“I’ll put on walking shoes next time,” she says.
“If I were you, I would also put on a veil.”
The liberties he allows himself, she thinks to herself, as she reflects on what he has just said. Of course, she is no fool; she has come prepared, having acquired a pair of veils, one in Dearborn, Michigan, the other in Nairobi. But she will don the damn thing on her own terms, not because he has advised her to wear one. She needs no reminding that she is dressed differently from the other women whom they have encountered so far, the largest number of them veiled, some in the traditional guntiino robes and others in near tatters. She is in a caftan, the wearing of which places her in a league of one. She wore it, she reasons, because it was close to hand and she hadn’t the time to open her suitcases and rummage in them, looking for a veil. Besides, this custom-made caftan permits her to carry a knife discreetly.
He asks, “Shall I take you to a who-die stall? Where you can buy a veil?” She reads meanness in his eyes and interprets the expression as a male daring a woman to defy the recent imposition, which stipulates that women should veil themselves. When she was young, it was uncommon for Somali women to wear one; mostly Arab women and a few of the city’s aboriginals did.
“‘Who-die stalls’? Why are they called that?”
“Stalls from where you buy secondhand veils.”
Then Zaak explains at length that in recent years, dumping of secondhand clothing on the world’s poor has become de rigueur, as many citizens of these countries are in no position to pay the astronomical prices for new clothes.
“I see,” she says, nodding.
He is in his element, and goes on. “The who-die stalls are run by local entrepreneurs who buy a shipload of secondhand clothes for next to nothing from a dump house in the developed world and then import these in. The importers and the retailers are all under the impression that everyone is getting a bargain. The truth is, sadly, different.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the practice has destroyed the local textile industries, as they can no longer compete with the dumpers. People have dubbed the practice with knowing cynicism; who-die clothes from who-die stalls!”
Soon enough, a vast sorrow descends upon Cambara, as she remembers how she had taken a suitcase full of her dead son’s clothes, and donated them to charity so they might be parceled out among Toronto’s poor. Of course she does not know where the clothes that have survived her son have ended up. Years back when she lived here, it was the tradition for well-to-do people to offer the clothes of their dead folks to a mosque. Now, in the harsh light of what she has just learned, she is aware that it won’t do to shrug it all off. She will have to think of how best and sanely to dispense with the garments to which she attaches fond memories—her living, active son wearing them. She will wait for a few days before deciding what to do and among whom to distribute them, gratis, no doubt.
He says, “What do you say? Shall I take you to a who-die stall to buy a veil?”
Cambara sidesteps his question, putting one to him herself. “Hadn’t you given up smoking many years before you left Toronto?” she asks.
“Yes, I did.”
“Then why have you gone back?”
“One vice leads to another,” he says with a smirk.
“How do you mean?”
“Qaat chewing is the first vice I’ve picked up coming here,” he says, waving his cigarette. “It passes the time.”
“What does? Smoking?”
“Qaat chewing helps me to bear the aloneness of my everyday life,” he says. “You see, Mogadiscio is a metropolis with none of the amenities of one. There is nothing to do here: no nightclubs, no places of entertainment, and no bars in which to drown your sorrows, as even the taverns are dry of liquor. Only restaurants.”
“No cinemas?”
“None to speak of.”
“No theaters?”
“None,” he says.
“What has become of the National Theatre?”
“The National Theatre is in the hands of a warlord whose militiamen have used the stage and props, as well as the desks, doors, ceiling boards, and every piece of timber, as firewood. The roof has collapsed, and everything else—the cisterns, the sinks and the bathtubs in the washroom, not to speak of the iron gates, the computers—all has been removed, vandalized, or sold off.”
“What if someone wants to put on a show?”
“It would be a hit, but it will never happen.”
“You mean because of the warlords who run the city?” she asks.
“Or the Islamic courts that will step in to stop it going ahead,” says Zaak.
“On what grounds?”
“On moral or theological grounds.”
