Don't Tell Me You're Afraid (7 page)

“Well, tell Alì that his friend doesn't know anything about it.”

“They're the same faces you make when you sing!”

“I don't make faces when I sing!” Hodan got angry and said that from then on she would sing with her back to the audience or with a paper bag over her head.

The rehearsals usually went on for two or three hours, and after a while I got bored. At that point I'd go to the back of the room and do some stretches, since at that time Alì was insisting that I develop the muscles of my legs, which to me, skinny as I was, always seemed to be stretched to the breaking point.

S
INCE
H
ODAN
HAD
GONE
, almost every night Alì came and played with me on the empty mattress.

Often he ended up falling asleep, then waking up suddenly and crossing the courtyard to go back to sleep in the room he shared with his father and brothers.

At first he consoled me over Hodan's absence.

As soon as we finished eating, rather than stay outside in the courtyard and play as we had always done, we went into the bedroom and, in the moonlight, with the
ferus
turned off, we talked until my brothers and sisters came in. We talked mainly about the future, as we had when we were little and used to spend our afternoons in the eucalyptus tree. But we were older now, I could tell by Alì's hands, which seemed huge to me. Alì saw me as a champion hailed around the world; he said that someday people from all corners of the globe would travel kilometers just to meet me, to have their picture taken with me and shake my hand. I
laughed and couldn't imagine such a thing. I said that if that were so, I would feel guilty: Traveling all that way just to meet me didn't make sense. Then he grabbed my hand with those long, bony fingers of his, shook it, and said: “Can you picture all those people who'll want to shake your hand, like I'm doing now?”

He, however, was not going to stay in Somalia. He told me he was going to do what Mo Farah had done. As soon as he was a little bigger, because you couldn't make the Journey, as everyone called it, when you were eleven. It was too dangerous. He would go all the way to the uppermost part of Europe; for sure he wouldn't stop at Italy or Greece.

Like Mo, he would go straight to England.

As he spoke, he stared at the photograph on the wall with a faraway look. A friend of his brother's who had made the Journey had told him that in the countries of northern Europe, if you were a refugee fleeing from war they gave you a house and a stipend. But for Alì England was still the land of opportunity and besides, he said, it wasn't as cold as in Finland or Sweden, where you could freeze to death when you went out shopping.

We always said the same things. Talking about our future reassured us; it made us feel good. Not just because we could occasionally hear the firing of nearby mortars from outside. No, it was just talking about it that mattered.

Alì loved to talk, and I loved listening to him. We loved the way the story had evolved since the first time it had come out of his mouth, the way it had settled on the things that he or I liked best. It was reassuring to know how it would end; it was a nice way to spend our evenings. Not quite like Hodan's sweet voice,
but almost. During those weeks, those months, Alì and I shared everything we had, generous and unafraid: We exchanged dreams.

And then there were times when we fought, when he said that someday, as a champion, I would want to leave my country. He could say anything, but not that. I knew that someday things would change, and I was sure that I would play an important role in that change. But Alì said that in the end I would give in, that I too would go to England and, like Mo Farah, I would run wearing the jersey of the country ruled by the queen. With that jersey I would win the Olympics.

He did it to infuriate me, and he succeeded. When he said that I would marry Mo and that we would be the most famous sports couple in the world, I tried not to lose my temper, but I couldn't help it. I slapped him. He laughed and slapped me back. Then he pushed me on my back on the mattress, grabbed both of my arms, climbed astride me, pinned my wrists under his knees, and tickled me until I begged for mercy with tears in my eyes, imploring him to stop.

“Only if you admit that someday you'll leave Somalia and marry Mo Farah,” he said as he continued tickling me to death.

“No!” I yelled.

“Then I won't stop!”

At that point I couldn't take it anymore and I gave in. “Okay, okay, all right, you win. . . . I'll leave the country . . .”

“You'll leave the country and . . . ?”

“I'll leave the country and . . . I'll marry Mo Farah,” I gasped.

