Текст книги "Black Mamba Boy"

Автор книги: Nadifa Mohamed

Соавторы: Nadifa Mohamed
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 17 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 7 страниц]

Jama’s life was no different from that of the goats tied up in the compound, staring blankly as they chewed on peelings. He was just a lump of dull clay that no one wanted to mold or breathe life into, he was not sent to school, not sent out with the camels, only told “Fetch this” and “Get out!” The wives made a show of exchanging glances and locking their rooms if he was nearby; they were all like Mrs. Islaweyne in their pettiness. The only comfort he found was at night in Jinnow’s aqal, when Jama would allow her to tuck him in under the thin sheets and wait for her to start talking about his parents. With his eyes tightly closed, Jama would listen to Jinnow describe how his father leapt out one night in the desert and with a flaming torch scared away hyenas that were stalking the family camels, how his mother had run away as a child and got as far as the sea before she was brought home. Jinnow remembered them at their best, young and brave before hunger, disappointment, and illness brought them low.

She recited old gabays to make him laugh: “Life in this world allows one man to grow prosperous, while another sinks into obscurity and is made ridiculous; a man passing through the evil influence of red Mars is feebler than a newborn lamb punched on the nose.”

Jinnow told Jama one night, “I know you are sick of milk. You think you are a man already but don’t hurry to that, Jama, the world of men is cruel and unforgiving. Don’t listen to those fools in the courtyard, you are not an orphan, you have a father, a perfectly good father who will return.”

“Why hasn’t he come to collect me, then? What’s he waiting for?”

“We are all servants of our fate, he will come when he can. Hopefully he has made a good life for you both somewhere.”

“What’s wrong with here? This is where we belong.”

“Your father has too much music in his soul for this kind of life. Your mother did too, but she tried hard to drown it out. Life here is too hard, everyone is peering over the horizon, but one day, inshallah, you will also see how wide the world is.”

“But where is my father?”

“Far, far away, in a town called Gederaf in Sudan, beyond Ogaden, beyond Djibouti, many months’ walk, son. I heard that he was fighting in Abyssinia but now it seems he is in Sudan trying to become a driver again.”

“Can I go to him?”

“Allah, how could I let you do that? I owe it your mother to make sure you don’t come to any harm. She is watching me, I feel her here”—Jinnow placed her hand on her stomach—“she is like a light there, you understand, son? Your mother, Kahawaris… sometimes the dead are more alive than the living; no one really dies, not while there are people who remember and cherish them.”

Jama was ready to explode, cooped up in the compound, he needed a job so that he could add to his mother’s money and find his father. He scoured the barren town for places to work, but shops and homes operated on the most basic level of survival and there was no room for such luxuries as paid servants. The market consisted of a handful of women laying out dying fruits and withered vegetables on dusty cloths in the sand, sitting in the sun gossiping, collecting their meager income in their laps. The market brought everyone together to trade, all of Hargeisa’s Aji clans – the Eidegalle, Habr Yunis, Habr Awal, Arrab – emerged from the wire perimeters that the British had built around their encampments to keep them apart. The eating houses were the haunts of Hargeisa’s men, who were offered only two dishes whatever their wealth, boiled rice with either boiled goat or camel. The cook would serve as waiter and dishwasher as well and would earn a pittance for all three jobs. Children and young men mobbed them for the leftovers, pushing the smaller ones out of their way. Men chewed qat constantly to stave away the nagging hunger in their stomachs, so they wouldn’t succumb mentally to it, wouldn’t humiliate themselves. Late in the afternoon, the steps of the Habr Awal warehouses were clogged with men talking over one another, laughing, and composing epigrams, but later as the qat left their bloodstreams they became morose, reclining like statues as the town darkened around them. Even with qat, the fear of hunger determined every decision, where to go, what to do, who to be. Destitute nomads would come in from the countryside and sit under trees, too exhausted to move any farther. If it was a Monday and they could drag themselves to the white offices of the Sha’ab in the southwest of town, the district commissioner would hear their appeals, and bestow four annas on the most deserving.

