Chapter 5
When Xemi got out of the car his legs were fast asleep. He tried shaking off the numbness, limping as life returned to his dead limbs while he surveyed his surroundings.
There were many people all around him. All of them young, kids and teenagers. One teenage girl was hopping around in her excitement crying out 'they're here, they're here' in the twilight just before dusk.
The building was evidently a home but one unlike any he had seen before. There were rocks all around it of varying sizes. Some looked more like boulders than your average stone. The only rock free space was in front of the door: A flimsy dark green metal door which gave entry to a small courtyard.
On the right side was the carcass of a neighbouring home with rocks strewn in a conspicuous plot. A gravestone couldn't be more of an indication that the remains of something previously intact was left there.
'What on earth happened there,' Xemi wondered, 'and how long ago did this occur?'
There were crenellations enclosing this house, big tall walls, but it could be scaled because of the big tall rocks all around it, with smaller ones at their feet serving as steps for whomever felt that way inclined. The walls had shards of glass on top, and in the twilight, the green glass, which were broken Heineken bottles, shimmered like green fire on the ramparts of a magic castle.
That was the first instance of property related glass Xemi had seen since he had come to this country. And it was for what purpose? He smiled slightly. He then glared at the people around him, sensing that the main attraction had arrived, himself that is. Before they went inside, his father whispered to him:
'You are about to meet close family.'
Xemi knew it meant salaams and shaking hands. He looked at the giddy girl and as he came closer she ran inside.
'Who is that?' Xemi asked his father.
He said that he didn't know, smiling at his own ignorance. In his own mind he found that things had changed since he had last been there...
Xemi was on autopilot, separated from his father, greeting one person after another, not knowing who was who when he was guided to a stout, dark skinned woman seated in the corridor. He said the islamic greeting and went to shake her hand.
For a moment, his hand was dangling in the air while her eyes finished passing over his exposed legs. She quickly covered her hand with her long blood red coloured scarf when returning his handshake but he also noted that she used her other hand to cover her mouth. He had the strange sensation that she was whispering prayers while she shook his hand.
'But why? Who needs prayers?' he asked himself. 'Me? For what? Or is it her, for touching my hand with her scarf? Haha!'
He moved back thinking that he should have just waved from a distance so she could save her prayers for someone else. Then his father came up and embraced this same woman. Xemi looked stunned, throwing up his hands like he was offended but soon gathered that this was his sister because they broke too many social barriers to be anything else.
His aunt did not look like his father. She was dark skinned, fat with a flat nose. He was tall, lighter skinned with a longer aquiline nose. Xemi had the picture of his father's other sister in mind who looked just like him.
'What on earth are we doing here?' Xemi thought. 'This woman can't be getting ready to leave this place. She looks like she has at least two kids. Are we doing international family visits now too?'
They then entered what turned out to be the living room. There was a gaggle of people here, a younger crowd, seated on two beds temporarily erected in the living room.
The entire welcoming committee had been split into several factions. There was one outside the house, with the giddy girl and other children. One in the corridor with his aunt, another in the living room with an assortment of different types, and as he passed one room he saw another faction full of older men.
This living room crowd was reigned by a slim, young and beautiful girl, with the colour of light amber. She was wearing a golden coloured dress which completely matched her skin. She was so cute that for the first time Xemi didn't mind being on this continent.
He felt himself smiling as he sat next to her on one of the beds while she was saying something with a peculiar accent which made some of what she said unintelligible to him. She knew she looked good and returned his smile like she at times struggled with humility, but her smile gave way to bewilderment as she noticed Xemi's own smile.
'Allah, what is that? That, that, what is that? Is that - metal ? Why does he have that on his teeth ?' she said, shocked.
Xemi had braces but since his dad kept moving around he hadn't completed the dental treatment. He had them for four years when the treatment was meant to have been for two years. No one there had seen braces before and his father explained what they were for.
Apart from the beautiful girl, another guy stood out. A chubby well kept figure who looked like he had money expressed by the rings on his fingers but further expressed by the curious constant habit of flossing his car keys, twirling it around. With a really good natured smile, he kept exclaiming 'Allah, Awad,' over and over again. Xemi initially was confused as to what he was referring to, thinking it might be some word that he wasn't familiar with because he had never heard the particular name before but then he realised that he referred to his father, like that was the name he knew him by. He sat mouth agape for a moment and then turned to his grinning father who was sitting on one side and the girl on the other.
