Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

He hit her first, punching her unjustifiably hard in the nose and face, cutting her lower lip in the process and making it bleed copiously. Tasting her own blood, she went berserk, and for a moment behaved wildly, striking him fast, fiercely, and with compound interest. She flipped—no doubt about it—and acted as though possessed of a moment’s madness, hers the unfocused gaze of the disoriented. She could not define what occurred, taking hold of her by the throat, as it were, between him striking her, her turning away, and tasting the blood of her cut lower lip. Barely had she apprehended that he had crossed yet another line, smacking her, when she misconstrued what she perceived to be two ants—one crawling up her spine, the other going down the small of her back—which, in reality, were two drops of perspiration of such concentration, not ants. Itching, her fingers searching, she touched the moisture, and then she understood that she had confused an inanimate thing with a living one.

  She was concentrating on attending to her bleeding lower lip when he hit her yet again on the back of the head, flooring her, and kicked her some more in the teeth. While she was still down, he informed her that he would be leaving for a long weekend and that when he got back he did not want her to be in the apartment—her own apartment, bought with her mother’s money—because he was selling it and collecting his share. Moreover, she knew where he would go and with whom. She felt frustrated at his attempt to swindle her out of what had been legally hers. So that was where trust got her?

  She recalls dabbing at her cut lip and staring at her index and middle fingers now coated with her own blood. After a moment’s reflection, she snapped, seeing in her blood her own failure and the failing of many a woman. She did not like herself one bit. No, she was not jealous that he was off for the weekend with his Canadian mistress. She was angry. And to her, there is a difference between being jealous and being angry, but she was in no mood then to articulate her sentiments. The fool could have gone where he pleased, alone or with someone else; she did not care. He was after all a despicable creature. She was displeased more with herself than she was with him, for having allowed these and many other terrible things to be done to her, or for things to go so badly that she felt hard done by them. Above all, she found it impossible to countenance that her son had drowned in the swimming pool of his legal partner and paramour while they were having it off in the main bedroom, which was in the other extreme of a sprawling house.

  The memory of hitting Wardi now intrudes upon her consciousness. She remembers how she struck him with a passion that contained in it a vengeful rage wrapped in contempt, the consequence of a most terrible upset bottled up for a very long time. Did she train secretly in martial arts for several years in preparation for the day when, their embittered relationship having reached a head, she might administer the knockdown blow at short notice? Of course, she wanted him to know that she was no pushover. And what better way to prove this than to give him back his own bitter medicine, humiliate him because he demeaned their oneness, neglected to attend to his son by keeping an eye on him when in the pool. As she laid into him, the image of burying Dalmar, then running into Wardi’s mistress first at the cemetery and later at her home: these gathered in her mind as storms do, culminating in a riotous spleen that deactivated her brain before it exploded in a total breakdown. Maybe this explains it all: why she became dysfunctional, sanctioning the beast in her to take charge.

  Dissecting with her now sharp mind the detritus of her rage then, she reasons that maybe she paid him back with higher interest than was his due. She might have killed him if she had not changed her mind at the last minute, stopping just in time, well aware that a knife, however small or dull, is a lethal weapon if one places it in the hand of a mother whose only son drowned in the swimming pool of her husband’s lover. She feels that her rage accrued into a motive, justifying the administering of a fatal blow. In the end, she caused him a lot of pain. Wardi lay motionlessly on his back, his body instantly sown with a copse of bruises, some growing as big as grapes, some assuming the hardness of cacti, some becoming as patulous as malignant pustules soon after, and others ending up as knobbly as the fruits of a baobab tree.

  After knocking him down with her karate punches, Cambara was at first overwhelmed with a sense of haplessness, not of regret but of indecision. Then euphoria, the excitement of accomplishing a feat of which she had unconsciously dreamt many a night for a long time. When it came to replacing her feeling of remorse, she reminded herself that she had wanted to knock him unconscious one day. In fact, a part of her now wished that Wardi’s mistress had been with them and had seen her lover on his knees, begging. This filled Cambara with a considerable sense of elation.