Jama thought himself tough but the youth of Hargeisa were desert-hardened, belligerent brawlers, uninterested in small talk with strangers, and the boys his age just wanted to sing and dance with the market girls. Not finding any companionship inside the compound or outside, Jama retreated deep into himself and made his mind his playground, fantasizing all day about the father he had somehow lost. Conjuring his father was a pleasure: his strong muscles, gold rings and watches, nice shoes, thick hair, expensive clothes could all be refashioned on a whim, he said and did only what Jama wanted without the intrusion of reality. The fact that his father was alive made him everything Jama could want, while seeing his mother in his mind’s eye was agonizing; he could recall the way she smelled before dying, the sweat running down her temples, the fear she was trying to mask from him.

Jama had seen young boys working in the slaughterhouse, ferrying the carcasses of freshly killed animals to the eating houses and market. He watched the couriers, their necks awkwardly bent by the weight on their shoulders, their feet frantically shuffling forward, propelling whirlwinds of sand up their legs. The work was hard and dirty, but Jama resolved to get money by whatever means necessary.

He woke up early one morning, the sky gray and the air still cool, and snuck out of the room, Jinnow’s snores chasing after him. A hyena-rich darkness covered the town and Jama could feel jinns and half-men at his back stalking the alleys, making the hairs on his neck stand on end. He sped to the slaughterhouse, the cries of camels and sheep growing in volume as he got closer, and he summoned up an image of his father: tall, strong, elegant in uniform, a smile playing on his dark lips. The slaughterhouse was empty of people; only the penned-up animals, waiting since nightfall for their deaths to come, acknowledged him, fixing their pleading eyes on him, sticking their flaring nostrils into the air. Jama felt the impending bloodshed sizzle in the air and rubbed down the tiny hairs on his lower spine as they nervously stood up, as if they were frightened conscripts standing to attention before a bloodied old general. He paced up and down, avoiding the eyes of the animals, turning his back to them, counting the stars as they one by one bowed and left the stage. As the sun rose, more tiny figures emerged from the dawn horizon, approaching Jama with hostile eyes. Jama looked around with satisfaction as he realized that he was among the tallest of the motley crew of boys that had formed, waiting for the butchers to come and make their selection from them. With the same swift appraisal of strength and value that they had for livestock, the butchers would pick their couriers for the day. The Midgaan and Yibir boys, those too young to understand that they would never be chosen, were insulted out of the lineup: “Get out of here, you dirty shit, go and clean some latrines!” They moved away, forming a separate line, silent and enraged. The oldest porters were camel herders who had been possessed by jinns in the haunted desert and were now forbidden from approaching the camels. The smallest were barely five years old, bewildered little children who had been dumped in Hargeisa by nomad fathers keen to toughen them up. They had been ripped from their mother’s arms and now slept huddled in groups on the street. Hungry and lonely, they followed older children wherever they went, their fathers occasionally visiting to ask, “So, how much have you made?”

The butchers arrived already smelling of blood, and with an impatient slap on the shoulder and a grunt they pushed out of the line the boys they would employ that day. Jama was one of the straight-backed chosen few. The unlucky ones slunk away to their mats or patches of dirt and prepared to sleep away the day and its insidious hunger pangs. Jama walked toward the killing ground but hung back, hoping to avoid seeing the actual slaughters. A man shouted, “Hey you! Whatever your name is! Come here!”

Jama turned around and saw a broad, bare-chested man kneeling over a dead camel, still holding on to its reins as if it could make an escape.

“Jama, my name is Jama, uncle.”

