Let's Go Swimming on Doomsday, page 20
“Come on.” He starts around the back of A-block, under a grove of acacia trees. I’ve never been back here before. I didn’t think there was anything behind the Doctor’s quarters but trees and rubble. Maybe he’s taking me to a planning meeting in a secret room where no one will see us. But Khalid stops under the trees and looks up. I follow his gaze. The brightest stars are caught in the branches.
“You proved yourself a warrior out there.”
The same queasy feeling of pride swells in me again. You killed to save your brothers, I tell myself angrily. What was I supposed to do? Let Khalid and Bashir die? I force myself to focus.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Khalid goes on.
“What I said?”
“About wanting to help. About how I would need someone on the mission I can trust. I think you were right.”
I hold my breath, not daring to move. This is it. He’s talking about the mission.
“I’ve spoken with the Doctor, and when he heard how you performed out there, he agreed that you could be an asset to the team. But he’s not one hundred percent ready to bring you in yet.”
“Yet?”
“He wants you to do this . . . job . . . first. He fears that your faith is not strong enough. That you may not be willing to carry out difficult tasks set before you.”
I frown. “What? Why? I fought for us. I did difficult things.” I killed people. Bile fills my throat and I have to force it back down. Don’t go there now, Abdi. “I’m ready,” I say. “Is it another mission? I can go, I can be ready. Where is it?”
For a second, something like pain flashes across Khalid’s face. “It’s here.”
“I don’t underst—”
Khalid pulls something from his pocket, stopping me. In the low light I can barely make out that it’s a book. He hands it to me.
“What is this?” I say, squinting at it. The cover is a painting of a half-naked white woman, swooning into the arms of a beefy man with long hair. I give Khalid a confused half smile.
“It’s haram, is what it is,” Khalid says, his face still. He doesn’t find it funny.
My smile fades. The book sits between us like something smelly. I don’t know what to do with it. I try to give it back to him, but Khalid’s hands are clenched at his sides.
“We found it in the kitchen girl’s things,” he says.
It takes me a second to put two and two together. The wrapped package I saw Bashir give Safiya. It wasn’t perfume. It was a book. A romance novel in English, not something to flash around in a place like this. But still, why does Khalid look so mad? I shake my head. “I really don’t understand.”
“That book is filthy. Fornication outside of wedlock, adultery, blasphemy . . .”
I wait, confused about what this has to do with me. Or . . . does Khalid know I was there when Bashir gave it to her?
But instead of getting mad at me too, Khalid says, “You will punish her. That’s the job.”
“Punish her?”
“Da’ud,” my brother says, “this sort of Western imperialist trash is what we’re trying to wipe clean from our country. And she flaunts it right under our noses. She might as well have defecated in the middle of the mosque. She has to be taught a lesson. The General is assembling the Boys in the yard right now. Come, she’s here in the cell. You’ll bring her out.” He turns away.
With what feels like a punch in the face, I realize I have been back here before. The corner Khalid is heading for is the cell where I was held the first two days I was here. I grab my brother’s arm. “Wait, what is it you want me to do to her?”
He stops, straightens his back. “She will receive the standard punishment: a whipping. Twenty lashes. You will lead it, landing the first blows, and then the rest of the men in your unit will follow.”
I stare at him. “Twenty lashes? For reading a book?”
“It’s not just a book, Da’ud. It’s what it represents. We have to show the Boys that this sort of thing is not tolerated. If we let her get away with it—a servant girl—they’ll think they can get away with worse.”
“But . . . the Doctor wants me to do this?”
Khalid narrows his eyes. “If you can’t go through with it, tell me now, brother, because the justice we will soon deliver—this mission you are being tested for—will be a thousand times more terrible and glorious than what you will do tonight. This girl is nothing. But by punishing her, you prove yourself true to the faith and worthy of the cause.” He stops, searches my face. “Can you do it?”
I stare at him, trembling, wanting to scream, No! No, no, no! This girl is not nothing! And whipping her for reading is wrong! Don’t you remember watching American movies at Salama Cinema? You loved them! They were fun. They let us forget about all the bad stuff around us. They made us happy. But looking at Khalid now, I realize that if I were in Safiya’s shoes, caught watching a Hollywood action movie, he’d feel like he had to punish me too.
My mind spins. Where is Bashir? What will he do when he finds out about this? I can’t hurt and humiliate the girl he loves. I can’t. It isn’t like my hands are clean; I killed people today. But what Khalid is asking me to do feels wrong in some whole other way. I killed to save him and Bashir and the others. This? It’s different. He wants me to cause pain where none needs to be. Because of some stupid book. I start to tell Khalid all of this, but as I open my mouth, I find my mother’s face floating before me, my ayeyo’s, Hafsa’s and the twins’, and I’m frozen. What happens to them when I say no?
I look at my brother. He’s barely recognizable anymore.
It’s them or us, I hear Scarface say. Don’t forget that.
I hear Jones ask, Do you want your family to be safe? What are you willing to do?
I swallow the choking feeling in my throat, and realize this was never a choice. I’ve started down a dark road, and now I can’t turn back. It’s too late for that.
