Her elsewhere look is back, the driver notices with agreeable suddenness. She says, “If you work out, do not hesitate to add the armed youth’s levy to my bill, and I will pay it gladly.”
He recalls the days he served as head chauffeur driving visiting dignitaries on missions to the country, and he bows his head with deference, in thankful acknowledgment of her generosity. He says, “Yes, ma’am!”
A few hundred meters on, when they hear the distant hum of a huge generator, the driver informs her that they are less than half a kilometer away from their destination. For the first time since her arrival, Cambara is in awe of the enormity of her commitment: to come to Mogadiscio and help make the world that she finds a better place, in memory of her son, whose life has been cut short.
“Here we are,” he says. “Hotel Shamac, ma’am!”
ELEVEN
They have barely come within view of the gate when an armed guard, in what she guesses to be the hotel uniform, comes out of a small lean-to recently assembled in haste from discarded zinc sheets when neither she nor the driver has prepared for it. The man is of medium height, has a wide face, prominent jaws, and a snub nose, his nostrils barely visible. SnubNose flags down the taxi, the tires of which screech to a halt, jerking her forward. Notwithstanding her edginess, Cambara affects total calm, even after another man appears on the scene. The second armed sentry has a long upper body and the tiny feet of a midget. TinyFeet orders the taxi driver to step out of the vehicle; he circles the vehicle several times, his finger on the trigger of his machine gun all the while and his attention focused on Cambara, maybe hoping that she will lower down her side of the window and show her face.
She sits back, with her face veil in place and eyes closed, as though trying to soothe herself into trusting that everything will be all right soon. Scarcely has she decided to explain to them that she intends to take a room in the hotel if there is a vacancy, when TinyFeet yanks the vehicle door open and instructs her to alight in order for her to be frisked.
A roaring row erupts between the taxi driver and SnubNose, when the driver shuts the door of the vehicle and encourages Cambara to stay put.
“Who are you to close the door when I’ve opened it?” TinyFeet challenges, furious and red-eyed. He pushes the driver away.
Cambara enjoins the driver, sotto voce, to desist from provoking the armed guards any further. The driver falls silent at her insistence, even though she can see that he is in a defiant mood, ready to rear up in further resistance and, if necessary, fight. Then, recalcitrant and fearless, he says to TinyFeet, “But can’t you see, it is inappropriate for you to subject a woman to a body search? It is not done. A woman should be doing that kind of job, not men. At least not you.” He adds, after a weighty pause, “Would you allow your wife or sister to be humiliated in this way by a man, whether armed or not?”
Now the altercation takes a more ominous twist, and SnubNose joins the shouting match, turning it into a threesome, two armed fools poised against her protector, who is unarmed—how unfair. Cambara listens, with a bilious discharge gathering in her gut, as she considers whether to step in. SnubNose speaks loudly and threateningly through his nose, but she cannot make sense of what he is saying, he is so enraged. Also, his accent is dyed-in-the-wool local, and his choice of words points to a speech pattern of a hard-edged sort and of a pastoral provenance that Cambara, who is city-born and has been away from the country, cannot follow.
TinyFeet involves himself and for her benefit interprets what his colleague has said. “Let us tell you something,” he says. “We will shoot first at the tires of your taxi and then at the passenger if you do not go into reverse and leave immediately or if the woman does not alight. Make your choice and be quick about it too.”
“Let us be sensible,” the driver pleads.
“Are you accusing us of being women molesters?”
“I am doing no such thing,” the driver insists.
“You are insulting us. I know what you are doing,” says TinyFeet.
Cambara’s pretense of composure is completely shattered; she cowers at the disturbing thought of her virtue being violated. But I’ll be damned if I will allow them to touch me, she says to herself. She replaces her hand among the inner folds of her body tent, and only after she takes a good grip of the knife does she feel comforted.
