The Orchard of Lost Souls (22 page)

She has seen a landscape like this only once before, as a fourteen-year-old on her way to Dhusamareb during the Somali Literacy Campaign.
‘Haddaad taqaan bar, haddaanad aqoon
baro.
If you know it, teach it, if you don’t know it, learn it’ had been the slogan, all the schools, colleges, universities emptied of students and professors for seven months so
they could be sent to fight against illiteracy in every town, village and encampment. Radio Mogadishu broadcasters described the conflict in the most passionate terms: the weapons were pens, books,
chalks and blackboards, the heroes simple teachers and teenagers who gallantly battled ignorance throughout the country. Filsan had set out from Twenty-first October Square in Mogadishu during
Eid
in August 1974. The President had delivered a magnificent speech and she could still recite parts of it: ‘The battle you engage in with your forces has more honour than the
ordinary one, and has more value than anything you have known.’ He was right; if she could go back to that time she would. She missed living with the blacksmith’s family, teaching in
the mornings and late afternoons, learning country songs and dances from the daughters, sitting by the stream at dusk, drinking milk straight from the cow. The whole campaign had been paid for by
civilian donations, and even as a fourteen-year-old she had been treated with respect because she could read and they couldn’t. She wrote down the poems of old men in the new Somali script
and they folded her scribblings and tucked them into their clothes like talismans. It was a dreamtime – they were full of love for the country and one another; now there seemed to be only
rebels and thieves and soldiers fighting each other. She felt that she was the only one to still believe in that old Somalia, the one she grew up with.

The tarmac road ends abruptly and the truck slows to deal with the stony, broken track. In the south of the country there would be ostriches, antelopes, occasional lions or leopards, but here
the only wildlife to pass them has been an old tortoise dawdling by the side of the road. It is a barren landscape, hard and dull, made for nothing other than mischief. There are no signs or
obvious landmarks; the driver seems to know by intuition which forks in the road to take.

Filsan asks how people navigate on moonless nights in these desolate areas, and he points to the sky. ‘Maybe God tells them or they still know the old maps of the stars and find their way
like that.’

Her own ancestors were merchants on her father’s side and sorghum farmers on her mother’s, sedate accumulators of land and wealth; she has no family history of crossing deserts or
camel caravans. It seems as if this wild terrain had determined the character of the people or had attracted like-minded spirits to dwell upon it. As the lorry approaches the border with Ethiopia
it begins to climb slowly but steadily, the air fresh and scented by the yellow flowers of gum arabic trees. A young shepherd hides behind a thicket of acacia trees as the convoy passes, his small
figure just visible between the scrubby crowns, his black-headed sheep grazing across a vast distance.

Filsan turns back as Lieutenant Afrah calls for attention.

‘We are approaching our objective and I demand that each of you act according to the training you have received. We do not expect to engage the enemy today but as always maintain
vigilance; we will conduct brief house-to-house searches and if you find villagers with arms, bring both weapons and offenders to me. The explosives crew are in the last truck of the convoy and are
experts. It should take no more than half an hour to destroy the reservoirs. We want a smooth, calm operation. We will be in constant contact with Birjeeh by radio; anything out of the ordinary
must be reported to me. Do a final check of your weapons now.’

It is a
tuulo,
barely even a village: a few beehive-shaped dwellings with old cloth hanging over their entrances, a teashop with kettles resting on open fires, one
solitary stone building with a tin roof, goats, stray children, a cleared space under a tall tree for religious lessons and clan meetings. Filsan feels that she has stepped back in time, that she
is staring at a scene that has hardly changed in centuries:
bedu
women peer out of their
aqals,
their attention fixed on her, on her trousers in particular – this alien,
this neither male nor female curiosity in their midst. In her eyes they are just as peculiar: short, hunched, toothless, like children prematurely wizened.

The elders have been summoned and Filsan remembers her role in this theatre. She steps forward to intercept the three men, but they ignore her and continue on their sticks and bandy legs to a
conscript behind.

She grabs the man on the right by the arm.
‘Jaalle,
it is me you need to speak with.’

He is a thin, wiry man but he shakes her off with surprising force. Filsan pursues, not willing to ask for anyone’s assistance in dealing with him; she wants to drag him back by the long
tufts of grey hair skirting his bald pate and make him kneel at her feet. She catches up with him and shoves the barrel of her gun in the small of his back. ‘Stop!’

