A HAND PUSHED THROUGH THE CURTAIN AT THE DOORWAY. THEN A WOMAN wrapped in a floral robe, an edge of it held between her teeth, emerged, her gaze deferentially downcast. With one hand clutching her right ear, the other holding a little girl’s hand, she came forward. The girl, her gaze diffuse, held the lower edge of the woman’s robe. It was clear from the little one’s movements that all was not well with her. Jeebleh was uncomfortable as he followed her inside, and he looked away from the pair to Dajaal, who by then had found two chairs for them to sit on. Jeebleh was tempted to turn his back on the whole business, and walk out of the house. But he thought better of it when Dajaal introduced the woman, calling her by name, which Jeebleh failed to catch. It wouldn’t do to unnecessarily displease Dajaal, who had been very kind to him all along, and he didn’t want to be rude to the poor woman or her unfortunate daughter. He shook the woman’s hand when she proffered it. Dajaal called to his granddaughter several times; her delayed response suggested that she was hard of hearing, or retarded, or both.
“She’s deaf from the helicopter noise,” Dajaal explained. “And yet she manages to hear ungodly noises, like airplanes, and huge diesel truck engines, and heavy-duty motorbikes, and she cries and cries and cries, nonstop. Maybe she senses the earth shaking, I don’t know.”
The girl stood staring at them, her thumb in her mouth. Jeebleh tried to entice her with the candies, but she wouldn’t approach. He tried to engage her in baby talk, but she just stared at him, as though in amazement.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The young thing wouldn’t speak. Now he looked up at her mother bringing tea, the child almost tripping her. “My daughter hasn’t spoken a word all these years,” the woman told Jeebleh.
Dajaal tried to bring the girl over to Jeebleh, but she cried so fiercely he left her alone. After a few minutes, when his daughter-in-law had served them tea, Dajaal invited her to come and take the candies out of his own palm. He sat so close to her he could’ve touched her. The girl’s pupils appeared dilated, but her stare was unseeing.
When her grandfather’s hand went nearer to give her the candy, she burst again into tears and, taking several steps at once, fell forward. Her mother picked her up, quieted her. The girl, now somewhat relaxed, studied the strange world from the advantageous height of her mother’s protective hip.
“She lives in a world of fear,” the woman said. “Dust storms disturb her, noises too.”
“You say she doesn’t speak at all?”
“She can’t string two words together.”
“And doesn’t laugh either,” Dajaal said.
“How old is she?”
“Almost five and a half.”
Jeebleh didn’t know what to say.
“A baby does not suffer alone,” the mother said.
Dajaal stayed out of it now, seemingly aloof.
The mother continued, “We all suffer with our babies, share in their suffering, don’t we? It’s been very difficult to be the mother of a child who’s never smiled, and never known laughter or the joy of being young. She cries fitfully, wets her bed and slobbers, her nose is forever moist. We keep trying to make her blow it, but I doubt she’ll ever blow it for herself.”
Jeebleh looked from the woman to the child and finally to Dajaal, as if he wanted to be helped out of a fix he had got himself into. He rose to his feet hesitantly and stood unsteadily. Then James Brown’s honking was no more, and Dajaal was telling Qasiir to tell Jeebleh all that had happened on the day the helicopter’s uprush hurt his sister.
Before Qasiir could speak, his mother began: “Children in search of a bit of fun were the first to run to the villa where the two helicopters were hovering menacingly. There were American soldiers in the helicopters, an attack team of about twelve, in big vests worn over fatigues. The earth shook to its foundation, and we were all frightened. We had a routine to follow when helicopters came or when we expected an attack: we would all go together and move north, in small groups to avoid being seen, all of us protected by men with AK-47s. This wasn’t the first attack, and as with all the others, we didn’t think it would be the last.
“But I couldn’t leave, because my daughter wasn’t feeling well, and I stayed behind to give her the medicine prescribed for her earache. Besides, the arrival of the helicopters filled my son Qasiir with bravado, and he came into the room we all share, looking for his dirt-brown jeans and his T-shirt with some writing in English. I thought he might help me join the others, but his mobile rang, telling him where to go and what to do. He ran off in haste with several other boys, answering the call of their commander. They knew no fear, my son and his posse.”
When she paused, Jeebleh looked at Qasiir, and the youth grinned foolishly. He took up the story where his mother had left it. “I was the leader of the posse, wasn’t I? I had on a T-shirt that said ‘Frank James is alive and well and living in Mogadiscio,’ and I was tougher than all the others. We were useful as spies, my friends and I, and I was the one with the mobile. One of the top men of our militia had given it to me.”
