The Orchard of Lost Souls (11 page)

Nasra hides her face and sobs, and with wide, anxious eyes Deqo sits up. ‘I would miss you, Nasra,’ she says hurriedly, parting her back.

Nasra doesn’t reply and Deqo understands that she is not enough for Nasra, not by a long way.

The first day of 1988 is bright and blue-skied, the street outside littered with leaves and broken twigs blown about the previous night. Deqo holds a hundred shillings tightly
in her right hand, a gift from Nasra to celebrate the arrival of the new year and to maybe apologise for her tears. The little girl who danced with her in the rain is sitting with her mother on a
large cement step, resting her face on her knuckles; Deqo waves in greeting but when the girl raises her hand her mother yanks it down. The wiry woman narrows her eyes at her. ‘Keep
walking,’ she shouts. Deqo holds up her head and marches on, but her stomach does a small flip as Nasra’s words return to her; she doesn’t want to become another daytime
ghost.

Looking down at her freshly painted red toenails and the clean, lotioned skin of her feet, Deqo sees no reason for anyone to look down on her. She looks good in her mind, better than she ever
has before. Her cheeks have filled out and the constant headache she used to have from hunger has gone, but she also feels heavier, slower and less sharp-witted now that she doesn’t have to
graft for every little morsel. She feels as though she is in disguise: dressed in Nasra’s hand-me-down green skirt and white shirt, she wonders if anyone will recognise her at the market or
if she will pass for one of the plump and carefree local girls.

Deqo veers off to the left to explore an open area she hasn’t noticed before; there are scrubby bushes in a sandpit and boys kicking a rag ball. Deqo and Anab had sometimes joined the
footballers near the wide, empty riverbed beside Saba’ad; for no obvious reason some matches would just grow until maybe a hundred players gathered, creating a gravelly pitch that stretched
for a mile in each direction. More makeshift balls would have to be made from rags tied up with shoestring when the others crumbled under the stampede of toddlers and teenagers, girls and boys
– the girls often just picking up a ball in their hands and running to the goal because they couldn’t understand why they shouldn’t. On those afternoons, when the girls abandoned
their
buuls
and chores and the camp was veiled by the dust they kicked up, Deqo had run and run and leapt for the golden sun, a bright medal just beyond her reach.

After watching the boys kick the scrappy ball around listlessly for a few minutes, Deqo skirts the sandpit and strolls up to a crossroad with four tracks leading away from it. She chooses one
randomly and passes the giant power station, the Pepsi factory with rows of trucks parked outside, and then after another patch of scrubland there is the ditch, full of trash and spirit bottles,
and a rope bridge to the other side of town. Looking down on the ditch from the swaying bridge, it is hard to believe that she once spent her nights there; it is a wild, dark jungle, a
no-man’s-land full of threat and danger, her barrel probably full of snakes or scorpions by now. It is the kind of place where human skeletons might sink into the soil undisturbed and
unmourned. She is a different girl now to the one who had sought shelter in that wasteland; she must have outgrown and abandoned some kind of shell or cocoon there.

The market has been her salvation, its noise and smells and rough interactions have kept her human, and she reaches it with relief, clasping the treasure in her hand more tightly. She has never
had a hundred shillings before and has to fight the desire to hide it from herself for a rainy day, but Nasra made her promise to buy something frivolous with it. The spot where she had sold stolen
fruit is hidden behind the large backs of several middle-aged market women. Children swarm around her newly long legs – pallid glue sniffers, shoeshines, pickpockets, religious students in
long white robes and prayer caps, street sweepers – there are enough of them to populate a small town of their own, with hierarchies, feuds and alliances to match anything the adults can
muster.

No one recognises her, her transformation complete; who would believe it is the same Deqo who used to sleep in a rusty barrel? She catches her reflection in a mirror hanging up in a clothes
stall and sees a girl with neatly pinned up hair holding her nose imperiously high.

Nothing grabs her attention enough to part her from the hundred shillings until she reaches a corner stall with animals. The trader, sitting on a stool with a white lamb cradled in his arms, has
dark, pitted skin and oily straight hair and smiles a generous smile as she approaches. A tortoise crawls lethargically around his feet, tied by a leg to the stool, various birds squawk and flap
inside cramped cages, and in the depths of the stall she can see a small brown-mottled fawn sat on its haunches. Deqo quietly kneels beside it and the fawn looks at her with terrified, wet
eyes.