He freezes and turns slowly to face her.

She withdraws the rifle but holds it tightly, still aimed in his direction.

‘We want to speak to the commander. What reason have you got to come here? What wrong have we committed?’ His eyes are clouded with glaucoma, his ears as large as a desert
fox’s.

‘My commander has delegated me to speak with you. We are here with the full authority of the revolutionary government. There is strong evidence that you have been assisting the outlawed
National Freedom Movement, and to prevent further collaboration the
berkeds
surrounding this settlement will be destroyed.’ Filsan speaks in a rush, not stopping to breathe.
‘You are still entitled to use your traditional drop wells and will be supplied with supplementary water once a month by the local government.’

Another elder steps forward, wagging his rough-hewn cane at her. He is a broad man with henna-dyed hair and he expects her to take a step back; she doesn’t. ‘Those
berkeds
are our personal property, we paid for the materials, built them, we maintain them . . .’

The whole village seems to have crowded around Filsan. The other soldiers have disappeared into the shacks.

‘This is government land,’ Filsan raises her voice and gestures to the expanse beyond them, ‘and you do not even deny that you use the
berkeds
to support the
terrorists.’

The third elder, younger than the other two and still possessing a full head of black hair, joins the conversation. ‘
Jaalle,
’ he says mockingly, ‘we use those
berkeds
to water our camels, our goats and sheep, to perform ablutions before prayers, for a cup of tea in the mornings. We have nothing to spare for anything else. We are in the middle of
a long drought; do you think we would give water to rebels?’

As he speaks, a huge plume of water, mud and stone flies into the sky to the west of the village. Detonations every three minutes radiate around the village, the bellow of the dynamite echoing
against the limestone hills. The villagers run towards the explosions, the elders in the lead, children yelping in excitement and fear behind them.

Filsan pursues and catches up with the crowd just as Lieutenant Afrah orders the final detonation. The rectangular cement walls of the nearest
berked
have been blown into fragments that
jut out like headstones from the mud.

The destruction silences the elders but she can sense their anger in the same way she had learnt to read her father’s: the set of their jaws, the tension in their shoulders, their bodies
angled away from the subject of their hate.

The commandos begin to filter into view, smiling and relaxed, unconcerned by the reaction of the villagers. These kinds of raids are welcome to them, bringing minimal risk and potential loot.
Filsan pants after her chase and presses her palm against the stitch in her ribs. The villagers are rooted to the soil, their heads turning from crater to crater, false rain dripping from the
acacias. She marches towards the elders, intending to explain the necessity of the action, the benefits they could enjoy if they only shunned the rebels, the projects that they might partake in to
diversify the local economy.

The red-haired elder swivels at her approach and swings his cane at her face. She doesn’t notice her finger squeeze the trigger of her rifle as her whole body recoils from the blow. The
knock of the rifle against her chest surprises her, as does the sudden pop of bullets. When the elder falls back onto his behind she assumes that he has lost his balance trying to strike her, until
points of blood spring up over his shirt, turning the white cloth a red that darkens before her eyes. Then the two other elders drop to the ground, their open eyes still watching her. Movements at
the periphery of her vision blur so she does not recognise the grey shadows as her comrades advancing on the prostrate men.

‘Hold fire!’ shouts Lieutenant Afrah.

Filsan looks down at her feet and sees bronzed beetles scuttling over them; she presses one boot on the other, and the beetles are stilled, transformed into empty bullet shells.

The elders are slumped over each other like drunks; a howl sweeps over the plain as first one woman and then another and another rushes to the dead and dying bodies.

Filsan tries to step forward but her boots feel cemented down.

Lieutenant Afrah aims his Kalashnikov at the young men in the crowd. ‘Get back! Back! Back!’

A group of soldiers corner the youths and force them back to the cleared space at the centre of the threadbare settlement. Filsan notices how thin their calves are for the first time, just
shafts of bone below their frayed sarongs. They are hustled away, hands on the back of their afros, to squat in the sun until the soldiers depart.

