Cambara mulls over the day’s events and at night eats her heart out until there is nothing left of it to pump her blood around. Cambara and Zaak have known of each other’s waking, sleeping, and other bodily timetables, their likes and dislikes, since living together first as youngsters and later when they pretended to be husband and wife in Toronto. Now that they do not have to bother about form, she wonders if Zaak will cope with the tensions that are an integral part of their new condition.
Cambara was born to a happier childhood, with parents who adored her, especially her father, who was very content with an only daughter, on whom he doted. Although of a firmer strain of mind, Arda adored her in her own way from the moment of delivering her into the hands of a world ready to welcome her with adulation.
They were a very atypical Somali couple, her parents, blessed as they were with an unusually bright and attractive daughter. It was unheard of for a man to be as devoted as her father was to his only wife, Arda, to whom he was also faithful. When Cambara grew to be self-consciously lonely, needing a kind of playmate and companion, her parents “invited” Zaak, Arda’s nephew, the oldest of six brothers and the smartest of them all, into their home, to keep Cambara away from mischief; he was also to tutor her in her science subjects, in which she was weak. Because Zaak’s parents often came down heavily on him in view of his maladroitness, Arda took care not to be on his case even, being all thumbs and no fingers, when he made a hash of things. Arda brought him into their home on the speculation that Cambara would benefit from living in close proximity to a boy very different from her, gambling on the assumption that he would stand her in good stead in the future.
Zaak, in recompense, received material comforts as well as intellectual backup, these being of a piece with living in Cambara’s home. He trained his mind for higher things, whatever these meant, and while doing so, kept Cambara busy and out of misconduct. To keep his mind occupied profitably, Zaak would set himself unattainable challenges, including committing an entire dictionary to memory or picking up the rudiments of a new language in a matter of days. She would often catch herself asking, But to what end? He would retort that he was doing these things just for the fun of it. Then he would spend the best part of a weekend reading Tolstoy in Arabic, only to read the same novel the following week in English.
Years later, only after he had spent two thousand days in prison, a thousand and one of them in solitary confinement, would Cambara understand what he meant when he spoke of training his mind for higher things. Everyone assumed, until a decade later, following his marriages to, respectively, Cambara and Xadiitha and then his relocation to Mogadiscio that he had come out of detention unscathed. Not so, apparently. Cambara thinks that maybe his current physical and mental conditions are symptomatic of the country’s collapse, a metaphor for it.
When younger, she was the more self-assured of the two, the one with the handsomer demeanor, blessed with everything you wanted in a child growing up. He was weak in the eyes and wore glasses as thick as an elephant’s posterior. He had a feeble heart and was given to complaining of sudden flutters. Quite often, you saw him holding on to his chest, doubling up in pain, or coughing nonstop. He was deficient in many physical departments but was very strong in the mind. Cambara’s mother admired his mental strength but so often worried enough about his health that she consulted doctors and, on occasion, other types of healers, some quacks of the duplicitous kind, others of the sort who sought cure-alls for ailments in the word of the divine.
Cambara became aware of their physical boundaries when she came in on him one day, naked. His pubes were covered with hair; hers weren’t. And he was fondling himself. To this day, she doubted if he had seen her or heard her tiptoe away. She would’ve been about nine and he about fifteen. She had gone to his room to ask him to help her with a math problem, and she had to slink away quietly. This would have been the first secret she had withheld from her mother. If she had spoken of what she saw to either of her parents, she was sure her parents would not have stopped at blaming him; one of them might have consequently punished him. Years later, as putative spouses sharing living spaces but no intimacies, she would often wonder to herself how much change would have occurred between his youth and then, as a grown man. Not that she was ever tempted to look through a knothole. She feels certain that in his current state—what with his distended paunch and his continuous consumption of qaat, said to affect a man’s sexual prowess negatively—Zaak’s manhood is as lifeless as a hangnail.
Furthermore, she recalls now that later the same morning, while she was alone and brooding, she happened to come across a peacock that was excited at seeing her and which behaved as though agitated when Cambara paid it no mind. The peacock was on full display, with an elevated peacock eye, vainglorious in bearing and gait, and with a most gorgeous train, which he now thrust forward at Cambara, or so thought the then pubescent girl. A nearby harem of peahens kept their safe distance, especially when the feathers of the peacock’s tail started to shake and he moved in Cambara’s direction, eager to make contact with her. From where she was, she remarked the shimmering quality of the peacock’s feathers at the same time she heard the rustling sound that, aroused, he emitted. She would hear it purported that young girls or women anxious about their own sexuality attract peacocks; these pick up their body odors, which, unbeknownst to them, they release into the biosphere. On that day, in her own dim recall, Cambara, weeping, ran off to her mother. She came close to telling her mother whom she had seen, where, and what he had been doing; she came close to speaking about being aroused at the sight of a peacock in full libidinous magnificence. Was it then, she wondered, that Arda began to think that her daughter and nephew were destined to become man and woman?
