Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  To set an example, the driver is the first to get back on his knees, mopping, washing, and assisting another youth. She works together with SilkHair to remove the accumulated grit from a corner where two walls meet and where someone spilled a drink with high sugar content. It’s just as well, she observes to herself, that they’ve dislodged a clan of ants that have set up their base of operation for several months. They all join in the general banter, teasing each other amicably. She takes the opportunity to remind them that even though they are half her age, they cannot haul the furniture back and forth without fuss or complaint. She challenges the remaining two bullies who were nasty to SilkHair to help her pick up the two two-seater settees. She discovers that neither has any idea how to lift his side of a settee off the floor without doing his back in. Then she tells them, “Forget it,” and does it with SilkHair after explaining to him how to position his body.

  All eyes swarm to her, as if she were a bee soon after the season’s flowers have blossomed into pollen of welcome seeds. Thanks to the driver, she has stung every one of them, and they are besotted not so much with her as they are with the idea of her or the idea of what she can do for them. She hopes that the driver has helped them relax into what they are doing and into relishing the sweetness of their labor. Her skin bristling, her body serves her as a radar trap in which she catches their admiring eyes as they stray away from the work they are engaged in and zoom in on her. She is relieved that the driver has spoken, saving her from caving in under the pressure of making difficult choices. Now she has two allies, SilkHair and the driver: the one because she has stuck her neck out for him and then presented him with clothes; the other because he has gone out on a limb for her and set a precedent.

  She believes that the youths have gotten to know her far better than they have Zaak, with whom they chew qaat and whom they see as a boss, because he never dirties his hands, never bothers about house cleaning or cooking. She reasons that since all her involvements with men have been on a one-to-one basis and since this has proven to be unsuccessful, it is her wish to build a bridge of some kind of rapport with so many men all at the same time, something that she hopes she is going to be good at, as an artist. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of watching audiences lapping up the heartfelt intimacies of an actor at her best, when the audience might confuse who she is in real life and what makes her tick, move, love, and hate with the character she is just portraying.

  She thinks that SilkHair looks more grown-up than when he went into the bathroom. No longer in tatters, smelly, or dirty, he has become the envy of every youth who is there. Cambara assumes that in their eyes she deserves their high praise, especially after the driver has added his word to support her action. She hopes she will have become a person to befriend, not the new boss on the block. This nervy awareness puts a proud spring in her stride and a grin blemishing the corner of her mouth.

  Someone asks, “Where is Zaak?”

  Cambara couldn’t care less where he is and does not want to talk about him. Instead, she wraps her arms around SilkHair, and together they walk to where the driver is giving the final touches to a spot he has just cleaned.

  She asks, “What about lunch?”

  “Chicken,” SilkHair announces.

  He strikes her as a poseur, and she is amused.

  “A good idea,” the driver comments.

  A door in Cambara’s head opens. She puts her hand in her slacks pockets, bringing out five U.S. dollars in singles, which she hands over to the driver, whom she asks to take two or three youths, including SilkHair, to the open-air market and to buy chicken and vegetables sufficient to feed everybody. SilkHair’s eyes anchor their new cast in the bay of self-confidence.

  The driver picks up the trace of worry entering Cambara’s eyes when she notices that the kitchen is not clean enough to cook in. The driver takes three of the youths, whom she presumes to be closer to him, aside, and they speak in low voices. They volunteer to finish the job, mop the floor, clean out the cupboards and the surfaces, as Cambara goes up to have a shower.

  Then the driver says, “Let’s go get the food.”