“Whatever. Come and take this carcass over to the Berlin eating house for me. Wait here while I prepare it.” Jama stood back and waited as the butcher took his cleaver and cut off the neck and legs, removed the skin from the camel’s torso and emptied it of heart, stomach, intestines, and other organs that only the poorest Somalis ate. The carnage shocked Jama, its efficiency and speed making it even more dreadful, he stood before the giant, naked, gleaming rib cage, frightened and awed by its desecration. The butcher got up, wiping his red hands on his sarong before picking up the rib cage and balancing it on Jama’s head. Its weight made him stagger and the soft, oozing flesh pressed revoltingly onto his skin. Jama pushed himself forward, trying to not career around, but the heavy load drove him left and right. He stopped and pushed the rib cage down his neck onto his shoulders and held it wedged there as if he were Atlas holding up the world in his fragile arms. The broad bones jutted into Jama’s back, and blood trickled down from his hair onto his shoulders and down his spine, making his brown back glisten with a ruby luster. His nose was filled with the dense, iron smell of blood and he stopped against a wall to retch emptily. Blood dripped onto the sand, decorating his footprints with delicate red pools, as if he were a wounded man. He finally reached the eating house and hurriedly handed the rib cage to a cook through the window. The cook grabbed it as if it were weightless and turned back to his talking and chopping without acknowledging the human carriage that had brought the delivery to him. Jama walked back to the slaughterhouse, a grimace set on his face, his arms held away from his body so that they wouldn’t rub and release the metallic stench. He delivered four more carcasses that morning and by the end he resembled a little murderer covered in the juices and viscera of his victims. Jama carefully tied his hard-earned money in the bottom of his sarong and walked home. The blood dried quickly in the noon sun and his hair and skin began to itch, he rolled his palms over his skin and the blood peeled off in claret strips. The insides of his nails were choked with dried blood and his sticky hair attracted fat, persistent flies, their buzzing causing an infuriating pandemonium by his ears. Jama had grown used to his own high, rich smell but the scent of death clinging to him was unbearable. Knowing that the precious water in the compound was only occasionally used for bathing, he hurriedly removed as much of the filth from his body as he could, using sand to clean himself as the Prophet advised. He arrived at the compound door and it was opened by Ayan before he had even knocked, she had fresh cuts on her face and one of her plaits had come apart, her wavy hair fanning out over one side of her head. “Nabad Jama,” she enunciated slowly, looking into his eyes intensely. “Where have you been? You look tired, and what is that in your hair?” She reached out to touch but he slapped her hand away.

“Get off, you idiot,” he said gruffly, walking away to Jinnow’s room. He could hear Ayan skipping behind him, her rubber sandals clapping the earth. “I’ll get you one day,” he threatened. Tired and hungry, he just wanted to collapse onto his straw mat. Ayan continued to follow him until, unable to contain herself any longer, she exploded with her news. “The ginger cat is pregnant! She’s not just fat, there are kittens in there! Come and see, Jama! Come.”

Jama turned around and gave her the most belittling dead eye he could muster, before going into Jinnow’s room and slamming the door shut behind him. He heard Ayan squeal in frustration before trundling back to the main courtyard. There was a stillness in the air, the compound was silent, cobwebs floated from the ceiling, cockroaches scuttled into crevices, everyone was dozing. The droning of insects in the air was punctuated by the hammering and ratter-tattering speech of workmen building a house nearby. The smell of charcoal, onions, meat, tea boiling with cloves and cardamom drifted from underneath the door. As Jama dozed, images of Hargeisa appeared in his mind, the roughness of hot rocks and thorns underfoot, the soft prickliness of camel fur, the taste of dates, ghee, hunger, a parched mouth surprised with the taste of food.

_______

A young woman arrived at the compound while he slept, she carried her slim possessions in a bundle on her back and looked ready to collapse. She was one of Jinnow’s nieces, who had recently run away to marry a man from another clan.

“Isir? What are you doing back here?” shouted one of the wives.

“That man doesn’t want me anymore, he’s divorced me.”

“You see! Has he given you your meher, at least?”

Through the thin walls Jama was wakened by the compound women scurrying around. “She has been possessed, I can a see a jinn in her eyes, call Jinnow,” they cried. Jinnow brought Isir into the aqal, and Jama pretended to be asleep but watched as Jinnow inspected Isir, rubbing her hands all over her body, half doctor, half priestess.

“How do you feel, girl?”

“Fine, I’m fine, just keep those crazy women away from me,” Isir said; she was dressed in rags but her beauty was still intense.

