Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  There is order too to Jiijo’s narration of her story. There is also discipline in the choice of words with which she describes the current state of her mood. It occurs to Cambara that Jiijo, her countenance grim, is reveling in the telling of her tale; she is enthralling as she continues to improvise, letting go of a sentence at a time, an idea at a time. Captivated, she watches Jiijo reinvent herself right there and then. Cambara, through a combination of circumstances, senses that she has a glimpse of Jiijo’s strong sense of personhood, striving hard and desisting from showing how startled she is when she hears Jiijo say, “What help is there for our doomed nation?”

  Wanting to bring Jiijo back to her story, Cambara responds with a question. “What was it like being married not to the father of your baby but to another man, albeit a cousin, whom your parents chose for you, presumably to preserve the façade of family honor?” she asks.

  Jiijo works in total concentration on a corn on the small toe of her right foot, peeling off dead skin and tossing it away. “I could not bring myself to deceive my new husband. Instead, I chose to deceive my family, for I went to a ‘midnight nurse,’ as they say in these parts, and aborted the baby without letting anyone know except a school friend. I took ill, terribly ill. My mother was the first to learn of the reason, and she persuaded my father, without letting him in on our secret, to postpone the marriage until I was well enough. It grieves me that he never got to know what I had done before he died in the second week of the civil war.”

  “Tell me about your husband.”

  Then Jiijo lunges forward into her speech with the assumed gravitas of what she means to convey.

  “He was successful in business, and, strangely, we were happy with each other for a long while, he and I,” she says. “He was a most gentle husband, wonderfully caring of me and all my requirements, granting me all my wishes and a lot more. However, I was unhappy in the marriage, because we were childless. After trying for several years and failing, he sent me off to Europe—no expense spared—to consult doctors, a number of whom I saw. The doctors did many tests, made me undergo numerous configurations, but to no avail. I wanted so much to bear a child, maybe out of regret for having aborted mine, or maybe out of guilt because he was such a nice man and I was a bad woman to whom something terrible would happen one day, I have no idea. I had the urge to take my body through a pregnancy, and I wanted him to share with me the experience, the tribulations and joys of motherhood. I thought this would bring us closer, would delight him and delight me too.”

  The story moves Cambara, who, remembering how much joy mothering gave her, appreciates the dilemma.

  “I could not decide whether to make a clean breast of the fact that I had undergone an abortion,” Jiijo continues, “but because I was not sure what good that might do, the doctors, who could read my body the way a blind person reads Braille, chose, for their own reasons, not to speak of my abortion to my husband.”

  Jiijo has worked herself up into a heightened state of disquiet, one moment speaking with brio, the next falling sorrowfully silent and sullen, and then talking with slothful abandonment, the tone of her voice moist with the unshed tears waiting to be let go.

  “When I look back on how Gudcur has treated me, the man who has fathered my children, and I think about my condition of enslavement,” Jiijo says, “I have difficulty reconciling his kindness to me, as his chosen woman, with the cruelty others associate with him. I will not deny having sensed his hard-heartedness. I’ve seen evidence of it when he plays mind games that are crueler than the physical pain the militiamen under his command mete out to their victims: beating, raping, looting, and plundering. And, of course, he beat me up last night. No denying that.”

  A mobile phone rings somewhere in the house, most likely in the room opposite where they are. Jiijo sits up, first wrinkling her face into a frown and then falling silent, in self-rebuke. The phone’s ringing a few more times, with neither Jiijo nor Cambara answering it, coincides with the rapping on the pedestrian gate. On hearing the noisy arrival of her children’s familiar voices, Jiijo requests that she let them in, and Cambara is happy to do so.

  Worn out from talking, too tired from having told Cambara her story, and too exhausted to minister to their never-ending indigence, Jiijo seeks a quiet retreat from the children. She takes leave of the scene, fleeing surreptitiously, and then closing the door behind her.

