The Orchard of Lost Souls (7 page)

The fragrant girl pushes past the others and presents herself before the policewoman, who beckons her out of the cell with a henna-painted finger before locking the door again. The prisoners
ease into the small space the girl has left behind. To Deqo’s amusement, fragrant girl does not so much as look back at those she has left behind; the girl who had thrown her arm over her in
the truck is left to stand there, head hanging. Deqo is pleased: when arrogant people like that are are forced to see how little they really matter she feels a small charge of satisfaction.

One by one the schoolgirls are called, bailed out and hustled home by their fathers, mothers, uncles and elder brothers. They are released before the boys to protect them from shame; the shame
that grows and widens with their breasts and hips and follows them like an unwanted friend. Deqo has long been aware of how the soft flesh of her body is a liability; the first word she remembers
learning is ‘shame’. The only education she received from the women in the camp concerned how to keep this shame at bay: don’t sit with your legs open, don’t touch your
privates, don’t play with boys. The avoidance of shame seems to be at the heart of everything in a girl’s life. There is at least a chance in this women-only cell to put shame aside for
a while and flop down without wondering who might see her legs or who might grab her while she sleeps. She finds a space near an elderly destitute woman on a rush mat.

‘Get me a cup of water,’ the woman croaks.

Deqo looks at the reclining figure, so old and self-important. ‘Get it yourself.’

The woman sighs. Deqo notices that she is missing all of her front teeth. The woman nudges her with her foot. ‘Go on, my sweet, just get me some water, I have an axe slicing through my
head.’ She makes kissing noises to cajole her.

Deqo tuts and rises to her feet; she will ask for water for herself too, fill up her stomach a bit. She waits by the bars; she can hear the policewoman talking at the end of the corridor.

‘
Jaalle, Jaalle
! Comrade, Comrade!’ Deqo cries out.

No answer.

‘Comrade Policewoman with the hennaed fingers and black
koofiyaad,
we need cups here.’

The policewoman approaches and pushes a tin cup through the bars. ‘Don’t try and be funny here, little girl.’

‘I wasn’t trying to be funny, I just wanted water.’

‘Aren’t you too young to be selling yourself? Or have you been stealing?’

‘No! I haven’t done anything, honestly. They mistook me for a protestor.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘From Saba’ad.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I work in the market. I never steal, never!’

The policewoman’s face softens a little; she tilts her head to the side and looks over to her colleague.

‘Luul, this refugee girl is here by mistake; she was pulled in with all those protestors this morning.’

The other policewoman comes to join her. She is tall and flat-chested, unable to fill out her uniform like her friend.

She pulls a face. ‘Let her out, we’re not going to get anything for her.’

‘True, she’s a waste of bread,’ laughs the policewoman with the henna on her fingers.

The door chimes open once again and Deqo runs to the old woman on the mat to hand over the cup before stepping out into the corridor of freedom.

‘See you another time, Deqo,’ Nasra calls out.

Deqo waves back.

The policewomen walk on each side of her in silence.

‘
Jaalle
, when will that woman be released?’ asks Deqo, before being led out of the station.

‘Never you mind, you should stay away from women like that, they will drag you down into their nasty ways. Stay away, you hear?’ She adjusts the beret on her head.

‘Is she a . . .’ Deqo hesitates at that powerful word that has plagued her throughout her short life.

‘A whore? Absolutely, and much else besides.’

