Black Mamba Boy Read online

  Tessenei was a hub of international trade: loot from the homes of Italian colonists was traded for goods from Egypt, and askaris sold their Italian weapons to Abyssinian shifta. Kunama farmers and taciturn Takaruri hunters exchanged their produce for cloth, coffee, and sugar, the Sudanese presiding over this mercantile frenzy like referees at a wrestling match. They opened caravanserai and bazaars and sold their sizzling kebabs at every corner. Jama was known to them and everyone else as the little Somali who could speak many languages. Jama picked up Kunama from Hawa and would translate for the rural women in disputes with Hakim over the quality of their vegetables or the extent of their debts. All kinds of people came to the shop. Once, a man burst in, carrying a spear and shield, wearing the lion skin of an Amhara warrior, only to shout, “Waryaa inanyow!” to Jama. He was no Amhara but a full-blooded Somali, a Habr Yunis man from around Hargeisa who had ended up in Abyssinia and fought against the Italians. He took off the sweaty lion pelt and chatted with Jama about the desert, camels, and his plan to join the Royal Navy in Egypt. Before sunset he picked up his mane, spear, and shield and disappeared toward Sudan.

  Jama spent two years working for Hakim without pay; he traded his labor for something to eat and somewhere to sleep. On that coffee-scented floor he became a man, his arms and legs no longer able to fit comfortably in his nook beneath the counter; he felt like an elephant trapped in a goat pen. At night he thought about trying his luck somewhere else. Hakim was often kind but he was also a grouchy merchant who muttered complaints under his thick walrus mustache. When Jama finally made up his mind to leave, Hakim threw his big hands in the air and said frantically, “Haven’t I been good to you? What more could you want?” Hakim reached into his pocket and gave Jama exactly two pounds for his seven hundred and thirty days of toil. Awate cried when Jama told him he would be leaving and held on to his long legs to slow him down, but Jama pried him off. “I’ll be back, Awate. You can be my coolie when I open a store,” he promised.

  Jama explored the local villages, looking for one isolated and poor enough to lack a Sudanese stall. It was a bleak journey. Roads were still blocked by burnt-out tanks, minefields were hidden under weeds, and bones jutted from shallow graves. Jama found Focka nestled in a lush valley; it was a tiny village with barely twenty families who trekked two hours to Tessenei for textiles, medicines, paraffin. When the little Somali came to visit and spoke of his plans, they nearly nailed him to a stake to stop him escaping. Among the matriarchal Kunamas, women like Ambaro, Jinnow, and Awrala were everywhere, bossing him about, giving him unwanted advice on how to build his stall, teasing him about his exotic looks, his thin girly face, and wavy hair. He had emerged from the underworld into this land of Amazons. The villagers were excited to have a foreigner in their midst, and Jama’s stall, made from torn-down Italian billboards and covered with palm fronds, became the talking shop, tavern, and in the evenings, dancehall. Young men, tired and sweaty, would come in from the fields and untangle their muscles in wacky dances they named the pissing dog, the hungry chicken, the rutting ram, all the while getting limp on honey mead and running up large debts at Jama’s stall. The elders would occasionally perform epic sagas about their ancient queens who had come to Eritrea as nomads and been seduced by this fertile land.

  To satisfy his customers’ desires and avoid the high British taxes, Jama would hire a camel and take the risky night route through the desert between Tessenei and Kassala. He cherished these expeditions, his pale clothes glowing in the moonshine and sand grains glinting like diamonds in his path, and he felt like he had gone back in time to when his own ancestors sought out new lands. The white-hot stars were so bright they nearly burned him, and the moonlit dunes would undulate and swim as he was rocked into somnolence on the camel’s back. Jama would be jolted awake when he heard the laughs of hyenas following him, the snap of their jaws as they bit at the camel’s long thin legs. Smugglers were a delicacy to local hyenas, and on this long isolated stretch if a smuggler was thrown off his startled camel he would have no hope of rescue; they would pounce and leave nothing behind.

