“What! You think there are eight days in a week?” Jama scoffed.
“No, I know exactly how many days there are in a week, but you need an extra girl for those special times when you’ve worn one out.”
“Dirty bastard. What about you, Ascaro Abdi, got any girlfriends?”
“No,” cut in Shidane. “He’s already had enough trouble. He made us leave Aden when he was caught with an Arab girl. I saw her with a baby just before we left, and guess what, even from far away I could see the light bouncing off that baby’s big forehead.”
“Ya salam!” Jama laughed. “What really made you leave Aden?”
Shidane and Abdi giggled. “We were caught stealing shoes from outside the mosque. We had new shoes every Friday! Sometimes we even sold the idiots back their shoes saying we had found them in an alley. It was working well until we stole the shoes of a detective, then we were put on the first ship back to the homeland.”
The Italian officers rode on horseback ahead, trying to hide their fear from their charges, but many of them kept ducking into bushes to ease their loosened bowels. When they finally reached the border, panic and jubilation took hold of the hundred askaris and they charged in all directions, searching for something to conquer. There was only desolation; deserted homes, burnt cooking pots, and the paraphernalia of refugees, forgotten shoes and sheets. The invaders passed along dirt tracks, their guns and artillery useless against the oppressive susurrations of cicadas. Just as Jama was about to fall asleep on his feet, he heard shooting, and clambered up a date palm to get a better look. With a pounding heart he saw two white-robed Sudanese policemen on horseback fleeing from the Italians. Their black stallions evaded the bullets and Jama could see puffs of dust where the bullets hit. Askaris fired into the air in excitement and it felt like a genuine battle was taking place rather than a routing of two sleeping policemen by a hundred soldiers. Italian officers chased one another to the saddles that the Sudanese policemen had abandoned in their haste, and held them aloft as if they had found the Ark of the Covenant. Everyone cheered and whistled. “We are part of a victorious army,” the Italians said. “Every man should be proud of what they have achieved here today.”
Shidane, Jama, and Abdi laughed deliriously at the sight of the Italians fighting over the busted old saddles, pushing and shoving one another for the glory of taking home a souvenir from the day they conquered the mighty British Empire. Eventually, some agreement was reached and the saddles were handed over to the askaris to carry back to Omhajer. Four askaris proudly carried the saddles on their shoulders and even Jama and Abdi reached over to touch the old leather for remembrance’s sake.
“We are the testicles of the Ferengis,” sang the askaris, but Shidane frowned at them. “We have thrown our balls away,” he grumbled.
Despite their victorious foray into Sudan, the war was not going well for the Italians. British Hurricanes made raids on Asmara and Gura, shooting to pieces fifty Italian aircraft before they could ever leave the ground and read Jama’s messages. Although the Italian army in East Africa outnumbered the British by four to one and Jama had yet to see the enemy, the Italians were fighting a losing battle. Agordat fell even though the Italians had inflicted heavy losses on the small contingent of Indian and Scottish troops. All it took was for a turbaned sepoy to get too close and yell “Raja Ram Chander Ki Jai,” and Italian officers would drop their guns and head for the hills, they had not come to Africa to die. Barentu was left to the British without so much as a fistfight while the generals in Rome and Asmara desperately tried to find a town for their last stand.
They chose Keren, a Muslim town of whitewashed buildings, camel merchants, and silversmiths; it was nestled like a medieval fort in the bosom of a severe mountain range, with only a small gorge for access. The Italians bombed this gorge with more energy and vitality than they had brought to any other activity in the war. They pulled up their imaginary drawbridge and awaited the Scots, Indians, French, Senegalese, Arabs, and Jews who made up the Allied effort against them. Jama and the signalers were called to Keren along with ninety thousand other askaris and were among the last to arrive, it having taken days of marching with blistered feet and nauseating lorry rides to get there.