Deqo marches back to the ditch with her eyes to the ground, deep in thought. She still has time to collect fruit from the farms and reach the market before it closes for lunch.
Her legs propel her forward robotically but her mind is whirring with memories from Saba’ad, stirred up by her encounter with Nasra and China in the cell. ‘Whore’s child,
whore’s child, whore’s child!’ That’s what the other children in the camp had yelled at her for as long as she could recall, but she hadn’t known what a whore was; it
sounded bad, like a cannibal or a witch or a type of
jinn,
but no adult would describe what made a whore a whore and the children didn’t seem to know much more than she did. She was
born of sin, they said, the bastard of a loose woman. From the children’s story her nativity went like this: a young woman arrived in the camp alone and by foot, heavily pregnant and with
feet torn to shreds by thorns. The nurses at the clinic bandaged her feet and let her wait for the child to be delivered. She refused to give her name or her husband’s, and when Deqo was born
she abandoned her own child without naming her either. Deqo had been named a year later by the nurses when she climbed out of the metal cot the orphans were kept in and began disappearing;
Deqo-wareego was her full name, ‘wandering Deqo’, and she had learnt that the one thing she could do that the other camp children couldn’t was drift as far as she liked. She
belonged to the wind and the tracks in the dirt rather than to any other person; no watchful mother would come after her shouting her name in every direction.

At first she had believed her mother was a
jinn
who had changed into a human for only a short while and then had to change back, but she was always too cold to have had a mother made of
fire. Then she thought her mother may have been blown away by a typhoon, but too many older orphans said they had seen her walk away on her own two feet. Finally she decided that her mother, this
‘whore’ they talked about, was not like other women who lived and died beside their children, but another kind altogether, who knew that her child would be clothed and fed, just not by
herself, like a bird who lays her egg in another’s nest.

So Deqo had grown up thinking herself a cuckoo amongst the other camp children, whose parents were all refugees from the fighting and famine that had engulfed eastern Ethiopia from the seventies
into the eighties; some were Somali, some were Oromo, but they all had their families or even just their family names and clans to help them. Deqo deeply wishes she had a second and third name; she
won’t be greedy and ask God for a whole
abtiris
of seventeen names or anything, just two more would allow her to puff out her chest and announce her existence to people. When she was
too young to know better she had taken the name Deqo Red Cross because that was the name of the clinic she lived in, but the frowns on the white-uniformed nurses’ faces let her know it
wouldn’t do as a replacement name. She lived as just Deqo, or sometimes Deqo-wareego when the nurses shouted at her, and waited for her prayers to be answered.

When Anab Hirsi Marfan came into the orphanage at around six years old, head shaved for lice and wild with grief, Deqo was charged with looking after her. When she ran away to the burial ground
Deqo was in close pursuit, nervously waiting and watching while the little bat-eared girl beat her hands on the mound of earth covering her mother. The older graves were marked with rocks, planks
of wood, or thorny acacia branches, but the newer ones were unadorned, rolling up the hill in a wave. The cemetery resembled the vegetable plot between the clinic and orphanage, pregnant with
plantings that would never grow, watered with nothing but tears. Anab shovelled her hands into the dirt as if she was trying to dig up her mother or bury herself; eventually she tired, defeated,
and laid her face down on top of the grave. Deqo had then approached and stretched out her hand; Anab took it, her fingers bleeding, and sloped back with her to the orphanage.

Deqo took ownership of Anab from that day, sleeping and eating beside her in the large tent that housed fifty-two orphans and strays. Every day she and Anab ate
canjeero
for breakfast,
played beside the standpipe where the earth was damp and malleable, followed funeral processions to the cemetery, had an afternoon nap and then played
shaax
with mud counters before the
unchanging supper of rice and beans and lights out. Lying in the dark, whispering and tittering, Anab called her Deqo-wareego Hirsi Marfan; they were new-found sisters, thrown together like leaves
in a storm.

The myriad buildings that Deqo is slowly learning the names and purposes of appear in the edges of her vision as she steps into the pitted road. The library for keeping books
to learn from, the museum for interesting objects from the past, the schools in which children are corralled and tamed, the hotels for wayfarers with money in their pockets – the existence of
all these places brings pleasure, despite her belief that as a refugee she is not welcome inside.

