Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  Mr. Winthrop feigns interest. “What’s she up to?”

  “She is off to Mogadiscio,” Arda replies, as if going to Somalia is tantamount to committing a crime in a murder-free suburb in Ottawa. “She is off—to use her own words—to recover our family property. Do you remember the property, which you saw, loved, and then rented? She wants to wrest that property from the clutch of a warlord with lots of blood on his hands. No one is asking her to go in pursuit of trouble or of possible death. Not I. If she were to listen to my advice, I would suggest that she rid herself of her estranged husband, that she divorce him and not bother about the property. Alas, she will not hear of it. She just likes to complicate matters, maybe because the plainness of things wearies my daughter, drives her nuts. Up she must go to that wretched country and risk herself for nothing. Because I am sure that the property, which you and I know well and which brought us together, making us into the friends that we now are, is in ruins, unrecoverable. I keep asking, What is the use? I keep saying, What is the point?”

  A sudden ruckus in the street brings Cambara back to the present, alerting her to the fact that not only is she in Mogadiscio, come on a reconnoitering walkabout, veiled, in disguise, she is now in a shop as part of her expedition and is bearing witness to two preteen boys locked in combat, kicking, punching, and tearing at each other’s sarongs. A large woman in a wraparound guntiino, bearing a club the size and shape of an alpenhorn, comes out of one of the houses, walks past the crowd of onlookers now gathering, just watching. Silent and serious-looking, she puts her club down close to her feet, from where she can pick it up before grabbing one of the boys by his hair, pulling it. Throwing him back as if he were no bigger than a greasy dishcloth, she steps in between them, frighteningly huge. Then she stares down at one, then the other, not speaking but domineering.

  The shopkeeper, with a touch of pride, says, “Here is further evidence if you need it.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “In former days,” the man explains, “two boys of their age from different clans would have settled a small dispute by shooting at each other; not now. And they would not have allowed a woman to stop their fight; they would have killed her, point-blank. Now you can see them going their different ways, licking their wounds in humiliation and silence.”

  Cambara watches, mesmerized, as the amazon who a moment ago separated the two boys stands, elbows pointing outward, and waits for the crowd to disperse before returning to her house.

  “Who is she to them?” she asks the shopkeeper.

  “She is nothing to either of the boys,” explains the shopkeeper. “Not their mother or aunt. Or even a distant relative.”

  “Where does she come into it, though?”

  “She is a member of the Women for Peace network.”

  “Please tell me more,” Cambara pleads.

  The shopkeeper obliges. “In several of the city’s districts, women have been organizing against gun violence. Gun violence has led to a high incidence of rape and the deaths of many. The failure of the country’s political class to end the civil war has prompted the women to set up an NGO—Women for Peace—funded by the EU.”

  “How come you know all this?” she asks.

  “Because my wife is on the steering committee.”

  Cambara realizes that he is looking at the back door, presumably through which he goes into his house, where his wife may be busy attending to some chore or other. She is about to ask if his wife is at home, when a young fellow enters the shop through the same back door to announce that he will take her to her waiting taxi.

  The man does his sums for her benefit a second time, and Cambara collects her change in wads of Somali shillings, so bulky she does not know where to put it. The shopkeeper comes to her aid, giving her a handbag, almost new. When she hesitates, saying that she does not know when she will return it or how, he encourages her with the words “We’re bound to see you again and will be happy to. Take it, and bring it back when you come again.”

  Thinking, “There goes my chance of asking the shopkeeper to give me his name or his wife’s, or the source of the items on the shelves,” she follows one of the assistants as he walks out through the front door, wheeling a barrel load of her purchases, covered in a toweling material. The young fellow turns a sharp right, then a sharp left. The taxi, an ancient Lada dating from the Cold War years, when the Soviets ran the show in Mogadiscio, boasts bald tires and is phenomenally rich in rust and paint loss, not to mention the number of things that she presumes will not work. She wonders if it is wise or safe to sit in it and be driven first to Hotel Shamac, where she can get to the business of tracking down Kiin, then perhaps to Hotel Maanta, and after that to Zaak’s place.

  “Where to?” asks the driver, as the youth puts her purchases in the car boot, the driver struggling first to open it, then to fit them in. She can see the glassless window open, she can feel the seat sagging, even before she goes in and sits, She can also see, from where she is, that the space where her feet will be when she enters is a gaping hole. If she derives any comfort from taking the taxi, it is that there is no one with a gun; even the driver seems unarmed. She is immensely relieved. Nonetheless, just to be sure, she asks, after he has closed the trunk, “No armed escort?”

  “My taxi is so old it is safe,” replies the driver, showing the cavities in his mouth as if she were a dentist requesting that he let her see his gums.

  “Hotel Shamac, please.”

  “Please get in.”

  TEN

  A small bother gains purchase in Cambara’s mind. She wonders whether to settle on the invented identity of a veil-wearer or reestablish her own, now that she is driving away from the area in a taxi that is about to move. She finds the requirements of her veil-wearing identity not only too demanding but exhausting, burdensome, too hot to lug along, and too cumbersome to accommodate.

