Knots (21 page)

“I don't know if I can eat.”

“In the meantime go and have a shower,” Cambara says, convinced that she would persuade her to eat something. “We'll talk when you're done.”

Jiijo obliges.

As paean to her attentiveness, Cambara calls on Jiijo every instant she is able to, now holding her hands away from herself, given that she is busy chopping onions or garlic, now washing them and touching the back of her hand to her forehead. On one occasion, the fever in Jiijo's gaze floats in the delirium of her high temperature, the pupils of her frenziedly restless look filmed with anxiety, her lips hardening as if encrusted with dried mud, her saliva flowing, much of her tongue out and motionless, like an alligator sunning.

Between cooking and attending to Jiijo's needs, Cambara avails herself of the opportunity to study the lay of the place. She surveys the condition the property is in, this being the first time she has had the run of it, free to go where she pleases. Overall, the house is in terrible disrepair, its shabbiness the consequence not only of the coarse indifference of its occupants, who before moving into it may never have set foot in a house similar to it, but also of having been vandalized, some of the rooms severely so. However, she is delighted with the immaculate state the hall, used for receptions and parties, is in. Otherwise, the house will require very detailed ministration, the kind of purposeful care an artwork in a bad state of repair requires.

The meal ready and her surveying done, Cambara brings two platefuls of food, one for her, the other for Jiijo. “Feed a fever,” she says, encouraging her to eat, “and you will be on your feet in no time.”

Jiijo tucks into her brunch but not before feasting her eyes, delighting in the attention that Cambara has so far lavished on her. When they have eaten and she has cleared the plates, Cambara returns and says to Jiijo, “Let's hear your story.”

“Where to begin?” Jiijo says.

As she prepares to listen, Cambara assumes that Jiijo has the baptism blood of sacrifice running in her arteries. She remarks too that there is a big difference in her bearing today; the poor woman appears more broken than before, no longer a capable enough woman. When they first met, Jiijo struck her as a strong and purposefully alive woman, behaving in a manner befitting a woman of noble upbringing.

Her voice grave, she says, “I do not know who you are or why I am pouring out my heart to you. You could say that misfortune is my second name. If I am holding back nothing, it is because I know that nothing can hurt me more than I hurt already.”

Then she pauses for a long while and, waiting for the story to develop in her head before she shares it with Cambara, her calloused right hand taking a good grip of her own thigh, which, like the rest of her body, appears lifelessly dry because of its exposure to the hostile elements. Cambara tells herself to remember to select a moisturizing cream from her own supply, certain that it will bring the shine of life back to Jiijo's skin. Jiijo massages her thigh up and down to ease the ache in her bones and help relieve her mental anguish at the same time.

“I am the daughter of a tailor,” Jiijo introduces herself. “My father had a small tailoring business together with two of his younger brothers. We were okay, we had enough, there was always food on our tables, and we were happy with our lot. To make more money, my father ran a key-cutting service on the side, one of two such outfits in our part of the city. Because he and I were very close, I spent a lot of time with him in the tailoring business—something my uncles did not approve of—or helped him cut keys. From an early age, I felt wiser than my peers, many of whom I found to be shortsighted or immature. My father did not want to marry me off to one of my cousins, as we Xamaris tend to do, but allowed me to stay on in school. You could say that I am the only one among my cousins who has some kind of education. I was preparing to take my high school finals and then go to university when I became pregnant out of wedlock. There was no alternative but to marry, not the father of my baby but a cousin several times removed, who came from the richer side of my extended family. Then the collapse occurred.”

Then silence, as if resisting the storm of fury in the form of the rage she feels inside of herself. The muscles of her face tighten, as though the mere thought of what happened causes her tremendous pain. Cambara, alert to her surroundings, lights upon the fact that Jiijo's plate, almost greedily cleaned up, is on the verge of falling off the table. She catches it in time and places it on the floor close to her feet.

Jiijo continues, “I have known gang rape as much as you can get to know someone on a first-name basis. Since the collapse, I have been a kept woman, living in a small room in a big house for much of the past few years, a small room with the lights off, which made me as frightened as a blind kitten. I suffered the daily humiliation of not knowing which of the many youths would come to the room and take me. It puzzles me that I did not go out of my mind totally or that I held on to the skirt of life the way a scared kitten clutches its mother's flank. My days of misery lasted until Gudcur came to claim me as his. As much as it is hard to accept it now, I admit to having seen him as my protector arriving on the scene to free me from further fear. Once it became apparent to everyone that I was his woman, I settled on relaxing into my condition, accepting it. My usual good-natured manner emerged when he showed how gentle he could be when he chose to.”

Talking about her miserable past and touching on the terrible things that had befallen her seem to provide Jiijo with a provisional easing of her agonies. She manages to wear the grave aspect of a woman hurt at the same as she displays the strength of her personhood.

Her expression crestfallen, Jiijo goes on, “There are odd moments of satisfaction in my situation when you consider it. Being illiterate, the men come to me to assist them in managing their lives in a way that is strangely gratifying. I also read and write their letters, and cook all the meals. Until a year or two ago, when some of the schools reopened, I used to teach Gudcur's children.”

