“How old are you, sweet little love?”
“I don’t know.”
Cambara remains in her clumsy crouch, her every bone creaking, her every joint aching, and her thighs enflamed with pain. She can tell that Zaak is close by, chain-smoking and unwrapping the bundle of qaat and helping himself to its shiny, leathery leaves upon which he chews meditatively, like a cow attending to its cud. His eyes redden, and his right cheek bulges gradually, chipmunklike.
She says to Zaak, “Can I borrow some money?”
“How much do you need?”
“A couple of dollars’ worth in shillings.”
He says, “I have less than a dollar.”
Her stomach turns at the disturbing thought that he has bought qaat and paid money sufficient for several families to live on for a week. How wasteful! She can’t bear the thought of receiving the money from him herself, she is so disgusted.
She says, “Please give them the money.”
And she extends both her hands to receive the plastic bag into which the woman has stuffed the produce that Zaak has paid for.
They walk back to the house, Cambara furious with herself all the while for having accepted her mother’s condition that she stay with him. As they tread along, he stops every now and then to select juicy young shoots of his precious qaat and consumes them hungrily.
She looks away, in revulsion.
TWO
Fretful, Cambara is in the upstairs bathroom, bracing for a cold bucket shower, her first in many years. The thought of having one brings on goose pimples. As she readies for the first drop of cold water, she clenches her teeth, closes her eyes, and, standing in rigid expectation of the water descending from above her head, trembles all over. She considers giving up the idea and finding a hotel with warm running water and all the modern amenities she is used to. On second thought, however, she carps at admitting defeat so soon after arriving, conscious of the fact that more civil war–related travails lie in wait for her and that it is high time she took this small challenge head-on.
She remembers talking to Zaak earlier and cannot get rid of seeing the bemused look on his face, as he informed her, almost with a touch of glee, that the geyser in the upstairs bathroom is no longer working, but if she wanted, she could have a warm shower in his downstairs bathroom. Truth be told, she declined his invitation to use his bathroom, because she did not wish to repeat her Nairobi experience years ago when they shared an apartment and she found him wanting. She wonders if the disparaging smile his face wore earlier meant that he hadn’t forgotten how much she disliked cold showers. Whatever the case, she thanked him and said that she preferred getting accustomed to the conditions prevailing here right away to postponing the inevitable, for, sooner or later, she would have to confront similar situations and worse. She puzzles over the problem of sharing a small space and living in intimate proximity for a few days. Can she suffer it and for how long? Will they rub each other the wrong way?
Even though she doubts that Zaak will knock on the door on some pretext or another or walk in, she makes sure she bolts the bathroom door from inside, just to be sure. She opens the window wide to let in the early-evening sea breeze, which in its own way weakens her resolve to have the cold shower after all. Her chest rises and falls as she fills her lungs with sea air and breathes in nostalgic memories of the city’s salted humidity. The puff of the wind washing over her helps stimulate her powers of recall, and before she knows it, she is in her preteens, mischievously baring her budding breasts in Zaak’s presence and daring him to touch them. Because he hadn’t the nerve, she accused him of being a shirking coward. Naked and in flip-flops, her right hand resting limply on her hip, her admiring gaze falls on her waist, which is too narrow for a woman her age, especially one who has had a child. Cambara wonders how much the exposure to civil war horrors has affected Zaak’s outlook on life and, if so, in what significant ways.
As if asking now the right profile and now the left one to yield up their cheeky confidences one at a time, she stands slightly to the left of the mirror and then to the right of it. She listens to a faucet dripping, a cistern running, a rusty window shakily creaking on its hinges. Then, when she least expects it, she distinctly picks out the sound of a bird calling to its mate, in mourning. She regards the face looking back at her lengthily from the depth of the looking glass with renewed apprehension. She ascribes her inability to compose herself in the way she likes to the fact that, like the bird, she too is grieving.
Her eyes bulge with so many unshed tears, and she senses a sudden, almost blinding rush of hot blood flowing to her head, but she catches herself in time before losing her balance and dropping to the wet floor in a dead faint. She stands upright and breathes in deeply, harder and longer, and more frequently until she is sure that the world won’t pull away from under her feet. Now steady, and not likely to founder, she inhales some more sea air, and when she imagines that she has taken in enough, she regains her normal bearing. She first bends down slowly with deliberate willfulness, and then lifts the scoop, which she dips into the bucket filled to the brim with water. Lest she lose her grip, she clutches at the scoop as if making a grab for an item that is, of necessity, an extension of the self. She raises the scoop, preparatory to pouring the water on her head. However, before a globule of liquid has reached any part of her body, her face wears an expectant, tense look, and then ready, set, go. The first drop is insufferable, causing her body to be covered with tiny bumps; the second drop is not so unbearable. By the time she has emptied scoopfuls on her head, she feels she has acclimatized to the inclement temperature, and no part of her body raises a single goose bump. Because she is no longer breaking out in cold spots, she compliments herself for a small achievement, the first since her arrival.