  After yet another cold shower, for which she is better prepared, Cambara comes down to ready the kitchen in time for the youths’ imminent return from the errand to the open-air market. In her effort to do so, she opens the lower and upper cupboards, the storeroom, the pantry, and every drawer with functioning runners and to her great dismay, finds the shelves not dusted as well as she might like. Moreover, she can see that although the youths have washed the cooking implements, they have not rinsed them in hot water, or properly. Not a single utensil or piece of crockery is of top quality. The wood of the cupboards is cracked, damaged, or warped; the soap too dry to be of use, or moldy. The more she gets to know of the state of disrepair of the kitchen and of the foul condition that it is in, despite the attempt on the part of the youths to clean it, the more she thinks of herself as a frontierswoman come to reclaim these men from their primitive condition. But she decides to keep her vow to the youths and cook for them in appreciation of their collaboration, certain that it will make a good impression on their thinking. She wants to leave the scene of their encounter in a more improved fettle than the one in which she has found it. Maybe then she may win over their hearts and minds—even if only briefly—to her triad of society: work, honest living, and peace. She is aware that in the views of someone like Zaak, she is being naive. So be it.

  Like a rodent nosing an edible bit of food out of a spot difficult to access, she prises open the cupboards, the drawers, and the sideboards in order to ascertain what is in them. There is, overall, a basic lack: of cooking oil, of sharp knives or knife sharpeners, cutting boards, of butter that has not gone rancid, of sieves and swabs, of detergents, disinfectants, and serviceable sponges; of mops with enough pieces of string or cloth attached to the handle. Nor are there washing-up facilities, clean dishcloths, usable hand or paper towels, or wooden spoons and other implements necessary to provide a decent meal for a dozen persons. The pots are of the wrong shape or are of midget size, too small for her purposes. What there is in the way of cutlery points to the house’s multiple occupancy through the years: comparable to the cutlery of variously married households, the plates not matching, the forks and the spoons likewise.

  She tries to make do with what there is. She mixes soap powder with water, lathering it up, and eventually decides to use the facecloths as dishcloths. It takes her a long time to wash and then wipe the drain board, on which she plans to dry the pots and dishes.

  Scarcely has she done that when she hears a sound, which, at first, she mistakes for a door with creaky hinges being forcibly opened. She is waiting for evidence of Zaak’s presence nearby when she identifies the noise as being that of a chicken clucking. She cranes her head to have a glimpse of the scene before her and sees SilkHair carrying three live chickens, their heads down, their necks stretched and struggling, wings opening outward and wrestling, their legs tied together with string. Trailing behind him are a couple of the other youths, nerves strained. They are bearing baskets on their heads, their steps hesitant, slow, and exhausted.

  She thinks disaster, remembering that she has never killed a chicken in all her years. Neither before she left the country, when there were servants who performed those chores, nor in Toronto, where she bought them ready to go into the oven. She wonders what she must do if the men are too untutored in the art of slaughtering chickens. After all, it does require some training or at least a type of guts to kill to eat. It will be no problem to boil their feathers off and then cook them, if someone hands them over, dead. Her mind is running fast through these and her other inadequacies when SilkHair joins her in the kitchen. He puts down the chickens in a corner on the floor and instructs the others to deposit their basket loads likewise. Just as the other youths make themselves scarce—returning, most likely, to their qaat-chewing—SilkHair crowns his sense of achievement by consulting a piece of paper, his tongue run
ning off the price of potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, carrots, live chickens, washing-up liquid, metal brush, et cetera, first in Somali shillings, then in their dollar equivalent. Then he gives her wads of change in the local currency.

  “Well done,” she says. “I am impressed.” Moved, she ruffles his silky hair, almost taking the liberty to hug him and then kiss him.

  Expansive joy shines in his eyes. As he gazes into hers, her pupils are set ablaze with memories of her son. She turns her head away as though in obedience to a secret command that tells her not to weep but to rejoice.

  Then something happens for which no one is ready. One of the birds kicks one leg free, and when SilkHair rushes to hold her, she kicks harder and harder until she releases her second leg and jumps out of his grasp, clucking, screeching, and crying, as chickens that know that their time has come, do. Cambara watches determined not to intervene or help him in any way, because she wants to know what stuff he is made of, how patient and resourceful he is, and whether he will tire easily and give up, throwing his hands up in the air.

