The Orchard of Lost Souls (18 page)

Then came the obsessive cleaning, her hands scrubbed until the skin began to blister and peel. Kawsar would lay out a plate and spoon before lunch and Hodan would wash both again before she ate
with them – that is while she still shared cutlery with her mother, before that dawn-blue tin bowl appeared with a separate spoon to go with it. The little girl who was weaned on meat
softened in her mother’s mouth now seemed disgusted by her touch, but remained too pampered to cook for herself, the charcoal stove too cumbersome for her to bother with.

Kawsar accepted it all, pretended not to see when Hodan hit her own temple with a furious fist as if trying to knock difficult thoughts out of her head. Her first concern had been to protect
Hodan from predatory boys, those stray dogs that could sniff out vulnerability from the other side of town. She was growing into her body faster than she was developing in her mind. Kawsar began to
understand why those Arab women in Mogadishu covered their daughters all in black with only a slit for the eyes; it could serve as a chrysalis until their girls were ready for the heat of
men’s eyes. Hodan still seemed too young; her breasts looked ridiculous on her narrow chest, and she had the brown-glazed teeth of a child who couldn’t keep their fingers out of the
biscuit tin. It would take another decade for her to appear anything like a grown woman, but still boys in uniform lingered outside the bungalow gate after school trying to watch Hodan through the
windows. One day Kawsar lost her composure and threw a shoe at one of those dogs, aimed the wedged sole at his face, hoping to blind the scoundrel, and he in return had thrown a stone back at her,
hitting her in the ribs. That was the beginning of the end, the transition from control to anarchy, from hope to despair, from decency to shame.

It would have been different if Hodan had been a more aggressive child, one who could turn her anger and pain outwards towards others. In the playground at Hodan’s school the boys wore
steel-capped shoes and before class they would gather into a knot and kick each other’s shins, the winner being the boy who survived the longest in the fray. It was not unusual for eleven-
and twelve-year-olds to settle a squabble with a razorblade secreted under their sleeve. The teachers could whip, kick and punch their students as much as they pleased, but if they went too far
then a parent would come in and square off with them. Violence was an article of faith nowadays, accepted and rewarded at every level; there wasn’t room for the gentle or thoughtful. Just
amongst her neighbours, Kawsar witnessed toddlers being pushed into fights by their older siblings; Hodan was once jumped by a group of girls for no other reason than they envied her new shoes. She
ran home with a tear in her shirt, her hair ripped out of its braids, a bleeding scratch from her nose to her cheek, but what upset her most was the state of her exercise books, which had been torn
and stamped upon. She didn’t want Kawsar to replace the books or find the girls’ mothers so that they would be punished, she just shook with grief for her once immaculate books; there
was no vengeance in her, but that magnanimity was perceived as weakness, as bloodlessness by adults and children alike. She was ‘cowardly’, ‘not right’, they said. Dahabo
had tried to teach her how to argue, to cuss, to fight, because Kawsar was just as meek as her daughter. Dahabo cuffed and teased Hodan to fire a reaction but it didn’t work, the girl just
hid behind her mother and waited for Dahabo to leave her alone. When she did succumb to violence it was against herself.

Nurto returns after washing the dishes and doesn’t mention the protest; instead she sits calmly on her mattress and pores over photographs in an Indian magazine given to
her by the market trader. She examines the hair, eyebrows, make-up and henna of the actresses under the glow of the
feynuus,
furrowing her eyebrows as if hard at work, wondering how she
can recreate these looks with her sparse equipment. She tears out the pages with the most beautiful women in the magazines and keeps them under her pillow, as if she hopes their splendour will seep
into her as she sleeps, her dreams probably tinted red and gold like the pictures.

A new moon has just been born, fragile and slender in its nursery of stars, and Kawsar gazes at it as she whispers a prayer for Hodan’s soul.

She remains awake long after Nurto has turned off the lamp and fallen asleep. She only succumbs to drowsiness when she hears Maryam English’s children leaving for school at seven, the
crunch of their sandals loud in her ears, their reddish hair gliding past her windowsill. Kawsar falls asleep with her cheek bathed in a ray of sunlight.

