Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  Cussing, he goes on all fours, kneels down, half crawls awkwardly, and supporting his clumsiness with both his hands, which shake, almost collapsing, he exerts a great deal of effort into making the hundred-eighty-degree turn before collapsing. The strain causes him to sweat. He is puffy, his shortness of breath worries him, he wheezes. Eventually, Zaak assumes a convenient squat position. Then he exhales, relieved.

  When he has paused long enough and has regained his equanimity, he asks, “How did you go about getting there?”

  “I walked.”

  “You walked everywhere?”

  “I got a taxi on the way back.”

  “Where? Be specific.”

  She reflects upon the question and the command to be precise, sensing the presence of an invisible snare, like a speed trap, into which one goes unawares. There is no way of knowing if the driver or the youths have seen her in the taxi that took her from the shopping complex or from the hotel to the house. And since he has neither the charisma nor the guile to draw any information out of her, it is appropriate that she avoid the ambush.

  She waffles. “You know I can walk for miles and miles if I put my mind to it? Remember how I used to jog ten miles every now and then without a break or a moment’s rest?”

  “No problems?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  Zaak picks up a bundle of qaat, selects a couple of young shoots, snaps their tender ends off with the impulse of an executioner decapitating a criminal, and then stuffs them into his mouth. When his eyes tighten, Cambara assumes they do so at her inauspicious conduct—a madwoman courting danger by going it alone, walking, when he has offered her a lift in a truck, with a driver and an armed escort. That’s what he will say, even if it is untrue.

  “You are not okay in the head,” he says.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “You’re most peculiar in the way you behave.”

  She doesn’t rise to his untoward comments but looks at her watch and studies its time-telling face, as a semi-literate might attempt to strain elusive sense from the sequence of the letters in front of her. She interprets his “You’re not okay in the head” as meaning “You’re not behaving like a woman.” She remembers instances from her past in which men used similar words to put her down.

  “You do find it all incredibly exciting, don’t you? Courting danger,” he sallies, his voice almost breaking, his gaze uncertain. Knowing him, Cambara imagines him to be more irritated with himself for appearing so helpless than with her for exhausting his graciousness and testing his patience.

  “I won’t deny that,” Cambara responds.

  “Wooing danger has some appeal?”

  “To some people, it does.”

  “Does it to you?”

  “I haven’t thought of it that way.”

  Perhaps he sees her doings as the workings of a sex-starved woman mourning not the death of her only son but the loss of her husband. Is this why he retreats into the surrounds of his indulgent indecisiveness, one instant describing her as insane and wanting not to have anything to do with her rash behavior, the second displaying worry and warning her about going further? As for her, she turns a thought over and over in her head, and she analyzes it from every possible angle. Is it a tall order for her to want to leave every place better than she has found it? Is this why she has bought the food with the same ease with which she requested Kiin to get a plumber and an electrician? Maybe she needs to prepare Zaak for the changes that she plans to introduce. He is not likely to accept the changes without a struggle. After all, a pig is more comfortable wallowing in its squalor than lying on a bed with a mattress, bedspreads, and freshly laundered sheets.

  “Why?” he asks, all of a sudden.

  Then he holds his palms side by side in the gesture of someone praying Salaatul Khauf, performed in time of war when other prayers are difficult to recite for fear of the ongoing hostilities. Zaak stares at her, the expression on his face clouding. Cambara thinks he is annoyed in spite of himself; she suspects he thinks that she is raving mad, coming to Mogadiscio, as she has, and going it alone.

  She does not bother to answer his question.

  “Why?” he repeats, his palms opening and going toward each other in the gesture of one praying in preparation for a blessing.

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I am not doing anything to you.”

  “But you are,” he says. “You know you are.”

  Zaak is in a sweat and is murmuring profanities. Cambara reckons she cannot relieve him of his sense of frustration, considering that she does not know the basis of it. Is he breaking in a kind of sudden high fever, because her uncontrolled impatience is destined to consign her to disaster? Or is it because he is disturbed that he cannot bend her to his will and that when she runs into ruin and he steps in to help, he will not be in a position to? There is no way he can avoid blame.

  “I phoned your mother earlier today,” he says.

  A great unease descends on her mind. Her anger gives her a jolt and then suddenly rises toward her head, nearly blinding her.

  She asks, “When did you call my mother?”

  “I came back home unexpectedly just about noon and found you gone,” he says, “no note from you, and no indication as to where you might have vanished. I was worried. As your host, cousin, and former partner, I kept thinking, ‘What will I say to Arda if something happens to you?’ That is when I rang her.”

  “Did you think she would know where I might be?”

  “I thought she might fill me in.”

  “On what? Fill you in on what?”

  “About things you do not tell me.”

  “I see,” she says with knowing sarcasm.

  “What do you see?”

  “Bet you thought you were doing your duty by me?”

  “How’s that?”

  “As a male cousin, you feel responsible.”

  “I won’t deny that I do,” he concedes.

  “You keep your watchful male eyes on me and my doing, and you want to make sure that even though I may put my life in danger, because of an act of madness from which you will do all that is in your power to protect me, I must not bring dishonor to your name and the name of the family.”