Cambara and Zaak’s relationship lost its childlike innocence soon after that, and she dared not look at him from then on without remembering these two, in her mind, related incidents. Even though she considered asking that he show himself to her again, she could not bring herself to do so, fearing that he might not. Meanwhile, he became more self-conscious in her presence, often displaying shy evidence that he had discovered his own body. Less voluble than before, he took refuge in sulky silences.
As she washes the dishes in the sink with soap powder intended for clothes, she wonders what his reaction might have been if she had broached the topic. She had never dared to allude to this incident in Toronto. She doubts very much if there is any point in doing so now.
“Tell me,” Zaak says. “How is Wardi?”
Cambara is at a loss for elegant words. This is because she wishes to avoid falling into a foul mood, in which her fury may run ahead of her and lead her astray, into a world of rage, remorse, or regret. She thinks it inappropriate to scamper after one’s rage, convinced that she will never be able to catch up with it. It is a pity, she reasons, that, because of her wish to exercise some self-restraint, she will not allow herself to express the full extent and source of her sentiments either. Her mother is loath to be around her daughter when her rage erupts, a rage she describes as being hotter than and more dangerous than Mount Etna. In addition, of course, Zaak knows that Cambara’s parents raised her in a way that precluded her being straitjacketed into the role of a traditional Somali female. He is doubtful if, having been told of it, he could have located her rage as a recent one, to do with her conjugal relationship. To him, Cambara was fine, until one day you would find her off her noodle, deluded, and highly impractical.
He looks on, expectantly silent, as Cambara speaks cautiously lest her words run into one another, like the felt pen scrawls on a blotting paper. How she wishes she could lean on the very rage that is crippling her; how she wishes she could draw sustenance from it. But her words come out a little too creakily, her voice, even if raised, remaining soft in the peripheries and hard at the center, like calluses rasping on sandpaper. She is aware that she will be talking about a man whom she hates to another whom she equally loathes: two men, both losers, with whom she
has had a kind of intimacy, the one foisted on her, the other chosen by her. She has no doubts they are or will be in touch. Let Zaak relay whatever it pleases him to; she does not care.
“It’s daunting to explain what has happened,” she says, and, pausing, she looks him in the eyes until he averts his gaze. “For years, I have lived with an unarticulated rage that has since become part of me and that has taken a more murderous turn after my son, Dalmar’s, drowning. I trace the source of the rage and Dalmar’s unfortunate death to Wardi.”
She has tears in her eyes, but because she will not let go of a drop of it, she trembles. Cambara is a dyed-in-the-wool rejecter of other people’s unearned pity.
Zaak intercepts the course of their conversation, guiding it to terra firma, and asks if she intends to live in the property herself if she manages to wrest it from the hands of the man illegally occupying it. He adds a rider, “As I said before, I doubt very much that the man will go without a fight.”
“I have no idea what I will do with it once the property is in my hands,” she replies. “I feel certain deep within me that I will wrench it from his clutch.”
“You must know something I don’t,” he says.
“I do.”
“Will you share it with me? I’m curious.”
She does not repeat what she said to her mother about the warlords being cowardly et cetera; she chooses not to, because this way he will have a counterargument. She says, “I am a determined woman, and determined women always have their way.”
A snicker. Then, “Will you rent it or sell it?”
“I haven’t figured out what I’ll do,” she says.
Struck by the sorrow spreading on his countenance, he is perhaps mourning like a man watching the passing of an age. He quotes a few lines from an Arab poet, and imagines seeing a dove struck in midflight and shot at the very instant she gazes upon her destroyed nest; the dove dies. The image of Cambara meeting a sorry end makes him shake his head in disapproval. However, he does not speak of the ruin he envisions for anyone who attempts to dislodge a warlord, minor or major, from the house he occupies.
He asks, “Why wrest the property from those living in it if you have no idea what you will do with it?”
“Because it’s mine,” she says.
“And you want it back, no matter the risk?”
“What risks can there be?”
He has heard of a handful of property owners who have been gunned down when they tried to repossess what was legally theirs. Some have reportedly been harassed and run out of town; others have been humiliated and their womenfolk raped to teach them a lesson. No longer sure if there is any point in voicing his admonitions, he wonders if her determination to forge ahead with a plan hatched in Toronto, while she was enraged and with no intimate knowledge of the situation on the ground, is tantamount to a death wish. The more he thinks of it the more surprised he is that Arda made no mention of Cambara’s intentions. Is it possible that she has no idea how mad her daughter is? Wardi had once been the cause of their separation, when daughter and mother wouldn’t exchange a greeting. Could it be that they were barely on talking terms and that Arda had rung him to host Cambara out of concern for her safety, no more?”
“Do you know who the occupant is?” he asks.
“Tell me what you must tell me, anyway.”
“His name is Gudcur,” Zaak says, “and he is the ringleader of a ruthless clan-based militia raised from the ranks of one of Mogadiscio’s brutal warlords.”
“I don’t stand in awe of any of the warlords.”
“Have you worked on the practical side of things?”
“What might these be?”
“How you are going to go there and so on?”
