Black Mamba Boy (27 page)

Joe opened the door of the jeep and pulled Jama and Liban out with him, screaming back at the deputy in his own language. Joe took charge now that they were in Palestine, walking them toward a British army canteen he knew from his boxing days. Jama was fearful of the reception they would get from the Palestinians but all they saw were a few hunched men leading heavily laden donkeys. To the side of the road, Joe saw the walls of an orchard and peered over. He threw Jama and Liban over the top and then jumped over the high wall as if it were a chicken coop. Inside, the orchard was a sight worthy of paradise, with bright globes of nectar hanging heavily from green trees. Jama felt as if he had not tasted an orange in centuries. They ravished the trees, squatting in the cool, fragrant shade and gorging themselves. The sticky juice ran all over their arms and chests, seared their lips, and attracted bees, but it was worth it. Before they could doze, they heard the orchard gate scrape open and an old man’s lamentful mutterings; they quickly fled back over the wall.

When they reached the canteen, a Palestinian chef raced over to them and embraced Joe wholeheartedly, without any of the bigotry Jama had expected. Joe threw his heavy arm over the Arab’s shoulder and led him away to talk quietly. When they returned, the chef asked Jama and Liban if they had really worked as galley boys on British ships, and they convinced him with enthusiastic tall tales. The chef offered them work in the kitchen.

Joe held the top of Jama’s head in his massive palm. “Petit garçon, you have no problem now, good pay, good food, Allah rewards the kind,” he said, kissing Jama on the cheeks before pulling money from his pocket and shoving it into their hands, “Take, take, merci, merci.”

Jama and Liban weakly resisted before accepting. Joe stayed for a last meal with them before wandering away with old acquaintances and disappearing into a lorry. He gave them a thumbs-up before zooming off into the distance and returning to his wife and daughter. Jama felt as if a mantle had been pulled off his back. As darkness fell, Jama and Liban grew afraid; they were two African boys in a congregation of Arab men and they had lied to them.

“What will happen tomorrow when they realize we don’t know what we’re doing?” asked Liban looking over his shoulder.

“I don’t know, but we’ve already lied, they’re going to be angry.”

The chef cheerfully brought them dinner and laid down canvas sheets in the storeroom for the night. “See you bright and early, boys; I need the best of you two.” Jama and Liban smiled and nodded at the chef, pretended to bed down but instead they sat up, waiting for the dawn. When the first slivers of light were visible through the barred windows, Jama and Liban grabbed their meager belongings and ran away. They were afraid of the Arab soldiers but more important, they had not left home to work in a canteen in a Palestinian border town and their destiny demanded another throw of the dice. They avoided the road, walking along the dunes, just keeping the stretch of tarmac in sight. They had made a mistake in not bringing food and water, and by midday they needed to rest under a tree.

“You only see a dead man sitting under a tree,” panted Liban. The gravity of their situation was beginning to dawn on Jama when a group of dark men appeared in the distance.

“Police, police!” hissed Liban. “Quick, behind the tree!”

Jama and Liban each nudged the other, believing their
harsh breathing would give them away, but it was the banging of their heartbeats that seemed so loud. They could hear footfalls and voices a few meters away; the language sounded strange to Jama, guttural and accusatory, and it took him a few moments to recognize it as Somali. He poked his head out and saw Bootaan, Rooble, Samatar, Keynaan, and Gaani from the apartment in Alexandria walking past, arguing among themselves.

Jama ran out after them. “Waryaa! Waryaa! Wait for us!” he yelled.

The men looked back in shock before falling about in laughter. “Would you look at them? You look like jinns,” laughed Rooble, picking leaves out of Jama’s hair. “What happened to you?” he asked.

“We got jailed in Port Said and they brought us here,” said Jama, delighted. It had been a deep worry to him that no one knew where they were, that Bethlehem would never know what had become of him.

“Where are you going now?” asked Gaani of them, as if they were crazy children.

Jama and Liban looked toward each other. “We don’t know,” they said in unison. The older men, older only by a few months or years, tutted and shook their heads. “First get to Gaza. There is a Somali man always at the bus stop, Musa the Drunk, he will find you. Tell him to put you on the bus for Sarafand. In Sarafand there are Somali men working for the British. One of them is your people, Liban, and one yours, Jama, but they will all give you money and then you can go where you like,” counseled Samatar.

