The Tears of Dark Water (38 page)

“If you want to know what happened on the sailboat, I’ll tell you,” he said quietly. “I did it. I pulled the trigger. Are you happy now?”

Megan sank into her seat. “Okay,” she replied with a trace of sadness. “I can live with that. But I need you to tell me why. Were you intoxicated? Were you under duress? Did you have a psychotic episode? You could have made your escape and left the Parkers unharmed.”

He shook his head. “The reason doesn’t matter.”

Her eyes flashed. “You’re far too intelligent to believe that. If you were coerced or your capacity for rational action diminished, we could establish a defense to the murder charge.”

He stared at a dark spot on the table, an imperfection in the grain of the wood.

When the silence became uncomfortable, she said: “What’s going on here, Ismail? Why do I get the sense that I’m being manipulated?”

He looked up at her again and felt a flutter of déjà-vu. He needed her to trust him, just as he had needed Paul to trust him. Everything depended on it. “I can’t tell you the reason. Not yet. But I will tell you. I need you to accept that.”

She returned his gaze without blinking. “I’ll do that on one condition. I want to know how all of this started. I want access to your family. I want the jury to know who you really are.”

In an instant, Ismail’s guilt metastasized into shame. He thought of his relatives scattered across the globe. He was certain that all of them knew about his father’s death. The clan networks were like gossip chains, disseminating news almost as rapidly as the modern media, and far more personally. To them Adan was a hero and a martyr, a man who had made the ultimate sacrifice for his country. The last thing Ismail wanted to do was to tarnish his father’s honorable name.

He held his breath until he began to feel light-headed. Then he made his concession. “My father is dead. I’m certain my mother is, too. I have an uncle in Minneapolis, an aunt in London, and an uncle in Mogadishu. I suggest you talk to them.”

“What is the name of your uncle in Minneapolis?” Megan asked.

He spoke the name in a whisper: “Farah Said Ahmed.”

Yasmin

Middle Juba, Somalia

January 29, 2012

The Juba was low again, a latticework of water ribbons meandering between green banks, but at least it was still flowing. There had been times in the past year when the river had nearly disappeared into the sand. The rains of the
deyr
had brought an end to the worst drought in anyone’s memory, but by November they were gone and the heat had returned, parching the land again.

Yasmin knelt in the shade of a broad-limbed
higlo
tree and dipped her jug into the water. When it was full, she stood and strapped it to her back, looking out across the river toward the horizon. The desert was a patchwork of yellow earth and green scrub, broken by the occasional cluster of deep-rooted trees—feathery acacia, flat-topped
qudhac
, and majestic
damal
. The sky was a dusty blue and sprinkled with small clouds.

The village where she had lived for almost three years now was in the hinterlands of southern Somalia, equidistant from the port of Kismayo and the Kenyan border. It was a hardscrabble town of herdsmen and the merchants who served them, thriving in the good years when the rains came and the camels and goats and cattle grew healthy and fat and brought strong prices at the market, and struggling to survive when the rains failed and the livestock starved and the waters of the Juba slackened and grew brackish. It was worlds apart from urban Mogadishu and light-years from cosmopolitan Nairobi, where Yasmin had spent her early childhood.

“Are you finished?” Fatuma asked from her perch at the base of the
higlo
tree. “I’m hungry.”

Yasmin regarded her with a mixture of irritation and compassion. Fatuma was always in need of something to eat these days. She was eight months pregnant with Najiib’s child.

“
Ha
,” Yasmin said. “Yes. Let’s go.”

She rearranged the fabric of her
hijab
and helped Fatuma to her feet, leading her to the gate in the wall and the courtyard beyond. The house where Yasmin lived with Fatuma, Najiib’s first wife, and Jamaad, his
habaryaro
, or aunt on his mother’s side, was made of cinderblock and had a covered porch and a tile roof—rarities in a village mostly comprised of mud huts. But there the luxuries ended. The windows were open to the air. The concrete floors were only partially covered with rugs. The toilet was a hole in the ground with ceramic footrests. And meals were cooked on a camp stove.

