The Orchard of Lost Souls (16 page)

A child runs a metal cup along the bars of the window but Kawsar doesn’t look. Unknown children have begun to peek in; they are tentative, unsure if the rumours of a witch who never leaves
her house are true. They catcall through the bars and run away, spit and throw pebbles at the window. They are reincarnations of all the children who are begotten to harass old women, a fresh
regiment of them born in every generation to extinguish the will to live in the already despairing; yet they are condemned in their own way, to always be eight years old with big, new teeth
cramming their mouths, their hearts brimming with confused spite and fear. She does not believe they are her neighbours’ children – they could not have turned against her so easily;
they have to be children from other quarters, who do their mischief far from home and run away before their mothers miss them.

She remembers the widow in rags who lived in a wooden shack behind her childhood home, her garrulousness in spite of the isolation in which she lived, the little boys who taunted and threw
stones at her, thinking the muttering was a sign of madness or possession. The only thing that possessed her and now Kawsar are memories, scenes from infancy to the last few days rising up
unbidden.

‘Naayaa,
Kawsar, let us in!’ Dahabo bangs the door.

‘Open it!’ Kawsar calls quickly to Nurto in the kitchen.

Nurto speeds to the front, her hands covered in tomato flesh, her bare feet making a slapping, sliding noise. She flings the door open and spins back to the kitchen, stubbornly avoiding
Kawsar’s eyes.

Dahabo bends down to kiss Kawsar’s forehead. ‘Look at all these papers in your window.’ Dahabo points above her head.

‘They are offerings, prayers. Don’t you know that I am the local saint.’ There are maybe fifteen chewing gum and lollipop papers rolled thin and prodded through the wire mesh
as if her room is a saint’s shrine.

‘Little scoundrels! They have nearly torn the damn thing apart!’

‘Let them have their fun.’

Dahabo pulls out those wrappers she can reach. ‘You know that the curfew has been brought forward to four in the afternoon now, while it is still bright outside?’

‘When did they say that?’

‘Yesterday, announced it in the market before we shut up.’

‘And what reason did they give?’

Dahabo scrunches up the papers in her hand. ‘From what people are saying in the
suuq
it looks like the NFM will be attacking the cities before the month is out.’

‘That is just talk, people have been saying it for years.’

Dahabo sits on the edge of the bed. ‘No, Kawsar, it’s different now. There are rebels rising against him in every region. If he goes down he will take the country with him,
he’ll want all of us buried alongside him, like one of those pharaohs in the Kitab. My daughters are panicked, they want to get their children out,’ she says quietly.
‘Jawahir’s husband has arranged visas for us all to join him in Jeddah.’

Kawsar doesn’t trust her ears and asks her to repeat what she just said; again that ‘us’ lands on her like a small incendiary. ‘Why do you have to go?’ Kawsar asks,
almost dumbfounded.

Dahabo turns her face to meet Kawsar’s eyes. ‘What would be left of me without them?’

Kawsar will not let her go without a fight, without laying claim. She will scream, scatter her possessions on the floor and rend her garments. ‘And what will be left of me without
you?’

Dahabo holds Kawsar tenderly by the chin. ‘Come with us. Leave this box prison behind and come with us. You are my family too.’

Kawsar imagines the one-bedroom flat in Jeddah, the mattresses stowed against the wall during the day, the mess and rush of children, arguments between three or four generations echoing from the
kitchen. She cannot spend her last months as silent and unwelcome as a toad in an outhouse, looking out on all of that.

‘Can’t I just have you, Dahabo?’

‘You have me, but what can I do?’

‘Stay. Don’t let anyone chase you out.’

Dahabo exhales and sinks down deeper into the mattress. ‘Remember Asiya from college?’

‘What of her?’ Kawsar remembers the girl she had bullied in class, a bundle of bad teeth, bad hair, bad clothes who had encroached on their friendship.

‘Not one of her children remain with her, either dead, missing, in jail or with the NFM. We will all be like that soon.’

‘I am already like that, Dahabo. Don’t ask me to sympathise with her.’

‘I am afraid. I am afraid to wake up in the morning, to think about what will happen next week, next month, next year. I feel frayed, I cannot hold myself together anymore.’ She
beats her heart with four fingers.

‘I will hold you together, come live with me. I will tell Nurto to leave.’

‘My children,’ Dahabo says firmly before putting her shoes on. ‘I can’t be separated from them.’

