“I know why she is leaving,” says Mugdi.
Gacalo looks from Mugdi to Timiro and back at Mugdi. “Am I missing something? Have the two of you been conspiring?”
“Our daughter is leaving because she can’t stand being around when the two of us are fighting to the bitter end, neither of us prepared to allow the other to have his or her way.”
“If that’s the case, what are you going to do about it?”
“What are we doing about it, Mum,” says Timiro. “Remember, this concerns every member of the family, including my unborn baby.”
Timiro will forever time the moment her father’s resistance buckled to when she used the inclusive pronoun “we,” in “What are we going to do about it?” It is true that she has run out of patience with her bickering parents. Still, she feels that her father has put on himself pressure unlike any other, understandably—he will do his best not to allow outsiders to intrude harmfully into their lives during the auspicious period when they are expecting a grandchild. Later, she will claim she knew he would concede to Gacalo when she saw the twinkle of his eyes. As it happens, he acquiesces to all of her mother’s dictates: renting a vehicle to fetch them from the airport; taking Waliya and the children to their new home, a three-bedroom apartment Gacalo has obtained for them; and what’s more, doing all of this alone, as when the day finally comes that Waliya and her children are to be picked up, Gacalo will announce that she is chairing a meeting that she cannot afford to miss. And so there is nothing left for Mugdi to say but “It’ll be a pleasure to welcome them, darling.”
How sweet of him!
As Gacalo gathers her papers to leave for the office, she offers Mugdi a multipocketed leather purse heavy with coins.
“What is this? Gold?”
Gacalo replies, “Coins for your parking.”
Mugdi has never known Gacalo to be fretful, yet now she is as antsy as a mother hen, clucking protectively at anyone approaching her chicks.
She says, “Will you promise not to ask them any embarrassing questions—not when you first meet them, nor later, when you are in the car on your way to the apartment, where I’ll be waiting to welcome them?”
“I won’t.”
“How I wish he too was coming!”
He says nothing, knowing she is referring to Dhaqaneh. She turns away from him, the well of her eyes filling with tears. Before she departs, she says, her voice moist, “Be sure to call me anyhow.”
On the drive to the airport, Mugdi brims over with sadness and not for the first time thinks of himself as a man born to grief, a Somali concerned about the death of a son or the arrival of a widow and her children when he should be sorrowing over the terminal cancer that has infected his nation. He detests Somalia’s dysfunction, unrelenting since 1991, the year the country collapsed after its clan politics had gone awry, and Mogadiscio became a killing field.
Mugdi arrived in Norway in 1988, before the start of the strife. Norway was a different country then. The majority of its Muslim population consisted of a homogenous community of Pakistanis, who had come as indentured laborers. Soon after Mugdi’s arrival, he learned of a nineteen-year-old Norwegian member of the right-wing National Popular Party who had launched a bomb attack on Nor Mosque in 1985—a forewarning of the attacks that would increase in frequency.
Johan Nielsen, his friend, said at the time, “There’s nothing new about this. Nowadays hate groups perceive Muslims as an existential threat to Norway in the same way similar hate groups of old perceived Jews, with contempt and fear.”
“Still, it is worrying,” said Mugdi.
His wife, Birgitta, went on, “The year before, a prominent Norwegian politician of extreme right-wing persuasion falsely claimed to have received a letter from a Muslim, in which the author forewarned that one day mosques will be as common in Norway as churches are today and that the heathen cross in the flag will be gone.”
Mugdi felt so unwelcome and unsafe hearing of such incidents that he even considered returning to Somalia, and perhaps would have, if Gacalo hadn’t pleaded with him not to for the sake of the children. Instead, he did what he could for his country from afar, writing articles and editorials in which he advocated for peace among the warring clan militias. Then he joined a group of former Somali ambassadors, politicians, and intellectuals whose aim was to deal with the rupture in Somalia’s body politic, to stop the hemorrhage, but to no avail. Still he did not give up, and was soon in New York to provide background documentation for the United Nations Security Council meetings on Somalia. He was traveling constantly and saw less and less of his family. It was during this time that Dhaqaneh began acting out, skipping class until his frequent truancy led the school to threaten his expulsion.
