Infidel

  Abeh made us move back behind him because that was the way things were. But I loved my Abeh, and it wasn’t fair, so while he was kneeling on the mat I crawled forward anyway, until by the end of the prayer Haweya and I were just about level with him and Mahad. To my mother’s horror, we did this again and again. After about a week my father was irritated and my mother was sort of pleased, because it proved she had been right: he should never have let us move forward in the first place. In any case, Ma said, women do not pray with men. From the very first day Abeh should have been praying in one room with Mahad, and she with us in a separate room. But Abeh said no, “We pray together as a family. This is how God wants it.”

  After Abeh returned to us, all the rules relaxed a bit. He said that although we must do the ritual ablution before the morning prayer, we need not wash before the other prayers unless we had passed wind or gone to the bathroom. Washing at every prayer even if we were clean was a waste of water, Abeh said, and Allah wouldn’t want that.

  For a while, before every prayer, when Ma asked, “Have you washed?” we would all chant, “I am pure.” Ma would say “Pure! You’re filthy!” and we would say, “But, Ma, dust is not impure.” Before the next prayer, again, “We are pure!” and again, until my Ma would blow up and say, “We are going to put a stop to this nonsense right now,” and drag us off to the bathroom and douse us.

  After my father arrived back in my life, I opened up the way a cactus blooms after rain. He showered me with attention, swept me up in the air, told me I was clever and pretty. Sometimes in the evenings he gathered all three of us children together and talked to us about the importance of God, and of good behavior. He encouraged us to ask questions; my father hated what he called stupid learning—learning by rote. The question “Why?” drove my mother mad, but my father loved it: it could set off a river of lecturing, even if nine-tenths of it was way above our heads.

  Ma taught us to tell the truth because otherwise we would be punished and go to Hell. Our father taught us to be honest because truth is good in itself. I loved his evening lectures, and although we all soaked up the attention he gave us, from the beginning I was Abeh’s favorite.

  If we kids behaved badly, I always took the lead in owning up. I would say, “You won’t punish us if I confess something, will you? Because if I do tell the truth and you do punish me, you’ll be forcing me to lie to you next time.” My father would burst out laughing and say, “Tell the truth then,” and I would tell him: we had broken something, or annoyed the neighbors. He never hit us, just made us promise not to let it happen again.

  My mother was spartan. She provided no more than the necessary attention and affection to anyone except Mahad. And even with him, her benevolence was relative: she simply didn’t hit him as much as she hit Haweya and me. My mother was not a warm, cuddly woman to begin with, and life hardened her. She was worried all the time, and when she laid down rules, she meant it. But after a few weeks with Abeh we had learned to chant, “It’s not the rules, it’s the spirit.” It drove Ma crazy.

  * * *

  Whatever my father’s job really was, it paid well. But even though his Saudi work permit stipulated that he must not continue with his political activities, my father continued to work with the SSDF in secret. He thought the Saudis were crude and stupid and he didn’t believe they would manage to find out that he was still part of the leadership of a political movement in exile.

  When the five months’ paid rent was up on our flat, my father insisted we move to Riyadh, where he worked. Ma didn’t want to leave Mecca, but we children hated that apartment building, and I think even Ma was secretly relieved when Abeh found us a larger, much cooler house in Riyadh. It had sections, the woman’s house and the men’s (although we didn’t live that way), with a hallway and a closed door between the two. Men came and went by the front gate, an imposing metal grille with lamps on either side. We were never allowed to venture out unaccompanied. But a little doorway led from the courtyard in the women’s section to the courtyard of the women’s house next door, so that women and children could circulate between them without ever going outdoors.

  Haweya and I obtained permission to visit the neighbors via this little doorway. We used to watch TV. There were reruns of an endless TV series about the life of the Prophet and the battles he fought to establish Islam and bring stray polytheists to the straight path of the one true God; his face was never shown, because he was holy and nobody could act his role. We learned the clapping games of the little girls in the neighborhood. While their fathers were out and their lethargic, almost inert mothers slept away the afternoons, the girls who lived next door used to congregate together and play music. There were five or six of them—I suppose from several mothers—from about ten to fifteen years old. They tied cloths around their hips and swayed at each other, rotating their hips and shoulders and wrists with meaningful glances. I was eight years old, and to me these girls, even the ten-year-olds, exuded a torrid, and completely unfamiliar, eroticism.

