IT IS NOT without some nervousness that I wait inside the big swinging steel doors of the Unicef compound. I had been advised against this sortie with heaping specifics of the Murphy assassination. Each additional minute of discussion with Brian revealed more of the frightening details of his ambush. I am somewhat comforted that it was an apparent assassination of one who was well-known to the local people; one subclan thought Murphy was favoring another in the distribution of relief supplies.
“I can’t stop you from going, of course,” Brian had warned me. “You are not a permanent, only a contract worker, so it’s your call. But it is not something I would do anytime soon.”
“But you have been out at night, I heard.”
“Who told you that?”
“My driver.”
“Well, he must be thinking of someone else. I would definitely not go out in this town after dark. And no one on my watch ever has, to my knowledge.”
He runs his hands through his shaggy blond hair and shrugs. “Tomorrow you go up the river. It’s your last night in Kismayo. You might as well have a night on the town—although, again, I strongly suggest that you don’t.”
“A night on the town isn’t exactly what I have in mind.”
“Well, if you’re not back in the morning, we’ll assume you ran off with one of the local girls.”
A Unicef guard beckons me into the guardhouse and points through the peephole. Harun waits outside, standing a little uneasily. Instead of the outfit that he wears daily to the port—baseball cap, ragged aloha shirt—he is clad in a clean white shirt over clean trousers and a traditional round flat-top Moslem cap. He has dressed for the occasion. Even his assault rifle looks like it has taken a little polish. For some reason this gives me some comfort.
I don’t see his dented UN rig with the smoky incense burner and scratchy music tapes. Perhaps it is off to the side, beyond view. It is getting dark and I can’t imagine walking the shadowy streets of Kismayo at night.
“Ah, Captain Diep Maleh! We go?” he greets me as I come out of the high-walled compound. He shakes my hand and grins, still apparently unsure I’m really coming.
“No car?”
“No car, Captain. UN car not my car. I’m just driver. Car in shop.”
I hesitate, look down the street. “Come,” Harun says. Looking up at our dun-colored compound and the security it represents, I realize I have never actually stood on the ground outside, only whisked through the heavy reinforced gates in the UN rigs. It is imposing. Our redoubt could be a lonely undermanned French Foreign Legion outpost of seventy-five years ago on the edge of the Tunisian desert. I suppose there is little difference—this citadel of turrets, sandbags stacked around the gun emplacements (that have no guns), even the pockmarks from bullets that have chipped away at the massive walls. The suspicions, the guns, the hot Arab tempers, and the dusty Islamic town itself provide the same tangy ingredients. As a youth, I enjoyed watching the adventurous movies of the Foreign Legion. I never wanted to appear in one.
“You come now, Captain.”
“Okay, Harun, let’s go.”
Harun takes my hand and we begin walking down the pitted dirt road under the compound. I don’t like this hand-holding business, as common as it may be, and I walk stiffly, my arm rigid and unable to relax. Harun doesn’t seem to notice, or mind. As we walk away from the security of the UN, I feel like a kid who has met a dare and is following an older boy to the highest diving board, knowing he will have to jump. I am protected only by my faith and trust in this young Somali whom I’ve known for little more than a few weeks.
The little children who once might have been so friendly when I was in the car see us approach and run away. The youngest flee in tears at the rare sight of a white man walking in their midst.
There are no telephone or electric poles; they’ve been cut off at the ground and used as building material or firewood. There’s a railroad line through town but there are no tracks; the rails have been welded into antitank traps and the heavy cross ties used to build fortifications. There is no city sewerage, and the oppressive sweet stench of ordure mingled with the smells of frying goat for the evening meals assails the senses. Cholera is common here.
Hand in hand, we pass in front of the Somalia National Bank, a stately Italianate whitewashed building in the throes of destruction. Round tents of stick and animal hide, reminiscent of those of Native Americans, litter what may have been a well-groomed lawn. On the balcony of the building, colorful sarongs, cotton shawls, a few frayed men’s and boys’ trousers, and other indefinable clothing—squatter flags—flutter in the evening breeze. The top floors probably house the more powerful and wealthy of this seedy commune, perhaps even our salaried day workers—the cooks, the radio operators, the cleaners—those who keep our operation going.
Away from the compound and out of a car, there is noise. The din of Somali and Arabic, the crowing of roosters, the laughter of naked children, the tinny competing sounds of faraway radios. The eerie call to prayer in no melody any Westerner could compose drifts through the streets from a nearby mosque.
We turn another corner, onto a deeply potholed road lined on both sides with tall leafy trees. Complemented by the dusk, it is possible with some imagination to see that Kismayo was once a well-laid-out colonial city.