‘How much?’ Deqo asks the trader.

He scratches his jaw before answering, ‘Give me five hundred.’

She runs a hand over the animal’s back; it trembles with each rapid heartbeat. It should be with its mother. ‘I only have a hundred.’

‘Oh, forget it, then.’ He turns back to the street and spits.

‘What do you feed it?’

‘Cow’s milk. Why don’t you ask your mother for more money if you like it so much?’

‘I don’t have a mother.’ She scratches the fawn under its chin and its ears flick in response.

‘Or your father then. Or . . .’ He drags a straw basket over to his stool and tips it so she can see inside; a flurry of yellow chicks fall over each other and chirp in alarm.
‘You can have one of those for a hundred. Pick one.’

Deqo pats the fawn on its head and then examines the chicken orphanage. She pities their fragility; it would be easy to crush one in her palm. She sticks her hand in and strokes the downy chest
of one flailing on its back. The first two years of her own life had been spent in the overcrowded cots that contained the camp’s youngest orphans, where they were left to clamber over each
other and poke curious fingers into unguarded eyes. Somehow she had emerged from that cage and learnt to walk and talk and feed herself.

‘I’ll take her. And when I have enough money I’ll come back for the deer,’ she says resolutely.

He mock salutes her and takes the money. ‘I’ll be waiting for you!’

Deqo walks back to the house slowly, tickling her face with the chick’s fuzz; she hopes that it will one day grow into a proud, bright-plumed hen, the matriarch of her own ever-expanding
brood.

China steps over Deqo to set the kettle on the charcoal burner; she harrumphs and makes indistinct complaints aimed either at Deqo or the baby tied to her back. The boy’s
face is squashed hard against China’s back; it looks uncomfortable but he doesn’t whimper. Deqo is half grateful, half envious that she has never been carried like that. The chick is on
her lap, walking up and down the length of her thighs.

‘I thought you were meant to work in this house, not just sit there with that thing and eat our food?’

‘I have finished the cleaning, China. Is there anything else you would like me to do?’ she replies calmly.

‘Well, take this weight off my back for a start.’ She unwraps the boy and dumps him into Deqo’s arms.

Nuh’s arms flop to the side of his body; he smells as strongly of alcohol as his mother and seems drunk too, his eyes half closed and motionless. She looks up sourly at China. Why did you
get to keep your child when you can’t even care for him? she thinks.

‘Deqo!’ Nasra exclaims. A tall man with a wooden cane stands behind her in the courtyard. ‘You’re back. Is that what you bought?’ She points to the new chick.
‘Have you named it?’

Deqo shakes her head. ‘I’m still deciding.’

‘Does that child belong to her?’ the man asks. He lifts his sunglasses up to look at her more closely, muttering something into Nasra’s ear.

‘Of course not, that is China’s son.’

The man steps further into the kitchen and bends down over Deqo; he smiles and reveals two gold canines. ‘Pretty girl,’ he says, catching her nose between his tobacco-stained
fingers.

‘You’re in perfect health, aren’t you, Deqo?’ Nasra gently pulls him away from her.

Deqo nods shyly.

‘Let’s talk in my room,’ Nasra says, leading the visitor out of the kitchen.

‘Oh, you’re set for the chopping board, little one,’ chuckles China.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ll soon find out.’ China takes Nuh from her and walks back to her room with a flask of tea.

Deqo shoves the chick into her skirt pocket and stands beside Nasra’s door, but she cannot hear the conversation no matter how hard she presses her ear to the wall. Deqo goes back to the
kitchen, telling herself to not be so suspicious; Nasra wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.

The new year brings new customers – soldiers and plenty of them; the man who jumped into the courtyard returns nearly every night and brings his comrades with him. The
house of women has become the house of men, and even Stalin seems humbled. Unhindered by the curfew, they arrive at midnight and leave before dawn, but by that time the bungalow is in chaos, with
displaced cups and glasses everywhere, broken plates thrown into the kitchen, cigarette butts and empty bottles littering the courtyard, washing pulled from the line and trampled, urine all over
the toilet floor.

