Black Mamba Boy Page 5

  Jama saw only a sea of solitude, an expanse of nothingness impossible to navigate on his own.

  “Those stars are our friends, they have watched over our ancestors, they have seen all kinds of suffering but the light in them never goes out, they will watch over you and will watch over your grandchildren.”

  Ambaro felt Jama’s tears falling on her and grabbed hold of his hand. “Listen to me, Goode, I am not leaving you. I will live in your heart, in your blood, you will make something of your life, I promise you that. Forgive me, my baby snake, don’t live the life that I have lived, you deserve better.”

  “I wanted to make you happy, hooyo, but now it’s too late.” Jama wept.

  “No, it is not, Goode, I will see everything that you do, the good and the bad, nothing will be hidden from me.”

  Jama pushed his face against his mother’s cheek, rubbed his moist face against hers, hoping to catch whatever she had, to go with her to the next life. Ambaro pulled her face away from him.

  “Stop that, Goode. Shall I tell you what the Kaahin told your father?” she cajoled. “A great Kaahin once told your father when he was a boy that his son, the son of Guure Mohamed Naaleyeh, would see so much money pass through his fingers. Guess what your father said to the Kaahin? He asked him, ‘What’s money?’ Neither of us had seen any before, but now I know money is like water, it will give you life. Take the Kitab amulet from around my neck.”

  Jama began to unpick the large knots in the string that hung the amulet over Ambaro’s chest. Folded in a paper heart lay prayer after prayer, and in this heart Ambaro kept her hope, as she did not trust her body anymore. The Arabic script had smudged and faded on the thin exercise paper the wadaad had used. “Inside the amulet is one hundred and fifty-six rupees. I do not want you using it until you absolutely need to; wait until you have grown up and know what you want to do with your life.”

  Jama squeezed the amulet in his palm. He had never seen a rupee, never mind hundreds of them, his world was of ardis lost in the street, paisas to pay for stale cakes, occasional annas thrown to Abdi from the passenger ships.

  “I have been saving that for you, Goode, promise me you will not waste it. Don’t tell anyone about it either, tie it around your neck and forget about it.”

  Ambaro’s swamped lungs protested against her chatter and her face suddenly contorted as she gasped for breath. Jama did not believe a word of the old Kaahin’s prophecy; he knew that no boy born for a special fate would have to see his mother choking on strange liquid that poured out of her mouth and nose. Jama wiped his mother’s face on his ma’awis and held her in his arms. “Shush, hooyo, shush,” he soothed, rocking her gently. His mother fell into a curl with her back turned to him and soon fell asleep. Jama watched the rise and fall of her back and grabbed a handful of her tobe to keep himself connected. The fabric dampened in his nervous grip; she was already slipping from him. He would have preferred his umbilical cord to have never been severed but to extend limitlessly like spider’s silk between them. He belonged to no one else, she belonged to no one else, why couldn’t God leave them together?

  Jama’s eyes remained open all night, scanning the dark room for any figures that might materialize to take his mother away. The gloom was alive with shifting densities, lumps of gray light that hovered slowly along the floor, furry black masses that shivered in corners. Jama’s fingers loosened their grip on Ambaro’s tobe and reached out. Ambaro’s arm was relaxed along her side, her fingers resting on her hip. Jama placed his hand on hers, she felt like one of those shells washed up on the beach, cold, hard, smooth, veins making superfluous swirls under her skin. Everything powerful and vibrant about her had gone, only the worn-out machinery of her body remained, and the little life that wondrous machinery had produced was left to grieve over everything she had once been.

  HARGEISA, SOMALILAND, MARCH 1936

  The chaperone finally released his hold on Jama’s forearm, leaving a sweaty handprint on his skin. Jama’s legs shook from the long journey in the back of the old lorry, and he clasped both of his thighs to steady them while his clansman went to replenish his stash of qat. Jama had put up with the mushy green spittle and the acrid stink that had accompanied the ostrich catcher’s habit for the day and night it took to cross the Red Sea by dhow and get to Hargeisa. Jama’s bloated, gaseous stomach bulged out before him and he wondered why it stretched farther and farther out the hungrier he got. His stomach had been relatively peaceful throughout the journey, but for weeks after the burial it had contracted, cramped, made him vomit, given him diarrhea, the pain in his gut slowing his steps to that of a decrepit old man. A clanswoman of his mother had found him huddled in an alley, covered in dust and blood. It took just three days for a human telephone network of clansmen and women to locate his great-aunt and deliver Jama to her like a faulty parcel. In Aden the Islaweynes had paid for Ambaro’s burial but expected Jama to look after himself. Estranged from Shidane and Abdi, he had hung out with the dirtiest of Aden’s street children, eating fitfully and badly, sometimes picking up food from the dirt and giving it a casual clean before swallowing it in a few untasting bites. He became argumentative and loud, often fighting with the other abandoned children. To appease the hungry demon in his stomach, seething and cursing from his cauldron of acid, Jama had fought with stray cats and dogs over leftover bones. He tried to be brave but sadness and loneliness had crept up on him, twisting his innards and giving him the shakes. Jama dreamed of his mother every night; she followed a caravan in the Somali desert, and he would follow, calling out her name, but she never turned around, the distance between them growing until she was just a speck on the horizon.

