Phoenix Ashes
By Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
Translated from the Italian by Clara Hillis
Scarlette would go to sea. She was a towering and statuesque person, with steadfast legs, wearing tall boots and a black raincoat. Even during the war, after we evacuated, when the estuary would just erupt fountains of sulfur. Steaming geysers would spray into the sky, and she would go to sea. Even when the city caught all ablaze and was devoured by a white heat. Ashes everywhere: an opaque veil against the sun covered the trees, the houses, and every single rowboat.
She would set off into the dark with her hands tight on the oars, leaving behind her a frothy wake that gurgled with foam. She would look like she was straddling a steed, a magical steed of webbed hooves and a whale’s tail. In the dark, her oil lamp flickered intermittently. When she pulled the boat ashore, a fine, opalescent dust powdered the air, transforming the sun into a great, clouded moon. Sometimes, she would haul the catch onto land: the nets were heavy, and the lines would lacerate her hands.
Then there were mornings when I would accompany her to the beach: submerged to our waists, we would hunt cockles and clams with the rake, or gray shrimp between the rocks. Or we would go to the marsh for eels: the marsh was dry, but a small creek ran through it, and it was on this bank that we would mount our rod. The eel would grasp frenzied onto the roots, so slimy and slippery that it might escape. It would keep writhing right there in the skillet, an awful sight among the garlic and herbs. And yet my passion was the eel larvae, the silvery threads like fluorescent hairs that we would catch in a sieve. Sometimes, I would bring them home all clumped together in a bucket, which with some water and a little salt, was like it had an estuary inside it.
Scarlette would go to sea, unlike any other woman from these parts. The women repaired nets, they harvested mussels in cold water and limpets for lures, they cleaned the lines, they sold fresh fish on the dock, or they preserved it in salt. But go to sea, no, that only the men were permitted to do. The women labored in the canneries, at the time a seasonal trade, when the sea brims with sardines.
The sirens would sound to announce the arrival of the boats, and the women would head to work, accompanied by the clatter of their clogs, their arms golden brown and bare. They would arrange the sardines in the sun, sprinkling them immediately with salt, beheading them in one motion, stripping them of their insides. Rinsing them first in saltwater, then in fresh, then drying them out in the breeze, they would fry them for a few minutes in red copper pots. Others would then can them at long tables made of wood and zinc, with a drizzle of fresh oil.
There had been a time when Scarlette would trawl for sardines. With a crew of five men, aboard the vessel that she herself would helm. Fishermen are a superstitious sort and believe in fate, they’ll sew silver into their sweaters, they won’t burn fishbones, they’ll avoid mentioning pigs and rabbits on board. Scarlette’s husband was convinced that she brought good luck, and he wanted her always by his side, like a charm. Her sister, Jeanne, would wait for her at the dock with the other women, her hands spread on her apron, and they all half-envied her, half-idolized her. But this was all before the war, before the occupation, before the enemies had seized their boat. Unwilling to yield, Scarlette’s husband had run off and joined the resistance. And, though his abandonment pained her, Scarlette had not yielded either: scouring around, she’d encountered the carcass of an old sailboat, and working with tar and tow, she’d dismantled it piecemeal, hull and cabin, sideboard and frame, splitting and prying, until finally she had her fine skiff. It was an old spinner who had given her her net, or rather, she bought it on credit – as it was a time of famine, repaying him in fish.
Scarlette was the daughter of an old communist fisherman, an old man darkened by sun and imposing in figure, with a yellowish oval of mane and beard. His huge, calloused hands were covered in luminous down like a dusting of gold. Many years ago, he had lost his wife and his tender to unkind time and fortune: his wife to tubercular disease, his tender in an awful storm. He alone survived with two children, and to be near them, he took up work as a maritime pilot in the great shipyards. On the bridge of command, he’d climb across the rope ladder, an expert of depths and tides. But fishing was his passion, and on his days off, he would set out into the open sea with his small daughter beside him. It was from him that Scarlette learned how to steer a boat, to maneuver the helm, to raise the sails, to divine where there were fish. She would face the agitated, swollen sea with her back stiff, the bluish waves turning to foam. She challenged even the swirling marine vortices that spiraled in sprays. And because of this, her older sister had taken on a kind of resentful admiration toward her, almost as if she too longed for the destiny of a fisherwoman.