“Yes, that’s right, that’s what you should do,” agreed the others.

They pointed out the way to Gaza and then turned back
toward Sinai. Jama and Liban followed the route the men had cursorily pointed out. Most Somalis avoided sharing the precise routes and tricks that they hoped to benefit from themselves, as they did not want to be beaten to a ship, and careless words might put border guards on their trail. They turned away from the road when they heard an army lorry approaching, but it was traveling so fast it was upon them in seconds. It slowed down beside them and Joe Louis stuck his head out the passenger window, squinting in disbelief. “Jama? Liban? Garçons? Where you walking to?”

Jama and Liban raced each other to the window to explain their predicament. Jama forced his voice over Liban’s. “He was a very bad man, Jow, we woke up in the morning, worked for him and then he sent us away, he wanted to give the work to his Arab friends.”

Joe kissed his teeth. “So where you want to go?” he asked.

“Gaza,” replied Liban, annoyed that Jama was doing all the talking. Joe pulled them into the lorry and took over the wheel from his Ferengi companion; he rushed them to the Gaza bus station, tearing past the checkpoints in the powerful and unquestionable army vehicle. Liban slept next to Jama, his head thrown back in exhaustion, while Jama massaged his painful feet and reveled in the luxury of being driven. The bedu walking along the road, dragging their donkeys behind them, looked infinitely, hopelessly poor in comparison. Joe drove at dangerous speed but was a born driver, an equal match for any hazard the road jinns threw up; he drove with one hand, his face relaxed and content, staring at the open road. At the bus station, with a paternal slap on their cheeks, he disappeared for the last time.

As Samatar had said, Musa the Drunk quickly found them. They shared with him the same mishmash of features, an awkward
alchemy of eyes, noses, mouths, hair textures, and skin tones that belonged to different continents but somehow came together. Their faces were passports inscribed with the stamps of many places but in their countenances was something ancient, the variety of those who went wandering and peopled the earth. Musa was completely incongruous in the quiet bus station, a shabby middle-aged Somali man, barefoot and balding, with the sharp smell of alcohol emanating from somewhere about his person.

“My sons, my sons,” Musa slurred, staggering with alarming speed toward them, shamelessly scratching his balls before grabbing them in a fevered embrace. Jama and Liban were embarrassed by him; they looked terrible already, but his company gave their appearance another level of seediness and destitution. Musa, whose thick ribs stuck out from a soiled, buttonless shirt, was lonely and talkative, the poster boy of failed migration. He spoke little Arabic after all his years in Palestine and had no interest in what the locals thought of him. After listening to their story, Musa ushered them to the stop for the Sarafand bus, where they sat on a bench, stinking in the sun, Musa talking loudly and obscenely: “I’ve had her”; “I’ve done her”; “He wants me.”

Jama and Liban cringed beside him and feared he would attract the police to them, but the Palestinians ignored him completely. Jama gave Musa money to buy musakhan from a nearby vendor and he scuttled off, to their relief. They took all the deep breaths they could before he returned and brought his miasma back. Sitting with him depressed Jama. As Musa continued to talk Jama could see the remnants of what had been a sharp, witty mind, but it had been pickled in gin and blunted by isolation.

Musa told them how he had ended up in Gaza. “I have worked for the British all my life, I was their donkey, but most of the time a happy donkey. I learned how to read and write English. I got a good wage, lived in nice quarters, had a household back in Somaliland, but they sacked me, my wife divorced me, and I have stayed in this bus stop for some years now. Whenever I want to leave, I will just take one of these buses.” As Jama listened he could see his own life taking Musa’s terrible trajectory, see himself forever poised to try the next place, only to belatedly grasp that the good life was not there. Jama looked at Musa and realized that not even a madman would have left everything he had on the advice of a ghost.

“You can’t force your fate,” mused Musa.

“Come with us to Sarafand,” offered Liban, but Musa shook his head silently, adamant that he had business in Gaza.

Jama started to question his own journey. He had spent all the savings his mother had left him, was living on what charity others gave him in a strange hostile land, and had no realistic hope that he would ever become a sailor. The bus came while Jama was in this funk, and he boarded it simply because he had nothing else to do. Musa ran alongside the bus, waving and banging the window, but Jama didn’t wave back.