We pause by the Catholic church that stands enisled among the acacia. The dusty area in front of the building, blemished with random sprigs of dead grass, is oddly free of the shanties that clutter most of this despairing city’s free spaces. The building’s black stone facade of Gothic symmetry weeps with the stains of weather. It is a sharp contrast to the whitewashed flat Arab buildings and the mud-colored shanties that surround it.
“Church,” Harun says. It is as if he is proud to be able to identify, to acknowledge the symbol.
The poetic brutality of the building, standing defiantly among the shabby surroundings, is singularly disturbing. Why does it still stand when so many other buildings of more local importance are mere shells? Curiously, the church’s heavy wooden portal is secured by a large rusting padlock. Who would care to lock a church in this nearly entirely Muslim town so long ago abandoned by Christians? Who is preserving it? Is it part of someone’s dream—a hope that one day the West will return?
Carved in the black stone above the archway is a sculptured relief of Mary holding a swaddled Jesus. A bearded Joseph stands proudly next to his family. All wear tarnished halos. The paint on the relief is faded. Mary and Joseph look happily down at the baby. The face of the infant Jesus is little more than an empty cement hole, gouged out by hundreds of well-aimed bullets.
Chet tells of the days following the UN’s ill-conceived occupation of Mogadishu. Children emptied their recoilless rifles and grenade launchers at the modern Western-style buildings, smashing offices and apartments into rubble just for the hell of it. The youths were not shooting at one another or at anyone inside but at a world they could not see or reach, a world that had abandoned them to their fate. It is not an idle wish that the UN presence in the form of seven internationals might restore a faith in an outside world. Yet I know now that few here or on the outside really give a damn.
I notice more frequently men walking the streets holding hands, and I begin to relax. Unconsciously I begin to appreciate our display of friendship; it is something of a security guarantee and it makes me feel invisible. As long as Harun is holding my hand, I feel safe.
Night comes quickly here, just a few miles south of the equator. There are no street lamps, and in the gathering darkness, the soft lights of the kerosene lanterns dance mysteriously in front of small makeshift stalls along the road. There is still light enough to make out the wares on the tables: detergents, cigarettes sold individually, soft drinks, sesame biscuits, and some rusty tools.
We are walking toward the end of town and it is nearly dark. The weak glow of the lanterns and the charcoal braziers lights the way, casting surreal designs before us. Shadowy Brueghelesque figures, bent and secret, drift across our path in a danse macabre. We have become one with these ghostly apparitions, and our own movement seems to drift over the surface unnoticed. Something moves under my foot. A snake? A rat? I stumble, and Harun tightens his grip and keeps me from falling.
There is a timeless indifference here. Despite war, no war, UN, no UN, Kismayo will probably go on this way forever, as it did before and during the days of the Italian and British administrations, as it does now with us, the benevolent troops crusading under the banner of the White Man’s Burden. Here, the hard fight for survival continues as it always has, whether the colonialists are European exploiters or relief workers.
“My home!” Harun says proudly.
He motions ahead to a collection of silhouetted adobe shacks randomly huddled at the end of the road. Tiny dancing flames from stoves and burners form a narrow corridor to the cluster. Flickering lights briefly illuminate dark, quiet figures. A donkey brays nearby.
Harun’s hand tightens. I feel his tension.
Harun is acknowledged by his shadowy neighbors with a few cursory words and muffled grunts as we pass the small cooking fires toward a single mud shack in the back. An old gray cow, with ribs exposed like the dusty exhibit in a museum, stands patiently next to Harun’s home. A rope around her scrawny neck is anchored to one of the protruding sticks of the hut.
Light glimmers through the sides of the animal-hide door. Harun lifts the heavy skin and motions me inside.
My eyes take a moment to get used to the brightness within. The low walls of rough red clay slapped onto the interwoven wattle reach to a roof of makuti—woven palm fronds. Many of the village homes in Somalia are roofed with grass, and a house of makuti is one that is considered well-constructed. Harun’s home is a single large room, bedroom and living quarters as one. In the dark corner on the ground away from the lamp is a thin American-made Sealy Posturepedic mattress with the tag still on. The bottom of the mattress is spattered red from the mud. A couple of shawls are thrown over the bed.
The dirt floor is spotless, swept clean of everything but dirt.
A current calendar with a photograph of New York Harbor hangs on a peg on the wall.
Harun barks something in Somali, and the animal-hide door is slowly swept aside by a tall woman clad in a red sarong with a green leafy border. Another kanga of strange desert-colored logos is carelessly wrapped as a shawl over her head and around her shoulders; wisps of long silky black hair peek out from under her scarf.