“What happened?”

“That idiot, that enemy of God says I am possessed.”

Isir caught Jama’s eyes peeking out from under his arm and he shut them quickly.

“Has he given you any of your dowry?”

“Not one gumbo.”

In the dim light, the women looked as if they were ready to commit some mysterious deed. Jinnow gathered herbs from her leather pouches and told Isir to eat them. She left Isir to rest and called the other women of the compound. As the neighborhood alaaqad with shamanic authority, they could not refuse her.

Isir shook Jama. “Are you Ambaro’s son?”

Jama nodded. Isir’s large brown eyes had the same burning copper in them as his mother’s had.

“Go and listen to what they’re saying for me,” she demanded.

Jama went as Isir’s eyes and ears. “Our sister needs us, she has been afflicted by a saar, we must exorcise her tonight, as her husband is not here you must bring perfume, new clothes, halwa, incense, amber, and silver to my room to satisfy the jinn. I will conduct the ceremony,” proclaimed Jinnow.

“She’s always been like this, it’s the price for her beauty.” Ayan’s mother laughed. “Isir has always been leading men on, and now one of them has finally put a curse on her.”

“Nonsense,” shouted Jinnow, “she is of our blood, we cannot stand aside when she needs us. What if a man threw you out with the rubbish?” The compound women grumbled but agreed to prepare the saar ceremony.

Some cleaned Jinnow’s room, some cooked, some borrowed drums, others collected the gifts. When the children had been fed and sent away, Isir was led by a procession to Jinnow’s room. Jama was locked out, but with a pounding heart he climbed the wall and walked over the roof until he could lean over Jinnow’s window. The room was brightly lit with paraffin lamps, smoky with expensive incense. Jinnow had brought more old women, mysterious crones with shining dark skin and strong hands. After the incense had been passed around, and the gifts presented, Jinnow took the largest drum and pounded it intermittently while shouting out instructions to the jinn. Isir stood in the center of the room, looking stiff and nervous. With every command the old women chanted “Ameen” and the young women clapped. Then the old women brought out small drums, got to their feet, and started drumming in earnest. Jinnow stood behind Isir, grabbed her around the waist and forced her to dance, the crowd ululated and danced with them. Jinnow tore off Isir’s headscarf and pulled at her hair. Jama watched as Isir’s movements took on a life of their own. Jinnow was an inch away from her face, shouting and crying, “Nin hun, nin hun, a bad man, a bad man, never tie yourself to a bad man, we told you he was useless, useless while you were brave and strong, Allah loves you, Allah loves you.” Isir’s tears flowed freely down her face; she looked like a lost little girl to Jama. Jinnow spun around Isir with more energy than he could have imagined, steam was rising from the women and no one noticed his head hanging upside down in the window. Isir had her head flung back, her eyes half-closed but staring unseeingly into Jama’s, she was saying things that Jama could not understand. Jinnow was encouraging her, shouting, “You are carrying this load on your back and you are staggering around with it like a tired camel, stop here and pass your load to me! Send him out of your soul! You are full of ghosts! Spit them out! Get your freedom, my girl!”

Isir carried on weeping while the compound women danced around her, clapping their support and flushing out their own grief.

Isir became a small ally against the compound women; she slept in the same room as Jinnow and Jama and joined in on their late-night conversations.

“I used to sleep right there next to Ambaro, where you are now, Jama, plaiting our hair, tickling each other.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” encouraged Jinnow.

“Jinnow would throw a slipper at us to quieten our laughter.”

“They had no sense of time.”

“Do you remember, aunty, how she would read our palms? Telling us all kinds of things, how many men we would marry, how many children we’d have. She scared the other girls with that talk.”

Jama sat up on his elbows and listened attentively to the women.

“It’s because she had the inner eye and she didn’t soften or hide what she saw. I saw it in her from an early age, I watched her read the future in shells when she was not yet five, grown men would come and ask her to tell them their fate. Did she tell you all this, Jama?” Jinnow asked.