Jiijo is something of a raconteur. As she speaks, she attends, bizarrely, to removing hair from her half-plucked armpits. Cambara looks upon Jiijo as another actor, raw, untrained. It is the way Jiijo talks, the way she lets go of her words with a baffling ease, telling as she does a tale, her own and the nation's. No doubt, the woman's life has been difficult. However, from the way she narrates her story, it is as though Jiijo is laying herself bare to Cambara, in the expansive attitude of one victim to another. Cambara strains her ears, listening for changes in the tone of her voice, miraculously managing to wish away all intimations of fear in the secure belief that no one will hurt Jiijo more than she has been already.

There is order too to Jiijo's narration of her story. There is also discipline in the choice of words with which she describes the current state of her mood. It occurs to Cambara that Jiijo, her countenance grim, is reveling in the telling of her tale; she is enthralling as she continues to improvise, letting go of a sentence at a time, an idea at a time. Captivated, she watches Jiijo reinvent herself right there and then. Cambara, through a combination of circumstances, senses that she has a glimpse of Jiijo's strong sense of personhood, striving hard and desisting from showing how startled she is when she hears Jiijo say, “What help is there for our doomed nation?”

Wanting to bring Jiijo back to her story, Cambara responds with a question. “What was it like being married not to the father of your baby but to another man, albeit a cousin, whom your parents chose for you, presumably to preserve the façade of family honor?” she asks.

Jiijo works in total concentration on a corn on the small toe of her right foot, peeling off dead skin and tossing it away. “I could not bring myself to deceive my new husband. Instead, I chose to deceive my family, for I went to a ‘midnight nurse,' as they say in these parts, and aborted the baby without letting anyone know except a school friend. I took ill, terribly ill. My mother was the first to learn of the reason, and she persuaded my father, without letting him in on our secret, to postpone the marriage until I was well enough. It grieves me that he never got to know what I had done before he died in the second week of the civil war.”

“Tell me about your husband.”

Then Jiijo lunges forward into her speech with the assumed gravitas of what she means to convey.

“He was successful in business, and, strangely, we were happy with each other for a long while, he and I,” she says. “He was a most gentle husband, wonderfully caring of me and all my requirements, granting me all my wishes and a lot more. However, I was unhappy in the marriage, because we were childless. After trying for several years and failing, he sent me off to Europe—no expense spared—to consult doctors, a number of whom I saw. The doctors did many tests, made me undergo numerous configurations, but to no avail. I wanted so much to bear a child, maybe out of regret for having aborted mine, or maybe out of guilt because he was such a nice man and I was a bad woman to whom something terrible would happen one day, I have no idea. I had the urge to take my body through a pregnancy, and I wanted him to share with me the experience, the tribulations and joys of motherhood. I thought this would bring us closer, would delight him and delight me too.”

The story moves Cambara, who, remembering how much joy mothering gave her, appreciates the dilemma.

“I could not decide whether to make a clean breast of the fact that I had undergone an abortion,” Jiijo continues, “but because I was not sure what good that might do, the doctors, who could read my body the way a blind person reads Braille, chose, for their own reasons, not to speak of my abortion to my husband.”

Jiijo has worked herself up into a heightened state of disquiet, one moment speaking with brio, the next falling sorrowfully silent and sullen, and then talking with slothful abandonment, the tone of her voice moist with the unshed tears waiting to be let go.

“When I look back on how Gudcur has treated me, the man who has fathered my children, and I think about my condition of enslavement,” Jiijo says, “I have difficulty reconciling his kindness to me, as his chosen woman, with the cruelty others associate with him. I will not deny having sensed his hard-heartedness. I've seen evidence of it when he plays mind games that are crueler than the physical pain the militiamen under his command mete out to their victims: beating, raping, looting, and plundering. And, of course, he beat me up last night. No denying that.”

A mobile phone rings somewhere in the house, most likely in the room opposite where they are. Jiijo sits up, first wrinkling her face into a frown and then falling silent, in self-rebuke. The phone's ringing a few more times, with neither Jiijo nor Cambara answering it, coincides with the rapping on the pedestrian gate. On hearing the noisy arrival of her children's familiar voices, Jiijo requests that she let them in, and Cambara is happy to do so.

Worn out from talking, too tired from having told Cambara her story, and too exhausted to minister to their never-ending indigence, Jiijo seeks a quiet retreat from the children. She takes leave of the scene, fleeing surreptitiously, and then closing the door behind her.

Left alone with the four children just back from the Koranic school, ages ranging from six to twelve, begrimed, hungry, eager to get to know her, and competing for her attention, Cambara asks them questions about their day away without listening to their answers, feeds them, and then offers them sweets and chocolates, which they eat to their heart's content. Then she entertains them with an Indian fable, which she tells them from memory.

When the smallest of the children pleads with her to tell them another story, Cambara looks at her watch, realizing that she has been here for more than three hours. She calculates on the best way of handing the responsibility of caring for the children over to their mother, pinning her hopes on the youngest to rouse their mother so she can go away. Woken up, Jiijo joins them, looking revived albeit groggy-eyed. And Cambara withdraws into the bathroom to read the pages the storm had kicked up. These turn out to be pages torn from an American oil-drilling company's document detaling payments to one of Mogadiscio's notorious warlords. Alas, she forgets it there when she emerges.

Cambara takes leave of them, promising to Jiijo and the children that she will be back as soon as she can. She makes a dash for the door.