Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  TWENTY-FIVE

  No sooner has Cambara fastened her seat belt and readied to start engaging Dajaal in a conversation about the masks in the play than he whips out his mobile phone and, calling some man by name, tells him that he and a guest are on their way and that he should meet the vehicle at the usual entrance; he won’t have time to go to the apartment himself.

  It is then that her itinerant eyes fall on two items with religious significance: a rosary and the word “Allah,” in Arabic, both hanging down prominently behind the rearview mirror. She stares at them, as though in a hypnotic state. At first she looks alternately bemused and baffled, and then she reasons with calmness that she is being facile in inferring Dajaal’s religious inclination or lack thereof from two artifacts that may have come with the car whenever it was imported as a reconditioned vehicle from the Arabian Gulf, as many of the cars plying the roads in Mogadiscio are. Nor does she need reminding that she too has donned a body tent, the type of veil associated in the minds of Muslims with the most devout women, something she is not, yet she has worn it anyway.

  It won’t do her or her cause any good if she broaches the subject head-on when he appears not to be well disposed toward her. Who knows if he may relent in a day or so, perhaps after he has had a chance to read the text. She will have a word with Bile, who may agree to intercede with him. Moreover, is it not possible that Seamus may have got the wrong end of the stick? It is feasible to interpret Dajaal’s position as that of making a theological point to an Irishman, something he does not need to do when speaking with her, a fellow Muslim, albeit secular leaning. In any case, she must try her utmost and without prejudice to get on the right side of Dajaal’s goodwill. To bring this about, it is unwise to discuss the subject with him now, much less pick a quarrel with him over his objections to her use of the masks later. Dajaal deserves a heartfelt thank-you from her.

  As she embarks on speaking his praises, she realizes how much pluck it will take to find the words with which to express not only her genuine intentions but also her ambiguities. Her mixed emotions stiffen her features, and she senses that whatever she has to say will not pass muster and that whatever phrases she lights on will sound either inadequate or too formal. Silence being no alternative, she settles on speaking and does so only after her attempt to make eye contact with him has failed.

  She says, “I’ve meant to thank you for all your help, Dajaal. You’ve put your life and the lives of others on the line. Thank you.”

  He is as brief in his response as he is self-contained in his reticence. “My pleasure.”

  Silent, he gives his full attention to his driving, and he looks straight ahead, conscious, nonetheless, of her stare. If she is daring him to meet her gaze, then maybe the slight grin that forms and then disappears momentarily is his way of responding to it.

  “You’ve set things in motion, with admirable results, managing something not short of a miracle: organizing the repossession of my family property without shedding a drop of blood. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.” Then silence.

  She falls despondently quiet, the faint echo of her voice replaying in her head. She feels as if she is in a free fall, the string attaching her to the parachute becoming so entangled that there is no chance of it opening. The intensity of her vulnerability, the unpredictable nature of her volatility surprises her as much as it shocks her.

  The first to break the silence, Dajaal says, “I fear that Seamus may have misinformed you or worried you rather unnecessarily.”

  “Please explain what you mean,” she says.

  He obliges. “Maybe Seamus has misunderstood me.”

  Cambara says nothing; waits.

  “I have no objections to the use you are making of masks in your play,” he continues. “All I’ve said to him is that Islamic Courts folks might object to the use of carved images in theater and that if that were to happen we would run into trouble. Insurmountable trouble.”

  “Have you ever seen any puppet theater yourself?”

  “I have.”

  “Not in this country?”

  “No. In the former Soviet Union,” he says, adding, “when I was a student there, training as a military officer. A theater troupe from Ukraine came to perform for us. We also had the Guinean Ballet troupe perform, as they did here in Mogadiscio too, several years later. Both here and in Odessa—I am speaking of the ballet now—the audiences were shocked when the women performing in it bared their breasts in the final act. In Odessa, they gawked and asked for an encore. Here, in Mogadiscio, the audiences applauded. But then the courts were not much of a threat. Siyad Barre was in power then and he wouldn’t have countenanced their objections. Things are different now. The Islamists have terrific clout and an armed militia, and cinema owners and TV producers do their bidding when they forbid the showing of a program or the airing of a broadcast.”

  Cambara recalls that for generations, women in Africa have employed the baring of breasts not so much as art, as the Guinean Ballet is known to have done, but as a political forum, used in opposition to the male order of society, which is corrupt, inefficient, retrograde. But that is not where she wants their talk to go; so she brings it back into line, saying “Do you know anyone who might raise objections to my use of the wooden masks? Personally?”

  “I haven’t discussed the topic with anyone other than Seamus,” he says, “but I know the way things are here. All you need is one hardline Islamist quoting a verse from the Koran on so-called religious grounds, and you will find holier-than-thou crowds with placards gathering in front of the theater, picketing, and stoning the building or anyone entering it. Some self-described Muslim leader is bound to pass a fatwa on the head of the author, and a Mogadiscio businessman, eager to gain popularity and fame, will promise a sum of money in hundreds of U.S. dollars to anyone who will carry out the death sentence. In the meantime, the BBC Somali Service will interview the Muslim leader, the businessman in question, and the author of the puppet theater on their Friday program.”

