Don't Tell Me You're Afraid (10 page)

Who knows, maybe even Mo could see them.

From Europe, from London. From far, far away.

Who knows, maybe he might decide to send me a note of encouragement for what was to come, for the upcoming race in Djibouti, for instance.

Then, before I dropped off to sleep, Hodan's velvet voice sang me a wonderful, glorious victory song.

A
MONTH
LATER
, with the unconditional finality with which everything had now started happening in my life, Aabe left us forever. With the swiftness and inevitability with which events were taking place, my guiding light was also gone. One moment everything was as it always was. And the next moment nothing was the same anymore. As of that day, darkness fell.

That morning, as he often did, Aabe had gone to the Bakara market to meet a few friends and do some shopping. Someone, his face concealed, came up behind him and shot him. Just like that, for no reason. An act that only took a moment. Of no consequence to any onlooker, inconspicuous amid all the frenzied hawking and shouting. Given the general indifference, the shadowy figure slipped away without even causing a stir. No one made a move; very few had even noticed.

Bakara was the most dangerous place in the city. Packed with people coming and going at all hours hunting for items to buy and sell, hoping to make a profit or just waste time. Every corner
brimming with color—blue, green, red, yellow, white, black—the colors of the fabrics, the spices, the fruits and vegetables. And above all teeming with hands, legs, feet, faces, eyes darting rapidly from this to that, the reek, the odors, the ooze. Littered with spit, banana peels, apple cores, watermelon rinds, the remains of apricots and peaches. That's Bakara, a hellhole. Because it was so congested, it had always been the most unsafe place.

But until that day it had been the place where
other people
died. The site of deaths that no one cared about.

The clans' militiamen, or Al-Shabaab's men, might place a bomb inside a shopping bag slung over a woman's back. One would drop the bomb in as he passed by. Then, from a distance away, another one pressed a button. And
boom
.

Twenty people in one fell swoop. Or thirty.

Children, women, elderly people.

No one gave a damn about it. Activity around the corpses stopped just long enough for everything to go back to normal. It was always someone else who died, someone else who left parents, children, relatives, and friends.

That day, however, that “someone else” suddenly touched us, and death took on its full significance.

That day it was Aabe Yusuf.

Our father.

Gone.

Forever.

After that night Hodan and I no longer slept on our mattresses but in the big bed with Hooyo. Aabe's body had been laid out on a wooden table covered with a cloth, on view in the courtyard for twenty-four hours, for the public to pay its respects. Our
mother spent nearly the entire time standing there welcoming the people who came, her hand in the hand of her dead husband. I, however, didn't even look at him. I wanted to keep my memory of him intact forever.

Said couldn't stop crying while Hodan entered into a silence that she broke only at night, in bed.

She slept between me and Hooyo and sang us to sleep with hymns that accompanied Aabe's Journey, songs that spoke to us with his voice, as if he were with us and were telling us that it was all the fault of the warlords and fundamentalists that he had left us alone. She sang clenching her fists.

We lay hand in hand staring at the ceiling, Hodan in the middle with one hand in mine and the other in Hooyo's, and as she sang in that strained voice she almost crushed our knuckles.

When we buried him, there was a stream of people with us. Everyone introduced himself as Aabe's best friend.

Aabe was gone and, like it or not, life had to go on.

His absence in the smallest everyday actions plunged me into a state of furious rage that intensified rather than destroyed my urge to run and to win. What's more, it made me invincible and unassailable. Nothing could ever hurt me anymore. They had already taken Aabe from me; no one could ever again find fault with what I did.

My grief was so great that I did not fear the worst. Often as I ran, I found myself crying like mad. When I came home and he wasn't sitting in the courtyard, I burst into sobs. In the evening, after dinner, we missed his deep voice and his jokes. Said tried, but the void seemed even more painful.

In those days and weeks I felt an obligation to complete what I
had started in the name of the invincibility that Aabe had bestowed on me. Sometimes as I ran, my mind wandering on its own, I caught myself imagining the most absurd, unthinkable things: that Aabe had been taken from us just to allow me to run freely, protected by his death, which had brought vengeance to our family.

But as soon as I stopped and pulled myself together, I realized that I was just being foolish.