In the weeks since her arrival in Hargeisa she has learnt something every day just from observing the life around her. In the first few days she slept in the market, led there by electric lights
and children’s voices. She huddled rigidly under the stalls with a few girls and many, many boys fighting and sniffing all night from little bags that gave them leaky noses. She left there
and found a concrete area in front of a warehouse that was swept clean and raised above the dust of the street. She found a little sleep there until one night a pack of stray, short-haired dogs
found her, growling and barking as she hid her face in her hands. They drew the attention of the watchman who frightened them away and then banished her too. She had then stayed a week outside the
police station, hoping for their protection against boys and strays, but instead there was the constant disruption of police cars, of foot patrols and military vehicles sweeping up and down the
road. Eventually, she had gravitated closer and closer to the ditch, lured by its quiet thicket and isolation, to the point where she is now perfectly comfortable sleeping within its deep darkness,
unafraid and undisturbed, unless it rains and a deep chill enters her bones.

Deqo reaches the ditch and turns off at the red-berried shrubs that mark the path towards her barrel, speeding down the slope and only staggering to a stop when it comes into
view It is a mysterious sanctuary that swallows her up at night; she doesn’t know who brought it here and only found it herself by accident one moon-bright night. She scoops up the rainwater
that had so tormented her the night before and quenches her thirst, the taste of kerosene faint at the back of her throat. Then she pours the rest over her head and torso, squeezing the excess from
her thin smock. It will dry in the time it takes her to collect all the fruit she needs from the farms.

She hurries over to Murayo’s plot which lies near the right bank of the dry waterbed, far from the noise of the road, where a flock of birds roosts and chats, their nests like bad
imitations of wicker baskets. They fly up and hoot at her approach as if to warn Murayo. It depends on how Murayo is feeling each day as to whether she will allow her to glean the fruit, but since
Deqo alerted her to the burglar crouching on the roof of her mud-built home she has been generous. Deqo scans the ground for the squishy, over-ripe mangoes she can eat herself before bothering with
the hard, green fruit still ripening on the branches. Today there is only one lying splattered in the weeds, its orange flesh trembling with black ants.

Up in the trees she checks the foliage for snakes. She once grabbed a sleeping green snake as she climbed, its mouth suddenly yawning, rigid and white in her face, making her fall clear out of
the tree. She spits into her palms and hugs the slimmest trunk, above which are a clutch of mangoes that have a nice red blush to them ready for picking; her hands hold her up while her toes slip
against the smooth trunk. Before she loses her grip she grasps the branch that holds the mangoes and plucks them off one by one, throwing them gently to the ground, then edges back towards the
trunk and slides down, enjoying the sensation of the trunk against her skin. She collects the mangoes in her damp skirt and rushes away before Murayo comes to water her crops. The next plot is
larger, dominated by dense banana trees, some so laden that the bananas hang near her head; she takes six, all that she can carry in her skirt, and turns back to town.

At the
faqir
market Deqo retrieves her piece of cardboard with the slice of advertising still visible on it from the pile on the ground and lays out her merchandise in
two rows of six, alternating banana and mango. She has tried other jobs: collecting scraps of
qat
to sell on to the dealers, pulling grass to sell as goat feed to housewives, sweeping the
main market when there aren’t enough girls in the evening, but this is her favourite. Her workday is over early and she has no boss to tell her what to do, and on the days that there are no
customers she can eat the pilfered fruit herself.

Most of the other sellers are middle-aged women, with hefty arms and feet overflowing the edges of their sandals. The only one of them who is always kind to her, Qamar, is not there today so
Deqo sits on her haunches and waits for customers. They come slowly, browsing the other stalls before deciding they can get the cheapest price out of her. She watches how the other sellers haggle
and imitates their impatient gestures and harsh words. ‘Take your shadow off of me if you’re not interested,’ she shouts. ‘You are blocking people with more than lint in
their pockets.’ She says this with a straight face despite her tiny ramshackle body and the twigs in her hair.

The bananas go first to a woman carrying a toddler on her back, and then the mangoes disappear in ones and twos. She holds the money in her hand with satisfaction; there are no dramas today no
thieves encroach and no arguments take place. She hates those days when honking, clumsy women stampede through her patch in pursuit of someone or other.

She rises and shakes the dust off the cardboard.