Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  The prayer inexplicably protracted, the old man leading it recites longer verses. She can only think that he is doing this because he believes the mission on which the armed escorts, the driver, the plumber, and Cambara are embarking is a dangerous one, and who can tell, maybe it is. For her part, Cambara prepares herself mentally for the return trip to Zaak’s and then a visit to the property, the first in the company of anyone, most importantly armed escorts. She also primes her body for what she ranks to be her new station, in which she need not wear a veil if she is not of a mind to do so.

  Now that she judges the veil to be a kind of entrapment, she removes the head scarf when no one is watching. When her eyes meet the driver’s—his lips still astir with his recital of more Koranic verses—she smiles and then feels triumphant when he nods, presumably in approval of what she has done. She struggles to undo the knotted strings of her veil. She cranks down her side of the window, allowing the breeze to circulate more, and she revels in the waves of fresh wind fondling her cheeks and ears. Emboldened, she fiddles afresh with the knots of her head scarf, which now mysteriously slip off most easily. She exposes a bit of her hair, shifts in her seat, and sitting back, takes off the headwear altogether. Only the driver keeps a watchful eye on her doings; all the others, with their backs to her, are paying attention to the Koranic recitation. Her veil removed, she is, in her mind’s eye, wearing a chemise, bought from a Pakistani outlet in Toronto, with a custom-made pair of baggy linen trousers.

  Finally, the prayer ended, they all shake hands with the old man who led them through the worship, thanking him; he blesses the armed escorts, who retrieve their weapons and put on their shoes, and the plumber, who gathers his tools. He advises them to be careful. Then he bids farewell to the chef and the waiters, who go their own ways. The driver is the first to get into the car, and as each of the armed escorts finds his own cosy corner in the truck, the plumber is the last to enter, he places his tools at his feet, and slumps in the back. The driver opens the glove compartment and takes out the revolver, tucking it away in his top shirt pocket. Two of the armed escorts are badgering each other with personal questions neither has the desire to answer.

  Cambara sits up front, eyes focused ahead of her, conscious of her closeness to the driver, whose hands keep colliding with hers whenever he changes the gears. She cannot tell if he is doing this to elicit some sort of response or if it is coincidental. Infused with self-doubts—she remembers him watching her with keen interest as she doffed her veil, then her headscarf. Maybe he thinks of her as modern, that is to say, game? She backs out, withdrawing into her silent thinking. She pictures finding Zaak or Gudcur in their respective houses, slouched and chewing their midday usual.

  She reckons that convincing Zaak of her good intentions, if he happens to be home when she gets there today, with a plumber moving about the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms as well as the kitchen, will perhaps be easier with than coping with Gudcur’s fury. She dares not imagine what he may do once he takes umbrage. After all, running into Gudcur, with a plumber, driver, and armed escorts in tow will bring her face to face with the stickiest of situations, the first of its perilous kind. It will be interesting to see how she holds up against the minor warlord, who, to find out what she is up to, will do his utmost to break down her resistance. Not having met the fellow in the flesh, awake, and not having gathered sufficient information about his character or weaknesses, Cambara can only conjure up the worst of scenarios: shootouts, deaths, and more blood. She imagines Gudcur’s murderous fluids surging up within him, going to his head, spurting and squirting, boiling over and burning everything and everyone in sight. In all likelihood, the man, becoming angrier and therefore deadlier, will raise the stakes the moment he realizes that she has been coming repeatedly to the house, visiting Jiijo and his children, on whom she has been lavishing sweets. He will want her to explain her motives and the purpose of her visits; he will want to know her identity, why she is bringing his wife and children presents, why she is driving around with a plumber to his house, and why she has come with armed escorts from another clan. Gudcur will insist that Cambara tell him what her business with his family and his house are.

  It takes the driver several attempts to reverse the vehicle out of a tight spot. He wheels the pre-power-steering model forward and then backward, his gear-changing polished, professional, and fast. However, when the two young escorts share a private joke, burst into laughter, and begin to roll in their seats in stitches, the driver loses his composure, braking just in time before crashing into a tree and then halting crudely before the front of the vehicle collides with the wall to his back. Unspeaking, the plumber is contemplative.

  After the vehicle has exited and then eventually picked up moderate speed, heading north, and it hits one of the main subsidiary roads, Cambara prepares to give the driver several leads to help him get them to Zaak’s place. Just then, she observes the driver’s sudden loss of poise, which does not make sense to her until one of the armed escorts talks of his and the driver’s last visit to the northern neighborhoods of the city. In his account, the young man tells her that the visit dates back to a decade ago when he and the driver participated in some of the fiercest skirmishes between former warlords StrongmanNorth and StrongmanSouth.

  To keep panic from setting in, Cambara asks the driver questions, all the while struggling not to lose her sangfroid and doing her best to sound convincing and appear unruffled.

  “On whose side did you and the driver fight?” she says and then looks away, almost trembling with judicious displeasure.