  “I feel duty bound, that’s right.”

  “Do you think we are in Saudi Arabia?” she asks.

  “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  She looks at him steadily in the eyes and lights upon his awkward expression, more surprised than shocked. Of course, he knows what she means: She is accusing him of behaving in an unenlightened way.

  He takes a pretty long time to consider his response, and then he shakes his head, indicating his disapproval. Finally he says, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Then he falls silent and furrows his forehead, maybe to add a rider to his admonition, and this results in a preoccupying thought darkening his face. When the shadow shrouding his appearance clears, he mouths the words “Don’t be ridiculous” a second and a third time. It is then that Cambara happens upon his countenance, which reminds her of a quote from an author whose name she has forgotten that it’s not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.

  “You’re impossible!” he says.

  She remembers his favorite descriptions of her behavior or general attitude when they were both young, and the word “impossible” was the key one, as in “You are impossible.” Or he would use the word “incorrigible,” as in “She is incorrigible.” The former description was always directly addressed to her, the latter more often cast in the third person to third parties. In those days, his descriptions of her were made in an amicable tone of voice with not a trace of anger. He may have thought of her as too forward in the way she looked at him and in the teasing manner she threatened she would touch him, even though she never dared, fearing a reprimand from her mother. He was vulnerable when provoked and prone to giving in. She w
as wont to saying he was lying, and he wouldn’t bother to tell her off, unless he felt embarrassed, which he often did in front of their peers. She remembers the shock on his face when she wore her first lipstick, her mother’s, at the age of nine. There was an amused look of expression when he saw her putting on a bra, to cover the dark patches on her chest that passed for nipples.

  Cambara is debating what to do or say when she discovers a change in the surroundings and then hears footsteps quiet enough to suggest the tread of someone tiptoeing, his or her intentions unknown. Turning, she sees a figure silhouetted against the fading light in the doorway and moving neither forward nor back. When she identifies the person as SilkHair, a smile of relief spreads itself all over her face.

  She says to SilkHair, “Would you like to come and help me cook supper?”

  He replies, “Yes, I would.”

  She tells SilkHair to go into the kitchen ahead of her and to start chopping the onions, tomatoes, and garlic on the new cutting board.

  Then, just as she prepares to take her leave politely from Zaak, he speaks slowly, getting his words out sluggishly, maybe because the chewing has already affected the pattern of his speech. “Do you know why it does not augur well for outsiders who have no understanding of what is going on in Somalia and have no idea what has caused the civil war to erupt to meddle in it?”

  She does not like the intent, the tone, or the implication of his question, but she realizes that she has no desire to engage him in further banter and cuts it to the quick. “Tell me?”

  “Because when we Somalis are hemorrhaging one another, it is best that we sort out our differences without outside interference.”

  Cambara is impressed with the sensational progress SilkHair has made, his ability to get the hang of cooking improving at a phenomenal speed. She finds the onions chopped, the garlic crushed, the tomatoes cut into quarters, the potatoes and carrots washed, peeled, and then put to soak in water.

  She assumes from his demeanor, his body language, and his speech mannerisms that in all probability he has a middle-class background—a ten-year-old boy fallen on tough civil war complications, maybe both parents dead and no living relation to look after him—but she chooses not to ask him questions, concerned that he might close her out. From his gradual opening to her, initiating the dialog himself and then terminating it, he puts her in mind both of a tortoise pulling in its head out of self-preservation and a lizard scuttling away at the slightest threat.

  The vegetable curry and rice cooked, she asks him to take the food out to the youths in the outhouse, where they are camped. She makes him promise her that he will bring the containers back, wash them, put them on the drain board, and dispose of the paper plates and plastic knives. When she asks Zaak if he has changed his mind and will eat, he says, by way of dismissing her, “Good night.”

  She withdraws to her room to read and sleep.

  THIRTEEN

  Feeling young of heart, strong of body, questionable of judgment, and yet unbending in her doggedness to set things in motion, Cambara walks away from the gate to Zaak’s house the following morning swathed in a baggy, custom-made all-gray veil with the sides zipped up for quick, easy removal in the event of a need to karate-kick an aggressor. The veil she has on today is easier and more pleasant to wear: less weighty, airier, and lighter in color. She ambles away from the entrance when she is certain that no one is shadowing her and after she has securely locked it. There is a determined spring in her stride that bespeaks of a secret urgency to which no one else is privy; there is much purpose to her gait. A casual observer might think of her as someone fleeing from a crime scene, edgy that she might get caught before escaping.