“Yes,” I finally tell him. “I’ll do it.”
THIRTY-SIX
THEN: OCTOBER 2
THE FORT, SOMALIA
SAFIYA
By the time they are ready, her panic has dulled. At first it was sharp, like the knives she uses every day to chop and cook their food. But like the knives, the fear cannot stay sharp for long, and soon the blunt blade is sloppy, hitting places it shouldn’t. Opening up memories.
Safiya thinks of her littlest brother, only just starting to walk when she left, running into everything, lumps on his forehead like eggs. He would be three by now. Where is he?
She remembers a secret boyfriend she had once. He was recruited into the ranks of Boys long before she was. Dead before he turned seventeen. She can’t remember exactly what his face looked like. Just that he was sweet. Once he brought her cold soda from a store with a generator. The curvy bottle had beaded with moisture, and something about the way it felt in her hand made her blush for reasons she couldn’t quite understand.
It is dark. But that isn’t why she can’t see the Boys. It’s because she has been tied to a pole, her back to them. All she can see is wood grain and the flickering orange light from the Boys’ torches. The flames make the grass shadows dance under the trees.
And for a long time, long enough to hear the Boys grow restless and start to whisper, nothing happens. She’s on her knees. Her arms go prickly where they are tied above her head, then numb. She stares at the wood grain, getting lost in it, finding worlds in the places between the lines.
Finally she hears the Boys stirring. Their anticipation swells. Shadows jerk and waver.
Two Boys come and stand close to her.
They say something, a proclamation of her guilt. A sentence: twenty lashes. She tries not to listen. She tries to stay in between the wood grain.
But then a hand grabs her dress from behind, and there is a little snick of fabric under a knife, and the cloth is ripped along the line of her spine, her whole back undressed, peeled like an overripe mango. Her breasts hang free. She cannot move her arms to cover them.
Her headscarf is pulled off.
The undresser moves away, but the other Boy stays.
They are not finished.
The night breeze is cool on her skin; she feels goose bumps rising. Her flesh is aware of everything.
The first lick is fire, cold and then hot.
She screams, awake, alive, nakedness forgotten.
The second lash is worse than the first. She had no idea something could have so many dimensions of pain. Brilliant like starlight, deep and dull like a hammer.
By the fifth, she is out of air for screaming.
She is aware of the whip changing hands, but it isn’t until the eighth stripe across her back that she fully understands that twenty of the Boys will have a turn.
These Boys she cooks for, morning, noon, night.
Whose shit she buries in the latrine.
Whose clothes she washes in salty and then fresh water, and hangs out to dry.
Whose oily bodies she endures when they come in the middle of the night and she is too tired to fight.
These Boys who go out of the gates alive, and who come back full of holes, empty of life.
Who have piled up in graves beyond the wall, too many to remember.
Who are always replaced, a never-ending spring of young men.
Twenty Boys will have the whip handed to them. Each will look at her back. Each will get to make a decision. Twenty chances for the pain to stop.
It doesn’t stop.
After thirteen she loses track.
These Boys.
Each of them a band of fire on her body.
Each one a mark.
THIRTY-SEVEN
THEN: OCTOBER 2
THE FORT, SOMALIA
When it is over, the General dismisses the Boys to the barracks for bed. I look for Bashir among the faces that slowly fade from the torchlight, but can’t find him.
Safiya barely moves, her back a mess of red ribbons. General Idris tells me to take her to her cell. I untie her hands from above her head and have to catch her because her legs won’t hold her up. I hear her moan softly as my fingers close around torn flesh. Her blood is sticky and warm, and little insects, attracted by the light and the smell, are starting fly around her.
I whisper, “Put your arms around my neck.” She manages to, and I brace her against my back, half carrying, half helping her stumble to the dark cells. She is lighter than I expect her to be. She had always seemed larger under all her dresses and layers and bluster.
When we are out of earshot, I begin to say softly, “I am so sorry. I am so, so, so sorry.”
She doesn’t answer. I’m not sure she’s fully conscious, though her feet continue to plod forward. Her breath is a wet rasp deep in her chest.
I don’t press. Forgiving me is probably the last thing on her mind right now.
When we’re almost to the cells, I see a figure before us and tense. Please, no more, I think, expecting someone like Nur. But instead of his jackal leer, I find only the stony face of Bashir.
He puts down a basin of water and rags as we approach. “I’ve got her from here,” he says, the fury in his voice barely contained. He lifts Safiya off my shoulder and helps her toward a clean mat he’s placed on top of the filth in the cell.
“Can I help? Can I do something?”
“No.” He eases Safiya down. I hear her whimper, and him say something soft and reassuring.
“I can get medicine, or—”
Bashir spins toward me, all gentleness gone. His eye flashes with rage. “I think you’ve done enough. Get out of here.”
I stumble back, feeling each word like a spike through my chest. “I didn’t want to do it, Bashir. You know I didn’t. Khalid said it was the only way they would trust me.”
The excuses sound so pathetic.