The world had lost its colors, its scents, its sounds. From that day on, everything was dulled, murky, like the wax of Alì's face that morning. It was as if I had entered an endless tunnel, the space between its walls barely wider than me, and all I could do was run, run as fast as I could, looking for a way out.

And in fact, during the two months before the race in Djibouti, I ran to the point of collapse.

Each time I trained I heard in my head the words that Aabe had told me the morning of my first big race:
You're a little warrior running for freedom, whose efforts alone will redeem an entire people.

Those words pushed me to the extreme.

I trained in the courtyard with the weights; then at night I would sneak away to the CONS stadium, covered by the burka, and practice starts, sprints, lunges, reps. I felt invincible. Every day I would go on like that, six, seven, eight hours straight.

Until I collapsed on the ground, exhausted. Without Alì to grip my wrists and pull me back up.

So usually I sprawled on the patchy grass of the soccer field and lay there for minutes at a time, gazing at the sky.

I liked to picture myself from up above, from where Aabe was looking down on me, like a point in the center of a huge rectangle.

There was only the grass prickling my back, the cool, fresh evening air, the sky full of stars, my heavy breathing, and myself.

After a while everything became silent, my body began to unwind, my legs and back relaxed, my breath settled down.

Then I would take a deep breath and hold it for a while; I'd discovered that the effort kept the tears from coming. I stayed like that for as long as I could, my cheeks puffed out like a carp, so filled with air they nearly burst.

Until it was time to come back to earth, to get up and put on that horrible black garment that covered me from head to toe.

And return home, slowly, breathing through my nose and trying to keep my head empty of any thoughts.

May a thousand pounds of putrid shit fall on your heads and bury you forever.

O
NE
DAY
WHEN
I came home from school, there was a man talking with Hooyo in the courtyard who claimed to be from the Olympic Committee. Somewhat balding, with broad shoulders that spoke of a lean, athletic physique.

He was wearing a suit and tie, which immediately made me mistrustful, because only bridegrooms, politicians, and businessmen dressed that way. But then he told me that he knew about my win in Hargeysa and that Abdi Bile himself, the great champion from the eighties, would be glad to meet me.

“Okay, but when?” I asked.

“Right away, if you'd like,” he replied calmly as he adjusted his tie. “By the way, I haven't yet introduced myself. I am Xassan. Xassan Abdullahi.”

I looked at Hooyo and Hodan, who nodded yes without speaking. I could go if I wanted to. Hodan, however, would come with me.

“We're only too pleased to have your sister come as well,” the
man said in his equable way. “Let's go. I have the car parked down the street.” He seemed like a British gentleman or like someone who had traveled a lot in his youth or had lived abroad a great deal.

Hodan and I looked at each other. For the first time in our lives we would ride in a car!

We left the courtyard and the man led us to the car. It was a red Honda sedan. He opened the back door and we got in. It was very cold inside, because of the air-conditioning. It felt like being surrounded by ice. Then too the black leather seats made a crackling noise every time we moved. Seen through the windows of the car, the city looked different, both smaller and more impoverished. The people along the streets whom I had seen a million times seemed even more like good-for-nothing idlers.

We arrived in twenty minutes or so. It was the first time I had set foot in the headquarters of the National Olympic Committee.

Inside there were men and boys, some wearing the tracksuit of Somalia's national team, others dressed stylishly like Xassan. He went into a room, politely telling us to wait for him outside. On the walls were lots of photographs of athletes. Hodan and I kept looking around, feeling ill at ease.

As we lingered in the hall, a young man wearing Somalia's blue tracksuit came up and showed us to a place where we could sit down. It was a small room with more photographs. After a while, another man appeared at the door: white hair, jacket and tie, and a pleasant face. Hodan and I were as awkward as two little girls on the first day of school.

“Let's go to my office,” he said with a big smile, motioning us out.

We entered the office and were seated in two black leather
chairs in front of his desk. A nameplate on the door read
DR. DURAN
FARAH, VICE PRESIDENT
. Along the walls, shelves held numerous trophies. He took a box of chocolates out of a drawer and offered them to us. I'm not a sweets lover, except for sesame paste, but Hodan is, and she took two. After asking us how we were and exchanging a few words with me, he said they knew that I'd won an important race and they thought they could try to make me into a real athlete.