Jeanne at times would ask my help shelling shrimp: “Your mother, always going to sea,” she would never tire of repeating. “Even when she was pregnant, she would still go,” she would mutter scoldingly, as if to point out that there was just as much work to be done on land.
In fact, there were rumors that Scarlette hadn’t made it home to give birth to me, but that she brought me into the world on the beach, having just disembarked. They said she would keep a kind of sack at sea, which she would hang like a cradle, fastened to two fishing lines, nursing me occasionally. I would stay in the sack, and she would rock me beside her, lurched by the waves.
My parents had had a dizzying love for one another, one of those inextricable, absolute loves that could sink anything, or perhaps that was merely what Scarlette had convinced herself. That’s why, when the enemy seized their boat, it had shocked her, his sudden decision to flee.
“What are you going to do about the resistance, if we stay behind?” she had asked her husband, her pupils like two darts, “We have only ever battled bad weather and misfortune.” I stood there, soot in my eyes, pretending to pull a crab from a hole. Hers was not truly a question, though, but more like she knew the reason and could not fathom it.
“I’m going to fight for our freedom,” he had responded, “and for our land. We are not just the sea, you know.”
He had gone willfully, without even turning to look back, and it was then that my mother had suffered the betrayal of abandonment: her husband had wed to another cause, at her expense. Even if there were still functional tenders and fishermen, it seemed she had to settle for repairing a wrecked boat, for those men, without my father’s superstitious insistence, would never accept a woman on board. I never saw her cry; to me she was made of marble, a caryatid with blue eyes.
And I don’t know if everything she put into the oars was for survival or for revenge, as we were in wartime, and food was scarce. Jeanne would trade sole and sprat for a bit of bread and potatoes. Everything we had, we scrimped.
Returning from fishing, Scarlette would wash away the sea from her raincoat and boots, and she would rinse herself with lukewarm water, seated in front of me with her back turned to the bed. She would release her plaits that were shielded by a lace handkerchief, and they would tumble heavy to the ground, longer than her stool, longer than her own back. She would loosen them gracefully, her fingers scored by the nets, and a cascade of honey would spill onto the floor. She always wore them shaped like a ciambella at her nape, and so it was only in the confines of our bedroom that it was permitted to admire them.
At sunset she would set back out, and the color of the sea would seem to match that of the sky. The violet would vanish, tinted by the first shadows of night, and then there would remain only a red tinged expanse, like sunburnt skin.
The moon would whiten in the light of the dying day, and I would picture my mother as a fairy, one of those night fairies who, her body sprinkled in magic oil, flies off naked and alights on a stolen ship. She’d fly far away, to pluck my father from the resistance and bring him back. Or perhaps Scarlette was a magical creature like a siren: she would wait for him on the rocks, combing her hair, waiting to lead him to her golden palace underwater, surrounded by luscious gardens.
My mother would always tell me that there was once a fisherman who was born a mortal, and who always went to sea, since that was his trade. Until one day, casting his rippling net over a flowering terrain, he noticed that the fish were coming to life after chewing on green and garnet leaves. They say the plant was called Dogtooth; when he tried chewing them himself, they turned him immortal, and his feet transformed into flippers and his legs into a tail. Thus, the pointed, bulbous plant condemned him to remain in the sea eternally. Scarlette would pick the pink, waxy Dogtooth flowers whenever she would gather herbs: on the cliffside, she would gather chicory and nettle, to show her sister that she wasn’t above laboring on land. In my daydreams, she persuaded me that this is why she regretted not thinking of Dogtooth before: perhaps she could have offered it to my father, tethering him forever to the estuary and to the sea.