  Recalling her conversation with Seamus, she asks what he would do if, for whatever reason, someone were to object to the props as being graven. “In other words, on which side of the fence will you be if and when my life is under threat or if the hall in which I produce the play is firebombed?”

  He acts as though he is impervious to her stare, which she has now trained on him. It’s obvious not only that he is not oblivious to it but also that he is bothered, a little shaken.

  “I’ll have to give that some serious thought.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Neither speaks for a long time.

  “You wouldn’t say the images are un-Islamic?”

  “Some people would,” he says.

  “You wouldn’t, would you?”

  When he doesn’t wish to commit himself to a position, a sudden sense of apprehension quietly seeps like an oil slick into unreachable and therefore uncleanable areas of her awareness, she feels disaffected. Why has she never considered that it may come to this? Which would she rather walk away from: her art or the family property, which is as good as recovered, as good as restored, and therefore all her own? She notices that Dajaal is slowing down, driving at funeral speed and looking now in the rearview mirror, now ahead, as if trying to spot someone.

  Her voice meek, she says, “What a stark choice to make!”

  Dajaal says, “I am aware of it, yes.”

  Then both of them catch sight of an elderly man emerging from a huge, dilapidated building, moving in haste toward the vehicle, with his hands flailing excitedly. When the man gets closer, a smile of recognition spreads its wings on the old man’s wrinkled face. Dajaal eases off, changing gears and braking, but he does not switch the engine off.

  He says to the old man, “Please take this woman to Bile,” and to Cambara he says, “Ring me on my mobile when you want to be picked up, and I will do so. Pronto.”

  He reverses without waving, and off he goes.

  A
little antsy, Cambara steps out of the vehicle affording herself the time to wave and then address her words of thanks in Dajaal’s direction, although she is aware he won’t hear them. Maybe she is doing it for the sake of form, given the presence of the old man, of whom she is now in pursuit.

  Catching up with him, they walk in parallel past a metal gate and a desolate space, down a stairway into a cool, damp, and dark basement. She wonders where they are, maybe in a sort of cave with flaky walls and an otherworldly echo. Afraid, she stays close to him, as they pass puddles of water, provenance unclear. They walk toward human voices—women chattering noisily, children in playful pursuit of one another—but she cannot tell from where they are emanating, from up above or from another basement below. The old man is hell-bent on getting her to Bile’s and she on not being left behind in this place, which is as damp as the bottom of a grave recently dug close to a swamp and emitting a god-awful smell, like Zaak’s mouth soon after he has awoken.

  The old man, perforce, takes it easy when they come to a slippery staircase, holding on to the side railing, which is rusty and wettish. She too is cautious, moderating her pace to match his, her shoed feet meeting a perilous clamminess. The old man says, “Careful,” when she trips, and sighs heavily when she stands on the tips of her toes, flapping about, until she grabs hold of the side railing in time before falling. It is a mystery to her how the old man can figure out where to go or what is happening to her without looking over his shoulders; it is as though he has eyes on his back.

  She feels relieved when they emerge into an open space, a former parking lot with no cars now. They climb up a short stairway, past a courtyard with a row of potted flowers and walls covered with creepers, dark, green, and young: the leaves of passion fruit in full splendor.

  They stop in front of a metal door, the old man hesitating to press the bell. As for Cambara, she is reading a verse on a plaque nailed to the lintel: “Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God.” Scarcely has she had the time to decide from which holy scripture it was taken than the old man pushes the door open and leaves as fast as someone running away from a crime scene does.

  As soon as she walks, unescorted, into the apartment, a telling odor, ominous in its fierceness and rather irrepressible, hits Cambara in the face, overwhelming her senses. The smell takes her back to a memory in her distant past, and which she thinks of no reason to relive: a baby making a terrible mess, soiling its clothes with its own waste, and she, the mother of the child, cleaning it all up.

  Feeling protective toward Bile, as soon as she has worked out the source of the odor before taking even one step further. She decides not to allow anyone else, including or rather especially the old man, to be privy to any of this, she closes the door behind her. When she tries to figure out what to do or how to attend to the smell, a recalcitrant thought, disturbing in its meaning, crosses her mind.

  Then she approaches Bile, his eyes glazed over, soiled, the dominating image that comes to her one of a strong workhorse with weak knees. He is lying on his side, dissipated, with no more energy to expend on getting up, his left hand under his head, the right hand balled into a fist and stretched forward; both the back and the front of his trousers brown, most probably with his waste; one of his slippers off and the other half on. His right cheek is plastered with the thick deposit of dried yellow detritus probably stained with some partly digested food that the rest of his body, not agreeing with it, has rejected. It is obvious from his misted-over gaze that Bile does not even recognize her, but, as if needing to exonerate him of blame, she remembers that when they met, she was in an “elsewhere veil.” Now she is in a caftan, hair uncovered; he is in his apartment and is in an otherworldly state of mind, hardly capable of determining how come he has ended up adorning his clothes with his bodily discharges.

