Chapter 1
The beads rolled in the most curious of ways; seemingly searching for one another, knocking against one another, even when it would seem more appropriate for them to separate, to move further away from one another. Safia followed their movement in a hypnotic slumber, wondering when they would cease to roll, cease to search for one another, and almost immediately they became still. There were five of them, almost in a perfect circle. Safia stared at them with amazement. Why wouldn't they move away from each other, she wondered to herself, as she softened her grip on the ones left in her hand, and the dangling string. She experienced a sudden urge to unite them. After a movement which had the air of warming a frozen body, she bent her heavy body, with mutterings and occasional squeal, put her two hands on the floor and lowered herself on her knees towards the beads, grabbing them one by one.
This was the same morning that Xemi had left, and Safia had been in her bedroom experiencing the same sadness and loss that she had been so familiar with and used all her life forces to prevent from happening. But sadness and loss are intrinsic to the human condition and any attempts to foil them, will only amplify them.
Safia picked up the beads, angrily now but suddenly stopped as she stared at one. Though her bedroom was dark, the morning sunlight flitted through her door, bouncing off the sheen of the beads, showing her reflection.
'Slightly below the standard of beauty,' she muttered with a wry smile, snatched the last bead and stopped to listen. She heard someone moving outside and as she heaved herself as upright as she could, while she was still on her knees, she looked up to see the figure of her daughter, Mayloun, looking down at her. Mayloun as usual had her head wrap on, with noticeable delicate grooves under her eyes which entrenches and darkens as one ages.
'Mother, why are you on your knees?'
Safia didn't answer immediately as the puffiness of her daughter's face, as well as the particular morning shade, made her daughter strikingly beautiful.
'And this is slightly above average,' she muttered, as she heaved herself up, derrière first, not to stand, but to sit back on the bed.
'What did you say?' Mayloun asked sharply.
'Nothing. What did you get up to last night, in order for you to look so fresh this morning?'
Mayloun smiled which put on show her gums with its queer discoloration.
'Making babies,' she said playfully, rubbing her belly, which she had pushed out in a comical way. 'Let's start preparing. Maybe I can have Xemi's bedroom, because my room isn't big enough for three.'
Safia, long used to Mayloun's habitual sexual jokes, simply said in a dismissive voice:
'Prepare the fire for breakfast first, and then we'll see about your bastard baby.'
'I want his bed. It's bigger than mine. The baby can sleep next to me.'
Safia looked closer at Mayloun who was grinning at her mother, and her woman's intuition told her the merriment had something behind it. Her eyes opened wider.
'Mayloun, don't tell me...'
When her brother had first left, as a young man, Safia had felt emptiness, a gnawing, awful emptiness, that never truly filled since its inception. She was close to her brother, closer to him than to the man who eventually became her lover; and not through the love of others, not with the birth of her children, not until his son came, was that hole filled, instantly overflowing once she felt her brother's son near her. She was so happy if only because she realised something fundamental, something life changing, when the boy came to live with them. What she learned was that though adulthood promises misery no matter what, she saw that there was a way to counter it, to fill this emptiness that the loss of dear ones left in their wake. That way was replacement, like for like, and she tried whatever was in her power to keep Xemi there.
As her brother was younger than her, she wielded some influence over him. When he had doubts, in the beginning of Xemi's hunger strike, of the wisdom of leaving him there, she called him a coward, and told him that he would be bowing to his son, when it should be the other way around. When Xemi fell ill through food poisoning, she minimised the danger he was in, though she was worried to death for his life. When his father kept saying that it was time for his son to return, and study, she said Islam was to be studied first, and that he hadn't submitted, yet hoping he never would...But then came the inevitable and she, defeated, reconciled herself to the terrible emptiness once again, increased in depth and diameter this time, because the second loss is always worse than the first.
Despite the crime that Mayloun had committed, Safia looked at her daughter as an angel who was sorry for her pain, and wished to take it away, with the promise of restitution.
She addressed her calmly, as gratefulness and excitement rushed through her entire body. Her hands shook as she put bead after bead back through the length of the string.
'You should put some weight on, Mayloun,' she told her daughter, when Mayloun was at least chubby, verging on overweight.
'Yes, mother,' Mayloun answered eagerly, rejoicing at her mother's blessing.
'And move less.'
She didn't look at her daughter as she addressed her, knowing her eyes shone, not through the fire of fury, but the light of desire.
Mayloun grinned and stifled delighted laughter.
There was no confirmation of any pregnancy but for some reason both knew with certainty that a baby would be born from the two cousins, and that Safia would be a grandmother and a great aunt at the same time, to the same person; which is fitting, because in the Somali language the word for both grandmother and great aunt is the same word.
