Don't Tell Me You're Afraid (14 page)

T
HEN
, shortly before Teresa was to leave Mogadishu to return to the United States, something unexpected happened.

I'd gone out after supper, covered by the burka, to return to the stadium. I still did that every now and then. I didn't go to train there but to feel the grass beneath my back, to stay and gaze at the stars awhile, to do what I would have liked to do at the beach but wasn't allowed to: relax, lose myself in the immensity of the sky, let my thoughts fly.

When I got back, Hooyo and my siblings had already gone to bed; the courtyard was silent and deserted. Only the lofty eucalyptus soared, oblivious to everything. Not a breath of air stirred; the tree's narrow leaves were motionless.

In the middle of the courtyard I noticed a small bundle resting on the ground and went over to it. It was a white
hijab
folded and tied up at the four corners to form a pouch. How strange. Could Hooyo have forgotten something outside? Yet it seemed
to have been put there on purpose, waiting to be found. Right in the center of the big expanse of dusty white earth.

I opened it.

And it knocked the breath out of me.

Inside was a mountain of bills.

I tried to count them quickly. Maybe a million shillings. A ton of money. A family could live comfortably on it for two years. Eating meat twice a week, fish on Friday. It was a fortune.

Who could have . . . ?

Suddenly there was a thud from what had been Yassin and Alì's room. It had been years since it was used, though it seemed like millennia. For a time, while Aabe was still alive, he and Said had used it as a storeroom; then no one had gone near it. I hadn't set foot in it for ages. Since Alì and his family had left, I'd acted as if it no longer existed, as if it had never existed. Just the thought of all the hours that Alì and I had spent in there would have filled me with sadness.

Then I heard the noise again.

It must be a cat, or maybe a rat. Still, I had never heard any sounds coming from there before.

Slowly I approached the door. Nothing, not a sound. Then I opened it and stood in the doorway. It was very dark—the moonlight filtered in only faintly from the door—and the room smelled damp, musty, and dusty.

Gradually my eyes began to adjust to the dark.

The room was full of Aabe and Said's cartons, along with a few tools and piles of Hooyo's fruit crates, all stacked up. Everything had been heaped near the entrance, blocking the view toward the back, where I remembered Alì's family's mattresses were stored.

All of a sudden, I heard the same sound as before, but louder. It had to be a rat. I took a few steps forward.

Then I saw it.

A mattress had been moved against the back wall. On it, sitting cross-legged, was a shadowy figure.

I let out a stifled scream and leaped back, bumping into a large cardboard box and losing my balance. I was on the ground. I was making an abrupt move to get up when a voice spoke.

“Samia.”

It was a man, maybe a boy, a male in any case, but the voice told me nothing else.

“Samia, it's me. Don't you recognize me?”

I squinted and took a closer look at the shadow. He had long hair and an unkempt thicket of beard on his chin and cheeks.

A shiver of cold terror ran down my spine.

I didn't breathe.

“It's Alì.”

I moved nearer to him. Could that bearded man really be Alì? Was that lined, sunken, stricken face his?

I took another step, bumping the mattress with my foot. The eyes were those of my best friend, but they were hidden behind a hardened shell.

I knelt down on the mattress and right away, up close like that, I had the urge to touch him.

At first he drew back, but then he yielded.

We hugged each other tighter than we'd ever done before. On that dusty mattress in a room full of cobwebs and dampness.

“You've come back?” I asked. I recalled that night so many years ago, when Aabe had given me a pair of sneakers and I had
gone into that same room to show them to my friend. He had been lying on the mattress, hiding his head under his arm. He had been little then. A child.

“I'm leaving,” he replied. His voice was unfamiliar. Only his small, close-set eyes and flat nose were as I remembered. The lips were surrounded by the black beard; I couldn't see them clearly.

“What do you mean you're leaving? You just got back!”

“I've stayed too long. We weren't supposed to meet.” His voice was harsh.

“Why did you come home?”

“To leave you the
hijab. . . .”

A pause.

Then he started sobbing and told me everything.

He had joined Al-Shabaab many years ago, shortly after his father, Yassin, had made the decision to leave Bondere.

His brother Nassir had already been recruited, having gone along with his friend Ahmed. For Aabe Yassin it had been a terrible blow, and he had thrown Nassir out of the house. He had feared that Alì would end up pursuing the same path, following his older brother. So they had moved far away to the south, to the small town of Jazeera, where Yassin and Aabe had been born and raised. There his father had hoped to keep him away from the extremists. But he had been mistaken, because Ahmed and Nassir had introduced Alì to the administrative committee of Al-Shabaab even before the family left. That's why Ahmed had been looking for Alì that afternoon.

It had been a difficult decision for him: Should he follow his brother or listen to his father? In the end he had given in. Shortly after the move to Jazeera, he'd left Yassin's house and joined Nassir.