“You see? I was right!”

Then we burst out laughing and made up. Every now and then one of the adults, hearing our screams, stuck his head inside.
Seeing us play, he said something we didn't even hear and quietly went back to where he'd come from.

As we lay side by side, Alì sometimes began singing. I had told him that I liked it when Hodan sang, and to tease me he started wailing in falsetto, his voice pitched artificially high like a girl's. But he was so out of tune that most times we started hitting each other and tickling again.

When we were together, Alì went back to being the way he'd always been. Only when he was with me did the melancholy that now always clouded his eyes fade.

I was worried about him.

I had tried many times to ask him what was wrong. I'd tried to talk about Ahmed, who hadn't been seen at our house since the night I'd won the annual race; I reminded him of the encounter that long-ago evening when Ahmed had protected us from the two fundamentalist kids. But Alì never responded.

Just raising the subject made him darken even more. So he won and we didn't talk about it.

We never talked about it, for two whole years.

B
Y
DAY
,
HOWEVER
, every day for two years Alì continued to be my coach. He had gone to the city's old library and borrowed all the training manuals he could find. For months, every afternoon in the courtyard he forced me to read them to him. As a result, we also succeeded where we had failed a long time ago: Thanks to his passion for racing and training, Alì learned to read.

He always said that whereas the heart was the engine and breath the gasoline, the muscles were the pistons, and they had to be strong, resilient, and responsive.

In the courtyard in the afternoon or late at night, when the others were already in their rooms, he made me do reps, thirty-meter sprints, from one side to the other at maximum speed. As many as a hundred in a row. I started from the back wall and sprinted to the entrance wall. Then I turned around and did the same thing in reverse. Again and again, until I collapsed on the ground, utterly spent.

“Enough, please,” I begged him, exhausted, drenched with sweat.

“Samia, do you remember the first rule? Don't complain and do everything I tell you,” Alì said, sitting in the shadows on the wicker chair Aabe used in the evening. I hated him.

“No. I said enough. I'm ready to drop.” I tried to move him to pity by throwing myself on the ground and pretending I was about to pass out.

At that point Alì made me get up, with the dust stuck all over me, and do another ten reps. Finally, a lap all around to cool down.

To strengthen my arm muscles, he'd made weights out of tin cans or plastic bottles he'd found in the street or at the Bakara market by filling them with sand. He liked going to the market; he loved being in crowded places with thousands of people all talking at the same time and scurrying around, jostling and shoving, bumping into one another like busy ants. I, on the other hand, didn't like it at all. Not just because of the crowds, which I hated, and the reek of sweaty armpits that collected under the blue plastic awnings hung over the stalls to protect them from the scorching sun, but also because Bakara scared me. Not only was it the biggest market, but it was also the area of the city where most terrorist attacks occurred. Killers from the clans, as well as Al-Shabaab extremists, liked having all those people together.

I never wanted to go, whereas Alì, who wasn't afraid of anything, found a thousand excuses to go back there.

As a result, he'd come up with the idea of the weights.

There were thirty-three-centiliter cans of Coca-Cola, half-liter bottles, one-and-a-half-liter bottles, and two-liter ones. All filled with sand from the beach.

For my legs he'd instead used four pieces of wood to build a kind of small scaffold on which he hung different weights, depending on the exercise I had to perform. He made me sit on a chair and put that contraption on my thigh, asking me to lift it. Or, with me standing, he placed it on my ankle, which I had to raise to my thigh. The weights were very heavy. My scrawny little legs had to make a tremendous effort. We went on like that until I begged for mercy and he, moved to compassion, let me stop.

That we did all this when we were thirteen years old seems incredible. Yet that's what we did.

In spite of this, even though we were so close, on one of the worst days of my life I betrayed Alì.

I did it out of fear, but I still betrayed him.

That day Alì hadn't kept time for me, because he'd had to go help his father at work. His brother Nassir, who usually went with Aabe Yassin, wasn't around that day.