Qasiir received instructions via the mobile from a man he had never met, a deputy commander to StrongmanSouth. When he was on the phone, he tried to impress his boys, remaining dramatically silent, nodding in agreement with the invisible commander. Now and then he would proclaim, “Of course I won’t share the secrets with anyone else!” Jeebleh imagined the boy switching off the phone and picking up a sliver of wood, placing it in his mouth, and pushing it about with his tongue in imitation of Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars.
In spite of the terrific noise created by the helicopters, Qasiir’s posse could hear every word he said, as he told them what to do. He might have been relaying a message received directly from the Almighty, each syllable delivered as though he were honoring it, each vowel drawn out in deference to StrongmanSouth. The boys couldn’t tell whether or not he was quoting someone when he said, “Remember that death visits you only once. And so our commander in chief says we must be ready for it, and must welcome it too. How do we achieve the impossible? Discipline.” He repeated the word “discipline” several times, until it had the force of an incantation.
They went into a huddle and piled their hands one on top of another, like basketball players at the beginning of a game. They also took a collective oath, reaffirming their fearless commitment to total war against the enemies of StrongmanSouth. They were ready to undertake risky missions now that the assault had begun in earnest.
“And to prove how we were prepared to die for our commander, one of my boys began chanting in rhythm to the rotating helicopter blades,” Qasiir said. And to Jeebleh’s amusement, he got up and started chanting an imitation of an American gangsta rap. He sang some sort of war cry, “Dill, dill, gaalka dill, dill, dill, gaalka dill!” and after a pause, chanted in English, rapping in rhythm and repeating the command “Kill, kill, kill all!” Qasiir’s acting was so effective that Jeebleh could hear, in his own mind, the chopper’s noise, razor sharp, the blades turning and turning.
The deadly birds continued to hover, Qasiir said, raising an immense cloud of sand. And as the blades rotated faster and faster, the noise grew louder and more frightening, until the swirling currents tore zinc roofing sheets from flimsy dwellings and ripped cardboard from the walls of lean-tos serving as dwellings. A few odd pieces of plywood, no nails to hold them down, were blown away as well.
Qasiir’s mother interrupted her son. “None of this mattered to the helicopter pilots or the soldiers in their funny-looking vests! It was siesta time in Mogadiscio, when we all sought shelter from the scorching sun. But on that day it felt like the entire earth was caught up in waves of tremors, each tremor speeding up the pulse of every person or animal in the neighborhood.”
Qasiir rose to his feet, acting out more of that day, and Jeebleh was able to imagine the accelerated heartbeats of the ailing, the panting lungs of the infirm, the thrashing of the alarmed, the sand funneling in a mighty whirlwind, people cowering in their shacks, curses spoken, spells cast, homes destroyed, businesses disrupted, lives suddenly ended.
Qasiir’s mother described the horrific terror of her baby — then barely a year old — who, torn from her breast, had been caught up in the avalanche of courtyard sand stirred up by the rotors of the helicopters. And when the mother went on her knees, keening in supplication, praying, cursing, cursing and praying, Jeebleh stared, dumbfounded, now unable to imagine the terror.
“I became hysterical,” she continued, “and tore at my bare breast, where my daughter had been nursing. I wailed, I wept, I cursed, I prayed, but to no avail. I tore at my clothes, until I disrobed, convinced that my child had been swallowed up in the sand raised by the helicopter’s sudden arrival. Then I saw the shape of evil. Rangers pointing at my nakedness and laughing. I stopped wailing, and covered my indecency, and then cursed the mothers who bore these Rangers. I’ve never glimpsed worse evil than those men cupping their hands at me, their tongues out, pointing at my nakedness.”
Qasiir and his team heard her wailing. He shouted to his posse, instructing them not to shoot at the helicopters, fearing that his baby sister might be hurt in the crossfire. Looking back, both Qasiir and his mother speculated that one of the pilots might have become aware of what was going on and, in an effort to help, might have steered away from where the mother knelt, naked, weeping, praying, cursing, wallowing in the sand. “Then”—Qasiir acted it out in a wild charade—“two men appeared from nowhere with RPGs, and they gunned for the chopper. There was a mighty crash: the helicopter was down!”
“And I wouldn’t stop wailing,” his mother broke in, “until I saw my baby fall to the ground, close to where I was. I crawled on all fours to where my daughter lay, praying that I would find her alive, and unhurt. All the while, my hard, evil stare was focused on the Rangers in the downed chopper. I lifted my baby into my embrace, and half ran, half walked away, aware of the Rangers’ eyes trained on my back.”