  With smuggled Sudanese cigarettes hidden under his clothes, Jama would return triumphantly to the village. He was never caught by the Sudanese police. The crunch of a policeman’s footstep or his smoker’s cough carried for miles on the desert air, and if Jama heard anything he would find another smuggler’s track. With these nocturnal journeys Jama doubled his takings. He expanded the stall until secondhand shoes hung from their laces above his head, paraffin lamps glowered like squat policemen at his side, and homemade perfumes, oily love potions, wafted out of scavenged glass bottles. Everything Jama sold brought the glamour of the outside world to Focka. Under the eternal woods of overgrown baobabs and fragrant tamarinds, a village was being shaken out of a daydream. The magic of oil and coal made life easier, faster, dirtier, and Jama’s stall offered as much of the outside world as he could carry. When the harvest was brought in, people gasped at the lewd fecundity of the earth. Carrots long and rampant jumped out of the soil, red saucy tomatoes pouted from their vines. Emerald, citrine, and ruby peppers shone from dowdy wicker baskets, and the lambs, the lambs, shouting and boasting all the way to market. Women carried baskets full of eggs as big as fists on their heads to Tessenei. Focka, only Focka had been blessed, and the rest of the villages in the Kunama country revealed sullen sacks of gnarled vegetables and sour fruit at market. The people were angry. The farmers of Focka were keeping the lucky Somali to themselves. Women met in all the villages; hushed secret midnight conferences took place.

  “Poison him with cobra spit, and then bring him here for the cure,” counseled one old woman.

  In another village a woman offered herself as the honey trap, but in Gerset, Hawa told them to offer Jama land in return for his sorcery.

  Jama accepted Hawa’s offer of two acres, but promised the people of Focka that he would keep his stall there. He borrowed a mule from a neighbor and with his blanket, tools, and cooking utensils on the mule’s back he headed for Gerset. The women had cleared the ground for him, rich soil, damp to the touch, combed through like his mother’s black hair. It was a beautiful sight to behold, the first real wealth of his life. He paced along the perimeter, measuring the distance from one corner to another. It was a large, open-handed gift from the women and he kissed Hawa’s hands in gratitude. The women built him a hut, singing “Akoran Oshomaney” as they worked, “Don’t Let Your Friend Down.”

  They finally left him alone to work his sorcery, but he didn’t know what to do. Protected from view by exuberant banana trees, he bent down and picked up handfuls of soil and rubbed it against his arms and legs, it was cool and soothed his hot skin. He brought it to his nose, it smelled of trees and their breath. He tasted it; iron and blood. In his revelry he walked around Gerset, the women smiled and waved as he roamed, he felt wonderful among these trusting Amazons, their beautiful village untouched by war, hidden from Ferengi maps. They stopped to welcome him. There were no titles in Gerset, no masters or lords, not even misses; respect was given freely, equally, generously, all were descendants of Queen Kuname. According to custom, only the women and older men had met to decide which plot to give Jama; the youths would learn of his presence when they returned from grazing the cows but Jama was assured that they would give him no trouble and there was quiet apart from the shouts of dogs, coughs of goats, and chuckling of lambs. Tired and thirsty, he reached the village shop. He pushed the curtain aside, his footsteps soft, padded by unswept dust. A girl sat behind a crooked wooden counter, her head on her arm, snoring with fat flies buzzing around her head. She jumped at his approach, quickly wiping the drool from her chin. She was beautiful, sloe black eyes and red ripe lips atop the long neck of a gerenuk, her pure brown skin set off by yards of carnelian and amber beads; she had been polished with butter and cream. Meeting her startled antelope gaze, Jama asked for a cup of milk, and with swift, dancing steps, she went to the old cow in the backyard and milked a cupful.

>   “Good afternoon,” said Jama, his heartbeat skittering.

  The girl nodded to him. She emanated light like a saint on a church wall, but her expression was more suspicious than beatific.

  “Where have you come from?” she finally asked, her voice deeper than he expected. He could smell honey on her breath.

  “You name it, I’ve been there.” He smiled, she smiled back, and that was it.

