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Knots

Page 9

by Nuruddin Farah


  FIVE

  It is very early the following morning, and Cambara is already awake, the jet-lagged state of her body demanding that she get out of bed. She walks downstairs and then moves about with the stealth of a burglar, cautious, quiet, and looking this way and that. Finally, as she tiptoes into the kitchen area, certain that she has the place to herself, no strange male odor yet scented, and prepares to make herself tea and a bite to eat, if she can find any food. She discovers that she is face to face with Zaak, who, with an unpleasant smugness on his face, is hiding in a corner, waiting, as if in ambush.

  “How is my dearest doing?” Zaak says.

  The tone of his voice sounds self-satisfied; he seems to take much delight in seeing her surprised expression and obvious discomposure.

  Unsettled, she takes refuge in an all-encompassing silence, careful not to make a tetchy remark that she would later regret. After a moment or so, she grows sufficient pluck to stare at him long and hard, and, as she does so, she affords herself the time to look back on their young years together. She finds it hard to picture ever having had the hots for him.

  In those days, Cambara’s favorite read was an Italian girlie fotoromanzo monthly called Intimità. With her and her schoolmates, the affaires de coeur took precedence over everything else. Her friends, giggly, many of them spoiled brats because they belonged to the bourgeois classes, would not want to pay him a moment’s attention. When on two separate occasions Cambara tried to egg on two of them to dance with him at her birthday party, one of the girls refused, describing Zaak as “the pits.” Cambara pretended not to know what her friend was talking about, when that was certainly not the case, and then rose to his defense, saying, “He is just insecure, the poor fellow, but he is nice, once you get to know him.” Some of her friends started to tease her, one of them predicting that whoever took a fancy to Zaak was sure to be led to “Endsville.” No doubt she has ended up doing just that.

  Now Zaak asks, “Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, I did, considering,” she replies.

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  “I have a long day ahead,” she says.

  “What are your plans?”

  Just as she readies to answer him, if evasively, she starts at a sudden noise, which disorients her. She looks in the direction of the kitchen and then up at the roof, hoping to identify the source of the scurrying sound, but she cannot decide if it is that of rats or other rodents, and if this is coming from somewhere up in the ceiling or from the scullery. Finally, she is drawn to an identifiable ruckus: a diesel truck arriving outside, its doors opening and closing, a number of youths alighting, and then the hubbub of human voices approaching.

  “That’ll be my lift,” Zaak explains. He pauses and then adds self-importantly, “The truck comes with its armed escort, six youths and the head of the security unit, formerly a major in the disbanded national army.”

  He makes as if to get up, taking a good while before he manages to rise to his feet. When finally he does so and moves, it is as if he has metal in his knees, his every step a stumble of sorts; he appears incapable of coordinating his movements. He pauses, straightening his back, and rubs his spine, then his fogged eyes.

  He says, “I am late for work, as it is.”

  “Can your driver give me a lift?” she asks.

  “Where to?”

  “To our family house,” she says.

  He shakes his head in disbelief. He affects a smile before looking away, and pretends to be concerned.

  “Are you mad?” he asks.

  “I won’t go into the property,” she vows.

  “What do you mean, you won’t go into it?”

  “In fact, not only will I desist from going into the property, but I will also make sure not to show myself to the minor warlord occupying it,” she says.

  “Exactly what do you intend to do?”

  “I just want to see the family property.”

  “In which you’ve never lived.”

  “Because it was rented out to foreign diplomats.”

  “A property you haven’t set eyes on for decades.”

  “I would like to see it up close,” she says, “and get to know where it is in terms of where we are, your place.”

  “You could do with a bit of help, couldn’t you?”

  “To be honest I could.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “What is there to tell you?”

  He asks, “You don’t expect the family occupying the house to present you with the keys and apologize as soon as you meet them, do you?”

  “Are you taking me for a fool?”

  “You’ll be acting like one if you do not take into account the fact that you are courting danger,” he warns her. “It will not be a walk in the park to gain access to the property, still less to dislodge him.” He pauses, grins ostentatiously, and then adds, “He won’t give it up without a fight.”

  “I know it won’t be an easy task.”

  “I’ve heard of several property owners who’ve come to grievous harm when they’ve tried to recover it,” he says exultantly.

  Her smile reluctant, Cambara sets about changing the subject. So she takes a step away from Zaak and in the direction of the door, making as if she will open it to let in a youth who is hanging hesitantly about as he considers whether or not to knock.

  “Where else would you go if you had transport?”

  “To one of the big hotels.”

  “You are not thinking of moving?” Zaak asks.

  “I am not,” she replies. “Not yet.”

  “Why one of the big hotels, then?”

