Black Mamba Boy

GERSET, ERITREA, JULY 1941

Jama waited a long time for Abdi, hoping that he would come around the bend one day, a little dusty, a little thirsty, but otherwise well. Sometimes casualties were brought to Tessenei on stretchers after stepping on mines or triggering booby traps. Jama would rush out of the shop to see the victim’s face but they were always high-cheekboned Eritreans. Jama wanted to search for Abdi, but the countryside was now a battleground for militias and shifta bandits. Shidane’s grave was a meeting place for robbers who gathered under his shade to share their loot. Jama wondered if Shidane’s ghost had called them to him, his spirit sitting beside them in delight as they counted and plotted. After bandits attacked Hakim’s shop, shoving their pistols into Jama’s face and grabbing sacks of grain and money, Jama remonstrated with Shidane, and they never returned. Ordinary Eritreans were also in a rebellious mood now that Italian power had been revealed as nothing more than a magician’s trick. Every man and boy had a pistol, rifle, or grenade. When Italian prisoners of war passed through Tessenei they hid their faces from the men they had tortured and the women they had raped. Even after the carnage at Keren, the ascendancy of the European was jealously guarded by the British, who pampered the Italians and protected them from any vengeance. When bandits attacked Italian villas or shops, British troops conducted house-to-house searches until weapons and suspects were handed over.

Jama lived a simple existence in Hakim’s shop, quietly watching the world pass by, everyday routines, miracles, and tragedies filling his days. He felt no joy or misery, just a deep yearning for all the things he had lost. The war was over but it had taken everything with it, and reduced his world to an oasis of peace surrounded by a scorched wasteland. Former askaris came to the store and made chitchat with him, some drank too much, some pretended to have forgotten all about the war but still there was the never-ending inventory of lost souls. “So-and-so died of shrapnel wounds”; “Tall Mohamed was hanged”; “Hassan was ambushed by shifta”; “Samatar went missing.” Jama could not stop listening even though he was sick of death; he wanted life in its purest form, like birds had, not this stunted thing that the askaris endured. Jama asked the men to look out for Abdi and to tell him that Jama Guure was waiting for him in Tessenei, but Abdi had disappeared, flown away on invisible wings.

Jama listened to the neighbor’s cockerel sound its alarm, its crowing muffled by the other morning sounds, buckets of water sloshing, fires crackling, men and women greeting one another, mules braying, babies crying. Hawa, an old woman wrapped in red cotton, came limping into the store. She heaved and panted, on her back a sack of chickpeas, and her muscular arms threw the heavy load at Jama’s feet.

“Good peas, the best I’ve grown in a while. I’ll want a special gift from you, my little Somali,” she said, holding out her hand.

“If I were the boss, you could have anything in the shop, aunty.”

Hawa waited for Jama to weigh the sack and hand over her payment of sugar. He was always generous, giving an extra spoonful to his regulars. Hawa tweaked his cheek and placed the packet under her arm. It would take another hour for her to walk back to Gerset and her home in the Kunama settlement. The sky was clouded over, threatening a downpour.

“Stay here, Hawa, wait for it to come and go,” said Jama, lighting a cigarette, phosphorus and tobacco sharp in his nose.

Hawa trundled back to him, closing her eyes to breathe in the smoke. “Give me one, you naughty Somali, or I will report you to the boss.”

Jama broke the cigarette in half and gave her the lit end. “It’s the last one,” he said apologetically.

He thrust the other half behind his ear and checked for rotten fruit in the piles delivered by local farmers that morning. Most of the bananas and oranges were stunted little specimens, bruised and misshapen. He removed the ones that were overripe and shared them with Hawa. As they ate, the rain began, the first real downpour of the rainy season, and the wind blew in, spraying them with water. Awate came running in on his way home from the schoolhouse. He was drenched, his thin clothes plastered to his body.

“Jama, I came top in my class today. Teacher said if I carry on like this, he will send me to his brother’s big school in Kassala.”

Hawa ululated and smoke escaped in spirals from her mouth.

“Manshallah, Awate, you will go to Kassala, but dry yourself, you don’t want to get sick,” Jama admonished.

Awate lived near the shop with a distant aunt of his father’s but he visited Jama every day to grab sweets and share his achievements. His face had filled out and he looked nothing like the wraith Jama had found.

Hakim, the shopkeeper, at first kept a close eye on Jama—“I’ve had boys work for me and rob me blind, my rule is any thieves get a taste of my switch”—but he never had to use it on Jama and soon left him in charge when he went to buy stock fifty miles away in Kassala. Although he had the largest store for miles, with villages nearby supplying him with sorghum, millet, maize, and sesame, Hakim was not a natural capitalist, constantly giving his spoiled children money from the day’s takings and keeping the best meat for his family. Jama sometimes thought Hakim had a shop only so that he could have an endless supply of delicacies to shove into his small, wet mouth.