  He makes a wise move. He stands in the doorway, blocking the exit, then bends down, almost crouching, clucking over the bird’s attempts to flee, admonishing her for embarrassing him, now snapping his fingers to go to him, now keeping his hands ahead of him, in readiness to accept her into his grasp, if not to pounce on her and take a good hold of her. He is silent; everything still, everything serious. Cambara watches as SilkHair waits, the sound he is making putting her in mind of the noise that some of the men who ply water in plastic jerry cans on the backs of donkeys utter in part to encourage their beasts of burden to move at a faster speed. No sooner has he turned round, seeking Cambara’s approval, than the hen slips past his outstretched hands, out of the kitchen, and through his splayed legs.

  Whereupon he chases the chicken into the living room and out, then past the kitchen, the bird half flying, half trotting, body atilt because of half-folded wings. Suddenly the chicken stops to look over a shoulder, eyes alert, and he pursues her into a corner to trap her. The chicken lifts her scrawny body up in time to fly above his head, mischievously clucking but only after securing safe escape.

  The footloose chicken and the clamor in the kitchen in addition to the hubbub created by the youths who join SilkHair in the chase draw the driver out of the toolshed and bring Zaak out of his sulk, or is it sleep—Cambara cannot tell when she sees him.

  “Have you gone mad?” Zaak asks her.

  She runs past Zaak without bothering to answer his question. She tells herself that the youths stalking their lunch is, to her mind, more of a welcome relief than the thought of them running after their human victims to shoot or kill them. Excited by the chase, SilkHair is shouting loudly as he continues to pursue the chicken. Once the din reaches the back garden, LongEars comes out of the shed, cheeks swollen with his chewing and gun at the ready. Cambara has the calm to notice what LongEars wants to do, and she shouts to him, “Don’t shoot.”

  The words have barely traveled the distance separating her from SilkHair and the chicken he is going after with fervor and is about to catch, having already bent down to do so, when she hears the gunshot, two bullets on the trot, the second one hitting its target and wounding it, feathers flying zigzag toward the ground. A hoarse cry emerges from the depth of SilkHair’s viscera. Cambara has a tenuous comprehension of what it means to be powerless in the face of brute force. She stands stock still, feeling like someone opening her eyes to the engulfing darkness and coming to see an indescribable betrayal in the action of those around her. She goes over to where SilkHair is crouched, furiously weeping, as though mourning the death of a beloved pet. She lets him leave the chicken where it has fallen and walks past Zaak and the youths, who are all staring, into the kitchen—to prepare the other chickens.

  Alone with SilkHair, she suggests that he swing each of the remaining birds as disc throwers do, making several full circles. Just when the first one has become disoriented and he is about to put it on the draining board in the kitchen, LongEars presents himself and offers to slaughter both birds, which he does with the efficiency of an assistant chef whose primary job it is to do so. One sudden swat, and the chicken is as good as dead and Cambara is ready to pour boiling water over it to help remove its feathers. She uses her Swiss penknife to quiet the thrashing of the second chicken, which is struggling animatedly. The rest proves to be as easy as one, two, three.

  When she has prepared the meal and Zaak deigns to eat with them, Cambara requests that as soon as they have finished eating they ask the driver to take them in the truck so that Zaak can show her the family’s expropriated property. To her great relief, he agrees to her demand.

  EIGHT

  Feeling like a different person with a brand-new selfhood, so to speak, Cambara comes out of Zaak’s house the following morning, dressed in a head-to-foot veil in the all-occluding shape of a body tent. To top it off, she has worn a strip of muslin cloth, which she holds between her teeth, like a horse with a bit, to keep it firmly in place, covering her entire face. She is donning the all-hiding garment for the first and only time in her life in the hope of disguising her identity. She walks with the consciously cautious tread of an astronaut taking his very first steps in outer space. Her forward motion plodding, her every gait a pained shuffle, her pace is as slow moving as that of a camel with its feet tied together. From a distance, she looks like a miniature Somali nomad’s aqal on wheels.