  Cambara looks at him in apprehensive silence, uncertain whether there is any advantage to gain from deliberately misinforming him as opposed to neglecting to tell him everything. She says, “I am looking for a friend of a friend who works in one of the hotels as a deputy manager.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “She is a friend of a friend,” she says with finality. Then she is determinedly quiet, content with the vague intelligence she has so far given him.

  A gentle early-morning breeze is blowing, the air moist with the saltiness of the sea. With patience, a part of Cambara is waiting for Zaak to run off at the mouth about the dangers of the city and about fatal muggings, and to dwell, for a few sadistic moments, on the large number of women who are raped, men maimed, horror statistics that are meant to keep the likes of her indoors. The other part of her waits for his snide remarks about her naiveté and how she is living in fantasyland. She is resolved not to allow him to put fear into her or to remain his guest and dependent on him. Even so, she will pay attention to the hidden meanings of what he might say and interpret his words in the light of what information other people might volunteer, then collate and compare these in the hope of negotiating a safe course between the perils.

  “I’m thinking perhaps I should come too,” he says.

  She would rather they not go together when she tries to insinuate her way furtively into the family property. She would rather he did not know anything about her plans or how she intends to charm her way, lie if need be, to gain access. He is bound to disapprove of her method and very likely will sabotage her effort.

  “I’d prefer if you lent me your driver and car.”

  “Things are more complicated than you realize.”

  “What’s so complicated about that?”

  Waiting for him to explain, Cambara is under the impression that Zaak’s faraway look is that of someone racing to catch up with an idea running ahead of him but in the wrong direction.

  He says, “We need to make detailed preparations.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll need an armed escort.”

  “Why?”

  Seeing him gloating smugly, she feels immediately shamefaced as she recalls from the few bits of information she has garnered about how Mogadiscio functions that, as a deterrent, it has become compulsory for owners o
f cars and trucks plying the roads to hire the services of armed escorts not necessarily to ensure the safety of the passengers but of the vehicle, because of the frequent carjackings that take place. She reminds herself that in a civil war setting, she must attach herself, perforce, to a broader constituency from which she may seek succor in the event of life-threatening complications. It is more than obvious that as a woman, alone, she stands no chance of surviving any of the possible civil war–related ordeals unless and until she appends herself to a group, armed and therefore clan-based, or civic in origin and therefore ideological. Hence the need to locate Kiin, an active member of the Women’s Network.

  “I’ll organize the armed escort and the truck.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of being a nuisance.”

  “It’ll be a pleasure, not an inconvenience.”

  “Please. You have important work to occupy you.”

  He says, “I insist on coming with you.”

  After a solemn moment in which she considers her options, she realizes that, like it or not, she has joined whichever group Zaak belongs to and that she might as well benefit from her association with him until she has disaffiliated herself from his clique and become part of Kiin’s.

  “You come on the understanding that I call the shots,” she says. “We drive close to it, we do not stop anywhere, and the armed escort remains inside the vehicle. Is that agreed?”

  “We are at your service,” he says.

  She tells him, “I can’t thank you enough.”

  Zaak is chuffed. She discerns a frisson of joy in his eyes, then an adrenaline rush of excitement lighting up his entire face. There is delight, which expresses itself in his bodily movements, for he makes as though steeling to embrace her, but, thinking better of it, he restrains himself in time before wholly committing himself. Moreover, there is a lascivious look in his shifty gaze. Even so, he focuses less on the upper parts of her body and more on her sandaled feet, like a teenager blushing at the sudden appearance of his paramour. Cambara is wickedly attractive to him. She knows what Zaak thinks of her, how much he has always adored her body. Not only is she aware of this, she is also conscious of the obvious fact that he is in awe of her irresistibility, which probably explains why he is acting in a provocative way, why he has been mean all along: because he hasn’t ever had her and never will.

  “Why do you look rested and I do not?” he asks.

  “Because I did not chew any qaat, that’s why.”

  “You look rested and beautiful,” he says.

  She looks away, smiling. She is in her summer cotton casuals: a pair of stretch slacks—comfortable to wear indoors, especially when relaxing—and a shirt open at the neck, her cleavage temptingly ensconced. She cannot help wondering if Zaak is tempted to take advantage of her situation, which is in upended disarray. Their current circumstances are the reverse of what they were several years ago, when he was the guest and the one in need, and she the host and the one in a position to be kind or unpleasant.

  He knew the boundaries then and behaved as well as he could under the prevailing conditions. Some hosts are by nature inhospitable when it comes to their private spaces and are miserly if it is their turn to share it.

  He says, “You’ll have to change if you want to go out of the house. You won’t want to attract unwelcome attention to yourself, which you most definitely will if you are dressed the way you are.”

  “Would you advise me to change into a veil?”

  “Since you have brought one? Yes. By all means.”

  “I have brought two, as it happens.”

