Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls

‘Get out of my house if you’re not going to speak.’ Kawsar points a stern finger towards the front door.

The girl doesn’t reply or shift an inch. Her feet are bare and dusty, her long legs sprout like weeds between cracked paving, but her resemblance to Hodan is certain: the heart-shaped face, the dimples, the reed-like body all belong to her child.

‘Watch your feet on the glass,’ Kawsar says, her tone softening.

The girl stretches her toes, shifts her balance, but stays rooted to the same spot. Her smock is torn in places along the side.

Kawsar takes a deep breath. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I just want to rest.’ The voice is not Hodan’s; it’s deeper and wearier.

‘Rest then.’ Kawsar waves a hand in the direction of Nurto’s mattress.

The girl treads over to the divan and tucks her legs slowly underneath her, shyly pushing her skirt down between her knees as she crosses them. She chews her bottom lip nervously like Kawsar used to as a child.

‘What is your name?’

‘Deqo.’

‘Where have you come from?’

‘The ditch,’ she says, deciding that the old woman would prefer to hear that than Saba’ad.

‘Where is your family?’

‘It’s just me.’ The girl meets her eyes.

Kawsar feels a charge when she hears those words.

‘How do I know you are not here to steal from me?’

Deqo shrugs her shoulders, suddenly surly and tired of the questions. She picks at the dirt underneath her fingernails.

Kawsar’s eyes fall appraisingly on her, from the short toes to the dull, knotted hair on her head. She looks like one of those hardy, parasitical children born in times of famine, probably carried over from Ethiopia when only a few weeks old and nursed on rainwater and sugar, kept alive by a will already steely and adult.

The old woman’s room is like a tomb, sour with stale air and dust-coated. Deqo watches her for sometime before leaving the safety of the kitchen. She reminds her of those crones in Saba’ad who conduct ceremonies in their tiny buuls; with names like Sheikha Jinnow or Hajiya Halima, they are the ones who know how to let blood, burn sicknesses out, diagnose and remedy the myriad ailments that constantly afflict the unhappy women of the camp. Their holiness comes from pilgrimages to saint’s tombs and the miracle of their own longevity. Deqo assumes this old woman must be so convinced of her closeness to God that she doesn’t feel the need to flee like everyone else; she survives on prayers alone and is waiting for the dust to slowly settle and entomb her in her own shrine. Then Deqo steps into the bedroom and immediately recognises whom she has found.

Kawsar clears her throat and adjusts the bed sheets nervously. ‘You should leave now; this isn’t the time for tea and conversation.’

Deqo’s attention is suddenly pulled up. ‘I don’t have anywhere to go.’

Kawsar thinks that even the most ragged, glue-sniffing beggar-child would go running back to their family in fear of these bombs, but maybe Deqo is unafraid because her family are nearby, looting the neighbours’ homes alongside the soldiers.

‘So what do you expect to do when the soldiers arrive?’

‘There aren’t any nearby. We’ll be safe for a while.’

Kawsar raises her eyebrow at the presumptuous ‘we’ and feels a wave of mischief rise in her, ‘What shall we do until they get here then?’ she says with a smile. ‘Play shax ? Chase a garangar along the street? Plait each other’s hair?’

‘Yes, would you plait my hair, please?’ Deqo replies eagerly, lifting a hand to her head as if to hide its scruffiness.

Kawsar senses a pulse of pleasure at the girl’s frankness, a kind of warmth that tending to a child’s needs has always given her, a sensation she has nearly forgotten.

‘Get the hair oil and comb from the dresser.’

Deqo hands them to her.

‘Sit beneath me,’ Kawsar orders.

The girl sits lightly on the floor, holding her weight up with her arms; she smells of fruit and sweat.

‘We should wash it, but never mind.’ Kawsar pulls apart the old plaits, sifting Deqo’s soft but dirty hair between her fingers, massaging jasmine oil into her scalp while Deqo toys absentmindedly with the bottle top.

The words of an old song play in Kawsar’s mind: ‘Love, love isn’t fair, teardrops always chase behind.’

‘Can I stay here for a while?’ Deqo asks.

Kawsar’s heart is beating hard, her breath shallow and quiet. She wants time to end at this moment, for there to be nothing in the world beyond her nimble fingers and the girl’s hair to spin into silk. There must be a hunchbacked, toothless sorceress somewhere who weaves all these disparate people together, thinks Kawsar, who carelessly throws this child together with me, while families are ripped apart.

Resting a hand on the girl’s narrow, sinuous back, she can feel the heat of her soul through the oily palm of her hand, as smooth and alive as an egg. She doubts that incandescence can just disappear. If they are killed right here, would their ghosts continue as they are, the old ghost plaiting and the young one waiting, fidgeting? She can imagine that, the silence and peacefulness of it, a source of envy to passers-by — battling with the rage and chaos of life — who happen to glance in through the barred window.

Filsan rushes through corridors behind the orderly and the dead student, disembodied voices flying past like birds, snatches of sunlight filtering through dust-specked windows. The orderly stops and she freezes. He enters a room and she can tell by the stench that they have reached the mortuary.

He returns empty-handed and she sneaks a peek through the closing door. There are no other hospital workers inside and she holds the door before sliding through. Bodies are heaped on the floor, three deep in places, in various states of decomposition. Her eyes dart around for Roble’s face but she keeps returning to the young girl, her narrow body stuck on a shelf above the others. Filsan catches sight of the metal stores on one side of the white-tiled room and opens them methodically, top left to bottom right. The faces are like molten wax models: a facsimile of an old woman here, a wealthy civil servant there, a newborn baby squeezed beside its mother. She opens the last door despondently, hoping to find him and not find him at the same time, but there he is.

They have wrapped Roble decently in white cloth, leaving only a diamond shape around his face. He appears to have aged twenty years overnight; his cheeks are sunken, his lips wide and slack, his eye sockets deep and dark. There is no blood, no visible injury; she touches his eyebrow and smoothes the hair, and the incredible frigidity of his skin is the only convincing proof that he is gone. She runs a fingertip over his bottom lip and then twists her head to kiss him on the mouth, her nose grazing his chin; the first kiss of her life numbs both her flesh and spirit. She opens her eyes to the mortuary tiles, to the grime on the fridge handles, to the prettily marbled veins on the hand of a corpse waiting on a concrete slab.

‘I’ll be with you soon.’ Filsan pushes the handle and returns Roble to his abode.

Shaking wildly, unable to withstand the stench, she strips to her bloodied underwear and shoves her uniform in a corner. She undresses a dead woman — a teacher-type with sensible, large-rimmed glasses — taking her paisley diric, shawl and delicate sandals, leaving the bruises on her naked body visible like emblazoned accusations.

She clambers out of the window into the bright sun of the weed-strewn hospital yard. She adjusts the scarf to cover her nose and mouth and bends her head down low. Putting one foot cautiously in front of the other, she knows that she will probably be killed before the day is out, either as a deserter or as a lone woman in the middle of a battlefield, but she cannot remain, whatever the cost.