  Jama looked around him. Somaliland was yellow, intensely yellow, a dirty yellow, with streaks of brown and green. A group of men stood next to their herd of camels while the lorry overheated, its metal grille grimacing under an acacia tree. There was no smell of food or incense or money drifting in the air as there was in Aden, there were no farms, no gardens, but there was a sharp sweetness he breathed in, something invigorating, intoxicating. This was his country, this was the same air as his father and grandfathers had breathed, the same landscape that they had known. Heat shimmered above the ground, making the sparse vegetation look like a mirage that would dissolve if you reached out for it. The emptiness of the desert felt purifying and yet disturbing after the tumultuous humanity of Aden—deserts were the birthplaces of prophets but also the playgrounds of jinns and shape-shifters. He heard from his mother that his own great-grandfather Eddoy had walked out of his family’s encampment and into the sands, leaving no one word of where he was going, and was never seen again. Eddoy became one of the many bewitched by the shifting messages left among the dunes. Though these stories of people losing their minds and vanishing terrified Jama, his mother used to tease him, telling him that it was no bad thing to have a jinn in the family and that he should call on his great-grandfather if he ever became lost. His ancestors had been crow worshippers and sorcerers before the time of the Prophet, and the people still kept tokens of their paganism. Precious frankincense and myrrh still smoldered in the same ornate white clay urns; black leather amulets hung from the chubby wrists of infants. His mother’s amulet was tied tightly around his neck, the sacred pages grubby and hardened together. He lay down under the acacia tree and spread his arms out, the sky covered him like a shroud and he felt cooled by the watery blueness washing over him, he guessed the time by looking at the position of the sun and decided to rest. He awoke, disturbed by the sound of two voices above his head, and opened his eyes to see an old woman standing over him, as tall as a policeman. She bent down to wipe the drool from his sleepy face and held him to her bosom, filling his nose with her sour milk smell. Tears beaded up in the corner of his eyes but he drew them back, afraid of embarrassing them both. Jinnow took his hand and led him away, Jama floating from her hand like a string cut loose from its kite.

  Hargeisa appeared all of a sudden in a valley scattered with tr
ees. On the outskirts of town Jama and Jinnow passed the Yibro settlement, their tents hardly distinguishable from the brush, and Jinnow picked up her step as they neared it. Jama looked over his shoulder at the children drawing shapes in the sand and felt Jinnow tugging his hand. “Don’t go near them, Jama,” she whispered, “they hate Eidegalles and all other Ajis, be careful or they will use their sorcery against you.”

  It was only the expanse of emptiness around it that made Hargeisa seem like a town, but unlike the straw-and-skin tents they had passed, the houses in Hargeisa were forbidding white stone dwellings, as utilitarian as beehives. Large barred windows were decorated above with simple geometric designs, and the wealthier houses had courtyards with bougainvillea and purple hibiscus creeping up their walls. Everywhere you looked there were closed doors and empty streets. All the town’s dramas were played out by figures hidden behind high walls and drawn curtains.

  Finally the gate to his grandfather’s compound creaked open and a smiling girl said, “Aunty, is this Jama?” but Jinnow pushed past her, still holding Jama solidly by the arm.

  In the courtyard, women stood up to get a closer look at the boy.

  “Is this the orphan? Isn’t he a spit of his father!” “Miskiin, may Allah have mercy on you!” they called.

  The girl bounced along in front of Jinnow, her big eye constantly peering back at Jama.

  Jinnow reached her room. “Go now, Ayan, go help your mother,” she said, shooing away the girl, and pulled Jama in after her. A large nomad’s aqal filled the room, an igloo made of branches and hides. She caught Jama’s look of surprise and patted his cheek. “I’m a true bedu, could never get used to sleeping under stones, felt like a tomb. Come lie down and rest, son,” she said.

  The inside of the aqal was alight with brightly colored straw mats. Jama lay down obediently but couldn’t stop his eyes roving around. “Do you remember that you once stayed here with your mother? No, look how my mind is rotting, how can you remember, you couldn’t even sit up,” Jinnow chattered.

  Jama could remember something, the snug warmth, the light filtering through woven branches, the earthy smell, it was all imprinted in his mind from a past life. He watched Jinnow as she fussed around, tidying up her old-lady paraphernalia. She had the same high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and low-toned, grainy way of speaking as Ambaro, and Jama’s heart sank as he realized his mother would never be old like Jinnow.