'Is that his name, is it?' he said to himself in bemused shock, since this deceit was funny in its outrageousness. To trick him into going to Somalia was one thing, but to have a completely different name was insane. Xemi felt mildly delirious and started to think he was in a fever dream.
After about five minutes of ogling, slightly awkward conversation, which was more sudden exclamations and darting looks, as the mix of ages and sexes in this room made things difficult, they moved to the final one. There were five old guys sitting on perpendicular cream coloured divans. Interestingly, they all had on kufis and Xemi went around and shook hands.
When he came to one, who was particularly rambunctious in his handshake, Xemi was told that this was his father's brother. A really dark skinned man with the same complexion as his sister. He had a debonair, white streak in his beard and hair. It looked so perfect Xemi thought it must have been designed, but it looked natural, and probably was.
'I'm your uncle, I'm your uncle. Your father's brother, your uncle. That's right, your father's brother.'
He kept his hand in a vice grip as if the constant pressure would make it more evident that he was his father's brother.
Maybe it was the passage of age but elation at seeing another relative never happened to Xemi. All this excitement for someone who was in effect a stranger...
He took a seat next to his father on the floor sofa. It felt, to him, no better than sitting on the floor itself. The room looked neat and prepared for someone as it had a bed with more smiling, elderly men sitting on it.
Distant family no doubt, closer family on the floor sofa, Xemi determined. He had no clue who they all were.
They were talking to each other while Xemi was eyeing the bed. There were exclamations of surprise and his father was exhorted by words of 'tell him, tell him'. Xemi tensed in anticipation. His father turned to him.
'This guy is massive,' Xemi thought. Years of growth spurts hadn't changed how his father seemed to him.
With a half smile his father said:
'My mother died.'
Xemi wheeled away in shock and then wheeled back. What did this have to do with him?
'This is Somalia. You're staying here until you learn the language and culture.'
Xemi pursed his lips and turned away from his father. He used his tongue to play with his teeth; letting it roll in between the gaps underneath his premolars. He did this when he had to let something dreadful sink in.
He stroked his tongue in and around, stroke after stroke until the strokes came in rhythm with tears. The tears burst from his eyes uncontrollable now and he covered his eyes with his hands. He cried for a long time.
'Unforgivable, unforgivable,' he raged in his mind, thinking that he would die soon, by his own hands.
'What is wrong with that boy? Why didn't you tell him before?'
'He wouldn't have come if I did. Let's leave him.'
They were getting embarrassed by his crying. He was sixteen and it was unseemly to cry like this. He wanted to curl up and die then and there and he didn't care what anyone thought.
The room cleared and he was told this was to be his room. The disdain given was returned and he refused everything offered to him. He laid on the bed and faced the wall. He resolved then that this would be a battle of resolutions and that his would not break.
Chapter 6
Xemi woke up with a thin cotton bed sheet around him, light of fabric, but dark enough to obscure those wrapped within it. It felt cool to his body but he had pulled it over him as he couldn't sleep without his face hidden. He had another reason for obstructing vision.
As he shook sleep off, he resolved that with the sheets covering him was how everyone would come to find him. A procession came to see him but this was no carnival parade and he refused to put on the costume that they tried to make him wear.
He could hear voices coming closer and then entering the room. Two girl voices. Xemi had to strain to comprehend most of the language, but the language was latent and constant contact opened up the latch further and further.
'Allah, I would love to see how he looks. I swear I would cry too, being dropped here with people you don't know, don't speak the language, I swear I would want to cry.'
Xemi wanted to look upon his champion. Of course it was outrageous that he should suffer this and heard nothing of the like happening to someone else.
He could hear the rustle of a dress and the familiar seductive sway of a woman. Was she doing a little jig?
'Maybe she thinks I can see her,' Xemi told himself. 'Or she's trying to entice me into looking.'
'Why did they bring him here, Mayloun?'
'I don't know,' she replied.
He could feel them looking at him and wanted to laugh with pleasure at female attention until they left, leaving him alone again.