After her husband’s abandonment, Scarlette behaved as though she felt one half her heart dead, the other half alive. The twisted, dizzying pain yearned to leave her body, and she repressed it inside her, prideful. For some time, wallowing in delusion, she hoped for his contrite, repentant return. She would never ask anyone about the resistance, almost such that its mere mention would reopen her wounds. Then nothing remained but her cold heart, like extinguished lava. The war ended, prisoners and warriors little by little began to return, and it was as if she knew, though she wished she didn’t. We returned to the city as well, lodging precariously in a barrack after living three years as evacuees, and we found the city had died a violent death. Skeletons of houses emerged in the haze, and all around blew a funereal stench of charred ashes. Only the submarine base built by the enemies remained standing, almost in mockery, untroubled and wretched. These dangerous remains had been blown up, and from the heaps of rubble, trails of smoke arose against the light, as if they were cooking from below at a low flame. Everyone was unloading and exhuming, trying to rebuild. At times it would rain on the overflowing carts as though the sky’s flood gates had opened, and thus the sky and sea became a uniform concoction, black with cement and lime. They filled the marsh with debris, keeping only what was necessary: brick and zinc, radiators and slate, lead, valves, and wood. The occupation hadn’t cared about what had been ours: even the enormous bronze eagle bearing an armed soldier with his sword on his back had ended up in the metal forges. Many years before, it had been there at the feet of that statue that my mother had taught me to swim. I also knew that Jeanne had been forced to fuse the metals to make firearms. She would say that she had done it for the pay, while Scarlette insisted on fishing. But now, the shipyards had reopened their doors six days out of seven, and the workers would bring their midday meal, in metal, double-stacked lunch tins. A swarm of bikes spilled between the narrow, shattered alleys, in a bustle of carpenters, solderers, and blacksmiths.
I returned to a makeshift school in the barracks, which were painted blue and pale yellow. Everywhere was a construction site, and in the fog, you could make out small orange lights that grew gradually in number. For school, Jeanne bought smart clothes for her children and me; our shoes and jackets were new, but everything else had been scavenged. We changed our underthings seldom, and our socks only if they were wet. Some of our classmates donned long pants, fine sweaters and shoes, while my cousins wore breeches even in winter. We ate fish, but very little, and meat hardly ever, so our meals were stews of potatoes and carrots, and sugar candy was a rare treat. Jeanne sometimes would prepare a dessert of bran and rice with a bit of rum. Essentially, we were slowly restoring ourselves, and yet it was almost as though we were suspended, waiting for the squall, when the sky would blister with electric heat waves and reflect onto the burning black sea.
Then finally one Sunday a man appeared. It was one of those holidays where we children would go to the beach. Hopping onto our thrashed bicycles, we would chase emerald lizards through the dunes, occasionally gathering yellow shells in the sand. Between the maritime pines, we would play-fight with sticks, and when allowed, we would buy caramel apples at the stalls. Anyway, he appeared, and I was at the shoreline, sculpting a bird out of sand. I saw him; it was like he was made of tar, his presence incorporeal and exquisite, as if he was a spirit.
Or maybe I was just getting myself worked up, on account of a dream that I’d remembered when I awoke, a mysterious and terrorizing dream, where on a flat and deserted sea, a ship appeared, flying the flag of death. From the flagpole at the bow hung not only the yellow cloth said to be raised by ships stricken by plague, but also a black one with a skull and crossbones on the front. And, scanning the decks, promenades, and ladders, you could see that enormous, rusted, decaying ship was steered by none other than a crew of skeletons.
That is why the sudden apparition of a man above me, as I was smoothing down wings of sand, seemed uncanny. He gleamed black and, from my place on the ground, his lean and slender figure appeared elongated: every part of him, his nose, his cheeks, his chest, his palms, and his fingers, seemed stretched with care, or with great elegance.
