Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  It is when she turns away from the desolation outside and reenters the bathroom that she is impressed with how clean its floor is. She even forgets about all her other disconsolate impressions for a minute, and her eyes shine forth with radiance. Finally, she removes her boots and then takes off her clothes, item by item, dropping them on the floor and trampling on them, the way her son used to do whenever he was in a mood to try his father, Wardi’s, patience. How Wardi would go berserk, ready to hit the boy for his obduracy. Cambara, in maternal circumspection for her son’s well-being, would intervene, picking up the offending items herself from where her son dropped them and telling Wardi: “I want you to take it easy. And please let peace reign in this house.” Remembering the turf wars fought over the raising of her only son, whom she failed, as she could not safeguard him from Wardi’s filicidal tendencies, she is unable to keep her rage in check. She wishes that she had acted like a hen, clucking away in watchful frenzy over her chicks, shielding them from harm.

  She is so full of rage that she takes a huge karate kick at the door. Fortunately, she doesn’t break it in two. But that doesn’t stop her from letting go a scream so ungodly that running feet come and someone taps gently on the door to ask after a decent interval if everything is okay with madam.

  “Everything is fine, thank you,” she says.

  Then she sinks into a crouch, her fists balled into a fist, her teeth clenched, and her whole body in a tremor as if she is fortifying herself for a final showdown with her inner demons.

  When her desperate attempt to calm her nerves leads her to mutter self-recriminations of the remonstrative kind, in which she blames Wardi for her own shortcomings, the activated part of her mind pulls itself back in the rational belief that this is self-destructive. Has she not come to Mogadiscio in hope of chancing upon a noble way of mourning her loss, not in anger but while recovering the family property to devote herself to the service of peace?

  Then for the first time since her arrival in Mogadiscio, Cambara delights in walking barefoot in a bathroom, eyes closed, and her hands joyously caressing her naked body in the tactile appreciation of a blind bathing.

  She considers taking a room at Maanta as a test of her commitment to making her own way toward her independence from Zaak. It is also to provide her with proof, if there be a need to show some, that, as a mistress of her actions, she is not beholden to someone else, not least of all to a man, be it Zaak or Wardi. She will most likely keep certain aspects of her life private and will treat the room as her hush-hush retreat, rather like the way one keeps an affair secret. It amuses her now that she never had the temptation to have a love affair in all the years that she was married sadly and miserably to Wardi.

  Cambara comes out of her rooms after a hot shower, her first. She feels refreshed, with a younger spring in her step, as she bounces downstairs, past the cubicle that serves as the reception of the hotel wing, where the deputy manager of the hotel sits, reading. She assumes that Mohammed is reading a textbook, because he is underlining paragraphs of the text with a marker, very bright yellow. He is also mumbling something to himself the way semi-literates recite the letters of the alphabet when they have just mastered it. She nods her head to him in welcome acknowledgment of his warm grin.

  Coming out into the sun, she goes up a couple of stone steps and, to avoid colliding with a small structure built around the well, which suddenly juts out, she turns a sharp left. Finally, she sees a woman at the farthest corner and then spots the woman’s arms flailing in a manner suggestive more of someone drowning than of somebody waving. When she gets closer, she recognizes Kiin, who has a huge smile framing her face. Cambara moves speedily toward the restaurant-café, where Kiin is now at a table all on her own. The café part of the restaurant, which has a straw roof, is still under construction, supported by heavy beams on one side and metal scaffolding on the other.

