Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  Disoriented, as if she has walked into a cul-de-sac when she expected a throughway, she decides that the basement does not appear to have even a tenuous link to the upper portion of the building from where she has just come. Nothing makes sense to Cambara anymore. She knows that going forward, when she has no idea where she might end up, is no option worth pursuing, but then backtracking in hope of retracing her steps and finding Bile and Seamus’s apartment does not sound appealing either. She feels she is at the center of a storm of her own making, she, the unseeing eye.

  Her head fills with childhood memories, above all her intimate conversations with the echoing darkness late at night in a house faintly ringing with the depth of a predawn silence. Now that she is much older, grieving for her dead son and trying to build an alternative to the life she shared with Wardi, not to speak of the false life her mother had imposed on her, she does what she used to do as a child to fend off the oncoming feeling of fear. She improvises a song of her own composition and hums a half-remembered tune. After which, she repeats to herself some of her favorite lyrics, “Hello, darkness, my old friend.” The phrase caresses her lips, stirring and activating them with pleasant remembrances. Her heart beats frenziedly fast, her mind active in its effort to freeze-frame the memory into an image: that of a child in tacit dialogue with daytime darkness, reminiscent of an eclipse suddenly descending on the cosmos with Stygian blackness. But where is she? And what manner of basement is this? Will someone kindly lend her the wick of a candle?

  Cambara wonders what impression she will make on Arda, on Zaak, on Dajaal, on Kiin, above all on Bile, if they hear of it: the first time Bile and Seamus acquiesce to her request that she see herself out and they oblige, she loses her way. In a basement of all places. To the best of her memory, no one has ever spoken of shadowed forests hereabouts, definitely not in the center of an ancient city that has been under civil war siege for some ten-plus years. But where has she gotten to? Might it be that she is conjuring it all up out of an eagerness to be with Bile? She is no doubt anxious about the sightless cat too, a good enough ruse to excuse her knocking on Bile and Seamus’s apartment door and saying, “Isn’t it funny I can’t seem to go away from you? Fancy finding an eyeless cat going down and then losing my way in a forest, most likely, of my own manufacture. Here, do let’s feed her. A saucer for her milk, please. And I will need a mattress on the floor to crash on.” Then she’ll stay. But how much further will such tactics take her?

  In her attempt to get a good hold of herself, Cambara reminds herself how, in a number of children’s stories, among them Pinocchio, children who do not follow the set paths and knowingly or even mischievously stray away from them often meet with terrible consequences: Alice in Wonderland, in which the principal character goes down a rabbit hole; and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, in which Lucy and then the others pass through an open-ended wardrobe and, as their story progresses, try to grow the necessary will and strength to overcome impossible difficulties. Is her own adventure one that is to equal theirs? Does it mean that something awful, something disagreeable is about to happen to her for being naughty, and, if so, what form will this take? What has she done to deserve this punishment? The blind cat? Does her present misfortune emanate from her stubborn refusal to attend to the needy animal? Did she expend energy and goodwill on cleaning up Bile because she is returning a favor and investing in him? Did she help Bile undress so he could shower and then wash his dirty clothes for the same reason? A blind cat is a blind cat; what can it do for her? And what endearments, to which only the two of them are privy, did she whisper in Bile’s ear before leaving?

  There are protean qualities to her current worries, which alternately take the shape of a fear that keeps pounding on the door to her brain or of one that she can now trace to a childhood memory. In her recall, she goes truant, and, instead of coming home, being a latchkey child on some of the afternoons when her parents returned late, she follows a road show. Then, just as she prepares to take a longer route home—not wanting to meet Zaak, alone at home, because he has seen her kiss another boy, a classmate, and she is fearful he might tease her—Cambara pawns her wristwatch for money to buy a ticket to watch the late matinee circus. She knows she will not come home until dark, but that does not seem to worry her either.