  Cambara is on her way to her family’s expropriated property, discreetly consulting a map she has drawn from memory; Zaak, along with the driver, took her to within a block of the house late yesterday afternoon. She is finding it cumbersome to do so or to look around, hampered by the all-obstructing veil. Her feet feel trapped, her chest choked and her motion hindered. She is hot; she is boiling under the collar like a traveler hauling heavy bags she does not know what to do with. She is angry with herself for not returning to Zaak and then changing into an easy-to-wear garment and supplementing this with a niqab, a mere face veil.

  She slogs with the slowness of a van with terrible shock absorbers, leaning this way and then that in complete disharmony; she is in a great deal of discomfort, perspiring heavily inside her bothersome veil and hitching up her cotton drawers as though expecting that she might sense some air passing through. Notwithstanding all this, she lumbers on, convinced that she will tower above potential aggressors in the likeness of armed youths if they attack her from close range, thanks to her hidden weapon of choice, a knife tucked away in her pocket. Cambara has always seen herself as a potential member of a cloak-and-dagger sorority, and she thinks that a knife is handy when one is surprising an armed foe who is expecting one to be unarmed.

  She walks tall and well built; she is very imposing, very impressive; she fearlessly hobbles along. She draws her eyebrows close together in concentration, her mind busily sorting out the thoughts coming at her in waves. She is thinking about the number of codes that she has broken both before coming here and since then. Even though she is officially married to Wardi, she is living alone in a house with Zaak, who is not her spouse. She has done this before under a different, albeit deceptive context. Of course, this is not Saudi Arabia. There, to enter a house, you use one of two entrances; a small, almost secret side door for the women and a bigger, more prominent one for the men. It amuses her to remember the number of times many a Somali living in those parts has committed a faux pas. Some of them have received fifty lashes for presenting themselves at the wrong door and scandalizing the household, with the women looking through the peephole, giggling, and then reporting to the harridan who chaperones the female brood. Harum-scarum and in terrific haste, the hag might ring the principal male householder, who might in turn phone the police to deal with the menace.

  Only now does she wonder if she needs to go to the property in a disguise of sorts, considering that Gudcur, the warlord, has no idea who she is and does not know her genuine self. No doubt he or his family may suspect th
e motives of her visit, which is why, in spite of camouflage, Cambara has to think of plausible grounds that will enable her to gain entry between now and when she is ready to risk asking to be admitted. By then, she will have crossed and recrossed numerous boundaries and will have come upon the moment with which she will mark the action that will define her success or failure. She hopes that she will survive the perilous course on which she is moving, unafraid. She has had warnings about the dangers that await any man or woman visiting or living in Mogadiscio, a city rampant with the ghosts of its innocent dead.

  Her eyes are red like worry beads. She turns her thoughts away from herself for a moment and focuses her attention on the houses on either side of the road where she is walking. Nothing pretty to hold her interest; the streets have the destroyed countenance of a bombed tunnel that has fallen in on itself, and the houses boast the damaged look of a tin, now empty, crushed and lying abandoned by the roadside. She strides forth, sensing that she is separate from her surroundings not only because she is veiled but also because she is wary of running into youths who have more vigor than eunuchs do and who may try to force themselves on her, being presumably alone and unprotected.

  Gray as her self-doubts, her sangfroid refuses to acquiesce to her fear; she taps her inner strength for wise guidance. Despite her ambivalence about wearing veils, she wishes someone had taken a photograph of her in the body tent. She assumes that she looks a perfect marvel, a whirl of wonder wrapped in the mysteriousness of a voluminous veil, as surefooted in the sharpness of her bodily responses to the dangers that may be posed as she is relaxed in her knowledge that she can defend herself. She pauses in her stride to observe two women wearing less elaborate veils passing. Farther up the road, coming her way, there is yet a third in a class of her own—she thinks of a dervish spinning a holy trail of dust raised in the act of Sufi worship-in-dance.