Tessenei was a hub of international trade: loot from the homes of Italian colonists was traded for goods from Egypt, and askaris sold their Italian weapons to Abyssinian shifta. Kunama farmers and taciturn Takaruri hunters exchanged their produce for cloth, coffee, and sugar, the Sudanese presiding over this mercantile frenzy like referees at a wrestling match. They opened caravanserai and bazaars and sold their sizzling kebabs at every corner. Jama was known to them and everyone else as the little Somali who could speak many languages. Jama picked up Kunama from Hawa and would translate for the rural women in disputes with Hakim over the quality of their vegetables or the extent of their debts. All kinds of people came to the shop. Once, a man burst in, carrying a spear and shield, wearing the lion skin of an Amhara warrior, only to shout, “Waryaa inanyow!” to Jama. He was no Amhara but a full-blooded Somali, a Habr Yunis man from around Hargeisa who had ended up in Abyssinia and fought against the Italians. He took off the sweaty lion pelt and chatted with Jama about the desert, camels, and his plan to join the Royal Navy in Egypt. Before sunset he picked up his mane, spear, and shield and disappeared toward Sudan.

Jama spent two years working for Hakim without pay; he traded his labor for something to eat and somewhere to sleep. On that coffee-scented floor he became a man, his arms and legs no longer able to fit comfortably in his nook beneath the counter; he felt like an elephant trapped in a goat pen. At night he thought about trying his luck somewhere else. Hakim was often kind but he was also a grouchy merchant who muttered complaints under his thick walrus mustache. When Jama finally made up his mind to leave, Hakim threw his big hands in the air and said frantically, “Haven’t I been good to you? What more could you want?” Hakim reached into his pocket and gave Jama exactly two pounds for his seven hundred and thirty days of toil. Awate cried when Jama told him he would be leaving and held on to his long legs to slow him down, but Jama pried him off. “I’ll be back, Awate. You can be my coolie when I open a store,” he promised.

Jama explored the local villages, looking for one isolated and poor enough to lack a Sudanese stall. It was a bleak journey. Roads were still blocked by burnt-out tanks, minefields were hidden under weeds, and bones jutted from shallow graves. Jama found Focka nestled in a lush valley; it was a tiny village with barely twenty families who trekked two hours to Tessenei for textiles, medicines, paraffin. When the little Somali came to visit and spoke of his plans, they nearly nailed him to a stake to stop him escaping. Among the matriarchal Kunamas, women like Ambaro, Jinnow, and Awrala were everywhere, bossing him about, giving him unwanted advice on how to build his stall, teasing him about his exotic looks, his thin girly face, and wavy hair. He had emerged from the underworld into this land of Amazons. The villagers were excited to have a foreigner in their midst, and Jama’s stall, made from torn-down Italian billboards and covered with palm fronds, became the talking shop, tavern, and in the evenings, dancehall. Young men, tired and sweaty, would come in from the fields and untangle their muscles in wacky dances they named the pissing dog, the hungry chicken, the rutting ram, all the while getting limp on honey mead and running up large debts at Jama’s stall. The elders would occasionally perform epic sagas about their ancient queens who had come to Eritrea as nomads and been seduced by this fertile land.

To satisfy his customers’ desires and avoid the high British taxes, Jama would hire a camel and take the risky night route through the desert between Tessenei and Kassala. He cherished these expeditions, his pale clothes glowing in the moonshine and sand grains glinting like diamonds in his path, and he felt like he had gone back in time to when his own ancestors sought out new lands. The white-hot stars were so bright they nearly burned him, and the moonlit dunes would undulate and swim as he was rocked into somnolence on the camel’s back. Jama would be jolted awake when he heard the laughs of hyenas following him, the snap of their jaws as they bit at the camel’s long thin legs. Smugglers were a delicacy to local hyenas, and on this long isolated stretch if a smuggler was thrown off his startled camel he would have no hope of rescue; they would pounce and leave nothing behind.

With smuggled Sudanese cigarettes hidden under his clothes, Jama would return triumphantly to the village. He was never caught by the Sudanese police. The crunch of a policeman’s footstep or his smoker’s cough carried for miles on the desert air, and if Jama heard anything he would find another smuggler’s track. With these nocturnal journeys Jama doubled his takings. He expanded the stall until secondhand shoes hung from their laces above his head, paraffin lamps glowered like squat policemen at his side, and homemade perfumes, oily love potions, wafted out of scavenged glass bottles. Everything Jama sold brought the glamour of the outside world to Focka. Under the eternal woods of overgrown baobabs and fragrant tamarinds, a village was being shaken out of a daydream. The magic of oil and coal made life easier, faster, dirtier, and Jama’s stall offered as much of the outside world as he could carry. When the harvest was brought in, people gasped at the lewd fecundity of the earth. Carrots long and rampant jumped out of the soil, red saucy tomatoes pouted from their vines. Emerald, citrine, and ruby peppers shone from dowdy wicker baskets, and the lambs, the lambs, shouting and boasting all the way to market. Women carried baskets full of eggs as big as fists on their heads to Tessenei. Focka, only Focka had been blessed, and the rest of the villages in the Kunama country revealed sullen sacks of gnarled vegetables and sour fruit at market. The people were angry. The farmers of Focka were keeping the lucky Somali to themselves. Women met in all the villages; hushed secret midnight conferences took place.

