Nadifa Mohamed - Black Mamba Boy

Joe kissed his teeth. “So where you want to go?” he asked.

“Gaza,” replied Liban, annoyed that Jama was doing all the talking. Joe pulled them into the lorry and took over the wheel from his Ferengi companion; he rushed them to the Gaza bus station, tearing past the checkpoints in the powerful and unquestionable army vehicle. Liban slept next to Jama, his head thrown back in exhaustion, while Jama massaged his painful feet and reveled in the luxury of being driven. The bedu walking along the road, dragging their donkeys behind them, looked infinitely, hopelessly poor in comparison. Joe drove at dangerous speed but was a born driver, an equal match for any hazard the road jinns threw up; he drove with one hand, his face relaxed and content, staring at the open road. At the bus station, with a paternal slap on their cheeks, he disappeared for the last time.

As Samatar had said, Musa the Drunk quickly found them. They shared with him the same mishmash of features, an awkward alchemy of eyes, noses, mouths, hair textures, and skin tones that belonged to different continents but somehow came together. Their faces were passports inscribed with the stamps of many places but in their countenances was something ancient, the variety of those who went wandering and peopled the earth. Musa was completely incongruous in the quiet bus station, a shabby middle-aged Somali man, barefoot and balding, with the sharp smell of alcohol emanating from somewhere about his person.

“My sons, my sons,” Musa slurred, staggering with alarming speed toward them, shamelessly scratching his balls before grabbing them in a fevered embrace. Jama and Liban were embarrassed by him; they looked terrible already, but his company gave their appearance another level of seediness and destitution. Musa, whose thick ribs stuck out from a soiled, buttonless shirt, was lonely and talkative, the poster boy of failed migration. He spoke little Arabic after all his years in Palestine and had no interest in what the locals thought of him. After listening to their story, Musa ushered them to the stop for the Sarafand bus, where they sat on a bench, stinking in the sun, Musa talking loudly and obscenely: “I’ve had her”; “I’ve done her”; “He wants me.”

Jama and Liban cringed beside him and feared he would attract the police to them, but the Palestinians ignored him completely. Jama gave Musa money to buy musakhan from a nearby vendor and he scuttled off, to their relief. They took all the deep breaths they could before he returned and brought his miasma back. Sitting with him depressed Jama. As Musa continued to talk Jama could see the remnants of what had been a sharp, witty mind, but it had been pickled in gin and blunted by isolation.

Musa told them how he had ended up in Gaza. “I have worked for the British all my life, I was their donkey, but most of the time a happy donkey. I learned how to read and write English. I got a good wage, lived in nice quarters, had a household back in Somaliland, but they sacked me, my wife divorced me, and I have stayed in this bus stop for some years now. Whenever I want to leave, I will just take one of these buses.” As Jama listened he could see his own life taking Musa’s terrible trajectory, see himself forever poised to try the next place, only to belatedly grasp that the good life was not there. Jama looked at Musa and realized that not even a madman would have left everything he had on the advice of a ghost.

“You can’t force your fate,” mused Musa.

“Come with us to Sarafand,” offered Liban, but Musa shook his head silently, adamant that he had business in Gaza.

Jama started to question his own journey. He had spent all the savings his mother had left him, was living on what charity others gave him in a strange hostile land, and had no realistic hope that he would ever become a sailor. The bus came while Jama was in this funk, and he boarded it simply because he had nothing else to do. Musa ran alongside the bus, waving and banging the window, but Jama didn’t wave back.

“What a fool,” Jama sneered.

“Oh, leave him be, poor man doesn’t know today from tomorrow.”

“That’s his own fault.”

“No, that was his fate. Who knows, it could be ours.”

I would rather die, thought Jama. He was in a belligerent mood, a Shidane mood, his patience and optimism exhausted.

“You Ajis always think everything is owed to you.”

“What?”

“Deep down, you’re surprised when things don’t fall into your lap,” Liban persisted.

“You don’t know what I’ve been through, Liban, nothing has ever fallen into my lap!”

“It has, think about it. You have a strong clan behind you, someone wherever you go will give you food and water, will think you’re important enough to milk their camels for.”

“Liban, shut up, what camels are you talking about? From the age of six I slept on the streets in Aden with any passing maniac liable to drop a rock on my head. You had a father watching over you, a mother, sisters, cousins.”

Liban stared at Jama, lightning in his eyes. “Yes, I had a father, a father who could only watch as my mother was beaten up by an Aji, for a goatskin of water she had walked miles for!”

“Ooleh! Shut up, you two!” yelled the bus driver. Liban moved clumsily to a seat at the back of the bus.

“Suit yourself,” yelled Jama.

Sarafand was a town holding its breath; within a year it would be a ghost town, with stray dogs sleeping on mattresses and storing bones in the deserted kitchens. If only a place could speak, or howl, or bark a warning. In May 1947 the women of Sarafand collected olives, gave birth, drew water from the well, and arranged marriages as they had done for centuries on their native soil, the soil in which their mothers, fathers, and stillborn infants were held. But Sarafand held a secret. After the harvest and winter rains, a rolling black barrel filled with explosives and fuel would trundle along the main dirt path and stop outside the beyt al-deef, the guesthouse for strangers. After the blast, Jewish men would come with machine guns and order everyone to leave, destroying the old mudbrick homes with grenades.

The sprawling British garrison was the only clue to the coming devastation. Jama and Liban waited sullenly outside this garrison for the Somali askaris that Samatar had described to them. “I’m sorry that happened to your mother,” Jama finally said.

“I shouldn’t have shouted at you, brother.” Liban held out his hand. Jama took it and shook it hard.

They spotted the askaris late in the afternoon, three Somali men in their thirties and forties in tidy uniforms. The askaris knew the procedure; they each gave a pound to the boys, and Jama’s clansman walked them to where the other Somali worked. The clansman’s name was Jeylani, and like the others he repaired shoes, holsters, and other leather goods for the British soldiers; he was a former nomad who had acquiesced to this unclean but profitable work. Jeylani had been taught to work leather by Mahmoud, the Yibir man they were about to meet.

Jeylani was not impressed by Jama and Liban’s escapades. “Go home, boys. You look intelligent, I know you speak good Arabic, but don’t waste your lives being pushed around in Arab lands. Go home, there is nothing for you here, there is going to be nothing but violence. My advice is to head into Jordan, then Arabia, do your pilgrimages and then get a boat home. Every week I see boys like you fleeing from God knows what.”

Jama listened carefully to what their elder was saying and nodded in agreement, but Liban walked on ahead with his wide, optimistic strides, certain that he would never return to Somaliland a poor man. Mahmoud was a gentle, thin man with deep wrinkles across his forehead, who poured tea for them and asked how they had found him. He smiled knowingly at mention of Musa the Drunk, and was quick to give his share of the langaad, tipping Liban with an extra pound as Jeylani had done with Jama.