The front door swings on its hinges; Kawsar likes it open for a quarter of an hour in the morning, to sweep the fetid smell of her bandages and old breath from the room. The
wound from the compound fracture of her hip is still festering, itching away under the cotton gauze, and she scratches it with the end of her
caday,
the tooth stick bumping over glossy,
stitched skin. In quiet moments like these she often feels her heart skip a beat as she remembers the soldier’s distant eyes as she beat her to the floor.

‘You can’t hurt me,’ she says repeatedly, her breathing slowly returning to normal.

The strip of street life visible from her bed is dreamlike, rushing past like film spinning wildly from its spool: dogs, goats, infants with bare bottoms, the speechless extras of life appearing
within the frame of the door and then deliquescing into the world beyond.

From the window opposite the video hall she sometimes hears the older neighbourhood children talking in hushed voices, and in secondhand
whodead
clothes their younger siblings re-enact
the dramas that their parents try to hide from them. Kawsar once – in her upright days – had watched as a girl in overalls arrested a cowboy, while a bridesmaid and diminutive nurse
barked orders at her, sticks pointed in place of guns. They watch videos for ten shillings in Zahra’s little cinema and come pouring out afterwards, imitating the flourishes and facial
acrobatics of Amitabh Bachchan or throwing karate moves stolen from Bruce Lee. She can hear them now, scuff-kneed boys and girls organising the rescue of uncles from Mandera prison, planning heists
of Midland bank so their parents can pay their taxes, and swearing vengeance against the policemen who ransack their homes. The NFM is full of the older versions of these children, leaving town
hidden in the boots of cars when sticks can no longer stand in for guns. The whole country has ceased to make sense to Kawsar – policewomen have become torturers, veterinarians doctors,
teachers spies and children armed rebels.

Nurto is in the bathroom; the price of her not attending the student protest is that she has a free morning, and so far she has used it to paint her nails and apply henna to her hair.

The four walls of Kawsar’s bedroom seem to close in a little each day. Holes in the roof let rainwater trail down the blue paint leaving ghostly tears, as if the room is mourning all the
deaths it has witnessed. First, her mother had curled up into a small ball of pain and within days of moving from her own bungalow had become mute and helpless, dying with her eyes clenched as if
she had wished it herself. Farah, at an august fifty-five years of age, had died within hours of complaining of chest pain, too quickly for the doctor to finish his shift at the hospital and attend
to him; sweat pouring from his face and back, he clenched at his heart and arm and begged for water, cup after cup. Hodan had witnessed these deaths, her huge eyes picturing every detail as she
hovered around Kawsar’s legs, intermittently squeezing them as if to say ‘be strong,
Hooyo,
be strong’. Kawsar had been strong but then her child had taken a knife and
cored her.

The shock when Kawsar woke to an empty house and couldn’t find Hodan in the orchard or courtyard was melded with relief that she had remembered a world existed beyond
their walls. She waited happily until lunchtime for Hodan to return, expecting her to have left for the market to buy the day’s supplies. When the sun passed its zenith and began to drop,
Kawsar’s mood sank with it. She asked the neighbours if they had seen her but they were ignorant of her whereabouts; she ran to Dahabo’s stall to see if Hodan had visited her but left
disappointed. Returning home, she opened the wardrobe to discover a holdall had disappeared along with some of Hodan’s clothes, and she realised that the falling night would find her alone in
the house. Dahabo escorted her to the police station that same evening to report Hodan as missing, all the while assuring her that her daughter would be home by morning. Throughout that clear,
full-moon night Kawsar had waited, ears pricked for footsteps, until the sun lit up neon lights in the slats of the shutters.

Hodan did not return for ninety-two days. She did not tell Kawsar or anyone else where she had been or what she had seen, but two weeks later she took a can of gasoline and a box of matches into
the bathroom and set herself on fire. The image of her bald head, marbled skin, and grinning, skeletal face has never left Kawsar. It was with anger that she had buried that husk when those
accursed fluttering eyelids had finally stilled. What sin had she committed to deserve such punishment? Even if Hodan had become a whore selling her body in the street the humiliation could not
have been greater. It was years later that Kawsar had learnt young girls were doing this to themselves nowadays, torching themselves in washrooms and courtyards before their lives had even
begun.