After she has toweled down and gone back to the privacy of her room, which she bolts from the inside, and has chosen what to wear—a discreet dress, decent and not in any way provocative enough to make Zaak wish they had been lovers—she revisits a scene that is permanently etched on the screen of her memory. In it, she and her mother are on an afternoon walk in a park in the suburb of Ottawa where her parents had relocated a couple of decades before Somalia had collapsed into stateless anarchy and where her father, a diabetic, had had two legs amputated in a matter of six months and had been bedridden for nearly two years. At the time, Cambara was not doing as well as she might have hoped in her dream profession, acting. She was worth no more than cameo parts, nothing big, and even then didn’t have her name in lights. She had not landed any role that might turn her overnight into a household name anywhere. No one showed the TV commercials in which she had had parts, even though they had been commissioned, and none of her other short skits were ever aired in prime time. In fact, earlier that month, Cambara had failed to get an audition for a role about a young, ambitious Somali woman who is at loggerheads with her in-laws over the infibulation of her seven-year-old daughter, a story that her agent made her believe had been written with her in mind. No wonder she was in a downbeat mood.
“A pity that my biggest fan is in no position to hire me for an acting role,” Cambara would remark tongue in cheek to her mother and friends. Arda was so enthusiastic about her daughter’s potential that she would delight in speaking gloatingly and praising her to high heaven; she would describe her, preeminently, as an actor who would one day surprise the world, given the chance. When relatives or family friends pointed out that Cambara was getting on in years and hadn’t as yet made a breakthrough, married, and provided her with a grandchild, Arda, in her riposte, would speak of the primacy of her profession, which she would place above marriage or childbearing. She would add that Cambara would turn her mind to matrimonial matters only after she had secured an acting contract worth the wait. In the meantime, Cambara worked as a makeup artist for an outfit called The Studio and was very popular among theater folk and among Somalis, who sought her out so she would prepare the bride on the eve of her wedding.
In fairness, Cambara was more realistic than her mother made her out to be. At times, it embarrassed her to hear her mother’s over-the-top bragging, her mother who awoke nearly daily animated with the energy derived from the belief that Cambara would one day make it big, and that she would bring a smile to everyone’s lips and pride to her own eyes and heart. Arda dreamed of precipitating a profitable scheme that would lead to her daughter’s ultimate success. Ever since her parents’ relocation to Canada several years preceding the fighting in Mogadiscio, which wrenched power from the dictator’s iron grip, Cambara assumed a central role in their lives. She rang them often and called on them whenever she could. When her father took ill, it fell to Cambara to drive to his house and spend her weekends or holidays. And when the old man became bedridden and there was need for round-the-clock care and her mother relied on an elderly Filipino woman for this purpose, Cambara helped out the best she could. Her father’s death brought them much closer. How the two women enjoyed their long conversations, complimenting each other, the one a fan, the other, in her self-restraint, refusing to lap it all up like a famished kitten consuming the milk in a saucer. However, seldom did either allow her talk to veer toward the very personal: marriage or babies. Discreet, Arda would reiterate that, in matters of the heart, she had faith that Cambara eventually would make the right choice.
One day, half a year after her father’s death, Arda invited her on the pretext that she might have discovered an elixir for her professional problems. Cambara went to Ottawa to humor her mother, assuming that her mother’s summons had something to do, most likely, with the strife raging in Mogadiscio and the rest of the land, no more than that. If anything, she supposed that a relative was in some trouble and needing a leg up, or maybe the Canadian government was setting up a commission to help its policy makers come to grips with the Somali crisis, and it was possible that through someone’s intercession, Cambara was being asked to join the assembled pundits. Whatever it was, and even though she would not elaborate on it at all, her mother had sounded chuffed. She doubted if the visit would have any bearing on her professional ambitions or would result in her mother’s discovery of a panacea, but since, in her experience, Arda’s records of intervention were invariably marked by success, Cambara said to herself, “What do I lose?” and drove to Ottawa to hear her mother out.
They got down to the business of talking after a hot bath and a delicious meal prepared and served with loving maternal care. All was good at the initial ground-clearing phase, in which Arda spent a long time on the preliminaries and Cambara listened with due patience and filial deference as her mother untangled the wool gathered from the mesh of her speculative fibers. However, when Cambara finally got the drift of her mother’s plan and paid more attention to the nuances being employed, Cambara found out that she could not fight the feeling of nausea gradually coming upon her in waves and eventually overwhelming her with a sense of despondent torpor. The short of it was that Arda was proposing a course of action that would prejudicially undermine Cambara’s sense of privacy and encroach upon it drastically.
Cambara was disturbed. Not only was the plan, as her mother conceived it, unworkable, from her own point of view, it broke with a long-held understanding between them, reached during the young woman’s teens, that at no time and under any circumstances would either of her parents ever make a decision that might affect her without first talking it over and clearing it with her. In her zealous attempt to remain her own person, Cambara stood guard over her own privacy, allowing no one to intrude upon it and permitting nobody, family or nonfamily, to step past its threshold unless she approved of it. What upset her no end was that she and her mother spoke and met often, especially after her father’s death, and she was appalled that the old woman could entertain such a preposterous idea without taking Cambara’s feelings into account, in this way entering sensitive territories beyond which she knew she was not to venture ever. Whatever had made Arda barge in without her time-honored thoughtfulness! Yet this was precisely what Arda had done. Cambara could see no sense in her mother’s behavior, which was so unlike her. To put it another way, what her mother was now proposing did not tally at all with what she had alluded to when she invited her a couple of days ago to come and talk about the panacea to her daughter’s professional success.
