Black Mamba Boy (23 page)

“Poison him with cobra spit, and then bring him here for the cure,” counseled one old woman.

In another village a woman offered herself as the honey trap, but in Gerset, Hawa told them to offer Jama land in return for his sorcery.

Jama accepted Hawa’s offer of two acres, but promised the people of Focka that he would keep his stall there. He borrowed
a mule from a neighbor and with his blanket, tools, and cooking utensils on the mule’s back he headed for Gerset. The women had cleared the ground for him, rich soil, damp to the touch, combed through like his mother’s black hair. It was a beautiful sight to behold, the first real wealth of his life. He paced along the perimeter, measuring the distance from one corner to another. It was a large, open-handed gift from the women and he kissed Hawa’s hands in gratitude. The women built him a hut, singing “Akoran Oshomaney” as they worked, “Don’t Let Your Friend Down.”

They finally left him alone to work his sorcery, but he didn’t know what to do. Protected from view by exuberant banana trees, he bent down and picked up handfuls of soil and rubbed it against his arms and legs, it was cool and soothed his hot skin. He brought it to his nose, it smelled of trees and their breath. He tasted it; iron and blood. In his revelry he walked around Gerset, the women smiled and waved as he roamed, he felt wonderful among these trusting Amazons, their beautiful village untouched by war, hidden from Ferengi maps. They stopped to welcome him. There were no titles in Gerset, no masters or lords, not even misses; respect was given freely, equally, generously, all were descendants of Queen Kuname. According to custom, only the women and older men had met to decide which plot to give Jama; the youths would learn of his presence when they returned from grazing the cows but Jama was assured that they would give him no trouble and there was quiet apart from the shouts of dogs, coughs of goats, and chuckling of lambs. Tired and thirsty, he reached the village shop. He pushed the curtain aside, his footsteps soft, padded by unswept dust. A girl sat behind a crooked wooden counter, her head on her arm, snoring with fat flies buzzing around her head. She jumped at his approach, quickly wiping the drool from her
chin. She was beautiful, sloe black eyes and red ripe lips atop the long neck of a gerenuk, her pure brown skin set off by yards of carnelian and amber beads; she had been polished with butter and cream. Meeting her startled antelope gaze, Jama asked for a cup of milk, and with swift, dancing steps, she went to the old cow in the backyard and milked a cupful.

“Good afternoon,” said Jama, his heartbeat skittering.

The girl nodded to him. She emanated light like a saint on a church wall, but her expression was more suspicious than beatific.

“Where have you come from?” she finally asked, her voice deeper than he expected. He could smell honey on her breath.

“You name it, I’ve been there.” He smiled, she smiled back, and that was it.

Bethlehem Bighead was a mule, with a Tigre father and a Kunama mother, Muslim and Christian, born in a cowshed, a shepherdess in the morning, a farmer in the afternoon, and a shopgirl in the evening. With a head full of dreams and fantasies, she would pluck lavender and jasmine and come home with blooms in her braids but minus a goat, only to be beaten and sent back out into the darkening hills until she had found it. Her black thicket of hair earned her the name Bighead, and she wore it like a crown of thorns, pulling at it throughout the day, plucking strands from her eyes, from her mouth, from her food. When her sisters jumped her, they used her hair as a weapon, forcing her head back with it and dragging her across the dirt by it. Her mother would sometimes put an afternoon aside to laboriously braid it, laying it down into manageable rows like their crops, before like a rain forest it burst out of its man-made boundaries and reclaimed its territory. She was a
true village girl in that she wanted nothing more than to live in a town; already sixteen, she had to wait for her five older sisters to marry before she could escape. Jama’s face came to her now before she fell asleep. His deep, hypnotizing eyes saddened her, and there was something about his lost and lonely bearing that made her want to suffocate him in her bosom.

From her perch on the hills, amid the bleating goats, Bethlehem could see Jama in his turban, planting seeds. He was clumsy with his tools and to her amusement he would pull seedlings out of the earth to see how much they had grown. He was trying to stare them into life, she thought.

When she brought the goats back down, Bethlehem sidled past his field. “You’re not doing that very well, you know. You shouldn’t plant them so deep. They need to see the sun through the earth.”