I stealthily slipped out and ran a little lap around the block. I was on my way back home, in a narrow street with three abandoned houses, when—right about halfway—I spotted a guy with his back against the wall, staring at the ground.

He wore dark glasses and one of those black shirts the extremists wear, but he was unarmed: no machine gun, no rifle.

I tried to act like it was nothing.

When I passed him, he called to me in a soft, almost alluring voice. Maybe I was tired of running, but that's how that voice sounded to me.

“Samia.”

I turned around and looked at him. I didn't know him.

How did he know my name? I turned around again and kept going.

“Samia, stop! Don't worry, I'm a friend.”

Never trust anyone: Aabe had taught us that the very day we were born. I tried to continue, but the guy spoke again.

“Stop. I just need to ask you something.”

He was tall and thin, with broad shoulders. Dark skin. A mass of tangled black hair and the fundamentalists' long beard covering his face.

He moved away from the wall and took a step toward me.

“Where's your friend?” Now the tone was sharp, peremptory.

“What friend?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

“The one who's always with you, day and night.”

I was scared. He'd picked that time and place because he knew that at that hour it was unlikely that anyone would come by; those who worked were at work, and the alley was deserted.

“I don't have a friend. I'm always with my sister,” I replied after a slight hesitation.

“Don't pull my leg. I know very well that Alì is your friend. I know everything. I just want to know where he is,” he said in a harsh voice as he moved toward me.

“I don't know. . . .”

“You're an athlete, Samia, right? You like running, don't you?” His tone had turned threatening. He was just a few steps away now. Up close he was even taller than he'd seemed before, his shoulders even broader and more powerful. The sun reflected off the dark glasses in two luminous points.

“Yes, I'm an athlete,” I replied in a trembling voice.

The guy stuck his right hand behind his back, under his belt, and suddenly pulled out a long knife.

I took a step back, ending up with my heels against the wall behind me. I glanced around but saw nobody; the doorways of the houses were deserted.

He reached out his arm, pointing the blade at my left leg, then came even closer. He was way too big for me to be able to do anything.

I was petrified. Even if I'd wanted to move, my limbs did not respond to my commands.

“And an athlete needs both legs to run, right?”

I was shaking, terrified; I didn't know what to say. “Yes, both of them . . .” I stammered.

“So if you don't want to lose one, tell me where Alì is. Don't worry, I won't hurt him. I just want to talk to him. I want to know where he is and have a little chat with him.”

“But I don't know where Alì is.”

“And I think you do know.” He took another step forward until he was right in front of me. “Well . . . ?” The blade of the knife was now in contact with my skin; I felt it red hot on my knee, sharp.

“I don't know where Alì is. . . .”

He pressed slightly and the blade scratched my skin; immediately a line of blood welled up above the kneecap. His other hand squeezed below my neck, pinning me against the wall, his face just inches from mine. I smelled the scent of his cologne and I saw my distorted face reflected in his lenses.

“You don't know. . . .” He kept increasing the pressure. “Then again, do you know what a blade does when it sinks deep
into the flesh? First it cuts the tendon, then the muscle, and finally the bone.”

At that moment he jerked the blade away and with the same hand, not letting go of the knife, pulled off his glasses and placed them on his head.

I recognized him then. His bloodshot, dilated eyes, so close to mine. Green as emeralds. It had been three years since I'd seen him, and he had become a man. By now he must be twenty.

Ahmed. Him again; fate was playing nasty tricks on me. Just as on that night so many years ago when he had caught me and Alì by surprise, he'd reappeared out of nowhere, threatening to cut my leg.

The shadow that for all those years had lain between me and Alì, dimming my best friend's smile, was now in front of me, transformed into flesh and blood.

Then he lowered the blade and pressed it against my leg again. I felt a sharp pain, and I was scared.

I tried as hard as I could to stop myself, but I burst into tears. Abruptly, like a fountain.

I didn't want to lose my leg; with all my heart I didn't want to. I would never in my life run again. It would be the end of my dreams, the end of my liberation, the end of everything.