  I had never seen this kind of dancing, only the ritual ceremonies that rainmakers sometimes staged in their neighborhood in Mogadishu: a jerky magical ceremony rather than a dance. When Haweya and I play-acted this new kind of dancing at home, my mother went mad with rage. She had brought us to Saudi Arabia to become pure and live the narrow path of Islam alongside the Saudis, and now Saudi women were leading us astray.

  Some of the Saudi women in our neighborhood were regularly beaten by their husbands. You could hear them at night. Their screams resounded across the courtyards: “No! Please! By Allah!” This appalled my father. He saw this horrible, casual violence as a prime example of the crudeness of the Saudis, and when he caught sight of the men who did it—all the neighborhood could identify who it was, from the voices—he would mutter, “Stupid bully, like all the Saudis.” He never lifted a hand to my mother in this way; he thought it was unspeakably low.

  Still, we had to be allowed to leave the house sometimes, and my mother couldn’t ban us from going to the neighbors’; it would have been rude. Their families were very different from ours. For one thing, their mothers were idle; they had servants. And the little boys simply ran rampant. All the children ran around as much as they liked—Arabs are very tolerant of small children—but the boys were in charge. They would turn off their mother’s TV program and order their older sisters off their chair.

  In Saudi Arabia, everything bad was the fault of the Jews. When the air conditioner broke or suddenly the tap stopped running, the Saudi women next door used to say the Jews did it. The children next door were taught to pray for the health of their parents and the destruction of the Jews. Later, when we went to school, our teachers lamented at length all the evil things Jews had done and planned to do against Muslims. When they were gossiping, the women next door used to say, “She’s ugly, she’s disobedient, she’s a whore—she’s sleeping with a Jew.” Jews were like djinns, I decided. I had never met a Jew. (Neither had these Saudis.)

  Yet these same neighbors could be very caring. They came around to ask if everything was going well, and brought us sweets and sticky pastries. Sometimes they invited my mother to weddings. Even though she didn’t approve of these women, she felt she couldn’t refuse, and would go—which meant she took us along, too. Weddings meant three evenings of festivities, all attended only by women, who seemed to come to life on these occasions, dressed up in their finery. On the first evening the bride was covered to protect her from the evil eye; you could see only her ankles, decorated with spiral henna designs. The next day she glittered in Arab dress and jewels. On the last evening, which is called the Night of Defloration, she wore a long white dress in lace and satin and looked frightened.

  On that evening the man she would marry was there, the only man ever allowed in the presence of women not from his family. He would be sweaty, ordinary looking, sometimes much older, wearing the long Saudi robe. The women would all hush as he came in. To Haweya and me, men were not from another pl
anet, but to the Saudi women in the room, the bridegroom’s arrival was hugely significant. Every wedding was like this: all the women falling silent, breathless with anticipation, and the figure who appeared, entirely banal.

  * * *

  Things were not going well at home. My parents’ once strong bond was breaking down. Each had very different expectations of life. My mother felt that my father was not attentive enough to his family. It often fell to my mother to accompany us to school and back—different schools, because Mahad was a boy—returning alone. She hated having to go out without a man, hated being hissed at by men on the street, stared at with insolence. All the Somalis told stories about women who had been accosted on the street, driven away, dumped on the roadside hours later, or simply never seen again. To be a woman out on her own was bad enough. To be a foreigner, and moreover a black foreigner, meant you were barely human, unprotected: fair game.

  When my mother went shopping without a male driver or spouse to act as guardian, grocers wouldn’t attend to her. Even when she took Mahad along, some shop assistants wouldn’t speak to her. She would collect tomatoes and fruit and spices and ask loudly, “How much?” When she received no reply she’d put the money down and say “Take it or leave it” and walk out. The next day she would have to go back to the same grocer. Mahad saw it all and couldn’t really help her; he was only ten.

