North of Dawn

by Nuruddin Farah

  Timiro agrees with her mother’s approach and says, “She’ll do even better if you spend long, uninterrupted hours with her, if only to make sure she knows she is on the right path to wellness, mentally and physically.”

  “I will. Of course I will. I can’t praise Saafi highly enough for what she did,” says Gacalo. “Now it falls to us to support her.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Mugdi has reason to remind himself of the saying that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The cliché has never made sense to him before, but he appreciates it now more than he ever thought he would, when Gacalo walks in and drops a bombshell, telling him about the phone call she received at work.

  “What are you saying? What’s happened?”

  “You won’t believe it. You can’t.”

  Then he listens to her ranting against Waliya’s recent roster of gaffes, including her set-tos with her children and her lack of concern for their well-being. He is all the while on tenterhooks, wanting to know what the accursed woman has done.

  “She’s now committed her gravest blunder.”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense! Tell me, what has she done?”

  “She hosted Zubair, a wanted man! The officer who called told me that the Norwegian antiterrorist unit apprehended him when they raided Waliya’s apartment earlier today.”

  He becomes quiet and then asks, “Where is she now?”

  “The widow is not directly accused of engaging in any criminal activity,” says Gacalo. “Still, the fact that she was taken in by the antiterrorist unit, fingerprinted, interviewed, and then released can only be an unwanted stain on her character—and by extension, on ours.”

  Saafi, who has just spent her first night in their home, seems relaxed in their presence, though her sense of relaxation slowly gives way to agitation as she realizes that something has happened. Though she can barely understand a word of Norwegian, she hears her mother’s name mentioned repeatedly. Has her mother done something terrible, she wonders. Has she killed someone or been killed or taken into detention? She wishes her brother, who has been spending more time with Mouna at Himmo’s home, playing chess and enjoying the company of the others, were here to tell her what’s happened. Or that one of her grandparents will.

  Finally Saafi cannot help herself and asks, “What’s happened, Grandpa?”

  “We’ll explain things later,” says Mugdi, “when we know more.”

  Then he finishes making Saafi’s omelet and serves it to her. He thanks the heavens that Saafi has been spared the sight of bulky men breaking down her apartment door and storming in, barking out orders in Norwegian. He can imagine the fright this would cause the girl.

  “Are we to blame?” asks Gacalo.

  “We’ve harmed no one, hurt no one, and misled no one. How can anyone blame us?”

  Saafi can barely eat the omelet before her as she struggles to understand their conversation.

  “The guilt of one Muslim will be laid at the door of every Muslim,” says Gacalo. “Who’s to say we won’t be viewed with suspicion by the authorities and seen as associates of terrorists? The agents who linked her to Zubair will surely link her to us, as we share a file.”

  Mugdi thinks of Beret, one of the two main characters in Giants of the Earth. A disrupter, she is in direct conflict with everything the landscape of Spring Creek represents. Just like Beret, Waliya is forever creating havoc, unable to come to terms with her new country’s climate, culture, or faith, nor able to tear herself loose from all that defined her back in the land where she was raised. Mugdi retreats into silence and reflects on how Beret, in distress at being pregnant and away from her parents, seeks solace first in Per Hansa, the man who impregnated her, and then in religion. And Waliya, in her search for peace and shelter, came to a country she did not love, to the house of her husband’s father, on whom she could not rely for support.

  Saafi is now nibbling at her omelet.

  Gacalo says, “I know that earlier today Naciim went to the apartment to pick up something he forgot, his notebook. Do you think the antiterrorist unit might question him?”

  “Not without the presence of an attorney.”

  “Our turn to be questioned isn’t far off.”

  “There’s no way of knowing what the antiterror unit will do or if they will want to talk to us.”

  “Perhaps not, but challenging times are ahead.” Her nerves frayed, Gacalo falls into a protracted silence of her own, before saying, “The media will cover the story from every possible angle now that one of the most respected Somalis, a former ambassador, no less, is a proven associate of a terrorist.”