In his desire to placate the armed guards, the driver lowers his voice. Speaking almost in a whisper, he implores TinyFeet. “Please, this is a very respectable lady, in a veil,” he says. “I can vouch for her. She won’t be any trouble if you allow her to go in without you frisking her. As it is, she intends to check out the hotel, because she wants to take a room. So why do we not escort her in? A woman at the reception can do the body search, inside, if there is need. I’ll get back into the car and go in reverse and wait for her here. If not, then I suggest that you bring a woman out to where we are. Because it is not proper that you or any man touch her. She is a lady and must be treated as such.”
When the goings-on jar on her nerves some more, she resolves to bring it all to a head—and suddenly. She alights from the taxi, laboring as she does so. Now that she is out of the car, her veiled persona imposing, she stretches her arms, straightens her back, massaging it, and repeatedly stamps her booted feet on the ground in the manner of an elephant frightening away its attackers. Besides getting the dust off her footwear, she hopes she will be able to cast a spell on the armed guards. If only she could forge bewitchments that will make them do her bidding. She looks stately; they seem enchanted, fascinated, their undivided attention fully focused on the enigmatic figure of a woman, veiled, standing a little over six feet, her hands ensconced among the wrappings of her tent, doing with them what only the Lord knows. Maybe because they are not used to women performing, Cambara’s imperious presence unsettles them.
On the outside, she appears to know what she is doing; not so inside. She is terribly worried that she may not pull it off; her viscera keep churning overwhelming quantities of barf. But the actor in her takes absolute command of the situation.
“Since you won’t let my taxi in,” she says, “please let the driver bring out of the trunk of his taxi my oddment of purchases. You may inspect them. In fact, I would be grateful if one of you will give him a hand to bring them in, given that there are no page boys about.”
She turns her back on them and walks away in an ungainly manner, every short shuffle a huge undertaking, conscious that no one can touch her for this out-and-out act. She has no way of knowing if they will shoot her in the back, but she doubts it. When she has taken a few paces, and they do not order her to stop unless she submits herself to being bodily searched, she looks back and sees them whispering to one another, nodding their heads; their acquiescent glances end in TinyFeet affecting a retreat and SnubNose following suit.
At TinyFeet’s behest, the driver parks on the shoulder of the dusty road, then retrieves Cambara’s shopping bags and follows her, grinning from cheek to cheek, his wandering eyes meeting the armed sentries’ scowls. Neither offers to help carry the bags. In fact, SnubNose wags his finger menacingly at the driver. When he joins her at the reception, the driver, eager to return to his vehicle, puts the bags down and asks, “Do you want me to wait for you?”
“That won’t be necessary,” she says.
She removes her face veil and notices several men looking at her from different angles, not one of them making a move toward her. Curiously and rather irreverently, it strikes her as if, in the view of some of them, she is behaving like a stripper doing it on the cheap.
Self-conscious, she pulls out of her bag a handful of bills bundled into thousands with a rubber band. At a guess, she hands over to the driver several wads of the devalued currency. “Will this suffice?” she asks.
He weighs the wads, as if he can tell their value by weight alone, and then shakes them before his face, as if they’re only good for use as fans. He seems pleased, though. “This will do,” he says. “Thanks
.”
She gets closer to the reception desk, no longer enwrapped in the mystery that is of a piece with her veil, impressively tall, her head high. She takes her short steps with catwalk elegance difficult to reproduce, disregarding the half-dozen eyes that are trained on her every move. Wearing a triumphant expression, she struts with confidence.
One of the men behind the desk summons some of the page boys and asks them to stand by. They do so, with their hands behind their backs, waiting for instructions. Cambara feels certain they will handle their assignment with finesse; she imagines what it will be like to take a room in this four-star hotel, a world that is familiar to her from having stayed in many others of similar billing. Only this one in civil war Mogadiscio is visibly a bit run-down. All the same, it feels unreal to her after Zaak’s place. She recovers her sangfroid the closer she is to the sign “Reception.” She enjoys the feel of the place, the cleanness of it. She wonders if the management is aware of what is happening outside the gates. She can’t tell if she will mention this to anyone.
From the near distance, she reads the sign “Deputy Manager,” only the D in “Deputy” and the e in “Manager” are missing. For his part, he studies her with the knowing eyes of a familiar. Then he asks, “Can I help you?”