  As it happens, her mother is about to organize a search party—in those days, not many households had telephones—and her father is about to go to the nearest police station and report her as missing, when she lets herself in with her key. Coming in from the dark outside into the part of the house where a bulb is burning bright, she looks like an alley cat that has just fled from a fight with a raft of foxes.

  Now, mysteriously, the darkness of the night lifts all of a sudden, and the basement is ablaze with light, as if there were a skylight. Cambara hears her name called several times, and she follows the sound. Eventually, she emerges into the evening twilight and the flight of outside steps. She finds Dajaal waiting and saying, “Where have you been?”

  Because she cannot herself explain where she has been, why or what has made her take the wrong fork in the road—if that is what she has done, and she doubts it—she keeps quiet, saying nothing, afraid that he might think her mad. She walks past him and gets into the car, using the front door, which she has found open. It does not make sense to blame it all on her bad sense of direction.

  Just before moving, he asks, “Where?”

  She says, “To the family property.”

  “Not to the hotel?”

  “Later,” she says. “Let’s pick up my boys.”

  He starts the engine and lets it idle, his hand resting on his chin as though he is considering several choices available to him. Then he changes gears and moves speechlessly, as if saying what is on his mind will amount to nothing more than wasted breath.

  She wishes she had the gumption to ask him what he thinks about Bile’s dreams, which she suspects that Seamus will have shared with him. How might Dajaal interpret the dream in which Bile is in a stranger’s clothes? For she has been in his, Bile’s, when washing her own and waiting for them to dry. And if she had come out at Seamus’s reentry into the apartment as he called out her name, he might have thought of the dream as uncanny fortuity, mightn’t he?

  There comes a stage in every story, Cambara reflects, when the protagonist is alone, afraid, worried, too exhausted, or too hungry to continue. Perhaps she has reached that point in her story. Is this why she is feeling queasy?

  In the car, Dajaal driving, eyes focused on the road, she sits upright, looking ahead of herself, her hands in her lap, her fingers entwined, the thumb and middle fingers twirling her wedding ring, as if she is trying to remove it. She is having difficulties doing so, because it is too tight, the ring having set into the flesh around it and the joint having grown bigger over the years. She feels that she has come to the point in the story when the protagonist has changed from one state of being and hasn’t made the full circle in which the metamorphosis is complete. She is lonely, fearful, and begins to envisage feeding on hunger itself.

  Dajaal says, “My turn has come to thank you.”

  “Why is that?”

  Turning to her, almost touching her thigh with his half-extended hand and withdrawing it just in time, he repeats, “Thank you.”

  Surprised, she asks, “What have I done?”

  He replies, “Seamus told me when I called a few minutes ago on the phone about what you’ve done for Bile. We’re both touched and very grateful to you. You’ve been exceptionally kind. Seamus describes you as a woman with a noble spirit, and he commends you. So do I.”

  “The pleasure to have been of small assistance has been mine,” she says. “Not that I’ve done much, to be honest with you.”

  She observes, when she studies his face, that the heat mixed with emotion has made the veins on Dajaal’s forehead stand out, so that they resemble serpents crisscrossed with deep furrows. How the years have plowed the fields of his head, le
aving only thin wisps of hair with a lot of pluck.

  “As for the masks, the props for your play?”

  She sits forward. “Yes?”

  “I’ve given the matter serious thought,” he says. “You won’t have anything to worry about. You produce your play the way you like it, and I will support you and provide you with adequate security for as long as it is in production.”

  Has someone else spoken to him to make him change his mind? If so, who? Bile can’t have done it; he was in no condition from the moment Dajaal dropped her off until he came to pick her up. Unless they talked in the period between the moment she left the apartment and said her good-bye to Seamus and Bile, traversed the passageways of the basement, and met up with Dajaal. It is all very confusing. How long could she have been in the basement? Couldn’t have been half an hour. Whoever did it, someone suggested that Dajaal reconsider his opposition to the use of the masks and moderate his views. Who? She has no idea. Does Dajaal’s shift of position warrant her worry? The thought of it and what would happen if he did change it yet again gives her the shakes. She hopes that she will muddle through and come out the other end in one solid piece.

