“This is the border with Somalia,” said Faridoon. A straight line ran north and south, highlighted in pink. “This is where we are.” Just to the left of it, and about eight kilometers inland. “Now,” he said to Cathleen, “tell us what’s been happening.”
“More of the same,” said Cathleen. “A whole lot more of the same. Oh, Faridoon, the little girl they brought in last night. Oh, God, you must come see her with me. Ten years old, Faridoon. And every night there are more. And we know we only hear about a few of them.”
“It’s the shifta doing this?” I asked. “These Somali bandits?”
“No,” said Cathleen. “I’ve been out here a long time and I know shifta better than I know some of my cousins in Dublin. The shifta take advantage. They get what they can get. But this is more like an organized campaign, like there’s a method to the madness.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a protection racket these sick fucks are about. And in Allah’s name no less. The men here see that they can’t defend their wives or daughters. They see the soldiers and police don’t do the job. But over here”—she pointed to a town called Wolla Jora on the far side of the border—“there’s a lot of Itihaad people. Just when the rapes are increasing, some of their preachers show up in the camps. Quiet like. And they say they’re going to do the job the police don’t. They say they’re going to give men back their dignity, they’re going to protect their women-folk. You know, ‘Islam is the solution.’ ”
“And nobody does anything.”
“No. A few years ago the Ethiopians went into the northern areas—here.” She moved her hand over a corner of the map. “They were going after Itihaad for their own reasons. But, you know, it’s like trying to clean with a dirty mop. You just spread the dirt around. Then last year we started hearing about new arrivals across the way, in this area.” She drew a circle with her finger. “Not sure who they were, but the Itihaad people were very impressed with their new guests. You could see that right away. Their guns got better. Their trucks got better. And, you know what, the rapes increased.”
“Al-Qaeda?”
“Some of its best and brightest,” said Cathleen.
“A long way from home,” I said.
“For them the rapes are bonus pay, don’t you know.”
Chapter 14
The clinic was four grimy stucco walls beneath a tin roof dense with cobwebs. There were eight metal beds. The paint on them was worn away by the clenched hands of patients in pain and the iron legs were rusted by pools of sweat. Some of the sick were on the floor, crowded inside because of the rains. The girl was curled up on a stained mattress, wrapped in a coarse wool blanket. She had a high forehead, delicate features, and large, warm black eyes that seemed to see us, but not to follow us. The air near her was stale with sickness. She smiled when Cathleen spoke, but did not lift her head. Cathleen ran the back of her hand over the girl’s cheek and said something else to her in a language I did not understand.
Outside the clinic a tall man with midnight-black skin stood beneath the eaves clutching a stick. He looked into the distance like a sentry and his jaw was set, whether in pain or anger was hard to tell. Faridoon approached him and spoke a few words, but the man said nothing. He just nodded his head slowly, almost rhythmically, the way some athletes do when they’re about to sprint out of the blocks. But there was nowhere for this man to go, nothing for him to do.
“That was the girl’s father,” said Faridoon as we drove back toward the compound.
“That little girl is his only child,” said Cathleen. “Her mother’s dead. But after something like this, some men in these parts might walk away from the shame, you know. Not him. I think he really is a good man.”
“What did he do before he came here?” said Faridoon. “He doesn’t look like a farmer.”
“Shifta,” said Cathleen. “Ivory poacher back in the old days.”
“Ah,” said Faridoon.
“Ah, Mother of God!” said Cathleen. “It just breaks your heart. You won’t find tougher people than these in the whole world. Too tough for their own good. And so proud, and so completely fucking hopeless.” She turned on me. “Do you have any idea what that girl has been through?”
“I saw women who were raped in Bosnia,” I said. “I have an idea.”
Cathleen shook her head. “In Somalia, girls are mutilated already when they are six or seven years old. Did you know that? All of their genitals are cut away with a knife or a razor blade and they are sewed almost shut.”
“Why the hell would they do that?”
“Women do it to them—the mothers to the daughters—because that’s what the men expect. So when a little girl like that is raped, the sheer physical damage to her, and the pain, is almost beyond belief. She is lucky, very lucky, she did not die. And she still might. And we don’t even have tests here to see if she’s been infected with HIV, which she might well be. And I ask myself what kind of men would do that to her. And I can’t get over the idea that this is part of some sick goddamned game by the people across the way.”
“You don’t know that,” said Faridoon.
“I see what’s happening,” said Cathleen.
“Do you hear any names?” I said.
“Abu Zubayr is the name I heard,” she said.
Early in the afternoon, as soon as there was a break in the weather, I drove Faridoon back to the airport. “See what we can do here,” he said as we pulled the blocks out from under the tires of the Cessna. “Develop an action plan. But don’t cross the border under any circumstances.”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so.” He climbed into the pilot’s seat but left the door open to talk. He looked over the controls. “You’re going to be tempted to talk to Abu Zubayr, but that could be a trap—and almost certainly will be.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know him. And so do you.”
“I do?”
“I’m sure you met him in Bosnia. Very quiet. That was before he lost the sight in his eye. In those days he was called Salah.”