  She remembers coming out of the shop, feeling elated and believing that she has achieved a feat far in excess of her own expectations. She recalls emerging into the glare of the afternoon hour, majestically wrapped in her tentlike garment, slow-moving and imposing in an eye-catching way, doing her utmost not to attract unnecessary attention to herself, yet this is what she has ended up doing. She could tell this from the way in which dozens of loiterers hanging outside the shop like paparazzi now fasten their stares on her, as if she were a celebrity. In preference to going in and sitting in the taxi, she decided to make sure the youth put all her shopping bags in before she turned her back on him.

  To make matters worse, the youth who wheeled out the cart loaded with her purchases took his time off-loading it, transferring the items one by one into the many-holed trunk of the taxi. On occasion, he even rummaged in the shopping bags. She had no idea why and dared not ask him, lest she upset him—who knows what he may do, or whether he will react violently?

  Now, the taxi engine running, Cambara keeps her wary eyes on the driver gawking at her, and the small crowd that has gathered staring. For his part, the driver has his foot on the brakes and the handbrake firmly in his right hand, maybe because he does not trust its efficacy.

  When Cambara gives the youth who has helped off-load a tip in a wodge of shillings the real value of which she does not know, she gets in and says to the taxi driver, “Shall we go?”

  The taxi is ill tempered, and its engine stalls as the driver engages it into a second gear to get moving, perhaps because the first is dysfunctional, she is not sure. He turns the key in the ignition two or three times before he cranks it and it catches. This reminds Cambara of her horrid experience in the truck, with Zaak. However, once she ceases to worry, the vehicle moves without stopping. Now she is unnecessarily preoccupied, not only because it is the first time she has put on a veil but also because it is the first time since her arrival in Mogadiscio that she is in a one-to-one situation, alone in a car with a male stranger. It is important that she settle on a choice of identity that makes her garb match her behavior. Can she mea
sure up to the challenge as a pretender?

  Two options are open to her. On the one hand, she can act as though finding herself alone in the company of a male stranger is frightening, wholly paralyzing, keep her face veil on for effect, and decline to exchange a single word with the driver during the entire journey. This, she knows, will necessitate staying out of his rearview mirror and his radius of vision. She doubts she can pull this off, with the seat in the back being so uncomfortable and her moving and readjusting to avoid the springs and the sagging inconvenience. Moreover, she has to ensure that at no time during the entire trip does her face wander into his discernment, or her eye make contact. She cannot act in a way he might construe remotely as coquettish. On the other hand, she can act true to form and don her God-given identity in place of the veil. Given the choice, she will opt for the identity in which she plays herself—a woman easygoing in the company of men. What to do with the trappings? Cambara resolves not to rush but to wait for the appropriate time.

  He is saying, “Are you staying at Hotel Shamac?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I may up the price of the ride.”

  “Do you think that is fair?”

  “I am afraid,” he says, “the word ‘fair’ no longer forms part of the vocabulary here.”

  “I find that disconcerting.”

  “Do you know what that tells me about you?”

  “What?”

  “That you are from somewhere else.”

  “Because I’ve used the word ‘fair’?”

  “And also because of your veil.”

  “What about my veil?”

  “It’s obvious you are not accustomed to wearing one,” he says, and manages a smile.

  “How can you tell that?”

  “In pre–civil war days, I used to head the transport unit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, assigned to chauffeur important dignitaries and ambassadors on missions to Somalia. I remember how often many of them would take off their ties, as if they were masks of disguise, the moment they were in the car and among their friends. How they would sigh, a large number of them, relieved.”

  She feels exposed, and fresh strong winds of self-doubt start battering her from all sides. Her bodily movements strenuous, she shifts, agitated, a part of her mind urging her to remove one of the disguises, the face veil; at least she will feel more comfortable. However, before she acts out her inner contradictions, she ponders whether caving in to the suggestion from a man unknown to her will undermine her objective and turn her into a quarry of his machination, whatever his motives. An uncanny memory, in which Wardi figures prominently, calls on her. She sits in the back of the vehicle as maudlin as a tanked-up drunk decidedly resisting surrendering to the groundswell of sorrows coming at her in sizzled waves.

  She elects not to acquiesce to the easier of the options, her thoughts wandering away, her eyes likewise. She sees more ruin everywhere she looks, houses with no roofs, lampposts denuded of cables, windows lacking glass panes: a Mogadiscio raided and destroyed. Looking around from where she is, she sees women in cheap chadors, men in sarongs and flip-flops, their guns slung over their shoulders. She concludes that the city, from her encounter with it in the shape of most of its residents, appears to have been dispossessed of its cosmopolitan identity and in its place has begun to put on the clannish, throwaway habits of the vulgar, threadbare semi-pastoralists. Even though she cannot contain her despair, she does not wish to dwell on the consequences of the civil war and the destruction visited on the entirety of the society; she wants to talk about the positive side of things. Therefore, she decides to focus on the shopkeeper and his wife, who, according to her husband, is active in the Women for Peace network that Raxma had told her about.

