Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls

Filsan raises her face and meets his gaze.

‘Are you from a military family?’

‘Yes, sir, my father is Irroleh.’

‘I trained with him in East Berlin. A wonderful soldier.’

It has worked. Her father’s name is like a key clicking in a lock; she can almost hear the door swinging open to her.

‘How is he?’

‘He is very well, sir, he is based in the ministry of defence,’ Filsan lies. Her father has been suspended and is currently at home while under investigation.

‘I will have to look him up next time I’m in Mogadishu. And you, how long have you been here?’

‘Just three weeks, sir.’

He smiles. ‘It’s a village, isn’t it?’

She smiles in return. He is like the men who carried her on their shoulders as a child, friendly giants with big hands and big laughs.

He turns to one of the foreign men and pushes his chair out, still addressing her. ‘Why don’t you accompany us to the Oriental Hotel, we can talk further there.’

Filsan grins and reveals her small, overlapping teeth. ‘Yes, sir!’ A knot of guards surround the General and she joins the outer shell protecting him.

He steps into his black Mercedes and drives away in a convoy. The sergeant who had called her now ushers her into his jeep. Let the Guddi clear up and deal with the stragglers and argumentative old women. She has studied and trained to take her place at the heart of things. The jeep speeds to the Oriental Hotel near the bridge, the grandest and oldest hotel in town.

General Haaruun enters ahead of them, his hand lightly touching the back of an Asian ambassador’s wife; he bows and lets her enter before him.

Filsan jumps out of the jeep and follows the dignitaries into the main hall. She has an urge to rush to the toilet and check her make-up and hair in the mirror, but the professional side of her scoffs at the idea. She has never set foot in this place but was practically raised in the hotels of Mogadishu, eating her meals in them while her father drank coffee and networked all day long. After her mother left and before they had found their housekeeper Intisaar, they had barely lived in their villa, only returning at night to sleep. She is deeply intimate with hotels — their structure and schedules, the smell of the blue soaps found in every hotel bathroom — but standing here surrounded by these worldly people she feels like a big-booted bedu staring at the mirrors and gilt-effect chandeliers. She wants to wrap herself in the long window drapes and hide like she did as a child when there were too many strangers in the house.

General Haaruun has a tumbler of drink in his hand, the same colour as the whisky her father enjoys; he swills it around the ice cubes as he speaks. He doesn’t look at Filsan at all but she waits awkwardly close, busying herself with the details of the room: the red bow ties of the waiters, the matching velveteen of the sofas and curtains, the lacquered finish to the dining table in the centre of the room. She isn’t sure what to do with her body, what role she is meant to be playing — protector, supplicant, daughter. Her back stiffens, slackens and stiffens again. Turning for a moment she grabs a glass from a passing tray and throws the drink down her dry throat. Cheap white wine sloshes over her taste buds and hits her stomach; pulling a face, she returns the glass to the tray and swivels back into position. She will wait until Haaruun is ready for her.

He is deep in mirthful conversation with the American attaché. English sentences from her school days come back to her and make her smile: ‘Could you please tell me how to get to Buckingham Palace?’; ‘I am waiting for the ten thirty to York’; ‘I have an urgent need to see a physician.’ She imagines Haaruun and the attaché speaking these sentences to each other, their whole conversation full of random declarations and questions.

None of the other guests approach her. Maybe if she weren’t in uniform they would think she was worth speaking to, but now they just crane their necks to look around her. There are soldiers outside that she can talk to but then General Haaruun might forget about her, jump into his car and drive away into the half-light of the late afternoon. She needs the patience of a bawab; those bare-chested black men in turbans standing in the background of harems, as immobile as stone, simultaneously absent and present, their eyes as bright as a cobra’s in the dark. She has nowhere better to be — just her tiny, bare room in the barracks with its slimy toilet and lumpy mattress.

‘Comrade! Come join us.’ It is Haaruun.

Filsan’s knees click as she walks to his side.

The American has his hand on Haaruun’s shoulder, his grey shirt wet under the arms.

‘You speak English, right?’

‘I do, sir.’ Filsan is self-conscious about her strong accent but has studied well.

‘I was just telling our American friend how strong Somali women are, that we don’t have any of that purdah here. Women work, they fight in our military, serve as engineers, spies, doctors. Isn’t it so?’

‘Absolutely, we are not like other women.’ She nods fervently.

‘I bet you this girl could strip a Kalashnikov in a minute,’ the General boasts, placing his gold-rimmed sunglasses on top of his bald head.

‘Yes, and she could annihilate an Ethiopian battalion while unicycling. I don’t doubt it,’ the American laughs.

‘Look, buddy. .’ General Haaruun grabs Filsan’s hand and raises it before twirling her around. ‘You’re going to tell me that American women can be trained killers and still look this good?’

Filsan fixes her gaze to the floor; she can feel others looking her up and down, eyes flicking over her like tongues.

‘Not bad, not bad. I wouldn’t want to meet her down a dark alley. Or maybe I would if it was the right kind of alley.’

General Haaruun clasps the attaché’s shoulder and hoots his approval before recovering himself. ‘Keep your capitalist hands to yourself.’ He mock-wags his finger in his face.

Filsan’s face burns hot, bringing tears to her eyes. She rushes away before they roll down, back to her corner as the lamps and chandeliers are lit across the room. She straightens her back and stands tall. Even in her uniform they see nothing more than breasts and a hole. He knows who her father is but still parades her like a prostitute. A waiter stops to glance at her; chest puffed out, barely a breath escaping her lips, she must look ready to burst.

‘Go to hell!’ she hisses.

He purses his lips to blow a kiss and grabs an empty glass from a nearby table.

One tear escapes down her left cheek and she scrapes it quickly away. The sky is black outside now, her reflection in the window shortened and stumpy-looking; she looks like an abandoned child on the verge of breaking down.

‘Comrade. Why don’t you let me drive you back to barracks?’ General Haaruun approaches and gestures to the door.

She hesitates but wants to salvage some of the hopes she had for the meeting, he might still offer her his patronage. Rearranging her features into an expression of gratitude, she nods acquiescence.

The Mercedes is parked two metres away from the hotel entrance. A young soldier bends to open the door but he waves him away. ‘Stay in the jeep,’ he orders.

General Haaruun holds the door open for Filsan and she slides in, holding her boots away from the upholstery. The windows are tinted black, and once the door has slammed shut they are in complete darkness with only the dials on the dashboard casting a fine red light over them.

Hargeisa is eerie at night. The electricity supply has been cut to make life difficult for the rebels, but the darkness feels portentous, and apparitions pass across the black windows as they race along, the glow of an occasional paraffin lamp radiating from a street-side shack. They are submariners passing through the deep sea, perhaps able to make it to dry land, perhaps not, strange creatures glubbing along on the other side of the glass.