  My mother never saw her tribulations as in any way the fault of the Saudis. She just wanted my father to do the shopping and the outdoor work, like all the Saudi men did. None of the Saudi women we knew went out in the street alone. They couldn’t: their husbands locked their front doors when they left their houses. All the neighborhood women pitied my mother, having to walk on her own. It was humiliating; it was low.

  My mother felt my father had failed her in many ways. He made her take on responsibilities she felt should rightly have been his. Somali culture didn’t make it any easier. To my father, it was natural to waltz in with an extra eight or ten men he’d invited for lunch. He never told her where he was going or when he’d be back. If the atmosphere became less than congenial at home, he would go to the mosque in the morning and turn up a day or two later. My mother had to wash every little sock and headscarf by hand. She was alone.

  I think there were times when she was happy: cooking in the evenings, her family around her. But how many of those evenings did she have? Sometimes, at night, I would hear my parents talking, my mother listing all the ways my father had failed her, her voice tense with rage. Abeh would tell her, “Asha, I am working to give us a future in our own country.” Or he would say, “These things wouldn’t happen if we were living in a normal country.” Abeh never liked Saudi Arabia and always wanted us to move to Ethiopia with him. But my mother wouldn’t do it: Ethiopians were unbelievers.

  A few months after our move, my grandmother arrived to help my mother with the household. She didn’t like the way Ma talked about Abeh either. “When you’re born a woman, you must live as a woman,” she used to say, quoting a proverb. “The quicker you understand that, the easier it will be to accept.”

  Some time after we moved to Riyadh we started school, real school, in the morning, with Quran school in the afternoon. But real school in Saudi Arabia was just like madrassah. We studied only Arabic, math, and the Quran, and the Quran must have taken up four-fifths of our time. Quran study was divided into a reciting class, a class on meaning, a class on the hadith, which are the holy verses written after the Quran, a class on the sirat, the traditional biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, and a class on fiqh, Islamic law. We learned to recite the ninety-nine names of Allah, and we learned how good Muslim girls should behave: what to say when we sneezed; on which side we should begin to sleep, and to what position it was permissible to move during sleep; with which foot to step into the toilet, and in what posture to sit. The teacher was an Egyptian woman, and she used to beat me. I was sure she picked on me because I was the only black child. When she hit me with a ruler she called me Aswad Abda: black slave-girl. I hated Saudi Arabia.

  Not all Saudis were like this. One morning, while I was in school, a sudden wind blew in, so strong it almost pushed me over. With it came the heady smell of rain, which made me homesick. (The smell of rain is perhaps the most poignant scent I remember from my short life in Somalia.) Storm clouds began to gather and parents drove up to collect their children; because of the storm, school was closing early, but my mother must not have realized that. It began to rain: first big drops that hit me hard, then huge drifts like solid sheets of water thundering down. The streets were flooding fast. When I was the last child waiting at the school gate I ran in the direction I thought must lead me home. The water was more than halfway up my shins. I fell down, crying.

  A big arm folded over my chest from behind and hauled me out of the water. I thought a Saudi had come to take me away, rape me, cut me to pieces, and bury me in the desert, as in my mother’s stories. I started screaming, “Whatever you do to me Allah will see you!” But this man wordlessly carried me into his house and dropped me on his wife’s lap. She gave me dry clothes to wear and calmed me down with warm milk while her husband went back out to my school and found my mother and Haweya. Then, when the rain stopped, he drove us all home.

  * * *

  We told our father we didn’t want to be girls. It wasn’t fair that we weren’t allowed to go out with him and do all the things that Mahad could. Abeh would always protest, and quote the Quran: “Paradise is at the feet of your mother!” But when we looked down at them, our mother’s bare feet were cracked from washing the floor every day, and Abeh’s were clad in expensive Italian leather shoes. We burst out laughing every time, because in every sense of the word, Paradise was not at her feet but at his. He was important, he was saving Somalia, he had lovely clothes, he went outside when he wanted to. And we, and she, were not allowed to do as we wished.