“I’m looking for the fisherwoman,” he said, and thus introducing himself, he offered me a small, colorful pile of feathers, blue-black, iridescent red, dusty rose, olive yellow, adding, “But these are for you, Sefora,” and his eyes were like candle lights through the black outline of his lashes. Hearing him pronounce my name, I was taken by a dreadful foreboding, and I made to flee, afraid. But I was too curious, such that I turned back immediately, this time finding him more human.
“They’re the ones who told me,” he tried to reassure me, pointing a long arm toward my friends, who were playing at flinging stones into the sea not far away.
“Then they’d have also told you that the fisherwoman is my mother,” I replied a bit arrogantly, regaining confidence. Meanwhile, rings formed in the water from the cast pebbles, rings which widened until they disappeared.
I made broad motions with my arms to make it clear to the others that I was taking off, and I asked the stranger, “So who are you?”
“I have a message for her.” He was wearing brown pants and a beret, and a red neckerchief at his collar. “She probably already knows I’m in town. I sort of stick out around here.”
I stuck the pile of feathers in my t-shirt and asked him, “Can you walk fast?” whirring around him with my bicycle.
“I’ll follow you,” he replied simply. And he followed me between the oaks and locusts, and I rode to and fro so as not to lose him.
When we arrived, my mother was sitting on the doorstep: she had two buckets of ocean water and piles of mussels between her legs. For a moment she seemed to lift her gaze and hint at a greeting, but then she continued her task indifferently, like nothing had happened. She took the shells between her fingers in order to pass over them with the back of a blade, she rubbed them forcefully with a scourer, and, after bluntly tearing the beard from the valves, she plunged them shiny and smooth into salt water. Through the half-open door, you could see the chairs upside down on the table, rags and shoes propped in the corner, as if she had suddenly interrupted her cleaning, caught up in an urgent matter. I wasn’t able to understand what that urgent matter could ever be; but perhaps the man was right, and my mother was expecting him imminently, her visitor. The light of the late morning entered the room and sliced through it in a straight line of fine, silvery dust.
Scarlette breathed in the smoke of the glowing charcoal, and for an instant she cast her eyes about the barrack behind her, then she returned with a scowl to what was in front of her, staring right through us. I stood motionless before her, and in that moment, I would have given anything at all to hear her say something. But I too was at a loss for words, and I felt a tearful lump growing in my throat, and it felt as if this lump didn’t want to release but instead clogged my ears and lips. And I don’t know if it was the vision of that spirit made of tar that cut off my speech, or if I simply understood that words were no longer needed, now that I’d seen him.
I lifted my eyelids seeking his eyes, and he met my gaze, squeezing my shoulder with his hand. Then, as though she had awoken with a start, Scarlette finally seemed to see us, and after rinsing the last mussel, she motioned for us to follow her inside. She took the chairs off the table and set out cups along with an ice-cold bottle of cider. Then, as if it were nothing, and she was attending to a regular and respected guest – not a stranger –she turned her back and began cooking.
First, she turned the stove to a high flame, then she began frying shallots, sautéing them in cider and cream. When the sauce had thickened just so, she added broth from the cooked mussels and plated them on dishes looking like floating aquatic flowers. She moved at a frustratingly unhurried pace, and it was as though the room was filled with the sea, all three of us were miraculously breathing underwater. About an eternity had passed when the man finally decided to speak.
“My name is Nuur,” he said, reeling off the words, “and your husband was my friend.”
He inhaled deeply, and then, with his long, elegant, fingers, he offered her a scrap of cerulean cloth. Scarlette unfurled it carefully, taking her time. She held it in her palm almost as though to warm it up, until we saw clearly that the scrap of cerulean cloth safeguarded an engraved spiral ring. It was my father’s wedding band.
