The Orchard of Lost Souls (3 page)

‘Where are you going?’ demands Dahabo.

‘I’ll be back, stay here.’

‘Kawsar, wait!’

But she is gone, pushing past the women in the aisle, stepping on their toes and clambering over them when they don’t move quickly enough. A couple of steps down and she is free of the
crush.

‘Whore . . . imbecile . . . bitch,’ shout the
Guddi
beside the stand, and there she is – an anguished face pleading for mercy.

‘Give her to me,’ Kawsar says with more calm than she feels.

‘Go back to your own business,’ replies a young turbaned woman dismissively.

‘This
is
my business. I said give her to me.’ Kawsar charges forward and reaches for the girl.

The young woman holds Kawsar back. ‘You want us to call security, you old fool? You want to be thrown in jail?’ she shouts.

‘Do what you like, you can’t hurt me. I am from this town, I was born here, I won’t be told what to do by you.’ Her voice is shrill as she lunges yet again for the
girl.

The
Guddi
block her and form a semi-circle around the child. ‘Milgo, go and call security, this mad woman wants trouble,’ the young woman says, and a gaunt older woman runs
back to the entrance.

The little girl breaks free from her captors and runs away at full pelt.

‘Naayaa! Naayaa!
Don’t worry, I will catch her.’ The youngest girl in the group follows in pursuit.

Their attention returns to Kawsar. ‘You want a night in jail to show you how things are? Old women have hard heads and learn too late sometimes.’ The group’s leader presses her
finger into Kawsar’s forehead for emphasis.

Kawsar brushes her hand away. They stand inches apart as if in a duel.

A petite female soldier wearing a beret approaches with two male soldiers on her heels. She looks disgusted by the whole scene and gestures impatiently for Kawsar to follow her. The
Guddi
make space and Kawsar departs with her head held high.

‘Kawsar! Where are they taking you?’ Dahabo asks, leaning over the edge of the stand, Maryam beside her.

‘Jail,’ replies the soldier, ‘and we’ll take you too if you don’t return to your seat.’

‘Go back, I will see you later.’ Kawsar is strangely jubilant; she is the one making things happen now.

Deqo carries on blindly into the strange city. Looking behind, she sees her pursuer still running clumsily after her. She accelerates, taking wide, elegant strides. In
Saba’ad she had never been able to run freely between the crowded
buuls,
the women’s legs outstretched in the small spaces between them; it was an environment that enforced
slowness, wariness rather than childish abandon. She imagines now that there had been hands grabbing at her skirt and pulling her back, down into the earth that sucked people in every day. Here
there is space, endless space, wide roads and boundless buildings.

She pumps her legs and arms, her lungs heaving, her heart pounding, testing her body to the edge of its capacity. She feels faster than the cars on the road, the crows in the sky, the bullets in
the soldier’s rifles. She races against herself until the stadium is far behind her; the thud of her feet hitting the dust matches the beating of her heart. She is a slick machine in complete
possession of itself. She reaches a bridge and crosses the vibrating concrete. Past the two-storeyed Oriental Hotel with Land Rovers pulled up near its entrance and the glass-fronted pharmacy, the
mechanic’s shop with black tyres piled up outside, the scrap metal merchant’s corrugated tin shack. The streets are empty of people, little piles of dust and leaves gathered in corners
every few metres as if sweepers have just been there; a single bus passes her as she speeds towards the market.

The old woman is quiet in the back of the van, her nose in the air as if she’s in a taxi; haughtiness is all she has to hide behind now but it won’t work. She will
have to spend a night on the floor like all the other miscreants, use a bucket to relieve herself and wait until she is told she can leave. This isn’t the oldest troublemaker Filsan has had
to deal with – the market woman who pelted General Haaruun’s motorcade had to have been over eighty – but this one looks wealthier, well-bred.

They pull up beside the central police station. Filsan hasn’t bothered to handcuff her – what’s the point? She can hardly outrun anyone. The old woman pulls her headscarf
around her cheeks but Filsan yanks it back to reveal her face. It is only then that their eyes meet, the old woman’s full of reproach and contempt. Filsan grabs her arm and leads her into the
police station; she will report her behaviour in the stadium to police officers and then leave them to take care of her.