  The separation was etched into every detail of every day. If we wanted to go somewhere as a family, we had to take separate buses: my father and Mahad in the men’s bus, Ma and Haweya and I in the women’s. My father would mutter with rage at the stupidity of it all when we finally met up together, at the bazaar or the gold market. “This isn’t Muslim at all!” he would rage. “This is from the time of Ignorance! The Saudis are as stupid as livestock!” In practice, the rule of separate buses applied only to foreign workers. All the Saudis seemed to be rich, and Saudi women were driven around by drivers in their husband’s car.

  When I told people I wanted to grow up to be like my Abeh, he would glow and say “You see! The children will save the country!” and hoist me up in his arms. Then the visitors—Somali men who waited deferentially for my father to come home and spoke to him with respect—all looked at me and chuckled and said I looked just like my father, with my round forehead and sharp cheekbones. Later on, he would hug me and say I was his only son. It made Mahad hate me even more.

  Often my mother, too, received visitors—other Somali women, Dhulbahante, like my mother, who almost all worked as maids for Saudi households. One of them was called Obah. She was young and pretty, always nicely dressed. Her nails were always hennaed, and when she talked she waved her hands about in the air, leaving, to my mother’s disgust, a trail of cigarette smoke. One day Obah had to leave the people she worked for, for fear of being dishonored; or perhaps she had been dishonored, and that was why she had to leave.

  My mother disapproved of Obah’s feminine flourishes and her cigarettes. She saw all this frivolity as sin. Still, she agreed to shelter her; Obah was a clan mate, and it is expected.

  We children liked having Obah in the house. She laughed and waved her smoke around and wore her headscarf so loose you could see her gold earrings. She used a yellow powder and water to keep her skin soft and smooth. She was nothing like my austere, demanding mother.

  One day Mahad and I stole some of Obah’s cigarettes. We smoked them, and vomited. My mother told her she had to go. I don’t know where she went after t
hat, but a few months later we heard through the Dhulbahante network that Obah had been arrested and charged with prostitution. We were told she was jailed, then flogged in public, and that she had been deported to Somalia.

  To the Saudis, the very fact that Obah was in the country alone would have been enough to establish that she was a prostitute; no further proof was required. And to Siad Barré’s regime in Somalia, the very fact of having left her country and sought employment abroad would be enough to establish that she was a dangerous “anti.”

  When my father heard what had happened to Obah he was enraged. “This is not Islam—this is the Saudis, perverting Islam,” he roared. My father was Muslim, but he hated Saudi judges and Saudi law; he thought it was all barbaric, all Arab desert culture. Whenever we heard of an execution or a stoning, my mother always said, “It is God’s law and God’s will, and who are we to judge it?” But we also knew that no Somali could ever win if a Saudi decided to take him to court.

  My father’s scorn for the Saudis was all-embracing. On September 16, 1978, there was an eclipse of the moon in Riyadh. Late one afternoon it became visible: a dark shadow moving slowly across the face of the pale moon in the darkening blue sky. There was a frantic knocking on the door. When I opened it, our neighbor asked if we were safe. He said it was the Day of Judgment, when the Quran says the sun will rise from the west and the seas will flood, when all the dead will rise and Allah’s angels will weigh our sins and virtue, expediting the good to Paradise and the bad to Hell.

  Though it was barely twilight, the muezzin suddenly called for prayer—not one mosque calling carefully after the other, as they usually did, but all the mosques clamoring all at once, all over the city. There was shouting across the neighborhood. When I looked outside I saw people praying in the street. Ma called us indoors and said, “Everybody is praying. We should pray.”

  The sky grew dark. It was a sign! Now more neighbors came knocking, asking us to pardon past misdeeds. They told us children to pray for them, because children’s prayers are answered most. The gates of Hell yawned open before us. We were panicked. Finally, Abeh came home, well after nightfall. “Abeh!” We ran to him. “It’s the Day of Judgment. You must ask Ma to forgive you!”