“But you reckon ordinary folks will watch it?”
“I reckon they would,” he replies.
Cambara’s enthusiasm is unconcealed. “How do the armed youths entertain themselves when they have time on their gun-free hands?”
Zaak replies, “They watch videocassettes of Hindi, Korean, Italian, or English movies.”
“Surely they are not schooled in these languages?”
“The movies are dubbed into Somali.”
“Dubbed? By whom?”
Chuffed, Zaak is clearly pleased that he has for once impressed Cambara with his knowledge about something of which she hasn’t an idea.
“There is a burgeoning dubbing industry in Mogadiscio,” he says. “There are also kung fu films, locally produced and entirely shot here.”
“Where are they shown?”
“In the buildings that once belonged to the collapsed state, which are now free-for-all, run-down, and populated by the city’s squatters. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the city polytechnics, the secondary schools.”
“How are the films distributed?”
“The Zanzibaris, who have come fleeing from the fighting in their country,” Zaak informs her, “have cornered this side of the business. They have total control, Mafia-like.”
“Have you seen the dubbed movies yourself?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Maybe he has time only for qaat, she thinks, then she asks, “Do you know anyone who has?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
She needs to get in touch with Kiin, the manager of Maanta Hotel, who, according to Raxma, a close friend of Cambara’s back in Toronto, is well connected and might serve the salient purpose of Cambara’s accessing information about the videocassettes, and building local contacts, including the Women’s Network, which may help her with all sorts of matters.
Cambara will admit that she has made a faux pas arriving in Mogadiscio unprepared, with no addresses and no telephone numbers of anyone except Zaak and no personal contacts. Perhaps it is too late to think of ruing her impromptu decision to come. Granted, she mulled over the visit for a long period. No matter, she won’t engage Zaak in serious talk until she has been here for a while.
She has no idea what Zaak will think of it, but she cannot help imagining him being more sarcastic than her mother, who reacted with unprecedented bafflement when Cambara informed her of her imminent trip to the country. Asked why, Cambara, in a straight approach to the task informed by a touch of defiance, told her that she meant to reclaim the family property, wrest it from the hands of the warlord. Arda instantly fumed with fury, describing her daughter’s plan as a harebrained ruse. “This is plain insane,” Arda had observed. Then the two strong-headed women battled it out, Cambara pointing out that those warlords are cowards and fools and that it won’t be difficult to be more clever than they so as to boot them out of the family property.
“This is downright suicidal,” Arda reiterated.
After arguing for days and nights, Arda consented to Cambara’s “ill-advised scheme” with a caveat: that they involve Raxma, who had wonderful contacts in Mogadiscio, and, while waiting for things to be put in motion, that Cambara should either wait in Toronto or go ahead and stay with Zaak. Be
ing a schemer with no equal anywhere, Arda set to work clandestinely on setting up a safety net as protective of her daughter as it was capable of keeping her abreast of every one of the girl’s madcap schemes. Only then did Arda agree to “give her blessing for whatever it is worth for a plan as flawed as a suicide note.”
A battlewagon hurtling down the dirt road and coming straight at them startles Zaak, who grabs her right arm and pushes her off the footpath into the low shrubs. The vehicle is carrying a motley group of youths armed to their qaat-ruined teeth. Cambara picks herself up, dusts her caftan, and has barely sufficient time to stare at the backs of their heads before the battlewagon vanishes in the swirl of sand it has helped to raise.
“Are you okay? You are not hurt?” Zaak asks.
Cambara has already moved on. She asks, “Do the warlords themselves know why they continue the fighting?”
“I don’t follow you,” Zaak says.
“Are they and their clansmen economically better off than they were when the civil war erupted? And is their position more secure? Why don’t they stop destroying what they’ve illicitly gained?”
Zaak takes his time before answering the questions, but when he does, he adjusts the tone of his voice to that of someone quoting from someone else.
He says, “The warlords make as much sense as the idea of bald men fighting over the ownership of combs, knowing that they have no more use for it.”