The silence returned, and it seemed like Scarlette felt a rising of all the bile she’d swallowed over the years, which now violently choked her with acrid, inescapable bitterness. The man now appeared absent from his body, as though he had let his spirit hover in the air, and I listened to him, my senses lucid and sharpened. And, from what I could read of his thoughts, I understood my father must have sent him, as a way of telling us that he’d come to his senses, that he’d finally been freed of his obsession with the resistance. But Nuur had too much of a tangle inside him to give voice to these thoughts, he needed time. He sipped his soup with caution, and at every bit of cracker and mussel, his shoulder blades seemed protrude more and more over his ribcage. One mouthful was enough to fill his stomach, and it was then that we both understood that he must have come from hunger even blacker than ours. For motives tacitly understood, my mother made up a bed for him in the corner of the parlor, a simple straw bed with worn blankets. And I don’t know if the reason he decided to stay, at least temporarily, was out of a token of friendship or a sense of guilt, as anyhow we were in a time of rationing, and we were always short on laborers.
Everything we had, we shared. We lived in hardship. The barracks were narrow and uncomfortable, and they had constructed communal baths in the fields, where you could only shower on Saturdays, encircled by steam as you waited your turn. You had to do laundry in the kitchen sink, except for in the working-class neighborhood, where certain American philanthropists had built a washing-machine station, which was entrusted to a salaried clerk. At first, the women were dubious, fearing ruined blouses, lost buttons, torn underwear. They had to organize a demonstration of the machines to win over the women’s skepticism, and they eventually persuaded them that laborers and washing machines did the same job.
Nuur was a carpenter, and as such he found work right away at the shipyards. There, he cleaned fishbones from an old table with sandpaper, leveling and buffing it until smooth, and thus he came by a good bit of work. He patiently recovered the tools of the trade — hammers, planers, hacksaws, pincers, screwdrivers — and he busied himself with nails, pegs, and glue, repairing and rebuilding furniture, doors, and windows, for in all the devastation, very little had been left standing. Behind our barrack, he decided to raise a small garden, teaching me to sow onions, potatoes, pumpkins, and savoy, and it soon became clear that he was a man of the earth, and not of the sea, like we were. To my joy and delight, he also built a chicken coop, where I would collect eggs in the morning. I began to suspect that all his bustling about night and day helped him keep his thoughts at bay, as if his words, which threatened to come to the surface, had the power to incinerate his breath. It was as though the truth, with its sour, sugary redolence, would boil over the edge, eager to reveal itself.
Slowly, the past began to emerge, Nuur’s past before the war, before he even became a carpenter and later a rifleman. His village was blessed by fresh, bountiful water, he told me, because in times long ago, a small bird had uncovered a spring by unstopping it with its beak, and from this fount births a stream that cascades down from a chalky-white wall in the dense surrounding greenery. Rows of palm trees lined the stream, and from their wood people carved the central beams of their houses. The soil was so soft that you could dig wells with your hands, wells from which water would immediately gush to the surface to irrigate the nearby fields: fields of sorghum and lentils, papaya, mangoes and limes, and even vineyards. The wells would appear for anyone, and their briny water would harden and brighten the enamels of the people’s teeth. The village was a hub for caravans headed straight toward the ocean and the ports: nomads would sell goats and camels, or skins, butter, and myrrh, in exchange for sugar, dates, and cloth. They also grew cotton, which they wove into pristine, stately clothing. And, to bring about the harvest, they would celebrate a yearly festival where the men would fight each other with canes, to fertilize the terrain with their own blood.
At the center of the village grew an enormous sycamore, with foliage ample enough to host some hundred peregrine falcons in its shade. The peregrines would congregate to honor the holy man whom Nuur descended from, a saint with incantatory powers over the red-beaked sparrows. He explained to me that these small migratory birds with gray bodies, black faces, and scarlet (though occasionally gold) beaks, would in fact descend in hordes upon the harvest, darkening the sun like locusts. But the saint knew how to charm them, reciting sacred verses until the birds swarmed around him like bees around honey.