“All you have to do is tell me where Alì is. . . .”

“Ahmed . . .” I faltered.

“Come on, Samia, tell me. . . .” He went on holding the blade pressed against my leg, keeping my neck clenched with his other hand, making it hard to breathe. I started coughing, but my throat was squeezed shut. Mucus started running from my nose. I was choking, and my leg felt like it was on fire.

“Go on, you can tell me . . . unless you want to say good-bye to your knee.” He thrust very hard and the blade sank a couple of millimeters into the flesh. I felt faint from the pain; it was as if someone had shoved a burning ember into the pit of my stomach. I just wanted it all to end. “Come on, Samia. . . .”

He was an inch away from my face; I stared at him, eyes wide open, not breathing.

“You've turned into a really pretty girl, Samia, you know that?” he whispered in a hateful voice as he drove a knee between my legs.

I immediately pictured what was going through his head.

I gave in.

“At the market . . .” It slipped out almost against my will.

Ahmed bared his teeth in a nasty leer. “At the market
where
? Which market? Bakara?”

“At the market with Yassin . . . his father . . . at Xamar Weyne . . .”

“Good girl, Samia. Good girl. I remembered that you were a smart girl. Smart and beautiful.”

Then, suddenly, he let go of me, and I collapsed on the ground like a sack of beans.

Just like that, Ahmed took off in a jiffy without saying another word.

I got up, still dazed, and ran straight home.

Without saying anything to anyone, I rinsed the scratch and sat on the ground against the wall of Alì's room, waiting, praying that he would appear in the courtyard as soon as possible with his father, Yassin. That everything was normal, that what had happened to me was just a figment of my imagination.

But it wasn't; it was all real.

I was crushed by what I had done.

If Hooyo tried to say something to me, I didn't even hear her. I was terrified at the thought of having betrayed my best friend. I felt like a bad person, someone I didn't know. I felt like I was capable of betraying my own mother, or even Hodan or Aabe. Like I was capable of betraying anyone. Including myself.

Finally, around six, Alì and his father showed up. The weight that was overwhelming me evaporated. Right away I searched for some sign in Alì's eyes. But there was nothing except the usual veil of sadness and detachment.

As soon as he arrived, he went straight to his room, head bowed. He passed me with barely a hello.

I followed him and explained what had happened: I told him he was in danger, I warned him about Ahmed, I showed him the cut on my thigh.

He wasn't surprised.

Instead he replied with something that I hadn't expected: “Nassir has left our house. My brother has moved away.”

I was dumbfounded. “What do you mean, he left your house? What does that mean?”

“Last night, after supper, he admitted to Aabe that he has joined Al-Shabaab. He's been spending time with them for years. That much we knew. But yesterday he said that he wants to go to the Koranic school, to be an active member of the organization. He's decided to follow Ahmed.”

I remained silent while Alì sobbed. When he stopped crying, he told me not to worry, that Ahmed wouldn't do anything to him, that Nassir would protect him.

There was a strange light in Alì's eyes as he spoke, however. As if he were elated, inspired. A light that I had never seen before, that scared me.

We fell silent; then he asked me if I could leave him alone for a while.

I left the room and went to Hooyo, who was in the courtyard starting to set up the
burgico
for supper. I tried to act like nothing was wrong, asking my mother if I could help her, but my motions were as clumsy as an elephant's.

After a while Alì came out and climbed the eucalyptus with those precise, soundless, velvety movements that made him look like a cat or a monkey. He knew that tree by heart; he knew exactly where to place his bare toes without even looking.

In no time he was at the top.

The place where no one could reach him. His place. Maybe the only one. He would come down when he got over it.

Even though Alì told me not to worry, I was miserable. I had betrayed my best friend, and that feeling stung more than the blade. That night, watching Alì swiftly scale the tree with those fluid, perfect movements of his, I felt even more alone than I had when confronted by Ahmed, who had wanted to cut my leg.