“What manner of men are they, the warlords?”
“The scum of the earth.”
Hot with readiness to do battle with the notion of “dirt” in civil war parlance, Cambara relives with a sense of repulsion the memory of Zaak’s creative mess and downright filth in his living conditions. She is appalled to register how his tolerance level has grown since they shared a place, how he abides toilet floors wet with God-knows-what, bathtubs black as though smeared with the soot from the sweepings of a chimney, a kitchen crawling with cockroaches and other bugs, bed-sheets brown with repeated use. Maybe the civil war has something to do with Zaak’s lowering the measure of his endurance. Maybe she hasn’t the right to claim to have known him intimately when she was assisting him in his application to gain his landed-immigrant status in Canada. Even when he first got there, Zaak had unclean ways, above all the uncouth habit of wetting the toilet seat, which made flat-sharing a daily embarrassment. And rather than endure or put up with it, she will have to find an alternative accommodation.
She won’t ever forget the shock at meeting him at the airport, when she detected cynicism and hostility both in the expressions on his face and in the remarks he made, as he hauled her half a dozen pieces of luggage to the four-wheel drive. Soon.
“Have you brought a department store?” he said.
Not rising to his comment, she said, “You know what I am like.”
“I know what women are like,” he chided her.
In a fit of pique, she almost asked him to take her to a hotel—and to hell with what her mother might say. She has come with enough cash and can afford to take a room in one of the best hotels for the duration of her stay, however long that might be. But again, she will only do it under her own terms; she won’t be pushed into making hasty, regrettable decisions. Her impatience tested, he knows what she is capable of and how often she takes umbrage at men and allows her anger to act as though it is independent of her.
As soon as they got to his place and he showed her to her room and pointed to the adjoining toilet and bathroom that were to be all hers, Cambara’s entire body suddenly went slack, and, in an instant, she was visibly suppressing a yawn, and he was offering to leave her alone for her to shower and settle in and, if she could, sleep off her jet lag. He explained that he had an urgent meeting about a conflict between two warring militias from the same subclan, a frequent-enough occurrence. But he would come back and take her along on her first expedition to the open-air market, where he would buy his daily ration of qaat. Then she heard the sound of his steps going down the staircase, a door opening and slamming; she decided to take a nap without changing into a nightgown. She remembers ceaseless noises near enough to lead her to believe that he was hanging outside her room—so close that she imagined sensing his nervous breathing.
Then she remembers him snottily shouting, “Wakey, wakey, rise and shine,” when in her drowsy reckoning she couldn’t have been asleep for more than five minutes.
Maybe she ought to have slept on, sparing herself a long walk to the open-air market so that Zaak could feed his craving for qaat. She is so exhausted that she finds it difficult to keep her eyes open, so overwhelmed by accumulated fatigue that her head feels as heavy as a wet mattress, her tongue as lifeless as the faulty stitching of a quilt. She curses under her breath in Québéçois French, knowing he wouldn’t understand a word of it.
New, all of a sudden, she awakens to a mélange of fragrances emanating from ancient spices; she is in front of a spice stall at the open-air market where a woman who trades in them is offering to sell her a selection. Other potent scents from a jamboree of mints almost knock her sideways, they are so powerful. Not far from where she is standing as if jinxed, another woman is beckoning to her. The second woman is encouraging Cambara to buy from her spread of edible plants and roots.
“I’ve brought no money,” Cambara says apologetically to the woman, who is offering her fresh cinnamon sticks, cumin seeds, roots of ginger, and cloves of garlic.
The woman is very pushy, and Cambara is more irritated with herself for not bringing some cash. A dollar would make a big difference to any of these women. As Cambara walks a couple of steps away from the stall, feeling foolish, the woman follows her and says, “Take everything that is on the mat for a dollar. This is a bargain.”
How has this woman worked out that Cambara is from elsewhere—a dollar country? Amazing.
