Changing scene, she brings the tea tray; he, coming after her and humming what she imagines to be a Somali song of the nationalistic variety, is already opening the wrappings of the crackling biscuits. Her gaze, wandering, rests for a few moments on a runic writing: “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood.”
Whatever does that mean, she thinks. He offers her a biscuit; she pours out the tea. No sugar—she drinks her tea white; he drinks his as it comes, black.
A very long silence.
“About Bile,” he says, broaching the subject, with the compunction of someone to whom has fallen the unenviable task of looking after an ailing person.
Seamus tries his damnedest not to appear unnecessarily intrusive. Cambara waits for him to continue, convinced that he is about to launch into an explanation of what, in his view, is the matter. But he doesn’t, his eyes furtively focusing first on his watch and then on a spot to the right of her, maybe on a stain at the bottom of her dress that she has failed to clean up. Cambara supposes that he has picked up a faint sound coming from Bile’s room, the way a mother does when her baby is sleeping somewhere close, and, jumpy, he gets up and, without saying anything to her, paces back and forth, muttering something to himself, looking in the direction of Bile’s room, door closed, maybe waiting for confirmation of whether he has heard something or not.
His next move takes him to the sideboard, where he sets about laying a table in record time: three places, three plates, three table mats, crockery, water tumblers each with ice cubes and slices of lemon in them, and a large bottle of mineral water.
“Can I help?” she says timidly
“Just in case Bile wakes up.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“When he does wake up, I will want him to eat something, because I’ve assumed from having been in the kitchen while making tea that he hasn’t cooked and you haven’t prepared a meal for him.” Then, like a caregiver remarking on the habits of his ward, “That he is fretful in his sleep means that he is having a bad, bad day.”
Seamus walks into the kitchen, washes his hands, puts on an apron, fumbles about in the pantry, brings out and opens several tins containing soup and green peas, empties the contents into microwave containers, and, using gloves, sticks them in the microwave. He turns the cooker on; brings out onions, chopping and frying them in olive oil; opens a tin of tomatoes; turns and pulls out pans, spices, garlic; and voilà, an easy-to-make sauce in quick time. He lowers the flames so nothing burns, then joins her, takes a sip of his cold tea, frowns, and asks aloud if she might like a fresh pot. She offers to make it; he shrugs a don’t-bother shoulder shrug, and sits down, one part of him listening for a sound from Bile’s room, a second timing the oven and the sauce on the cooker, and a third attending to her. She finds herself remembering Dalmar as a baby and her early days as a mother.
“In what state did you find him?” Seamus asks.
“Lying amid his waste.”
“But he won’t listen.”
She won’t allow herself to ask the question “To what won’t he listen?” no matter how often she wants to; she is unable to voice her sentiments: “But you don’t ask someone in his state what to do, you just do it.” What’s more, she remembers her vow not to talk about what she saw to a living soul. She knows she has no choice but to leave the job of what to do, from now on, to those who have been close to him for much longer. She raises her head and, when she encounters Seamus’s expectant look, she turns away, evasive.
“It breaks my heart for you to have seen Bile in this sort of sorry state,” Seamus says. “I’ve known him for much longer, from when we were both in our early twenties, and he was a live wire then, bright, fun to be with. We spent the wonder that is youth together, in Padua. We were a threesome, Bile, Jeebleh, and me. Jeebleh came to visit us a couple of years ago, a visit that set off a tremor that became an earthquake. Death called, and Bile’s half-brother answered; then Raasta, Bile’s niece, and her Down’s-syndrome companion and playmate, Makka, to whom he was attached, left the country for schooling in Dublin, as did Shanta, Bile’s younger sister, and her husband, Faahiye. From then on, his emotional fix, especially since Raasta’s departure, has been one of sadness, marked by inactivity. He doesn’t want to practice medicine, his thinking has slowed down to a frightening pace, he has disturbed sleep, and the smallest things upset him. Much of this is set off by a childhood trauma, linked to his half-brother Caloosha killing his, Bile’s, father.”