“Why don’t you come and help me, then,” Jama said, stopping to stare as she walked past.

“Eeeee! You wish!” she squealed, before striding away.

Jama studied the cycles of her day. He loved to watch her make her yawning advance up the hill in the dappled dawn light. She was a spot of red climbing up the gray-green horizon, her faithful retinue of stinking goats shouting after her. At midday, she would descend, her ramrod-straight back holding up that black flag of hair, and begin work on her mother’s fields. He could smell the flowers in her hair long after she had passed. Jama would wait until she was in the shop in the evenings before going to buy his eggs and milk, and they talked by paraffin lamp while her family ate dinner.

“What did you do before coming here?” she asked once.

“I was an askari.”

“How stupid you must have been,” she taunted, holding a blade of grass between her fingers in imitation of his cigarette.

The womb light of the lamp made them both braver, able to talk about things that bright daylight or deep darkness would have prohibited. Jama told Bethlehem about his parents, and she listened with the attention of a sphinx. In return, to cement their intimacy, Bethlehem described to Jama how her father kicked her for daydreaming and losing goats, how she had never been bought anything her whole life but only given her sisters’ hand-me-downs.

“Not one thing, Jama, can you believe that, never one thing for me only.”

Jama shook his head in sympathy and touched her hand; she let him for a second before pulling away.

Since Jama had arrived in Gerset, Bethlehem never went out with dusty, chapped feet but massaged them with oil every morning. She pilfered her eldest sister’s Maria Theresa coin necklace, earrings, and silver anklets, hiding them until she got near Jama’s farm, when she would put them on, scintillating past until he was out of sight and they could disappear back into her pockets. One day her hair was in agrarian rows, another day in two bunches, on yet another she would plait the front and leave the back out. Jama enjoyed the coiffures which gave her face different shapes and moods. As they grew closer, Jama rose before the sun to wait for her in the hills where they could spend a few hours together, before the village came to life and began its watch. He waited happily in the cold, holding fresh sprigs and blossoms for her, a shiver running through his body when she stepped out of his infatuated mind and became flesh again. Her bounding, voluptuous body appeared every night in his dreams, she wore her red cotton robes tight, and he memorized every contour of her body during the day
so he could re-create her in perfect detail at night. He was awkward and giddy around her but she did not complain, she watched him intently and pulled straw out of his hair.

“I have never felt like this before, I feel possessed,” he told her, and she glowed in pleasure.

One dawn, as they sat talking, a deep murmuring came from the skies, a torrent of rain and hailstones fell upon them,
bhesh, bhesh, bhesh
, and land slid down the hillside.

“Mary protect me,” screamed Bethlehem, desperately trying to gather her terrified goats as the earth tore away her anklets and submerged her knee-deep in mud.

Jama climbed a fig tree and pulled her out. She was so close he could feel her heartbeat thumping against him. Bethlehem buried her face in his neck while he tugged her free.

“Come, let’s get into that cave,” he commanded. She ignored him and ran after the goats, but Jama chased them toward the cave, and only then did she follow him. The mammoth granite hillside split into a cavern that had all the elegance and delicacy of a cathedral, stalactites hung down like censors and the light playing on puddles dappled against the high dome. Bethlehem said a prayer and kissed her rosary.

“Don’t worry, it will be over soon,” reassured Jama. “Come, sit closer, so I can keep you warm.”

“Are you serious about me, Jama? Or are you just playing? Will you marry me?” Bethlehem asked, cold and shivering.

“Yes,” replied Jama, putting an arm around her shoulder.

They made a loveseat out of the living rock and imagined their new life together as rain washed the old world away. Looking over them, however, was Rumor, she who flits between sky and earth, who never declines her head in sleep, and with swift wings she took flight to disturb the repose of the villagers.

When the midday sun had burned away the clouds, Jama, Bethlehem, and the goats returned to Gerset, to stares and whispers. Bethlehem kept her head high, believing herself to be practically married. She left Jama by his field and went home. Her mother was sweeping goat droppings away from their door.

“What took you so long, Bighead? You should have come home before the rain started.”

“Mama, Jama and I are going to get married,” Bethlehem announced.

Her mother screeched and threw away the broom. “What is this! What will people say? Your father’s poor old heart! Why can’t you wait for your sisters to find husbands first? What have you done?”