“Poison him with cobra spit, and then bring him here for the cure,” counseled one old woman.

In another village a woman offered herself as the honey trap, but in Gerset, Hawa told them to offer Jama land in return for his sorcery.

Jama accepted Hawa’s offer of two acres, but promised the people of Focka that he would keep his stall there. He borrowed a mule from a neighbor and with his blanket, tools, and cooking utensils on the mule’s back he headed for Gerset. The women had cleared the ground for him, rich soil, damp to the touch, combed through like his mother’s black hair. It was a beautiful sight to behold, the first real wealth of his life. He paced along the perimeter, measuring the distance from one corner to another. It was a large, open-handed gift from the women and he kissed Hawa’s hands in gratitude. The women built him a hut, singing “Akoran Oshomaney” as they worked, “Don’t Let Your Friend Down.”

They finally left him alone to work his sorcery, but he didn’t know what to do. Protected from view by exuberant banana trees, he bent down and picked up handfuls of soil and rubbed it against his arms and legs, it was cool and soothed his hot skin. He brought it to his nose, it smelled of trees and their breath. He tasted it; iron and blood. In his revelry he walked around Gerset, the women smiled and waved as he roamed, he felt wonderful among these trusting Amazons, their beautiful village untouched by war, hidden from Ferengi maps. They stopped to welcome him. There were no titles in Gerset, no masters or lords, not even misses; respect was given freely, equally, generously, all were descendants of Queen Kuname. According to custom, only the women and older men had met to decide which plot to give Jama; the youths would learn of his presence when they returned from grazing the cows but Jama was assured that they would give him no trouble and there was quiet apart from the shouts of dogs, coughs of goats, and chuckling of lambs. Tired and thirsty, he reached the village shop. He pushed the curtain aside, his footsteps soft, padded by unswept dust. A girl sat behind a crooked wooden counter, her head on her arm, snoring with fat flies buzzing around her head. She jumped at his approach, quickly wiping the drool from her chin. She was beautiful, sloe black eyes and red ripe lips atop the long neck of a gerenuk, her pure brown skin set off by yards of carnelian and amber beads; she had been polished with butter and cream. Meeting her startled antelope gaze, Jama asked for a cup of milk, and with swift, dancing steps, she went to the old cow in the backyard and milked a cupful.

“Good afternoon,” said Jama, his heartbeat skittering.

The girl nodded to him. She emanated light like a saint on a church wall, but her expression was more suspicious than beatific.

“Where have you come from?” she finally asked, her voice deeper than he expected. He could smell honey on her breath.

“You name it, I’ve been there.” He smiled, she smiled back, and that was it.

Bethlehem Bighead was a mule, with a Tigre father and a Kunama mother, Muslim and Christian, born in a cowshed, a shepherdess in the morning, a farmer in the afternoon, and a shopgirl in the evening. With a head full of dreams and fantasies, she would pluck lavender and jasmine and come home with blooms in her braids but minus a goat, only to be beaten and sent back out into the darkening hills until she had found it. Her black thicket of hair earned her the name Bighead, and she wore it like a crown of thorns, pulling at it throughout the day, plucking strands from her eyes, from her mouth, from her food. When her sisters jumped her, they used her hair as a weapon, forcing her head back with it and dragging her across the dirt by it. Her mother would sometimes put an afternoon aside to laboriously braid it, laying it down into manageable rows like their crops, before like a rain forest it burst out of its man-made boundaries and reclaimed its territory. She was a true village girl in that she wanted nothing more than to live in a town; already sixteen, she had to wait for her five older sisters to marry before she could escape. Jama’s face came to her now before she fell asleep. His deep, hypnotizing eyes saddened her, and there was something about his lost and lonely bearing that made her want to suffocate him in her bosom.

From her perch on the hills, amid the bleating goats, Bethlehem could see Jama in his turban, planting seeds. He was clumsy with his tools and to her amusement he would pull seedlings out of the earth to see how much they had grown. He was trying to stare them into life, she thought.

When she brought the goats back down, Bethlehem sidled past his field. “You’re not doing that very well, you know. You shouldn’t plant them so deep. They need to see the sun through the earth.”

“Why don’t you come and help me, then,” Jama said, stopping to stare as she walked past.

“Eeeee! You wish!” she squealed, before striding away.

Jama studied the cycles of her day. He loved to watch her make her yawning advance up the hill in the dappled dawn light. She was a spot of red climbing up the gray-green horizon, her faithful retinue of stinking goats shouting after her. At midday, she would descend, her ramrod-straight back holding up that black flag of hair, and begin work on her mother’s fields. He could smell the flowers in her hair long after she had passed. Jama would wait until she was in the shop in the evenings before going to buy his eggs and milk, and they talked by paraffin lamp while her family ate dinner.