When Mugdi was home, the tension in the household made him edgy and irritable. His sense of failure took the shine off his work for the nation. Frustrated and depressed, he cut himself off from the Somali community, spending more of his time in his study, at the gym, walking in a nearby park, or ensuring that Dhaqaneh was back on the straight and narrow.
But despite his efforts, all was not well with the boy, whose offenses began to increase in severity until he was charged with a minor felony, accused of injuring an elderly lady when he and his two Pakistani friends were tussling for a ball. Mugdi promised to Gacalo he would have a word with Dhaqaneh, but did not, busying himself instead with a new Somali political collective engaged in yet another peace dialogue. But when the collective’s efforts ended in disaster and the men and women who formed it blamed one another along clan family lines, Mugdi vowed yet again never to have anything more to do with Somali politics or self-serving politicians.
The next time Gacalo had reason to plead with Mugdi to be firm with their son, Dhaqaneh was in another pickle with the police, accused of being the leader of a group caught in an unpremeditated fistfight with swastika-bearing skinheads. It soon became obvious that nothing Mugdi or anyone else could do would reverse the path their son was on, as it was not beyond Dhaqaneh to act violently toward everyone, including his own father, whom he took to describing as “a dud politician, incapable of succeeding where his peers had excelled,” and whom he could not hold in respect.
When Dhaqaneh was in his teens and Mugdi was serving as Somalia’s ambassador to West Germany, based in Bonn, Dhaqaneh was often described as his mum’s boy, the two becoming quite close. Then, when puberty took total command of his mind and body, he spent more and more time alone in his room, the curtains drawn, listening to loud music, surfing the Internet, and watching porn. One night, during a visit home, Mugdi entered the boy’s room and found his son completely in the nude, with a blue film on. Gacalo thought that a sabbatical away from Timiro—the two had been fighting ceaselessly—would very likely bring the best out of the boy; maybe he was finding living in close proximity to her daunting. For she was dutiful and he was not; she was hardworking at school and he was not; she excelled in everything at which she tried her hand and he did not; she showed future promise, he did not. Dhaqaneh hated being compared to her and he hated her guts too. What if Gacalo and Dhaqaneh returned to Mogadiscio? Would he benefit from being in a different place, with fewer amenities? They could try it for a few months, staying in the studio apartment they still owned in the city, which Mugdi used whenever he had occasion to return to Somalia, usually for work.
Dhaqaneh raised no objections to this plan, reasoning that he would deepen his knowledge of Somali, and perhaps learn to play the guitar and write his own lyrics in the language. His parents knew of his growing interest in music, sharpened after meeting one of his favorite Somali singers, who had come to give a concert in Cologne. He was fascinated watching the singer playing the pear-shaped, many-stringed instrument known in Arabic as oud, but commonly called kaman in Somali. Now Dhaqaneh said that he wanted nothing more than to apprentice himself one day to someone who could help him realize his commitment to singing and
writing lyrics in Somali.
Gacalo and Mugdi were delighted he was eager to go to Mogadiscio, though Mugdi was considerably less pleased with his son’s singing aspirations.
Mugdi asked, “What about school?”
“No school. I want to become a singer.”
“It’s all settled then,” Gacalo said, and she purchased a kaman from a Lebanese shop specializing in Arab musical instruments. A fortnight later, mother and son were off. But they were back in Bonn before three months elapsed, Dhaqaneh having lost all interest in guitar playing and lyric writing. Besides, Somalia was not to his liking. Dhaqaneh was born and brought up abroad, and Mogadiscio was so different from the European cities he was accustomed to from his father’s postings—Moscow, London, Brussels, Rome. Neither Gacalo nor Mugdi was surprised when Dhaqaneh said that he couldn’t think of Somalia as his country.
On reflection, Mugdi would hand it to Gacalo that she had succeeded in her interventions with the boy early in his youth, when he worked and she was a housewife. When the roles reversed, she the breadwinner and it falling to him to be patient, tactful, and loving to the boy, he had failed.