Just like his ancestor, the carpenter also had loved birds since he was a child. With a tiny saw, he had built two wooden niches into the windowsill, where every day he would place a small dish of fresh water and a basket of seeds and earthworms. Strawberry finches would come pay him a visit, darting between the high grass and playfully dunking themselves in the water to drink or bathe. And, every so often, small birds of paradise would also come, with their long, jet-black tails. Even oxpeckers would sometimes come greet him, abandoning their preferred post on the spines of buffalos and hippopotami. And, in the house’s courtyard, his mother had allowed him to keep two guinea fowl that scratched about with their heads held high and their slate-gray feathers speckled with white. Among the thickets of Euphorbia, along the dark, foggy strip of the stream, making his way through the twisted vines, it wasn’t uncommon for him to catch sight of an ibis, its violet wings iridescent and its beak sharp and curved like the blade of a scimitar, intent on rooting out snails and lizards.
He grew in both age and skill, and soon he was able to build an aviary, where he raised homing pigeons, which he taught to travel long distances and find their way back. Neither of his parents seemed concerned about his passion, for he was bursting more and more with good health and joy, and deep down they believed that the incantatory power of their ancestor was at the root of his enthusiasm. Until one day, a white man arrived at the farm, and having barely even introduced himself, demanded he be brought an egg. His father retrieved an egg, and as he offered it to him, the white man flung a few coins at him in contempt. Nuur went to pick them up, but his father stopped him curtly, blocking them from him.
“The man came to ask for an egg,” he told him, “And it was arrogance, his own arrogance, to throw money in such a way. This is colonialism!”
He used the word, and his son did not understand, though he mentally continued to repeat it to himself. “This colonialism must truly be evil,” he thought, “For us to refuse money.”
Some time passed, and the white man returned, this time accompanied by his son. He appeared in front of the courtyard and pretended to look at the aviary. A lugubrious premonition seized Nuur’s thoughts, like a catastrophe fast approaching, a premonition fatal and funereal. Two pigeons took flight into the sky, circling each other in courtship: a violet mist condensed the sunlight in an ill omen. The white man shouldered a gun, took aim, and shot the two pigeons dead.
“There,” he said to his son, returning the weapon to his back. “At least I’ve taken out two pigeons today. What weak consolation, after an unlucky day of hunting.” And they left, without another word. The carpenter, who at the time was only a teenager, grew sick with a convulsive fever, and it was only his mother’s intervention that saved him. She prepared a brazier in a hut, where she set water to boil and wood to burn. The young boy sweat copiously, and his breath heaved, until all the evil had withdrawn from him, leaving him alone and crestfallen with his heart shattered in pieces.
After this experience, Nuur absorbed more and more awareness of this thing his father had called colonialism, as if it were an obscenity, and that sickly awareness seared into his chest in flashes of heat. With time, he grew to know it all the better, that troublesome, violent word, and inevitably, this knowledge molded his heart in ways gnarled and unforeseeable: his heart became metal in a forge, where the bellows pump and blast air.
The years passed, and one fine day, when he was nearly twenty years old, the white men came in camions, demanding men for recruitment. Weren’t they warring people, fierce and savage by nature, who owed gratitude to their magnanimous, civilized homeland? It was their moment to show their ardent loyalty to the metropolis, to fight to victory or to death. Those who refused to leave with them were coerced into forced labor, or worse, watched their entire families arrested. The young men were ordered to strip nude on the veranda and subjected to examination, like cattle. Their mouths were inspected, their genitals and their anuses, their backs and their lungs. Once organized into garrisons for training, they received their meager meal ration of rice and beans, and they slept on wicker mats. They wore a khaki uniform with a belt and fez the color of rubies. They left to fight a war that was not theirs, on large vessels convoyed by destroyer ships who shielded them from torpedoes. And this was how Nuur crossed a sea that he’d never seen, the ship’s flat keel oscillating in the wind, and landed at last on our coast.