“What did you do before coming here?” she asked once.

“I was an askari.”

“How stupid you must have been,” she taunted, holding a blade of grass between her fingers in imitation of his cigarette.

The womb light of the lamp made them both braver, able to talk about things that bright daylight or deep darkness would have prohibited. Jama told Bethlehem about his parents, and she listened with the attention of a sphinx. In return, to cement their intimacy, Bethlehem described to Jama how her father kicked her for daydreaming and losing goats, how she had never been bought anything her whole life but only given her sisters’ hand-me-downs.

“Not one thing, Jama, can you believe that, never one thing for me only.”

Jama shook his head in sympathy and touched her hand; she let him for a second before pulling away.

Since Jama had arrived in Gerset, Bethlehem never went out with dusty, chapped feet but massaged them with oil every morning. She pilfered her eldest sister’s Maria Theresa coin necklace, earrings, and silver anklets, hiding them until she got near Jama’s farm, when she would put them on, scintillating past until he was out of sight and they could disappear back into her pockets. One day her hair was in agrarian rows, another day in two bunches, on yet another she would plait the front and leave the back out. Jama enjoyed the coiffures which gave her face different shapes and moods. As they grew closer, Jama rose before the sun to wait for her in the hills where they could spend a few hours together, before the village came to life and began its watch. He waited happily in the cold, holding fresh sprigs and blossoms for her, a shiver running through his body when she stepped out of his infatuated mind and became flesh again. Her bounding, voluptuous body appeared every night in his dreams, she wore her red cotton robes tight, and he memorized every contour of her body during the day so he could re-create her in perfect detail at night. He was awkward and giddy around her but she did not complain, she watched him intently and pulled straw out of his hair.

“I have never felt like this before, I feel possessed,” he told her, and she glowed in pleasure.

One dawn, as they sat talking, a deep murmuring came from the skies, a torrent of rain and hailstones fell upon them, bhesh, bhesh, bhesh, and land slid down the hillside.

“Mary protect me,” screamed Bethlehem, desperately trying to gather her terrified goats as the earth tore away her anklets and submerged her knee-deep in mud.

Jama climbed a fig tree and pulled her out. She was so close he could feel her heartbeat thumping against him. Bethlehem buried her face in his neck while he tugged her free.

“Come, let’s get into that cave,” he commanded. She ignored him and ran after the goats, but Jama chased them toward the cave, and only then did she follow him. The mammoth granite hillside split into a cavern that had all the elegance and delicacy of a cathedral, stalactites hung down like censors and the light playing on puddles dappled against the high dome. Bethlehem said a prayer and kissed her rosary.

“Don’t worry, it will be over soon,” reassured Jama. “Come, sit closer, so I can keep you warm.”

“Are you serious about me, Jama? Or are you just playing? Will you marry me?” Bethlehem asked, cold and shivering.

“Yes,” replied Jama, putting an arm around her shoulder.

They made a loveseat out of the living rock and imagined their new life together as rain washed the old world away. Looking over them, however, was Rumor, she who flits between sky and earth, who never declines her head in sleep, and with swift wings she took flight to disturb the repose of the villagers.

When the midday sun had burned away the clouds, Jama, Bethlehem, and the goats returned to Gerset, to stares and whispers. Bethlehem kept her head high, believing herself to be practically married. She left Jama by his field and went home. Her mother was sweeping goat droppings away from their door.

“What took you so long, Bighead? You should have come home before the rain started.”

“Mama, Jama and I are going to get married,” Bethlehem announced.

Her mother screeched and threw away the broom. “What is this! What will people say? Your father’s poor old heart! Why can’t you wait for your sisters to find husbands first? What have you done?”

“Nothing, Mama, we just agreed,” Bethlehem stuttered.

“You will decide nothing without consulting me. I don’t want that little Somali sniffing around you, people are already talking, you don’t know anything about him, so just stay away.”

Bethlehem didn’t stay away. She went to Jama’s fields and helped him, he watched as she demonstrated how to pick out weeds and check for blight. The earth was pregnant with so much produce that, come harvest time, Jama employed two more female laborers, offering them a share of the crop in return. Bethlehem was paid too and her mother walked her to the field and collected her at dusk, but all day the lovebirds could twitter as much as they wanted. He described the Ferengi ships docked in Aden, the slaughterhouses of Hargeisa, and the markets of Djibouti. He did not have to describe Keren to her; the silver markets still glinted in her mind from her trips there as a child. Jama spoke about places but he didn’t speak about people — all the places he described were ghost towns that he traversed alone. He never mentioned Shidane or Abdi, but they were there in his stories, imperceptible shadows that walked beside him. There was a moment at dusk when a cool breeze blew, the leaves shook and rustled, and Bethlehem stretched her back in front of a golden sky, that made Jama melt; but within moments Bethlehem’s mother would arrive and march her home, leaving him to his thoughts as he rode his borrowed mule to Focka. On melancholy evenings, the scrub a dark green and the rocky paths a subdued blue, his mind dwelled on those he had left behind. He hoped to return one day, atop an unblemished racing camel, and visit Jinnow and Idea with gifts of gold, myrrh, and silk. He planned to either return in triumph or not at all. On the back of the mule he conducted imaginary conversations with Idea in which he told him about the Italians, their punishments, their arrogance, their cruelty, and Idea listened closely while stirring a pot, shaking his head in bitter sympathy.

