“I repeat: You won’t have to marry him.”
Cambara put on a worn smile, exhausted from trying to weather the storm that was her mother. Her head between her hands, she said, “Take me through it all. Tell me what you have in mind, this panacea.”
The way Arda explained it, it was all easy. She was to travel to Nairobi on a commission from CBS to interview the Somalis as they arrived and work with a local crew to film them. While there, she was to look up a counselor at the Canadian High Commission who would facilitate the processing of Zaak’s application so he could join them in Toronto after half a year.
Cambara said, “Everything is arranged?”
“Everything.”
Cambara said, “Still, I can’t understand why I can’t get him a visa with the help of this person whom I am to see? Why can’t you sponsor him and have a temporary visa issued to him? Why his spouse?”
Arda said, “The drag, darling, is that most visas issued locally would have period limitation. Three months, half a year, and two years at most. There is the added hassle that you cannot renew visas issued outside Canada. The applicant will have to go out of the country and reapply to enter.”
“Curse the day you became his aunt.”
“My sweet,” Arda said, holding her daughter’s hand, “I have it from good authority that Somalis wanting to come to Canada will find it very difficult to obtain visas, temporary or long term, in Nairobi. I have close friends in the relevant departments, some of them neighbors right here in Ottawa.”
“And marrying is the best option?”
“Two of my neighbors are on the case, as we speak, one of them having obtained the commission from CBS, the other liaising with the deputy high commissioner of Canada to Kenya, who happens to have gone to the same prep in Montreal, to make certain that your and Zaak’s papers go expeditiously to the relevant desk.”
“You’ve thought it all through, haven’t you? Why doesn’t he show up at the airport? He’ll be granted refugee status the instant he puts his foot on Canadian soil, being Somali. Why can’t he come the way the others are coming? He is not counterfeit currency or contraband.”
After a pause, Arda says, “A favor to me. Your mother.”
“Anyhow, where is the accursed fellow?”
“As we speak, Zaak has an apartment in the center of Nairobi, paid for on my credit card, via a Nairobi-based real estate agent. As his wife, you will be staying with him there.”
The Ottawa sky, darkening, made Cambara pause and stare at it as if daring it to rain. She knew that once her mother had made up her mind and had worked out the details of a plan, the likelihood of her backing down or finding fault with it would be minimal.
“You know what, Mummy?”
“What?”
“You wouldn’t do this if Dad were alive.”
“Let’s not go there.”
“Would you?”
“I would find a way,” Arda said.
“I am not so sure,” Cambara said.
In the silence that came after, Arda busied herself, attentively removing dirt from under her nails. This put Cambara in mind of a mother monkey picking lice off her baby’s head, then biting and chewing them.
Cambara asked, “Have you thought ahead, Mummy, on what Zaak and I must do about sleeping arrangements, first in Nairobi and then here, assuming that he is allowed to join me?”
“I have, indeed,” Arda responded.
“Yes. Go on. Tell me more.”
Arda said, “The imagination of most Somalis is prone to rioting as soon as they reflect on a situation in which a man and a woman share an intimate space alone, with no chaperone. They will assume that they are having it off.”
“And you don’t think we will?”
“I know you are your own woman.”
“What does that mean?”
“I trust your judgment.”
Talk of the imagination of Somalis going amok about sexual matters, as do all prudish societies. More to the point, could she, Cambara, share an intimate space with a man who might come on to her at the sight of her showered, with her favorite night cream on, walking into the bedroom and lying on her side of the bed, wanting to read? Could she sleep in such physical proximity to him? Will he respect her wishes, or will he pester her until she loses her temper and reminds him of his responsibility to himself: “All for your own good!” Tempted, will she make the first move? What of his bad breath? How would she bear it?
Just before dusk, mother and daughter returned from their long walk and talk, the one content, the other worn out, hot and bothered, and looking half alert to the goings-on, restless like a child having a bad sleep.
Between showers and a dinner together, Arda held out an envelope, which, when opened, Cambara discovered to contain an open return air ticket to Nairobi, a lot of cash in thousands of U.S. dollars, in small and large denominations, a yearlong and renewable insurance policy for two, with one of the parties described simply as “partner.”
“Do you have dates by which I must leave?”
Arda replied, “We’ll wait for the letter from the commissioning editor at CBS, who has assured my neighbor that she has put it in the post. Meantime I’ve booked your onward flight, window seat all the way. I’ll let you decide on your return date.”
“How sweet of you!”
“You’ll be a better judge, since you’ll be there.”
“What else?”
“Damn. I clean forgot.”
“What?”
Arda retrieved an envelope from the top of the sideboard, which, sitting down, she passed on to Cambara. “The yellow fever and cholera certificate.”
“But I haven’t had the jabs.”
“It’s all taken care of.”
“How did you swing it?”
“I know how you hate taking your shots.”
“Did you bribe somebody?”
“There are ways to get around such problems.”
“You’ve left nothing to chance, have you?”
