At that instant Yussur felt the pangs of labour and her features contorted with pain, her body with groans. As she groped for a chair, her body swung round. The tragic irony of it was that in her dolorous blindness she broke a china cup.
Bosaaso rushed her to hospital. It was an arduous labour, Yussur’s first, lasting several days, and Bosaaso and Duniya made each other’s acquaintance then. Yussur gave birth to a bouncing boy named for Dr Mire, but her milk yield was insufficient and had to be supplemented. Now this might not have bothered her were it not for her traumatic memories of being weaned from her own mother’s breasts. Incidents Yussur had clean forgotten returned to haunt her with frightening clarity, including overhearing her mother confiding in a woman neighbour that she enjoyed her milk-heavy breasts being sucked by Yussur, then four, more than she relished making love to her husband, the child’s father.
Depressed, Yussur did not bear her anxieties well. She exaggerated this small failing, predicting nothing but a gloomy future for the baby whom she adored. Her maternal ego was hurt and she became morose, lacking in will-power.
Because Yussur had a feeble constitution and did not wish to meet anyone, she asked Bosaaso to seek Dr Mire’s advice. Drugs were prescribed and bed-rest advised. Mire brought a psychiatrist who had a long chat with Yussur. All these steps helped. For a while she behaved like anyone with normal needs, happy to be alone with her baby and her husband, and demanding to be discharged from the hospital where she was in the private ward. Since Mire was not in Mogadiscio, other doctors agreed to sign her papers.
No one realized that Yussur was prone to depressive moods deep as death. To overcome the stress, she would lock herself in the master bedroom where she felt safe and also isolated from her mother and her younger sister who dropped by often to visit. Her mother talked, asked questions, suggesting absurd remedies for Yussur’s ills, worrying that the golden-egg producing daughter might die or something might happen to her baby: for in that event Bosaaso would cease providing for the mother and sister. Yussur wanted to see no one except her baby, her Bosaaso and the maid.
In a rare peaceful moment when she was less melancholy, Yussur asked Bosaaso, “You don’t mind being alone with me or the baby in this huge house, shut off from the rest of the world, do you, Bo?”
“Of course not,” he had said.
“And you don’t think I am insane, do you?”
“Of course not.”
Quietly efficient, the maid attended to Yussur and the baby’s needs. Herself a mother of several grown children, the maid gave cautious counsel in a gentle voice, acted sensibly whenever Yussur snapped at her, discourteous as only the young can be.
The doorbell rang day and night, at all hours. Yussur’s mother and younger sister wished to be let in. When no. one answered the bell, the two women took the mechanism to be faulty or the current to be off, so they resorted to banging on the door so hard one might have mistaken them for police officers preparing an assault. Unadmitted, they camped in the fore-yard, under a tree by the gate.
Dr Mire returned a couple of days later; he was let in immediately Bosaaso came out of the house and left in Mire’s vehicle. Three hours later they arrived accompanied by a neurologist and were surprised to find all the doors open and to hear women’s wailing. Three women mourning the death of Yussur and baby Mire.
The versions of what had happened given by the maid and by Yussur’s mother disagreed in essentials as well as substance. Apparently the maid, out of motherly kindness, admitted the old woman and sister directly after the doctor’s car had gone.
In both versions there is a balcony overlooking the garden, with Yussur standing on the balcony. And in both, Yussur held the baby in her tight hug, saying, “Will you be a darling boy and fetch me that lone flower in our garden and then give it to me?”
But from here on the two versions differ. In the mother’s telling, Yussur would walk back, bend to put the baby in its cot, then change her mind and return to her position on the balcony from where she would request her baby to fetch her the flower. Here the mother’s story ends. In that of the maid, no time elapsed between the moment Yussur made this most unusual demand of a baby not a week old and the instant she threw him down to get the lone flower. The maid told of a flash of insanity brightening Yussur’s eyes between her speaking the word “give” and death from the fall. Where was Yussur’s younger sister? Well, she had gone to her sister’s wardrobe to try on a dress because she had been invited to a party — and she missed it all.
All versions agreed in one fact: Yussur and baby Mire died.
MOGADISCIO (SONNA, 1 AUGUST)
Liv Ullmann has been recently appointed a special UNICEF Ambassador and in this new role has been visiting several countries in Africa south of the Sahara.
As part of her commitment, Ms Ullmann will travel rough on aircraft transporting grain, medicines and other emergency aid being airlifted to areas affected by famine and malnutritional ailments. Ms Ullmann has said that she is happy whenever she sees a smile breaking and then spreading on these children’s faces, happy when she notices them regaining hope in their own survival.
On her mission of mercy, Ms Ullmann will visit a select number of feeding centres and refugee-related projects in the continent, which is said to contain the world’s largest war-displaced population.
6
Duniya wakes from a dream in which Bosaaso tells her a story. She has morning conversations with Nasiiba and Mataan. And she is lent an article from yesterday’s national newspaper.
Duniya woke to a door being unbolted loudly An instant later she heard a jaw-breaking yawn, then footsteps approaching and going away Then the window overlooking the road was flung open, and the heat of the morning sun strode into the room. A blast of warmth licked the exposed part of Duniya’s face, scorching it.
“Time to get up, Mummy,” Nasiiba said.
Now why was Nasiiba up and about so early earlier than her twin brother who had earned for himself the nickname “house-hold alarm”? And why was she insisting that the rest of the world wake up?
“Shake off the sloth of sleep, Mummy Up,” Nasiiba sang.
Duniya did not stir.
“What’s the matter with everyone today?”
The sun felt hot, no longer in its infancy. Duniya wished she could cling to the comfort of sleep a little longer and resume her interrupted dream. But that wasn’t to be. Nasiiba was making a noisy point of the fact that she had risen before either her mother or brother, though she had been the last to go to bed. Duniya wondered if her daughter had butterflies in her insides about something — was this the reason?
“Mummy?”
“No,” Duniya replied. The word came out of its own accord.
“What are you talking about? No what?” Nasiiba asked.
How inconsiderate of the young to think only of themselves, Duniya thought. She recalled the Somali proverb that says your offspring are not your parents — the children’s thoughtfulness is a shallow well whose bounty runs out fast.
“I want to tell you something,” said Nasiiba, sounding urgent.
Duniya wasn’t interested in being told anything.
“It won’t take long, I promise.”
Duniya wasn’t interested.
“Open your eyes and listen to me.”
“No,” Duniya replied.
“You are in a negative mood today.”
Duniya said nothing.
“It’s very important that I tell you something, Mummy.”
Duniya lay quiet and unmoving. One of her ears was beginning to fill with air, causing a little pain; the other ear failed to hear anything as though suffering a momentary attack of Meniere’s disease. Her body slipped briefly into that ambiguous zone between sloth and sleep as she remembered her dream, in which Bosaaso told her how his late wife was resurrected from the dead, and she saw a baby clutching a lone flower tightly in its long-nailed fingers. The baby had been born without an anus and, there being no experienced surgeon in the city to perforate one for it, it had died, with no one mourning it.