Jama scanned his memory. “She only told me that I had been born with the protection of all the saints and that a black mamba had blessed me while I was in her stomach.”

“That is all true, you had a very auspicious birth, every kaahin and astrologer envied your signs, even Venus appeared the night you were born.”

Jama rested his head on his arm and sighed loudly. If only he could meet his father, he would believe all of their fanciful words.

Jama went to the abattoir every morning, and his eagerness and industriousness meant he was always picked out, creating enemies for him among the other hungry children, but only a few resentful slaps or gobs of spit landed on him. Jama saw the sweaty, smelly work as a kind of test that, if passed, would entitle him to see his father, a trial of his worth as a son and as a man. He wrapped all of his abattoir money in a cloth and hid it inside a tin can in Jinnow’s room. The bundle of coins grew and grew in its hiding place, and he could feel the reunion with his father approaching, whether his father came to him or he went to his father, Jama knew it was fated to be. He read it in the clouds, in the entrails of the carcasses he delivered, in the grains of coffee at the bottom of his cup.

After work, he often wandered around town, sometimes as far as the Yibro village that nestled against the thorny desert on the outskirts of Hargeisa. He walked through the pariah neighborhood looking for signs of the magic that Yibros were said to possess, he wanted some of their powerful poison to use against Ayan, to watch her hair and nails drop off. Jama peered into small dark huts, an outcast among outcasts, hot dark eyes following his progress. But there was no magic to be seen, the Yibros had yet to find spells that would turn dust into bread, potions to make their dying children live, or curses that would keep their persecutors at bay. An Aji boy in their midst could easily bring trouble. If a hair on his head was hurt, a pack of howling wolves would descend on the village, ripping and tearing at everyone and everything, so they watched him and hoped that his curiosity would quickly be satisfied. The village had only recently stopped mourning for a young man killed by Ajis, his body cut up and the flesh put in a basket outside his family’s hut. His mother collapsed when she brought in the basket and realized where the plentiful meat had come from. His head was at the bottom, broken and gray. No blood money could be demanded by them because they were not strong enough to threaten vengeance, his father went to work the next day as he did every day, smiling to hide his fury, bowing down to men who had dismembered his child. Jama saw that the village was full of women; Yibro men were usually laboring elsewhere, hammering metal or working leather or in the town cleaning out latrines. The children sat outside, picking their noses, their stomachs stretched to bursting point, destitution the way of life. The clan handouts that kept other Somalis afloat were absent here, as the Yibros were so few and so poor. Ancient superstitions meant that Aji Somalis ostracized Yibros and Midgaans and other undesirables without any thought; Yibros were just Jews, eaters of forbidden foods, sorcerers. Jama was only dimly aware that these people received a payment from families like his whenever a male child was born and that a curse or spell from a Yibir was more powerful and destructive than from anyone else. Jama could see why they were feared, their clothes were even more raggedy than his, their shacks open to the cruelties of the August heat and the October freeze, their intimacy with misery deeper than that of anyone else.

On a stagnant day, Jama returned home from work to find Ayan in Jinnow’s room, standing on tiptoe, her eyes ringed with stolen kohl, her raccoon eyes widening as she saw him staring at her while she snooped through Jinnow’s things. The beautiful silver kohl bottle rolling on the floor separately from its ornate lid.

“Thief! Thief!” shouted Jama, filled with horror that she might have found the hidden money. “What are you doing? You thief!” he said as he lunged at her.

Surprise had frozen a ridiculous expression on Ayan’s face, her eyebrows arching like the spines of frightened cats and her gap-toothed mouth hanging open. Jama pulled her arms behind her back, lifting her thin, dusty feet off the ground.

“Let me go!” she cried.

“What do you want in here? What are you looking for? Has someone sent you?”

“No, no, please, Jama, I was just looking, wallaahi, let me go!” she begged. Jama in confusion held on to her. Ayan was strong and supple for a girl but she was no match for a feral street boy. He was too embarrassed to check her body for the money, so seeing the imposing dark wood wardrobe with the key in the lock, he opened the door and shoved Ayan in. He quickly turned the key and stood back, shaking, with sweat beads trickling down his forehead. He stared at the wardrobe door as Ayan kicked and shouted to be let out.