“The Salah who used to sleep in the Ansar house? The one who sat next to Osama when he came.”
“That’s the one.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“We met in Wolla Jora town when he first came. He said he’s in the honey business now.”
“Salah.”
“Leave him alone, at least for now. Are we clear about that? Perfectly clear?”
I nodded, and couldn’t think why I felt relieved, then realized that was the connection to Summit. Or might be.
Faridoon swung the door of the Cessna closed and cranked the engine. A couple of minutes later, he was skimming the bottom of the clouds.
Cathleen brought a Coleman lantern to the table. The blue-white glare shone like a cold sun on the contour lines of the map. She leaned over the chart, planting her hands on both sides, seeming to want to take the chart and the land it represented into her arms and smother it all in her breasts.
“Wolla Jora is the town, but the place you want to know more about,” she said, “is this farm about two miles outside, which is where the distinguished visitors from abroad hold court and make their plans. Or so I’m told by some of the Orormo who wander back and forth through here.” She traced lines with her finger through small valleys and riverbeds. “You see how easy it is for them to cross the border. Nobody’s watching.” She shook her head and took a deep breath, studying every curving line on the map like a sorceress reading chicken guts before, finally, she heaved another sigh. It was hard to keep my eyes on the map with her huge breasts right in front of me. She looked up into my face. “Would you be wanting a little of mother’s milk?” she said.
She must have seen I looked a little confused.
“Whisky,” she said. “Would a glass of whisky do you?”
“Yes. Yes, it would,” I said.
Cathleen and I sat in the dark in a pair of the low lawn
chairs, our drinks cradled in our hands, talking to each other’s outlines.
“Have you known Faridoon a long time?” I asked.
“About six years,” said Cathleen. “Since he first brought me out here from Ireland.”
“How’d he find you?”
“The world of beekeepers is not so huge, you know.”
“His good luck.”
“Hah. And mine I suppose.”
“Are you Ismaili?”
“No thanks. We Catholics have enough strange beliefs.” I could hear her take a swallow of whisky. “Well, maybe if the Aga Khan was to propose to me I’d give it some thought, you know. But I haven’t had him come courting in quite some time. I take it you’re not a convert yourself.”
“No.”
“Know much about the Ismailis, do you?”
“A little bit I’ve read.”
“Don’t know much myself. Sure you’ve heard why they were called ‘assassins’—hashishin, because they were after smoking dope to help them on their way to Paradise. Seem to have given that up, though. More’s the pity.”
“Hah! Yeah.”
“You know they scared the bejesus out of Richard the Lion-heart and his crew, and scaring the English is no bad thing. I’d send them to Heaven for that. Did you ever hear how they’d jump off towers when the Old Man of the Mountain told them to? They’d do anything he commanded. Jump off towers. Disguise themselves as women. Spend years working in some rival’s court, just waiting for the order to kill.”
“I read about that, yeah.” I took a long sip of the whisky. “Sounded like fairy tales, but…”
“But what?”
“Now it sounds like Bin Laden.”
“I reckoned you’d say that. But the Old Man, you know, he was after something different. He was playing with the idea of Paradise, not just for the hereafter, but for the here on earth. You know what he used to say?”
I shook my head in the dark.
“ ‘Nothing is true.’ ” Cathleen slurred a little. “Everything is permitted.’ ”
I tried to see her face, but I couldn’t make out any of the features.
“And Faridoon is part of all that?”
“Oh no, darlin’. Nobody was ever part of that. It was all made up, don’t you know? The Ismailis don’t bother anybody. They’ve got schools, they’ve got foundations, ‘the Aga Khan this,’ ‘the Aga Khan that,’ and there are charities like this one.”
“So Faridoon’s not an assassin?”
“No more than you are,” she said.
“He said he talked to Abu Zubayr in Wolla Jora.”
“He told you that, did he?”
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“What did Abu Zubayr tell him?”
“Oh, I think it was a right difficult conversation. Abu Zubayr called him a heretic. But, then, you’d expect that, wouldn’t you? And Abu Zubayr called him a British spy. Can you imagine that? Faridoon?”
“I guess it’s hard to imagine.”
“And he told Faridoon he would kill him if he ever saw him again.”
“And he meant it?”
“Oh, I think so.”
The dark settled in on us. The whisky in my glass was almost gone.
“So tell me,” I said.
“Tell you what?” she said.
“Is anything true? Is everything permitted?”
Cathleen laughed.
Chapter 15
On the edge of the camp was a small mosque built out of mud and a few stones with a big mud cone for a minaret and a piece of scrap metal cut into the shape of a crescent moon on top of that. It seemed to me to be, in its way, very beautiful. The imam was an old man whose hair was white against the tight black skin over his skull. His body was bent, but his voice was still strong when he sang out the call of the muezzin before dawn, wailing in Arabic to tell us that prayer is better than sleep. Then, a few minutes later, Cathleen’s short-wave radio would click on, and we’d hear classical music telling us the BBC news was about to start.
According to the reports we heard, the war in Afghanistan was going pretty slowly for the Americans, at least at first. But it was going well, they said. The American bombers were doing their work day and night hitting “Al-Qaeda training camps” that Washington called “the terrorist infrastructure.”