  After a restless sleep, Jama ventured into the courtyard; the women carried on with their chores, but he could hear them whispering about him. He ran toward a leafless tree growing next to the compound wall, climbed its spindly branches, and sat in a fork high up. Leaning into the cusp, Jama floated over the roof and treetops, looking down like an unseen angel on the men in white walking aimlessly up and down the dusty street. The tree had beautiful brown skin, smooth and dotted with black beauty spots, like his mother’s had been, and he laid his head against the cool silky trunk. Jama rested his eyes but within moments felt tiny missiles hitting him. He looked down and saw Ayan and two little boys giggling. “Piss off! Piss off!” Jama hissed. “Get out of here!”

  The children laughed louder and shook the tree, making Jama sway and lose his grip on his perch. “Hey, bastard, come down, come down from the tree and find your father,” they sang, Ayan in the lead, with a cruel, gappy-toothed leer on her face.

  Jama waved his leg at that smile, hoping to smash the rest of her teeth in. “Who are you calling a bastard? You little turds, I bet you know all about bastards with your slutty mothers!” he shouted, drawing gasps from the women near him.

  “Hey, Jinnow, come and get this boy of yours, such a vile mouth, you would think he was a Midgaan, not an Aji. No wonder he was thrown into the streets,” said a long-faced woman.

  Jinnow, startled and ashamed, charged over to Jama and dragged him down. “Don’t do that, Jama! Don’t drag down your mother’s name.” She pointed toward her room and Jama slunk away.

  Inside the aqal, Jama cried and cried, for his mother, for himself, for his lost father, for Shidane and Abdi, and it released something knotted up and tight within his soul; he felt the storm leave his mind.

  Jinnow spent her days tending her date palms, selling fruit in the market near the dry riverbed that bisected the town, or weaving endless mats, while Jama appeared and disappeared throughout the day. With the men away grazing the camels, Jama spent his days on the streets to avoid the harsh chatter of the compound women who treated him like a fly buzzing around the room, swatting him away when they wanted to talk dirty. Their faces a bright cruel yellow from beauty masks of powdered turmeric, they dragged one another into corners, hands cupped around mouths, and in loud whispers languidly assassinated reputations. They drew shoes in fights as quickly as cowboys drew pistols.

  Clutching her brown, spindly fingers against the wall of the compound, Ayan would peer over and watch as Jama disappeared down the road. Ayan was the daughter of one of the younger wives in the compound and lived in a smaller room away from Jinnow. Jama would stone her every time she approached him, so now she just satisfied herself with staring at him from a distance, crossing and uncrossing her eyes, flapping her upturned eyelids at him. As a girl she was rarely allowed out, and Jama’s bad reputation within the compound and filthy mouth had slowly begun to win her admiration. She hoped to stare him into friendship but he had too long a memory for that and was still planning a revenge for the time she dared call him bastard. Jama slyly observed her daily routine of housework, child-minding, and standing around, one leg scratching the back of the other, and plotted her downfall. Ayan’s mother was a tall, shrewish woman with a missing front tooth, a neglected third wife who beat her children down with words and blows. In front of her mother, Ayan was a well-behaved, hardworking child but in private she was a gang leader and vicious fighter. Her troupe of scraggly infants would gather behind her after lunchtime and prowl around the compound, catching lizards by the tail, spying on older children and going through their belongings. If challenged, the younger children would take flight while Ayan fought the angry object of their snooping. Scratches and cuts formed patterns on her skin like the tattoos on a Maori warrior, her young face knocked into a jagged adult shape by the fists of her mother and cousins. Jama had no possessions to filch or secrets to hide, but to Ayan he presented an enigma, a strange, silent boy who had returned from a foreign land.

  Jama would sometimes see Ayan in the evening as the women gathered around the paraffin lamp to tell stories. Tales about the horrors some women were made to suffer at the hands of men, about the secret lovers some women kept, or about Dhegdheer, who killed young women and ate their breasts. Ayan would regularly be mocked as “dirty” and “loose” by the women and older children for being uncircumcised, she had been feverish with chicken pox when the Midgaan woman had made all the girls halal with her razor, and now her head drooped down in shame. Her stupid mistakes would also be recounted; she had once tried to open a lock with her finger and instead got it stuck.

  “I thought that is how people open locks!” Ayan wailed.

  “Served you right, that was Allah’s reward for your snooping,” rejoiced her mother. Jama’s favorite stories were about his grandmother Ubah, who traveled on her own as far as the Ogaden desert to trade skins, incense, and other luxuries despite having a rich husband. “What a woman. Ubah was a queen and my best friend,” Jinnow would sigh. All the storytellers claimed to have seen shape-shifters, nomads who at night turned into animals and looked for human prey in town, disappearing before daybreak and the first call to prayer. Ayan’s eyes would form frightened wide circles in the orange light, and Jama could see her trying to nestle next to her mother and getting pushed irritably away. Jama hoped that one of these shape-shifters would snatch Ayan away and take her out into the pitch-black night where shadows slipped in and out of alleys in which hyenas stalked alongside packs of wild dogs, hunting lone men together, ripping out the tendons from their fleeing ankles as they tried t
o run for their lives, their helpless screams piercing the cloistered night.

  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.”