She notices a formidable change in the air that makes her insides tense, and the silence more haunting. Now she hears the distant hum of a medium-sized generator, something unusual in this part of the city at this time of day. Then her eyes fall, as if accidentally, on an unmanned boom fifty meters or so farther down the dirt road and just before it a sign that says “JoOgSo,” scribbled most likely in the hand of a dyslexic, and under it the word “sToP.”
She looks around and realizes where they are. Down one city block, then right, and you will be facing the gate. Will it make sense to move her main base to the property? No doubt, it will be less costly than running up hotel bills, but will the place be sufficiently safe for her to pursue her theater work? Moreover, if it is the sound of a generator she has just heard and if it is coming from the house, then whose is it? Then she becomes aware, gradually, of purposeful movements both inside the vehicle and outside of it. The man in the back of the car she is in steps out with the gentleness of a grandmother quitting the room in which her daughter who has just delivered a baby has fallen asleep and closes the door firmly and speedily. Gacal and SilkHair, for their part, show signs of fear, and they both fret, not knowing what to do. Cambara tells them to sit tight, and they do.
Meanwhile, Dajaal puts his hand into the glove compartment and brings out a firearm, which he keeps hidden from view. He watches with studied caution as three young men crawl out of a camouflage of leafage, at first wary, then very friendly and enthusiastically waving. No older than Gacal or SilkHair, some of them are affecting the air of taking part in a skirmish between two armed militia groups, their tread measured, eyes darting in this or that direction, their weapons pointed, and their fingers restless. To her, it is all part of a theater of some absurd war, whose militiamen will fight without knowing when it will stop once it has started.
As the young boy who is clad in a baggy pair of trousers, which he hitches up every now and then, and carrying a compact machine gun whose weight jars with that of his own long-legged, skinny body approaches, he lowers his weapon out of deference to Dajaal, whom he salutes in imitation of the U.S. Marines he has probably seen in movies.
“Where is my nephew?” Dajaal asks the boy.
As if on cue, Cambara claps her eyes on him, a short youth with a god-awful stride, swaggering as if preparing for the second take in a rehearsal on a set for a movie in which he is playing opposite Clint Eastwood. He says, his accent as seasoned as it is put on to impress her, “Here I am. We are okay on all fronts, Uncle. How about you, are you okay?”
“This is Qasiir, my nephew,” Dajaal says.
Qasiir performs his stand-up routine with a New York Yankees cap and a white T-shirt with the words “Iraq Hawks Down” stenciled in black. Under the writing is an eagle with no wings and empty sockets for eyes, scarily unsightly. Qasiir is self-consciously posing, and when he realizes he is not making any impression on Cambara, he puts on a mortified expression and chews nervously on the end of the matchstick sticking out of the left side of his mouth à la Jean-Paul Belmondo.
“Any more questions?” he says, clearly hurt.
Dajaal asks, “All is well on all fronts?”
“As far as I know, all is well on all fronts.”
“That’s good,” Dajaal says.
“Hasta la vista,” Qasiir says, and off he trots, almost colliding with one of his mates, as he scuttles on his platform shoes, in the direction of a tree under which there is a canvas chair, resembling that of a movie director, only this one has an arm missing.
When they finally get to her family’s gate, she notices the remarkable transformation under way. She senses the variety of activities going on inside and tries her best to sort them out in her mind, in the hope of identifying them. She succeeds in doing so, notwithstanding the hubbub that is one with a house in the process of renovation and which is being gutted. She strains to hear through the loud noise of a working heavy-duty generator. Dajaal toots the horn, in code, and before she is able to say “sesame,” the gate—the rust on it that took years to form removed, its hinges repaired, and a first lick of paint applied—opens.
