Lorenzo took matches from his shirt pocket and lit the pipe. “Yes, I am going crazy with the dust and filth in here, why don’t you get started now?”
“Si, signore,” said Jama. He stood waiting for an instruction, while Lorenzo carried on smoking his pipe.
“Well?” laughed Maggiore Leon.
“What do you want me to do, signore? And signore… how much will you give me?”
“Good question. Let’s start you on five liras a week. You are only a small thing, I don’t expect to get much work out of you.”
Jama’s heart fell. Five liras! It wasn’t worth leaving the café for, and at least he got fed there, but Maggiore Leon seemed to be an important man, and in a place like Omhajer proximity to importance mattered a great deal.
“Start by sweeping the floor, and then I’ll find something else for you,” continued the maggiore. So you’re not so busy after all, thought Jama, his suspicion rising.
Lorenzo watched Jama’s clumsy sweeping, the broom slipping from his grip. Lorenzo laughed and Jama looked questioningly at him.
“Don’t worry, Jama, I just remembered something,” said Lorenzo, still laughing. If only his friends could see him now, sweating in a uniform, watching a native boy cleaning up for him. He found everything amusing now, Fascism, communism, anarchism, he could only trust in the patently idiotic. The blackshirts marching in front of his balcony in Rome, deliriously howling for an Italian Abyssinia, senile housewives rushing into the street to hand over their wedding rings to pay for Mussolini’s war. Demanding the civilization of a country they could not place on a map. He had joined the army late enough to miss most of the fighting but early enough to benefit from the generous officers’ allowances. To his delight he had also found a few Abyssinian girls to enjoy before the others had infected them with unpleasant diseases, but Omhajer was still a hardship posting after the leisure of Libya — a dusty, impoverished town full of the dregs of the Italian army, and a battalion full of ex-prisoners, alcoholics, and lunatics, few of whom had even finished their elementary schooling. They hated Lorenzo’s books, glasses, rumored Jewishness, and bullied him the way only soldiers can their officers. Lorenzo intended to study anthropology back in Italy so took photographs of the local villagers and notes on their lifestyles and societies; he had learned a smattering of Somali from the askaris, and he had even been invited home for a meal by a well-to-do Sudanese merchant. The other officers were shocked and disgusted at this intimacy with the natives, and one had threatened to report his crimes against racial hygiene to the commander.
Lorenzo had been struck by Jama’s self-possession the day he had been thrown off the bus. Lorenzo sometimes observed Jama muttering to himself in the teahouse and saw him loitering around town late at night, and began to feel sympathy for him. He was always alone, his forehead screwed up in concentration, and he reminded Lorenzo of his own solitary childhood. When Lorenzo’s mother’s letters had first arrived, describing in her unsteady, spidery hand the murders and assaults on Jews in Germany that she read about in the Corriere della Sera, he had brushed aside her concerns, reminding her that she had trundled off to the synagogue the day Italy had invaded Abyssinia to sing the Fascist anthem “Giovinezza” with the other neighborhood crones. “Not in Italy, Mama,” had been his final word on the subject. Now that he had spent time with rough, country Italians, and heard their anti-Semitic jokes and rants, he grew more circumspect and advised his mother to get her savings out of the bank and prepare to leave for France. Soldiers idle in their barracks said incredible things. Even Lorenzo was startled to hear a soldier claim the most exhilarating experience he’d had in the army was firing into a civilian crowd in the Ethiopian highlands when villagers there had protested the massacre of monks at Debre Libanos. “Sir, I am finished. How much will I get as a soldier? Can I become a soldier for you instead?” asked Jama, leaning on the broom.
Maggiore Leon looked at Jama. “Why would you want to be a soldier? You’re so young, you haven’t even stopped growing yet.”
“Well, give me lots of macaroni and I will grow quickly,” argued Jama.
Maggiore Leon laughed. “With teeth as big as yours, I am sure you could get through a lot of macaroni, but no, Jama, you have to be fifteen to sign up and then they treat you like dirt anyway, don’t bother yourself with soldiering. Here, go buy me some cigarettes, you can keep the change.”
Jama went to the Sudanese tobacconist and bought the cheapest cigarettes on offer. When he returned to the office, Maggiore Leon had gone. Jama placed the cigarettes on the table and sat on a chair against the wall to wait. The sun rose to its zenith and flies buzzed lazily in the heat. Jama scratched his mosquito bites and paced the room, driven to madness by the buzzing and the boredom. At last he left the office to search for the maggiore.
Maggiore Leon and the other officers were sitting around in the teahouse, Melottis in hand. “Ah, Jama, I thought you would find me. Do you have the cigarettes on you?”
Jama shook his head and scratched violently.
“Go and collect them for me, then go home. I am not going back in this afternoon. The mosquitoes are vicious here, they’ll eat you alive. When you get to the office, open the desk drawer, there is balm for your bites that you can take.”
“Si, signore,” said Jama.
Back in the office, Jama opened the drawer. It was full of scrunched-up papers, forms, letters, and a small pile of black-and-white photographs. Jama checked the door and pulled out the photographs. They were mainly head and profile shots of local Bilen peasants. There was a picture of a Takaruri man holding up the skin of a baby crocodile, and one of a Sudanese merchant smiling, his hands held out over his goods. The last picture was of a teenage Bilen girl, topless, her arms wrapped around her waist, her expression hidden by ornate gold chains that draped down her forehead and from nose to ear. Jama’s eyes scanned the incredible image. He had only ever seen his mother naked, and this girl looked like a mythical creature, unearthly, he could not tell where or when the photo had been taken.
“Sta’frullah, God forgive us,” he said under his breath. He felt his hands burn as he held it, so he stuffed the photo with the others back into the drawer. Jama retrieved the twisted tube of balm and put the cigarettes in the waistband of his sarong. These Italians were becoming more and more perverse to him, he felt that they would corrupt his soul, no wonder his father, God have mercy on him, had fled them. He thumped the cigarette packet on the table and stomped off as Maggiore Leon shouted, “See you tomorrow,” at his back.
Jama slept in whichever tent had spare ground, not that he managed to sleep much. Millions of mosquitoes congregated in the camp, moving in battalions from body to body while they innocently slept. Jama seemed the only one driven to distraction by them. He constantly shifted around, rubbed his legs together, scratched his bites, and slapped his skin, irritating the men whose dreams he punctured. He used the Italian’s medicine but it just seemed to attract the beasts.
“Allah, you look like something pulled from the earth, what happened to you?” said Jibreel.
“What do you think happened?”
Jibreel felt guilty about Jama, the boy’s soul seemed dimmed. “I’ll get you some aloe,” he offered. “Why don’t you rest for a while?”
The aloe soothed his skin but Jama felt like something evil had entered him, as if a jinn were pounding his head with a club, alternately roasting him on a spit and plunging him into ice-cold water. He shivered and sweated, sweated and shivered until his mat felt like a bucket of water had been sluiced over it. Jibreel watched over him and Jama heard his muffled voice through the pounding in his skull but couldn’t even turn his eyes toward him.