The harvests were greater than they had ever been, and the women of Gerset showed exuberant gratitude, bringing to Jama’s tukul a goat, blankets, sorghum porridge, figs, all of life’s little luxuries. Jama’s own sorghum plants towered so high and so strong that twenty women were brought in to help cut them down. Even Bethlehem’s mother came to him bearing eggs, and she smiled tentatively, appraising him all the time. Jama surreptitiously kissed the amulet around his neck; the magic the women saw in him was nothing more than what his mother could scatter on him from above.

The harvest was so abundant that Jama could pay Awate to look after the store in Focka, saving him the backbreaking donkey ride every day. The thud of sorghum being pounded in stone mortars followed him everywhere. The smuggling trips to Sudan continued but now he could pay for more expensive items: petrol, silver, cooking pots. He was the wealthiest man in Focka, and the second-wealthiest after Bethlehem’s father in Gerset, although he had plenty of weight to gain before he matched that rotund figure. Jama was almost complacent about his talents now. He thought all he needed to do was throw a few seeds in the earth and he would be richly rewarded. Bethlehem became the lady of the manor, watching over the women, overseeing their work, tutting and clucking around them until they complained to Jama. The sorghum grew tall and straight and shivered and sang in the breeze. Young men came to admire his fields and store because he was the boy their mothers told them to emulate. They looked on in wonder as the crowds of women — their aunties, sisters, girlfriends — huddled around the tukul of the thin, long-limbed foreigner, vying for his attention in loud voices.

Amid all the flattery, Jama could not hear the whispers of locusts flying toward Gerset. Millions upon billions traversing the miles with a blind hunger fell upon the village without warning. The ugly warriors from the Nile Valley ate the crops, the roofs of tukuls, ate through baskets to get at hidden grains and pulses, ate the food out of children’s mouths, and what they didn’t eat they maliciously defecated on, poisoning everything. Jama tried to throw cloths over his crops but the locusts ate the sheets as he laid them down, and his workers ran away to save their own fields, lunging at the insects with torches. Within hours all that was left of his farm were stiff stubs where the sorghum once stood and piles of locusts that had died in the frenzy. Jama ran through the ravaged village, staring dumbfounded as he went from field to empty field. The women screamed and rent their clothes, but it was too late to pray, to do anything. By the next day, every farm had been ruined; children would go unfed, debts unpaid; animals would have to be slaughtered before they starved to death. In his mind Jama canceled the debts that the distraught women owed him.

He went to find Bethlehem in the hills; even the grass was gone. She ran to him. “I saw them from here, I was so frightened I thought they had eaten everyone! They blotted out the sun, Jama!” She had been crying.

“They have destroyed everything we worked for,” Jama said, taking her hand. He walked her back to Gerset to see the damage.

It was a backward miracle, something made into nothing, and the suddenness of the destruction kept women wailing in shock. They believed in discipline and patience but that didn’t seem to matter now, when bounty could be reduced to penury in the blink of an eye.

Jama and the women of Gerset put their shoulders to the plow and worked from dawn to dusk collectively. They plowed the stalks, sowed the few seeds they had saved, and smoothed manure over the earth. They sang defiant songs of Kunama unity and sisterhood to raise their spirits, heckling when Jama tried to sing along with them. Bethlehem was relieved of her shepherdess duties, and she and her mother worked side by side in Jama’s field as well as in the others. There was no joy in the work, only furrowed eyebrows and dirty hands. Jama had lost most of his appeal to the women but a modicum of magic glittered around him, and they kept him as a totem of former hope. Bethlehem became desperate and fearful, worried that the man she loved would fail again. The month of the long rains was late coming, but then came a sickly, squalid deluge that formed stagnant pools in which mosquitoes copulated and multiplied. Jama’s malaria had come back every year since he had been infected in the askari camp in Omhajer, but this year he was as weak as an old man. Bethlehem’s mother advised putting a cup of sugar in water, leaving the mixture in moonlight, and drinking it in the morning, but it just gave him nausea and sore teeth. Many people were falling sick. Bethlehem collapsed at the farm and was carried home. When she returned to work, she told Jama that a medicine man had been sent for. He had asked her where the pain was, she pointed to her stomach, and he bit it, so hard that he had drawn blood, which he spat out and read for clues. To her shame he diagnosed lovesickness and said he had no cure for that. Fortunately, the people were agitated and distracted from everyday gossip. They consulted oracles, sacrificed livestock, prayed to their goddess, but they were not heeded. Like a curse, locusts again darkened the sky. In one day the second harvest was destroyed and Gerset beggared.