Cambara left for Nairobi as arranged. She hired a taxi from the airport and went directly to the place she was to share with Zaak. It irked her to be there exhausted from the long trip, having barely slept a wink because of a neighbor who talked endlessly. When she got to Zaak’s door, he was so deep in sleep that it took her and two security men from the apartment complex almost half an hour to rouse him from it. She interpreted irritably the fact that he was unprepared for her arrival. Her irascibility did not augur well, and she knew it.
Within an hour, soon after a shower, she joined him in the kitchenette and right away noticed the telltale disfigurements in body and soul, which she would see more of when she met other Somalis who had just come from Mogadiscio: trauma born of desolation. She could not put her finger on why she felt uncomfortable in his company, maybe because she sensed that he was transmitting to her a flow of detrimental vibes, possibly without being aware of them. She held back and wouldn’t get any closer to him, afraid that he might have transported some kind of contagion from the fighting that he had fled. To have the place to herself, she sent him out on an errand to the local general store with cash to buy basic groceries, including coffee, tea, and fresh milk. Then she had a couple of hours’ sleep. She awoke to Somali being spoken and was able to work out in no time that it was the BBC Somali Service early-evening bulletin.
They dined out their first evening together at an Indian restaurant two doors away from the apartment complex, prepared to pay for it. Whatever attempts either made to get to know the other or at least to converse bore no positive results: They behaved as if they were a married couple who were under the torment of a recent estrangement and who had no idea how to overcome their mutual antagonism. At some point, she decided that sitting and facing each other in a restaurant when neither was saying much and she was too exhausted was not worth a plugged nickel. She asked for the bill, which she settled, and they left. When they got to the apartment, she retired to her room forthwith, wis
hing him good night.
From the following morning on, she relegated every other worry to a back burner, determined to throw herself into her work. She got up early and fresh, poised to activate contact with the coordinator of the Kenyan crew, a young woman who doubled as a cameraperson/driver, who told her to wait for her and her Somali-speaking colleague, who had arranged for the interview appointments, at the main gate.
Half an hour later, Cambara, dressed in a discreet manner, eager to get started, and holding her notes in folders in an old leather bag in preference to a showy executive case, was at the main entrance. She introduced herself to the two women in the beat-up Toyota. Compared to the one at the wheel—younger, and guessing from her name, Ngai, Kikuyu-speaking—who looked livelier, the Somali-speaking woman sitting in the back of the vehicle was massive and broad as a cupboard. It was she who said something first, speaking to Cambara in halting Somali that sounded as if she had learned the language in an after-work adult education class, unable to get her tongue flexibly around all the gutturals in Somali. Next to her—in fact, within reach of her stretched hand—were the tools of the cameraperson’s trade, including a camcorder and other instruments. It was difficult for Cambara to know where she was from. The huge woman was carrying nothing save a kitschy handbag, pink like her dress and her shoes, the latter also in imitation leather. As soon as she saw her spread in the back of the vehicle, Cambara knew she wouldn’t rely on her for much assistance.
Ngai was a bouncy, slim, very friendly and talkative woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, pigeon-breasted, head recently shaved, and with eyes as huge as stray UFOs spotted over a mountain at dawn. She was easygoing and full of life, and she and Cambara hit it off immediately, each returning the compliment to the other. But she was a hairy driver and went into the blind bends rather perilously, often speeding when it was unsafe to do so and jabbering away mostly about the Somalis who, according to her, were everywhere, especially in the center of the city, and seemingly moneyed. It was obvious that Cambara took an instant liking to her.
“I kept telling my countrywoman sitting in the back that I am beginning to think that maybe Somalia is richer than our country, Kenya,” Ngai said, when they were on the road for a few minutes.
“Why do you say that?”
“All the five-stars in Nairobi show they are booked for months, no vacancies,” the thin woman said. “We always thought your country was much poorer than Kenya, kind of desert. You don’t have petrol, do you? Like Libya or Saudi?”
She couldn’t but shockingly admit how little Africans knew about one another’s countries as a result, ironically, of their biased colonial heritage. After all, what did she know about Kenya or neighboring lands? Not as much as she did about Europe or North America. As part of her effort to create a good working relationship, she explained the class nature of the Somalis flying into Nairobi and putting up in five-star hotels and those who were arriving in dhows and overcrowded boats that docked in Mombasa and, because they were poor, were being treated as stateless and therefore as refugees. She placed the two sets of Somalis in the civil war context. “We’ll learn more about them as we talk to more and more of them,” Cambara promised.
Then her series of interviews started, and she worked from early until late on some days, seeing less and less of Zaak in the daytime and more and more of him and Ngai, who went with the two of them to restaurants, in the evening. Cambara introduced Zaak as her man to some of the Somalis they met, and the two of them put on an act for their own and Ngai’s benefit. In private, Cambara kept him at a distance, and he didn’t seem to mind that much.
Because of the topicality of the events unfolding in Somalia, Cambara had a select number of her pieces aired on prime time in Toronto, including some in which she interviewed the staff of the Canadian and British High Commissions as well as the embassies of a handful of Arab and European countries, where the Somalis were headed. The notices in the Toronto papers were favorable, one of them, The Globe and Mail, describing the pieces as “impressive, the job of a pro.” There was a photo of Cambara, big enough to mount on her mother’s bedroom wall as a memento.