Jamaad waved from the porch, beckoning Fatuma to sit with her while Yasmin prepared lunch.
How our fortunes have reversed
, Yasmin thought as she went to the kitchen and heated a pot of water. When Najiib brought her here years ago, she had been the privileged one, the object of his desire, and Fatuma had been shunted to the side, the wife who couldn’t make a baby. But then time had passed and Yasmin, too, had failed to produce a child. They had grown as close as sisters during the long months of their barrenness, vowing that if Allah smiled on one of them, they would never let it come between them. But then Fatuma had conceived and everything had changed. Suddenly, Yasmin had become the pariah, forced to serve the mother-to-be of Najiib’s son. On his last visit, Najiib had spoken it like a prophecy: Fatuma would give birth to a boy.

Yasmin put spaghetti in the pot, diced some vegetables, and sautéed them in a pan with
hawaash
spices and goat meat left over from yesterday’s dinner. As she worked, she tried to buoy her spirits by reciting poetry in her mind, as her mother had taught her to do.

Al-Shafi’i:
If in your heart you are content, then you are equal to those who possess the world.

Sa’di Shirazi:
No man has the ability to number his numberless blessings.

Rumi:
Keep silence, that you may hear from that Sun things inexpressible in books and discourses. Keep silence, that the Spirit may speak to you.

But God didn’t speak to her; the verses of the poets didn’t lift her up. Instead, as the minutes marched on and the aroma of Somali spices filled the air, she found herself slipping into the well-worn rut of despair. This life she was living was a lie in all of its particulars, a miserable shell of alienation and abuse. She was the prisoner of a man who had murdered her father and so many others in the name of the faith she so cherished. Her soul was in exile, her hope all but gone, its only remnant a tendril of memory, a few words spoken by her brother in the back of a technical on the first day of blood and fear: “
If they separate us, keep your phone
,” Ismail had whispered. “
I will find you.
”

She had held on to her mobile, just as he said, secreting it in her undergarments and hiding it from Najiib and Jamaad and Fatuma until she acquired a plastic bag with a watertight seal and found a place to bury it—in a seam of dirt between the roots of the
higlo
tree. Every month she rose in the middle of the night and recovered the phone, bringing it into the house and refreshing the battery with Jamaad’s charger. Each time she sent a text message to Ismail’s old number, praying he would reply. But her inbox was always empty. After years of silence, she imagined he was dead, but she continued the ritual because she had nothing better to do.

She had given thought to escaping many times. The danger, however, was immense. The Shabaab controlled all of the towns for a hundred kilometers in every direction. Their spies were everywhere; even the most humble beggar could be an informant. The roads, too, were crawling with Shabaab fighters, bandits, thieves, and now Kenyan soldiers notorious for taking liberties with Somali women. Even if she could manage to evade all of them, she would almost certainly succumb to the elements. Without a local’s knowledge of watering holes or an animal to provide milk, she would die of thirst in less than a week, assuming she wasn’t mauled by a lion or struck by a cobra. The Dadaab camps in Kenya were two weeks away by foot.

When she finished preparing lunch, she served the spaghetti and chutney with
chapatti
—Indian flatbread—to Jamaad and Fatuma on the porch and ate by herself across the yard in the shadow of one of the
higlo
tree’s overhanging limbs. The isolation gnawed at her, scavenged for stray scraps of joy like a vulture picking apart a carcass. She had always been social by nature. When she and Fatuma were friends, at least she had a companion. Now she was an outcast, no better than a servant.
Hooyo
, she thought, imagining her mother’s face,
if God honors those who keep the faith, why is Aabbe dead? Why am I here? Where are Ismail and Yusuf? Where are you?

“Yasmin,” Jamaad called from the porch, holding up an empty glass that had been filled with water. “I’m thirsty. Please get me something else to drink.”