Jama felt ashamed. He remembered the story his mother used to tell him about a king who had become insane and was thrown out of his palace to wander the desert, telling insects and scorpions of the sumptuous life he had once lived. Gerset was a different place now. All the men had left to find work as laborers in Kassala, and the women called Jama the eunuch in the harem. He was nothing but a sickly eighteen-year-old with a fluffy mustache, they laughed. Bethlehem was abused for the airs and graces she had assumed as his betrothed, and the only solution she saw to this disparagement was a swift wedding.

Everyday Bethlehem cornered him. “Well, Jama, go and find work so you can pay for my dowry.”

Jama began to fear her, her desperate eyes burning into him, her tongue sharper with each hesitation on his part.

“I should have known you wouldn’t understand anything about how real families work,” she bullied. “Do you understand how you’ve made me look? Chasing after you, working on your accursed farm, I have made a fool of myself, you stupid foreigner.”

In the calm solitude of his tukul, he opened his father’s cardboard suitcase for the first time since leaving Omhajer. The musical instrument he now recognized as a Sudanese rababa, the toy car covered in orange rust that made the tiny wheels squeak against his fingertips, and the other paltry detritus of his father’s life seared his heart. His loss came sharply back to him, and that night he stayed awake in the dark, pinned to the dirt floor by grief for everyone he had lost. Surrounded by his father’s belongings, Jama began to imagine himself as his father’s sole legacy; everything that once had been his father was now contained in him. It was up to him to live the life his father should have lived, to enjoy the sun and rivers, the fruit and honey that life offered. He picked up the rababa and strummed its five strings, imagining the tunes his father had played to his army friends on their long marches. Jama couldn’t put the rababa down, it sat against his thigh and played him, it sang to him and brought back memories that had lain dormant since infancy, his father’s hair, eyelashes, the glint of his teeth all restored to him in startling detail, and he could feel his father’s stubble tickling his breastmilk-fat stomach and the head rush of being held upside down.

Jama’s revelry was broken by Bethlehem pushing her way into the tukul. “What are you doing? You’ve been in here for two days,” she demanded. He had lost all measure of time playing the rababa.

“I’ve brought you some food.” She shoved a dish of sorghum porridge into his hand and then began her lecture. “The women want their farm back, they need the land. You are going to have to find laboring work, Jama. The Italians are back in Tessenei, you know their language, go get a job.”

“They’re not back, it’s the other ones, the British,” Jama said patiently.

“You go ask anyone, the British put the Italians back in charge,” persisted Bethlehem vehemently. Jama stayed silent, unable to believe the news.

After eating, Jama picked up the rababa and played for Bethlehem. “What if I became a troubadour?”

Bethlehem snorted. “Don’t you dare!”

“You don’t think people in other villages would pay to listen to my music?”

“If you want to live a low-class life like that, I can’t stop you, Jama.”

“But you would like to stop me, wouldn’t you?”

“You’re a free man, I know that, I just can’t see why you would want to do such things, but I forget that you have been brought up in the gutter.”

“Shut up!” he snapped. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Bethlehem. However good I am to you, you still feel you can wipe your dirty feet on me.”

Bethlehem grabbed her basket and stormed out. Jama could hear her tears but was too angry to pursue her.

Jama carried the rababa with him everywhere he went, penniless but not unhappy. He had no money to pay Awate so the stall in Focka soon became threadbare and dusty, cobwebs hanging like a veil over the hatch. In Tessenei were a group of Tigre youths who spent their day ambling around, singing, drinking honey mead, and watching the world go by. They spied Jama with his rababa and asked him to join them. With a drum and now a rababa, they roamed the villages around Tessenei, busking at weddings and circumcisions. Jama grew his hair long like them, and it fell to his shoulders in wide black curls. They were wild boys who stripped off and jumped into waterfalls, and gorged themselves on the bounty of nature, wild berries, birds they caught with bow and arrow. Awate admired the new rebellious Jama and waited for him after school. Jama would pick him up at Hakim’s shop and heave the ten-year-old onto his shoulders to the villages. During daylight they all sat on the granite boulders by the river and tried to sweet-talk the washergirls away from their fiancés.

“Oh, you are beating my heart against that rock,” called out Sulaiman as he grasped at his heart in front of a giggling girl. As the day ended they were chased away by brothers and fathers.

Jama was carefree for the first time in his life. He had just enough food in his stomach and each day brought adventure and laughter, the boys accepting him the way that only layabouts can, without judgment or demand. His fingertips swelled and hardened as he mastered the rababa, making it whine, holler, and pulsate. Awate danced with his shoulders while the other boys sang and played jokes on the audience.

Bethlehem observed Jama’s new life silently from her hilltop, and brooded over how to reclaim him from the troubadours, but she stomped away from him when he tried to serenade her on the hillside. “Eeesh! I do not speak to vagrants!” she called.