On the fifteenth of March 1941, the battle began. Ten thousand shells an hour were fired by the British and Italian guns, and even a mile behind the front, Jama’s bones were rattled by explosions. Jama, Shidane, and Abdi trembled as they watched over the valley where Indian and Italian killed each other over African soil. “Ya salam!” exclaimed Shidane every time a British bomb hit the askaris. Everything became more serious: they were finally taught how to shoot, using cans as targets, and Shidane the Fearless, as he started to call himself, became the best shooter among them. The askaris were constantly scrutinized and observed. The British were said to be using northern Somalis as spies, so the Italians kept them away from the fighting while they still could. Trains regularly brought up supplies to the Italians, and Shidane used his quickly established friendships with Somali cooks to obtain delicacies such as chocolate, tinned chicken, tinned peaches, and his new addiction, condensed milk. His pack always rattled with tins of sweet, thick milk, and he charged askaris for the pleasure of a drop in their tea.
While 4th Company guarded a munitions store near town, caravans of refugees trundled past, some on camels, some on mules, and the poorest on foot, weighed down by their children, fleeing as their country was destroyed. Shidane’s enlistment pay was burning a hole in his pocket, so he frittered it away buying refreshing camel’s milk from the camel merchants. As the battle raged over the hills, Jama made binoculars of his hands and watched explosions that gave the mountains the appearance of erupting volcanoes. It seemed to him that the mountains would eventually crumble under the bombardment. Occasionally, 4th Company had to desert the munitions as the RAF flew ominously over, but the British planes sought out more substantial targets; they scored a perfect, deafening hit on a train bringing ammunition to the Italian front line. The train flew off the tracks as the mortars, grenades, and magazines blew up. The driver in the steam engine tried to race away from the burning carriages but was engulfed in a white-hot inferno. Jama watched the man struggling in the flames, he was a beating heart at the center of the fire, dancing and flailing, refusing to give his life up. It was the most courageous thing Jama had seen in this war.
The boys listened for the roar of the British airplanes, and waited impatiently for the next humiliation to be meted out against the Italians. On the one day it seemed that their signaling would be finally put to use, they looked up eagerly to the sky to see eight Italian planes in formation above them; but they were quickly attacked by three British Hurricanes. In the ensuing dogfight three of the Italian planes crashed one after the other into a valley and the other five limped away. It was so exciting that the Eritrean bulabasha pulled out his whip to quieten the boys. Jama was the first to become afraid of the bombers and began to tie twigs onto his head so the planes could not see him from above. Shidane and Abdi humored him, competitively adding to the foliage until they resembled walking bushes, their faces lost behind veils of leaves.
Every night the British would halt their bombardment for ten minutes to play caterwauling Italian opera on their loudspeakers followed by summaries of all the defeats the Italians had suffered that day. After the Italian-language segment, Eritreans and Somalis working for the British would take control of the microphone and translate the news, exhorting the askaris to desert, offering them rewards and medals if they did so. The askaris did not need much encouragement. Every night under the cover of darkness, thousands crept away, never to be seen again. All the Amhara disappeared when the British reported that Haile Selassie had returned from exile and Abyssinian patriots were pressing on to Addis Ababa. Ogadeni Somalis returned to their families and camels when leaflets were dropped on their heads, reporting that rebellion was brewing in Hararghe. Saturn and Mars had slid into conjunction, and the nomadic Somalis saw that a great defeat lay before the Italians and left before the stars punished them, too. That left a hodgepodge of Eritreans and young urban Somalis who used the leaflets to wipe their bottoms. From the ninety thousand askaris who had been present at the start of the battle for Keren, sixty thousand remained. The Italians tried to keep these obedient by shooting deserters or tying hands and feet behind backs and throwing insubordinate men into mountain gullies where jackals waited for them. The Italians also reprised one of their special forms of execution: they tied mutinous askaris, usually nomadic Somalis unused to taking orders, to the backs of lorries and accelerated along the rough road until there was nothing left on the end of the rope apart from a pair of manacled hands. One askari showed Jama and the boys a postcard he had bought from a hawker in Mogadishu. They squinted at the picture of the lorry, unable to see anything of interest. “Allah,” shouted Abdi, and he pointed to the shackled hands that hung off the back, piously cupped as if in prayer, but the wrists were shredded stumps, inscribing their curses in bloody script on the dusty road.