration. The butcher got up, wiping his red hands on his sarong before picking up the rib cage and balancing it on
Jama’s head. Its weight made him stagger and the soft, oozing flesh pressed revoltingly onto his skin. Jama pushed himself forward, trying to not career around, but the heavy load drove him left and right. He stopped and pushed the rib cage down his neck onto his shoulders and held it wedged there as if he were Atlas holding up the world in his fragile arms. The broad bones jutted into Jama’s back, and blood trickled down from his hair onto his shoulders and down his spine, making his brown back glisten with a ruby luster. His nose was filled with the dense, iron smell of blood and he stopped against a wall to retch emptily. Blood dripped onto the sand, decorating his footprints with delicate red pools, as if he were a wounded man. He finally reached the eating house and hurriedly handed the rib cage to a cook through the window. The cook grabbed it as if it were weightless and turned back to his talking and chopping without acknowledging the human carriage that had brought the delivery to him. Jama walked back to the slaughterhouse, a grimace set on his face, his arms held away from his body so that they wouldn’t rub and release the metallic stench. He delivered four more carcasses that morning and by the end he resembled a little murderer covered in the juices and viscera of his victims. Jama carefully tied his hard-earned money in the bottom of his sarong and walked home. The blood dried quickly in the noon sun and his hair and skin began to itch, he rolled his palms over his skin and the blood peeled off in claret strips. The insides of his nails were choked with dried blood and his sticky hair attracted fat, persistent flies, their buzzing causing an infuriating pandemonium by his ears. Jama had grown used to his own high, rich smell but the scent of death clinging to him was unbearable. Knowing that the precious water in the compound was only occasionally
used for bathing, he hurriedly removed as much of the filth from his body as he could, using sand to clean himself as the Prophet advised. He arrived at the compound door and it was opened by Ayan before he had even knocked, she had fresh cuts on her face and one of her plaits had come apart, her wavy hair fanning out over one side of her head. “Nabad Jama,” she enunciated slowly, looking into his eyes intensely. “Where have you been? You look tired, and what is that in your hair?” She reached out to touch but he slapped her hand away.