For the first time in his life he'd felt he was being treated like he was worth something; he'd gone to school, he'd learned to write, he had a decent place to live, a bathroom, three meals a day.

“Remember when I was little and couldn't even read?” he asked me with that hard-edged voice. “I only learned how later, thanks to you and your running and those old manuals from the library.”

My voice was all choked up; I couldn't answer. All I could do was nod my head as I stroked his arm.

“Since the day I followed my brother, I got everything. What I'd never had, what I'd never been.”

I squeezed his hand and gestured for him to go on.

Yassin had renounced him and his brother and turned his back on them, but as a result of that they found themselves free to have the life they would never have been able to afford. An education, clean clothes, full bellies.

Alì immediately excelled in Koranic studies, in the use of weapons, and in military strategy. He quickly outshined Nassir and even Ahmed, who had meanwhile been sent to a training camp near the Lamu Archipelago, off the northern coast of Kenya. At a very young age Alì had earned the trust of Ayro himself, the head of Al-Shabaab.

At that point Alì stopped; he could no longer continue.

I begged him to go on; there was a coldness and emptiness in his eyes that scared me, but those sobs were pleading to be heard, to be forgiven.

“Go on, Alì. I'm here,” I told him, swallowing the lump in my own throat and caressing his face.

“I had to do a bad thing. . . . I had to do something that I would never . . .” Again he burst into tears that he'd been
holding back. Mucus was running out of his pinched nostrils; he looked like the little boy I'd always known. I held his hands tightly and told him not to worry.

In the meantime my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I could now better make out his features, the good fabric of his clothes.

Around us there was only silence and a strong musty smell.

Alì took a breath, wiped away his tears, and continued.

The fundamentalists knew me and my sister Hodan; they called us “the two little subversives.” They also knew our father, who had never been willing to bend to the Islamic warlords. They knew that Alì and I had grown up together in the same house. After my win in Hargeysa, Ayro had gotten it into his head to teach me a lesson that would make me get over the urge to run.

They had to get rid of Aabe.

And so Ayro had gone to Alì and asked him to point Aabe out to the man who was to shoot him.

He'd had no choice. It was the cruelest, most heartless thing for him, as if he'd been asked to kill his own father. Yet if he hadn't agreed to do it, many more people would have been blown up along with the intended target. With the help of someone who knew Aabe, however, they could just gun him down.

So that morning at the Bakara market Alì had hidden among the crowd and stayed close to Aabe for a while. Close enough to smell his scent, which he remembered perfectly. The scent of his clothes, which for years had been the same as his own, since Hooyo did the wash for Alì's family as well.

Then Alì's eyes turned cold and he stopped talking.

I was petrified, turned to stone. The words had entered my ears,
but it was as if they didn't want to go all the way to my brain and had stopped there, waiting for me to shake my head and pitch them out. I don't know what I did, maybe nothing. Maybe I shouted or cried. I don't know. I don't know how much time went by either.

Then Alì said that the money was everything he had earned during those years, and he wanted us to have it. With a bitter smile he said that in the end he was like his father, who had wanted to compensate Aabe with money after Aabe had been wounded in his place. He knew it could not repay us, but it was the only thing he could do.

“I've repented, Samia. I'm out of Al-Shabaab now.”

I didn't open my mouth.

“If you can, forgive me . . .
abaayo . . .”

Silence.

Then, slowly, he stood up.

Before turning to go, he laid a hand briefly on my shoulder.

When he was almost at the door, he added: “You'll see, you'll make it to the London Olympics too.”

They were the last words I heard him say.

Then he was gone.

I turned around.

I was left with the image of his broad black back projected against the moonlight.

I don't know how long I sat there like that. Motionless, with tears streaming down my face and a thousand questions like pinpricks in my head. I was confused. What Alì had told me, something he must have repeated to himself many times in the solitude of his bed, was devastating.

How could he have? How could he have forgotten all the times
Aabe had held him in his arms and spoon-fed him as a child while his father, Yassin, looked after the other boys? How could he fail to recall the countless occasions when Hooyo had been a mother to him, washing and dressing him, cooking for him? How could he?

These and a million other questions raced through my mind. But I'm certain that the moment his back stood out in the moonlight was the moment I made the decision to leave.

In one instant, in that one image, my whole world fell to pieces forever. If my country had been able to make a monster out of the boy who had always been a brother to me, my soul mate, if it had turned him into my father's killer, then that meant I was worth nothing to my country.

Aabe was Somalia. But Somalia was now dead, killed by a brother.

I was wasting my time. I had already thrown away enough years and talent in a place that didn't want me. And that never missed an opportunity to remind me of it, subjecting me daily to shame and sweat and forcing me to endure the worst humiliations on the street wherever I went.

I had been exhausted for years, but I'd never wanted to admit it.

Hodan had been right.