  Aware now that their marriage was as good as over, she knew too that there was no possibility of patching things up or salvaging it, no benefit to be gained from displaying kindness to a fool knocked out and wallowing in self-reprimand, no mileage in making rash decisions that would inconvenience her in the end either. Take note: No face-saving ploys, please. The time to dispense with Wardi altogether had come. Only Cambara must do so on a caveat of her own stipulation. What about Zaak? How is she to deal with him? Cambara will have to wait, look at it from many vantage points, and then decide; there is time for that yet, a lot of time.

  In her recall, Wardi’s misshapen face boasts of swollen eyes moist at the edges, like a Styrofoam cup on which someone has inadvertently trampled. Nor does he dare show his ugly, puffed-up face to anyone, nursing his ego and his physical wounds with a huge sulk, silent, whereas she drives herself to the emergency ward in a hospital in the neighborhood, with her lips as thick as Dunlop tires. The nurse attending to her suggests that she press charges against the wife-beater, but Cambara lies, describing herself as the victim of a mugging. She receives half a dozen stitches, and the doctors discharge her with a warning that, given the viciousness of the cuts, she will do well to look after herself and to call the police if the dangerous man poses any further threat to her.

  In the event, Wardi does not go away for the weekend with his paramour as planned, scared she might ask how he came by those ugly bruises. Wardi and Cambara share the same space for a few days, hardly communicating; they eat and cook separately for much of this interim period, but avoid each other. For her, the modus vivendi put her in mind of the arrangement she had worked out with Zaak, each keeping to his or her part of the apartment. They would come together for the sake of decorum whenever one of their relations or friends visited or when they had to honor a friend getting married. Nor did Cambara speak of the fistfight; who started it, who bled more, who won, and who lost what. Privately, she felt she was the one hard-done by what happened, especially after the death of her son.

  Then, one morning, Cambara wakes up looking like a cat in distress, and, with her gut troubled, her mind unsettled, and smarting because of her heart, which hurts terribly, she resolves to put the greatest of distances between herself and Wardi. Long discussions ensue to which Arda and Raxma are parties, now with one alone, now with the other, and later with both. Security tops the agenda. Arda is of the view that no property in present-day Mogadiscio is worth the risk involved in its recovery. Raxma is inclined to hold the opinion that a visit now will be all to the good, may even have therapeutic value. But where will she stay? They agree to look deeper into every aspect, think of where she might put up and with whom, and then meet again.

  Cambara buys a one-way ticket to Mogadiscio after she hears back from both Arda and Raxma. While Arda insists that she will okay the trip on condition that she stay with Zaak and vow to return immediately in the event of the slightest danger, Raxma promises to contact Kiin, who owns a hotel and who, she is certain, can provide her with backup security and accommodation.

  Her eyes half open, clouded from exhaustion, Cambara stirs at the sound of the kettle singing downstairs and calling to her host, saying to him in kettle-speech, “Come and make your early tea, Zaak.” She lies motionless in the bed, revisiting her first days with Wardi in Geneva, when love
was good, and the two of them made it with the leisure of a man and a woman who could not have enough of it or of each other.

  Wardi and Cambara met by chance, in a café. Both had been stood up by the person each was waiting to meet: She had an appointment with a screenwriter working on a script about a Somali refugee being deported from Switzerland, and Wardi was to meet with an immigration lawyer to help him present his case to the refugee authority at the canton of Geneva. Drawn to each other as two lost souls, each sought salvation of some sort in and from the other. For Cambara, it was holiday time; she had just completed a two-week film shoot funded by a Swiss-Canadian outfit. Wardi, for his part, was a penniless Somali, eager to receive the papers on which his refugee status in Switzerland depended. She was charmed with immediate effect, and she felt there was no way to undo that; they were bound to each other.