  Left alone with the four children just back from the Koranic school, ages ranging from six to twelve, begrimed, hungry, eager to get to know her, and competing for her attention, Cambara asks them questions about their day away without listening to their answers, feeds them, and then offers them sweets and chocolates, which they eat to their heart’s content. Then she entertains them with an Indian fable, which she tells them from memory.

  “Once upon a time, the pathways of kites and crows cross that of a wounded fox lying helpless under a tree. The kites and the crows concur among themselves that they will share the spoils in equal portions, with the upper half of the fox allotted to the crows and the lower part to the kites.

  “The fox mocks at their options, and finding fault with the way its body parts have been apportioned, belabors the point that since, by the nature of things and in terms of creation, kites are superior to crows, it is baffled that its upper part has gone to the lowliest of scavengers, the crows. In the opinion of the fox, the head, the brain, and other delicate portions should go to the kites.

  “Because they cannot agree among themselves, a war ensues between the kites and the crows, and a number of each group die as a result, the remaining handful fleeing the scene with difficulty. Meanwhile, the fox feasts for days on the dead kites and crows, leaving the place healthy, observing that the weak benefit from the disagreements of the powerful.”

  When the smallest of the children pleads with her to tell them another story, Cambara looks at her watch, realizing that she has been here for more than three hours. She calculates on the best way of handing the responsibility of caring for the children over to their mother, pinning her hopes on the youngest to rouse their mother so she can go away. Woken up, Jiijo joins them, looking revived albeit groggy-eyed. And Cambara withdraws into the bathroom to read the pages the storm had kicked up. These turn out to be pages torn from an American oil-drilling company’s document detaling payments to one of Mogadiscio’s notorious warlords. Alas, she forgets it there when she emerges.

  Cambara takes leave of them, promising to Jiijo and the children that she will be back as soon as she can. She makes a dash for the door.

  FIFTEEN

  Cambara, following a civil war rule of thumb, takes a route different from the one she used earlier to the shopping complex, aiming to get a taxi to Maanta Hotel. She moves with the single-minded vigilance of a lizard, watchfully preparing to confront youths idling away their time on street corners or in front of their squats in wait for potential victims to walk past. Some people feel there is protection in numbers; not Cambara. She prefers doing her own thing her own way, believing that the key to success in her endeavors lies in acting alone.

  She is an optimist by nature. Asked why she is embarking on this adventure, she might reply that she is trying her luck. Notwithstanding that, she is inclined to keep the various parties with whom she is dealing separate so that none of them is au courant of her plans, especially not when she makes sallies into another party’s preserve. From the little she has seen of him, Bile strikes Cambara as a man with a noble spirit, and he keeps returning to her thoughts. Dajaal seems to act with a kind of authority and native ability that is formidable. It will be to her advantage to work in collusive partnership with Dajaal and to humor Bile while he, in turn, humors her. Kiin, a woman apart, has not capitulated to the strictures of living in the city, which is admirable, considering the potential danger. As for Jiijo, it is looking more and more likely that Cambara has already won her over. It saddens her, though, as a trace of gloom invades her own bearing at the thought of relying on Jii
jo to betray Gudcur, who despite being a warlord and a brute, has fathered Jiijo’s children. Cambara foresees incomparable complications ahead.

  Cambara now puts more energy into her stride, springing faster and faster, her heart anxiously beating like that of a young girl on her way to a rendezvous with her first date ever. This is because she is overwhelmed by the desire to get together with Kiin, with whom she wishes to become better acquainted. She is more than conscious that she has not done a thing about one of her principal pursuits: to devote more time than she has so far toward the construction of “peace,” so she may leave “the place” better than when she found it.

  To advance her commitment to recruiting some of the youths and to promote the idea of peace, she hopes to give them a start in normal life. She will buy SilkHair, who is young enough to go to school, all the exercise and drawing books that he will need to register at one or another school as a remedial pupil. Then she trips up, losing her balance and catching herself in time before falling. As she tries to steady herself and regain her composure, her eyes fall on a clutch of men gathered at the bend in the dusty road just before the shopping complex. The men are staring; they have daggers for eyes, one of them managing to pierce through to the start of a weakening resolve. She stiffens her determination against the oncoming mugging, and the men seem to sense it, backing off as she approaches.