  She does what she has done many times before as a mother. First she helps him to a half crouch, allowing him all the time in the world to stay on his knees, then assisting him to lean forward and against her before pulling him, very slowly, and gradually up and up and up into a sitting position on the couch. She minds neither the awfulness of the stench nor the fact that his vomit-and waste-stained cheek and his smudged trousers are rubbing against her body. After she has let him catch his constrained breath, she makes him lie on the couch on his back.

  The sun entering the apartment falls on Bile’s eyes, but they do not reflect light, only darkness, like that of a night of terrible sorrow. Even so, a distant smile traces his face.

  No time to spare, Cambara moves speedily about the apartment and soon enough she finds the bathroom, where she notices an unusual mess: the sink blocked with debris, the toilet and the seat of the bidet edged with slurry, the paper off its holder, unfurled and lying on its side. She goes to the kitchen, fills a kettle with water, and turns the flame on. While the water is boiling, she goes back to the bathroom and runs the taps, discovering that there is hot water for a shower. A minute or so later, she comes out carrying a huge bath towel, a flannel bathrobe, and a bucket full of hot water. All this while, Bile is lost to the world. When she comes to do the preliminary cleansing before leading him into the bathroom for his eventual shower, he does not collaborate or show any resistance, nor does he open his eyes as she wipes his face clean with a flannel. She moves him to this side and then that side until she places the huge bath towel under him. Then she covers him with the bathrobe. She undoes his belt; he stirs, alerting her to his conscious state. But even though he does not push her away, she leaves the room to answer the kettle’s singing, and make a pot of tea. She finds a tray and some honey.

  She helps him sit up, the bathrobe covering his front, with the huge towel below him needing to be readjusted. If she doesn’t solicit his opinion as to what she must do next or does not ask how he is, it is because she believes that he is in no condition to describe what is happening to him. She also knows that for a man of his age, he looks very trim, but there is no knowing what the question “How are you?” might produce and whether, trained as a doctor, he will be too scientific in his litany of complaints. Has he vomited because of an intestinal obstruction or because of a disorder in his inner ear? Has he struck his head against something, injuring it, and then, having lost consciousness, vomited, let go of his poo, as an infant might? His liver may have failed; he might be developing gout, the way a baobab tree might grow a calloused fungus. In a man his age, anything can happen; in one’s second babyhood, anything can occur.

  She makes the tea strong. Then she finds the sugar, two spoons of which end up in the cup, and stirs it with determined energy. As she places the cup in his hands, after adding honey into the brew, she encourages him to take a sip. She says, “Good for you,” in the same way a mother might address an ailing child whom she is encouraging to drink a bowl of broth. “Good for you.”

  She waits until he puts the rim of the cup to his lower lip to take his first slow swallow. Then she imagines Bile bringing gravitas, more than anyone else she has ever known, to the idea of sadness, nearly ennobling it. Clean of face, because she has already wiped it, less disconsolate of expression, because maybe he now feels energized by her presence, Cambara assumes that she sees intimations of normalcy in his behavior as well as in his body language, optimistically concluding that she is wrong about his being unwell, which now strikes her as no more than a moment’s aberration. nothing very serious. She ascribes the swelling of his face to the sudden gaining of much weight due to the indisposition of diarrheal complications. A day’s bed rest with lots of TLC thrown in will do him wonders. As a student of living theater, which she hasn’t had much time to practice or perfect, she sees him as a man acting out an imagined life at the same time as he is living it, in the end, crowning it all with the finest of details.

  Bile extends his hand to her, and she takes it. Pulling him toward her, she is tempted to give him a kiss on the cheek, convinced that this innocuous act might touch him wherever it is that he is hurting and cure him. That this is the fi
rst time in a long while that she has found herself in a situation that has so moved her, making her want to give him a kiss on the cheek, must mean something. In Canada, she might not hesitate to give a peck to a man leaving a party soon after being introduced to him but not here, where things are different, especially after the civil war. Some people might look askance at a woman doing what she has done. Not only has she stayed at Zaak’s house as a guest, but she has come into Bile’s apartment with no chaperone. And now look at what she has been up to: She has disrobed him and is now waiting to give him a shower. No way will such an insular society permit her to employ her theater props of the kind a mufti won’t approve.

  He won’t let go of her hand, no matter how gently she makes her intimations clear: that she wants it back to keep his bathrobe in place. He holds it as a child might a teddy bear in his sleep: hogging, hugging, squeezing it. Her naive hope that the tea will revive him does not materialize, at least not instantly. Now and then he winces as if in pain, then in less than the blink of an eye, his expressions worry her when she tries to give him a shower. His eyes do not seem right, not at all. Maybe so much suffering of whatever nature does not necessarily uplift one. He is restless, so jumpy, that his eyes are opening and closing with the speed of a worried stutterer’s tongue. His eyes are totally vacuous, a sad, sad emptiness caused, most likely, by the kicking in of a delayed reaction to antidepressants taken ill advisedly.

  He talks a fever talk. At first, he is inaudible. Then what he says does not make sense, until she asks him to repeat it two or three times.

  “Tell me,” he says, “what is gold to someone who does not understand its value? What’s a mansion to someone who won’t live in it? What manner of a man trains as a doctor and helps to cure others but can’t apply what he has learned to his own illness?”