Xemi ate and drank nothing for three days, giving a signal of intent and didn't leave his bed for anything. He felt so sure that if he stuck to it that he would win a reprieve. After all, if it's a case of his life versus a whim induced by grief and madness, his life would win out. But as soon as someone posed a question about Xemi's hunger strike his father's eternal and crushing refrain would be: 'he will eat when he's hungry'.
On the day of his father's departure, Xemi had heard the commotion and from it gathered that his father was ready to leave. His father came to sit on his bed. Xemi pulled the sheets over him tighter, breathless in anticipation.
In a soft voice, his father said:
'The cemetery where my mother is buried is not far from here.'
His eyes shone as he spoke.
'Don't imagine that you will leave here without knowing the language she spoke or the people she knew.'
'I'll speak to her like two dead souls speak to each other, without your cursed language, before I'll speak to you or anyone else that lives here. Soon, hopefully it will be real soon,' Xemi said to himself, nothing to his father.
His father in response to Xemi's silence squeezed his arm in goodbye. Despite himself, Xemi felt a surge of warmth coursing through his body at his father's touch.
'So that's that,' Xemi thought in tearful disbelief as he heard his father's car drive off. 'He's left me here to die, because I'm a burden that he doesn't want to carry anymore.'
He heard his aunt shuffle into his room and tried to keep his cries as silent as possible. But she knew what was going on because she felt the same. She sat where his father had just sat and in a false cheerful tone she said:
'At least your father left you only once, Xemi. Me, he has left three times…'
She laughed the closest a laugh could be to a sob, and Xemi heard the jingle of a rosary bead and mutterings of prayer like every prayer uttered was a tear shed and each bead moved a sigh shuddered.
Days passed and more and more people came to his room to look at him. Xemi kept his covers around him like a shroud, spending his days in torpor. He surprised even himself with his fortitude.
His will was opium, so he felt no hunger pangs sleeping as much as he could and when he was awake, his memories served for entertainment, vivid like hallucinations, nearing the fevers of delirium. He wanted death, but death did not want him. At least not quick enough for his liking.
At first he would keep his face covered so that he saw no one and no one could see him but then boredom flexed its might and kept his face uncovered. He wanted to look at the people the same way they wanted to look at him. His aunt smelled blood and plotted to have as many people in Xemi's room as possible. She believed that the more people came the more the social spirit within him would be bursting through, which was rumbling in discontent.
He tried to resist speaking to anyone but his own bodily functions were trying to force his hand. He wasn't eating or drinking but he started to get urges to go to the toilet even as he was trying to force it back and wait until he was dead. The moment came when he couldn't stand it any longer.
He got out of his bed with the same clothes he had landed with and walked out of his room. In the corridor he saw his aunt. She was looking at him like a dead man was walking out of his grave, with wariness and wonder in her eyes.
'Toilet?' Xemi asked rather aggressively in English.
'Toilet?' she repeated, relieved it was a word she understood. She however replied in Somali.
'At the end, on the right,' using her hands to illustrate the direction.
He walked to it, angry that he was forced to talk to people but pledged to make up for it with rudeness.
Curiosity made him look around at three rooms on the way to the toilet.
The room to the right was dark and he couldn't make out much except that there was a big bed in it with dark coloured coverings.
The next room to the left was also dark and he saw messiness, two beds not even of the same height, with female clothes everywhere. It looked like a cozy room. Untidiness had an appeal to him as it spoke of warmth and familiarity.
The final room, on the same side as the girl's room, was the kitchen and it was a grisly sight. The unplastered walls were black while the dark floor was cracked, undulating; seemingly empty, with curious white spots in several random places.
'The corner beyond vision was where everything must be kept,' he thought to himself. 'I wonder how they cook and why the floor looks like that. Maybe it's connected.'
He went to the back where he ducked a clothes line and to the right saw the toilet. He let out a laugh of incredulity. There was a manhole in the centre; and in a corner, on a little elevated dias that was made of stone, a long nosed watering can was resting, filled with water.
He looked inside and saw that the water was strangely cloudy. Xemi let out a sound of disbelief, muttering 'for what flowers?' and walked back out after pissing on the floor.