Seamus falls silent, and, hearing no sound emanating from Bile’s room, he gathers the tea things and returns to the kitchen to do what’s necessary. He puts the food that is ready in bowls and comes back. “Sorry,” he says.
“Why are you sorry this time?”
He doesn’t speak directly, because he goes to the kitchen, fetches the food, and lays it out on the table, maybe waiting for Bile to emerge. In her imagining, Seamus is apologetic because he has probably entertained the vision of Bile and Cambara talking and getting to know each other. Maybe he thinks that she is good for him, that he likes her enough to share Bile with her as a friend. Maybe Seamus believes that she might inspire Bile sufficiently to brighten his dark days, liven up his lethargic hours, and banish his pessimism. Maybe he had hoped that Bile would benefit from her company until he became too exhausted to stay up. Or perhaps he finds his own prying into their private conversation invasive. He comes back and he sits.
“Sorry I was not around when you got here.”
“What matters is that you are here now.”
Seamus’s eyes are dimming, Cambara supposes, from the strenuous effort of concentrating on several things at the same time. Also, something is disturbing him, for he is looking around as if someone has changed the position of the furniture in the apartment, his gaze traveling from one item to another, his nose seemingly active, busy trying to identify the foreign odor. Earlier, she remembers him focusing on a stain at the bottom of her caftan; now he is zeroing in on a blotch on the top end of the chair farthest from him, his nose twitching in the disturbed attitude of a house-proud person discovering a blemish where there oughtn’t to be any. He gets up quickly, as if driven by the anxiety to isolate the culprit chair, quarantining it in its own corner to be dealt with later, but he makes a point of not looking in her direction, lest she assume that he is blaming her for it.
“Had I known?” he says, as he takes his seat.
She looks deep into his eyes, as she says, “You were doing more useful jobs in our family house than I could ever dream of undertaking. I am most indebted to you.”
“Did you see him take any pills?”
“No. What pills does he take?”
“He is irregular about the antidepressants he ingests,” Seamus explains. “He takes a combination of drug therapy: some when he is in a dejected mood, others when he suffers from an abrupt onset, yet others when he is working on a quick-recovery plan. When he is regular, he eats fluoxetine. I know that Dajaal rang him to inform him of your visit, and although I have nothing to go on, I am guessing that to prepare himself for it, he took imipramine, administering the intramuscular injection himself. This may have resulted in his body’s excessive reaction to the drug. He has a large store of medication. I’ve known him to take enuretic tablets—you know, they are for bed-wetters—saved from the days when he ran the clinic at The Refuge.”
“He belongs in a hospital,” she says.
“Not here. A hospital in Europe or America.”
“I agree with you.”
“I’ve proposed to fly him to Nairobi, for a start, and from there somewhere else. He won’t hear of it.”
“A great pity. Such a waste.”
Seamus says, “He has been having a terrible time of late and won’t even hear of us hiring a twenty-four-hour nurse or of considering consulting doctors outside the country. Up in the early part of the day, functioning reasonably well; in the latter part, down in the depth of a well as dark as it is da
mp and worrying. Clinical depression of the worst sort.”
All she can say is “I had no idea.”
“It will be said of him—if something is to happen to him, God forbid—that he has made a deliberate effort to mess up his life, like a man willing his own slow death.”
“Is he in a position to know?”
“Why does he avoid taking his pills for the longest time possible and then eat them by the fistful, dozens and dozens of them, well beyond the normal dose?” Seamus says.
“A death wish.”