The local media got into the act too, thanks to an anonymous call and a fax received from Ottawa alerting a couple of the editors to how Cambara’s work “done in Kenya” was being received back in Canada. When one of the journalists from the Daily Nation rang for an interview, Cambara interpreted this as being part of Arda’s string-pulling; the idea was to turn Cambara’s visit to Kenya and the interviews she conducted into an article worthy of the front page of Kenya’s high-circulation newspaper. A features editor specializing in writing about women’s affairs in the continent did a piece on her for the paper, pictures and all.
The Canadian High Commission to Kenya jumped on the bandwagon after the appearance of the piece in the Daily Nation, and its titular deputy of mission, who had until then been of two minds whether to see her and for how long, invited her first to tea, which he later upgraded to lunch, because several of his colleagues at the station wished to join in. The high commissioner, who arrived late, was warm in his praise of her and had dessert and coffee with her as they chatted. When the luncheon formalities were over, she went down to the ground floor, where she met a woman whose name Arda had given her, the woman who would help with the speedy processing of Zaak’s papers. Back home in Toronto, the woman who did not rate inclusion on the guest list of the deputy said that she, Cambara, was the envy of the fraternity of journalists because of her scoop. Herself, she saw her success as a one-off thing, on a par with the one-off she was doing for Arda by assisting Zaak in getting to Canada. She had no intention of becoming a reporter for CBS or a bed-sharing spouse to Zaak.
Several weeks of living in close proximity with Zaak neither excited nor palled on her. Her mother rang frequently, at one point teasing her that “it is not a bad thing to be a wife, when you think of it, is it? Especially when you are not subject to the tyranny of cooking, washing dishes and clothes, ironing someone else’s pants, mending someone else’s socks, and having babies and caring for them all on your own, without the husband ever lifting a finger.” Three months later, when the news reached her that the papers might be issued any day now, Arda was still wondering how Cambara felt about being “a wife” to Zaak.
Cambara thought she was seeing the humorous side of things as she answered, “It feels like picking up a threadbare skirt at a flea market.”
In Nairobi, their living arrangement remained unchanged. She had no room for closeness in private—each stayed in his or her section of the shared space—but when they were in the presence of consular officers, they made frequent use of such endearments that are de rigueur for a couple just married. If she were not a born actor, she thought, these on again/off again intimacies might have been difficult. It took a lot of nerve to get used to the juices of fresh love flowing, only for them to be turned off. This was clearly playing havoc on him. Arda explained, “Because women have more control over their bodies than men have over theirs.”
Zaak’s carefree lifestyle—never keeping his side of the bargain, never helping in cleaning the toilets or making the beds, cooking or shopping for food—filled her with anger, and on such occasions, she hated their life of pretense. In Toronto, she knew the stakes would be higher; it was her territory, and she had very many friends from whom she held no secrets. The question was, how would she cope?
She was delighted to prove that she could excel in anything at which she worked and was pleased that the TV documentaries had huge political and cultural relevance to all Canadians, more specifically the Somali-Canadians. The idea of having kick-started a belief, until then not prevalent among Somalis, that they could make a success of their presence in Canada was ascribed to her, but she still felt unfulfilled. She wanted to make it at best as an actor or alternatively as the producer of a puppet play, having been interested in puppetry ever since she took a summer course in the art.
As if to
highlight her importance, a two-man TV crew from CBS turned up at the airport to interview Cambara. Beaming a smile the size of the cosmos, Arda, wearing a garland, carried a bouquet of flowers in one hand and in the other a placard with two V’s traced in black felt pen, the words “Congratulations: Two Accomplishments” as large as the mysteries not yet revealed. That evening’s prime-time news alluded to her marriage without mentioning the spouse by name, for neither mother nor daughter would divulge it to friends or relatives until “the lucky man” arrived.
As she combs her hair, which is an impenetrable tangle of kinks and a jungle of curls as dry as Somalia is arid, and as she struggles to persuade them to unknot, loosen up, Cambara remembers how on Zaak’s arrival in Toronto, hush met hush. Only one person was there to fetch him from the airport, Cambara, and she was judiciously dressed, her face swaddled in a shawl. She waited in a corner, away from the placard-carrying taxi and airport limousine drivers picking up strangers, or the others meeting their friends and relatives. No journalists. Not even Arda was there. At her mother’s suggestion, she condescended to give him a hug, following it with a brief kiss on the cheeks, just in case someone was spying on them, you never know.
She showed him to his room in the apartment, and just as she had said when in Nairobi, he too said, “I’ll be okay.”
But she asked, “What do you mean?”
“I’ll pull my weight,” he explained.
She thought of telling him “You are on your own,” and then walking out and letting him figure out what she meant, or of challenging him on the practicability of his intentions. In the event she said, “You don’t have to pull anyone’s weight other than your own.”
She expected him to come back with a smart quip. Instead, he surprised her. He said, “You won’t have reason to complain.”
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