Of all Nuur’s impressions of war, he had a distinct, immediate experience upon arriving at the port, when a nearby ship was torpedoed on one side and at once began to founder, the bow vertical as it went under. The sea grew oily with fuel, and it was then that Nuur saw for the first time, with horrible helplessness, men drowning right in front of him, like ants swallowed up by the deep.
Interminable, apocalyptic days in the trenches followed; the cannons blazed like mouths of fire, and the glare was so intense it transformed night into day in a havoc of bombs. To protect themselves from the hailstorm of grenades, they prepared sacks of sand and tree branches to make a roof over the ditch. The trench was slightly flooded due to the stream that ran down from the gorge, and the rifleman and his partner would take turns dozing off, seated on a flat canister. On certain evenings, they would be forced to march in a row, under a deafening deflagration of torpedoes. The grenades would strike at random, catapulting the bodies of soldiers into the grasses that would catch fire along with their clothes, emitting the deathly odor of a funeral pyre. Often there was nothing to be done, and they had to press on with mute resignation.
This was the inferno they lived in, an inferno of random, inhuman violence.
There was the time, for example, that they were targeted by a sniper, who hit one of Nuur’s partners in the jaw, killed two soldiers, and gravely wounded a fourth in the neck. They decided to wield the flag of the Red Cross, which was used for transporting wounded comrades during the ceasefire. And it troubled Nuur, the crossfire halted by the simple wave of a flag, almost as if it were not a carnage, but a simple soccer match.
Then the worst happened. The invaders began to advance with tanks from the bridgehead, and by some collective phantasm, everyone hallucinated that the enemy already stood before them. Prisoners fell, having fought furiously through the crackling flames: the enemy, steeped in vicious propaganda, separated the white soldiers from the black ones, some of whom were assassinated barbarically, struck by a rapid fire of machine guns, or flattened by the squeaking of tanks.
Nuur recounted the war like it was a phenomenon against nature: his eyes blazed white like stoked carbon, and Scarlette sat listening with her head slightly inclined, as though she wished to keep a sharp lookout in order to better read his thoughts. He couldn’t give us a sense of how much time he’d spent in the detention camp, but rather he said that by either good fortune or a miracle, he was given his chance; taking advantage of the drunk guards, he managed to escape through the orchards and up toward the mountains, through impassable, forested patches, following the paths of woodcutters that wound through the trees. He endured cold and hunger for weeks, sustaining himself on woodland berries and wild strawberries, and seeking shelter in the depths of the forest, like a wounded fawn. Every now and then, having overcome his fear of being unwelcome or turned in, he would knock on the door of solitary farmhouses, and it was always the penniless farmers who were the most generous: they gave him what they could, black bread, milk, a bit of cheese and eggs, if there were any left. At times they’d also offer him a bed so he could regain his strength, and they’d have hosted him even longer had they not feared retaliation from the enemy — whole villages had been burned for much less than hiding a fugitive rifleman.
It was the farmers who showed him the way, for what Nuur sought breathlessly, his one hope for salvation, were the guerrilla warriors whom he knew were hidden in the brush to resist the invaders.
It happened that while he was seeking them, he was found. It was my father himself who found him, one night when he was combing the forest to recover abandoned weapons from runaway soldiers. It was said that those who had been able to escape would hurriedly shed their uniforms and guns after surrendering, to blend in with the civilians.
Scarlette was listening, and I saw her instantly blanch, as if the flame of the candle that illuminated her brow had been moved by a sudden breath of air. Her long blonde plaits cascaded heavy down her back, and from her opalescent face, her eyes gleamed like crystals, shimmering with their own dazzling light.