“I am sure you can,” she says.
He looks away from her and at the computer screen, pressing buttons and taking sufficient time to consult before reporting the meaning of the entry he has just read. He clears his throat before begging her pardon. He surprises her by quizzing if, by any chance, her name is Cambara.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because we’ve received repeated phone calls and other inquiries from the manager of Maanta Hotel, who wants to know if we have a lady by that name as our guest. She has rung our hotel several times. Actually, she rang off less than five minutes ago.”
Cambara’s throat makes enough of a sound for the deputy manager to hear it. She is so pleased to receive this intelligence that she is at a loss for words; the thought and joy of knowing that she is about to talk to Kiin rasps her nerves.
The deputy manager senses her discomfort. He says, “Please forgive my forwardness. You see, Kiin’s description of you fits you to a tee.”
Her partisan belief that she has done the right thing coming here today hardens into an uncanny conviction, not only because of this extraordinary coincidence—that she has met someone who knows how to reach Kiin—but also because of the way the movement of the deputy manager’s head reminds her of a marionette coming to life. The silence is broken now and again, whenever one of the page boys or the driver, who hangs about as if his services will be needed, makes unanticipated shifts.
“You are most welcome, then,” he says effusively.
Her face tight with tension, she asks, “How might I contact Kiin?”
“I’ll ring her right away.”
“You are very kind,” she says.
The deputy manager consults the computer screen a second time and jots a number down on hotel letterhead. Cambara has a comforting sensation in her solar plexus in anticipation of his next move and her response. He asks, “How else can I be of help in the meantime?”
“Do you have a restaurant?”
“One of the best in the city.”
“May I leave these purchases in your care until I’ve had lunch?” she says, bending down to lift up one or two of the bags. This creates an immediate flutter of movement, with the page boys swarming around her, preparing to assist. When the page boys have stood back, affording her more space, she says, “I’ll pick them up after lunch, if I may.”
“By all means.”
At the deputy manager’s bidding, two of the page boys put her purchases in the luggage room, off to the right of the reception area. A third offers to escort her to the restaurant, on the fourth floor. As she follows the young page boy up the carpeted staircase, she can’t help looking forward to the moment when she will take off the body tent, easing herself out of what has become hot, unmanageable, and more of a burden. She thinks she can afford to relax, because she feels as if she is among friends, and there is no need to continue pretending.
Soon she is in an air-conditioned room, and a waiter shows her to a table by the window farthest from the generator, which is on. Another waiter arrives, in white shirt and dark trousers, writing pad open, pen raised in midair, and informs her that the kitchen is closing. She tells him what she wants to eat: a tuna steak, well done, and rice, with a green salad on the side. Then she asks the waiter to point her to the washroom, which he does.
As she rises, she thinks, with a smile, that so far luck has favored her and wonders if it makes sense to take a dayroom in which to relax after a long and demanding day. Even before she reaches the door of the washroom, she knows that this is no option, for it will, in a big way, sabotage, complicate, or delay her eventual move to Kiin’s Maanta Hotel.
She removes the constraint as soon as she is in the washroom, first taking off the veil and the colorful scarf with theatrical showmanship and then running her splayed fingers through her long hair as though recasting her features into new form. The mirror reflects an old self with which she is happy to get reacquainted. Energized, she hums one of her favorite tunes as she washes her face.
She tells herself that she has brought off something of a triumph, accomplished in half a day, fortunately without exposing herself to any danger and without receiving the slightest assistance from Zaak. She revels in the fact that she has visited her family property; gotten acquainted with Jiijo; found her way to the shopping complex in the neighborhood, where she has made all the necessary purchases; exchanged her dollars for Somali shillings; and then negotiated a taxi ride to Hotel Shamac. She will no doubt concede that she owes her linking up with Kiin to a coup of luck and good timing and less to cunning on her part. She counts it as a revelation that not all her worries or her mother’s safety concerns are justified; that, in low-intensity civil wars, you might not come to harm if you take the required precautions and prepare yourself for the worst but that you might just as easily be spurring disaster, prompting and courting it through no fault of your own.