  She says, “Very kind of you.”

  Dajaal continues, “Seamus, who at times knows Bile’s mind better than I, not only because they have known each other for much longer and have shared their good and bad days, has intimated to me that Bile is of the view that we take a positive outlook on life, especially when it matters. And I agree with him.”

  She says nothing, judging what Dajaal has just said to be no more than smug waffling, if taken on its face value. She settles on waiting until he has committed himself to an unequivocal position.

  He goes on, “Seamus and I talked after I had taken you to Bile’s and later, when I was bringing him back. Again, we spoke after I waited long enough for you in the car park and you did not show up.”

  “I can’t have been gone long,” she says.

  “Long enough for me to worry and phone Seamus.”

  She doesn’t want to challenge him, but she doesn’t think that the time between when she left the apartment and when she heard him calling her name was that long.

  “Did you talk to Bile then, because he was there and having a meal with Seamus? Is that what you are saying?”

  “From what Seamus relayed, Bile suggested a compromise. That you work on the basis of what he called ‘a limited release’ and that I moderate my earlier position and reconsider providing security for the specific site at which the play’s ‘limited release’ is being staged,” Dajaal explains.

  “What do they mean by ‘limited release’?”

  Dajaal replies, “That it’ll be for a couple of nights at a specific site and for a select audience. Small and intimate enough so we can take the temperature and work out what our future options are after the first night. From then on, we’ll decide. If we think it is risky to give another performance, then we won’t. This is a compromise with which I am okay. In fact, this was what Bile suggested all along, only I was putting up resistance. Now I’ve come round to accept it, because of your exceptional gesture of kindness.”

  Her eyes steady, she revisits in her memory the all-women evening do at Kiin’s hotel. That too had a select audience of a few hundred like-minded women who, comfortable in one another’s company, did outrageous stuff that might make a bald mufti wish he could borrow a wig and join in, carouse, cuddle, and delight in savoring the goods on display. She thinks that the plan might have a good chance of working. Dajaal’s men at the gates, checking; no uninvited guests. Only for one night, or maybe two, and only for a select audience, for a start.

  “Brilliant,” Cambara agrees.

  Dajaal’s features assume a happier aspect: his cheeks rounded from grinning, eyes beaming. His relaxed demeanor has a curious effect on her: She is excited by their physical closeness, the warmth of his body so near and yet so far, inasmuch as she cannot imagine touching or hugging him without undue complications.

  “You can trust Bile,” Dajaal says.

  “Bile has been wonderful to me,” she breaks in.

  “He’s the gem of the lot, precious.”

  What lot? He has no equal, she is thinking. Then, surprise of all surprises: She has all too pleasantly and absentmindedly removed her wedding ring without needing to apply water, soap, or oil. That she has eased it off her ring finger as uncomplicatedly as she has is a bonus. From this instant on, she may no longer consider herself wedded to Wardi.

  Dajaal, uncannily, goes on and, as if he knows what Cambara is thinking, launches into some sort of a sales pitch in praise of Bile. “You go anywhere, you won’t find another man like Bile: generous, trustworthy, amenable to other people’s ideas, and ready to make them his own for the good of everyone else. The poor man hasn’t received back as much kindness as he has given. Alas, there is more sweetness to life than Bile has known.”

  Dajaal’s high commendation of Bile’s character is perhaps in keeping with the Somali tradition in which, before a suitor asks for the hand of his intended, an aunt or an elderly female relative does the rounds, visiting the blood relations of the young woman before any serious bid is made for the hand of the bride-to-be. This last, crucial move, the most important of the courtship act, falls to the men. Only, Cambara thinks, she is not yet anyone’s bride. Moreover, she and Bile have not had the chance to talk about any of these matters; he has been indisposed. No matter. She can imagine nothing more challenging and more demanding than being in Bile’s company. Needless to say, it is very sweet of Dajaal, who is a regular kind of person, to involve himself in Bile’s well-being and to make as direct a bid for her hand as he has. It requires a man with a strong constitution to do so, and Dajaal has that and more, she assumes. In addition, he has an admirable loyalty and an enviable self-worth to embark on this most demanding of rituals.