When my father found him, Nuur was lying there as though he’d sunken into the ground, his uniform heavy with rain and stained with blood and mire. My father discovered him by sticking his torch in his face, and he recognized him for what he was: a poor soldier far from home, folded over in hunger and exhaustion. But pierced by that beam of light, the rifleman couldn’t say right away if this was a benign spirit or a malevolent one.
“We know you were searching for us,” my father reassured him. “But we couldn’t trace you. We need men who know how to shoulder a gun.” He led him toward the clearing where they’d set up camp and presented him to his companions, but not everyone took well to having a Black man on the team.
He confessed this to us, and a tremble ran through him, then with emotion in his voice, he added, “But your husband, yes, he was my brother.”
The months passed, and my father and the rifleman’s friendship grew, and it was from him that the rifleman learned of his love for the fisherwoman and the daughter that he’d left behind with some remorse. For now that he’d met Nuur, he could no longer entirely justify his homeland as his cause: his homeland was the same one that had dominated and tortured his friend. Often their days wore on slowly into impotence between acts of sabotage and recovering weapons, and so they came to know one another deeply, as they anxiously awaited the military landing and liberation.
As the truth was uncovered bit by bit, the rifleman assumed a more and more fatal tone. My mother smoothed her plaits over her shoulders. It seemed like the night air circulated freely in our barrack, as if it were free of walls and opened right out onto the sea. Scarlette stood by, slender and tall as though made of stone, her head seemed to graze the ceiling, and the darkness was so absolute as to make you shiver. The rifleman startled, and we then understood that the moment of revelation had come. They had taken a captive, an enemy pilot, who’d been shot down while transporting medicine to the wounded. He had parachuted into the forest, and when they found him, he had the deflated, tired air of someone conscripted into war, whereas his dream had been only to fly. According to his story, he maintained that he’d deserted his troop to join the resistance, something that was difficult to prove, in those times of disillusionment. You could see that his rifle weighed on him, and Nuur couldn’t say if it was the man’s expression that convinced him, or perhaps his own atavistic passion for birds. The agony that overtook him, like death at the mouth of the soul, was a heart-wrenching and contagious agony, so when his companions plotted to shoot the pilot, both he and my father resolved to save his life. They guided him along the trails and cliffs, and they spent the night in a farmstead for a bit of rest. This was their fatal error, for they were discovered, not only by their comrades in hungry pursuit, but also by an enemy patrol. They were shot by both parties, the pilot was instantly killed, while the rifleman and my father were able to escape, fleeing into the woods. It wasn’t until later, when he thought that they’d both been saved from the crossfire, Nuur realized that his friend’s wounds had been deadly.
To conclude his story, he placed on the table a pouch of lavender, cinnamon, and myrrh, whispering: “These are phoenix ashes. The pilot gave them to me as a gift, an amulet, because he knew I loved birds. Now they belong to Sefora.” Then he got up to bid us farewell, and he added, “We’re celebrating a party in town next Saturday, I’ll accompany you both.”
The next day my mother did not go to sea, but to Jeanne’s barrack, who had an old Singer treadle sewing machine, and she sewed me a splendid velvet dress, adorning the hems with the small, colorful pile of feathers. It was winter on that Saturday, and a heavy, incessant drizzle was falling, so Nuur took an old umbrella, fixed a waterproof cloth around it with tacks, and invited us into the shelter of that strange, traveling cabin. Scarlette made her way in the dark with a swinging oil lamp, and I held my skirt a bit raised to avoid the splashes. This was how I arrived at the party: triumphant, my dress trimmed with feathers.
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a writer, an oral historian and performer, and a teacher, born in Verona to a Somali father and an Italian mother. Her novel Madre piccola(2007) was awarded a Vittorini Prize, and she is also the recipient of the Lingua Madre prize in 2006.
Clara Hillis is a writer, translator, and editor based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, The Oxonian Review, Longleaf Review, and The Santa Barbara Independent.