Two youths come into view, both bowing theatrically and curtsying as clowns might. They urge Dajaal to drive in, and, as he does so, they wave to her in delightful consciousness, grinning. She can see a man, maybe an electrician, going up the rungs of a ladder placed against the wall with the slowness of a cripple coming out of a deep well. Lying in the courtyard that is open to the sky, there are a couple of cisterns, both new, if a little dusty, and other bathroom and toilet wares waiting to be installed. In short, a world, to the construction of which she has contributed little, is now being reinvented, thanks to these charitable souls. But as she looks farther to the right of the house and spots Seamus emerging from a truck parked there, she starts to wonder if she has the right to see herself as a catalyst for such remarkable revamping. She alights from the car, waiting beside it, as he moves, smiling, toward her. She believes that Seamus, Kiin, and Dajaal have the license to be pleased with the ways things are going. All the same, she wonders if she has the wherewithal to maintain the property and keep it in this style, taking into account how much it has cost to put the process of repossessing it into motion.
Dajaal gets back into the car, waves very enthusiastically to Seamus, to whom he speaks in kitchen Somali, spiced with a couple of infinitives in Italian, and then says to Cambara, “I’ll come back for you in an hour, to take you to Bile, if that is what you want.”
“That’s what I want. Thank you.”
Then he reverses the vehicle, making as much ruckus as the mason drilling into the wall does. Seamus clenches his teeth irritably and waits until Dajaal is safely out of the gate and out of his hearing before he says to Cambara, “How terrible, terrible, terrible.” Not sure she has heard his comment right, she grins.
After a relative pause in which he weighs matters in his head, Seamus speaks to her in English, even though for some reason he is inclined to lapse into Italian today. She has no idea why she expects him to put a cigar or a pipe into his mouth and light it up. She imagines that the hair on his face or head will benefit from becoming more wreathed in ashes of a riotous sort, salt-and-pepper attractive, curls the shape of garlic from the Mezzogiorno, like those of a don at some elite Jesuit college somewhere, where they drink good wine, eat terrible food of the boiled variety, and address one another by their surnames, no titles.
He says, “Welcome to this neck of the woods, my dear girl,” and he approaches her with care.
She says, “Good to see you wherever, whenever.”
As she chums up to him to give him a peck on the cheeks thrice, she catches a whiff of his sweat; she assumes that he may have had only a birdbath since yesterday, as the house is not yet connected to the city’s aqueduct or to an alternative system. She can’t help comparing his odor to Zaak’s and deciding that this does not disturb her in the least, because Seamus has been hard at work in honest slog, whereas Zaak is a lazy dullard. It’s under the pain of being tickled that she has kissed him; she has had to show restraint, despite the temptation of letting go of a chortle, or is she being too girlish for that? She decides to ask the first fully formed question that comes to her.
“How is Bile?” she says.
“At times, he can’t tell the difference between day and night,” Seamus says.
“How long has he been like that?”
“Off and on for two days now.”
“That bad?” she wonders aloud.
“It could be worse,” Seamus says. “I hope we can do something about his deteriorating state.”
“We? Who is we?” she asks.
“You and I and everybody around him.”
Not wanting to catch his eyes, she looks away.
“Especially Dajaal,” Seamus adds.
Then he apologizes for rescheduling their meeting. “In one way, I felt things were so barmy I sought solace in work. Came here, where I dossed down in one of the ro
oms on a mat. I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to the apartment. Anyway, it was almost one o’clock in the morning when I was ready to take a break.”
“A formidable commitment, indeed,” she says.
Her eyes encounter his, and she looks into them from close range, the brownness of his dark pupils, which are in the process of withdrawing from being seen, startles her. Here is a man, she thinks, who might use his shamanic powers to good effect, if he were to choose to.
“There’s a lot to be done,” he assures her.
She takes in her surroundings, agrees with him, and then adds, “But now that you’ve laid the foundation of the work, which is the most demanding aspect of any job, I’m certain that the remainder will be a lot easier.”
A man, most likely a plumber, walks by, his young assistant following, and they pick up a cistern each and then disappear into the bowels of the house without exchanging a word with either of them.