Food would be brought to him and he waved it away. He started drinking carbonated drinks left next to his bed because his will was disintegrating every day. Since he now drank, he had to piss more but dreaded that manhole. To circumvent that, he pissed in empty bottles but soon the bottles began to run out.
Looking for a way to solve this problem he thought that he had found the perfect solution. He emptied them out the glassless window. What Xemi didn't know was that he had emptied the bottles of piss on the forecourt and not the rocks as he had thought.
Then his uncle found out someone was pissing around the forecourt of the house. He was raging asking who did it. His aunt accused Xemi but was challenged by the same man, her husband. His voice softening, he quietly rasped:
'Why are you blaming this boy? It's Mahmoud, that fugitive, who did this. Why can't you raise these children properly? In particular that boy, who…'
Xemi had started to gather that his uncle held rancour, permanently on the surface, for his son who he despised for being a weakling and a guttersnipe.
Xemi's stomach rumbled even in its emptiness and with no way to empty bottles he was forced to go to the execrable toilet. He wished the grave had taken him first but instead he took some nasal tissues from his suitcase. He passed the excitable girl of the first night and her mother when the girl exclaimed in amazement:
'He's going in there with no water, hoyo?'
Her mother was confused also but said dismissively that 'these heathens have their own ways,' and returned to washing the clothes she had been occupied with.
'Water for what?' he asked himself as he entered. The first thing he did was look inside the manhole. It was dark but he saw a horrid semi congealing mass of brown liquid with assorted things floating on it: plastic bottles and toy cars and a child's shoe on top of the liquid; jagged, crumbling rocks on the side and noticed that the hole narrowed towards him and widened towards the bottom in a bottle shape.
Transfixed, he began to see the feelers of insects moving in the air, crawling from around the crevices of the crumbling sides as he stopped moving, sensing their safety in his immobility. He turned to stone at what he was witnessing; feeling his vertigo stir out of dormancy. He saw himself falling in and panic gripped Xemi cursed himself for looking, backing away to collect himself. This would disturb his sleep for time to come and he wished he had come at night with the darkness sparing him the sight.
He had no choice, breathing through his mouth, squatted over the hole and defecated as fast as he could, looking down sometimes to make sure no roaches were coming up the hole to crawl in his hole.
As he finished his business, noticing his defecation was white, he stood up gingerly and dizzily, because he was unused to squatting in that manner. He looked down to see many more feelers had come out for the loot. Wiping quickly, he dropped the nasal tissue, which had ripped neatly at the folds, and ran out of there.
Chapter 7
The constant slew of people coming in and out of Xemi's room continued unfettered and encouraged. Sometimes there would be girls looking in from outside his window, their own face hidden behind black veils, giggling, while they stared at him. Xemi liked this kind of popularity.
Then came some who spoke English. As he had not spoken more than two words to anyone in this village since he had set foot there, the consensus was that Xemi couldn't speak or understand Somali.
One English speaker was a bespectacled, well built bald fellow in his early thirties who used to live abroad. He exuded a natural panache of worldliness and Xemi found it irresistible not to be drawn to him. By coincidence, perhaps, the pretty girl from the first night was also there when Xemi was introduced to Ali Jakaf.
People referred to others by their first name and their father's name, a patronymic system, since only a few names circulate in Somali culture. Jakaf therefore was his father's name. He entered with the girl giggling next to him.
'Can we kiss?' he said to her as they sat down. She looked down flushing. He turned towards Xemi and he winked at him.
Xemi thought he was drunk which instantly increased his likeability.
'You like her?' Ali Jakaf added, pointing towards her, whose mouth was open stupidly looking from one to the other. He spoke Somali to her and English to Xemi and it was this fact that made Xemi respond back to him and not the others, the fact that he spoke English, which to his mind, separated Ali from the rest.
'Yeah. But I think she's some kind of relation to-'
'Look at that, he wants you too. Who doesn't? Show him to me.'
She couldn't hold his lecherous look and down went her bashful eyes, her flushed face. She emerged from embarrassment and looked at Xemi with a different look, one which said: 'I understand you. Of course you're just like everyone else' and claimed that if Xemi wanted a woman, one could be found.