  She draws her eyebrows together in concentration, frowning, her downcast look proof of her single-mindedness. She is carrying with her several items that she purchased yesterday from the general store and secretly stored in a corner of her room until this morning. She intends to offer as tokens of peace the boxes of sweets and a few bars of chocolate to Jiijo’s charges; the body cream, lotion, shampoo, soaps, and other woman’s things to Jiijo; and some rice. She would return the bag to the shopkeeper, if there is time. Faintly worried at the thought of staying longer than necessary, not knowing when the children get back from school, she hopes to present herself before Jiijo, get acquainted with the young ones, and complete her gentle questioning of Jiijo and leave before the minor warlord and his cohorts bestir themselves from their late lie-ins. Among other things, Cambara means to learn a few essential facts about her principal enemy, enough to know what to do and whether to share what information she gathers with Kiin and others who might give a hand in helping dislodge him. She needs all she can learn from today’s conversation with Jiijo and her charges, anything that might lend her an advantage in furthering her plans. The expropriator of the house and his minions, from what she has worked out so far, appear to be totally lost to the real world, chewing qaat all their waking hours and sleeping it off until early afternoon. She prays they keep to this timetable and do not alter their habit.

  As she moves forward with confidence, Cambara becomes aware that it may not be long before her repeat visits raise Jiijo’s suspicions and she demands that Cambara explain her true motives. Cambara wonders how she can home in on who the various parties she will be up against are, what their relationships are to one another, and, more specifically, to the property: who stays where and how many of them sleep to a room, and where in this equation the children are. Friendly approaches and gift-giving can help deflect suspicions or can equally rouse someone’s dormant mistrust. She herself does not know how resolute she will remain in the face of adversity; if her early attempts to get the information she is after produce no reliable results and the conditions become so inimical, she will have no choice left other than to try to stave off the unavoidable consequences that may lead to violence. Even though she has made inroads here and there and has discovered the presence of a soft center in the youths’ outwardly hard attitude, as well as in Jiijo, Cambara is sure that it will be days before she makes a solid breakthrough.

  If there is a concern that puts all her other worries in the shade, she thinks it wise to vary the routes she takes to get to the family property, detouring from the course of yesterday. This is because trouble comes with any territory that one passes through twice. One may go unnoticed the first time, but if one takes the same route a second time, then this presents someone with the opportunity to lay an ambush. The armed militiamen mount checkpoints in a matter of seconds, and they stop pedestrians and vehicles passing through, to harass, to impose a levy, to rob. That is how things are, she has been told more than a couple of times. Zaak has pointed out on more than one occasion that the vigilantes do not bother to differentiate between the goods on which a customs officer at a point of entry into a country may exact a tariff and a woman minding her business and walking through. But she dare not change the direction of her route too much for fear of losing her way to the property.

  A minute into what she knows is going to be an arduous haul, Cambara walks straight into a localized rush of wind in full swing, tumultuously gusting. A dust storm is astir, impassionately working itself up into a high degree of turbulence and producing an impetuous whirlwind that whips, gathering its energy into an ungodly fury. The vortex of sand tosses her into a sidelong stumble, and she reels, staggers unsteadily, flounders forward, and has immense difficulty remaining upright and holding the shopping bags she intends to give to Jiijo and her charges. She dodders in her bid to see if there is anything to hold on to with her free hand, lest she fall into a ditch or totter into an open sewer, if there is one hereabouts. The wind-driven grit smacks straight into her eyes, hurting and blinding her. She ceases all movement, turns her back to the surge of sand, then, to regain her balance, moves blindly backward, her eyes shut.

  During a brief breather, in which there is a near cessation of the gale, Cambara spots a hawk unperturbedly sitting on an electric pole from far off.
Envying the bird the steadiness of its poise, she admires the hawk’s agility, as it sways now a little forward, now a little backward. The hawk, in a dance of sorts, always manages to recover its equilibrium, the feathers of its wings slightly ruffled and opening outward, its claws clutching the wire tautly, its head tilted forward, as though in homage to a wind god. Cambara is at her most attentive and watching, when her foot encounters a pile of papers at which she kicks. She bends down to retrieve the thick pad of papers, deciding to examine them at her convenience later.

  Soon after that she notices three figures rising mysteriously into her view. She is, however, unable to make out the figures in relation to the world the dust storm has thrown into utter confusion. She realizes too that she has to negotiate an obstacle course comprised of a disarray of zinc sheets that have come loose from the nails holding them to the roofs, and small and large pieces of plywood that have tumbled off in somersault urgency, going wherever the gust of dust has deposited them. She is wondering if the pad of papers she has just picked up and is now holding in her hands has anything to do with the figures that have materialized into recognizable human shapes. Unafraid because she has no idea why she should fear them, she puts down her bags and waits for the figures as they come closer. And as she does so, she places the pile of papers in one of the shopping bags and then transfers the weight to her left hand, the better to have a free hand in order to defend herself.

  She rides her memory at a gallop, reminding herself that she is carrying a knife and that she has a good chance of winning a confrontation with any manner of youths; she reckons she has the element of surprise on her side. She has no idea who these young men are; for all she knows, they may have been on her heels ever since she left Zaak’s place or have chosen to catch her in a snare, because they saw her walk the same way yesterday. She believes in her heart that ne’er-do-well rogues are weak-kneed, lily-livered, and incapable of standing up to a gutsy surprise-on-her-side, knife-in-her-hand woman who takes the fight to them, which she will do, you can be sure about it. Not that she has ever been mugged, or raped herself, except when acting. She has heard it said that raping women is the principal delight of Mogadiscio youth.