  “I don’t believe that the media in general is necessarily more hostile toward Somalis, only that a number of them tend to give the Somalis bad press. I wouldn’t worry about any of this yet if I were you.”

  A brooding look on her face, Gacalo says, “Would you be willing to take the children in and look after them if I weren’t around? Or if their mother is found guilty and sent to a Norwegian jail?”

  “What do you mean if you weren’t around?”

  “No one is here forever, darling.”

  “Where would you be, if not here?”

  “I could be dead.”

  Mugdi casts an irascible glance at her and his Adam’s apple cranks up and down, as if it has suddenly become a bad-tempered mechanism. He says, “I won’t respond to such speculations.”

  Shortly after, Naciim turns up and straightaway Mugdi can see his pained expression, which covers him like a shroud.

  “Where’s Saafi? Is she okay?” asks Naciim.

  “She is easily broken, but she is okay on the whole. Grandma put on a film for her to watch and I’ve checked on her a few times. How about you?”

  “Mum wouldn’t tell me anything. She says I am too young to understand.” Naciim looks at the door of the TV room, which is pushed shut. “Have you told Saafi what’s going on?”

  “We’ve spared her the trouble of knowing.”

  “You’ve done the right thing,” says Naciim.

  Mugdi stretches out his hand and pulls Naciim toward him for a hug. He says, “Just remember we’re here, Grandma and I. Everything will be okay.”

  “I hope so. I’ll go and see my sister now.”

  The TV is off and Saafi is curled on the couch, crying. Naciim steps into the room as Mugdi hovers just outside, uncertain as to how best to be of use to the boy, who has ably taken charge of the situation. The agitation he feels comes to an abrupt end when Naciim, leading his sister by the hand, comes out and says to Mugdi, “I’ve told her everything.”

  Wiping away tears and nodding her head, Saafi says, “Thank you.” Then, to Mugdi’s great surprise, her sweet smile turns on, bright as a midnight sun, and she says, “I’ve told Naciim of a decision I’ve made.”

  Naciim urges her on. “Tell Grandpa. Speak.”

  “I’ll take more hours of Norwegian to improve my command of the language.”

  “That’s excellent,” says Mugdi.

  “I feel left out when I can’t follow what the radio is saying, for instance, or today, when you and Grandma spoke about what happened to Mum and again I couldn’t understand. I don’t want to feel like that anymore.”

  “That’s positive thinking,” says Mugdi.

  Later that morning, when it is time for Mugdi to leave for the gym and Naciim shows his keenness to go with him, the old man asks Gacalo if she has a reason to go out for a walk or to go shopping.

  Gacalo turns to Saafi and asks, “Would you like to stay with me or go with Grandpa and Naciim?”

  The girl says, “I am no longer the girl I was a couple of months ago and I don’t want anyone to see me as a problem to solve. What if I came with you to the gym?”

  “Wonderful. Come,” says Mugdi.

  “You’ll enjoy watching th
e women swim or do their workouts on this first visit. Later, you can decide on the exercises that’ll interest you,” Naciim says.

  “As if I need your advice,” says Saafi.

  “No offense. I meant well.”

  As they head out the door, Naciim and Mugdi each carry a bag with a towel and a pair of flip-flops, while Saafi goes as she is, albeit with a pair of Mugdi’s headphones through which she is listening to a reading of the Koran. Naciim begins griping about his mother. “Every day, before I came here, Mum would spend hours on the phone with her friend Arla. I liked the colorful stories she told us. But there was something she often did that troubled me: she brought bad, white men, who would take the two of them away, maybe to bars and naughty places. This irked me no end.”

  “How inventive you are,” Saafi says.

  “I have it on authority from Stepdad Dhaqaneh, before he made a good woman of Mum,” Naciim says. “Are you saying he was lying when he told me this?”