  Kiin is up on her feet by the time Cambara joins her table, her arms opening widely in an embrace. The two women hug and then kiss each other on both cheeks, like two childhood friends meeting for the first time in years, especially now that they are adult women, to share their fond memories of a long-forgotten era. Finally, Cambara sits in the chair diagonal to Kiin’s, their knees touching, their emotionally charged closeness in so brief a time starting to worry Cambara. Even so, a tingling sensation in the entirety of her body makes Cambara recall her teens, when she first felt the ending of her innocent girlhood soon after becoming conscious of the evident changes in her and remarking on the fact that boys and men were looking purposefully at her. A memory of being alone in the bathroom, naked, and touching her budding breasts comes back to her. So do two other incidents: one about her first encounter with Zaak having an erection and the other about her own encounter with a peacock. She remembers how catching sight of the peacock aroused her sexually. She feels Kiin’s closeness has nothing of a come-on to it. If anything, it is that of a woman who has lived a cloistered life showing her appreciation of an innocent friendship that will mean a great deal to her.

  Kiin now takes hold of Cambara’s hand and, kneading it and turning it this and that way, asks her, “How do you like your rooms?”

  “I love them.”

  Cambara makes a conscious effort to avoid looking into Kiin’s eyes, which are boring into hers at the same time as she tries to retrieve her hand, which is now lost to Kiin’s tight grip.

  “Lunch?” Kiin asks.

  “I am starving.”

  “What would you like to have?”

  “What’s there to eat?”

  Kiin summons the waiter, a short, very dark handsome man in his late twenties with thinning hair and a very beautiful smile. He approaches, and then, after being instructed to tell the honored guest what there is to have, the waiter recites the menu, deferentially addressing himself to Cambara, who, at first, has difficulty concentrating, because he is speaking very fast. After he has repeated itemizing the menu, Cambara places her order: salad, no first course, a dish of fish, sole, with a touch of garlic and plenty of lemon, fruit for dessert, coffee. When the waiter tells her that the espresso machine is not working, she asks for tea. Not sure whether Kiin has already put in her order of food and is waiting for it to arrive or whether she will eat elsewhere, Cambara looks from the waiter to Kiin, who nods to him, indicating that he is to go get Cambara her meal.

  Cambara says, “Tell me your story, how you come to remain in a city many others have fled, and how you come to run a hotel.”

  As Kiin pauses to formulate her ideas, Cambara tries to requisition her hand in the gentle way a mother might reclaim her finger, without any untoward disturbance, from the clutches of a child now asleep.

  “The city exploded into strife while I spent almost a month in the intensive care unit of the hospital under a doctor’s supervision,” Kiin says. “I had been married less than a year and was losing blood and had worries about my baby’s state of health, fearing that I might suffer a miscarriage. Anyhow, I was in no condition physically or mentally to be discharged, what with the tubes and the drips that I was on. I was heavy, I was miserable in my self-loathing, I was sick—in short, I was everything I never wanted to be. Given my situation, it did not make sense to me or to my then husband to join those fleeing the fighting in the city.”

  At the mention of a then husband, Cambara takes note of a brief clouding of Kiin’s features. Then she asks, “You had your baby, though, yes?”

  “A baby girl, born premature.”

  “And surviving?”

  “I have had another daughter since then.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Ten and twelve.”

  “That’s wonderful, that is wonderful.”

  “I would love you to meet them.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Here with me,” Kiin replies.

  “Do they stay at the hotel?”

  “No, at our home,” Kiin says, her finger pointing to a hole in the wall, which Cambara eve
ntually works out to be a door carved out of it. “In fact, it is the reason why I am not eating here. After I’ve kept you company, I will spend the afternoon with them, now that they are done with school for the day.”

  “Where do they school?”

  The waiter brings the salad, which Cambara starts to dress, after receiving an indication that Kiin will not have any. Then Kiin explains that given the absence of a central government and the lack of a functioning school system in the country, many middle-class families residing in the city have organized themselves into schooling neighborhoods, pooling their financial resources and running home-schooling facilities for their children, with manageably smaller classes. To teach, the stay-in-the-city families, many of whom feel they belong here more than they do in Europe or North America as refugees or landed immigrants, have recruited the services of well-trained teachers—at times overqualified for primary-school teaching—from Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. Mostly single men out to make a windfall, considering the civil war conditions in which they operate, these foreign teachers receive higher pay than they might in their home countries, and in U.S. dollars.