It was hard for me to listen. I kept hearing about our surveillance satellites and planes, our U2s and B52s, our electronic intercepts and our Predator drones, which flew over the enemy’s hideouts like huge dragonflies. Washington was real proud of those. But I knew the news didn’t have anything to do with the war on the ground. All that Washington saw were buildings that exploded in gun-camera flashes, or tiny people-shapes wearing turbans who were carrying guns and grouping and regrouping. And all they heard were the voices that wanted to be listened to. You couldn’t count on that to tell you, really, what was going on. This war had to be fought up close and personal.
Cathleen and I got into a routine pretty quickly. At night, when the place got quiet, she’d tell me everything she heard from the nomads and the refugees who came by that day. They always had bits and pieces of information, but what nobody ever told her, she said, was “I don’t know.” So a lot of what she heard were lies made up to please her. We were trying to put together a picture of the farm outside Wolla Jora: who was there, what they were up to, and also how they were defended. But some folks told us there were hundreds of strangers at the farm, and some said there weren’t any.
“I’ve got one man that I’ll be talking to who goes back and forth quite a bit,” Cathleen told me one night. “A regular commuter he is to Wolla Jora, and he’s got the brains to figure out what we need. Of course, it’s been weeks since I saw him, but he should be coming around these parts again soon.”
“I’d like to meet him,” I said.
“Oh, he’s my little secret,” she said.
That night we stayed up late, talking in the dark. I told her about Betsy and Miriam, and she just listened. Other nights we’d have a little of mother’s milk, and go to bed early. And every few days, real late, I would ask Cathleen’s permission to use the satellite phone and call Betsy at work.
I worried about her and about the loneliness that was eating away at her—at us. But I was also getting more and more worried about that package I’d left in the freezer at the Jump Start. Too much time was passing. Every day the odds got worse that someone would find it. And if they did, there was no telling what could happen. Maybe the virus wasn’t dangerous anymore. But I didn’t believe that. I figured it was probably just as dangerous, just as deadly as it always had been: the Sword of the Angel of Death.
When Betsy answered, we didn’t talk for long, and mostly we said the same things, like we were reading from a script:
“Are you okay?”
“We’re fine.”
“I’m making progress here.”
“That’s good.”
“I love you. I miss you so much.”
“We love you, too, and we miss you.”
And that was all. It wasn’t what I wanted or needed to hear. But it told me they were alive and well, and that none of the disasters that might have happened had happened. The calls kept me hoping that when I got home again, somehow we’d be able to pick up right where we left off. As long as Betsy and Miriam were living and safe, I thought, there would always be time for that.
Each night as I was falling asleep on a cot in that mud house in the middle of the wet African desert, I’d go dream-walking through my own place in Westfield. I’d go past the big sofa in the TV room that we bought in a discount mall outside of Wichita. It was big enough so all three of us could stretch out and share the popcorn. I’d look into Miriam’s room, at the bunk bed I made for her out of two-by-fours and four-by-fours. It wasn’t really a girl thing, but I thought she’d think it was fun to climb on, and she did. Now Barbie and her friends lived on the top bunk. A lot of times in my mind I saw Betsy sitting u
p reading in our bed. She kept the sheet pulled under her chin, but she was naked underneath it. She never did believe in sleeping with clothes on if she could help it. I saw Miriam in the kitchen. She had a milk mustache and her hair was hanging down around her face. She was studying her Fruit Loops as carefully as a code breaker, moving the pink ones to one side with her spoon, and the yellow ones to another.
I thought if I could make my home live in my head while I was still awake, it would stay with me into my dreams, and sometimes I think it did.
My day job was carpentry. The .50-caliber ammo boxes had the right basic shape and size for a beehive, but we had to make frames that hung inside them for the honeycombs. Before I came, Cathleen taught a Somali carpenter to do some of the work, but then he disappeared, nobody was sure where, so she taught me.
“You have to be very precise, you know,” said Cathleen, “because bees are very precise. So you’ll be wanting to make the tops of the frames thirty-five millimeters wide so they hang just so, with about seven and a half millimeters of bee space between them. Are you writing this down? Any more than that, and the bees look for some place else to build their combs, or, they just get sloppy. And we wouldn’t be wanting sloppy bees, would we? Any less, and they get too cramped. The little darlings are creatures of habit, you know. Like most of us.”
“I’ve been looking around for tools,” I said.
“Tools, eh? You think tools are a problem, do you? Well let me ask you this: Seen many bees around here?”
“Just the ones in back of the office.”
“And flowers?”
“No, now that you mention it. None.”
“Right,” said Cathleen. “There’s some. But we’re not building these hives for here. A lot of the people come from parts of Somalia where the earth really is green. Hard to believe, I know. But there are plenty of bees there. And there aren’t plenty of precise tools. What we’ll be doing is giving them hives, then teaching them the skills to take home to build their own, so that someday they will go home and use what they have, instead of waiting for the things that they don’t have.” She pulled a rifle cartridge out of her pocket.
The Sleeper Page 8
