The Orchard of Lost Souls (25 page)

‘I will report you! You can commit whatever crimes you like but you won’t take me down with you.’

‘What crimes?’

‘Don’t think I’m stupid. I may be a woman but I can’t be fooled so easily.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Filsan stops abruptly and lowers her voice, ‘You are selling arms.’

He bends back with laughter. ‘You’re crazy! Selling arms? To them? And what would they pay me in?’

‘So why are they receiving rocket-propelled grenades meant for the army?’

He pulls her close. ‘Because that is what the government wants. We can’t talk about this here.’ He takes her arm again and marches her to the car. ‘Get in the
jeep,’ he orders. ‘I can’t tell you everything but I will tell you what I know.’

They drive away from Saba’ad in silence and only when they have reached the long, empty road to Hargeisa does Captain Yasin feel comfortable talking. ‘The
government has decided that the situation as it stands is untenable. If the NFM continue to attack a village here, a battalion there, other clan militias will become emboldened and soon we will be
fighting on twenty fronts.’

Filsan has never seen him so serious before. She watches his sharp profile and feels that old desire for him creeping up on her.

‘They – all of the leadership in Mogadishu and Hargeisa too – have decided that there has to be a change.’

‘What kind of change?’

‘An end to it all. The whole population has to be resettled to stop the terrorists taking over.’

‘Empty Hargeisa?’

‘All the towns – Hargeisa, Burao, Berbera – anywhere the NFM might gather.’ He wipes sweat from his upper lip with his wrist.

‘When will this happen?’

‘Not confirmed.’

It seems unbelievable, too final, but it might be an improvement on this constant, draining game. The local population could live more freely in an area controlled by the government; it is an
extreme solution but these are extreme times.

‘How do you know about it?’

Captain Yasin smiles. ‘Ahh, don’t you know that I am in the inner circle?’

‘When will the rest of us be told?’

‘When it is absolutely necessary, and Filsan, please, you cannot tell anyone about this or we will both end up in jail.’ He holds her gaze in the rear-view mirror.

‘Don’t insult me. I am not some market gossip. I take my work more seriously than anyone else in the office.’

‘I know that,’ he nods. ‘That’s why I told you.’

On returning to her room, Filsan is overwhelmed by the urge to put things in order. She remakes her bed, pulling the corners tight, sweeps the linoleum floor and wipes a cloth
over it, tidies away the dirty clothes piled on the chair, dusts the windowsill till it is free of dead mosquitoes, collects the cassettes littered under her bed and shoves them in a drawer, jumps
up onto the bed and polishes the bare light bulb and, finally, opens the window and sprays a few squirts of perfume onto her bedclothes.

She emerges from her frenzy a little calmer but still restless. Thoughts fight for attention. She feels giddy, spun around; for so long she has wanted something to happen to her, anything that
would penetrate the film that separates her from the outside world, and now event follows event in a flood, leaving her bobbing along with waves tight around her chest.

The pile of books beside her bed – academic treatises on counter-insurgency and a hardback copy of Machiavelli’s
The Prince
– demand her attention. The Machiavelli
book was a leaving present from her father; she picks it up, wipes the dust from the renaissance portrait on the cover and opens it. It makes her smile that her father has autographed it as if he
wrote the five-hundred-year-old book. No dedication, no message, just the flourish of his signature on the title page. He had handed it to her wrapped in the plastic airmail package it arrived in
and told her that it articulated all she needed to know about people. She has not read it but places it beside her pillow as a kind of holy book, a totem of her old life. She is still unwilling to
find out what terrible secrets about humanity it contains and puts it back. She wants to read something dry, neutral, technical, and hopes
The Primary Manual on Counter-insurgency
will
focus her mind.

She turns on the bedside lamp. The densely packed words and convoluted diagrams hurt her eyes, but she forces herself to read its sentences again and again. Small boxes introduce examples of the
theories put forward by Mao, Marshal Bugeaud and others. She enjoys these histories – every known human problem and conflict seems to have antecedents, however ancient or distant; modern
communists were emulating biblical acts of vengeance.

The book helps, her thoughts less disordered now. Captain Yasin sinks to the bottom of her concerns. She detests what women become when men enter their lives. Love seems to make fools of women
infinitely more than it does men; in university the girls let their boyfriends copy their homework and sat morosely in the canteen deciphering the merest comment or act, cheapening and changing
themselves, throwing away their futures to marry men who would become little more than taxi drivers. Filsan suspects that she is too rational to truly love someone; it embarrasses her just to see
canoodling couples – it is as if they have had lobotomies – but if the opportunity presents itself to slip into a relationship with Captain Yasin, she won’t refuse it. She tries
to avoid the term ‘last chance’, but it is there in her mind unbidden.

She moves the Machiavelli book off the bed and a piece of paper flutters out, a blue-lined page from a notebook. She picks it up off the floor and recognises her own handwriting. ‘Dear
Hooyo
,’ it begins – she had written it on the bus to Hargeisa, in the hope that now she was living her own independent life away from her father she could start again with her
mother – ‘I have been promoted to a new position in Hargeisa and am looking forward to seeing how people live in the North.’

Filsan cringes at her words; she can imagine her mother laughing at them and shouting, ‘Who does she think cares?’