“But I'm already a real athlete,” I replied, digging my heels in under the chair.

“Let's say you're on your way to becoming one.” He smiled.

“But I won the race in Hargeysa. I'm the fastest woman in the country,” I insisted. I would have punched him there on the spot if he'd continued questioning my ability.

The man looked at me with his head slightly tilted; then he again displayed his white teeth in a smile. “Among the amateurs, Samia. For now, only among the amateurs.”

It was the first time he'd said my name, and I liked the way he pronounced it, with a drawn-out
a
. “Saaamìa,” just as Aabe used to say it. I drove the thought of my father out of my head. “Do you want to become a professional?” he asked then, breaking through the drift of my memories.

I didn't answer right away because I couldn't believe my ears.

“Do you want to become a part of our Olympic team?” Duran repeated in that gentle voice of his.

At that point he could just as well have asked me to jump off a mountain or swim up the Shabelle River and I would have done so without a second's hesitation.

Six weeks later I was back on a bus. Only this time I hadn't had to help Hooyo for months to pay for my ticket.

A bus to Djibouti.

With me was Xassan.

Overhead, a Somalia duffel bag.

On me, a blue Somalia tracksuit.

It was all so perfect that every morning since meeting Xassan, I had gone to Hooyo and asked her to pinch my cheek to make sure it wasn't a dream.

It prompted the first smile of the day from her, those mornings when her eyes were still swollen from crying all night, thinking about Aabe.

On that bus I felt like Florence Griffith Joyner, the fastest woman of all time, the perfect athlete, whose name had been engraved in my memory the first time I'd heard it on the radio at Taageere's: Poor man, I always made him tune in to the sports station.

I was wearing the color of my country, the blue of the sky and sea, and I felt like the strongest sprinter in the world. I would so much have liked Aabe to be with me. Sometimes I thought that even Alì would have been enough, if I couldn't have Aabe back. From their eyes I would have been sure that everything that was happening to me was real. Papa would have whispered gently: “I told you, my little warrior.” And that would have eliminated any doubt. Then he would have kissed me on the head, though I would have had to be the one to bend down, since I was taller now; I could no longer sit on his lap. And he would have said simply: “Go. Go and win.”

The two drivers spelled each other several times, and I slept almost the entire way. There was Xassan to watch over me.

After a twenty-eight-hour trip, we arrived in Djibouti.

We would rest up the night before the race in order to be in top form. Sleeping in a hotel was one of those things—like riding in a car, traveling by bus, wearing the Somalia uniform—that had always seemed impossible to me. Yet it was all real. The light of my good fortune had been lit somewhere. Maybe it was Aabe who turned it on, in a secret place known only to him.

The hotel wasn't fancy—it wasn't even all that clean—but it was what our poor Olympic Committee could afford. Still, I had a room all to myself with a bed, a mattress, and carpeting on the floor. Though the surroundings were a little shabby thanks to time and cigarette burns, there were no nocturnal animals, none of the spiders or cockroaches that drove Ubah crazy (sometimes at night she'd start hopping around like a cricket and would wake us all up with her shrieks). There were no awful things. Only nice things. But the best thing of all was the bathroom. I had never had one in my entire life. We'd always used the common toilet in the courtyard. A hut with a big hole in the ground that was emptied each week. We've never had running water; my brothers went to get water from the well every night before supper. By contrast, here in the hotel in Djibouti I had a bathroom all to myself.

A sink with a faucet. It was a little dirty, and the steady trickle had left a rusty stain, but if I turned the faucet on, as much water as I wanted came out.

A bathtub with a shower. I could stand under it and turn on the hot water and wash as long as I wanted without Hooyo saying anything.

And there was a toilet bowl for doing your business. I could pull the chain to flush it and the stink disappeared.

After ten minutes I felt like going down to the reception desk and calling Taageere to have him pass me Hodan so I could tell her everything. But I would save the news until I returned.

That night, on that mattress, I slept so soundly that it seemed like forever.