“I attribute this to the well of his bottomless sorrow, which the years have dug in and around him, and which no words can describe, it is so deep,” Seamus says. “In addition to the childhood trauma of his half-brother murdering his dad, I trace his indisposition—here comes my psychobabble, if you can bear it—to his decades-long detention in inhumane conditions, the worst of it caused by his being kept in total isolation. You may not know that he spent years in isolation after being given a life sentence for opposing the tyrannical regime, whose misrule led to the civil war. It was no accident that the prison gates were opened, this coinciding with the flight of the then dictator in an army tank, a tactic encouraged by armed militiamen at the command of a certain general, who just happened to be a clansman of Bile’s and who eventually became a warlord with his own fiefdom in the divided city, the southern part of which went to him and the north to another warlord. Anyhow, the tyrant’s fall happened to coincide with Bile gaining his freedom, the birth of Raasta, his niece, and the collapse of the state. To all intents and purposes, it appeared as if he had pulled through, put his memories of his worst years behind him, once he set up The Refuge and ran it with incredible devotion. This act of supreme ingenuity served to hold several of his sides together, enabling him to be close to his niece and her playmate, Makka, and his sister, each of them contributing to the rationale behind The Refuge and Bile’s well-being. You would have appreciated it if you had come in its heyday or even just before the idea of its irrelevance began to become clear, soon after Jeebleh’s visit.”
Cambara raises her eyebrows, asking a number of unspoken questions about Jeebleh: Who? What? Why?
Seamus’s moment of hesitation prolongs itself into a minute of stillness, his mouth slightly ajar but not issuing a sound.
Seamus goes on, “You see, it was a couple of years after he set up The Refuge that Bile and I linked up and, together, made things work and pretty well, I would say. We created our own paradise in a country that had gone to hell, a country with little hope of ever recovering from a state of total reliance on handouts from the international community. We did what we could then to assist in providing a rationale to disarm the militias through training them at a younger age and weaning them from glorifying the gun. But there was—there is—need for more universal commitments; no do-gooders can do as much as it will take to reconstruct the country’s infrastructure, reorient the people of this nation so they might find their proper bearing and help them to reestablish the state on a viable footing. Boring rhetoric, boring politics, yes, but the truth is that the political class has failed this country. Nor can you speak intelligently about Somalia or for that matter about Bile or Jeebleh or Dajaal without the wholesale condemnation of the cowardly intellectual class too.”
Silent, Cambara thinks that not many people have eyes like Seamus’s, which are like a falcon’s: alert to an impending peril, darting in several directions in the time it takes you to blink just once. Now she watches him stare straight ahead, his mind elsewhere and mulling over things. Cambara wonders if she is correct in interpreting his expression as rueful or as just plain hangdog, in that he has been lacking in humility, having stressed his contribution to his friend’s wellness more than he likes.
“Lately, however, since your arrival, actually his ups have been mightily high and his downs terribly down, highs and lows, which have brought us closer to despair.”
Cambara is surprised to hear that she plays such a role—though perhaps not too surprised, given the prominent role Bile has played in her imagination, and especially now that she is convinced without evidence to go on that Bile has been involved with reclaiming her property. “How do they manifest, these changes?”
“He has spoken of his dreams, in which he wakes up dressed in a stranger’s clothes or dining with persons totally unknown to him,” Seamus says.
“Does he enjoy the meals?”
“Toward the end of these eat-until-you-can’t-eat-any-more occasions, he feels that they are cause for celebration, especially when he has a glimpse of you, better still when he meets you. Only you invariably arrive as he is about to depart, or you are seated in a place he cannot get to, because the path to you is inaccessible.”
“How does he respond?”
“In the dream, his anxiety goes haywire,” explains Seamus. “His highs and lows keep vacillating, his moods continue to seesaw. One moment he behaves normally, even if he finds himself in a stranger’s clothes and among people whom he does not know, and in the next instant he becomes unpredictable, he is irritable and gets into fights.”
“Very odd and worrying.”
“Bile strikes me as an adolescent falling in love for the first time. This, in a sense, is the case, considering that before he met you that one time, in the car, he never seemed capable of love. He is not a man to display his emotions. When he was younger, he was so self-controlled that he could choose not to show his affections toward a woman, say, and operate clandestinely instead, having affairs on the quiet. But they were never affairs of the heart—maybe brief relationships for companionship or just for the heck of it. I have known him for more than half his life; I know the man well, better than most.”