Up where she is, in the bathroom on the fourth floor, the sea breeze blows gently into her face and reactivates her memory, stimulating pleasant past associations in which she pays a return visit to her young days in Mogadiscio, when Somalis were at peace with their identities, happy with the shape of their world as it was then. The problem now is how to navigate the perilous paths, with mindless militiamen making everywhere unsafe; occupying other people’s homes; vandalizing or removing and reusing the doors, garage gates, the motors and roofs of most of these properties.
She has never imagined she will see the day when she will appreciate the very thing she has always taken for granted—a clean washroom, the toilet system functioning, the bathroom floor immaculate, towels on the rails. She is comforted at the thought of being in an impeccable one for the first time since her arrival, and she is flushed with joy. It goes to show that only a corrupt society tolerates living in such filth, especially the men who put up with the muck they have made, as if dirt makes itself, reproduces itself. No woman with the means to do something about it will endure so much grunge. Her mother has always said that you are as clean as you make yourself.
In the restaurant, Cambara sits at her table with an exaggerated élan, eagerly waiting for her meal and a word from or about Kiin. A different waiter from the one who earlier showed her to the table helps take her body tent from her and places it on a clothes hanger. He introduces himself as the headwaiter and is in a white long-sleeved shirt, freshly ironed; well-tailored khaki trousers; and black lace-up shoes, recently polished to perfection. He brings her news from the deputy manager: Kiin is on her way and should get here shortly.
“Oh, but that’s wonderful,” she says, beaming.
“And the meal is on the house.”
“Thank you.”
She smiles with the eff
ortless serenity of a woman who has just won the lottery. As he walks away, maybe to bring the starter, she remembers the awfulness of cooking in Zaak’s kitchen, using what came to hand. She believes that she will never forget beheading their chickens with the dullest knife she has ever seen, tugging at the insides, gutting them, wiping off the blood of the birds she slaughtered for the armed youths, and cooking the chickens for their lunch.
The waiter returns bearing ice water, then a few seconds later a starter—a salad of tomato and mozzarella—and before leaving to get her second course, brings the olive oil bottle, the salt, and pepper closer to her. He is back soon enough, this time with her fish dish, browned to perfection and garnished with parsley and a slice of lemon.
Cambara tucks into her meal with an uncharacteristic joyous abandon, relishing every morsel. Just as she is debating whether to consider taking a room in the hotel for the sake of its kitchen and cleanness, her wandering gaze fastens upon a woman approaching with some urgency, her stride graceful. Cambara’s heartbeat quickens, beating in anticipation of making Kiin’s acquaintance, which she hopes will open many a door closed to her until now. To Cambara, the well-turned-out woman is walking with the dignity of one accustomed to carrying the world on her head and proud of doing so too. Eager as a preteen girl, Cambara prays that she and Kiin will share the sort of friendship only women are capable of forging. The Lord knows how badly a woman needs the friendship of other women in a civil war city repugnant with the trigger-happy degeneracy of its militiamen.
“I am Kiin,” the woman in all-black chador and white bandanna says, “come to welcome you to Mogadiscio.” Silence, then an exquisite smile attends Kiin’s face, her eyes becoming wider with the brilliance of a gorgeous grin.
Wishing she were bold enough to hug Kiin in advance recognition of their becoming soul mates, Cambara pushes her chair back and has just about contented herself with the mere shaking of her hands, when Kiin looks into her eyes, then embraces her chest to chest. Then Kiin plants a peck of a kiss on one cheek, then the other. An unbidden thought—that Kiin is a woman with formidable initiative, of strong character and profound conviction—coincides with a discordant idea as an eerie otherworldly feeling descends upon Cambara, in which she imagines herself as a discarded rag doll saved from the fire just in time and given a bit of dusting. Why have these colliding ideas—the one about a forsaken doll that has been abandoned by the child who has loved it and expects nothing short of continuous affection, the other about the redoubtable Kiin—come to her at the same time? Kiin’s Emirate type of veil is of flimsy material, comforting to touch, with her breasts bulging downward in flattened acknowledgment of an early motherhood.
Knots Page 17