The next morning we took the bus straight to the stadium. It was a real stadium; I had never seen one like it. Not even the one in Hargeysa had looked anything like it. This was an honest-to-goodness stadium, even bigger than the new one we had in Mogadishu: the one occupied by the militias and their tanks. It was enormous, huge. And its stands soared several tiers high, packed with people in constant motion, chanting, cheering, clapping, or whistling.

I was all worked up, but Xassan was serene; he appeared to be in perfect command of the situation.

The other athletes seemed much taller and more muscular than I. And they were dressed better too. I was wearing a used tracksuit. And I would run in my own T-shirt, my own shorts. The terry headband from Aabe. Somalia couldn't afford more, and I didn't ask for more; what I had already seemed like a lot to me. The other women, however, wore high-tech tank tops and matching shorts. Brand-name shoes and socks.

It all made me uncomfortable; I felt out of place, inferior. Xassan, on the other hand, remained composed, as if he were used to it.

I just had to keep in mind that, like the other women, I was there to represent my country and that I was being asked to give
it my all. And to do so in one shot: There were no qualifying rounds; we gave it our best in two hundred meters.

“Run as fast as you can,” Xassan said while we waited at the edge of the track for them to call our heat.

“I'll try.”

“Samia.” I looked at him. He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “You won't win today. You won't even come close, but show me what you can do. Show me you're not afraid of the track, the spectators, or your opponents.”

I squinted as if the sun were in my eyes, forcing myself not to lower my gaze. “I'm never afraid, Xassan,” I lied.

“Good girl. Don't be afraid today either. You'll see: Everything will go as it should.” Then he walked off toward the end of the course, carrying the tracksuit that I had worn during the warm-up, and I was left alone to await the call.

As I'd done in Hargeysa, and as I now did at night in Mogadishu, I lay down on the ground. It had become a ritual. I loved to feel the grass prickling my back and have its subtle, pungent scent in my nose. A ritual that I hoped would bring me luck here too.

When I heard my name on the loudspeaker, I got up. Head down, focused, I went to my block. I was starting in the fifth lane.

In much less time than I would have expected, the starting gun was fired.

Boom
.

I gave it my all, everything I had.

The others were simply faster than me; Xassan was right. I pushed to the limit, but there was nothing more I could do. Though I spurred my muscles to the bursting point, it was no use.

I finished sixth out of eight.

It had not gone well, yet I was still nearly ecstatic.

Aabe had watched me from the place where he was, and he was as joyful as I was; I felt it. Maybe even more so. His little warrior had run and given it her all, even though she hadn't won. But winning really didn't matter to him—I knew that. All he wanted was for me to push myself to the limit.

Two days later, at home, I regaled them all with my stories. The trip, the hotel, the stadium, the opponents, the size of the crowd, Xassan, all of it. I went to each of my siblings and insisted on repeating the whole account. I was all revved up.

Hodan, on the other hand, seemed strange.

She was happy for me, but I sensed a distance. It felt like she had something to tell me and was just waiting for the right time, even though she was trying hard not to let me notice. But between us there could be no secrets. I knew everything about her, even the slightest vibe, just as she knew everything about me.

It wasn't until just before going to bed that she told me she needed to talk to me. That she had made a decision.

I didn't know what she was talking about.

At first, through tears and sobs, she just kept repeating that she had made up her mind.

I took her by the hand and led her to our room, to our mattresses, our natural place. Nothing could be so terrible; we had already experienced all the pain imaginable with Aabe's death.

But Hodan kept sobbing and saying that she shouldn't be crying, that it was actually a positive thing, a good thing. For her, at least.

Then she told me.

She could no longer stay in our country; the sense of guilt for
what had happened to Aabe was killing her. The only thing she could do was leave. She had waited to tell me, waited until I ran the race in Djibouti and came back happy, at least, if not a winner.

But she had already made up her mind two months ago. And I hadn't noticed a thing. Aabe's death on the one hand and the Olympic Committee on the other must have blinded me to the world around me if I hadn't realized that Hodan was brooding over such an important decision.

She kept saying that it was all her fault that our father was gone, but I knew that it was my fault too. Indeed, in my heart I believed that Aabe had been taken away so that I could run in peace.

Something must be wrong, Hodan said, if Aabe had always urged us to follow our instinct for freedom, had actually nurtured it in us, yet that same instinct had first crippled him and then killed him.