Bashir doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look at me, but I can see him breathing hard, trying to keep calm. He brings the water and rags and sets them on the mat next to Safiya. He pulls a candle out of his pocket and lights it, placing it back in the recesses of the cell where it won’t be so visible. Someone may still see it, but I hope they just let it go. Her wounds will become infected if they don’t get cleaned. I keep backing away slowly. Bashir drips the first rag full of water onto her skin. She keens softly.
“Go, Da’ud,” Bashir says.
And there’s nothing I can say to make things better. So I go.
THIRTY-EIGHT
NOW: DECEMBER 15
SANGUI CITY, KENYA
I’m far, far away from Maisha by the time my anger is through with me. After storming out of the gate, I’d started running, blindly tearing down the winding streets of the Ring. It’s only now that I’m completely spent that I find myself gasping for breath on the side of the road, with no idea where I am. How much time has passed? It’s got to be two or three o’clock. What do I do now? Where do I go? Back to Maisha? An image of the yo-yo disappearing over Maisha’s wall darts through my head, and a swell of shame fills me. I can’t go back there. Not after what I said to Muna and Alice.
As the last of my fury drains, it’s replaced with a sick feeling. Muna’s right. I am a jerk.
Why did I snap at her and Alice like that? Why did I say I don’t want to do swim lessons anymore? That wasn’t true at all. Why did I have to be such an asshole? All I know is that it felt good to snatch something away from them. And that I feel horrible now. Nice job, Abdi. The only two people who were even remotely close to being your friends are probably now discussing how much they hate you.
I’m so lost in my thoughts that I almost plow into an old woman who’s stopped ahead of me. I catch her elbow to keep her from falling, and she scolds me with a “Pole pole, kijana!” Slow down, kid! The cars and people ahead of us have come to a complete stop.
“What is it?” I ask the old woman. It’s too early for a traffic jam this bad.
“Polisi,” she grumbles.
My heart takes off like a startled bird. I crane my neck. She’s right. They’ve put sawhorses across the road to narrow it to two lanes of traffic. A couple of cars have been pulled to the side for searches. There’s even a sniffer dog. It’s just like the roadblocks that Sam and I went through on the way to Maisha on the morning after the bombing.
I feel a push and step forward. People are piling up behind me. I look around for side streets I might be able to casually turn down, but there are none. The police must have put their roadblock in this spot because there are no escape routes.
You haven’t done anything wrong, Abdi, just keep walking. You can’t turn around and go back without being completely obvious. Already I notice that one of the officers is eyeing me, his lips pouted in suspicion.
I try to walk behind a tall man. Maybe they won’t even notice me. When I get closer, I see that some people on foot are being let past with just a nod, but others are being stopped to have their bags checked, their pockets turned out. As I watch, a man raises his arms and a cop begins patting him down.
I feel myself tensing to run. No, idiot, that’s what got you taken to the station and locked up the last time. Why would you run? You’re not guilty of anything except being Somali. Just keep walking.
I’m almost there. Sweat beads and rolls down my back. I try not to make eye contact with anyone. The dog tips his nose up at me as I approach, but the officers are busy with other people. With my heart in my throat I realize I’m going to pass right through.
And then, “Hey! You, boy! Stop!”
I freeze, electrified with fear. Then I’m being yanked to the side by my collar, nearly falling over.
The officer’s fingers dig into my arm. “Didn’t you hear me? I said stop!”
“I’m stopping,” I say, raising my hands.
“Don’t talk back like you’re somebody!” he yells, eyes wide. “Get your hands on your head!” He jabs me in the ribs with a baton, toward a wall where several other guys sit in a row, hands in zip ties, eyes blank. Most of them look Somali. I hadn’t noticed them before. One of them has a blossoming black eye. Another boy in a red shirt looks up at me.
For a second I’m rooted to the spot.
It can’t be.
It’s not possible.
Bashir.
Whole, with both eyes, his bones and skin intact.
The whole world stills, starts to kaleidoscope into Bashir’s face, and all I can think is, they’ve captured him. They’re going to send him back. They’re going to send me back.
Some rational part of my brain is probably trying to tell me that I’m not making any sense, that the police and the Boys aren’t on the same team, but most of my mind is a black hole, as deep and senseless as the one Jones tossed me in. Suddenly I’m an animal, I’m fighting like a wounded lion, snarling, lashing out, trying to run.
I get one meter before I’m slammed against the ground, hard enough that I feel my teeth clack and shift, and then the officer’s knee is jammed between my shoulders, making me gasp for breath. “Runner!” he shouts, and then feet pound, and from all directions curses are screamed in my face, descriptions of what’s going to happen to me if I don’t be still. I try to do what they say, but they hit me anyway, blows around my ears and face, kicks to my kidneys. My legs are spread; hands grope up my thighs and around my waist looking for weapons.
It’s all one vortex of sound: “Fucking Somali trash! Desert rat! We’ve got one! Is he one of them? Get his hands secure! Bring the ID photos! Get his legs! Stay down, you son of a whore, stay down!”
My body screams, but I force myself to be still, to not let the beating make me twist and writhe. Finally, they stop and I can suck down a breath. I turn my head back toward the line of guys against the wall. Most of them are watching, wide eyed, silent. I look for Bashir, call out his name, but he’s not there. The boy in the red shirt is watching me. I stare at him.
