Jama looked down at his palm. The skin was churned up like a freshly dug field, he could see the meat of his hand and the sight made him retch.
“Filthy brat! Get some sand and clean that up.” Jama staggered out. A Somali clansman stopped him in the street and washed his cut and wrapped a clean cloth around it. Jama was sobbing in pain and the clansmen tried to calm him.
“Ilaahey ha ku barakeeyo, God bless you, he will stop you hitting the ground, he will keep your head up,” chanted the clansman. “Go right back inside, Jama, and show him that you are a man. We will get our time, that stupid man doesn’t realize how vindictive we Somalis are.” He smiled and held Jama loosely against him.
“Go now, life is long.”
Jama returned to the office with a scoop of sand and threw it carelessly over the curdling vomit. He refused to make eye contact but picked up the whisk with his good hand. He felt proud and brave as he endured the stinging in his hand, he kept his chin up like a soldier.
It is hard to avenge yourself on someone you fear when everything about them, their height, power, possessions, confidence, imposes a sense of your own inferiority. Even a child’s imagination shrinks in the presence of terror. Jama returned every day to be bullied and shamed, despite the humming sickness in his bones he was like a moth drawn to the harsh light of the Italian’s power. Every day askaris were brought in, and Jama would watch over Silvio’s shoulder as he sentenced them to hanging or flogging or some original torture that he had devised. The Somalis, Eritreans, and Arabs were like dumb little children in front of him. Jama studied the way the Italian operated; he learned that neither physical ugliness nor moral weakness mattered in the world of men. A man was respected if other men feared him, and the Italian had somehow cracked the mystery of manufacturing fear in people. He was unpredictable and uninterested in the camaraderie of his peers, he reminded Jama of a wild boar, always on the verge of attack. There had been boys like that in Aden and they were the most dangerous, drowning smaller children while appearing to play or dropping rocks onto their sleeping heads. There were times when the Italian would try to show his gentility and he would put elegant music on the gramophone as he wrote letters home. With the floating up and down of the swaying music, he would close his eyes and a greasy smile would spread across his face like animal fat over a griddle. He never said please or thank you like the dead Italian had done but he would moderate the usual harshness in his voice while the music played, though soon after he would return to his usual brutality with a slap or thrown pen. Jama invented new insults silently in his head that made him smile patronizingly at the Italian. “Son of a thousand donkeys”; “Son of your sister and grandfather”; “Dirty-bottomed infidel”; “Pig-eating pig”; “Molester of goats and chickens.” But Jama also began to unconsciously emulate Silvio. He stood up straight and stuck his nose in the air, he avoided eye contact, he slicked his hair down with water, swearwords began to pepper his speech.
Today, Silvio was excited and energetic; he had made Jama polish his shoes until Jama could see the hairs in his nose clearly in the leather. The commanders had visited Omhajer and expressed their satisfaction with Silvio’s work. The office was full of Italians playing cards and drinking. One of them had found the maggiore’s camera somewhere and was trying to operate it, fumbling around with its delicate mechanisms. The flash popped like a slice of lightning in the man’s eyes and he threw it back on the table. Jama’s boss picked it up and began to arrange the drunk men in rows for photographs. He demanded someone take portraits of him alone, and he posed with his chin jutting out like Mussolini. He ordered askaris in from outside and with great happiness told them to hold him up in the air; four emaciated Eritreans and a Somali maneuvered him onto their shoulders and grimaced under his weight.
“Take a picture quickly, take it!” shouted the Italian. The askaris looked down as their shame was memorialized. The Italian’s buttocks reeked of too much rich food, and his monstrous thighs felt like pythons around their necks. The other Italians applauded and wolf whistled at him, and as soon as he came down, they all wanted to take a similar photograph to send to their brothers, fathers, wives.
Jama staggered to work the next day, malaria pounding at his head and his legs like weights beneath him. He looked up at the hazy sky; he had to approximate the time from the sun and the events around him. He did not understand the Italian’s insistence on arriving at a particular minute, he thought it stupid of the white man to place so much importance on portioning up time into meaningless fragments rather than following the fluid movement of the sun as rational people did. He hurried as fast as he could and saw the Italian waiting at the entrance of the tent, his hands on his hips, his whip curled up in his fist. Jama turned to run away but his legs were too slow, Silvio grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him off.
Jama called out, “Help me! Help me!” to the Somali askaris but they stood in fearful silence. Jama was brought to a wooden pen where chickens had been kept. It was empty now apart from floating down feathers and streaks of chicken shit. The Italian stopped and kicked Jama ferociously into the pen.
“How many chances do I have to give you? You should all be wiped out, you good-for-nothings. Stay there or I’ll hunt you down and whip that black skin of yours clean off.”
Jama clutched at his side, fearing his ribs had been broken; he cried out in his mother tongue, “To hell with you! You miserable sister-fucking pig,” but the Italian strode away, not deigning to turn his head.
Jama studied the jagged wound on his palm and felt his bruised ribs and demanded that God kill his offender. The clouds dissolved as the sun rose higher and higher. Jama waited to be let out but no one came for him, he stared longingly at the low gate but was too afraid to let himself out. Shooting pains ran through his body when he tried to lie down. An Eritrean askari he did not know gave him a sip of water, hurrying away before anyone could chastise him. The pain in his side, the scalding sun overhead, the twisting hunger in his gut wrenched out pitiful, hesitant tears. He wanted his mother badly, to salve his wounds and hold him to her breast; she would have fought anyone for him, even the Italian, but without her Jama was a nobody. He felt old and hopeless. If his life ended here in this animal pen there would be no prayers, no tears, nothing to mark his life as being worth more than that of a chicken. His stars had failed him and if his mother was still watching from heaven she could feel nothing but shame. Jama watched a figure approach the pen; it was the crocodile catcher with a small tortoise wriggling in his hands.
“What are you doing in here, boy?” asked the crocodile catcher incredulously.
“That swine put me in here,” replied Jama, gesturing toward the tent with his chin. “Where are you taking that tortoise?” he asked back.
“I thought I would take these madmen at their word. I found this little tortoise in my plot eating my tomatoes, so considering we don’t own anything anymore, I thought I would give it to them to deal with,” and with that the crocodile man spat out a wad of tobacco and marched over to the tent.
The crocodile catcher returned with two askaris and they were all laughing uproariously. The Italian had charged the tortoise with theft and given it a seven-day custodial sentence. Jama was to be its cellmate and guard. They placed the tortoise in the pen more gently than Jama had been thrown in, and the crocodile catcher gave Jama a handful of roasted peanuts from his deep pockets.