Seamus says, his eyebrows raised, “Espresso?”
Before responding to his offer, she commits a few moments to discovering where her two charges have ended up and what they have been doing. She locates them easily enough, because they are close by: SilkHair mixing chattily with the armed militiamen operating the gates; Gacal standing at the foot of the ladder, having attached himself to the electrician, busy passing him his tools and sharing a joke with another man removing coils of electric wire from their casings.
“I would love an espresso, thank you,” she says.
Then he says, “Sorry,” to Cambara and goes straight to where two of the militiamen have turned over a china washbasin to sit on, as they chat away with obvious excitement to SilkHair. Cambara hears him give the command Kac—Somali for “Stand up”—his pronunciation of the guttural c in kac perfect. The young men rise at his behest all right but, in typical Somali fashion, admit no wrong and argue in self-justification. According to them, their body weights together are so light they cannot break the washbasin by sitting on it. Seamus wags his finger at them and, before leaving them, speaks his last salvo. “Maya, maya,” he repeats. “No, no.”
He beckons her to follow him to the hall, which he has turned into a workshop. He goes behind a worktable, on which there are papers scattered where he may have scribbled his notes. When he sits down, his tools and some of the masks that he has carved since their last encounter are within easy reach. And to the right of the unoccupied surface of the worktable is a flask and beside it two demitasses. In a corner behind the worktable is an espresso machine and next to it several large bottles of mineral water; to the back of Seamus is a small fridge.
“Such heels, these militiamen,” he says.
Brooding and silent, he makes the espresso. She is taken with the beauty, the moment she sees them, of the lifelike face and head masks that Seamus has carved for her play in the likeness of eagles and chickens. The masks have become the object of her new enhancement; she is so captivated that she dares not turn her gaze away. No one looks happier than a touchy-feely Cambara who now lifts a full-bodied mask hewed out of fine wood in the semblance of a young eagle, almost bringing it close enough to her face to kiss its gorgeousness, then another, this time one sculpted in the semblance of a mother eagle, then one of a young chicken nervously cackling.
“What do you take with your espresso?”
“A glass of water, please,” she says, and she sits down and then turns around and extends both her hands to receive the espresso he has just made for her in one hand and then the water in the other.
Again, she focuses on the masks.
“They are gorgeous beyond belief,” she says.
“I’m not done with them.”
“I love what I see.”
“You are very sweet.”
She tells herself that a lot has indeed taken place since her first unannounced call at this house, in a body tent, making her acquaintance of Jiijo and then setting about worming her way into her confidence before moving in on her for the kill, so to speak. It has been a worthwhile effort.
Now she says to Seamus, “Tell me about Dajaal.”
“What do you wish to know?”
“What’s bothering him?”
Seamus pulls at his liberally grown beard at the same time as he begins to insinuate a couple of the strands of hair close to the right side of his mouth into it.
“There is a lot that he keeps close to his chest. Dajaal has been in a snit ever since he completed his assignment, which, among other things, involved the repossessing of your property. When I pressed him, he admitted to his unhappiness; he is very upset that I’ve carved masks in the likeness of eagles and chickens,” Seamus says. “He does not approve of what we are doing.”
“To what do you ascribe this?” Cambara asks.
“I have never known him to reveal his religious leaning to this extent; I’ve never thought of him as gung-ho devout,” Seamus says.
Cambara scowls, then says, “I want to know what has unsettled Dajaal: seeing you carve the masks, or is he just raising a storm about other matters? I am not clear what exactly is forbidden in Islam and what is not.”
“It is forbidden to create a likeness of Allah’s living creation,” replies Seamus. “You will know that the Arabic sawara, used for ‘creation of likenesses,’ is the same word that is used nowadays for photography.”
She pauses to reflect on his remarks, and then looks at him as if intending to challenge his certainity, asking, “Don’t tell me that photography is forbidden?”