Her contented air vanishes at the sight of my presence. She pulls up in sudden fright, black startled eyes defensive and fearful. Harun speaks and she appears to relax a little. There is something of a faint smile forming. With slow purposeful movement, she lifts an edge of her kanga to cover all but her eyes, yet her eyes, dark and warm, never leave mine. The look through that narrow window appears tantalizingly daring.
She has nearly taken my breath away. No older than her late teens or early twenties, she is a stunning classic Somali beauty, every bit as beautiful as those Somali models all the rage on a Western catwalk. Her light brown skin is smooth and flawless and velvet; her high cheekbones, a gentle nose, and a rather challenging mouth with a bit of an overbite accent non-African features. Her high forehead boasts a proud Nilotic heritage.
As she leaves, he turns to me and smiles proudly: “My wife.”
“She is very pretty, Harun. You are a lucky man.”
The girl reappears moments later with an earthenware vessel with a long graceful spout and long neck, its rounded bottom charred where over the years it has been set in the coals. She pours thick sweet tea with camel’s milk into two glasses and then withdraws into the shadows.
Harun does not introduce us. He ignores her as if she had ceased to exist. Dragging my stubborn Western ways along with me, I feel I must say something innocuously polite: Lovely home you have here. Or anything. It is not clear if that would be out of place.
I am so far out of my element. Harun is my driver. But now I am in his home as a guest. A role reversal. I don’t know small talk anymore. I haven’t anything to say. I cannot identify nor relate to anything here, and Harun and I sit across from each other in silence, smiling and drinking the lukewarm tea.
A movement in the shadows enters my periphery, and now accustomed to the fluttering half-light, I watch a rat poke his nose and forefeet into the top of an open white bag labeled in blue: Maize Meal, 50 kg, Unicef.
I begin to notice a few other items. Hanging near the bed is a framed mirror. Below, under an American flag, is a fresh cardboard box of yellow HDRs—Humanitarian Daily Rations—marked Food Gift of the People of the United States of America, RIGHT AWAY FOODS, McALLEN TEXAS. On a peg on the opposite wall is a new UN-blue flak jacket. It is the lighter Kevlar type, a damn sight lighter than the ones I have seen lying around the Unicef offices. Maybe he has also got the lighter-style blue combat helmet I could borrow. Then I realize he probably never was issued this gear.
Harun sees me scanning the room and, rising from the table, retrieves a thick book from inside a small locked trunk in the corner.
“The Koran,” he announces. It is a richly inlaid leather volume with red marker ribbons and pages yellowed by age. “It is the book of my father and of my father’s father and his father’s father.” He stands over me as I leaf blindly through the pages of Arabic scrawl.
“It’s very beautiful,” I say, looking up. “They say every Somali man can trace his family back twenty generations. Is that true?”
“I believe it is so. For me, I know my family from long ago. We once had many camelsin Ogaděn, but they were taken by Ethiopians and Russians. But now I have a cow.” He smiles ruefully. “My father and my wife’s father were enemies. Now they are both dead. I have the woman.”
Harun issues another quiet instruction and his wife, waiting in the shadows, slips out the door.
Harun replaces the Holy Book and returns to the table.
He raises his eyes to mine. “You are my brother.” His voice is gentle. If he had said I was his lover, it probably would have sounded the same.
“Thank you, Harun,” I say quietly. I don’t know what more to say. The import of this statement is evident. “I will be leaving Kismayo tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he repeats. He does not hide his disappointment. He looks down into his glass.
“I’m taking the boats to Hum Hum. I’m setting up a base on the river.”
“Marehan clan, Captain.” He looks up, proclaims, “You will be killed.”
“No, my friend. Don’t you know? I’ve got nine lives.” He looks confused. “I have many lives left on this earth. We will have the permission of the Marehan and General Morgan. They will guarantee my safety. It will be all right. It will be safe.”
Harun stares at his tea and shakes his head. “You will get permission and they will kill you just the same. After you bring them food. Tomorrow,” he repeats.
I shrug. But the fears I have been trying to deny are again demanding attention. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. “What is your wife’s name?”
“Like the country?”
“No, Captain. Ho-laan.”
“Does she speak English?”
“No, no,” he laughs. “She is only a stupid cow, Captain. She does not speak English. She only speaks Somali, Arabic, Kiswahili, and maybe little Italian, I think.”
In spite of his words, he leans back on the heel of his chair and grins proudly.
“She is a shifta, from a family of thieves. You know shifta, Captain? In Kenya, everyone from Somalia is called a thief. But only she is true shifta. Her father was rich, had many camels because he steal so many from the Bantu. You are American?”
“Yes.”
“Her father was camelboy. Like American cowboy. He was camelboy with many camel.”