Yasmin left her plate on the ground and fetched Jamaad a Coke from the refrigerator. Powered by a small generator, the fridge was one of the few modern conveniences they had in the house. When she handed Jamaad the bottle, the woman said to her: “I received a text from Najiib. He has promised to visit as soon as the baby is born.”

“Good,” Yasmin said, plastering a smile on her face and returning to her spot by the wall. How she hated the mask she had to wear to disguise the truth—that she loathed Najiib with all of her heart. When she met him, she had been a girl of seventeen with her father’s love for learning and her mother’s compassion for the poor. She had been chaste, uncorrupted by a man. Then in a single day Najiib had torn her world apart, defiling everything she considered good. Yet he didn’t hate her; he fancied her. And he wanted her to fancy him. How many times had he said that he wanted
her
to bear his son? He had turned her life into a wretched contradiction, and his return promised only suffering.

She could see it now: the joy on his face when he heard the baby’s cry, the presents he would give to Fatuma to reward her for her gift—gold jewelry and embroidered silk and Ray-Ban sunglasses and a new iPhone, the very icons of the West the Shabaab claimed to despise. Then after Fatuma was feted and asleep, he would come to Yasmin’s room and pour out his lust upon her, treating her like a common whore. He would leave her in pain, but he wouldn’t notice or care. She was whatever he wanted her to be. In Najiib’s world, he was his own plenipotentiary.

Allah was just a figurehead.

When night came, Yasmin made sure that Jamaad and Fatuma were comfortable before retiring to her room with her kerosene lantern. She owned only one book: a copy of the Quran in Arabic. She opened the volume and traced the flowing lines of the second sura, finding her favorite passage. She knew the words by heart, but she read them out loud like a prayer: “
Our Lord! Do not lay on us a burden greater than we can bear. Forgive us for our sins. Have mercy on us. You are our Guardian.
” Then she closed her eyes, turned out the lamp, and went to sleep without taking off her clothes.

Hours later, she woke again and listened carefully for sounds of movement in the house. Satisfied, she rose in the darkness and crossed the floor barefoot, slipping silently out the front door and across the courtyard. She couldn’t use the gate; it was padlocked. Instead, she went to the
higlo
tree and pulled herself up onto one of the limbs. She sat perfectly still, all of her senses attuned to the night sounds she knew so well—the cicadas, frogs, and nocturnal birds, and the soft murmuring of the river. She heard nothing amiss. The village was quiet.

In time, she slid across the limb and dropped down on the far side of the wall. She reached between the roots and uncovered the bag with her mobile phone. After powering on the unit, she saw that the battery had just enough life to find a signal. Her heartbeat increased when she checked her messages. As always she was disappointed. The last message in her inbox was from her mother the day before the school attack. She had texted Khadija many times over the years but never received a reply. Her mother’s silence meant one of two things: either she was dead or she had disappeared into the underground to escape the Shabaab.

Yasmin went to the river’s edge and sat on the bluff, looking at the stars. She saw Orion in the west and the Southern Cross to the south. She remembered the many nights her father had taken her and her brothers up on the roof in Mogadishu and taught them the constellations. “Your ancestors once read the heavens like you read a map,” Adan had said. “It’s a skill you should have. You never know when you’re going to need it.”

She could have spent all night there in the company of creation. But she stayed only five minutes before typing a message to her mother:
Hooyo, I’m alive. I need your help.
And one to Ismail:
Are you out there? I’m still waiting.

Then she climbed the
higlo
tree and returned inside to charge the phone.

Megan

Minneapolis, Minnesota

February 2, 2012

The winter air felt like dry ice on Megan Derrick’s skin. It was as if the gunmetal sky had frozen solid around her, drawing all the warmth from her body. She huddled deeper into her parka, pressing her gloved hands into the pockets and wincing at the sting of the wind on her cheeks.
Why does anyone live here?
she wondered as she waited for the car to arrive.
Why did the Somalis—a desert people—choose this city to establish the largest diaspora community in North America?