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

him.
    â€œI’m doing it so that you won’t have to.”
    â€œAabe,” I said once after thinking about it for a while, “how come you never complain about what you do? Omar Sheikh, our landlord, is always complaining about everything. Whenever he’s here he spends all his time telling us about his hard luck.”
    â€œComplaining only makes you keep doing what you don’t like,” Aabe answered in his deep voice, as he ran a hand through his flowing black hair. He had always worn his hair long. Hooyo teased him, saying he acted like a woman and that’s why he didn’t have a beard either. “Beards are for fundamentalists,” he would tell her. “If you really don’t like something, you just need to change it, my little Samia. I love my work, and I love it because I do it for you. This makes me happy.”
    I stopped to think a little, then asked him: “Papa, aren’t you ever afraid of the war?”
    He turned serious. “You must never say you’re afraid, my Samia. Never. Otherwise the things you’re afraid of will seem big and they’ll think they can beat you.”
    That morning he and Yassin left together, as always. They had just crossed Jamaral Daud, right beyond the parliament, and had stopped at their friend Taageere’s bar, a wooden shack in a small alley, to drink a
shaat
and shoot the breeze before work, as they did every day.
    Suddenly, however, they heard gunshots.
    A hundred yards away, from behind a six-story building, four or five Hawiye militiamen, affiliated with us Abgal, had appeared. They were looking for a Darod who, according to them, had stolen something, and they were shouting that he must have fled in that direction.
    One of them spotted Yassin standing with Aabe in front of the bar and pointed him out to the others, and they all started running toward him.
    Aabe and Yassin didn’t even have time to think.
    When the soldiers came closer, Alì’s father realized what was about to happen and instinctively started to run away.
    It all happened in an instant.
    As soon as Yassin turned his back, one of the men opened fire, followed immediately by the others.
    Aabe lunged to knock Yassin to the ground, clear of the barrage of bullets that had already riddled the wall a few inches from there.
    Later they told us that Taageere stood there the whole time as if frozen, the two glasses of
shaat
in his hands, poised in midair.
    Meanwhile, the gunfire was over as quickly as it had erupted.
    The soldiers shouted something and, satisfied, disappeared around the corner as swiftly as they had materialized.
    Aabe and Yassin turned, relieved, thinking they had come through it safely.
    But when they tried to get up, they realized what had happened. Taageere was white as a sheet.
    Aabe had been shot in his right foot.
    He hadn’t even been aware of it.
    The blood had already formed a small pool.
    Friendly fire had struck an Abgal in place of a Darod.
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    H ODAN CO MPOSED HER SONGS and then sang them.
    She had a beautiful voice, like velvet. It was a little husky and low but at the same time clear enough to reach the highest notes. When she sang, her smooth, round, porcelain-doll face wore an astonished expression, as if she were always about to reveal something. I adored her. I wanted to be like her, to have her beauty, her voice. Besides that, the veils never looked as good on any other girl as they did on Hodan. The bright colors, yellow, red, and orange, lit up her face like a sudden blaze in a dense forest.
    To mark the rhythm she would join her palms and tap her fingers together, like a shell in the Indian Ocean that continuously opens and shuts, following a steady tempo.
    She sang in the traditional
buraanbur
form, though blendedwith more modern music, in the style of her musical group, the Shamsudiin Band.
    She composed her songs in our room, alone, or while we kids were in bed, with