  “We fought alongside StrongmanSouth’s clansmen, who were allied with ours,” replies one of the armed escorts in the back.

  When her attempt to will herself into listening to the conversation without making comments proves unsuccessful and she settles on pandering to her curiosity, Cambara creases her features to display her displeasure with this stance. Then she sees herself as a woman with little knowledge of this thing everyone calls “the clan business,” the unruliness of whose politics has brought the nation to ruin. That she is sharing the confined space of a vehicle with four men, three of whom have blood on their hands, makes her question the credentials of people like Kiin, who employ them. She wonders if she will rue her short-sightedness, if she will regret the fact that she has accepted Kiin’s kind offer to lend her a car, a driver, and armed escort; call up a plumber, whom she uses herself; and help her to achieve her aims, whatever these are, since she has not insisted that Cambara tell her. But she thinks she doesn’t want to go there, because in a civil war no one is innocent: men, women, youths, clerics, everyone is an accomplice in the killing and maiming of others, known and unknown. As the motorcar hurtles forward, she turns to the driver and asks him what his profession used to be before the country’s collapse.

  “I joined the National Army, now defunct, before taking my secondary-school finals and was sent away to the then Soviet Union on a scholarship to Odessa, where I trained as a tank engineer,” he replies.

  Cambara asks the driver, “Do you happen to remember where you were or rather what you were doing when Siyad Barre, the tyrant, fled the city in an army tank?”

  “I was one of the few senior-ranking army officers who refused to join the militia that was out to take Mogadiscio, because it was there for the taking,” the driver responds. “We learned soon enough, and especially after the dictator had fled and the presidential palace had fallen into the hands of the nativists, those of us fighting to live up to the ideals of the National Army formed a very small minority, but we were fighting a losing battle.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Together with a couple of like-minded military officers,” the driver answers, “I set up a small unit numbering a dozen or so men and representing the clan spectrum of this country. We raised the unit with a view to protecting the members of the clan families of the ‘chased-outs,’ people whose properties had been rendered fair game—taken over, looted�
��and whose current occupants placed under constant menace, a scenario of ‘You leave, or else the massacre!’ Many departed against their will, becoming displaced or going to refugee camps in one or the other of the neighboring countries.”

  “What has become of your unit?”

  “You are looking at the remnant of the unit.”

  The plumber speaks for the first time, saying, “Take seven, you have a mere three.”

  Cambara falls silent. In her vigorous attempt to concentrate, as though fearing that the hour of her failure is at hand, she furrows her forehead, her features a tangled affair. Of course she is sad to admit that a similar fate might be waiting to ambush her honorable intentions. Cambara will agree, if asked, that it is virtually impossible to live up to one’s high ideals in these adverse conditions, but she prays that her effort will not falter or ultimately come to naught. For she plans to construct a counterlife dependent on a few individuals, namely Kiin, maybe Bile and Dajaal, whom she has cast in the likeness of reliable allies.

  When the driver parks the vehicle in front of Zaak’s house without needing further guidance, Cambara draws a breath, relaxing, and she looks as if someone has pulled her away from a disturbing view. Both of the armed escorts alight, one of them opening the gate, the other readying for any contingency, including a shootout. The driver looks this way and that before easing his foot off the brake and then engaging the gear. He stops under the shade of a tree, away from the prying eyes of prowlers who might casually spot the car.

  Cambara leads the plumber into the house and shows him everything he needs to see: the kitchen, the toilets, the downstairs and the upstairs bathrooms. As he bones up on the overall situation, studying the source of the water, the pipes that have gone rusty, those that are in disrepair, and starts to scribble copious notes, she takes leave of him, suggesting they meet at the car.

  Then she goes up to her room to pack two large suitcases. She fills one of them with several items of everyday clothing plus a couple of dresses for special occasions and five thousand U.S. dollars, a quarter of the money she has brought along, in cash. She stuffs the harder of the two large suitcases with books about puppetry, masks, and theater, several of them the size of coffee tables. She opens one, then takes a look at her sketches, her notes, and other relevant material that she has brought along to help her one day produce her play, a pet project at which she has been working on and off for several years, even if on the quiet. When she comes to making a choice of what to wear, she changes her mind several times and tries on different garments, mixing and matching styles before finally settling on a comfortably loose, cotton shirt and baggy trousers. She feels she can afford to do away with the veil and headwear altogether, and combs her hair, letting it down, as if reliving her young days in Mogadiscio. For effect, she wears a garbasaar shawl of the finest silk.

  She decides not to ask any of the youths to help her bring down the suitcases to the vehicle and hauls it all on her own. The plumber, who is about to wrap up his note-taking and cross-checking, hears the footfalls of somebody shifting, half pulling, and half heaving a hefty suitcase with wheels down a staircase. It is only after he takes a second and a more concentrated look at the figure humping down the weighty object that he realizes that he is staring at Cambara, who has on a stylish outfit. Amazed at the mutation, he softens the impact on his mind by offering to cart it himself to the truck, only to discover that he cannot even lift it off the ground, let alone drag it the way she has been doing. Then, as if to prove a point, Cambara humps it all by herself all the way to the vehicle, while the plumber goes back into the house to retrieve his tools, measurements, and sketches. She takes notice of the armed escorts amusedly looking from her to the plumber and then calls to the driver to request that he open the boot for her, please.