  “Where is Arla now?” Mugdi cut in.

  “Copenhagen, where she lives.”

  “I think it’s good Mum has a friend to talk to,” says Saafi.

  Naciim says, “Arla, in light of what Stepdad Dhaqaneh said, feels the impulse to cause havoc wherever she goes.”

  “But Arla’s your mum’s close friend.”

  Saafi says, “Mum adores Arla.”

  “But the woman is wild. How can Mum?”

  “Maybe she is no longer as wild as before,” says Saafi.

  Naciim shakes his head and says, “I doubt very much that she has changed her essential nature.”

  “If she’s been in Europe for a long time, then it is possible. Europe changes people after a while,” says Mugdi. “What don’t you like about her, Naciim?”

  “My mum is under her thumb,” says Naciim.

  “That’s not true,” says Saafi.

  “Mum will obey Arla’s commands. Stepdad Dhaqaneh never liked her either. He would complain about how she chain-smokes, is always showily dressed, and does all sorts of forbidden stuff.”

  “What forbidden stuff?”

  “Like wearing gold earrings and nose rings and rings on every finger and thumb. She even has a tattoo.”

  “That’s rich,” says Mugdi.

  “I tell you she is wild.”

  “How on earth do you know she has a tattoo?” Saafi asks.

  “A Somali woman tattooing her body? Isn’t that rather unusual?” says Mugdi.

  “Arla’s tattoo is just above the parting of her bum,” says Naciim.

  “How do you know?”

  “I was there when she showed it to Mum.”

  At this Mugdi stops in mid-stride. “You’ve learned quite a lot about this woman, haven’t you?”

  “He’s always been obsessed with Arla,” says Saafi. “Ever since we were young and she babysat us, when Mum would go out by herself,” says Saafi. “Obsessed and infatuated.”

  “I know a lot more than I let on,” Naciim says.

  No one talks until they reach the gym.

  At the gym, Mugdi fills in a lengthy form for Naciim and Saafi to be registered as his guests; he also pays a small fee. Then he leads the children through the turnstile, where he introduces Saafi to a female instructor, who says, “Leave her with me and I’ll show her what she needs to see.”

  Then he and Naciim go to the men’s section of the gym, where the old man points out the showers, weights, and swimming pool. He’s about to step out of the changing room to give the boy privacy, sensing that he will not undress in Mugdi’s presence, when a naked Norwegian man walks in. Naciim is visibly shocked. Then he sees more nude men entering or coming out of the showers. The boy has no idea whether to look, avoid looking, or act as if he is indifferent to all this. At school, nudity in the public areas of the gym is discouraged. He wonders if adult Norwegians are more relaxed about their bodies.

  “If the women in their section are as naked as the men here, then Saafi is in for a shock,” Naciim says.

  “Never been to the women’s section,” says Mugdi. He has been to Turkish and Moroccan single-sex hamams, but in Somalia there are no such bathhouses, and Somalis on the whole frown on male or female nudity, even if it is not beyond a Somali woman to display her assets by wearing a guntiino robe or transparent dirac dress, traditional clothes the religionists have lately described as un-Islamic and therefore forbidden.

  The two men go their different ways: Naciim to swim and Mugdi to the treadmill. Later, Mugdi searches the boy out in the pool, where Naciim’s technique strikes him as unrefined. He thinks that the boy would benefit from taking more swimming lessons.

  On the way out, Mugdi inquires at reception about a swimming instructor, and the receptionist introduces him to a young man in his early twenties who agrees to give swimming lessons by appointment to Naciim, on times and days to be arranged in advance. As they walk toward the tram, Saafi is silent. Naciim, on the other hand, can barely control his excitement. “I think Mum will be shocked to her very core if we tell her where we’ve gone today, what we’ve done or seen. But there is no point telling her about any of this, is there, unless we intend to shock her?”

  Naciim’s rhetorical question reminds Mugdi of a Somali of his acquaintance, who had quite the shock of his when he came upon a nudist colony—and he tells the story to the boy.