Xemi had a goofy grin on his face from all this talk.
'Yeah, you want that?'
'I could never perform under these circumstances,' Xemi told them and then noticed she was pregnant. Shocked, he asked himself how long he had been here. She hadn't shown the last time he saw her, her face suffering from the break outs of pregnancy...
Throughout Xemi's doomed rebellion, Ali Jakaf was the only one to bring him out of his shell. He spoke loud and direct making it difficult to ignore him. He would rage at Xemi's treatment, asking what he had done to be left there. Safia shrugged her shoulders, showing signs of intimidation.
Tears welled in Xemi's eyes at the support.
'You're too good to be here, friend. What are you doing here ? See how they live, did you see all the rocks outside and they are happy to live like this. Incredible. That's not you.'
Ali replied back after chuckling saying that life was easy there, and that was all he wanted.
Xemi wondered what had complicated his life in New York, where he was from, but didn't want to open what Ali had left closed for a reason.
Most of the time, however, it was the people who lived in the house who came and sat with Xemi trying to draw him out of seclusion. His uncle, his aunt's husband, master of the house, would sit there, on the bed that had replaced the divan, with his prayer beads looking half asleep.
He was old and hostile, with a stupendous amount of nose hair; tufts of hair were also shooting out of his ears, the likes of which Xemi had not seen before. Highly visible grey hair which disrupted his hearing ability.
He would answer the phone, which he would bring into Xemi's room, and hell would break loose sooner or later.
'Yah? What did you say? Yah? Yah?' Silence. 'Fuck your mother, you thief! Fuck the animal that you are !' he shouted, spitting on the mouthpiece, muttering something about a contemptible people while slamming the phone down in awesome fury.
His temper was explosive with its crackling cinders permanently aglow. He couldn't hear whoever it was, the person deliberately speaking in a low voice, and whenever that happened, and this happened a lot, he would fly into a violent rage. Xemi couldn't hold in his laughter. This old man raged like no other.
'What's this boy laughing at?' he asked his grandson, a dark skinned boy of Xemi's age, handsome with straight Indian-like hair and a beautiful jaw structure, who happened to be there on one occasion.
He was scared of his grandfather and Xemi could feel the uncertainty and apprehension emanating from him. They hadn't said more than two words to each other in half an hour before the lad was asked a question.
The silence was becoming oppressive even for Xemi. This boy wasn't sure how to answer but eventually after weighing the correct modes of address said:
'I think it's because of how you spoke just now.'
One could see the tensing of muscles because he didn't know how his grandfather would take it. His relief was palpable when the old man didn't blow up. At times, his aunt Safia sat in the same place.
One day Xemi, dizzy and weak from lack of food, got up and closed the shutters of his window. He had seen the videos and pictures but until he went there he didn't realize how mind boggling the number of flies were.
There were hundreds within minutes of opening the green shutters and those inactive because of darkness woke up as soon as sunlight illuminated the room and swelled whatever number came from the outside. He wanted to keep the shutters closed as much as possible because of this.
Whatever flies were in the room, Xemi caught mid air, as he did every day, using the light that entered through the door of the courtyard to track them. As he caught them he tore limbs and wings off them and then threw them on the ground. There were strewn across the floor dozens of dead bodies. He detested their buzzing and crawling on his highly sensitive skin and found it surprisingly easy, even in his state, to catch and kill them.
His aunt came in, moving her heavy body slowly, muttering something about the room needing light and air.
'Did you close it ?' she asked, not to reproach, but to engage him. Xemi ignored her.
A shard of concentrated sunlight with dust and flies playing around it appeared and ended at the bottom of his bed. This light, though not falling upon Xemi's face, gave his face a particular shade.
Safia sat down on the other bed with her beads, like her husband had sat on the same bed with his beads. This curious similarity made Xemi think they were praying for him, or for themselves. If he were to die, they would be accomplices to murder.
He was staring at the beam of light and she was staring at him, mumbling prayers. Then he heard soft murmurings that sounded like they didn't exist. He thought he could distinguish the words 'beautiful, beautiful', over and over again, from the phantom liturgy and frowned, wondering if he was imagining things, if this was hunger's hallucinations. It was, however, becoming clearer now. Suddenly his aunt burst out:
'Beautiful, beautiful, how can you be ours? Your skin is red, I swear it! Why aren't you dark like me?'