‘I have been thinking about you a lot and wondering if it is not time that we changed the way we behave towards each other. I know that you have not had an easy life and that you believe I
have but that is not the case. In my own way I have suffered and paid the price for you and
Aabbo
’s divorce.’ The note ends there, just as the recriminations would have
started. Filsan remembers tucking it away in the book to finish at a calmer time. She grabs a pencil from her drawer and rests the note on her textbook; she treats it like an exercise, listing the
pertinent points first:

It has been four years since they last met. Filsan had caught a bus to the Wardhigley district. Nothing had changed. The house was still filthy, crammed full of the fruits of
two failed marriages and the most current one. Filsan could feel crumbs underneath her on the chair, surfaces were sticky to the touch, and children drooled over her knees and hands. It disturbed
her to see her own reflection – older, fatter, but still recognisably her – living in these conditions. After placing a glass of carbonated orange and a saucer of biscuits in front of
her, her mother had retreated to the kitchen with a neighbour, but her voice carried through: ‘His hostage looks at me exactly the way he did’; ‘You would think she would come
here with money at least’; ‘She doesn’t look like the marrying kind, face like a shoe.’

‘His hostage’, that is what her mother had always called her. Filsan’s father had only given her mother a divorce on the condition that she left Filsan to him, for him. She had
accepted his condition, but from then on the child had become their Ogaden, their little piece of disputed earth. Deputations of clan elders visited one house and then another to negotiate access,
to encourage compromise, to drink tea and pontificate. Filsan’s father did not budge: from the time Filsan was five to when she turned thirteen, she was his alone. But as she got older and
began to grow into her mother’s face and body, he started to send her away for days to that messy, mud brick house. The way he looked at her hardened, he stopped embracing her, became
impatient with her hovering around. She stopped being his and became nobody’s.

She scribbles over the points; it is easier to leave her mother to the past, that wound is mostly healed and there is nothing to gain by picking at it.

The next morning there is a gold-wrapped sweet on her desk. Captain Yasin keeps his head down, tapping at a typewriter, his fingers stiff and awkward. Filsan hides her smile
and takes her seat, resisting the urge to ask him what has brought him to work so punctually. She has consciously not applied any make-up or changed a single thing about her appearance. If he wants
her he will have to take her without embellishment or artifice. She peeks surreptitiously at the top of his head and the bald spot germinating on the crown; the gold sweet is infantile but touches
her nevertheless.

‘I’ve got bad news for you,’ he says.

She looks at him directly.

‘Leave is cancelled. The rebels shot down a plane over the border last night; they have found ground-to-air missiles from somewhere.’

‘That’s terrible.’

He shrugs his shoulders. ‘The end is nigh.’

Captain Yasin leaves for lunch alone, but at the close of the day, when her fingers sting from the impact of the typewriter keys, he mooches over to her desk and asks what she
plans to do with her evening.

‘Read, Captain.’

‘Poor girl, is that the extent of your life?’

Filsan sits rigidly. ‘I am not here for fun. I want to make something of my life.’

‘Life is to be enjoyed.’

‘For layabouts and street boys, maybe.’

‘No, for you and for me too. Let me take you out to dinner.’

Filsan’s eyes sweep down to her hands. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know? Are your books really more interesting than me?’

‘I have work to do.’

‘A s do I. Let’s discuss it over a meal.’

Captain Yasin waits under an electricity pole a hundred yards from the barracks. He appears thin and angular in a white shirt that glows fluorescent in the dim light. She has
changed into a pair of flared jeans and a loose red tunic with a shawl over her shoulders. They meet awkwardly and shake hands under the light of a nearby tea stall, her hand tiny in his.

‘Roble, pleased to meet you,’ he smiles. It is the first time he has told her his name.

‘Filsan, likewise.’

Walking beside him, Filsan feels a static charge as if the cables above are lightly electrifying them; it surprises her how good it feels to stand beside a man and know that he has picked her
ahead of all the other women.

Roble leads the way with his hands in his pockets and makes small talk about the restaurants he likes, the hotels that serve alcohol, the best places to meet senior officials.

Filsan nods politely and wonders if he has heard about her incident with Haaruun. She knows that news of it has spread through the stares and nudges in her direction, but hopes dearly that it
has somehow missed his attention.

He draws her away from the road as a truck passes perilously close; the curfew is imminent and civilian vehicles rush to their destinations despite the derelict condition of the road.

They turn right at a checkpoint, he raising a hand in greeting to the group of soldiers behind the barrier, and enter the Lake Victoria, an open-air restaurant with tame wildlife roaming the
grounds.

It is packed with men in uniform, seated on white plastic chairs around tables set unevenly into the gravel beneath; red light bulbs hang in a chain from one corner to the next and the drone of
a generator masks the music from two large speakers.

The men glance up from their card games and meals to judge the woman in their midst.

‘Is this OK?’ Roble asks, pointing to a dark table under a bougainvillea bush.

Filsan knows what the stares mean. That she is a whore to be seen in public with a man she isn’t married to. Their eyes are still on her as she slips into her chair. A waiter in a black
bow tie and shoes with the soles slapping free appears quickly beside Roble. He orders two colas and a lamb platter.

Slowly attention drifts away from Filsan back to the red nucleus of the restaurant.

‘
Bedus
,’ Roble smiles. ‘You would think they have never seen a woman before.’

‘Uneducated, that is all.’

‘Or jealous.’ Roble strokes her little finger with his knuckle.

‘Don’t do that.’ Filsan snatches her hands from his reach.

He raises his palms in acquiescence.

A fawn barely a foot high creeps close to their table, shivering nervously; Filsan takes a pistachio from the bowl on the table and holds it out on her hand. It comes nearer and nearer and
sniffs Filsan’s palm. It is a thing of sublime beauty the large black eyes and extravagant eyelashes, the caramel coat, the delicacy of its bones. It refuses the pistachio and skits over to
another table.

‘Why are you not married already?’ he asks.

‘No one has wanted me.’

‘Do you know the reason why?’

‘No, why?’ Filsan smiles with surprise; she decides to be candid tonight, to not hold back for once.

‘Because you act like you don’t need anybody.’

‘I
don’t
need anyone, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want certain things.’

‘And those certain things are?’