  Bethlehem Bighead was a mule, with a Tigre father and a Kunama mother, Muslim and Christian, born in a cowshed, a shepherdess in the morning, a farmer in the afternoon, and a shopgirl in the evening. With a head full of dreams and fantasies, she would pluck lavender and jasmine and come home with blooms in her braids but minus a goat, only to be beaten and sent back out into the darkening hills until she had found it. Her black thicket of hair earned her the name Bighead, and she wore it like a crown of thorns, pulling at it throughout the day, plucking strands from her eyes, from her mouth, from her food. When her sisters jumped her, they used her hair as a weapon, forcing her head back with it and dragging her across the dirt by it. Her mother would sometimes put an afternoon aside to laboriously braid it, laying it down into manageable rows like their crops, before like a rain forest it burst out of its man-made boundaries and reclaimed its territory. She was a true village girl in that she wanted nothing more than to live in a town; already sixteen, she had to wait for her five older sisters to marry before she could escape. Jama’s face came to her now before she fell asleep. His deep, hypnotizing eyes saddened her, and there was something about his lost and lonely bearing that made her want to suffocate him in her bosom.

  From her perch on the hills, amid the bleating goats, Bethlehem could see Jama in his turban, planting seeds. He was clumsy with his tools and to her amusement he would pull seedlings out of the earth to see how much they had grown. He was trying to stare them into life, she thought.

  When she brought the goats back down, Bethlehem sidled past his field. “You’re not doing that very well, you know. You shouldn’t plant them so deep. They need to see the sun through the earth.”

  “Why don’t you come and help me, then,” Jama said, stopping to stare as she walked past.

  “Eeeee! You wish!” she squealed, before striding away.

  Jama studied the cycles of her day. He loved to watch her make her yawning advance up the hill in the dappled dawn light. She was a spot of red climbing up the gray-green horizon, her faithful retinue of stinking goats shouting after her. At midday, she would descend, her ramrod-straight back holding up that black flag of hair, and begin work on her mother’s fields. He could smell the flowers in her hair long after she had passed. Jama would wait until she was in the shop in the evenings before going to buy his eggs and milk, and they talked by paraffin lamp while her family ate dinner.

  “What did you do before coming here?” she asked once.

  “I was an askari.”

  “How stupid you must have been,” she taunted, holding a blade of grass between her fingers in imitation of his cigarette.

  The womb light of the lamp made them both braver, able to talk about things that bright daylight or deep darkness would have prohibited. Jama told Bethlehem about his parents, and she listened with the attention of a sphinx. In return, to cement their intimacy, Bethlehem described to Jama how her father kicked her for daydreaming and losing goats, how she had never been bought anything her whole life but only given her sisters’ hand-me-downs.

  “Not one thing, Jama, can you believe that, never one thing for me only.”

  Jama shook his head in sympathy and touched her hand; she let him for a second before pulling away.

  Since Jama had arrived in Gerset, Bethlehem never went out with dusty, chapped feet but massaged them with oil every morning. She pilfered her eldest sister’s Maria Theresa coin necklace, earrings, and silver anklets, hiding them until she got near Jama’s farm, when she would put them on, scintillating past until he was out of sight and they could disappear back into her pockets. One day her hair was in agrarian rows, another day in two bunches, on yet another she would plait the front and leave the back out. Jama enjoyed the coiffures which gave her face different shapes and moods. As they grew closer, Jama rose before the sun to wait for her in the hills where they could spend a few hours together, before the village came to life and began its watch. He waited happily in the cold, holding fresh sprigs and blossoms for her, a shiver running through his body when she stepped out of his infatuated mind and became flesh again. Her bounding, voluptuous body appeared every night in his dreams, she wore her red cotton robes tight, and he memorized every contour of her body during the day so he could re-create her in perfect detail at night. He was awkward and giddy around her but she did not complain, she watched him intently and pulled straw out of his hair.

  “I have never felt like this before, I feel possessed,” he told her, and she glowed in pleasure.

  One dawn, as they sat talking, a deep murmuring came from the skies, a torrent of rain and hailstones fell upon them, bhesh, bhesh, bhesh, and land slid down the hillside.

  “Mary protect me,” screamed Bethlehem, desperately trying to gather her terrified goats as the earth tore away her anklets and submerged her knee-deep in mud.

  Jama climbed a fig tree and pulled her out. She was so close he could feel her heartbeat thumping against him. Bethlehem buried her face in his neck while he tugged her free.

  “Come, let’s get into that cave,” he commanded. She ignored him and ran after the goats, but Jama chased them toward the cave, and only then did she follow him. The mammoth granite hillside split into a cavern that had all the elegance and delicacy of a cathedral, stalactites hung down like censors and the light playing on puddles dappled against the high dome. Bethlehem said a prayer and kissed her rosary.