“What a fool,” Jama sneered.

“Oh, leave him be, poor man doesn’t know today from tomorrow.”

“That’s his own fault.”

“No, that was his fate. Who knows, it could be ours.”

I would rather die, thought Jama. He was in a belligerent mood, a Shidane mood, his patience and optimism exhausted.

“You Ajis always think everything is owed to you.”

“What?”

“Deep down, you’re surprised when things don’t fall into your lap,” Liban persisted.

“You don’t know what I’ve been through, Liban, nothing has ever fallen into my lap!”

“It has, think about it. You have a strong clan behind you, someone wherever you go will give you food and water, will think you’re important enough to milk their camels for.”

“Liban, shut up, what camels are you talking about? From the age of six I slept on the streets in Aden with any passing maniac liable to drop a rock on my head.
You
had a father watching over you, a mother, sisters, cousins.”

Liban stared at Jama, lightning in his eyes. “Yes, I had a father, a father who could only watch as my mother was beaten up by an Aji, for a goatskin of water she had walked miles for!”

“Ooleh! Shut up, you two!” yelled the bus driver. Liban moved clumsily to a seat at the back of the bus.

“Suit yourself,” yelled Jama.

Sarafand was a town holding its breath; within a year it would be a ghost town, with stray dogs sleeping on mattresses and storing bones in the deserted kitchens. If only a place could speak, or howl, or bark a warning. In May 1947 the women of Sarafand collected olives, gave birth, drew water from the well, and arranged marriages as they had done for centuries on their native soil, the soil in which their mothers, fathers, and stillborn infants were held. But Sarafand held a secret. After the harvest and winter rains, a rolling black barrel filled with explosives and fuel would trundle along the main dirt path and stop outside the beyt al-deef, the guesthouse for strangers. After the blast, Jewish men would come with machine guns and
order everyone to leave, destroying the old mudbrick homes with grenades.

The sprawling British garrison was the only clue to the coming devastation. Jama and Liban waited sullenly outside this garrison for the Somali askaris that Samatar had described to them. “I’m sorry that happened to your mother,” Jama finally said.

“I shouldn’t have shouted at you, brother.” Liban held out his hand. Jama took it and shook it hard.

They spotted the askaris late in the afternoon, three Somali men in their thirties and forties in tidy uniforms. The askaris knew the procedure; they each gave a pound to the boys, and Jama’s clansman walked them to where the other Somali worked. The clansman’s name was Jeylani, and like the others he repaired shoes, holsters, and other leather goods for the British soldiers; he was a former nomad who had acquiesced to this unclean but profitable work. Jeylani had been taught to work leather by Mahmoud, the Yibir man they were about to meet.

Jeylani was not impressed by Jama and Liban’s escapades. “Go home, boys.
You
look intelligent, I know you speak good Arabic, but don’t waste your lives being pushed around in Arab lands. Go home, there is nothing for you here, there is going to be nothing but violence. My advice is to head into Jordan, then Arabia, do your pilgrimages and then get a boat home. Every week I see boys like you fleeing from God knows what.”

Jama listened carefully to what their elder was saying and nodded in agreement, but Liban walked on ahead with his wide, optimistic strides, certain that he would never return to Somaliland a poor man. Mahmoud was a gentle, thin man with deep wrinkles across his forehead, who poured tea for them
and asked how they had found him. He smiled knowingly at mention of Musa the Drunk, and was quick to give his share of the langaad, tipping Liban with an extra pound as Jeylani had done with Jama.

Mahmoud took a deep breath and said bismillah before biting into a slab of bread and meat. “I was just telling these boys to go home, to stop wasting their time here,” Jeylani said.

Mahmoud waggled his head. “Oh, they won’t stop until they have tried and exhausted their luck. I didn’t either, only after the seventh failed attempt to cross to Port Said did I give up.” Mahmoud laughed. “Each time I walk, they pick me up, I walk, they pick me up; my feet were cut to shreds!” he said, lifting up his black army boots. “If you two are desperate to get to Egypt and have better luck than me, I will tell you everything I know, no one knows that route better than me.”