Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls

A truck takes Filsan and Tall Abdi to the hospital, along with the bodies of Roble, Short Abdi, Abbas, Samatar and the nameless driver. The floor of the van is awash with blood, mainly from the driver’s neck where a section of shrapnel from the rocket has nearly severed his head. Roble is flat on his back, staring up at the moon, which is as bright as he had predicted. The rush of adrenaline has left Filsan and she now feels the gunshot wound in her hip; she squeezes her trousers and blood oozes between her fingers.

Chains clang as the gate to the main hospital creaks open for them; an orderly in blue helps her down from the back while Tall Abdi is stretchered out. He fought the battle with a chunk of muscle blown out of his abdomen, but now wails like a child, pleading for help from God, from the doctors, from his mother. Filsan holds onto the orderly as the van trundles to the morgue, her heart imploding as if primed with dynamite. She shakes her head in disbelief, wishing for a way to rewind time by just half an hour to change this ending.

‘Come on, come on, it’s not safe out here,’ the orderly warns.

He leads her to the emergency ward. They have to pick their way carefully through the beds and the casualties on the floor with assorted tubes attached to them. A pink-uniformed nurse directs them to a stained bed in the corner with a curtain around it for privacy. The middle-aged woman brusquely sends the orderly away and tells Filsan to lie down, then whips the curtain closed with a noise like knives being sharpened and asks what’s wrong with her.

‘My hip,’ she winces.

The nurse yanks down Filsan’s trousers and underwear and prods the swollen wound with her bare hands. ‘It’s just a surface injury.’

‘Please, let me have something for the pain.’

‘What can you give me in return?’

‘Check my trouser pocket.’

The nurse roots through all the pockets until she locates the roll of small shilling notes; she counts out the money with bloody fingers and then tucks the whole lot into her waistband. ‘I’ll get you something,’ she whispers.

If this is how they treat the living, what must they be doing to the dead in the morgue? she thinks. Were greedy hands searching through Roble’s clothes already? Would they steal the watch he was proud of or rip the silver tooth from his mouth? The certainty that they would nauseates her. There is nothing to cover her body with so she tries to tug her trousers up, but collapses back, preferring the exposure of the unkempt thicket of hair below her stomach to the corkscrew-like pain drilling through her pelvis.

The doctor comes, his face partly hidden behind a mask like an Arab girl’s, his coat dyed brown with dried blood. He stitches the wound quickly. He doesn’t seem to see her nakedness and works mechanically without word or eye contact. At the end, the nurse bandages the wound and gives her painkillers and a soiled blanket to sleep under.

The ward is loud and bright all night. More injured soldiers arrive and some depart, carried out unceremoniously to make room for the living. The provincial hospital only has one operating theatre, so procedures usually done under general anaesthetic are now attempted under local right there in the ward. Wrapping a pillow around her head doesn’t soften the screams and hollering from men losing an arm or foot a few feet away. At about four in the morning, still wide awake and feeling almost deranged, Filsan calls for water, and calls again, and calls again. She pulls open the curtain around her bed and squints against the fluorescent light. The doctor, surrounded by all the nurses, is arguing with Lieutenant Hashi.

‘This is an order from the highest level. You have no choice.’

The doctor raises his hands in disbelief and walks out.

‘Coward!’ spits Hashi after him. ‘The job falls on you then, nurses. Do your duty.’ He beckons a group into the ward. Ten uniformed high-school students in handcuffs shuffle past, flanked by four policemen, and he orders them to follow the nurses into an ante-room.

Birds chirp in the trees outside but her thirst keeps her from sleep. Filsan waits for the nurses to reappear but they don’t. Eventually, the orderly who had brought her in slouches into the ward and she taps on the metal bedframe to get his attention. She gets a good look at him this time: a bald man in his thirties, with an obsequious, fearful expression on his face. He checks over his shoulder before bending down and putting a hand on her upper arm. ‘What’s wrong, cousin?’

Gesturing to her throat, she manages to croak, ‘Water.’

He rubs her shoulder in an intimate way that she doesn’t like. ‘I’ll get it for you but you need to wait.’

‘Why?’

‘They are doing something sensitive in the room.’

‘You cannot even get a glass of water?’

‘No, no, no. I don’t want to see it.’

‘See what?’ she says, exasperated.

‘The children, they are bleeding.’

‘They’re donating blood, that’s all.’ Filsan wonders at the ignorance of the man. ‘You don’t need to worry.’

‘No! They are being bled dry. The soldier said they should be used like taps.’

‘Hashi?’

‘That one.’

‘Like taps? So they die?’

‘That is the plan.’

A squabble between stray dogs wakes Deqo. They growl menacingly and she rubs her eyes and yawns loudly in frustration. She will fill a bucket of cold water, disperse the hounds and then return to sleep. Water sloshes over the lip of the bucket and onto the courtyard but there is still enough to give them a shock. Head down, biting her lip, two hands straining around the thin handle, she doesn’t notice the vultures perched on the roof until a shadow swoops over her. It drops something near her feet and she glances down. A leaf? A wrinkled piece of leather? She picks it up curiously. A human ear. She throws it and the bucket down and bolts back to the veranda. The vultures swoop and circle before settling on the mango tree. She has never seen so many in one place, the branches of the tree sag and bob under the weight of them.

A muscular white dog with brown patches enters the gate, droplets of blood hanging like dew from the hairs of its muzzle, and sniffs the track leading to the house. Deqo grasps the broom resting against the wall and charges it.

‘ Bax ! Out! Out!’ she yells, shoving the bristles of the brush into the dog’s pink nose.

He stops in his tracks, yelping a few times, before padding out into the street. She pursues him and throws a few rocks at his rear. ‘Stay out.’

Then she spots the fugitive: torn, bloodied, but still smart in his suit and tie. She hits the broom against the wall until the pack leave their feast. She avoids his face and focuses on the shiny black loafers on his feet, decorated with a gold link chain. Wedding shoes, she thinks. The dogs growl their impatience but keep at bay. His rotund stomach bulges against his shirt burtons and already there is a smell, sweet and repugnant at the same time. Deqo pulls the shoes off his feet — they are too good to waste — places them against the wall and then begins to dig a hole in the sandy earth with the handle of her broom. The dogs watch curiously but don’t interfere. She will never be able to dig a hole deep enough to prevent them getting to him, but she can at least give him the dignity of a burial. About two foot down she gives up and kneels down to rest. Her eyes accidentally fall on his face as he slumps forward. The dogs have ripped away his nose and exposed the bone underneath his left cheek. The ear is gone too. The undamaged part of his face is that of a wealthy forty-something with unlined, pale skin, the kind of man who has recently returned from overseas to find a wife or maybe build an ostentatious villa near his mother with the money he has saved.