Just as Mugdi and Gacalo tried one more time to improve their relationship with their son, Dhaqaneh started to become a fervent frequenter of the mosque. He divided his time between the local university, where he was doing a degree in media communications and taking his studies seriously, and the house of worship, where he avidly prayed. Yet neither of his parents knew that an imam notorious for his radical views was influencing his behavior. Dhaqaneh was in his penultimate year of his studies when he displayed the first signs of displeasure at his family’s secular behavior. Over the coming weeks, he became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of them, until finally their irreconcilable differences came to the fore.
Dhaqaneh, who had always been a person of extremes, would say, “I love this and no other,” or “I hate this like no other.” As a child, he’d insist on eating nothing but spaghetti for weeks on end, only to announce that he wanted no more spaghetti, would not touch spaghetti for months, nor explain why. Eventually, there came a point when everyone asked fewer questions about his choices.
Nearly fourteen years later, in 2003, Mugdi summoned Dhaqaneh, by then a bespectacled and gangling man, with a full beard that had not known a blade, home for a private talk. He was calmer than he’d been in his youth, more pensive, following four years’ uninterrupted stay in Mogadiscio.
In those years, once the imam’s influence had taken hold, Dhaqaneh loved Somalia, returning to Oslo, to Gacalo’s delight and relief, only when he needed to replenish his depleted income. And when he was home, he remained secretive about his doings and whereabouts in Somalia. It irritated Mugdi no end when his son pontificated about his wish to “purify Islam from the Western influence that is ruining the religion’s originality.”
One evening at dinner, when conversation touched on Al Qaeda’s bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the 9/11 massacre, Dhaqaneh declared that Islam was the one faith that would save the world and everyone on it from perdition and, if need be, he was prepared to kill to achieve this.
A row ensued, tempers were lost, strong words were used, despite Gacalo’s pleas to her son to stop provoking his father and to Mugdi to see what was happening for what it was: a son separating himself from his father, making his way in the wider world. At the time, Dhaqaneh worked as a volunteer at a Saudi-funded Muslim charity in Oslo, living in a one-room studio near the mosque, where he gave free instruction to young Somali students in math and science and ran evening classes for adults, earning just enough to pay the bills. To supplement his income, he drove a taxi. Gacalo sensed that Mugdi was unhappy about their son’s lack of ambition. But she was pleased that he was at least popular among the Somalis, who adored him.
A few months later, Mugdi sought Dhaqaneh’s opinion when the boy’s religious mentor was reported to be under investigation, turned back from the airport, suspected of links to one of the 9/11 bombers. Was his son aware that Imam Yasiin had been headed to Mogadiscio when he was turned back? Mugdi asked, “Were the two of you planning to meet up there?”
The silence that followed was as deafening as it was prominent, as father and son stared at each other, neither willing to be the first to blink.
Mugdi broke it first, reminding Dhaqaneh that the people and government of Norway, in bold defiance of right-wing politicians and xenophobes, continued to admit into the country thousands of migrants and refugees, many of whom were Muslims. “I hope you and many others like you appreciate the government’s open-handed and left-leaning policies.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re on about.”
“How do you think Muslims should respond to Norway’s current climate of openness and welcome?”
Dhaqaneh said, “The point is moot, Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“I view all non-Muslims as creatures bereft of souls and, as such, they are in no position to decide what they do. Rather, it is Allah’s will that makes them host Muslims, and feed the multitudes starving in the famines in Somalia. In short, they have no choice in the matter.”
Stunned once more into silence, Mugdi reminded his son of the non-Muslim friends the family had, like Johan and Birgitta. “What do you think about them? Are they also creatures bereft of souls?”
“I don’t think of them as full humans,” said Dhaqaneh, “and yes, if it came to it, I wouldn’t hesitate to exterminate them.”
The option of throwing his son out of the house and asking him never to show his face again crossed Mugdi’s mind, yet he knew that such an idea would never fly with Gacalo.