The languor that at the moment rippled through her whole body made her want to sit on the first available bench in the park where they were walking. From the expression on her face, you might have thought that someone had held a bottle full of ether to her nose—she was so breathless, and she was becoming drenched with cold sweat. It rankled Cambara that she, who always took exceptional pride in declaiming that she could read her mother’s mind as easily as a fortune-teller reads a desperate client’s particular needs, was being proven wrong. It was obvious one of them did not make the grade this time, and both would have to revise their views, which she was finding equally disturbing. And when, a little later, Arda seated herself at a small distance from her, Cambara’s chest produced something between a chuckle and a snivel.
Emboldened, Arda took this as a sign she could resume speaking. She said, “The long and short of it is that I would like my nephew Zaak to join us here in Canada, legally.”
Cambara was sufficiently vigilant to spot the catch, instantly feeling the sting in the tail of the key word “legally.”
As irony would have it, planeloads of Somalis were arriving illegally at major ports or airports everywhere in the world, including Toronto, nearly all of them declaring themselves as stateless, and no one was turning any one of them back, not from Canada, anyhow. But Arda did not want her nephew to board an aircraft from Nairobi, where he ended up after fleeing the fighting in Mogadiscio, like tens of thousands of other Somalis, as a refugee. Being Arda, she intended to spread a carpet of welcome for him all the way from Nairobi, which he would leave, if at all, on a flight bound for Toronto, not as a refugee but legally as a spouse. She felt protective toward him, solicitously making sure that he was not vulnerable to harassment at the hands of the Kenyan immigration authorities, who were given to extracting exorbitant corruption money from Somalis relocating to Europe or North America. She did not want him to be apprehended at a midway location between Africa and Canada and returned to Nairobi. Making an already terrible situation worse, Arda, plodding, repeated everything from the beginning for the third or fourth time, as though she, Cambara, were a bit thick: that she would fly out to Kenya on a work-related visit to that country, link up with Zaak, who was waiting for a sponsorship to a third country, and bring him along as her spouse.
Without honoring any of what she thought of as her mother’s harebrained plans with a reaction, Cambara stared at Arda, as if trying to puzzle out what her mother meant when she spoke of her making “a work-related visit” to Nairobi. What “work” did she have in mind? But she wished to deal with what bothered her most first.
Cambara said, “Why would I want to become the wife of a man I haven’t thought about in that way or seen for a number of years?”
“That way, you’ll do me a huge favor.”
As she sought succor from the long silence, in which she considered the implication of her mother’s statement, Cambara discerned a trace of her mother’s fragrance in the form of uunsi scent, which Somali women traditionally wear to welcome back their husbands after a long absence.
She said, “Mother, you’re too much to take.”
“You’ll be a wife only on paper.”
“What would that make me in other people’s eyes?”
“You can act as a wife, can’t you?” Arda says.
“I don’t want to act like a wife to Zaak.”
“In the amateur theater you’ve been in,” Arda said, “I’ve seen you act as a lowlife, seen you play the role of a wife to a man who is not your husband. Why can’t you pretend to be a wife to Zaak? Pretend. Isn’t acting your dream profession?”
If you had seen Cambara in her current state, you might
have thought that she was strong on the outside and weak on the inside. Could it be that her mother was at last breaking her spirit? Was she about to relinquish all resistance? Admittedly, she had squandered her opportunity to set her mother right; maybe it was much too late to fend her mother off.
“Think of it as a favor to me, as I said.”
“I wish you wouldn’t ask that of me.”
“There is no else I can ask.”
“It is unfair.”
“Let’s think of it as your dare.”
“It’s unlike you to do this to me.”
“A dare to an actor. A wife only on paper. Think.”
Since they meant the world to each other, and since the word “no” seldom passed the lips of the one of whom the other requested a favor, Arda relied on the art of persuasion, softening the inner core of her daughter’s defiance not with authoritarianism but with pleading. Do me a favor, please, my daughter! Now a species of unequaled sorrow was beginning to take residence in Cambara and was becoming a tenant with full rights. She felt as inanimate as a puppet with broken limbs and no wires to get it moving. Even so, she doubted if acting as a wife to Zaak—pretending and only on paper, as her mother put it—would lend a greater dare to her acting ability or sharpen it. Knowing herself, she might take it on as a challenge, if only to try and turn it into a triumph to revel in. She wished the idea had come from her, then she could have determined the parameters of the relationship and walked out of it when her heart was no longer in it. If the original idea had been hers, then she might have experienced the real thrill from the perspective of her creativity. As things now stood, she would have to think of what Arda might say before instinctually terminating it. Zaak was not worth the candle that her mother was burning.
Knots Page 3