She said this in an almost whispering tone, so fast and liquid, reverential and prayer like.
Xemi turned to her in surprise and snorted a laugh. He looked at her closely. She was obese, with signs of ravaging age on her face. She was around forty but looked older. She had a look of wonder in her eyes as she made her spiel and more than once he had caught this look in her eyes when he saw her staring at him. He turned away, back to the sunbeam, playful dust, buzzing flies.
'She will never let me go,' he realised. 'She will bury me before that happens. What's going on here ?' he mused. 'What am I to her, what am I to them ?'
Even though he had said to himself that he wanted to die, in actual fact, he didn't really do this in search of death. Even after his father had left, he was still harbouring the hope that the longer he stuck to his hunger strike, the more chance he would have of leaving. But that delusion was over and seemingly dying from hunger was a myth. So what next?
Later that day, his cousin, the excitable one from the first night, entered his room with the daily food offering. A plate of spaghetti and tomato sauce on it. As he looked at it, desultory was his first thought.
Xemi's little cousin was ready to go through motions and turn back but he pointed to the floor. He motioned that he wanted a fork. She understood and brought it for him. He recognised a haughtiness and pride in her bearing as she left. That's one up on her parents for being the one to have something accepted.
Chapter 8
'He took it?'
'Of course. I gave it to him. What else could he do?'
Xemi could sense this girl cheesing a smile of victory. He was bored of waiting for a liberation that would never come and decided that there were other ways of leaving this place besides with his father or with death. The girl brought him something to drink and he drank that.
He was in a state of elation, possessed with sudden wild hope, for no apparent reason, and wanted to be active after weeks of repression.
He wanted to bathe and asked how to do it using hand gestures. His aunt had come in to rape him with her eyes once more. She ordered that water be placed outside in the sun for him.
After about an hour, he went to the back near the toilet where there was enough shade for him to sit. He was told to go inside the toilet but he told them never.
The water was in another kettle, bigger than the one in the toilet, metallic and heavy next to a purple tub that was in the shadow. He touched the water and was surprised to find it hot. It was almost too hot to touch.
'The sun must be scorching right now,' an awestruck Xemi told himself. He started scraping the grime off his skin which was coming off in flakes. He looked at his skin. It looked like he had a rash, thickening towards his hands, all of it accumulated filth. At least he hoped it was.
Sitting in the purple tub, which collected the water he was using to bathe himself with, Xemi considered his situation in bemusement. He looked down at the black water, all darkened by the muck - the dirt of rebellion.
He got up and felt fresh and turned to find a window. He was naked and now realised anyone could have seen him nude. 'These voyeurs love to see just my face, now, what price for the rest?' A smile crossed his face as he concluded that he couldn't care less if they had seen him naked.
'Maybe I should go back like this and see how they react.'
His better judgement went against that.
While putting his clothes on, a different shirt and a different pair of shorts, he found himself dizzy. All this exertion after weeks of inactivity was making him unsteady.
He went back to the room he was given and found his aunt seated on the bed opposite his. To that day no-one had slept in it. She had her beads and looked at him. Xemi was feeling giddy, exuberant. His social animus was fixing to burst.
A young man came into the room obviously sent for by his aunt. Slim, rakish with a thin moustache; his voice had the gravel of a smoker and pleasure seeker.
He introduced himself as Yonas and said he had come before but that Xemi had ignored him. Xemi couldn't remember him but didn't doubt what he said. He had ignored many people, sometimes even if they spoke English, if their accent had anything Somali about it.
Yonas had a long face with a strong chin which had a little goatee. His aunt's children came in the room too and he saw those who were featureless before.
There were three children born to Safia. There was the excitable girl from the first night: Howa. She looked the most like her mother. Flat faced, homely with a flat nose and verging on chubby; loud with the puberty induced delusion of grandeur. She was the youngest, at fourteen.
This surprised Xemi because of the middle child. This was the boy, Mahmoud. There were multiple times when Mahmoud had burst into Xemi's room trying to hide from Howa. She would follow and knock him about until he cried. Because Howa could beat up her older brother she thought she was special and put airs on herself.