  Odeywaa, the shopkeeper, finds her a taxi, which she takes not to Hotel Maanta, her destination, but—as a decoy—again to Hotel Shamac. There, the deputy manager receives her effusively, leads her to his air-conditioned office, and plies her with refreshments. He rings Kiin to alert her of Cambara’s arrival, and learns that Kiin is expecting her.

  The deputy manager says to Cambara, “My driver will take you to Hotel Maanta, where a message from Kiin is awaiting your arrival.”

  A few minutes later, the driver of the vehicle the deputy manager of Shamac has lent her is pressing the horn of the air-conditioned saloon car. Two sentries in blue uniform open the gate of Hotel Maanta, and, on making out the man at the wheel, they rise, as if in unison and in welcome recognition of him, greeting him with voluble chattiness. Cambara alights from the vehicle to find a thickset man in a white long-sleeved shirt, beige trousers, and black dress shoes moving in her direction, having taken the steps two at a time, nearly falling. He extends his hand, a smile spreading across his broad face, and comes toward her with the resolute intention of not permitting the guards to outdo him when it comes to receiving an honored client. Cambara surveys the scene ahead of her, favoring it with a cursory scrutiny, deciding that she likes what she has seen so far and is sure to fall in love with it the longer she is here. Moreover, she wants to be indebted to Kiin, to become friends with her, to receive good counsel from her; she wants Kiin to acquaint her with aspects of Mogadiscio that Cambara has not yet encountered. She looks forward to Kiin introducing her to the other women of whom Raxma has spoken, legions of women who are peace activists. Turning around, Cambara waves to the driver, who is maneuvering the vehicle out of a narrow space with consummate ease and leaving, while she mouths “Thanks” and he waves in acknowledgment.

  Beaming from cheek to chin, the large man introduces himself. “My name is Mohammed. I am an assistant to Kiin, the manager, and I have a message for you.”

  “What’s the message?”

  Mohammed puts his hand in his trouser pockets only to bring it out empty and then study it as if it might reveal a mystery to him. Then he inserts it in the other pocket, rooting in it, with Cambara waiting for him all the while, thinking he may bring out a piece of paper with a message scribbled on it. She is anxious, patient. In a moment, despite her expectation, he is looking at a key and, for some reason that is unclear to her, appears first mystified, then despondent. He hangs his head to one side, like a boatswain whose vessel has mysteriously gone adrift. Mohammed offers the key to her, saying, “Here.”

  Cambara takes it with both hands, muttering her thanks, which to her sound a little fake, and averting her eyes, because there is something she does not understand. She stares at the key for a long while, amused. In her head, Cambara replaces the word “message” with “key,” but this will not do. Rather than ask what to do with the key or to identify which room it is meant for, given that there is no number stamped on it and nothing to indicate what it may open, she asks, “And the message?”

  Mohammed makes the laborious effort of someone struggling hard to mask a speech impediment. He speaks, pausing between every two or so words. Cambara strains to string the words together herself to make sense of them. “Kiin has said to give you a key to the room that she has reserved for you.”

  Cambara turns the proffered key this and that way. The wind in the trees, the sweetness of their shade, the fact that the air here is fresh and no cigarette odor is riding the breeze: these, she hopes, will help her spend a very pleasant time at the hotel and make her stay in it an abiding joy. Overwhelmed with a sense of elation, and, unnerved, because everything is working out beyond her expectation, she loses her focus for a moment and then her physical equilibrium. Her gaze unfocused, she looks farther into the undefined distance, and as she does so, places her left foot behind her right, with the big toe of her left foot pushing against the right heel until she feels excruciating pain; then steadies herself.

  She asks Mohammed to lead her to her room and follows him not too closely as she conjures up images of her workaday situations during her stay at Hotel Maanta. After she ascends a flight of stairs down by the well to her left, her body cells register the proximity of water. The generator is on and providing electricity. She feels the earth under her feet tremble and prays that her room is farthest away from this ungodly din.