  He says, “Bile is the tops, no doubt about it.”

  She smiles sheepishly and looks away, telling herself that someone has probably used all the words that Dajaal has employed, in praise of Bile, to describe him. That is the trouble; in a sales pitch, one is selling oneself just as much as the item being promoted.

  When he continues his patter of praise, Cambara says, “Enough. You’re sounding as if you are speaking at his entombment. Bile is still with us and will live yet for a long time.”

  That shuts him up instantly.

  In the silence, they both become conscious of the fragility of who joins them. Unfortunately Bile is not around to say to the two of them, as a parent might to two quarrelsome preteens, “Enough. Cut it out.” It is then that it dawns on her that she and Dajaal are alike in their mad courage, the inimitable kind that can make a dent in Mogadiscio, a city that has fallen prey either to the machinations of the warlords or to the mysterious ways of mullahs’ courts claiming their fair share of divine support. The only difference is that she sees nothing wrong in relying on Dajaal’s bravery to do the dirty work as long as she does not bear witness or have firsthand knowledge of the perpetration of the violence. And it is obvious that he is doing whatever he is doing for Bile. She, like Bile, does not go anywhere near the scene of a crime where someone’s blood is shed. Yet Bile cannot not know what is going on. Sadly, that is how societies function, thanks to a few dozen who get their hands soiled to their elbows with blood.

  They avoid looking in each other’s direction, Dajaal concentrating on his driving and Cambara absentmindedly trying to put on her wedding ring. They are silent like a married couple having their tiff. All of a sudden, she is alert to the change of scenery, and she pays attention to her surroundings, becoming aware of a young man, whom she soon identifies as Qasiir, Dajaal’s nephew, approaching. This is the first of several checkpoints manned by the youths Qasiir has assembled, Qasiir, who now, raising his hand in recognition of his uncle, removes the roll of razor wire from in front of the vehicle. Three more stops and many exchanges of camaraderie later, they are at the gate, which opens to let
Dajaal drive in.

  Then Cambara hears someone rehearsing a text with which she is very familiar, because she has written it, in full voice.

  As she pushes open the door to get out of the vehicle, she says, “Please accept my apologies. I didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out.”

  “I would do anything for Bile,” he says.

  Just as she gets out of the door of the vehicle that Dajaal is holding open and before she has taken her first step toward the hall from which the rehearsing voice is emanating, her adrenaline rises to her head, almost depriving her heart of what it needs to continue its rhythmic beating. It moves her to listen with her full attention to the words she has written spoken with such eloquence. It is just as she gets closer that she senses an inconsistency in the delivery insinuating itself, for Gacal has become self-conscious, and he seizes. A pity, for his voice has left her impressed, sounding just the way she has always imagined it.

  “Why has he stopped?” she says.

  “No idea,” Dajaal replies, standing close by.

  Then a fly, noisy as a tropical summer in full swing, buzzes in front of her, hovering close to her eyes, and she shoos it away, after which she listens as Gacal picks it all up again, less hesitant, his words aimed at her but addressed to an imagined audience.

  “Once upon a time, there was a villager who went out alone in search of his son and the half dozen cows that he took to the fields in the morning for them to graze…”

  There is a pleasing gentleness to the voice, as if the speaker is aware that great expectations are borne in upon him and he is doing his utmost to fulfill them. Cambara is hopeful that given time and a bit of help and several hours of voice training, she will be able to iron out the unevenness that she can now detect, listening. Nothing is insuperable; she feels certain that she will be able to take care of this in less than a day or two, given the opportunity and Gacal’s willingness.