Don't Tell Me You're Afraid (4 page)

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
we ran the race.

The gathering place was at the national monument at eleven o'clock; the sun was almost at its peak and it was hot as hades.

The course wound through the streets of the city to the stadium: Once we entered it, we would run a lap around the field, then cross the finish line.

There were three hundred of us. For twelve months it was all I'd been waiting for: Week after week, day after day, I had mentally retraced every meter, every curve; I had imagined every moment of the race, picturing myself entering the stadium and at the finish.

Still, last night's encounter with Ahmed, along with Alì's mood, had had an effect on me too.

So I wasn't able to give what I could have. I tried to keep to the edge of the group, I did everything I'd planned to do, but something inside me didn't respond as I had expected. A part of my brain kept thinking about the glitter of those icy green eyes when they looked at Alì.

A year. I had spent a year training and I wasn't able to give my best. I would never forgive myself.

The course was the usual one; Alì and I had run it a thousand times. The streets had been cleared of the few cars that normally traveled them and knots of vendors were gathered along the entire length of Jamaral Daud, selling water or refreshing juices, bananas and chocolate bars for a few shillings. With its trash cleared away, the avenue was unrecognizable.

Had it been any other day, I could have won.

But no. I came in eighth.

Alì finished one hundred and forty-ninth.

“You're better at biting than running,” I teased him afterward. He had also ended up in a pool of excrement: an open sewer. Realizing that he was behind, he had cut through a side street where trash and feces were dumped at night, ever since a bomb had ruptured the sewer system built by the Italians. The cesspool that day had spread over the entire width of the street. Alì had thought it was shallow but found himself in it up to his calves. Still, he had gained a lot of ground.

At home that night we celebrated.

Hooyo cooked kebabs of lamb tripe and entrails, which I was crazy about.
Kirisho mirish,
a spicy meat and rice dish, along with sweet sesame paste, was my favorite. We were happy; Aabe told a lot of jokes and made us all laugh.

Alì, on the other hand, ashamed of the stench that stuck to him, didn't even want to come out of his room. His brother Nassir had made him wash before going in, and afterward he refused to come out.

Every so often, when Said or Nassir called out, teasing him about the stink, Alì shouted something from the room, sniveling woefully. At that point we all chimed in.

“Leave me alone!” he yelled from his self-imposed isolation.

“Go on, come out and eat, Stinko!” Nassir kept at him, knowing he was making him even angrier.

“No, I'm never eating with you again,” Alì shouted.

“May a thousand pounds of sewage fall on your head,” Said piped up, and we all laughed uproariously. Alì didn't answer.

Something was bothering him.

The fact that Ahmed was one of the fundamentalists' militiamen had affected him deeply.

I'd told him that my brother Said was right not to trust Ahmed, but Alì had replied that Nassir was very close to Ahmed, so he couldn't be bad.

Since that day, however, his eyes would suddenly cloud over with sadness now and then.

I'd try to make him laugh, but he would soon lapse back into his reflections.

I didn't know what to do.

After that night, for several weeks he began to spend more and more time up in the eucalyptus. If we played
griir,
he got confused about the number of pebbles and lost; and he had always beaten all of us. When we played hide and seek, he always hid in the same places, and if someone pointed it out to him, he paid no attention. He didn't care about winning.

He stayed up in his dumb eucalyptus, thinking about who knows what.

I didn't recognize him anymore.

One afternoon, out of the blue, he told me that he was going to stop running and that he would become my coach.

“Why the heck should you be my coach?” I asked him as I laced up my shoes.

“You're faster than me. It's pointless for me to keep trying. I don't have an aptitude for running; I have to face it. But you do.” He was nibbling an ear of corn that Hooyo had cooked the night before.

“And that's why you've decided to be my coach?”

“Every athlete has a coach. If I can't be an athlete, then I want to be a coach.”

“So if I win I'll owe it all to you. . . .” I teased.

