Don't Tell Me You're Afraid (2 page)

T
HE
WAR
NEVER
MATTER
ED
much to me and Alì. Let them shoot each other in the street; it had nothing to do with us. Because the war couldn't take away the only thing that was important: what he was to me and what I was to him.

War can take away other things, but not that. For example, it took the sea away from me. The first thing I smelled when I was born was the smell of the sea, which traveled straight from the coast all the way to the courtyard of the house, the saltiness that still clings to my hair and skin, the moisture that permeates every molecule of air.

Yet I touched the sea only once. I know it's water, that if you jump into it you'll get all wet, like when you go to the well, but until I do it I don't believe it.

Sometimes I touched the sand, even though I shouldn't have. Every now and then Alì and I, taking our time as we ran through the narrow alleys that only he knew, would approach the sea's vast expanse in the afternoon. We'd stop at the side of the big road that
runs from north to south along the entire length of the shoreline and, hidden behind a truck or an armored tank, would stay there for hours watching the waves move back and forth, teasing the sunlight that reflected everywhere. We were dying to dive in. That immensity was there in front of our eyes and we couldn't go in it.

Once or twice, however, Alì became impatient. I could tell by the way he kept rubbing his hands together without letting up. He looked around, took me by the arm, and told me to run. Just that one word: “run.” Those times we crossed the big road and sat on the sand. Crazy! They could shoot us: The beach is one of the militia's favorite spots; it's wide open; the rifles' bullets have a straight shot.

But we'd pretend we were normal kids who didn't think about such things and could just play.

The sand was hot and fine like specks of gold. We didn't see a soul nearby. We started tussling around, trying to get the sand all over each other, in our black curly hair, in our clothes, everywhere. After he rolled me over two or three times, Alì laughed like a madman; he looked like a lunatic. I had never seen him like that. He opened his mouth and displayed his big white teeth, saying, “You look like a meatball covered with corn flour!” and he went on laughing with that funny face of his: flat nose, big fleshy lips and small, close-set little eyes.

“You're a corn flour–covered meatball!” he repeated.

I tried to squirm free but I couldn't; he was too strong for me, even though he had no muscles: tall as a string bean and all bones. He kept me pinned on the sand while I tried to wriggle loose, pretending he wanted to kiss me on the mouth as he leaned forward, stretching his head out like a turtle. I turned my face
right and left, disgusted, but when he got close, instead of kissing me Alì said “Boo!” and blew sand in my eyes.

I hated him.

One time, only once, gripped by a power greater than us, we slowly approached the water. One small step after another, almost without realizing it.

It was a beautiful expanse, gigantic, like a sleeping elephant breathing deeply. The long waves made an amazing whoosh that resembled a voice; they sounded like the small shells in the glass jar that Aabe had given Hooyo when they were engaged, which she kept hidden in a wooden cabinet in their room. We would go pick up the jar and turn it over slowly from one side to the other to hear the voice of the sea.

Shhhh
.
Shhhh
.

We moved closer and dipped our hands and feet in the water. I stuck my fingers in my mouth. Salty.

That night, after that approach, I dreamed about waves. I dreamed of losing myself in that vastness, letting it cradle me, drifting up and down according to the water's mood.

Well, war, as I said, took the sea away from me. But on the other hand, it made me want to run. Because my desire to run is as deep as the sea. Running is my sea.

In any case, if Alì and I always pretended that the war didn't exist, it's because we were the children of Yusuf Omar, my father, and Yassin Ahmed, Alì's father. They too have been friends since the day they were born, and they too grew up together in the village of Jazeera, south of the city. They attended the same school and their fathers also worked together, in the period of the Italian colonists. Together our two fathers learned some proverbs in that
language from their two fathers.
Non fare oggi quello che puoi fare domani,
“Don't do today what you can do tomorrow.” And
Tutto il mondo è paese,
“The world is the same wherever you go.”

Aiutati che Dio t'aiuta,
“God helps those who help themselves.”

Another saying they learned from them is
Cascassero sulla tua testa mille chili di merda molle molle,
“May a thousand pounds of runny shit fall on your head,” with all its variants, which was a phrase their fathers' Italian boss always used to say, back when they worked at the port, unloading containers. One day a container packed with manure had suddenly opened up and the boss had been inundated by that “rain” from above. Since then things had gone very well for him, but even so he'd started using that expression whenever he felt like swearing.

Another proverb said,
Siamo tutti figli della stessa patria,
“We're all children of the same country.” This one is a favorite of Aabe and Yassin: best friends whom nothing will ever come between.

Like us.

“Can anything ever break us apart?” Alì and I wondered on those sweltering, brutally hot afternoons when he helped me climb the eucalyptus and we took shelter in the coolness of the leaves for half a day, talking about the future. Staying up there in the eucalyptus was wonderful; in place of the real world, we concocted one in which only we two and our dreams existed.

“No!” we told each other in turn. And then we made the gesture swearing to be blood brothers: We kissed our linked index fingers in front of our mouths twice, reversing right and left. Nothing and no one could come between us. We would have bet anything, even our lives.

But that eucalyptus was also Alì's favorite spot where he went
to hide by himself. For example, in the afternoon when he didn't want to learn to read.

Although Hodan was five years older than me, in fact, every morning she and I went to school together, to the Madrasa Musjma Institute, a district comprising primary, middle, and secondary classes. Alì didn't come with us; his father never had the money to allow him to study. He attended first grade at the public institution, but then the school was destroyed by a grenade and he hasn't gone back since then. After that unhappy day classes were held outdoors, and it wasn't easy to find teachers willing to risk a bomb on their heads.

