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Jeebleh was silent, but the driver answered the Major: “I suggest you lay off!”

Midway through the last rant, Jeebleh had decided not to rise to the Major's provocation, because he felt apprehensive. It worried him that he thought of the Major as someone behaving like a damaged person who placed his own inherent failures at the center of his self-censure, and who laid all blame at someone else's door. But he knew this notion wasn't right, and he didn't like the fact he was thinking it. Instead, Jeebleh eavesdropped on the conversation coming from behind him and was shocked to hear so much hate pouring forth from the militiamen, directed at StrongmanSouth and his tattered army that had laid their region to waste. Jeebleh looked for a long time at the wounded youth, with as much pained empathy as he could muster.

The driver jumped into the opportunity the silence had afforded him to change the subject, telling Jeebleh, “Our young warrior in the back stepped on an antipersonnel mine buried by StrongmanSouth's militiamen in a corridor of the territory we control. In the opinion of the surgeon in Nairobi, he was lucky to get away with injuries only to his leg—he could've been blown sky high.”

It grieved Jeebleh to note that many of the militiamen laying down their lives in the service of the madness raging all around were mere children. It pained him too that those in the vehicle with him were so full of adult-inspired venom, their every third word alluding to vengeance, to death, and to shedding more enemy blood. They had lost their way between the stations of childhood and manhood. To judge from their conversation, many of them preferred dying in the full glory and companionship of their kin to being alive, lonely and miserable. Jeebleh remembered what Oscar Wilde said: that simply because someone is willing to die for a cause doesn't make the cause just.

The Major said, “What do you, in America, think of us?”

It dawned on Jeebleh that there was something doglike about the Major: his tongue in a mouth forever ajar, throbbing with deadly menace. But after studying it for a few moments, he decided that the tongue hung out not like a dog's, but like laundry left on the line to dry.

“It's very hard to judge from there. I've come here to learn and to listen,” Jeebleh said.

“Then there's hope for us yet!”

“In some ways, I admit things were a lot clearer when I was last here, in the days of the dictatorship. But despite everything, and despite the prevailing obfuscation, I've come to assess the extent of my culpability as a Somali.”

And he imagined seeing corpses buried in haste by his kinsmen, the palms of the victims waving as though in supplication. Similar images had come to him, several times, in the comfort of his home, in New York, and on one occasion, in Central Park, he had been so disturbed that he had mistaken the stump of a tree for a man buried alive, half his body in, the other half out. This was soon after he had watched on television the corpse of an American Ranger being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadiscio. Those images had given him cold fevers for months. Now he felt the strange sensation of a many-pronged invasion, as if his nightmares were calling on him afresh. His throat smarted, as with an attack of flu coming on.

Abruptly the Major again gave the order for the car to stop. As before, the young gunmen dismounted from the vehicle's roof and took up positions facing the shanties at the roadside and spreading out fast, covering every possible angle. The Major got out and beckoned to several of them, and gave them instructions in a self-important way. He bid Jeebleh farewell, saying, “I hope you find your mother's grave!”

He vanished into the village, one armed youth ahead of him, another behind, and two others on either side—a VIP with his own security detail, presumably on his way to the money changer's.

 

 

“SO, YOU AND THE MAJOR DIDN'T EXACTLY HIT IT OFF,” THE DRIVER SAID.

There were half a dozen people left in the vehicle, including the wounded youth in the back. The driver did not move off right away, but waited for the Major's escorts to return. The engine kept running; everyone was now more relaxed.

“Is he on a dangerous mission?”

Jeebleh took it that the driver knew the Major better than he was prepared to let on, and gathered from the man's body language that he was comfortable in Jeebleh's presence. But would he take him into his confidence, tell him things?

The driver spoke, his voice almost a whisper. “When he was in the National Army, he was trained in intelligence gathering and sabotage. Now he's been assigned to sneak into the area controlled by StrongmanSouth, where he'll do a couple of jobs. I've no idea what these are, because I have no clearance.”