As Jama walked back from the hills to Gerset, Bethlehem’s words followed him. He remembered the rich, dapper-clothed seamen in Aden and looked down at himself, at the dirty white cloth wrapped around him and his beaten-up sandals, and he was suddenly ashamed of his poverty. Jama remembered the certainty with which Shidane spoke about becoming rich. Unlike Jama, his faith in himself had never wavered, and even as a street boy he had thought himself a prince whose kingdom had been temporarily lost.

Inside his tukul, hidden from the dewy night, Jama listened to rain falling on the straw roof. It beat out a rhythm that pulsed all over the village. He prepared himself for another long, lonely night. He lit the last of Bethlehem’s frankincense, its fragrant smoke warming the hut, and stretched out his tired limbs. He was somewhere between sleep and consciousness when in the dim light he saw tendrils shifting and dancing. A man took shape from the arabesques of smoke, extricating himself from the urn like a jinn from a lamp. First his hand appeared, then a thin torso and legs wrapped in ashy robes. He stepped delicately out of the hot coals and approached Jama.

Jama felt a rush of cold blood in his veins as the man touched his face and left a streak of black on his cheek. The man was beautiful, every eyelash, every wrinkle perfectly formed from blue, black, and gray smoke, and within his dark eyes was a pinprick of light, like the lamp of a lighthouse seen through a midnight fog.

“Jama.”

Jama didn’t reply, his tongue lay dead in his mouth.

“Goode, speak to me.”

Jama looked into his father’s eyes, felt the lighthouse beam wash over him.

“Goode, this life is a sliver of light between two great darknesses.” Guure’s voice was raspy, whispers of smoke breaking away from him. “You cannot remain here while your fate awaits you in Egypt. The world has been broken open for you like a ripe pomegranate and you must swallow its seeds.”

“What of my life here?”

“You will be married with children and grandchildren but you will also ride the waves of all the seas.”

Rain came down in broad sheets and battered at the door, cold air blew into the tukul and ripped at Guure.

“Father, why did you leave me and hooyo?”

“I thought my life would be long. I expected so much from it and wanted to come back when I could lay it at your feet, but I was merely a puppet with fine strings suspending me.”

Jama stared into his father’s eyes.

“But from the stars I watch you, your mother watches you, we have been beside you during every trial.”

Another gust of wind threw open the door. “My time is up,” gasped Guure as his spectral body was torn apart and the lamps of his eyes extinguished, leaving Jama in darkness once again.

The tukul was overwhelmed by the scent of frankincense in the morning, and the coal in the white urn was still red hot. Jama put his few possessions over the fire until everything was full of his father’s smell. He had no English, no idea how to get to Egypt, but this was not enough to stop him, he finally knew what to do with the small fortune his mother had tied around his neck. He tracked Bethlehem down, where she sat on a rock halfheartedly watching the goats. She gave Jama an evil look as he approached. “What do you want?”

“I want to tell you something.”

“Well, keep it to yourself, I’m not interested in you anymore,” she lied.

Jama sat down next to her but she moved away. “I have been given a message by my father. I’m going to find work like you want me to”—Bethlehem’s eyes lit up—“but it will mean that I have to go to Egypt and spend some time away.”

Bethlehem looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “What? What foolishness has come over you?” Bethlehem had no idea where Egypt was, but she knew it was far from home.

“I’m going to join the British ships and get rich and come home to you,” Jama cajoled.

“Home, home, you won’t come home! You will be killed, the hyenas will eat you, you madman!” she hollered.

“Calm down, Bethlehem, one minute you tell me to find work, and now this.”

“I want you to get a real job, near here, not disappear to another world because you have been speaking to ghosts! You don’t even know where you’re going,” she cried. Jama wasn’t sure if she was worried for him or was simply angry that he was doing something she hadn’t prescribed.

“I could come back a rich man, richer than anyone here, twice as rich as your father. He wouldn’t care that I was a foreigner then, would he?”

Bethlehem’s face was wet with tears.

“Why are you getting so crazy, Bethlehem? In the name of God, I’m only trying to do the right thing,” Jama said, exasperated.

“No, you’re not! You want to run away! Just like my mother said you would,” she shouted back. “You have made a fool of me,” she sobbed.

“If you want to make every decision for me, what’s the point of my being alive? You might as well live both of our lives for us. I’m going now, Bethlehem, you will see what I do. Judge me by my actions, that’s all I ask. I will come later to say goodbye.” Jama went to kiss her cheek. Bethlehem shook her head violently and pushed him away.

Jama dragged his dusty feet to Hakim’s store, where Awate waited gleefully for another day with the bad boys, but he was to be disappointed. Jama picked him up. “You know, Awate, when I came to Eritrea I was the same size as you, I was a skinny, desperate little thing. I was never sent to school like you, and I learned everything the hard way. While I am away I want you to finish this school, pick every last bit of knowledge out of that teacher’s brain, and then go to Kassala. When I come back you will write my letters and read books to me. I will promote you from number one coolie to number one ma’alim.” Jama kissed Awate on both cheeks and set him on the ground. Awate stifled his tears and turned in the direction of his tukul, dragging his schoolbag along the dirt.