An old woman pulls the wives off the corpses and shrouds the men’s faces under a shawl; she says nothing, but turns to Filsan and points a finger, whether to lay blame, mark her out for
retribution or curse her, she cannot decipher.

‘Get in the truck,
Jaalle,
we will secure the area,’ Lieutenant Afrah orders.

Filsan peers down at her distant boots. ‘But I can’t move.’

Afrah clicks his fingers and a conscript no older than fifteen comes to his side. ‘Escort her back to the truck.’

The conscript takes her elbow gently, like he would his grandmother, and leads her forward as she stumbles over the broken ground.

‘You did well,
Jaalle
,’ he keeps repeating in her ear as they trek the half-mile back to the vehicles.

‘But what happened? Who killed them?’ she whispers.

In the dark cocoon of her room Filsan watches scenes from the day flash across her mind: three corpses hitchhiking back to Hargeisa with her, the smeared viscera of flies wiped
back and forth over the windshield, a line of vultures silhouetted against the midday sun, the quick untruthful briefing to Major Adow back at Birjeeh, the soldiers gathered around her in the
canteen describing their own killings, the smack smack smack of the typewriter as she wrote a report of the operation in Salahley.

The alarm clock buzzes angrily at four a.m., drowning out the soft hiss of rain from the yard. Filsan slaps the contraption off and curls up to enjoy the warmth of the narrow
bed.

She notices her heart pounding under her crossed arms; it thuds as if she has been fleeing something or someone, yet she is safe, barely awake, in the comfort of her own room. Disquieted, she
rises and washes in the communal wet room, the cold water tightening the skin of her breasts and scattering large goose pimples over her arms.

The washroom smells foul, the one small window in the wall not enough to dry the damp walls or remove the stink of the blocked toilets: twisted hairpins, broken combs, rusty razors, stained
underwear all gather abandoned behind the door. Girls who had been trained to clean their homes from an early age rebelled, became slovens, leaving the mess for someone else to worry about while
pampered Filsan finds herself obsessing over dirty floors and full sinks. There is no point reporting the lazy private assigned to cleaning duties as no one would care enough about the
women’s quarters to discipline her. She ekes out a tiny amount of the imported shampoo she had bought in Mogadishu and scrubs her scalp with her fingernails.

Swirling thoughts in her skull refuse to coalesce and she scratches harder and harder to uncover the cause of the continued hammering within her ribs. As she bends down to rinse her hair under
the tap, she begins to cry, unstoppable tears that sting her eyes. The thoughts that had buzzed around each other now fuse and spell out m-o-n-s-t-e-r in glowing letters across the blackness of her
mind. The letters dance and mock her. She is in every way a monster and the weight of that recognition weakens her knees and bows her head; in prayer pose she rests her cheek against the slimy
floor and lets the flowing water rush over her.

Slowly Filsan’s heartbeat quietens, the word dims, she hears footsteps in the corridor, knocks on the door. Prising her body from the cement, she turns the tap off and wraps a towel around
her body before grabbing her nightdress and shampoo and scuttling back to her room. In the corridor she is forced to squeeze past a girl waving and blowing kisses to her lover in the yard. Filsan
glances through the window and catches the man tucking his shirt into his trousers and waving back. Her modern father had spared her, but this girl and the others are probably all circumcised, and
yet keep lovers as if it is their prerogative. It was only her who listened to the rules, who feared breaking them – no one told her it was fine to steal or fuck or kill as long as it was
kept quiet. She had taken every lesson so seriously, absorbed them in her heart, desperate for a pat on the head, and now she is unsuited for the real world, a freak.

Returning to her room, it appears more cell-like than ever, a criminal’s lair more than a soldier’s quarters. A small oval mirror on the opposite wall traps her reflection. The white
of her towel, the brown of her skin, the black of her hair form abstract shapes; she is anonymous, innocent, just a human silhouette. Filsan steps closer, the nightdress and shampoo still clenched
in her wet arms. The face of her mother stares back, cold and strange, the face that her father can’t stomach looking at. He doesn’t understand that she didn’t choose to look like
that woman; the high forehead, the wide-set eyes, the small nose and chin were imposed on her. She dislikes looking at her face as much as he does. If she had had a decent mother she would not be
here, nearly thirty years old, unloved and unlovable, wishing the mirror would crack into a thousand pieces.