The only way to learn was to enroll at the private school. Our father was able to afford it for a few years, thanks to many sacrifices, whereas since the beginning of the war Yassin has always had trouble selling his fruit and vegetables.

In Mogadishu it was said that few people wanted to buy from a filthy Darod
.

Alì has always been touchy about the fact that we knew how to read and write. It made him feel inferior. His clan was in effect viewed that way in our neighborhood, and that was one of the things that proved it.

Every now and then we tried to teach him the letters of the alphabet, but after a while we gave up.

“Alì, try to focus,” Hodan told him; she's always had a tendency to act like a schoolmarm, a little mother.

He tried hard, but it was too difficult. Learning to read was a long process; you couldn't attempt it in the afternoon, sitting in the courtyard at a small table that Aabe and Yassin used for playing cards, under a sun that was still hot and made you want only
to have fun. The only one who experienced anything like fun was Hodan, who played the teacher and made me and Alì be her pupils. I was always the good student, and he was the one who didn't pay attention.

“I can't,” Alì would say. “It's too hard. Besides, I don't care about learning! Being able to read is useless!”

I had to play the part of the schoolmate who wanted to help him; otherwise Hodan would get mad. “Come on, Alì. It's not so difficult; even I learned how. Look, these are the vowels:
a
,
e
,
i
,
o . . .”
I tried to encourage him.

He'd run away. It was hopeless. He'd stick it out for ten minutes until Hodan, at the beginning of the class, started reading a passage from a book. When it was his turn to try to read, he made up any excuse to disappear. Those times, when Hodan insisted and made him angry, Alì would climb the eucalyptus and stay there.

His eucalyptus. His favorite spot.

One afternoon, after arguing with his brother Nassir, he climbed up to the top and stayed there for almost two days. No one was able to get him to come down; no one else could climb all the way up there. Nassir tried every way he could to persuade him, but there was no way. Alì came down only the second night, weakened by hunger.

After that we started calling him “monkey.” Only a monkey like him could make it up there to the top. He'd rather be called that than learn how to read.

Anyway, Alì always acted uppity, but he was slower than me, even if he was a boy. He was stronger—if we fought he beat me—but he was slower.

When he wanted to make me angry, he said I was a
wiilo,
a
tomboy, and that was the only reason I ran so fast. He said I was a boy who'd been born in the body of a girl, that I was a know-it-all snot nose just like the boys, and that when I got big I'd grow whiskers like his father, Aabe Yassin. I knew it; there was no need for him to tell me: I knew I was a tomboy and that when people saw me running without veils, without the
qamar
and the
hijab,
wearing only shorts and a T-shirt bigger than I was, since I was thinner than an olive branch, they thought that I was not a perfect daughter of the Koran.

But in the evening, after supper, when the adults enjoyed making us compete in the courtyard for a scoop of sweet sesame paste or a chocolate
angero,
a crepe, I showed him. The courtyard was the center of life for all families; with the war it was best to leave the house as infrequently as possible.

After Hooyo Dahabo, with the help of my sisters, had cooked supper for everyone on the
burgico,
the brazier as big as a whole cow, and after we had finished eating what there was—usually bread and vegetables or rice and potatoes, and every once in a while a little meat—Aabe Yusuf and Aabe Yassin prepared the track for us.

Our older brothers and sisters cheered while Alì and I, posed like champions, bent over at the starting line, crouching down with our hands on the ground. We even had starting blocks, which Aabe had built by taking apart two wooden watermelon crates.

For the lines that marked the lanes, Said and Nassir, our older brothers, had to drag their feet from the end of the courtyard to the earthen wall, about thirty meters, outlining a turnaround and tracing a course back to the starting point.

I always won.

Alì hated me, but in the end I almost always shared the thing I love most in the world, my sweet sesame, with him—there's nothing I love more than sweet sesame paste. But first I'd make him promise not to call me
wiilo
anymore. If he agreed, I gave him half.

On those summer evenings, when the air finally cooled down a little, after the races Hodan and I would play
shentral
. Those were beautiful, relaxing days, when we all forgot about the war.
Shentral
was played by drawing a bell on the ground and then writing the numbers one to nine in it. You tossed a pebble and it had to land on the bell. Our brothers were playing
griir
instead, sitting on the ground and making stones fly between their hands.

Every now and then on those drawn-out, breezy evenings, Ahmed, a friend of Alì's big brother Nassir, would join us. Ahmed was seventeen, like Nassir and Said. To me and Alì he seemed very grown up, and to me and Hodan he looked handsome and unattainable. Ahmed had an olive complexion and light eyes, uncommon in Somalia; those green eyes gleamed in the moonlight and made his gaze seem all the more bold.

Once we asked him why his eyes were different from everyone else's; he made the gesture of having sex—one hand forming a circle while his index finger moved in and out—and told us that his grandfather must be one of the Italians who had fooled around with the black girls. Nassir and Alì burst out laughing. Not my brother Said; he gave him his usual stern look and shook his head.

Said didn't get along well with Ahmed, unlike Nassir, who idolized him. Maybe he saw him as a rival because of his friendship with Nassir, or maybe he just didn't like him; he always had misgivings about him, saying that there was something in those light eyes that he didn't trust. Alì never got too close to Ahmed
either. He often stared at him, studying him, but he kept away from him. Usually, when Hodan and I played
shentral,
Alì stayed near his father and Aabe, who argued every night at cards, staring at Ahmed cautiously from a distance.