She had given away all of Hodan’s clothes and possessions, and most of the gold jewellery that Kawsar had collected for her marriage was sold and the money given to the orphanage. The
sheets that still smelt of her body lotion were thrown out and replaced. The anger dissipated slowly over months but never left, burning under her like a bed of coals.

Kawsar wakes slowly from her drug-induced slumber and listens for Nurto’s movements to fix the time of day. There is silence until Nurto slams open the door from orchard
to kitchen and dumps the shopping on the floor. Kawsar listens to her footsteps rushing to the wet room and then the roar of water and banging pipes as the water tank empties into the tap.
Appearing later wrapped in a towel and dripping water from her nose and ears, Nurto shivers uncontrollably.

‘Wrap yourself properly.’ Kawsar throws a blanket to her.

Nurto scrunches the blanket in her hands and holds it to her chest ‘They . . .’ she says through chartering teeth.

‘Who?’

‘The soldiers . . . to see . . . so everyone could see them.’

‘What do you mean? Who hurt you?’ Kawsar shouts, already imagining Nurto stripped naked in the street.

‘Not me, not me. Nomads.’

Kawsar falls back on her pillow slightly. ‘In town?’

‘They dumped eight dead men down by the market, I saw one with intestines hanging out of a hole in his stomach.’ Nurto looks bilious and huddles on her mattress.

‘Did no one come to claim the bodies?’

Nurto shakes her head.

Kawsar can imagine the discussions of the wives and mothers of the nomads as they seek out the whereabouts of their loved ones, asking first the neighbours, then acquaintances and eventually the
police. But what distances must those women contend with? Their little homes surrounded by nothing but mountains and rocks, each
reer
a planet of its own. She used to meet the men on the
minibus to the
suuq,
carefully counting out the shillings of their discounted fare while exuding a pride that the townsmen had lost. The old turbaned men were often straight-backed and
hawk-faced, with robes that fell off their delicate bones; they hadn’t had to contend with the
Guddi
or curfew or forced parades, but now the regime had turned its attention to them
too.

‘Have a rest, let it pass from your mind,’ Kawsar soothes. Each day there is another outrage and it frightens her to see Nurto’s reaction.

After an hour Kawsar sends Nurto to Zahra’s video hall to watch a Hindi film and to take her mind off what she has seen. She sits propped up in bed and cools herself with a black lacquered
fan that Farah had given her once, strands of her fine hair stirring in its draught. The air outside is heavy, still, static with compressed electricity. The
Gu
rains are approaching,
belatedly making their way from the rainforests of Congo over the highlands of Ethiopia to fall on the parched, burnt land of Somalia. The sun up beyond the mauve clouds is hidden away but its heat
is still capable of drawing sweat from the creases in Kawsar’s skin.

The rainstorms so far have been half-hearted, rushing away just as they start; when the real rains come they are relentless, pouring through the roof and flooding the streets until it appears as
though the bungalows are at sea. They are a manifestation of a year’s worth of prayers, a deluge of nomad’s wishes. Only such a violent country could deserve such violent rain; it
doesn’t dapple against waxy leaves, it churns up the earth like artillery destroying roads in a few hours. Children are sometimes swept along with the torrent, their bodies found miles away
alongside drowned cows and mangled bicycles. From desperate drought to desperate flood, it seems as if Somalis can only expect disaster.

The flood she had seen in the far south in the sixties had seemed like divine punishment: water deep enough to submerge palm trees, minarets, telegraph poles, and within it swam crocodiles,
water snakes, whole families of disgruntled hippos. She recalls standing on Farah’s Land Rover on a hill looking down on villages where maybe only one or two straw roofs were above the water,
men, women, children marooned on them. All across the agricultural areas fed by the Juba and Shebelle the scene was repeated, a year’s harvest rotting underneath the invisible soil. It was
the first time the young country had needed to beg the former colonial rulers, and since then the government hasn’t stopped asking; from floods to famines to tractors and x-ray machines,
prayer mats turned to the west and knees bent in supplication.