  They left the café feeling each other, touching, holding hands. She was giggly, because she found him funny and lighthearted, and being with him excited her in a way she had not thought possible. Hours later, in the same day, she treated him to a gourmet meal at the first upmarket restaurant he had been to since arriving in Switzerland. He walked her to her hotel, where they sat in the lounge and talked until the small hours of the night. Just before dawn, she exchanged her single room for a double so they could chat some more and get to know each other better. He fell asleep with his clothes on. At nine the following morning—she had not slept a wink the entire night—she went out shopping and returned with the clothes she had chosen for him.

  She found him awake, just after a long shower. He stood handsome and desirable in a towel wrapped around his waist. Then she gave him the shaving kit she had bought, plus a pair of trousers and a couple of shirts, which fit him perfectly. He behaved as kept men are wont to do—taking their paramour’s continued loyalty and love for granted without ever reciprocating either. This should have sounded warning bells in Cambara’s appraisal of what to expect, but no. In love for the first time at the age of thirty-five, she was unwilling to hear anything but the sound of her adoring heart beating in rhythm with his.

  When he told her about Raxma and her mother’s phone calls from Ottawa, Cambara wore an amused expression, in the secretive attitude of a younger girl having her first date. She did not show interest in knowing what her mother had made of him. Why? Because she knew Raxma and her mother well, knew they could prove to be difficult and uncompromising when it came to Cambara’s choices of men, especially after what she had been through with Zaak. Arda located flaws in character, clan affiliation, educational background, or some other shortcoming in all the men in whom Cambara had shown interest.

  At some point, Cambara sent him out on the pretext of getting her Le Monde. While he was gone, she returned Arda’s call. Unsurprisingly, Arda segued into a song, in which the word “love” chimed not with stars shining most brightly but with the notion “ruse.” In short, Arda did not like the way Wardi’s voice presented itself well ahead of the rest of him. She had no liking of him, because she felt he was hard at work to make her fall for him. “Crafty bugger” was a phrase she employed more than once. Yet she had not met the man! Arda’s advice was: “Fly back home minus him.”

  For her part, Raxma thought that Cambara was deservedly having a delightful time, and, as such, she would not dare to suggest to her friend, who was swooning in the embrace of her fresh infatuation, to give him a wide berth—not until she met the fellow. Told about Arda’s take and how she had inferred the man’s character from a single, brief telephone conversation, Raxma reiterated that she would reserve her judgment at least until after Cambara had filled her in on the hiatuses in their story. She concluded that, not knowing enough, she would be inclined to a more prudent approach and cautioned against hasty marriage.

  Now, lying in bed in Mogadiscio, Cambara remembers with a good measure of self-recrimination that she did not heed her mother’s advice. Cambara returned to Toronto a few weeks later, minus Wardi, but that was not all. Cambara married Wardi at one of the city’s registries, unbeknownst to Arda, Raxma, and many of those very dear to her, convinced of her true love. It did not seem to matter to her what other people might say, or if they would or would not approve of the union. The hush-hush affair took place in the presence of two of her Canadian colleagues on the film shoot, who served as her witnesses. Before the ink of their signatures on the forms had dried, Wardi was urging her to file copies of their marriage certificate with the Canadian consulate, “for our family reunion,” he explained.

  Even though she found nothing terribly wrong with Wardi’s request to file the marriage papers the same day, Raxma felt a little uneasy, though she hesitated to describe it as distasteful. Compared with Raxma’s reaction, Arda’s was over the top. “What did I tell you?” she said. “He is a con man, not to be trusted.” Cambara proceeded with understandable caution from then forward, and she resolved not to reveal that Wardi was urging her to draw up a legal document clearly stating in legalese that what was hers was his too. It was her aim to humor him as best she could; that was all. Nothing else to it. Nor did any cautionary bells sound in her unhearing ears. How love deafens!