  “How long have you known the gentleman who runs the general store where you picked me up?” she asks.

  “I’ve known him and his family for a long time.”

  “Tell me a little about them.”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “His name, for a start,” she says.

  “Why are you interested in knowing about him?” the driver asks. From the expression on his face, she cannot decide if their conversation is entertaining him or causing him worry.

  “I’ve found him very friendly, a gentleman of the kind you rarely meet in a city said to belong to the self-serving warlords and their henchmen. It has been a pleasure doing business with him.”

  “What business are you in?”

  Of course she does not want to tell him much about herself, but then how can she expect him to help her with her questions about a third party when she doesn’t seem willing to talk about herself? She puts a different spin on a response to a question he did not ask at the same time as she tries to put him right.

  “I am saying it has been a pleasure shopping at his store,” she tells him. “Moreover, he has lent me a bag, and I want to return it to him as soon as I am done with it. It would be good if I knew his name. That is all.”

  “Everybody calls him by his nickname, Odeywaa,” the driver tells her. “He is an unusual businessman with integrity. He is honest, he is fair, he is very forthright with everyone with whom he deals, including all the members in the atypical cooperative that he runs—the only cooperative of its kind.”

  “What is so unconventional about it?”

  “He serves the community at large in a way no other cooperative does. Of the nearly two million Somalis in the diaspora, there are tens of thousands who find themselves in areas of the world from where they cannot make remittances to their needy relatives at home in convertible hard currencies, like the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the sterling. Odeywaa’s aim in establishing the cooperative is to provide an outlet for the Somalis residing within the country who receive remittances in clothes and other goods, where they can sell them almost at cost price. It is a very rare thing he is doing, in this city where everyone is flocking to the warlords’ homes, their heads bowed in fawning subservience to their authority, paying their respects and behaving as commoners do in the presence of their betters.”

  The driver goes quietly off on a woolgathering expedition, and from his face in the rearview mirror, she deduces that he is entertaining a private reverie; she lets him be, in silence, waiting.

  He continues, “In this low intensity of the civil war, more of us are wising up to the fact that we have nothing but disdain for the warlords’ doings, a kind of contempt equaled only by our scorn for the so-called clan elders, who sanction the recruitment of the youths into the fighting militia.” He pauses long enough for Cambara to sit forward, eager to hear his words. “I see the warlords for what they are—men in drag, every one of them.”

  “Men in drag? That’s a new one.”

  The driver goes on, “In fact, one of them—also known as The Butcher—fled the southern city of Kismayo, dressed as a woman, when he lost control of it.”

  “What do you think of the religious leaders?”

  “Alas, they have shown their true colors too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing that they have done since the explosion of the civil war will endear us to the religious leaders, many of whom have lapsed into a state of despair, in which they have declared their loyalty not to Allah, the supreme, but to their birth communities, each to his own, as it were.”

  They drive in silence again, moving in a southwesterly direction, over potholes that insist on frequent, abrupt detours and occasional sudden halts, if only to avoid the roadside ditches or the piles of rubbish along them. They pass walls pocked with bullet holes and buildings teetering unsteadily away in the opposite direction from which they will eventually fall when they do collapse.

  Cambara asks whether—now that the city is no longer divided into North and South, with two warlords running it, but has half a dozen less powerful signori di guerra, each ruling over his dysfunctional fiefdom—people are apprehensive, locked in a sense of insecurity, the Islamists may en
d up gaining the superior hand. These could appeal to the Somalis’ sense of religious identity, in place of the clan one, which has proven unsatisfactory. The warlords are a spent force; the Islamists not yet.

  As though on cue, young armed boys in fatigues, which have known better carers and cleaner wearers, emerge out of a building, and one of them raises his hand at their approach, stopping them. The grin that has been there for much of the trip—the grin of someone who knows something her interlocutor does not—descends toward her chin before disappearing completely. As the driver brakes with unprecedented abruptness, Cambara thinks ahead, imagining the vehicle collapsing, with the front and the back tires going their different ways and the rest of it landing on its belly and shuddering to a lifeless halt.

  One of the boys goose-steps to the driver’s side, his jaws busy chewing qaat. His hand extended out farther than his bleary eyes can focus, his tongue heavy, as if it were foam soaked in water, and his words running into one another competitively, he asks, “What have you got for us?”

  “We meet again,” says the driver.

  A much taller youth who is standing behind the watery-eyed youth says, with sarcasm, “You were mean then. Now let me warn you that you and your passenger will pay dearly for it if you do not give generously this time.”

  The driver’s eyes search in the depth of the rearview mirror for Cambara’s, and because the grin that has been there all along has vanished, he takes it that she is afraid. His hand, foraging until then in the glove compartment, emerges with a large roll of cash, which he turns over to the youth standing closest to him. When the youth uses the wad as a fan, indicating his dissatisfaction, the driver throws in two bundles of qaat. “Now you are talking,” the tallest of the youths, presumably their ringleader says, with a wave telling him to leave, which he does, as soon as he can.