They look at each other long and hard before Dahabo silently leaves the bungalow.

‘Stupid. Stupid. Old. Woman.’ Kawsar hits the heel of her fist against her head with every word. She doesn’t recognise the person she is becoming: an old crone who can’t
admit that her time is over, that children and grandchildren must come first. What was she thinking? Demanding that Dahabo stay behind with her, two old women counting each other’s grey
hairs, is that what she wants? Shameless and unnatural, that’s all it is. Next, when she hears laughter behind her back, will she be placing curses? Casting evil eyes? Wishing misfortune on
those that deny her or have their families around them? So this is how old women become witches – just one or two tragedies and green poison pours out of them.

Kawsar takes one reptilian breath an hour, the distant sun beating down on her head, her yellow eyes swivelling in the hollows of her skull, cold brown blood curdling in the
dry furrows of her veins. She has lost count of how many pills she has pushed down her gullet, but it is enough to mute the pain, enough to strip her vision of its loud Technicolor until her room
appears monochromatic and brooding through the thin slits of her pupils. She presses her palms into her eyelids and replaces the torpor of her life with shooting amber stars and exploding electric
galaxies. She learnt to do this as an indolent little girl, whiling away dead time by voyaging through the quiet, almost-black world behind her eyes. She has not aged much as a soul, still thinks
too much, loses herself to dreams and nightmares, her body hiding – no, trapping – what is real and eternal about her, that pinprick of invisible light in this dark shroud of hers. She
is doomed to beat about, fluttering against her skin, desperate for release into the world, as frantic as a firefly in a child’s jar.

Release. That is all she has ever wanted. At one point she thought she had found it. Sitting on the low branch of a strange tree along the River Juba, crocodiles’ eyes peering at her over
the scum of the water, twenty-foot palm trees alive with a chorus of black-tailed monkeys, hippos yawning downstream, and thousands of butterflies emerging from cocoons above her head, their
creased purple wings stirring the afternoon air, Kawsar could feel light streaming through her. She was open, skinless, born to witness this everlasting moment. Farah had searched the car for his
camera, tried to name the butterflies, to explain their presence on this particular tree, but she had covered his mouth and told him just to watch, to feel; she wanted them to be as mute and
ecstatic as those newborn butterflies.

Kawsar’s eyelids unstick and light filters through her stubby lashes. It might be sunrise or four in the afternoon, unmoored in the undulating waves of time she just
opens her eyes and accepts what she is told.

Nurto leans over the bed. ‘Dahabo brought these things for you.’ She places the basket beside Kawsar on the bed.

‘Why didn’t she wake me?’

Nurto shrugs and turns back to the kitchen.

‘Listen when I’m talking to you, you little whore.’

Nurto stops short at the insult and slides her eyes back towards Kawsar, the rest of her body immobile.

‘Take this rubbish back to the kitchen.’ Kawsar grabs the basket and skims it across the floor, upsetting its contents – dates and mincemeat set in ghee – over the dusty
cement.

‘Have you lost your mind, old woman? Throwing good food over the floor for me to sweep up. You think I’m your slave or something?’ Nurto snatches one of the handles, shoves the
basket against her hip and slams the door behind her.

‘Bitch,’ Kawsar spits out.

Behind that green door she doesn’t see Nurto but Dahabo.

It is such a distant thing to do; as if they barely know each other she has left a basket and skulked away. This behaviour from a woman whose birthing sheets she had washed and who had washed
hers in return. What next? They would need to make appointments to take tea like the English women used to. The old Dahabo would have nudged her awake or sat on the bed and just started talking.
What good was a basket without conversation? Had she become a beggar overnight? What need of alms had she who had once had Dahabo’s own mother as a servant in her family home?

Kawsar’s face flushes with anger. The saliva in her mouth is bitter and cleaves to her gullet; she finishes the water left in the cup on the bedside table.

She wants to throw herself out of the bed and bar the door, nailing planks across it until it is impassable, a warning and rebuke to those who pity her, who dare mistake her for a beggar, a
destitute, a woman without name or reputation.

Darkness spreads over her eyes like black oil. She has woken up with tears running greasily down her cheeks, her head tense as if she has been crying for a long time but with
no recollection of why. Nurto has left the paraffin
feynuus
on and the room stinks of the burnt wick. How many homes have burned down just because of simple mistakes like that?