  Back in Toronto, her mother made her position very clear: She wished to have nothing to do with the whole affair and would not help or hinder her daughter’s effort to get him to join her. Meanwhile, Canadian immigration took its time, cognizant of the fact that she had been married once before to a Somali and been granted a family reunion on that basis. The waiting took its toll on Cambara, who filled in multiple copies of more forms and more papers with the help of Maimouna, who acted as her lawyer. She rang Wardi almost daily, and if she failed to do so, he phoned her collect, her bills mounting and her anxiety likewise. Although she took no delight in her daughter’s misery, Arda hoped that Cambara’s enthusiasm for Wardi would wilt, like a tree in unseasonable weather, the longer she had to wait for the situation to resolve itself. To the contrary, Cambara claimed that her love grew and grew the more the immigration authorities put bureaucratic obstacles in her way, which she was confident Maimouna would clear.

  She had no satisfactory answers when, in passing, Maimouna asked why she had granted Wardi every demand he tried, offering him more than he had ever dreamt possible. More desperate than she cared to admit, she considered relocating to Geneva to be with Wardi. Arda thought her mad and said nothing, but Raxma would not hear of this. “Why, an unemployed couple—one of them a jobless makeup artist, the other a Somali with no refugee papers—couldn’t live on the welfare benefits of meager monthly Swiss handouts.”

  Finally, Cambara came clean about everything, including the fact that she had put down Wardi’s name as a co-owner of her own property in Toronto. Now that the onus was on Arda, she did what she knew how to do best. A fixer, she stepped in, calling up someone in authority. Within a month, Wardi’s application moved speedily from the junior desks and landed on much larger escritoires where prompt decisions are initialed at the end of a phone call. Notwithstanding this, Arda stuck to her original guns, in view of Wardi’s unhealthy hold on her daughter. She used Raxma to carry her messages, saying that she would remain forever suspicious of Wardi and, given the choice, would not allow him to get within her own parameters.

  His papers through, Cambara met his flight alone. With little love lost between Wardi and Arda, Cambara wondered if her mother would at least meet him, but the old woman would not acquiesce to her daughter’s request that she bring him to her house. The stand-off lasted for several months, until Cambara became pregnant, which happy event made Arda break with her stance: she rang to congratulate her daughter. Then Arda asked Cambara to visit, and mother and daughter had the opportunity to talk, but not necessarily about their estrangement from each other.

  Arda moved in with them a fortnight before the due date, agreeing to accept the fait accompli presented to her: that Wardi, a man she thought of as a rogue, was the father of the baby to whom she would be a grandmother. Raxma was a godsend, in that
she took Cambara away for long walks and entertained her when the going was toughest on all concerned. Arda did what she had to do, bit her tongue whenever she was tempted to speak, and learned to live with a man she did not trust for the forty or so days she was there to help look after the mother and the baby. Wardi absented himself often during that period, leaving earlier as a trainee attorney-at-law, arriving late at the most ungodly hours, and staying in the room farthest from his wife and her mother. On many a night, he did not even return home.

  That there was a great deal of unease all around was plain to see, and everyone remarked on it. While most of Cambara’s friends fidgeted around the subject of the relationship, Raxma was the only one who dared to broach the subject: the full-blown affair he was having with Susannah, the principal partner of the law firm where he was doing his yearlong internship. Cambara, meanwhile, concentrated on giving birth to a healthy child, believing that transmitting negative vibes to the baby before its actual birth might somehow adversely affect it. The baby born, Wardi spent more time away from the apartment, presumably with Susannah, in the office. Cambara, her mother, and Dalmar’s moods often lapsed in an equal measure of joy in one another’s company and a mix of guilt and anger when it came to Wardi’s unspoken-of absence.

  Now, as she hears the outside door of the house closing, presumably because Zaak has left for work, the image of Wardi—lying on his back with a tortured posture, his nose bleeding, his eyes runny with a sickly amber discharge, his lips cut and swollen—comes to her. She cannot help wondering whether their relationship would have been different had she not married him secretly. Then a fresh rage, mixed with hurt, rises within her, and she does not know what to do, short of continuing to hate herself for her own weakness.

  With her son drowned, her marriage to Wardi as good as over, Cambara is in Somalia, where she has more time for reflection. Has she come to Mogadiscio because she hopes to empty her life of him?