Jama whistled at him. “Awate, pick up your bag. A ma’alim cannot misbehave in front of his pupil.” Awate held it to his chest and gave Jama a sullen smile.

Jama heard a knock on his tukul and found Bethlehem, her mother, and her many sisters waiting outside for him. Bethlehem had dressed up for the occasion, in bright clothes, beads in her hair, silver jewelry hanging from her neck, ears, and wrists, but her face was angry and red-eyed.

“Greetings,” Jama said hesitantly.

“Greetings,” the women replied sourly.

“Little Somali, you have made Bethlehem even crazier than she was. She won’t stop crying, she tells me you promised to marry her but are now going back to your own country because a ghost has told you to! She will not eat, work, or talk. What can I do with a child like this?” spat Bethlehem’s mother, wagging her finger in his face.

“I’m not going back to my country, I am going to Egypt so that I can return with enough money to pay for her dowry. I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” said Jama, humiliated and unable to look at Bethlehem.

“Forget the dowry, a sane child will be enough. Marry her now, before you leave, it’s the only thing that will bring my child back to her senses.”

Bethlehem wiped her nose and eyes, looked pleadingly at Jama.

“I’ll marry you, Bethlehem, you are all I have in this world,” Jama said, his heart racing.

The marriage was performed by a group of red-robed old women who had some knowledge of the Qu’ran, but everything felt rushed, ramshackle. A goat was dragged over from Bethlehem’s yard and slaughtered to feed the well-wishing gossips trickling in from the fields. Jama and Bethlehem huddled together in awe of what they had just done. The scorn, anger, and misery had been wiped from Bethlehem’s face and Jama could see her beauty in full luminosity again. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He surreptitiously held her hand, unable to believe they would now be treated like grown-ups, able to do what they liked together.

Jama laughed.

Bethlehem smiled. “What’s so funny?”

“I can’t believe you’ve done this.”

“You can’t mess a Kunama girl around, little Somali. Let this be a lesson to you,” Bethlehem said, squeezing his hand.

When the women had eaten, they began clapping and singing, and Bethlehem taught Jama the dances, flinging her beaded hair from side to side.

“Wah! Wah! Dance, little Somali!” the women exclaimed, surprised that a foreigner could dance so well.

Jama lost himself to the rhythm, Bethlehem’s flushed face right next to his, her breath all over him. He danced with his girl until the hyenas started howling.

A procession of sisters, cousins, and aunts led Bethlehem to Jama’s tukul. She would live there until he came back, her own woman. Bethlehem had brought a bundle from her home, and as soon as her crying relatives had left, she unpacked and began to redecorate Jama’s dusty room. She made the tukul beautiful, with bright embroidered cloths covering the floor, straw baskets on the walls, and amber and silver necklaces hanging from a hook next to a chipped mirror. Jama watched his wife and wondered if she, too, would be taken from him.

“What are you thinking about, husband?” Bethlehem asked, holding his face between her palms.

“If you will ever leave me,” Jama replied.

“No, never, and I will never let you leave me, either.” Bethlehem put her hand on his heart. “This is mine now, your heart is my dowry, understand?”

Bethlehem held Jama to her, and he rested his head against her shoulder. He had not been embraced in so long, his flesh had become accustomed only to pain, but now she stroked his scars, kissed his face, brought life and heat back to his cold body. He wrapped his arms around her waist, ran his trembling hand up her narrow back, walking his fingertips over each of her vertebrae.

Bethlehem giggled nervously and pushed him away. “Why don’t I cut this too-long hair of yours? I am meant to be the one with the big hair, aren’t I?”

Jama nodded and grabbed his rababa, singing wedding songs while she scrambled around in her bag. Bethlehem had come prepared with a large pair of scissors, and she hacked away at his hair until he looked like the young man who had stolen her heart in her father’s shop.

“There, you are beautiful again,” sighed Bethlehem.

Jama laughed. “You think I’m beautiful?”

“You are the most beautiful man in Gerset! And maybe even in all of Eritrea. My sisters are so jealous that I captured you.”

“Ya salam! What flattery!”

“By Mary, it is the truth. I will never let you escape from me.”

“And I will never let you escape from me, I will bury my heart under your feet. Come, let me show you something.”

Jama led Bethlehem outside the tukul. The landscape was lit by a full moon, Gerset serene and hopeful, a night breeze rustling through the trees. “You see that star up there, the flickering one? Every night before you go to sleep I want you to look up at it and send me a kiss, and wherever I am, I will also look for it and send you a kiss. Don’t forget, Bethlehem, don’t stop until I get back.”

“I won’t forget,” said Bethlehem, squeezing his waist.

“Let’s go back inside,” Jama said, taking her hand. She followed him through the low entrance and with a big breath blew out the candle.