Nurto snuffles against her pillow, muttering incomprehensible but defensive-sounding words. She argues and bristles even in her dreams, thinks Kawsar. The silhouettes of great moths flit through
the room, beating against the mosquito screens on the windows like prisoners; they are eerie creatures that search for light just so they can immolate themselves with it. On full-moon nights when
everything is bathed in bluish-white light and even the leaves on the trees are clearly outlined, the face of the moon is obscured by millions of flying specks, jostling with each other as if they
are in a race to reach the heavens; they have a hunger, a single-mindedness that approaches devotion, reminding her of the
sura
in the Qu’ran that compares Allah to a lamp and his
worshippers to moths. Maybe the fabled tree on the moon is the moths’ destination and the bright light is just to mark their route; that singular tree grows a leaf with every birth and when
it drops so does the life attached to it. Her own leaf must be hanging by the most fragile of strands that even the beat of a moth’s wings would be enough to break its hold.

In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her. She never picked the fruit that fell from them, believing
it a kind of cannibalism, but out of those soft, unshaped figures had grown tall, strong, tough-barked trees that blossomed and called birds to their branches and clambered out over the orchard
walls to the world beyond. The infants in the orchard all had names, the genders sometimes distinguishable and sometimes imagined. The largest of them was Ibrahim, a nearly perfect boy with pale
hair thick on his curved, rubbery limbs. Seven whole months he had survived in her harsh womb. He was tired, with wrinkles furrowed deep across his brow, and she thought she had seen him take one
deep, resigned breath in her arms before he put down his clubbed hands and surrendered the fight. It had been difficult to bury him; he had toes, fingernails, a good head of hair, puffy eyes that
clearly would have taken the shape of her own. Farah was hostile towards the shrouded bundle; he refused to look, refused to touch. Kawsar remained in bed with him snuggled against her breast while
Farah called for a doctor to stem the blood flowing from her. By the time the Italian obstetrician had appeared at the door, she was drained yellow, her clammy skin as cold as the child’s, so
disconnected from her senses that she dropped her legs open without a murmur and revealed everything to the foreigner. He prodded and cut and stitched while Ibrahim appeared to snooze open-mouthed
beside her. When the Italian went to examine him she refused and pressed him against her breast, her nails breaking through his skin. She remembers hearing wails and screams but she herself was
silent. Two days later, while Farah was out, and when the gloss of blood and fluid had dried into Ibrahim’s hair and his lips had set to a dark grey colour, Kawsar gathered the stained sheets
around her waist and padded to the yard in bare feet. She clawed the earth with her hands, her nails split and shredded by the gritty soil, only stopping when she had created a narrow, two-foot
deep trench. She filled a bucket from the kitchen tap and washed Ibrahim clean, let him remain in the multi-hued blanket she had knitted, and then laid him gently down. She read the prayer for the
dead and then gently smoothed the earth over the blanket; it took a long time for the purple and red and pink squares to disappear under the brown earth.

Farah had returned late in the afternoon. He glanced towards the bed but didn’t ask what had happened; he sat in his chair in silence and read a newspaper while she pretended to sleep with
her face to the wall. He warmed up a beef stew bought from the dirty men’s café he frequented and placed a bowl beside her. His fingers grazed her upper arm. ‘Kawsar, you should
eat to replace the blood you lost, you need iron,’ he said, trying to turn her face to him.

She pulled back, mumbled something, the smell of the stew made her stomach turn. Her own raw flesh had so recently been cut up; she could imagine it diced, tenderised and seasoned. She
recognised the dense smell of abattoirs on her stiff, floral-patterned sheets. Farah kept his distance but the room was thick with green-eyed flies. A pad of cotton between her thighs oozed with
dark, blackened blood and once every few hours Farah tentatively reached in and replaced the pad, rushing away with it and washing his hands for a long time in the bathroom, his fingers reeking of
antiseptic when he returned. He must compare her to other women, she told herself, clean women who delivered healthy, thick-jowled babies one after the other and jumped to their feet within a few
hours to cook the next meal. The spectre of a second wife seemed more real with every miscarriage and stillborn. His relations must be whispering words into his ear, pointing to beautiful, young
girls with ripe breasts and wide hips and saying, ‘Why not? Why not?’ Why not, indeed. Maybe she could help with the teenager’s child – bathe it, sit with it while she went
to the
suuq
with friends, stroke its fat cheeks when it whimpered in sleep.