Jeebleh remembered reading about the region that the driver, the Major, and these youths came from: their ancestral territory had been turned into a battleground between bloodthirsty warlords. Many of the people had fled their towns and villages, fearful of being caught up in the fighting or of being massacred by drug-crazed militiamen on instructions to do as much damage as possible. The area had become known as the Death Triangle.

When the youths returned from having done their escort duty, the driver announced that he was ready to move. But no sooner had he done so than an argument erupted among the militiamen, those who had been on the roof insisting that they exchange places with those inside: Voices were raised; triggers were touched; death threats were made. Jeebleh prayed, Oh God, please, no shooting! He feared, for the second time since his arrival, that he might die in a mad shoot-out involving hapless youths.

Against the driver's advice, he stepped out of the vehicle, injudiciously volunteering to sit on the roof with the youths on guard duty. To his relief, his ploy worked, because those on the roof consented to remain there—as one of them put it, “for the time being, in honor of our guest.”

Jeebleh had barely pulled the door shut when he heard one of the youths on the roof lashing out at those inside for being favored by the Major, to whom as cousins they were closer than the youth was. Admitted into the intricacies of kinship, Jeebleh learned that the Major was in fact showing preference to his cousins, whom he kept close to himself, inside the vehicle and farther from danger, whereas he assigned roof duty to those more removed. For Jeebleh, this proved clearly that the family thread woven from a mythical ancestor's tales seldom knitted society into a seamless whole. He assumed that the driver and the wounded warrior had stayed out of the dispute because their subclan was loyal to an altogether different set of bloodlines.

Once peace had been at least temporarily restored between the youths, the vehicle was on the move again, but not for long. The driver, as courteous as ever, apologized for the time it was taking to arrive at Jeebleh's hotel. “It won't be long now,” he added.

“Where are we?” Jeebleh asked.

“We are in the north of the city, where our clanspeople have relocated to, having fled because of StrongmanSouth's scorched-earth policy,” the driver said.

The vehicle had scarcely come to a halt when Jeebleh noticed a change in the behavior of the militiamen. They showed a united front to the hordes of men, women, and children who came from the shanties all around. There was a lot of mingling, a lot of primordial rejoicing. As he watched the shambling efforts at camaraderie, Jeebleh thought nervously about the ingrained mistrust between the youths, who belonged to different subclans, and about the unreleased violence that stalked the people of the land: friends and cousins one instant, sworn foes the next.

From inside, Jeebleh looked on as a woman in some kind of nurse's uniform instructed a group of teenagers how to lift the wounded fighter out of the vehicle. The teenagers were rough-hewn in speech and manner, and struck Jeebleh as being careless, picking the wounded youth up like a sack of millet, despite the nurse's warnings—“Careful, careful!” Jeebleh was reminded of inexperienced furniture movers taking an eight-legged table out of a small room into a bigger one through a tiny door.

The driver, waiting, kept the engine running.

 

 

JEEBLEH WAS SAD THAT THE NIGHT HAD FALLEN SO RAPIDLY, AS TROPICAL nights do. He was sad that he took no account of it, when he had wanted to remain alert, from the instant he first remarked that it was coming at them in a series of waves. He wished he were able to tell the meaning of the stirrings in the darkness outside, a darkness that was imbued with what he assumed to be Mogadiscio's temperamental silence. Jeebleh heard a donkey braying, heard an eerie laughter coming to them from the mournful shanty homes. He had looked forward to the twilight hour, had been prepared to welcome it, hug it to himself, but when it did come he hadn't been aware of it.