As he walks into the arrivals hall, Mugdi cannot recall what he did or said in the immediate aftermath of that conversation. He knows Gacalo knows that he and Dhaqaneh had a falling out, but she has no complete understanding of what happened between father and son, and his determination to never share it fully has remained unshakable.
Mugdi finds a café facing the flight information board, gets himself a cup of coffee and a croissant, and watches the hordes of men and women also waiting at the arrivals gate, some holding placards in the air with the names of the persons they have come to pick up.
He assumes Waliya and Saafi, her daughter, to be loyal to a religious disposition of the sort that discourages physical contact between men and women unless they are married. Recently he has had the displeasure of extending his hand to shake that of a woman whom he has known for years, only for her to say, “I’m sorry, no handshakes.” Not that he sought an explanation, but she said, “We were bad Muslims before now, but now we know better.” On the contrary, he felt Somalis were better Muslims before the 1991 civil war poisoned their minds and ruined their hearts.
As his eyes move from the face of a Caucasian woman to a man with Middle Eastern features, and from a woman in a sari to an African man in an agbada, Mugdi is sad that scenes such as this, where a variety of races congregate at a public arena, are unavailable in Mogadiscio. As he watches the expressions on the faces of some of the Norwegians, he can spot some whose gentle features stiffen, turning ugly when they come face-to-face with a Muslim woman in full Islamic gear. Maybe a woman with a Muslim headscarf is seen as a threat, whereas a sari-wearing woman is viewed as unusual and fascinating in this part of the world. Mugdi remembers reading about a judge in the state of Georgia in the US who barred a woman with a headscarf from entering his court. Would the same judge turn away a Jewish man with a yarmulke or a nun in her habit? Mugdi thinks of himself as a spiritual man, even though he lacks the discipline to turn his sense of spiritualism into a formulaic faith with defined rituals and places of worship, where like-minded throngs professing to believe in the same faith congregate and pray on specific hours and days of the week. Mugdi doesn’t like any form of regimentation.
His phone vibrates and he answers it after checking the ident
ity of the caller. “Yes, darling?”
“We’re having a tea break and I’ve just entered the flight details into the internet and I understand that there is a delay in the ETA,” Gacalo says.
“Yes, I can see that on the board.”
An hour later, the public address system announces that the flight Waliya and her children are supposed to be on has landed. Mugdi sends Gacalo a text message saying, “They’re here.”
CHAPTER TWO
A moment later Mugdi debates the correctness of his statement given that Gacalo never received confirmation that the three did in fact leave Nairobi, from where Waliya was expected to call once they had passed through Kenya’s rigorous security checks—Somalis boarding aircraft to most destinations are made to go through a more strenuous interrogation. Moreover, Waliya or one of her charges was also to make contact soon after landing in Brussels and before connecting with their flight to Oslo.
Mugdi is prepared to wait for as long as it takes, maybe several hours, remembering that Waliya and her children have been traveling for almost a fortnight, their journey having begun in Nairobi and from there to Entebbe, Uganda, on three forged Tanzanian passports and air tickets that Gacalo had paid for. The tickets would take them to Damascus, where they were to spend a little over a week at a hotel frequented by traffickers who specialized in ferrying illegals to their European destinations. Gacalo rang them daily, and Waliya kept her abreast of what was happening, informing her of the identity of those whom she met and bargained with, and what they said and did, but also if there was an immediate need for funds to be wired.
From Damascus they flew on to Nicosia, Cyprus, with a minder representing the trafficker in tow. The family lay low for a couple of days, hardly leaving their hotel in the Turkish-run portion of the island. From there they flew to Rome, where they arrived late at night, because the minder escorting them knew that the Italian immigration officer manning one of the counters would facilitate their entry into the city. In Rome, they put up at a hotel in the suburbs of the city near Fiumicino. Not that any of them would be interested in sightseeing, with their bodies in a free fall and their minds exhausted, unsure that they would ever make it to Oslo. Waliya advised patience when her son Naciim raged and Saafi almost joined him in a riotous mutiny. “Allah is on our side,” she said.
North of Dawn Page 2