Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls

Flinging the broom to the ground, Deqo grabs his leather belt and attempts to drag him to the edge of the pit. It is like hauling stone; she tugs again at the belt but the rigid body won’t shift. Stepping over him, she pushes his bullet-pierced back with her hands and then her feet; it is like the games she and Anab used to play in Saba’ad, play fights where one attacked and the other rolled up in a ball and resisted. Giggling a little, imagining that he is just pretending to be dead, she pushes his bottom. It is no good; he was at least twice her weight while alive and now has the dull burden of death on top of him. Deqo has learnt to be persistent though; there is no problem that she can’t find a solution to within her own limited means. She stalks around him, wondering how best to take him the few inches to his grave. If she could only lift his torso she could use his weight to flip him. Taking hold of the broom she slides it under his side and then levers it up; he moves slowly, slowly, slowly and then rolls onto his stomach. She tries again and this time he tumbles into the grave.

Sweating and with a stench of rotting flesh on her hands, she brushes great armfuls of fine sand over him, concealing first his face, then his torso and finally his long legs. It is done. She tears a cluster of flowers from the pink bougainvillea and plants it over his head. ‘There you go,’ she exclaims.

The children’s bodies are brought out of the anteroom in twos. A hand drops off the trolley as lifeless and yellow as an autumn leaf. Filsan watches mesmerised as the nurses go in and out of the bleeding room with barely a flicker of reaction. They hold scarlet bags of blood in their fingers — apparently destined for the operating theatre — and go around the ward with smiles for the patients. Follow orders. Follow orders. Follow orders. That is the code they have been brought up under and it endures until the burden of guilt cracks the spine. Her father would probably explain their actions as the necessities of war, but to her they seem like the cannibals of old tales: totally ordinary yet irrevocably depraved.

The orderly returns with a glass of water.

‘Has it finished in there?’ She gestures with her head to the anteroom.

‘One more to go.’

She gulps from the glass.

‘May Allah have mercy on their souls,’ he says, before pushing his squeaky trolley away.

She doesn’t know if he is referring to the students or the nurses.

Her mind travels to that last child beyond the unvarnished wooden door of the nurses’ station. At that age she was planning on becoming a pilot for the Somali national airline, a fanciful dream that never got off the ground but which had felt real and possible and irreplaceable at the time. Her father was under too much suspicion to influence the aviation professors by the time she was old enough to apply for university. She imagines the needle going into the student’s slim arm, the thick maroon blood seeping out of it, slowly, painlessly but lethally. When will they realise that life is leaving them? That for all the incandescence and noise of their short existence, death is wrapping its tendrils around them?

Filsan is both attracted to and repulsed by what is happening in that room. Is she brave enough to offer herself instead of that teenager? Or should she just submit to a future of growing grey hairs seated next to her father in their matching armchairs? The decision is made for her when the door jolts open and the last corpse is carried out in the arms of an orderly; it is a girl, her long, black plait swinging and bouncing beneath her, her wrists free of shackles, the expression on her face calm and beatific.

Filsan edges off the bed; the pills have subdued her pain enough to let her keep pace behind the orderly.

Time to leave, Deqo thinks. She does not fear death itself, but the idea of her body being eaten by the city’s scavengers chases her from the comfortable solitude she has enjoyed so blithely. People — both danger and sanctuary is to be found amongst people. The new-found possessions she can’t leave behind — the shoes, dresses, cans of food, compact mirror — she bundles into a scarf and knots up, away from jealous eyes. It is time to return to Saba’ad, to the lumpy porridge, dust and interminable waiting.

She tidies the various messes she has made, bidding farewell to each room and respectfully closing the doors. The vultures have left the mango tree but, on reaching the road, she sees two of them standing on the uncovered knees of the man she buried; the dogs must have unearthed his bottom half and then abandoned him, and now the birds pick vigorously at his thighs. Deqo trudges in the opposite direction.

The street is full of militiamen, dressed half in whodead and half in camouflage wear, stripping the homes as professionally as removal men: three short men carry a huge wardrobe on their heads to a nearby lorry, while a boy wrenches the corrugated tin roof off a samosa stall.

She avoids the checkpoints she can and talks her way through the ones she can’t. Her derelict condition is enough to convince the soldiers she is who she says she is. A few teashops and cafés are still open to cater to the military, but otherwise everywhere is deserted. She loses track of where she is in relation to the ditch and looks around for anything that might guide her out of the city, before wandering into a pretty neighbourhood with goats bleating plaintively in the yards.

The sun has passed its zenith and Deqo feels sweat trickling down her temples. She leans against a bungalow and notices an orchard opposite with tall fruit trees waving to her over the glass-crested wall. There is a low, wooden gate. She jumps up and climbs over. It is like being back in the ditch but tidier and sweeter smelling. The ground is littered with pomegranates, tamarinds and papayas. She fills her skirt and then sits in the shade under a tree to eat a wrinkled yellow papaya, spirting the slimy black seeds as far as she can. Someone has put hard labour into this orchard; there are no scrubby, unused patches or broken hoses and scrap metal piled up in a corner. Weaverbirds sing in the nests above her head and trumpet-headed flowers blow within arm’s reach.

Curious and emboldened by the peace of the orchard, she creeps towards the small, blue-painted bungalow and peers through a crack in the back door into a dark, empty hallway. The bars on the kitchen window are designed to keep out a burglar but are wide enough for her; she drops her bundle to the ground and crawls in, dropping feet first into a hillock of saucepans.

A clatter in the kitchen, a pot lid maybe, dancing like a cymbal before making its peace with the earth; Kawsar swivels her head towards the half-closed kitchen entrance.

‘Come on, I’m ready,’ she says with a voice that doesn’t sound like her own.

The kitchen door swings gently, tauntingly, but no one appears. She had once found a thief in her kitchen and held him tight as he tried to escape out the back; she fought with him and is eager to face the soldiers now.

‘ Soobax ! Come out!’ she yells.

Still nothing stirs. Kawsar grabs her glass and throws it with all her strength at the kitchen door. The glass shatters against the door handle, rainbows flaring as the shards tinkle to the floor.

A hunched figure emerges as if lured out by the yellows, reds and blues that Kawsar has conjured up. It is a small and indistinct shape. A girl with frayed plaits and a blood red smock holding her hands behind her back as if on parade.

‘Hodan?’ She is angry this time, fed up with her child torturing her.

The girl’s face is downturned, her chin pressed into her neck, a fan of black eyelashes hiding her eyes. She doesn’t evanesce this time.

‘Answer me,’ demands Kawsar, her heart beating harder. She searches the girl for injuries but there aren’t any; she is only playing dumb.