“Jama! Jama! Jama! Let me out! I can’t breathe!” said her muffled voice.

Jama gathered himself, and with a jabbing finger said, “You are staying in there, you dirty thief, until Jinnow comes back and checks you.”

Ayan screamed long and loud, her erratic breathing and convulsive tears clearly audible in the room. Jama wiped the sweat off his brow and walked out of the room as Ayan continued to wail and weep. “It’s dark! It’s too hot. I’m going to die. Murderer! Murderer! Jama the Bastard Murderer!”

Jama waited and waited outside Jinnow’s room while inside the cupboard Ayan gulped down the warm old air and emitted a low, strange whine. Her jail was lined with nuptial gowns and undergarments given as part of ancient dowries, the relics of dead loves and youthful dreams of glamour and romance. The velvety blackness around her shifted and made room for its young visitor. She felt like she was at the bottom of a deep, deep well, too deep in the earth to ever be found, and panic washed over her in rapid waves. The noon prayer came and went as did the afternoon prayer, and it was not until it was nearly time for the sunset prayer that Jama could hear Jinnow’s voice rising up from a commotion in the courtyard. Jinnow walked down the hallway followed by a loud troupe of compound women, with a beleaguered look on her wrinkled face.

“Have you seen Ayan? Her mother can’t find her,” Jinnow asked.

Jama looked up, and it was only then that it occurred to him how long he had spent on that doorstep and how long Ayan had spent in her makeshift prison. Jama got up creakily on weak legs. With slippery fingers before a roomful of expectant females, Jama turned the key on the wardrobe lock. Immediately a stink of urine swelled out of the hot, stuffy cell. There lay Ayan, barely conscious, her head flung back, her too-red tongue lolling. A collective gasp surged from the audience and Jinnow shoved Jama violently out of the way to get to Ayan, she shook Ayan and kissed her face until the girl’s eyes snapped open and a long scream coiled out from her. Ayan’s mother grabbed her child and hugged her suffocatingly against her bosom. “May God break your back, you devil,” she said over Ayan’s shoulder, her eyes ringed with antimony shooting daggers of hate deep into him.

Jama stuttered, “She’s a thief, Jinnow, check her, she was trying to steal my money.”

“May God break your balls, you lying bastard, you are cursed by all the saints,” screeched the mother. “Oh tolla’ay, tolla’ay, my poor child. May God put you under the ground, you eunuch, you devil!”

Jinnow’s head sank down and fat tears rolled down Jama’s face. Young women bearing water and cloths dragged Ayan from her mother’s grip and took her away to revive and clean her. Ayan’s mother stretched out to her full height and with a long sharp fingernail pushed up Jama’s face. “I want you out of here, or I swear to God I will cut your nasty little thing off.” The courtyard women departed, leaving behind them a miasma of hair oil and incense.

Jinnow pulled Jama into a crushing grip and kneaded his back, shoulders, and neck, violently and soothingly. She told him to lie down but he didn’t, he pulled away and took one last hard look at her. Jinnow’s small eyes were framed with short, feathery eyelashes, her skin looked like old paper, moles spread over her cheeks and nose, and three of her front teeth were gold; she was an elderly Ambaro. Jinnow and Isir left their room to placate Ayan’s mother, and Jama grabbed his stash of money and snuck out behind them as stealthily as a cat. There was a deep, false silence echoing across the courtyard but he could see twinkling eyes peeking out behind curtains and doors. As he walked out into the sunset, a bitter wind flicked at his threadbare clothes and drew goose bumps from his skin. Stars grew smaller and dimmer above as paraffin lamps were placed on windowsills down the street, burning like golden fireflies trapped in cages. Jama heard Jinnow calling him back and glanced over his shoulder, Jinnow stood in the street barefoot, her arm threadlike as she held it aloft. He waved to her, trying desperately to communicate his gratitude and love, but he ran on. It fell into Jama’s mind that he wasn’t a child anymore; he needed to learn how to be a man. Jama reached Naasa Hablood, the Maiden’s Breasts, the conical twin hills overlooking Hargeisa, and peered below to see the lamps and lights of the town disappearing into the gauzy brown haze of a dust storm. The wind licked and slapped the cowering nomad tents while the white stone houses stood pompously amid the flying rubbish, but eventually the whole town disappeared as if it were just a mirage from an old Arab tale; and just as easily Jama was spirited away from family, home, and homeland.