  “Is the generator on all day and all night?”

  “It’s not on when we can tap into an ice factory in the proximity,” replies Mohammed. “We turn it on whenever the owners of the factory are load shedding, and they do this without prior notice.”

  She remembers in the days when power was supplied by the municipality of the city and cost almost nothing, and no one ever heard of load shedding. Realizing that she is lagging a few paces behind Mohammed, she catches up with him, and they walk up another flight of stairs, down an asphalted lane, with trees and shrubs on either side of it, through a metal door, up the stairway to the first floor, and along the corridor.

  Finally, Mohammed comes to a shuffling halt and points out the metal door with no number on it to her. She inserts the key in the lock somewhat tentatively and after several attempts, turns it with resolute thrust. She thanks him again and lets herself in, securing the door behind her with a bolt.

  The two-room setup—neat, decent-sized, boasting two beds, both pushed against a wall—faces away from the two generators, one of which is on now, maybe because the minimal daytime supply of power provided by the privately run electricity company is off. That the air conditioner is on and that she can barely hear the noise of the generator assures her further that she will like it here.

  Moving about the two rooms to explore the extent of their combined spaciousness, Cambara paces out the distance between the rooms and then the two beds, and then concentrates on measuring out their relative nearness to the bathroom. Like a spoiled child making a choice by going meeni-mano, now pointing at one bed and now at the other, she settles eventually on the bed on the right side in the belief that she will enjoy sleeping in it more. She stretches herself on it, testing how comfortable lying on it will be. Then she pulls open one cupboard after another until she discovers, discreetly worked into one wall, a safe, with instructions in Somali, Arabic, Italian, and English. Cambara is agreeably surprised to find, when she pulls the handle toward herself, intending to set the combination number of the safe to one she will remember, that her luck is favoring her with a good smile. This is because there is a Post-it note from Kiin informing Cambara that she has left a mobile phone under the mattress of the bed to the right-hand side of the room and asking her to
“please ring her up” to let her know that all is well. She does as Kiin suggests, pressing the Menu button and speaking right away to her kind host. Then Kiin tells her that she has also arranged for a plumber to see Cambara in an hour or so and asks her to wait until he arrives, then take him and show him the jobs she wants done. Mohammed, on Cambara’s say-so, will be only too glad to organize a vehicle and bodyguards for her.

  Cambara rings off, her unbounded sense of exhilaration spreading to the point of affecting her so deeply that she is almost tearful. She decides no one can touch Kiin for out-and-out kindness shown without obvious ulterior impulse. Civil wars or not, there are people like Kiin who are by nature generous to a fault, well meaning, and excessively munificent. In contrast to the uncharitable Zaak, who is her cousin, her former “spouse,” and her current host, Kiin has taken to seeing to all of Cambara’s immediate needs despite the fact that they are not blood relations. Cambara thinks that this goes to prove that not every Somali is obsessed with the idea of clan affiliation and that many people behave normally even if the conditions in which they operate are themselves abnormal.

  Cambara’s display of marked, positive attitude toward Kiin’s generosity is short lived when she starts to sorrow over the general state of decay in the compound opposite the hotels. The unsightly scene before her pulls her up for further grief. She stands directly behind the window, looking out and surveying a wasteland of heartbreaking ugliness: trees that have not grown to their natural height, scraps of wood and metal thrown any which way, children rifling in the arid waste all around, as though in search of something precious that they can sell. The fact that she sees adult men squatting and defecating in full view of the road, which is about fifty meters to their back, troubles her no end. Then her wandering gaze dwells for a few moments on a man wielding an ax and turning a huge metal pipe of industrial size into fragments, chopping it into cartable portions. She reckons that men giving themselves in to insatiable greed employed similar destructive methods first to dismantle the national monuments and then to break them up into bits before selling them off dirt-cheap in the one of the Gulf states.