I would do as she'd done.

I would do as Mo Farah had done.

The next morning I asked Said to lend me his cell phone. I called Teresa in America and told her that I would go with her. Hooyo would understand; my brothers and sisters would accept it.

“I've made up my mind. I'm going with you to Addis Ababa,” I told her.

H
ODAN
WAS
HAPPY
about my decision, saying that I had finally found the courage to leave that country and wholeheartedly follow my dream. In the meantime, she and her husband, Omar, and Mannaar had moved to Helsinki, where the government would soon provide them with a house and a monthly allowance.

Mannaar was my joy. At almost a year and a half she was still identical to how I had been at her age. Sassy, with animated eyes, a tall, skinny beanpole. Hodan would do everything she could to enroll her in an athletics class once she turned two, which was actually common practice up there.

I didn't want even one shilling of Alì's money. Together Hooyo and I decided that she would keep half and the other half would go to Hodan for Mannaar. Not a single day should be wasted. We would know soon enough if she really had talent, but meanwhile she would be given the best possible start, and maybe she would get to her first race with the body of Veronica Campbell-Brown. She would win more races than me, and earlier than I had.

The endless wait for the documents required to leave the country was marked by an infinite tenderness that I had begun to feel for everything that was closest to me, for my brothers and sisters, for Hooyo, and for all my usual places. One day I even burst into tears with Abdi during a break in our training session: Sitting in the middle of the field, I told him that I would miss him and the CONS stadium so much.

“How can you miss a track full of bullet holes?” he asked me as he retied his shoelaces and got ready to start running again. True. Yet I knew that I would miss everything, and I lived each hour trying to absorb as many memories as possible, soaking up details that would be precious to me.

Another afternoon the same thing happened to me at Taageere's bar when he insisted that I drink a
shaat
with him. “Soon you will go,” he said. And I burst into tears again. “Don't cry, little champion,” kind old Taageere continued as he poured a little milk in the tea; his face was furrowed with wrinkles so deep that it looked like one of those masks representing Iblis, the devil. Except that he had gentle eyes turned down in an expression of constant compassion. “When you get there, you will quickly forget us. And when you come back, you'll be so famous that you won't even have time to come and say hello,” he said as he finished stirring the
shaat
. “If you don't, I swear I will come to your house and make you tell me everything, one way or another.” I ended up crying on his shoulder, releasing some of the anxiety that clenched my stomach. He hugged me, then considerately changed the subject, speaking softly as always.

It took me six months to leave. That's how long was needed to arrange for my expatriation papers.

Teresa had overseen the whole process from afar, and when the time came she returned to Mogadishu. She had become my guide and mentor. I had decided to put myself in her hands. Teresa was only twenty-six years old, but she already had a lot of experience, had lived in many countries, and knew her way around. I had finally decided to stop resisting and trust her. She was my passport to freedom.

The day I said good-bye to Hooyo and my brothers and sisters was very sad. Unlike Hodan, who had surprised us all with her departure, my leave-taking went on for a whole day, starting the afternoon before. I would be back before long, I kept saying; Ethiopia wasn't far away. As soon as I started winning more international competitions, I would have enough money to come and go whenever I wanted.

I took only the essentials with me: almost nothing, as usual. My racing outfit. The tracksuit. A few shillings. Aabe's headband and the photo of Mo Farah, which I'd taken off the wall after ten years. By now the page was tattered. It was no longer paper; it was an image and a dream printed on butterfly wings. The two medals from Hargeysa were left there, hanging from a nail now rusted by dampness. As she'd done with Hodan, Hooyo gave me a handkerchief with one of the shells that Aabe had given her many years ago. She wanted me to carry it with me always: It was her protection. She folded the cloth into a band and tied it tightly to my wrist with two knots. Hidden between the folds, the tiny shell couldn't even be seen.

“That way you'll carry your beloved sea with you,” she told me. “The entire sea in this seashell.”

Teresa had to wait awhile for me in the taxi before I could
tear myself away from Hooyo. I couldn't help it; I just couldn't leave her. Finally I clenched my fists, gave her one last kiss, and went to confront my new destiny like a soldier or a warrior going off to battle.

We would travel by plane and would land, after a two-hour flight, at two in the afternoon.

It was the second time I had been taken to the airport by car, and this time my frame of mind was very different. I didn't even need a sleeping pill for the flight. I was so sad that I wasn't afraid of anything. Fear is a luxury afforded by happiness.

In the few hours since I'd obtained my papers, everything in my life had changed. In what seemed like just moments, as if I'd been catapulted through time, I was somewhere else, in another world, ready for a new start.

During the trip Teresa and I talked nonstop. Teresa kept telling me to focus on what was to come and forget about all the things that had slowed my career. It would take some effort, but I could do it. If I had made it to the Olympics on my own two legs, I'd be able to do that too.