As they moved, Jeebleh, with nothing better to do, pulled at his crotch to help lift the weight off his balls. From the little he had seen so far, the place struck him as ugly in an unreal way—nightmarish, if he dignified what he had seen of it so far with an apt description. Most of the buildings they drove past—he had known the area well; Bile's mother had had a house hereabouts once—appeared gutted; the windows were bashed in, like a boxer who had suffered a severe knockout; the glass panes seemed to have been removed, and likewise the roofs. In short, a city vandalized, taken over by rogues who were out to rob whatever they could lay their hands on, and who left destruction in their wake. Jeebleh's Mogadiscio was orderly, clean, peaceable, a city with integrity and a life of its own, a lovely metropolis with beaches, cafés, restaurants, late-night movies. It may have been poor, but at least there was dignity to that poverty, and no one was in any hurry to plunder or destroy what they couldn't have. He doubted if there was enough space in people's minds for the pleasures he had enjoyed when living in Mogadiscio.

“I feel embarrassed that my colleague was rude to you in my presence,” the driver said. “I cannot apologize enough. Kindly forgive us!”

“I suppose I should've said to the Major that I had returned to reemphasize my Somaliness—give a needed boost to my identity,” Jeebleh said tentatively. “Do you think that would've made any sense to him?”

“I doubt that it would have.”

“To tell you the truth, I was fed up being asked by Americans whether I belonged to this or that clan,” Jeebleh continued, “many assuming that I was a just-arrived refugee, fresh from the so-called clan fighting going on in our country. It's irritating to be asked by people at the supermarket which clan I belong to. Even the colleagues I've known for years have been lousy at secondguessing how I felt about clan identity and my loyalty to it. You see, we Somalis who live in America, we keep asking one another where we stand on the matter of our acquired new American identity. I've come because I want to know the answers. I also wanted to visit these heat-flattened, sunburned landscapes, and see these shantytowns, witness what's become of our city.”

When he had finished speaking, Jeebleh relished the quiet drive, the silence of the hour, the fact that there was no fighting, no guns firing, no traffic in the roads. He could hear voices, but they weren't threatening or frightening. The night they were plunging into extended a hand of welcome. Would that he could challenge his demons of despair, if these got in touch. On this trip, his life felt like it was on a mezzanine suspended between a floor marked “Ennui” and another marked “Hope.” While he knew that anything could happen, he was determined to do his utmost not to end up in a body bag, or in an overpriced coffin addressed to his wife and daughters, care of a funeral agency with a zip code in Queens, New York.

The driver said, “I'll give you my telephone number so you can call me when you need to. And please don't hesitate to get in touch if there's anything I can do to help.”

“It's very kind of you.”

The vehicle stopped in front of a hotel gate. The driver applied the hand-brake, turned to Jeebleh, and announced, “Here we are!”

JEEBLEH TOOK NOTE THAT THE GROUNDS OF THE HOTEL WERE MARKED off from the street by a large sign, handwritten in Somali, Arabic, English, and Italian, warning that no one bearing firearms would be allowed onto the premises.

At the sound of the horn, the gate opened slowly, and his gaze settled on two men, neither, evidently, with a gun. One of the men appeared to have only one arm, while the other was distinguished by an enormous pair of buckteeth, bright white against an otherwise obscure face.

Above the gate, up in the heavens, the sky was soaked in the blood of sacrifice: it reminded Jeebleh of the Somali myth in which the sun is fed daily, at dusk, on a slaughtered beast. He remembered being told, as a child, that the routine of feeding the sun daily at the same hour made her return for food the following day. Now that he had gained his adulthood and come back to this fragmented land, he lamented the tragic absence of a hero worthy of elevation to solar eminence. He might have been at the gate of prehistory, because the quickening darkness of the hour dyed the visible world with the dim color of yet other uncertainties. Would he be safe at this hotel? Did it have running water? How intermittent was its electricity?

Of the two men at the gate, OneArm advanced with the wariness of a chameleon, once all the militiamen had gotten down from the roof of the vehicle. He was so dark he might have been woven out of the night. He moved around the vehicle in the stylized goose-step of a sentry on duty. “No guns, please,” he told the driver, who assured him that neither he nor Jeebleh was armed.

Bucktooth stayed behind, focused with reptilian attentiveness on every possible movement, his right hand in his pocket—maybe because a firearm was hidden there. The gate firmly in his grip, he kept half of his body out of immediate danger in the event of a shoot-out.