This boy Mahmoud, was sickly looking, sloven, skinny; curly hair perennially covered in sand or dust with the faintest of freckles on his face. The littlest thing like a refusal over something could make him wail. At sixteen he was two years older than Howa and if we take the word of Safia, their mother, five months younger than the eldest child, Mayloun.
While everyone was sitting somewhere in the room, Mayloun was standing in the doorway, leaning against the hinges, barefoot, with her hand on top of the door and the sun's winding revels playing on her face. Mayloun looked like she was adopted. There was not a trace of her parents in her. It was like golden Alstroemeria overcame a God's curse, weary of maintaining his spell, returning her to mankind once more.
She was wearing a light brown dress, with her hair wrapped up, but unruly dark strands revolted in some places from under her headwrap. Her fleshy arms were bare and at an angle you could see the side of her breasts. She had an exquisite form which was perhaps a couple pounds away from stretching its sublime fullness. Her soft body was at its peak, the closest to perfection, this curse breaking beauty. Xemi was bewitched and wanted to play a game.
Ever since he had freed himself from self imposed social confinement, he had felt throbbing elation and wanted to push boundaries. After laughing at the fact Mahmoud was getting beat up by his younger sister, he wanted answers to personal questions he had always wanted to ask of Somali people.
Xemi asked Yonas to ask his aunt if she loved her husband. His smile gave Yonas's face a pinched look. A dutiful translator, he translated. Safia replied yes but like a brother. She rubbed her two forefingers to illustrate the link of brotherhood.
'The love you mean, no, we don't do that.'
He was delighted at the way she said 'no', like she shouldn't even be talking about this. She made a motion to cover her mouth as she said it and retracted her hand quickly.
'I want to get married,' declared Xemi.
Yes, we can do that for you was the response, enthusiastic like grave diggers to a potential suicide.
'I want to marry her,' Xemi then clarified, pointing at Mayloun still standing by the door. No one needed a translation.
Mayloun didn't flinch although her eyes became a little bigger, and one could see a barely perceptible sway of the door she was grasping. Howa burst out in a fit of childish giggle.
Xemi was mildly disappointed as he thought he would elicit a stronger reaction from Mayloun. Her extremely open body language however as she was looking at him made him think she wouldn't mind it at all. Her mother had a different reaction and expressly forbade it.
'Your sister? But that's your sister.'
Sister, sister she kept saying like he couldn't understand the word, rubbing her two index fingers together again.
'It's not right.'
'No, I have made my decision, I want her,' Xemi said, gesticulating towards Mayloun who still hadn't said a word.
'You really want her?' Yonas asked with a grin that exposed his ugly teeth.
'No, I'm just joking,' Xemi replied with no body language so no one could infer what he was saying.
'I can't screw my cousin.'
'Oh but we do that. You can have her if you want.'
'That's not possible when...I want to ask something else. I heard about this somewhere and want to know if it's true. Do people cut the clitoris here?'
Yonas replied in the affirmative, steeling himself for mortification.
'So all the girls in this room are mutilated? Ask her if she has a clit,' Xemi ordered, while pointing at the stony faced Safia, his aunt.
'No, no I can't ask her that,' Yonas mumbled, laughing a little looking at the floor because he didn't want to look at her.
Xemi pressed him and he mumbled something distinguishable only to Safia while still looking at the ground.
'Yes, of course I am. We all are. It's to make us clean.'
'So you don't feel anything when you..'
At this point Xemi made the universal gesture familiar to you and yours of intercourse.
'My dear boy!' Safia exclaimed as she laughed awkwardly, exposing a mouth with several missing teeth. 'Which way are you going?'
'What about pleasure?'
'Pleasure?'
'You will never have the pleasure of orgasm.'
'God spare me pleasure!'
'So why do you exist?'
'To glorify God.'
Xemi laughed in disbelief as Safia rose, telling everyone to leave 'crazy' Xemi alone for the time being. What kind of joyless world was this that he has fallen into ? He marvelled to himself. He was dropped here because they were his people, and he was one splinter among many, but he would not countenance any closer relation, blood or no blood.
'How could they think that blood was enough to make me one of them?'