  “Don’t worry, it will be over soon,” reassured Jama. “Come, sit closer, so I can keep you warm.”

  “Are you serious about me, Jama? Or are you just playing? Will you marry me?” Bethlehem asked, cold and shivering.

  “Yes,” replied Jama, putting an arm around her shoulder.

  They made a loveseat out of the living rock and imagined their new life together as rain washed the old world away. Looking over them, however, was Rumor, she who flits between sky and earth, who never declines her head in sleep, and with swift wings she took flight to disturb the repose of the villagers.

  When the midday sun had burned away the clouds, Jama, Bethlehem, and the goats returned to Gerset, to stares and whispers. Bethlehem kept her head high, believing herself to be practically married. She left Jama by his field and went home. Her mother was sweeping goat droppings away from their door.

  “What took you so long, Bighead? You should have come home before the rain started.”

  “Mama, Jama and I are going to get married,” Bethlehem announced.

  Her mother screeched and threw away the broom. “What is this! What will people say? Your father’s poor old heart! Why can’t you wait for your sisters to find husbands first? What have you done?”

  “Nothing, Mama, we just agreed,” Bethlehem stuttered.

  “You will decide nothing without consulting me. I don’t want that little Somali sniffing around you, people are already talking, you don’t know anything about him, so just stay away.”

  Bethlehem didn’t stay away. She went to Jama’s fields and helped him, he watched as she demonstrated how to pick out weeds and check for blight. The earth was pregnant with so much produce that, come harvest time, Jama employed two more female laborers, offering them a share of the crop in return. Bethlehem was paid too and her mother walked her to the field and collected her at dusk, but all day the lovebirds could twitter as much as they wanted. He described the Ferengi ships docked in Aden, the slaughterhouses of Hargeisa, and the markets of Djibouti. He did not have to describe Keren to her; the silver markets still glinted in her mind from her trips there as a child. Jama spoke about places but he didn’t speak about people—all the pl
aces he described were ghost towns that he traversed alone. He never mentioned Shidane or Abdi, but they were there in his stories, imperceptible shadows that walked beside him. There was a moment at dusk when a cool breeze blew, the leaves shook and rustled, and Bethlehem stretched her back in front of a golden sky, that made Jama melt; but within moments Bethlehem’s mother would arrive and march her home, leaving him to his thoughts as he rode his borrowed mule to Focka. On melancholy evenings, the scrub a dark green and the rocky paths a subdued blue, his mind dwelled on those he had left behind. He hoped to return one day, atop an unblemished racing camel, and visit Jinnow and Idea with gifts of gold, myrrh, and silk. He planned to either return in triumph or not at all. On the back of the mule he conducted imaginary conversations with Idea in which he told him about the Italians, their punishments, their arrogance, their cruelty, and Idea listened closely while stirring a pot, shaking his head in bitter sympathy.

  The harvests were greater than they had ever been, and the women of Gerset showed exuberant gratitude, bringing to Jama’s tukul a goat, blankets, sorghum porridge, figs, all of life’s little luxuries. Jama’s own sorghum plants towered so high and so strong that twenty women were brought in to help cut them down. Even Bethlehem’s mother came to him bearing eggs, and she smiled tentatively, appraising him all the time. Jama surreptitiously kissed the amulet around his neck; the magic the women saw in him was nothing more than what his mother could scatter on him from above.

  The harvest was so abundant that Jama could pay Awate to look after the store in Focka, saving him the backbreaking donkey ride every day. The thud of sorghum being pounded in stone mortars followed him everywhere. The smuggling trips to Sudan continued but now he could pay for more expensive items: petrol, silver, cooking pots. He was the wealthiest man in Focka, and the second-wealthiest after Bethlehem’s father in Gerset, although he had plenty of weight to gain before he matched that rotund figure. Jama was almost complacent about his talents now. He thought all he needed to do was throw a few seeds in the earth and he would be richly rewarded. Bethlehem became the lady of the manor, watching over the women, overseeing their work, tutting and clucking around them until they complained to Jama. The sorghum grew tall and straight and shivered and sang in the breeze. Young men came to admire his fields and store because he was the boy their mothers told them to emulate. They looked on in wonder as the crowds of women—their aunties, sisters, girlfriends—huddled around the tukul of the thin, long-limbed foreigner, vying for his attention in loud voices.