Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls

Shaking her arms dry, she peeps into Stalin’s open door and, finding it empty, grabs a cloth from the kitchen to start work. To her it is just an excuse to touch interesting things; she has no idea how to clean the various jars, instruments and trinkets scattered around the room, but she enjoys handling them, turning them around in the light and imagining their use. Eventually her attention turns to the mattress on the floor with its sheets entwined into floral ropes; she shakes them out, smoothes them back over the bed just as she has seen the nurses do in the hospital, and then lifts the striped pillow. She does a double take at the sight of the butcher’s knife hidden beneath it. She doesn’t touch but leans over to take a closer look: the blade is a long, wide slice of silver, the black handle has grooves moulded into it so that it can easily fit into a hand, and around the point where metal meets plastic is a dark stain that might be rust or old blood.

‘Get out of here, thief!’ a girl shouts before pushing past Deqo and grabbing the knife, pointing it at her face. ‘Who told you that you could enter my room?’

Deqo raises her hands in terror and points to the courtyard. ‘Nasra,’ she stutters.

‘Nasra! Did you bring this street kid into the house?’ the girl yells.

Nasra joins them in the tiny room and pushes the knife away from Deqo. ‘Stalin, what are you thinking? I said she could work here. You can’t just stick a knife in every stranger’s face.’ She sighs. ‘Didn’t you see her asleep in the kitchen?’

‘I went out to buy my breakfast.’ Stalin looks Deqo up and down. ‘You shown her to anyone yet?’

Nasra glares at Stalin before ushering Deqo out of the room. ‘Go to Karl Marx’s room, she won’t say anything to you.’

Nasra closes the door and stays behind with Stalin.

Deqo looks over her shoulder. Still trembling slightly, she decides to stay out of Stalin’s room in future and leave her to clean it on her own. Stalin is the opposite of Nasra: stocky, muscular, stern-faced, her hair pulled back from her face and pomaded — she looks ready to beat someone to a pulp. What did she mean about showing me to someone, wonders Deqo. I am not a wild animal, there is nothing to see.

She crosses the yard to Karl Marx’s room and knocks before entering. It takes a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, but when they do she sees Karl Marx on her back with her palms on her chest. Deqo stands beside the door, unsure if the shape on the bed is breathing or not.

‘Come in, I’m not dead. Not yet anyway,’ Karl Marx says without opening her eyes.

‘I have come to clean your room.’ Deqo holds back the sneeze tickling her nose.

Karl Marx doesn’t move a muscle; her profiled face is sharp and pale against the blue wall. ‘Clean it then.’ Her words seem to come out through her large ears or thin nostrils as her lips do not move.

Deqo takes the cloth and sweeps a layer of dust off the windowsill, but it is inhibiting having another person in the room. Karl Marx begins to shift, flinging her legs to the side of the bed and yawning loudly. Deqo glances at the woman’s skeletal naked body, her protruding collarbones forming a yoke around her neck, bleeding sores crisscrossing the skin on her meagre thighs. Deqo examines her discreetly and sees a woman who should be in hospital. Karl Marx grabs a corner of the bedclothes and dabs at the blood on her legs; she is unperturbed by her appearance and slowly rises, showing the two triangular bones of her buttocks as she retrieves a diric from the floor.

Deqo feels a lump in her throat and hums softly to distract herself.

‘You one of Nasra’s?’

‘Haa, yes.’

‘You selling?’

‘Selling what?’

‘The thing between your legs.’

Deqo takes a minute to decipher what could be worth selling or even possible to sell between her legs. ‘No! I clean and run errands only,’ she says hurriedly. She imagines Karl Marx doing what the goats and stray dogs do when they mount each other and is disgusted. That is what makes a whore a whore, she realises, and her eyes widen.

Karl Marx sits down heavily and looks at Deqo with lowered eyes. ‘I was your age when I started this.’

Deqo cannot see what anyone would want with Karl Marx; she looks like she has TB, typhoid, and every kind of sickness going. In Saba’ad people would have run from her.

‘Look at me,’ she says.

Deqo stops and looks her squarely in the face.

‘How old do you think I am?’

There are already white hairs on her head, her breasts beneath the sheer diric hang down to her navel; she is far into old age in Deqo’s estimation.

‘Go on, say it.’

‘Fifty? Fifty-five?’

Karl Marx laughs, revealing broken khat-stained teeth. ‘You little bitch! Take twenty off that and you’re close.’

Deqo smiles in return, not believing her words but too polite to challenge them. ‘Why are you called Karl Marx?’ she asks.

‘Because I have shared and shared and shared until there is nothing left to give.’ She clutches at her bosom and sighs.

‘What about Stalin and China?’

‘Stalin is named after Jaalle Stalin of the Russians for her brutality, and China is a favourite of the coolies. Nasra doesn’t want a name.’ Her attention turns to the store of white medicine boxes on the floor, and while Deqo straightens the bed she crunches tablet after tablet in her mouth.

‘What will your name be?’

‘My name is Deqo, I don’t want it to change,’ she says firmly. If Nasra didn’t need a new name to live here then nor would she.

‘Wash those clothes for me, would you?’ Karl Marx points to a pile by the door.

Deqo hesitates, unsure if laundry is one of her duties, then decides to ingratiate herself with Karl Marx; it can’t hurt to have another ally against Stalin within the house. She picks up the laundry and leaves.

Deqo drops Karl Marx’s clothes into a basin in the courtyard and then scrubs them under the tap with a green soap; the trickle of water is so slow that she leaves the basin and attempts to finish the rooms before returning. After knocking three times on China’s door and not receiving a reply Deqo pads across to Nasra’s room, where incense burns in a white clay urn. Nasra has just had a shower and her hair is wrapped in a towel away from her long neck. The skin above her knees and elbows is paler than the rest and mottled with small moles that rush over her chest and thighs; she rubs a milk-white cream on her body with a rough motion, kneading the flesh between her fingers and pulling it away from the bone.

‘Take some.’ Nasra holds out the bottle.

Deqo squirts a tiny amount into her palm and returns the bottle. The scent of the lotion, the razorblade and the myriad jars of perfume on the dresser seem to express the metamorphosis from little girl to woman, the necessary grooming and management demanded by a body grown large and wild. She rubs her hands together and puts them to her nose, the lotion’s scent is overwhelmed by soap, charcoal, bread and sweat.

Nasra rips the towels from her head and body and stands in all her splendour before the wardrobe. Deqo averts her eyes, but the difference between Nasra’s solid thighs and backside and Karl Marx’s makes her want to look again and check how a grown woman is meant to be; to see how many changes her own body will undertake.

‘You slept well?’ Nasra flicks through the folded piles spilling out of the wardrobe.

‘Yes,’ Deqo replies enthusiastically, despite the fact she barely closed her eyes.

‘Good. Maybe you will stay with us then.’ Nasra dresses, choosing her clothes carefully. ‘You have to tell me if you need anything. I want you fat and happy, understood? I want you to be my little girl.’