The women sleep all day, exhausted, while Deqo cleans. The old customers do not come, afraid of the soldiers, and she misses their neatness. It is hard to sleep when there is music all night and
footsteps a few inches from her head, but it is their voices that really bother her: why do men speak so loudly? They shout rather than talk and laugh like the world needs to know they are
laughing. She covers her ears while they boast about how the city is theirs, how they can do what they like and no one says anything, and as if to prove that, one of the young conscripts likes to
run into the kitchen, pull up her skirt and then escape while the others guffaw. They declare each week that planes and artillery and bulldozers are on their way to Hargeisa, but Deqo never sees
them. The chick, now named Malab after her honey-coloured new feathers, has also come under threat from a strange young soldier with a shaven head, who tries to stamp on her if she leaves the
safety of the kitchen.

The presence of the soldiers has made the neighbours even more hostile than before and the front door is streaked with goat shit. Deqo begins to cover her head and a little of her face when she
heads for the market after Stalin is caught by local women and beaten with brooms. They are angry that their husbands and sons have been taken away and some had come to the house earlier to plead
with Nasra to find out from the soldiers where their loved ones had gone. She had refused. It was Nasra they were after, Stalin said when she staggered in, bruised and limping, but the neighbours
would send a message through any of them.

After the dry season ends, Karl Marx packs a suitcase and leaves one night without bidding farewell to any of them. Nasra, China and Stalin remain behind but are subdued; they take what they
want from Karl Marx’s room and continue to play act with the soldiers, laughing dryly at their jokes and dancing strangely with them in the dark courtyard.

Nasra is glassy-eyed and drinks from China’s bottles; she looks through Deqo when she tries to talk to her, her words slurred and incoherent. She has lost weight despite the money she is
drawing from the soldiers. Deqo asks why she doesn’t send some of them away if they are upsetting her, but Nasra pushes her away and tells her to leave her alone.

The air warms up as the months pass but little rain falls; the one tree in the courtyard is desiccated, and even the plastic vine Nasra decorated it with is bleached and brittle. Only Malab
thrives in the bungalow, growing fat on the corn Deqo feeds her; everyone else is tired and fragile. None of the women cook anymore; there is just bread, fruit and biscuits to eat and Deqo can feel
her wrist bones again.

On her way to the
suuq
she often passes children tied by the feet to a barrel or stake outside their home. They stand for hours as punishment for some misdemeanour, staring at her with
absent eyes, rubbing the places where they have been whipped or beaten. Everyone is angry – even the sky is grey and motionless; there doesn’t seem to be space for anything but silence
and obedience. A new checkpoint is set up at the top of the road and she recognises some of the soldiers from the night visits; they let her through easily while others are stopped and searched.
The market is bare and each item is sold at a new, higher price every time she goes there. Many of the traders have disappeared altogether and there are large dark spaces where their stalls used to
be. The animal seller has departed along with his tortoise and antelope.

Deqo feels herself retreating into the past. Memories of Anab alive are eaten up by images of her dead, the quiet penetrated by her cries, the heat and then the cold of her skin as the cholera
emptied her, now washing over Deqo in waves. What had made the life seep out of her body but not Deqo’s? Had she just wanted to return to her mother enough to leave her little doll body
behind and vanish from the earth?

Carrying a string bag of papayas and oranges, Deqo opens the door and sees a wide pink suitcase in the hallway. The door to Nasra’s room is ajar and she peeks in. The
floor is covered with clothes and shoes and Nasra picks through them in a panic and stuffs them into a shoulder bag.

Deqo continues to the kitchen before Nasra can shout at her. Malab scuttles excitedly beneath her feet, pecking at her bare toes; she is almost fully grown and her sharp beak stings. Deqo pushes
the hen away and begins to peel an orange when Nasra calls her name.

The old man with the sunglasses is smoking behind the door while Nasra stands in the middle of the room, dressed in black and wearing a headscarf. She holds her arms out and gestures for Deqo to
come closer.

‘Little one, I have to leave for a while. I need to go to Ethiopia to find a new job, but you won’t be alone, Mustafa is here to look after you. You have to do what he says, OK? He
will keep you safe.’