Seamus, grinning, reads from his notes, and, cautious like a septuagenarian treading on slippery ground, replies, “According to the late Sheikh Muhammad Bakheet, a former Mufti of Egypt, photography is not forbidden, because, he says, ‘this art is no more than captivating a shade or a reflection by special technique, similar to what we see in mirrors.’ What is not allowed is to ‘create a likeness which has no previous existence,’ a likeness that might be construed as competing with Allah’s creation. Statues, sculptures—these are forbidden. Unless they are meant to serve as toys.”
She gives serious thought to what he has just said, and then asks, “What are we to make of Dajaal’s response?”
“He’s organized a posse of men to stab Gudcur, who is a clansman of his and Bile’s,” Seamus replies. “Why he has chosen to act in this contradictory way when it comes to the masks is beyond me.”
“We need Dajaal on our side,” Cambara says.
“If you want to know, Dajaal’s hostility to the idea of my carving the eagles and chickens has, in part, precipitated my moving here from the apartment I share with Bile last night. And that is saying something.”
“Will talking to Dajaal be of any use?” she asks. “Has Dajaal bothered to quote an authority on the basis of which a Muslim is forbidden to carve, say, a mask in the likeness of an eagle or a chicken?”
“I doubt that he knows any authority to quote,” says Seamus.
“He does not even pray with any regularity.”
She takes a sip of her espresso, cold and bitter.
Seamus goes on, “I’ve never seen him say his devotions even once in all the time we’ve spent together, and we’ve spent many a sunup and many a sundown together. I’ve known him to be disciplined enough to keep his opinions about many matters to himself. He is so private, Bile and I do not know what he does after work.” A despairing look spreads itself on his face as he says, “Now this!”
“Just a thought.”
He looks for a long while at his fingers, stained, most likely with Superglue and other adhesives. He applies a clear liquid with an odor reminiscent of linseed oil, and then he rubs his hands together.
“I owe him thanks for all this,” she says, her hands gesticulating. “It can’t have been easy to achieve what Dajaal has done. Such a strategist, especially if he has had a hand in staging the attack on Gudcur’s redoubt, that drew him out of the property.”
“Now that I think of it,” Seamus says, his face lighting up with t
he flames of memory, “I remember Dajaal being in a state a few days ago after he and Bile had a long talk, in camera, so to speak. In all the years I’ve known the two of them and I’ve known them for donkey’s years, neither of them wanted me in on their discussion. Then I didn’t see Dajaal for a whole day, and when next he turned up, he was not alone. He had Kaahin, a former fellow officer in the now defunct National Army, in tow. Another in-camera huddle. I knew then that some sort of secret operation that would require renting one or two battlewagons and as many as a dozen highly trained fighters was being mounted. Later, I learned how much it would cost to pull it off. I only know of all this because I was the one who went to our money changer to pay off the men, none of whom I had ever seen.”
“Where did the funds come from?”
“Some benefactor from abroad. Otherwise, it is all hush-hush. Kiin is in the picture somewhere. It’s all unclear to me.”
Cambara suspects that Arda, with help from Raxma, is up to her old tricks, funneling the funds in through an intermediary. Her head pounds with pain, as if the drilling coming from another room were boring into her, reducing her to someone with a brain needing to be overhauled.
“It distresses me that it has come to this.”
“Let’s not despair. Talk to Bile. About Dajaal.”
“Let’s find a way of somehow involving Dajaal in the production.”
“Talk to Bile; he’ll know what to suggest better than I.”
“Do you think that having Bile talk to him may persuade him to come to our side of the fence? Or if he were to read the text, he would like it?”
“No idea.”
They fall silent, neither able to find anything to say. Gacal comes in to announce that Dajaal is waiting in the car for Cambara to join him, and when she does, she discovers that the engine is on, idling. She gets in, puts on her seat belt, and he reverses, then drives off speedily without a single word.
Knots Page 36