“Does anyone beside you know of any of this?”
“Dajaal does.”
“And what is Dajaal’s take?”
“When I’ve encouraged Bile to pursue the dictates of his heart, suggesting that he search you out, look you up, ring you up, fix an appointment with you, do something, do anything, Dajaal has opposed it.”
“On what basis?” She can hear the suspicion in her voice, and regrets it.
“Not on the basis of the clan business.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“Dajaal argues that this is no way for a man of Bile’s age to act, fall in love at first sight,” Seamus says. “You’ll know it more than I do, but Dajaal’s reaction is no different from the reactions of many a Somali, typical. They do not expect a man of Bile’s background and age to do certain things, even if he is sick with love.”
Cambara is tempted to tell Seamus that what she feels for Bile is not so very different, even though, because she is a woman, she might use different terms to describe her emotions, but she stops herself just before the words make their way out of their secret place, where she has hidden them ever since meeting Bile.
“There is another way of explaining Dajaal.”
“What’s that?” she asks.
Seamus says, “He is worried about the changes that your presence in Bile’s life will bring into their relationship and is afraid he will lose out, because you might decide to take him away to Canada. With you. You can imagine how much that would devastate him.”
It is at that instant that two things happen almost simultaneously: The phone rings, and Seamus answers it quickly, in an undertone, not wanting its squealing to wake Bile up. But then, just as suddenly, Bile comes into Cambara’s line of vision, leaning against the doorjamb, tall, very thin, his gaze conspiratorial, as if reminding her not to divulge their secret.
Seamus, unaware of Bile’s whereabouts, says to Cambara, “Dajaal is downstairs in the parking lot and is waiting to take you to your hotel, if that is where you want to go.”
Nodding, Cambara rises to her feet and then points her chin in Bile’s direction to alert Seamus of the new development. She takes long strides toward Bile, hugs him long and lovingly, and whispers a few private words in his ear.
She lets go and holds him at some distance, her lips trembling with the words that she struggles to flesh them out with sound. They look each other in the eye for a long while, neither moving nor saying anything, Cambara’s hands on Bile’s elbow. Then she turns away from him and waves to Seamus, thanking him for everything, promising to look him up. Then, with her head in a muddle, her legs almost failing to carry her away from the apartment, because she does not want to go, she hopes that she will find the parking lot, where Dajaal is waiting for her in the car.
“Don’t bother. I’ll see myself out,” she says, leaving.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Going down with no one to guide her out of the building, Cambara runs into a blind cat soon after bouncing down the stairway, two steps at a time. She comes almost to a superstitious impasse, and is tempted to go back, pick up the cat, and knock on the apartment door to make Bile and Seamus aware of its presence. She decides not to, and continues on her way down, determined to get to Dajaal fast.
She seems most herself when she thinks that she can adequately describe her own current mental state as turbulent, because she is at a crossroads where anything may happen: She could lose almost every major gain she has made at one single go or just as easily hold on to what she has won and procure more. This is the arbitrary character of civil war: wanton in its injustice, casual in the randomness of its violence. No law protects you; everything is in disorder. In great part, it is Dajaal who decides. In one manner or the other, all depends on him. He is now playing a role as significant as the one Zaak did in her first couple of days, as Kiin did for a while, Kiin who assisted her in planting her feet on terra firma. How is she to continue from here on?
She is reflecting on the nature of her agitation and whether she can do something about the inopportunity of Bile’s and her affections—as Dajaal seems to see it—when she not only loses her way in the labyrinth of her conflicting emotions but also follows the wrong fork in the footway leading down. She steps straight into the passageway ahead of her, having been misled by the unseasonable brightness of the sun at this hour, her mood so low that it is imposing a sinking feeling on her thinking. It occurs to her, after a short while, that she is actually walking away from the light into a narrow corridor that is darkening the farther she proceeds. She doubts if this pathway will eventually conduct her to the parking lot. Lo and behold, she has ended up in a basement.
Knots Page 39
