Duniya said, “Why is everybody asking me if I’m all right?”
“When a number of people ask you if you’re all right, perhaps it’s a roundabout way of telling you you’re not all right.”
“But I am all right,” she said.
In the eighteen months he had known Duniya, Dr Mire could not remember a single occasion when he was dissatisfied with her performance of her duties or her general behaviour. He preferred her to any other nurse, believing that she had the strength of mind to do what her conscience told her. She handled emergencies well, and like Hibo, didn’t panic; he could rely on her to remain calm and professional. Whether he admitted it to himself or not, the fact that he was a friend of Duniya’s elder brother, currently living in Rome, had a positive bearing on their working relationship.
“Be my mirror for a change,” she said, “and tell me what I can’t have seen.”
He said, “You hurt easily today.”
“How do you see that?”
“I sense you are open sores all over,” he said.
“On the contrary,” she smiled, “today I don’t hurt at all.”
“I’ll be specific,” he said.
Her eyes wouldn’t focus. “Are you psychoanalysing me?”
“Why haven’t you changed into your uniform, for instance?” No longer defiant, Duniya was angry with her colleagues. “But why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Do you usually need someone to tell you?”
Duniya fell silent. She didn’t want to talk about her dream; or about her chance encounter with Bosaaso who had driven her to work.
Dr Mire went on, obviously misunderstanding the vacant look in her eyes. He lapsed into jargon, “About uniforms — I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I am quite aware of the class nature as well as the gender politics of hospitals in which uniforms assume a hierarchical significance, in particular, hospitals where all the doctors are male and all the nurses female. You weren’t making a point out of this, were you?”
She thought for a second and her eyes brightened with mischief as she remembered her meeting with Bosaaso. “Maybe.”
“Shall we talk about it now or some other time?”
“Some other time,” she said. “There’s all the time in the world, isn’t there?” She grinned to herself.
“In that case, shall we resume work? And will you please steady your hand, prevent it from knocking the universe over?”
She went out without being instructed to do so and informed Hibo and the junior nurse that Dr Mire was ready to continue consultations. But she didn’t change into her uniform.
She vowed to herself that her hand would knock nothing over from then on, and it didn’t. Having assured Dr Mire that all was well with her, she had to do whatever it took to prove it.
It was such an arduous responsibility not to think about Bosaaso, given that Dr Mire reminded her of him. She also found it almost impossible whenever she came into contact with Hibo not to ask herself self-reproaching questions about Nasiiba. Since one thing led to another, Duniya recalled to mind the out-patient who spoke of her husband giving her gonorrhoea, a husband who brought into the house both good and bad things, the woman had said.
Stubbornly, Bosaaso came to her, assuming different shapes, mysteriously clad in all sorts of disguises. All the same her hand remained steady and she worked beside Dr Mire and her colleagues without knocking anything else over. Nevertheless, she still stood out because she wasn’t wearing uniform. Agile and moving fast, she was compared by one of the junior nurses to an agitated butterfly, hopping from one pollinated flower to another. Also, Bosaaso’s name was on the tip of her tongue when one of her friends asked her how she was getting home later that day since there was no public transport. No sooner had the first syllable of his name teased her lips than she closed her mouth, silencing it.
The rest of the day was taken up with routine work, pregnant women inquiring after the health of their foetuses, this one complaining of sleeplessness, that one about loss of appetite. Dr Mire would glance at the card, then at the woman in question, and with reading-glasses decorating his forehead like a devout Muslim’s prayer-scar, he would now and again ask what the bed situation was in the event of an emergency. Glasses and gloves now off, now on, his hands now rubbery and now dry from constant contact with soap and alkaline-treated tap water, Dr Mire was ever prepared to undertake another examination. Duniya behaved like a truant pupil with whom the headmaster had had a wise word.
Only once was she near to knocking something over, feeling the hot wind of her rage cross her face like the shadow of a travelling cloud. This was because in her opinion Dr Mire humiliated a patient by insisting she come back next week accompanied by her husband, mother or mother-in-law, “someone responsible,” as he put it. Why? The woman had been re-infibulated each time she gave birth. Now what might he achieve by talking to a husband? The poor woman had come on her own to consult Dr Mire about a complication arising from the physical outrage meted out to her. Barely in her mid-twenties, she had been married three times, twice to the same man, who loved his women re-infibulated. This barbarous activity had turned the woman’s private parts into an overmined quarry. After Duniya spoke her mind, Dr Mire revised his instructions to the woman. “Come back next week, alone,” he said.
Soon it was closing time and the nurses were alone in the hall, after Dr Mire and all the out-patients had gone. Conversation reverted to how bad things were, and the immediate question that was the day’s refrain: “How do we get home if there’s no transport?”
One of the nurses said, “As I see it Mogadiscio is like a city preparing for an early evening curfew, with the odd car on the streets, and rivers of pedestrians breaking at the banks, at times flooding the main roads.”
Another, “No electricity, no water, no bread baked, no papers.”
A third said, “Does anyone remember the time Mogadiscio had a power shortage that lasted several days? I happened to have graduated just that week and had been assigned here. You know what? The lights went out when we were in the middle of a delivery. We were just two nurses both recently graduated, and no doctor on call. A miracle that the mother and baby survived because my colleague and I pulled at the wrong limb.”
In the silence that followed, Duniya suddenly felt an empathy with the Chinese, remembering it was the People’s Republic of China that built and donated the Benaadir Maternity Hospital to the people of Somalia. The modesty of the Chinese as a donor government was truly exemplary. No pomp, no garlands of see-how-great-we-are. Somewhere in the hospital grounds was a discreet plaque announcing the day, month and year in which it had been commissioned and by whom. And you would meet the Chinese doctors, who came as part of the gift, as they did their rounds, soft of voice, short of breath when they spoke Somali, humble of gesture. Unlike the Italian and Dutch doctors on secondment from their governments as an overpriced aid package from the European Community, the Chinese did not own cars. They arrived at work in a van, in which they returned to their commune in the evening. And unlike other doctors (including Dr Mire) who ran their own vehicles, the Chinese gave lifts to nurses working the same shifts as themselves. So Duniya suggested that the other nurses try their luck with the Chinese.
A fourth nurse said, “Petrol shortages, power failures or the unavailability of public transport can only be defined as a double curse for women.”
The nurse who had spoken first said, “How do you mean?”
“On the one hand these give unheard-of advantages to men harbouring wicked intentions towards us; on the other, by refusing to be seduced with lifts, a woman exposes herself to the perils of being raped in a dark alley.”