  “Are you satisfied with the education they are receiving?”

  “Yes, we are, considering.”

  “What do poor families do to provide schooling for their children?”

  “Sadly, because there is no state, the only other form of school is Koranic.”

  Kiin, in the meantime, displays some girlish behavior, giggling at the most unlikely places in their conversation. She also takes hold of Cambara’s hand again, rubbing it, or just continuing to touch her, seeking and making bodily contact with her.

  “You can tell me what you think of how, in your opinion, they are doing when you meet my two daughters, born and raised here,” Kiin says. She falls silent when the waiter brings Cambara’s well-done fish and a side dish of spinach.

  “The father of the children?”

  “We’re still man and wife,” Kiin says, “but we are separated. Like me, he has continued to live in this city, despite the civil war, in preference to leaving and relocating elsewhere as a refugee and then as a holder of the national papers of another country. We are happy here, never mind how others might describe us: as murderers of the clan families fleeing the city, as occupiers of their properties, as robbers, looters, plunderers of the city’s wealth.”

  “You’ve been okay?”

  “One gets used to all kinds of situations, however awful, to the extent that one will do what one can to survive minimally. If need be, one will become inventive, resourceful, and will find accommodating ways that are on occasion contradictory until one is doing relatively well even in the most terrible of conditions. We are doing well, as you can see. Meanwhile, I am raising my two daughters, and they are, thank God, growing up nicely.”

  Because the time does not seem right for Cambara to ask a leading question and Kiin has taken a pause, each of the two women remains absorbed in her silent thoughts.

  Kiin says to Cambara, “You have been away from the country for a very long time, haven’t you?”

  Cambara feels that Kiin knows a lot more about her than she lets on, most likely because their mutual friend who alerted Kiin of Cambara’s imminent arrival in the city will have filled her in on her life story. Their mutual friend will have described Cambara as a celebrated actor; as a woman whom a man betrayed; a mother grieving over the loss of her only son. A woman of good breeding, Kiin has not even alluded to any of this. There is time yet, though; there is time yet. The waiter retrieves Cambara’s half-eaten meal and brings her half a mango, the size of a football, and cut into squares. Cambara is so sweetly impressed with her first mouthful that even Kiin’s mouth waters, and she asks the waiter to bring her the other half. They eat scoops of it before Kiin dares to break the silence.

  Then she continues, “Right now, Somali society is at its most disintegrated. There are so many fault lines that no two Somalis think alike, or are even likely to share a common concern for the nation’s well-being. The men prefer starting wars to talking things over; they prefer going their different ways to coming together and sorting out their differences; they help provoke more fighting and begin shooting, despite the fact that their disagreements are about matters of little or no significance. Men are prone to escalating all minor differences until they become armed confrontations in which many lives are lost, every shoot-out boiling over into unstoppable battles and the battles exploding into wars. I would say my husband and I might not have upgraded our disagreements into a serious falling-out were it not for the uncivil conditions in which we find ourselves. We love each other, my husband and I, but we cannot see our way out of the positions we take. I am a woman and am for peace at all costs; my husband is not for peace at all costs. Living under such a stressful situation day in and day out for years has taken its toll on the way we relate.”

  Then, quite unexpectedly and without prior intimation or warning, Kiin remains unspeaking for a long time. She shakes her head, disturbed at the memory of her own and Cambara’s broken home. Then suddenly she sniffs loudly and, with the abruptness of a storm raging, bursts into tears, her cheeks wet with the flood of emotions breaking their banks.

  By way of explanation, following a pause, Kiin says, “It is times like these and stories like yours and the many tragedies of other women that are disheartening to listen to, the terrible things men have always done to women and gotten away with. It saddened me when I first learned of your tragic loss, and it breaks my heart now to remember how Wardi neglected your son.”

  Neither speaks; the waiter removes the plates.

  Kiin says, “I am sorry that I have dropped the weight of my emotions on you in this way, tearfully linking your loss to mine and to all the other women that I know.” She pauses, looking about, and then says, “Men are a dead loss to us, and they father wars, our miseries.”

