Don't Tell Me You're Afraid Read Online Free PDF

then.
    I’d try to make him laugh, but he would soon lapse back into his reflections.
    I didn’t know what to do.
    After that night, for several weeks he began to spend more and more time up in the eucalyptus. If we played
griir,
he got confused about the number of pebbles and lost; and he had always beaten all of us. When we played hide and seek, he always hid in the same places, and if someone pointed it out to him, he paid no attention. He didn’t care about winning.
    He stayed up in his dumb eucalyptus, thinking about who knows what.
    I didn’t recognize him anymore.
    One afternoon, out of the blue, he told me that he was going to stop running and that he would become my coach.
    â€œWhy the heck should you be my coach?” I asked him as I laced up my shoes.
    â€œYou’re faster than me. It’s pointless for me to keep trying. I don’t have an aptitude for running; I have to face it. But you do.” He was nibbling an ear of corn that Hooyo had cooked the night before.
    â€œAnd that’s why you’ve decided to be my coach?”
    â€œEvery athlete has a coach. If I can’t be an athlete, then I want to be a coach.”
    â€œSo if I win I’ll owe it all to you. . . .” I teased.
    â€œNo,” he replied seriously, “it’s because you need someone to train you. You can’t do it alone.” A pause. I raised my head and looked at him.
    â€œCan’t do
what
?” I asked.
    â€œYou can’t become a champion.”
    We were eight years old.
    As usual, I didn’t answer him. But from that day on I had a coach.
    I might have lost a playmate on account of Ahmed, though I didn’t want to admit it. But I had found myself.
    After that day I turned into what I had always wanted to be: an athlete.
    All thanks to Alì, without his even realizing it.
    I hugged him tightly and we went out to run in the wind on that afternoon of boundless joy.

CHAPTER 5

    T HEN , on a morning like any other, which gave no sign of what was about to happen, while Hodan and I were still asleep, Aabe went out as usual with Yassin to go to work in the Xamar Weyne district.
    The area was a distance away but very busy, full of people coming and going, an ideal place to do business. Hundreds and hundreds of vendors hawked their products to passersby from large and small stalls in every color of the rainbow. This was the Xamar Weyne market, a raucous madhouse where the sellers were almost as numerous as the buyers. Cotton, linen, sweaters, charcoal, American jeans, shoes, fruit, sandals, vegetables, incense, spices, chocolate . . . Each one peddled his specialty.
    Yassin was two years younger than Aabe and even taller, over six feet. He looked older, though: He had more wrinkles around his eyes and on his brow, and his eyes always seemed sad. Hooyo said it was because he had suffered so much over the loss of his wife, the beautiful Yasmin, Alì’s mother, who had died of cancerwhen we were two years old. There was a framed photograph of her on a dresser in their room, and every time I went in there I was taken aback by how beautiful Yasmin was. The broad forehead, the big, elongated eyes, the same full lips that Alì had.
    Every morning Aabe and Yassin left the house at five and didn’t come home until around six in the evening, at sunset. They had two large stalls, Aabe’s for clothes and Yassin’s for vegetables.
    â€œI hope you will never have to work as hard as I do, my little Samia,” Aabe, exhausted, always told me when I was little, before saying good night to me in the evening. I loved having him there close to me: Those moments were magical for me. I would lose myself in the scent of his aftershave and I was happy; I felt safe. Even his clothes had a smell. It was the smell of Aabe’s clothes after a long day’s work; I would have recognized it among thousands.
    â€œIf you can do it, so can I,” I told