Don't Tell Me You're Afraid Read Free

and turn it over slowly from one side to the other to hear the voice of the sea.
    Shhhh
.
Shhhh
.
    We moved closer and dipped our hands and feet in the water. I stuck my fingers in my mouth. Salty.
    That night, after that approach, I dreamed about waves. I dreamed of losing myself in that vastness, letting it cradle me, drifting up and down according to the water’s mood.
    Well, war, as I said, took the sea away from me. But on the other hand, it made me want to run. Because my desire to run is as deep as the sea. Running is my sea.
    In any case, if Alì and I always pretended that the war didn’t exist, it’s because we were the children of Yusuf Omar, my father, and Yassin Ahmed, Alì’s father. They too have been friends since the day they were born, and they too grew up together in the village of Jazeera, south of the city. They attended the same school and their fathers also worked together, in the period of the Italian colonists. Together our two fathers learned some proverbs in thatlanguage from their two fathers.
Non fare oggi quello che puoi fare domani,
“Don’t do today what you can do tomorrow.” And
Tutto il mondo è paese,
“The world is the same wherever you go.”
    Aiutati che Dio t’aiuta,
“God helps those who help themselves.”
    Another saying they learned from them is
Cascassero sulla tua testa mille chili di merda molle molle,
“May a thousand pounds of runny shit fall on your head,” with all its variants, which was a phrase their fathers’ Italian boss always used to say, back when they worked at the port, unloading containers. One day a container packed with manure had suddenly opened up and the boss had been inundated by that “rain” from above. Since then things had gone very well for him, but even so he’d started using that expression whenever he felt like swearing.
    Another proverb said,
Siamo tutti figli della stessa patria,
“We’re all children of the same country.” This one is a favorite of Aabe and Yassin: best friends whom nothing will ever come between.
    Like us.
    â€œCan anything ever break us apart?” Alì and I wondered on those sweltering, brutally hot afternoons when he helped me climb the eucalyptus and we took shelter in the coolness of the leaves for half a day, talking about the future. Staying up there in the eucalyptus was wonderful; in place of the real world, we concocted one in which only we two and our dreams existed.
    â€œNo!” we told each other in turn. And then we made the gesture swearing to be blood brothers: We kissed our linked index fingers in front of our mouths twice, reversing right and left. Nothing and no one could come between us. We would have bet anything, even our lives.
    But that eucalyptus was also Alì’s favorite spot where he wentto hide by himself. For example, in the afternoon when he didn’t want to learn to read.
    Although Hodan was five years older than me, in fact, every morning she and I went to school together, to the Madrasa Musjma Institute, a district comprising primary, middle, and secondary classes. Alì didn’t come with us; his father never had the money to allow him to study. He attended first grade at the public institution, but then the school was destroyed by a grenade and he hasn’t gone back since then. After that unhappy day classes were held outdoors, and it wasn’t easy to find teachers willing to risk a bomb on their heads.
    The only way to learn was to enroll at the private school. Our father was able to afford it for a few years, thanks to many sacrifices, whereas since the beginning of the war Yassin has always had trouble selling his fruit and vegetables.
    In Mogadishu it was said that few people wanted to buy from a filthy Darod
.
    Alì has always been touchy about the fact that we knew how to read and write. It made him feel inferior. His clan was in effect viewed that way in our neighborhood,