“No,” he replied seriously, “it's because you need someone to train you. You can't do it alone.” A pause. I raised my head and looked at him.

“Can't do
what
?” I asked.

“You can't become a champion.”

We were eight years old.

As usual, I didn't answer him. But from that day on I had a coach.

I might have lost a playmate on account of Ahmed, though I didn't want to admit it. But I had found myself.

After that day I turned into what I had always wanted to be: an athlete.

All thanks to Alì, without his even realizing it.

I hugged him tightly and we went out to run in the wind on that afternoon of boundless joy.

T
HEN
, on a morning like any other, which gave no sign of what was about to happen, while Hodan and I were still asleep, Aabe went out as usual with Yassin to go to work in the Xamar Weyne district.

The area was a distance away but very busy, full of people coming and going, an ideal place to do business. Hundreds and hundreds of vendors hawked their products to passersby from large and small stalls in every color of the rainbow. This was the Xamar Weyne market, a raucous madhouse where the sellers were almost as numerous as the buyers. Cotton, linen, sweaters, charcoal, American jeans, shoes, fruit, sandals, vegetables, incense, spices, chocolate . . . Each one peddled his specialty.

Yassin was two years younger than Aabe and even taller, over six feet. He looked older, though: He had more wrinkles around his eyes and on his brow, and his eyes always seemed sad. Hooyo said it was because he had suffered so much over the loss of his wife, the beautiful Yasmin, Alì's mother, who had died of cancer
when we were two years old. There was a framed photograph of her on a dresser in their room, and every time I went in there I was taken aback by how beautiful Yasmin was. The broad forehead, the big, elongated eyes, the same full lips that Alì had.

Every morning Aabe and Yassin left the house at five and didn't come home until around six in the evening, at sunset. They had two large stalls, Aabe's for clothes and Yassin's for vegetables.

“I hope you will never have to work as hard as I do, my little Samia,” Aabe, exhausted, always told me when I was little, before saying good night to me in the evening. I loved having him there close to me: Those moments were magical for me. I would lose myself in the scent of his aftershave and I was happy; I felt safe. Even his clothes had a smell. It was the smell of Aabe's clothes after a long day's work; I would have recognized it among thousands.

“If you can do it, so can I,” I told him.

“I'm doing it so that you won't have to.”

“Aabe,” I said once after thinking about it for a while, “how come you never complain about what you do? Omar Sheikh, our landlord, is always complaining about everything. Whenever he's here he spends all his time telling us about his hard luck.”

“Complaining only makes you keep doing what you don't like,” Aabe answered in his deep voice, as he ran a hand through his flowing black hair. He had always worn his hair long. Hooyo teased him, saying he acted like a woman and that's why he didn't have a beard either. “Beards are for fundamentalists,” he would tell her. “If you really don't like something, you just need to change it, my little Samia. I love my work, and I love it because I do it for you. This makes me happy.”

I stopped to think a little, then asked him: “Papa, aren't you ever afraid of the war?”

He turned serious. “You must never say you're afraid, my Samia. Never. Otherwise the things you're afraid of will seem big and they'll think they can beat you.”

That morning he and Yassin left together, as always. They had just crossed Jamaral Daud, right beyond the parliament, and had stopped at their friend Taageere's bar, a wooden shack in a small alley, to drink a
shaat
and shoot the breeze before work, as they did every day.

Suddenly, however, they heard gunshots.

A hundred yards away, from behind a six-story building, four or five Hawiye militiamen, affiliated with us Abgal, had appeared. They were looking for a Darod who, according to them, had stolen something, and they were shouting that he must have fled in that direction.

One of them spotted Yassin standing with Aabe in front of the bar and pointed him out to the others, and they all started running toward him.

Aabe and Yassin didn't even have time to think.

When the soldiers came closer, Alì's father realized what was about to happen and instinctively started to run away.

It all happened in an instant.

As soon as Yassin turned his back, one of the men opened fire, followed immediately by the others.