  “What is a nudist colony, Grandpa?” Naciim asks.

  Mugdi explains, to the boy’s considerable awe.

  “Would men and women walk about naked in mixed company? And don’t some men pester the women they see in the colony?”

  “In nudist or naturist resorts, men and women who are comfortable with such things go there,” says Mugdi.

  “Have you ever been to a nudist site?”

  Mugdi shakes his head. “No.”

  “I’d like to go to one,” Naciim says. “It would be fun to take a burka-wearing woman along, wouldn’t it?” he continues.

  “How I wish you’d desist from being so crude in your comments about women,” says Mugdi.

  When they arrive back at the house, Saafi waits until Naciim is having a shower and then says, “All my life, I‘ve been used to one way of looking at the world. Now the visit to the gym has shown me that there is an entirely different way of seeing.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “At the gym, the women struck me to be without fear and behaved, from the little I saw, as though they were equal to men.”

  Mugdi nods his head and says, “Interesting, very interesting.”

  Saafi, needing no encouragement, goes on, “Maybe they were raised, from a very young age, to do whatever men could do. All the time I watched the women, I kept thinking that perhaps this is what Dr. Qumman wants me to be like.”

  “And how were you raised, from a young age?”

  “It makes me feel, from what Qumman has explained to me, that I am in this world for the sole purpose of giving pleasure to men.”

  Mugdi wishes Gacalo, Timiro, or Qumman were here to hear what Saafi has just said. They would be so proud of the girl.

  After Naciim has showered, Mugdi asks him if he’d like to join Saafi and himself for a bite to eat.

  “I promised Mouna I would go to Auntie Himmo’s home and give her a game and she would help me with my Norwegian,” replies Naciim.

  “Give our best to Auntie Himmo.”

  “Auntie Himmo is at work.”

  “But Mouna is there?”

  “She is expecting me.”

  “She is lovely, isn’t she, Mouna?”

  “She is kind, she is gentle, she is sweet, and I learn a great deal from her. I love her so much. She treats me as though I were her younger brother.”

  “And are you coming back here or going to your mother’s, when you are done?” asks Mugdi.

  �
�Maybe I’ll go and see Mum after that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Naciim awakens to low voices of women. He lies in bed, trying to work out what is happening and why the women are speaking in whispers. Then his mother is at his bedroom door shouting, “You promised you’d bring back my daughter, your sister! Tell me, did you see her yesterday and where is she?”

  “Who are these women in our home, Mum?”

  “Answer me, son. Did you see Saafi?”

  “I did. She was at the home of Grandpa and Grandma and she is fine. Unwilling to return here, but fine.”

  One of the women, who comes out of his mother’s room, almost jumps out of her skin when she spots Naciim, and runs back inside.

  “Did you see the way that woman ran, Mum? She ran because she saw there was a man in the house. And from now on, if I am to stay, you must treat me as one!”

  “To be thought of as a man, you must behave like a man,” says Waliya. “You must say all five of your prayers and fast Ramadan without fail. These are the obligations you must meet, and only then will I refer to you as one, never before.”

  “Who are these women, Mum?”

  “Zubair’s sisters and cousins.”

  “What business brings them here?”

  “They’ve come to commiserate with me.”

  “Commiserate how?”

  “Commiserate with me in my moment of sorrow,” she says. “So what did you do when you were staying with Mugdi?”

  Naciim tells her that he went to a gym with him, but makes a point of not informing her that Saafi was there as well. He knows his mother has never been to a gym and is unlikely to ever go to one.

  “Does Mugdi go to a gym at his age?”

  “He is healthier than most younger men.”

  She then wants to know the setup of the gym and he tells her that it is a private club, with one section for men, another for women, and a third larger section where men and women mingle and share the facilities, stretching, squatting, lifting weights, riding exercise bikes and treadmills, even swimming together.