Free One Secret Summer by Lesley Lokko Page B

and sofar, at least, her only friend, only spoke German and a little English. Niela dimly remembered the fuss that had been made
     when her Uncle Raageh had declined to marry the young Somali girl who’d been chosen for him and had married an Austrian girlfriend
     instead. She couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly have objected – his marriage to Ulli had produced Ayanna, not only
     the most beautiful young woman Niela had ever set eyes on, but also one of the nicest. Ayanna was twenty, only a couple of
     years older than Niela, but she might as well have come from another planet. She was in her second year of a psychology degree
     at university. She still lived with her parents – hers was the large, almost empty room at the end of the corridor that had
     been given over to the Adens’ suitcases – but she spent most of her time at her boyfriend’s flat on the other side of the
     city. Niela regarded her comings and goings with amazement. Ayanna wasn’t married and yet
she slept at her boyfriend’s home
? And he wasn’t Somali either! He was Turkish. Uncle Raageh seemed unperturbed. She overhead her father asking him one day
     how on earth he could let it happen. ‘Oh, they all do it, Hassan,’ Raageh said, laughing. ‘What’m I to do? I can’t stop her.
     Better we know where she is.’ Niela didn’t hear her father’s reply. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
    By the time spring was over and the city emerged from under its blanket of snow, the Adens, each in their own way, had begun
     to settle in. Hassan found work, although it was nothing even remotely like that which he’d been qualified to do. He no longer
     had a profession. His profession had become the task of putting food on the table for his family. He left every morning to
     work in the Turkish wholesaler’s, where he managed to find a bookkeeping position, and returned every evening. His work had
     no place in their lives. He did not speak of it, and neither did they. The refugee housing authorities had found them a small
     flat in Simmering, to the south of the city. Niela’s mother spent her days cooking and cleaning, much as she’d done in Mogadishu,though without the help of half a dozen servants or the support of her close-knit community of friends.
    In June, after almost four months of the government-mandated language courses, Korfa and Raageh were deemed fluent enough
     to begin school. Niela’s position was more precarious. She was too old for high school, but her German wasn’t yet good enough
     to sit the entrance exam for university, even if they’d have been able to afford it. It was a strange hiatus. The past was
     no longer available, but the future was too uncertain to believe in. Suspended between two worlds – one to which she no longer
     belonged and another to which she couldn’t – she waited. As her German improved and the boys were swallowed up by school,
     it fell naturally to her to become the family’s eyes and ears, to interpret the what was happening around them and to do whatever
     she could to make sense of their new lives. She struggled against it at first. With her father and brothers gone from morning
     to evening, she couldn’t bear the routine of helping her mother prepare the flat every day for their return, cooking, cleaning,
     fussing around the men when they came home at the end of the day. She began to look around for something else to do.
    The relationship between her uncle and her cousin fascinated her. Her Uncle Raageh was a lawyer. After a particularly hard
     day in court, he would come home, loosen his tie and, if Ayanna and Niela happened to be around, beckon them into his book-lined
     study. ‘Come. Set up the board. I’ve had a hellish day. Let’s play.’ The three of them would play chess, Niela and Ayanna
     on one side, Uncle Raageh on the other, until Tante Ulli came in with wine and cheese and the game was abandoned in favour
     of talk. Niela, who had always considered