‘The cells are full,’ the policewoman at the desk barks, not even looking up from the paper in her hand.

‘She has caused a public nuisance during the celebration.’

The policewoman raises her head and looks at the suspect. ‘What did she do?’

‘Harassed and threatened women from the
Guddi
.’

The policewoman laughs and bends over the tiny public nuisance. ‘Are you not too old for this? Are you not ashamed of yourself?’ She is maybe twenty years old with streaks of
bleached blonde hair peeking out from under her cap. ‘Where do you live?’

‘Guryo Samo.’

‘Name?’

‘Kawsar Ilmi Bootaan.’

She jots her details into a form and then shoves the pen behind her ear. ‘She won’t take up too much space, I guess.’ The policewoman sighs. ‘Hand her over.’

Filsan watches as Kawsar is escorted to a group cell. She walks slowly but shows no emotion; she moves like a tourist on a tour of the place, looking left and right as if to say, ‘Yes,
yes, everything is as it should be.’ The barred doors click behind her and then she is gone, swallowed up in the guts of the police station to be digested and excreted out another day.

Saylada dadka,
thinks Kawsar. This is where her journey ends, in the ‘people market’. From here the fortunate ones will be ransomed out while others end up
in the hospital morgue or disappear into prisons all over the country This was the place that had broken her child. She looks around, imagining where Hodan might have sat that first night after she
was arrested with her classmates. The cell is large with walls that had once been painted white but are now gangrened and blackened with mould. It is little more than a dungeon with around thirty
women and girls spread across its concrete floor.

‘Take a seat,
eddo
,’ an inmate breast-feeding a child calls out.

Kawsar hesitates. It is clear from the woman’s jaundiced eyes and gaudy dress that she is a prostitute. The woman shifts over on her mat and pats the floor.

‘What’s a lady like you doing in a place like this?’

‘I couldn’t take any more of them, I realised.’ Kawsar crouches down slowly onto the woven straw mat.

‘What did you do?’ she prods, teasing her nipple back into the baby’s mouth.

Kawsar shrugs. ‘What can I do? I just told the
Guddi
to stop beating a child.’

‘Those bastards. You were lucky they didn’t beat you. Look here,’ she points to the infant’s temple, ‘see that dent? It’s where a policeman’s stick
caught him during a raid. No apology, no nothing.’

Kawsar strokes the fine, smooth skin of the boy’s forehead. Before he has even reached his first birthday he has been marked by the violent world surrounding him; perhaps he will be unable
to see or hear or walk in the future and that won’t matter to anyone but this drunk, sloppy mother feeding him her poison through her milk. ‘He’s beautiful,’ she says.

‘He should be, his father was very handsome, a real Ilmi Boodari.’

Kawsar smiles. ‘You look too young to know anything about Ilmi Boodari.’

‘He died the year I was born.’

‘Of love . . .’

‘Of course, of love! He was the most romantic Somali man to ever live or write poetry, but no one knows his songs better than me. I have each and every one on tape.’

An addict of love as well as drink, thinks Kawsar. That makes sense, from one high to another.

‘What is your name?’

‘People call me China.’

A laugh escapes from Kawsar. ‘Why? Are you a coolie? Do you build roads in your spare time?’

‘No, but I help the men who do.’ China meets her gaze and raises an eyebrow flirtatiously.

Kawsar imagines the baby in a drawer under the bed while coolies with dirty hands climb into bed with his mother.

‘Don’t look so pious. When it’s not the coolies it’s probably your husband or son.’

Kawsar rises from the mat feeling small and vulnerable.

‘Go! Go to hell! It was my mistake to show you any kindness. Go and sit over there on the cold floor,’ China bellows, pushing her away.

Kawsar walks to the opposite wall where the smell of the waste bucket has cleared a circular space. Her breath is shallow and pained. She knows women like China always carry a weapon.

‘Please, Dahabo, come quickly, get me out of here,’ she prays. Whatever rush she had got from standing up to the
Guddi
has now evaporated. She wants nothing more than a cup
of strong tea and to be back in her clean, safe home.

