Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Page B

“All circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later.” Magool had warned me that getting through to Somalia was hard and advised me to keep trying; I called so often, whenever I had a little free time, that it became a habit. I had almost come to believe that Magool had deluded me and the line would never work when finally, one afternoon, in the front seat of the Land Rover of a friend of mine who was driving me out of town to buy furniture for an apartment I had just rented, I connected to the phone line in my mother’s dirt-floor house in Las Anod, a place located between Somaliland and Puntland, two autonomous regions in what was once Somalia.
    “Hello,” said a soft voice on the other end. (This greeting came to us Somalis when the British introduced the telephone to our country; ever since, Somalis say
hello
when they pick up a phone.)
    “Hello,
hooyo, M
a. It is me, Ayaan.” I held my breath, certain she would curse and hang up on me.
    “Hello, did you say Ayaan?” Now I was certain it was my mother. I hadn’t recognized her voice at first.
    “Hooyo
, mother, mother. Yes, it is Ayaan. It is me. Please don’t hang up.”
    “Allah has brought you back to me. I am not going to hang up.”
    “Mother, how are you? Do you know that Father just passed away?”
    “I know that. You must know, my daughter, that death is the only thing that is certain. We are all going to die. What credit for the hereafter have you built for yourself?”
    I sighed. My ma had not changed. It was as though the five years in which she and I hadn’t spoken had never been. Her voice was the same, with its echoes of her Dhulbahante clan, and so were her constant references to death, to the hereafter, and her expectations and demands, her evident, manifest disappointment in me, her oldest daughter. I made an attempt to change the subject: “Ma, I think it was gracious of you to send Magool to forgive him on your behalf.”
    “Did she pass on my message?” she asked me eagerly. “What did he say?” My mother was desperate to know how Magool had handled it; she must have heard gossip about Magool’s ungodly life, for she also wanted to know whether her messenger to his hospital bed was appropriately dressed.
    “Ma,” I replied, “Magool is a responsible and honorable young woman. She did exactly as you said. She told me that Abeh responded, that he understood her, and I am sure you can be comfortable that it was not too late.”
    “Ayaan, did you go and see him?”
    “Yes, Ma, I did. I am happy I did. It was tough.”
    Our conversation went on like this, stiff and tense, almost like strangers speaking, but with ripples of unspoken meanings and fears. Ma filled me in on the details of my grandmother’s death, in 2006, “around the time that Saddam Hussein was tried and executed,” as Magool had said. Grandmother had become deaf, Ma told me, and she grew smaller and more immobile, until one day that mighty, fearsome force of will stopped breathing.
    She told me a little about her own life since then. She was living alone in Sool, a district in what was once the land of the Dhulbahante, her nomad clan of camel herders. I paused for a moment toimagine it: a little hamlet of cinderblock buildings, unpaved roads, thorn bushes, and endless dust. She would have to fetch wood to make charcoal for the brazier. Perhaps she was comforted by being among her ancestral people.
    Then my mother turned the conversation back to what I was doing to invest in my hereafter. “Do you pray and fast, and read the Quran, my daughter?”
    It took me so long to think of a good answer that she asked if I was still there. I decided to tell her the truth. “Ma, I don’t pray or fast, and I read the Quran occasionally. What I find in the Quran does not appeal to me.”
    As soon as I said the words I regretted it. Predictably, she flew into a rage. “Infidel!” she cried. “You have abandoned God and all that is good, and you have abandoned