Sand scratched his eyes and blurred the path as it danced around the desert in a frenetic whirling ballet. Jama’s sarong was nearly pulled off by the mischievous sand jinns hiding within the storm. He covered his face with his sarong and managed to make slow progress like that. The dust storm had turned the sun a dark orange, and it crept away below the horizon to be replaced by an anemic moon. Jama stumbled across the hills, kicking rocks away with bare feet, giant thorns poking and prodding dangerously. Desert animals scurried around looking for refuge, their small paws scrambling over Jama’s sand-swathed feet. Exhausted, Jama stopped and collapsed onto the sand. With nothing but the howl of the wind around him, he fell asleep, the cold scratch of the storm still assailing his arms and legs. When he opened his inflamed eyes it was the hour before sunrise but he could see a tarred road laid out in front of him as if jinns had prepared it while he slept. It had been strewn with sand, leaves, and twigs by the departing storm. The wind had calmed and the temperature was mild. He stood up excitedly and scanned the road, left to right, right to left, hoping for the round lights of a lorry to emerge, but there was no light apart from the white of the moon. The tar was cool and smooth against his desert-sore feet and he walked slowly while the sun returned joyously to the east, its rays lighting the undulating road until it took on the appearance of molten gold.

A rumbling sound reverberated along the road and then the “daru daru daruuu” horn of an invisible lorry pierced the morning air like a cockerel cry. Jama ran down to meet it, and narrowly avoided its gigantic hood as it careered around the bend and raced past. Standing in its sooty trail, Jama wondered how long it would take to get to Sudan, if he had enough money, if he could get food and water on the road. He only knew to walk away from Hargeisa, everything else was a mystery. He walked up the side of a hill, rocks slipping under his feet. He tripped on the skeletons of goats killed by earlier droughts; their bleached rib cages jutted out of the dirt like teeth and inside them tiny yellow flowers sprouted from cacti. The desert terrified him, the silence, the boulders marking nomad’s graves, the emptiness. Jama scampered farther up, hoping to find human company by following the goat droppings left by a passing herd. As he climbed higher the Maroodi Jeeh valley was spread out beneath him, and he scaled the large granite boulders believing that he would be able to see Sudan from the summit. He squinted at the strip of blue on the horizon, unsure whether it was sky or sea. The land looked eerie from this height, dry riverbeds snaked across the earth as far as the eye could see, acacia trees grew bent and stunted in tangled, harassed-looking clumps like old widows begging. Massive stony-faced boulders sat squatly amid nothing. Towering termite mounds, the zenith of insect genius, stood tall and imposing like bleak apartment blocks. A nomad’s house built from branches and straw had a high fence around it, keeping out emptiness. A raw breeze prickled Jama’s skin, and dark purple clouds dotted the sky. To the far east shone a spontaneous river, fed by rain falling on the distant Golis Mountains. Vultures swooped above the river, praying for drowned bodies. In the water, opals and emeralds glinted. Small villages had grown alongside the road, the fragile dwellings placed so close to its edge that it seemed the speed of a racing lorry would blow them away. Here and there forgotten paraffin lamps burned dangerously in the makeshift homes. Far off to the north galloped British colonial officers in khaki, looking for warthogs to set off their game of pig-sticking. Warthogs were rarely seen in the country anymore but the British were even more elusive, generally preferring to hide in their Raj-style government bungalows from the heat and bloody foreignness of Somaliland. The sight of the groomed Arabian horses sweating in the scrub, tormenting the poor warthogs, saddened Jama and he climbed back down the hill to the road.