Knots (37 page)

Dajaal goes around to where she is standing, and he places his hand discreetly on the shoulder closer to him, as if assuring her that there is nothing to worry about and that everything will be fine; she will see.

“I hope so,” she says. And she gets in beside him.

Dajaal drives out of the hotel gates, turns left onto a sandy road, and then takes the bend fast in the petulant attitude of a man to whom someone has shown an undeserved mean-spiritedness. The vehicle veers out of control and comes close to colliding with a boulder on the wrong side of the road. He slows down, however, and holds the steering wheel firm in his hands until the tires get a solid purchase on the ground and the car has regained its balance.

Gacal and SilkHair chat nonstop, though, teasing each other, pulling each other's leg, each putting riddles to the other to solve. The man in the back, fiercely alert to his surroundings, is unsmiling, unspeaking—poised, gun ready, as if he can discern some danger only he is able to see. In addition, it seems to her as if Dajaal is ill at ease with her; he has a sour face for the first time since they first met. Has she done something to offend him? Or said something that has upset him? Or is she being oversensitive, as usual?

“Is everything okay, Dajaal?” she asks.

He nods without looking at her but says nothing.

Cambara resists asking the man in the back if he is expecting an attack on their vehicle; not only because she is not sure if his mood has something to do with Dajaal's but also because she remembers how often she has run into Somalis who are in the habit of trespassing on her generous disposition when she inquires how they have fared in the civil war, many of whom have spoken of war-related trauma. Many point out how lucky she has been not to have experienced it firsthand. She has read enough about these men and women and met a sufficient number of these veterans to know that some of them tell the tales of their woes as though they were medals they wear to a gathering of fellow sufferers; they revel in excluding those, like her, who have not endured the physical and mental pain of the strife.

The man's childish pout and his physical posture, no longer as refined as when he was younger and serving in the army, equal a body language with which she has become familiar since meeting Zaak and Wardi. She has known of other Somalis who have come out of Mogadiscio following the disintegration and whose moods are high one moment, full of jovial talk and amity, and then in the next instant, when you think that all is going well with their world, something goes out of sync, and all of a sudden they behave out of character. Doleful, she has often seen Wardi going down, down, down, drooling, a man devoid of life's energy. His life, or what there was of it when dejected, would fall apart right before her, literally as she watched him, disintegrating. How tragic! The sad part was that he blamed only her for his muddle, even when she had no hand in it. An individual under so much civil war pressure is bound to succumb to the strain of madness that passes for clan politics, even though most Somalis tell you that what keeps the fire of the strife going is the economic base on which the civil war rests. She has known Wardi to waver between his loyalty to the principles of justice and his allegiance to his immediate blood community. You can bet that anyone who has lived through the worst years of Somalia's strife will have a god-awful countenance like the man sitting in the back. Wardi has no equal when it comes to his unjustified sense of paranoia. Maybe this man too? Not so Dajaal; she must ask him why.

She thinks that whatever else she doesn't know about Dajaal, she imagines that his character has benefited from his associations with Bile and Seamus, an alliance that has kept a potentially disheveled state of being in constant check. Anyone in their company would rein in their impulsiveness. A side glance at Dajaal strengthens her faith, vicariously, in the burgeoning closeness that she imagines is taking shape between herself and Bile through her relationships with Dajaal and Seamus.

In the darkroom of her imagining, she develops the picture of a woman who bears a visage similar to hers and who shares with her several significant particulars. As it happens, this woman is sitting in the passenger seat, next to a man who answers to the name of Dajaal; she has a hangdog expression and is trying to work out how fast she can wipe it off and replace it with a seemingly agreeable grin. Is she up to the challenge though, not only of erasing the shamefacedness of her features but also of engaging in small talk? After all, Dajaal has been very accommodating of her, and has taken one of the most daring challenges in that he has secured her family property, to which he is now driving her.

She asks him, “Has Bile had a hand in the recovery of the property? How much have you involved him?”

His voice inscrutable, he says, “In what way?”

She goes on, the timbre of her voice low, almost a whisper, “Has he talked you into stepping in or did the idea to do so originate with you? Likewise, have you coerced your grandson to help organize the mounting of roadblocks and the setting up of security?”

Answering neither of her questions, Dajaal changes gears, preparatory to coming to a halt, hand brake up, hazard lights on. He sits very still after stopping, his ears erect, listening for alien sounds that might require his attention or that of the man sitting in the back, weapon poised. Gacal and SilkHair fall silent, the former turning around, curious; the latter about to duck, flattening himself on the floor of the vehicle the instant there is an exchange of fire.

When she looks at him, wanting an explanation, he says, “We are here, madam, at one of the access points to your family property, the first of three checkpoints mounted to control the movements into and out of the streets leading there. We are barely two minutes' drive from it. Listen.”

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.