“I was hoping you would point me in the general direction of the place, since I won’t recognize it, because of the state the whole neighborhood is in,” she says, taking a sip of her now cold tea. “I would appreciate it if you took me round and showed me the outlay of the area. You can leave the rest to me.”
“Any contingency plan if you are hurt?”
“I hear what you’re saying,” she says impatiently.
“I want you to know I’ll take no part in it.”
“I am aware of that.”
A sudden harshness comes into his eyes, and she stares back hard at him. Maybe she is hoping to shame him into withdrawing his pledge not to be party to her lunacy. He absorbs her reproving stare with the equanimity of a sponge taking in more water than it can hold, and, having nothing better to do, he starts to sort the rice from the chaff, preparatory to cooking the risotto for their evening meal.
Growing restless in the extreme, Cambara rises to her full height and then, as an afterthought, bends down to gather the tea things. As she does so, Zaak has a good glimpse of her cleavage, and, fretful, he stirs in his chair. Both are conspicuously nervous, and Zaak, the first to move, takes two long strides in the direction of the toilet, entering it, maybe because the door to it happens to be the only one that is near and open or maybe because he needs a place where he can hide his embarrassment. For her part, she draws her lips back into a huge grin as she says to herself, “In addition to being a loser, he is a wanker.”
When, several minutes later, he joins her in the kitchen, she is drying her hands after having washed the pile of dirty dishes. She has her back to him, standing imperiously in front of the sink, her head bent slightly to one side, her body tall as a pole, motionless and in concentration. He cannot work out what is on her mind, in part because of her air of toughness, practiced, and also because of her determination. She will work on regaining the inner calm that she first lost on the day her son died and that she thought she would never ever recover on the morning she beat Wardi up. Then she will prepare for the ultimate battles. She intends to reject death; she means to celebrate life, and she can only do this away from Zaak, not with him. She prays that Kiin will prove a helpful, trustworthy friend on whom she can rely.
Midway through drying the plates, she turns round. Zaak, as if on cue, reassembles his features, adorning his fat lips with a beautiful smile.
“What is on your mind?” he asks.
“It may not make any sense to you, but I am thinking that mine is a life that needs simple satisfactions,” she says. “I want my own property back, and I want to put my life together the best way I can, on my own terms and under my own steam.”
“Does Wardi figure in any of this, somewhere?”
“I have no wish to factor him in,” she replies.
“Maybe that is the problem?”
“How is that?”
The word “problem” has in Zaak’s view an erotic edge to it; it boasts of a territoriality, if you will, of things hidden, of sweets binged on, of lies spoken and not owned up to, of the death of a child not as yet satisfactorily mourned. And she? She is wholly unanchored by his use of the word in its erotic sense. Maybe “problems” arouse him.
“Might I suggest something?” he asks.
“Go ahead.”
“Think ‘danger’ before you do something rash,” he says. He sounds wise, at least to himself, and he grins from cheek to cheek, euphoric. “Meanwhile, you and I will work on arriving at a modus vivendi agreeable to us both.”
She moves about as though she has been cast loose from everything that might hold her back, her eyes twinkling with a knowing smirk, lit with a torch of mischief.
“You are on your own if you decide to visit the property,” he says. “I am making it clear for the last time. I’ll come nowhere near the place.”
“We’ll stop half a kilometer away and won’t come out of the truck. You will point me in the direction of the house so I can familiarize myself with the surrounding landmarks.”
“All set,” he says.
“Just a moment.”
And she goes to her room upstairs and returns shortly, wearing an oversized veil, khaki-colored, dark mirrored glasses, and on her head, although she doesn’t need it, a scarf
to further disguise her appearance.
Then they go for a drive to reconnoiter.
SIX
Cambara, reminding herself to ask Zaak to give her a set of keys, gets into the four-wheel-drive truck, clumsily hitching up the bottom end of her veil and eventually reclaiming its loose ends from the sharper corner of the vehicle’s door, in which it had gotten caught. She heaves herself up into the passenger seat, first by raising herself on the heels of her palms, her entire upper body leaning forward in a tilt, and then by lifting the rest of her body up into place, voilà! She shifts about a little agitatedly before repositioning herself in an attempt to be as far away from Zaak as possible.
Zaak replaces his house keys in his pocket, breathes anxiously in and out, the words catching at his throat when he starts to say something. He looks at Cambara with an incensed expression on his face. He turns away from her, the better to wait until she has made herself comfortable before he speaks. Then she observes that he is more eager to talk to his captive audience than he is to start the engine and get moving.
He says reproachfully, “You are being rash.”
“How so?” she asks.
He holds her gaze. Then he says, “Why the rush?”
Stymied for an appropriate reply, she remains silent.
He says, “We have all the time in the world to plan so that we make things work to our advantage.”
“We do, do we?” She singles out the one word, the first person plural in “to our advantage.” She is surprised by his feigned keenness to include himself, remembering that he has been saying that he does not wish to have anything to do with her folly.
He scrutinizes her features for a clue and, discerning none, goes on, “The way you are going about it—calling on the man and his family who are occupying the property without having the slightest idea what we will do after the visit—is downright foolish.”
Knots Page 10