  Uncomfortable in her silence and unable to think of what to say, Cambara shifts restlessly in her seat, her hand covering her mouth, unavoidably charged with a keg of emotion; she prays that she is capable of quashing them before they explode, like Kiin’s. How delicate! And what a tempestuous woman!

  Kiin says, “It is on behalf of the other community of women and because we have a mutual friend in Raxma that I am extending a hand of friendship to you. Maybe we’ll invite you to join us.”

  At first, Cambara knows neither how to react to what she has witnessed nor how to respond to the proposal to join the community of women working for peace.

  “But of course,” says Cambara finally.

  “I am so pleased, so pleased,” says Kiin, who, with disconcerting jerkiness, rises and lifts Cambara, hugging and kissing her. She appears pumped with the adrenaline that is of a piece with the joy of recruiting Cambara to the cause of women. She goes on, “We have our all-women half-yearly party tomorrow evening, and I am hosting it here. I am very, very happy that you can join us. You’ll enjoy yourself: an all-women party, good food, excellent music, lots and lots of dancing.”

  For her part, Cambara, now taking her seat and acting calmly, is thinking how she has come to the end of her veil-wearing days, and how, now that she can dispense with the need to be in disguise, she will go to Zaak’s and pick up a couple of her suitcases. She has in mind the low-cut dress that she will put on for the party tomorrow evening and is about to ask Kiin questions about the other women when the gate opens and a man is shown in. Soon, Kiin is welcoming the plumber who has come with his tools, and Kiin is organizing a car and bodyguards.

  “Be on your way with the plumber, take him where you want, and show him the job you want done,” Kiin says. “I trust you are carrying the mobile, so call me if there is need. Or come to think of it, even if there is no need, call to chat. In addition, I am sending along with you a driver and the head of the hotel security, both of whom are family, and they will treat you well and do what you ask of them. Let me know if there is a problem. Meanwhile, I will go home and be with my da
ughters. Take care till we meet again at suppertime.”

  Cambara wonders if the world Kiin has entrusted to her will be a better place when she has the time to give it a shape in which she will be at ease.

  SIXTEEN

  Kiin lends her saloon car to Cambara, who, again in the veil she wore earlier, now sits in it waiting for the driver, for the youths assigned to the car as armed escorts, and for the plumber, who has been brought to her to give her an estimate, to finish praying. The escorts have stood their weapons against the wall they are facing, and the plumber has placed his tools close by, where he can keep an eye on them. To a man, they have left their shoes, which they took off before making their ablutions, behind them. They are almost halfway through praying, with the old man leading the prayer, reciting his verses excitedly, when a couple of the waiters, wearing their uniforms, join them, hastily prostrating in obeisance to the fast rhythm already set. As if not wanting to be left out, the chef of the restaurant, with his white paper toque still on, is the last to become a member of the praying party.

  She remembers that when she was introduced to them one by one, their names recited as she shook their hands, Cambara found every one of them to be as carefree as a sailor on R&R, easygoing, blasé in the manner in which they engaged one another in amicable banter. The younger ones have the habit of yanking each other’s chin or of challenging each other to a wrestling match. Young or old, Cambara is under the impression that they have been together for a long time, which may be so, and have shared life-and-death experiences. She feels certain too that they are prepared to stick their necks out for one another and that, in addition to delighting in the camaraderie of participating in the same battles, they are bound to one another by their commitments to the same blood family. On the strength of what she has seen so far, Cambara prefers their company to Zaak’s lot, except for SilkHair, whom she is already missing. This is so, in part, because the Maanta management disallows any of its employees to chew qaat on the premises or while working. Buoyed by what she considers a healthier atmosphere and cheered to a large measure by the fretful chat with Kiin, her awareness of selfhood boosted, she feels invigorated. As a result, there is discernible pluck to her decisions and the actions arising from them.