Deqo skids to a stop. Ahead of her is the woman who had come to her rescue in the stadium, climbing down from one of the jeeps that had overtaken her. She had looked so tall
and brave when she confronted Milgo, but now the soldiers tower over her. She follows behind a female soldier, up the concrete steps, her knees seeming to buckle on the fourth step before she
regains her balance and enters the building. Deqo crosses the road and stares up from the bottom of the stairs. The fragrant incense on the woman’s clothes is powerful and sweet and Deqo
inhales deeply, imagining the home this smell comes from – it will have pots bubbling on the stove, clothes drying on a line in the sun and a bed piled high with pillows and soft blankets. A
full stomach and a good night’s sleep were necessary to make people kind, Milgo said, when she went too far with the hidings.

Deqo decides to wait in the shade across the road until the gentle lady returns to thank her; it had been rude just to run away like that and leave her in trouble. Maybe she hasn’t got
children and would let her live with her, she has seen that happen before – women arrived at the hospital, browsed the cots and took a baby home. Deqo could cook, clean, run errands; she was
better for an old woman than a whining baby.

A few people emerge from the wide, dark entrance of the jail but not whom Deqo wants. They come out shielding their eyes from the light, their clothes crumpled and stained, but Deqo feels
certain that her woman is unsulliable; she will smell as good on her release as she did when she went in.

A reverberation emanates from the direction of the bridge she has just crossed. Deqo takes a few steps towards it and watches a group of women, all dressed like her saviour, come slowly into
view, a wave of red, white and brown crashing over the road, singing out in praise of the President and Somalia as they wave branches in the air. They march in rows of ten, some in the road, some
clambering onto the pavement, an army of housewives invading the silence. Deqo ducks into an alleyway in case Milgo appears alongside them.

A Somali film crew run past. With their lumbering cameras, bags and microphones, they remind her of the foreign photographers who descended on Saba’ad during the cholera outbreak, stepping
on people’s fingers and shoving cameras into their faces as they died silently on the ground. They had seemed friendly until they began to work, dominating the clinic as they littered it with
cables, generators and so many different machines. They had filmed Old Sulaiman crying over his dead family, all four children and his wife wrapped in thin sheets ready for burial, his tears
coursing down into his beard, their cameras less than a step away. He had survived but left the camp, not even a bundle on his back, abandoning his possessions for his neighbours to pick over. Some
people said he went back to the Ogaden, others into the city, but he was never seen again.

The marchers wave their placards and shake their branches until the flow peters out, leaves and twigs are stomped into the tarmac in their wake. They take the life in the street with them and
leave her with images of corpses lined up for burial outside of the clinic walls, the smell of them clinging to her skin like oil.

The stadium events are finally over and the dignitaries rise as the national anthem is played over the speakers. Filsan stands in a phalanx of soldiers just beneath General
Haaruun. With the
Guddi
units safely despatched she has eased her way to the dais. There are two other female officers nearby but she is the closest, and she casts a competitive glance at
them, hoping that the General will notice the sharpness of her uniform, the straightness of her back, the smartness of her salute. She has not eaten all day and her eyes are turning scenes into
dreamscapes: spectral figures waving to her from the edge of her vision, the stands undulating with hands at their tips like surf, fires burning wherever the sun hits metal. A tap on her shoulder
makes her jolt as the final strains of the anthem float away.

‘His Excellency wants you to be introduced to him.’ A sergeant with a star on each epaulette speaks in her ear.

‘Huh?’ She has waited for this moment for so long and that is all Filsan can say.

‘Quick, he is waiting.’ The sergeant turns his back and clicks his fingers for her to follow.

She rushes around the barrier and up the steps. Large electric fans stir the blue and white silken sheets covering the dais, and she feels like she is standing on a cloud as the wind pushes it
across the sky.

Filsan dabs the sweat discreetly from her hairline and salutes General Haaruun.

‘At ease, soldier.’ His voice is smooth, soft, so comfortable in his power that he doesn’t need to bark it. ‘I always like to meet female comrades, encourage them in
their career. What is your name?’

‘Adan Ali, Filsan, sir.’ She can’t look at him.

‘Which agency are you in?’