Holaan appears in the room and places an enameled bowl of ugali, a mush of maize meal in coconut milk, in the center of the table. She sets before us small tins of boiled black beans and a saucer of green chili peppers fried in salt. She returns with enameled cups filled with camel milk, yellow and thick. She withdraws silently to the shadows.
There are no utensils and I don’t expect any. Forks and spoons are not common in this city. Those left behind by colonialists and once used in hotels most likely have been collected and sold as scrap. I finger the first of the beans and mix it with the mush. Although it is bland and unappetizing, I’m hungry. I’ve eaten far worse. But I look forward to the nyama choma.
I look up at this mysterious woman whose languid eyes regard me through the veil. I try to imagine her beautiful face. I am compelled by those eyes. I catch myself gawking.
“We have baby,” Harun says quietly, as if it is a secret.
“You have a baby?”
“Yes. Soon.”
Despite the loose robes, it does appear that his wife is pregnant. I can’t help but feel—a sensation from memory—the body of the dying infant that I held in my arms outside the MSF compound. I pray theirs will survive.
Pushing the ugali away, Harun looks up at Holaan and speaks, mentions something about the nyama choma. I hear only the whisper of her reply. He appears surprised. He repeats the same thing and she answers, it seems, somewhat defiantly.
He backhands the bowl of porridge onto the floor, jumps up from the table, knocking over his chair. Standing before her, he slaps her full across the face.
I jump up, my fists clenched, but I really don’t know what to do. She cowers back against the mud wall and whimpers. He lords over her, his fist poised within inches of her face. Her eyes, large, malevolent, and frightened, glare back at him.
I would have never thought Harun capable of such demented violence.
She mutters something, deep and guttural, unmistakably challenging.
He explodes. Wrenching her head back by her hair and scarf, he begins to haul her out of the shack. Her veil has slipped off and her pretty face is contorted by fear. “Harun!” I shout. I must stop this. I want to grab him, pull him off, slam him against the wall. I reach for his shoulder. But never touch. He ignores me.
Outside in the night, pressed in by other shanties and silent figures standing, sitting around their cooking fires, he throws her to her knees and stands over her, shouting abuse. I look around for help. Suddenly, he reaches down for her hair with one hand and, wrenching her face upward, slaps her again with the other. She screams, tries to twist away, then she stops resisting. Her mewling seems to inflame him more. Without warning, he slams her face into a still-steaming pile of wet cow dung at our feet.
Grabbing Harun’s arm, I try to pull him away from the sobbing, sputtering girl. He rounds on me with uncomprehending disbelief. And blind personal hatred. His furious dark eyes drill into mine.
Softly I plead: “Please, brother.”
The fires of fury in his eyes begin to ebb. He releases his grip on his wife. She is gagging from a mouthful of dung and begins to vomit. Dark shapes have risen and are gathering around us. Their attention seems to be on me, their toneless muttering a frightful incantation. I sense they are not shocked at the display of domestic violence but at my interference with it. I am surrounded, trapped by their ghostly indecipherable enmity.
On her hands and knees, Holaan stumbles forward into her home. Harun slaps the cow shit off his pants and looks contemptuously over at me. Without a word he disappears into the shack, jerking shut the animal-hide door behind him.
* * *
During the long walk back to the compound, I relive, over and over, those frightening moments. I hurt with guilt, I hurt for her.
It is later now and the street activity has diminished by half. It is darker, and I wonder whether it is obvious I don’t belong here. I seriously question whether I will make it back alive. I try to force myself into anonymity. I take some comfort that no one expects a crazy gal to be walking the night streets of this lawless town alone. It hasn’t been done in years. Still, I walk tall, purposefully, afraid that I might show that I am scared to death, a figure sneaking, squeezing past shadows.
Like most children, I was once afraid of the dark. That was before I realized as an adult there is sanctuary in darkness. But this darkness is different; this weighted blackness seems to shift and flow, black against black, and I’m certain death awaits behind each tree. I pray that I can find the way back to the compound. I have been praying a lot recently, and it is not without some justifiable need that I start believing again. I suppose foxhole religion is as valid as any other, assuming all things are equal. At least we don’t have to specifically address our appeals. I wouldn’t know who to pray to.
The girl’s beautiful young face smeared in dung is seared into my mind. Again, I relive it and I try to see me doing something. Anything. I had heard that brutality toward one’s wife in many parts of the Arab world is accepted and expected. There is a Somali proverb that says: A man who can control his temper is not a passionate man. But such cruelty against a woman hardly seems to warrant the honor of passion. Harun’s violence remains with such awful clarity that I feel, I taste the cow shit as if it had happened to me. Unconsciously I run my hand over my own face. Many times.
As I step carefully through the night, an equally terrifying fear begins to course through my veins. Tomorrow I will take a boat up the river and I will run the gauntlet between warring subclans.