  On rejoining the group, the plumber, to cancel out his mates’ jeers, asks Cambara what is in the suitcase. By way of reply, she points at an airline label with a picture of a porter rubbing a bent back that reads “Very Heavy.” The plumber makes as if he will rephrase his question when the driver says to him, “It is rude to ask a lady what she is carrying in her suitcase.”

  Then Cambara looks from the driver to the armed escorts and finally at the plumber, wondering aloud if one of them will please come and give her a hand to bring down a second suitcase. The men exchange equivocal glances, none volunteering to go with her, because they all assume that the second suitcase might be bulkier than the first one. Not even her throwaway, singularly charged and defiantly delivered one word, “Men,” her head raised, eyes audaciously expressive, moves any of the men to follow her.

  When she rejoins them, swinging the suitcase, proving that it is much lighter than they have hypothesized, all four look embarrassed. No one, however, says anything for a long while. They get into the vehicle, the driver starts the engine, turns the radio on, maneuvering out of the gate, and then stops at the first intersection. He wants to know their destination. She instructs him where to go in a piecemeal fashion, telling him where to turn left just before they hit a bend, suggesting that he slow down prior to his veering right. Not one of the four men has the slightest idea that they are unwitting abettors, four men aiding a woman in her plot to achieve one of her aims. Nor have they the faintest inkling of their involvement in her dicey attempt to recover her family property.

  They are well on their way to Cambara’s family house when, the radio still on, a news item about a street-by-street turf war involving one Gudcur and his men against another militia group attracts everyone’s attention. There is total silence inside as they listen to the latest wire dispatches filed by the Horn Afrique journalists close to the scene: Gudcur and his militiamen have lost several of their number, been pushed back a couple of streets, and have had to improvise the construction of a bunker on which they now rely as defense. According to eyewitness reports, Gudcur and his men’s fighting prowess are under a great deal of strain, given the likelihood of another militia faction to their south, whom they dislodged a year earlier, joining forces with their opponents and attacking them from the rear.

  When the news ends Cambara asks the driver, the volume of her twitchy voice drowning out the music, if he knows Gudcur.

  The driver switches off the radio and says, “I don’t know him personally, but I think that he is a thorough piece of work, objectionable in every possible way, and deserving of the punishment being dished out to him.”

  “Give me the background,” she says, feigning total ignorance of the man and his past and current activities. “What’s the fighting about and why now?”

  The driver responds, “The fighting is for control of a checkpoint close to the main intersection to a bridge, which is seen as a lucrative means of exacting charges on the road users.”

  She knows it sounds naive even as she formulates the question, but she asks it all the same. She says, “Is it lucrative enough to meet his financial needs?”

  “He wouldn’t fight if it were not.”

  “How many checkpoints would a man like him control to make enough to feed his fighters and live in grand style?” she asks.

  “He is a middle-ranking warlord,” the driver explains, “subordinate to the high-ranking strongmen who have earned the right to occupy center stage in the country’s politics and who are invited to every National Reconciliation conference held to provide our failed state with a central government. Gudcur is an ally of the current incumbent of StrongmanSouth’s hub of operations.”

  Then one of the armed escorts joins in, throwing his words of contempt as if the object of his derision, Gudcur, were in the vehicle with them, sitting between Cambara and the driver. He says, “We are happy to hear that he is thrashing around, like a fish caught in a net.”

  The other armed escort nods his head vigorously in agreement with his mate. The plumber’s closemouthed stance, however, bothers Cambara, because she has no idea what to make of his reticence, why he is tight-lipped. She assumes that it does not happen oft
en that a professional residing in Mogadiscio does not confer empathy or loathing on the activities of a warlord, especially in a street-by-street battle for the taking of a checkpoint, the control of which allows him to impose a duty on every motor vehicle or good that comes through it.

  Cambara says, “I hadn’t realized.”

  “What? What hadn’t you realized?”

  Her heavy breathing is audible in the confines of the truck as she wears an impish grin on her forehead crossing swords with a tangle of fretfulness. This is because she is sick with worry, fearful that, unbeknownst to the four men, she is taking them to Gudcur’s lair.

  Scarcely has she prepared to intimate her deep involvement in Jiijo’s life and her very complex connection to Gudcur than she realizes that they are almost there. Drawing comfort from the fact that she is not likely to meet Gudcur there, Cambara presses ahead and then tells the driver to stop opposite but not too close to the gate. Then she and the plumber alight, leaving the driver and the armed escorts to remain in the vehicle, covering them, in case of problems.