“Nothing, Mama, we just agreed,” Bethlehem stuttered.

“You will decide nothing without consulting me. I don’t want that little Somali sniffing around you, people are already talking, you don’t know anything about him, so just stay away.”

Bethlehem didn’t stay away. She went to Jama’s fields and helped him, he watched as she demonstrated how to pick out weeds and check for blight. The earth was pregnant with so much produce that, come harvest time, Jama employed two more female laborers, offering them a share of the crop in return. Bethlehem was paid too and her mother walked her to the field and collected her at dusk, but all day the lovebirds could twitter as much as they wanted. He described the Ferengi ships docked in Aden, the slaughterhouses of Hargeisa, and the markets of Djibouti. He did not have to describe Keren to her; the silver markets still glinted in her mind from her trips there as a child. Jama spoke about places but he didn’t speak about people—all the places he described were ghost towns that he
traversed alone. He never mentioned Shidane or Abdi, but they were there in his stories, imperceptible shadows that walked beside him. There was a moment at dusk when a cool breeze blew, the leaves shook and rustled, and Bethlehem stretched her back in front of a golden sky, that made Jama melt; but within moments Bethlehem’s mother would arrive and march her home, leaving him to his thoughts as he rode his borrowed mule to Focka. On melancholy evenings, the scrub a dark green and the rocky paths a subdued blue, his mind dwelled on those he had left behind. He hoped to return one day, atop an unblemished racing camel, and visit Jinnow and Idea with gifts of gold, myrrh, and silk. He planned to either return in triumph or not at all. On the back of the mule he conducted imaginary conversations with Idea in which he told him about the Italians, their punishments, their arrogance, their cruelty, and Idea listened closely while stirring a pot, shaking his head in bitter sympathy.

The harvests were greater than they had ever been, and the women of Gerset showed exuberant gratitude, bringing to Jama’s tukul a goat, blankets, sorghum porridge, figs, all of life’s little luxuries. Jama’s own sorghum plants towered so high and so strong that twenty women were brought in to help cut them down. Even Bethlehem’s mother came to him bearing eggs, and she smiled tentatively, appraising him all the time. Jama surreptitiously kissed the amulet around his neck; the magic the women saw in him was nothing more than what his mother could scatter on him from above.

The harvest was so abundant that Jama could pay Awate to look after the store in Focka, saving him the backbreaking donkey ride every day. The thud of sorghum being pounded in stone mortars followed him everywhere. The smuggling trips to Sudan continued but now he could pay for more expensive
items: petrol, silver, cooking pots. He was the wealthiest man in Focka, and the second-wealthiest after Bethlehem’s father in Gerset, although he had plenty of weight to gain before he matched that rotund figure. Jama was almost complacent about his talents now. He thought all he needed to do was throw a few seeds in the earth and he would be richly rewarded. Bethlehem became the lady of the manor, watching over the women, overseeing their work, tutting and clucking around them until they complained to Jama. The sorghum grew tall and straight and shivered and sang in the breeze. Young men came to admire his fields and store because he was the boy their mothers told them to emulate. They looked on in wonder as the crowds of women—their aunties, sisters, girlfriends—huddled around the tukul of the thin, long-limbed foreigner, vying for his attention in loud voices.

Amid all the flattery, Jama could not hear the whispers of locusts flying toward Gerset. Millions upon billions traversing the miles with a blind hunger fell upon the village without warning. The ugly warriors from the Nile Valley ate the crops, the roofs of tukuls, ate through baskets to get at hidden grains and pulses, ate the food out of children’s mouths, and what they didn’t eat they maliciously defecated on, poisoning everything. Jama tried to throw cloths over his crops but the locusts ate the sheets as he laid them down, and his workers ran away to save their own fields, lunging at the insects with torches. Within hours all that was left of his farm were stiff stubs where the sorghum once stood and piles of locusts that had died in the frenzy. Jama ran through the ravaged village, staring dumbfounded as he went from field to empty field. The women screamed and rent their clothes, but it was too late to pray, to do anything. By the next day, every farm had been ruined; children would go unfed, debts unpaid; animals would have to
be slaughtered before they starved to death. In his mind Jama canceled the debts that the distraught women owed him.