Finally the woman says, “And since you haven’t brought any money today, why don’t you take these and bring the money tomorrow?”
But Cambara won’t hear of it; she hates the thought of being in debt to anyone, no matter how small the sum. In fact she says it in so many words and as plainly as she can, but the woman won’t let her be.
“How can it be that you haven’t any money?” the woman challenges. “Tell me where you are from, so I know. Are you from Amriika? Igland? Swiidan? Filland? Put your hand in that pocket of yours and bring out the dollar. Please do not waste my time.”
Cambara finds herself automatically putting her hand in the deep pocket as the woman has instructed, and her fingers meet the knife. She brings out her empty hand and rubs it against the other hand. She says, “I have no money today. Not a cent.”
“I’ll take what is in that pocket in exchange for my entire spread,” the woman says.
When Cambara reiterates that she has no money in her pocket, the woman’s look forthrightly questions her statement, and the two of them stare into each other’s eyes. The woman says, “Take the entire spread of spices and vegetables in exchange for the single item that is in the pocket out of which you’ve brought your hand.”
Cambara searches in vain for Zaak, whom she cannot locate. Curiously, however, she doesn’t feel abandoned or threatened. It is because she is among women. She enjoys seeing so many women trading in local produce and wearing colorful guntiino robes, the traditional attire, and the fact that they are dominating an entire section of the marketplace. Many are past their prime and don’t seem bothered about their exposed breasts; they strike Cambara as easygoing both in the way they carry their bodies and in their attitude toward one another.
She shakes herself loose from the vegetable seller and goes deeper and deeper into the mud-choked portion of the marketplace, pressing on, with one part of her conscious mind hoping to locate Zaak and the other busy working out what she might do if she can’t find him. Then she sees a child sitting on a straw mat next to an older woman, presumably her mother. Cambara is grief stricken as an image calls on her. Careworn, drowned in the suddenness of
a renewed distress related to her recent loss, she relaxes a little when she identifies the gender of the child—a girl. Next to the girl and sitting in a self-contained way, the woman has a spread of tomatoes, a pile of onions, and some emaciated-looking and nearly dry potatoes.
Zaak is back. He is saying, “Touché.”
Cambara pays him no heed. She stares at the girl until she cottons on to the little one’s tender adult movements. The girl’s expression reminds her of Dalmar, her son, whom she misses terribly and whom she has begun to see in every child of either sex or any age. That’s not all; the small girl has only one leg, her second leg having been replaced with a wooden one, crudely constructed out of grainy wood. Furthermore, as Cambara’s fragmented memories gather themselves around the girl’s grainy wooden leg, she sees Dalmar, who had a keen interest in constructing puppets. The little girl’s sweet smile, coquettishly flung in her direction the way an older woman might dart one at a man, takes Cambara back to Dalmar’s last day on this earth, as he got into the backseat of his father’s car, sweetly making smile-throwing gestures toward her and waving. Such a sweet smile in a girl so young and knowing, formulated in the carefree attitude of one who has suffered hugely at such an impressionable age. The girl is holding in her arms a modestly dressed corn-husk doll, which she is gently rocking to sleep.
Cambara makes herself look into the eyes of the little girl as into the mirrored sorrow of her loss. She feels that, despite everything, the girl has about her a sense of comfort, of being a child and a mother at the same time, and of grimacing at the discomfiture of what it is to be so young and drawn. Cambara stoops over the little girl and then crouches down pretty close to her.
“What’s your beautiful name, sweet little love?” Cambara asks.
She stares into the girl’s big dark eyes as she might look into the unfathomable black hole with which she has become intimate since her son’s death.
Even though the girl says her name several times, Cambara fails to disentangle the girl’s guttural consonants from her mute vowels. Then she looks from the little girl to the woman and then at the surrounding chaos, and back finally to the little girl, who is singing to her corn-husk doll a lullaby about a mother who has been raped, a father killed, an uncle dispossessed of his property, and a sister gone and never heard from again.
Knots Page 2