Aabe lunged to knock Yassin to the ground, clear of the barrage of bullets that had already riddled the wall a few inches from there.

Later they told us that Taageere stood there the whole time as if frozen, the two glasses of
shaat
in his hands, poised in midair.

Meanwhile, the gunfire was over as quickly as it had erupted.

The soldiers shouted something and, satisfied, disappeared around the corner as swiftly as they had materialized.

Aabe and Yassin turned, relieved, thinking they had come through it safely.

But when they tried to get up, they realized what had happened. Taageere was white as a sheet.

Aabe had been shot in his right foot.

He hadn't even been aware of it.

The blood had already formed a small pool.

Friendly fire had struck an Abgal in place of a Darod.

 • • • 

H
ODAN
CO
MPOSED
HER
SONGS
and then sang them.

She had a beautiful voice, like velvet. It was a little husky and low but at the same time clear enough to reach the highest notes. When she sang, her smooth, round, porcelain-doll face wore an astonished expression, as if she were always about to reveal something. I adored her. I wanted to be like her, to have her beauty, her voice. Besides that, the veils never looked as good on any other girl as they did on Hodan. The bright colors, yellow, red, and orange, lit up her face like a sudden blaze in a dense forest.

To mark the rhythm she would join her palms and tap her fingers together, like a shell in the Indian Ocean that continuously opens and shuts, following a steady tempo.

She sang in the traditional
buraanbur
form, though blended
with more modern music, in the style of her musical group, the Shamsudiin Band.

She composed her songs in our room, alone, or while we kids were in bed, with the
ferus
lit, waiting to fall asleep, enjoying the last laughs of the day.

At some point, every night, Hodan withdrew, pulled out her little notebook, and began writing. She wrote about all kinds of subjects, about what made her suffer and about what gave her joy.

I watched her closely, studying her smallest gestures. She and I, in fact, had always slept next to each other, ever since I was born, when she had just turned five. Our mattresses were placed at right angles along the side of the room nearest the door, just inside the entrance. And since birth I'd gotten used to falling asleep with her voice in my ears, growing slowly softer and softer, until fading off into a whisper.

Maybe that's why I always slept well and why, as everyone said, I was confident about what would happen tomorrow, thinking it would be better than today. It was because of Hodan's voice, which had accompanied me to sleep since I was born.

“I've given all my optimism to you,” she'd tell me.

Unlike me, Hodan was always worried; she always had something on her mind. She found peace only in the evening, when the
ferus
was turned off and she could go on whispering her songs about the war, about our family, about the future, about running, about Alì, about our father being shot, about the children we would one day have.

We always fell asleep hand in hand, our heads touching. As I held her hand, I felt her grip gradually loosen and become more gentle. And I realized that she relaxed as she sang.

I knew I was her first audience, and it filled me with pride. I felt she gauged her songs by my smiles; though the themes varied widely, they all spoke of one thing: the importance of freedom and the power of dreams.

On the night Aabe was injured, while he was in the hospital recovering from surgery, Hodan composed a song that compared him to a great winged horse.

She sang it in the middle of the room, sitting cross-legged on my brother Abdi's mattress.

Hooyo was with us too; they hadn't let her sleep at the hospital. The beds couldn't be occupied by relatives, since sick people or those wounded by mortars or gunfire were continually coming in. Small and composed, Hooyo sat on my sister Ubah's mattress, right in front of me, her feet flat on the ground, not cross-legged like us. Head in hands, her eyes were fixed on Hodan. She was lost in thought; her gaze drifted here and there.

Ubah had lit incense, and the strong, sweet odor filled the small room. The song said that our father would continue to fly as he had done up to that day, and that, flying, he would ferry us into adulthood. That his arms were as vigorous as the wings of a huge bird and his legs as sturdy as the trunks of ancient trees.

For some reason, what I've always remembered about that night was the tears that silently filled our big brother Said's eyes as he stared impassively ahead of him.

I got up and went over on tiptoe to wipe them for him.