  “Put on a veil on top of what you are wearing.”

  “It will be unbearably hot.”

  Quick to take offense, he turns his back on her and flings the words at her. He says, “It’s your call.”

  She notices a smudge, dry and unwashed, at the lower corner of his lip and pictures him eating and bringing his plate close to him, like a Chinese peasant picking up morsels of food with chopsticks, inaccurately tossing food toward his mouth and missing occasionally. He was always a messy eater, Zaak. The residual smear of an uncooked meal, that is what she thinks she is looking at.

  The man is a mind reader; he says, “Breakfast?”

  The thought of eating food prepared by him in his house is so disturbing that she can only shake her head no. Actually, she means to pick up something somewhere else, she has no idea where or what. A hotel with a restaurant will do her nicely. There she will inquire if anyone knows how she can reach Kiin, her friend Raxma’s friend and cousin.

  What attracts her attention is not the state of the kitchen, where she might want to cook, or the piles of unwashed plates, which she might wash, but his forefinger, to the end of which something has attached itself: the brown texture of a sort of waste, which eventually she identifies as mucus. He must have picked his nose with the nail of his index finger, which is the longest and dirtiest nail she has ever seen. Smiling, she sees the inside of his mouth, which is unsightly.

  Such is the strong feeling that has come over her that her hair reacts to it, each hair rising in the shape of rashes on her skin, the size of pustules. When she readies to speak of her irritation, her tongue, ineffectual, turns as coarse as a camel’s, unimaginably papillary.

  “Let us see,” she says, talking to herself.

  Her movement away from him has the feistiness of a woman angered into action, a woman who cannot hear the loudness of her heartbeat, because her bitterness has gotten the better of her.

  “I can make tea for myself,” she says. “I suggest you go, as you must not let everyone wait for you here at home, where the armed escorts are, and at the office, where the elders of the subclans engaged in skirmishes are expecting to see you.”

  She starts washing a teapot, scrubbing it clean with a metal brush until it is almost as shiny as a mirror—before he has had the opportunity to respond to her suggestion. For some reason, he looks off-kilter all of a sudden, as redundant as a piece of furniture no longer of any use to anyone.

  She boils water for her tea, which she makes in silence. No milk, because she reckons it will have turned, what with the intermittent power supply, and no sugar, because she has decided she will give it up as of today, thank you. During this long pause in their tentative talk, she replays yesterday evening’s rude remarks, which prompted her to leave the room and forced her to seek refuge in the seclusion of the upstairs rooms.

  He seems to have worked out a detail concerning how he would like to organize his day and hers. She can tell this from his renewed sense of purpose. Finally, he says, “Give me a minute, please.”

  He explains to her that he is going out to talk to the driver and the armed security detailed to escort him to and from work and that he will collect the keys of the truck from the driver and ask him to take a mini taxi back to the office.

  “What about the armed youths?”

  “They’ll come with us in the truck to guard it and guard its passengers too,” Zaak informs her.

  “Might this not send the wrong signal to the warlord occupying the family house, if he happens to see us casing his joint? We wouldn’t want him to become aware of us reconnoitering, or of my presence in the country or for that matter in his neighborhood,” she says.

  “Trust me,” he says. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Then he goes out the back door to have a word with the driver and the armed escort.

  “You will bring me back here, and then you will go to work?” she says. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he replies. But after a pause, he asks, “But why can’t you wait for a couple more days, when we are better organized and can deal with all eventualities?”

  “I want to get this out of the way,” she says.

  “Make your tea, we’ll talk some more.”

  As she does so, in the isolation of the kitchen, now that he has stepped out to talk to the driver and the armed escorts, less unwelcome memories call on her, catching her off guard, memori
es from their youthful years. To forestall any infelicitous emotions overwhelming her, she strikes the posture of an adolescent girl, impossible to please and hard to get, relaxed, blasé, full of gumption. A bit of a poser, with an undecided expression gathering into a frown as concentrated as a storm, she stretches her body and folds her arms across her chest. She breathes slowly and evenly, lulling herself into a sense of necessary composure. She tells herself that first she must put aside her uncertainties, in order to take a good hold of herself and banish all reservations from her current preoccupations.

  She tilts her head to one side and then remembers the curious remark Zaak made when he picked her up from the airport, comparing blood relations to rivers in which the currents move in different directions, occasionally going parallel but hardly mixing. “And yet the patches of water belong to the same river, as do the members of a blood community,” he said. “There is the matter of choice in regard to which side of the river you stand on. Had you given thought to any of this before upping and coming to Somalia?”

  She thought he was fishing. She believed it wise not to tell him much, definitely not before she had her feet firmly on the ground, had her own room in a hotel, and had reconciled herself to her new situation. She would not give in to his badgering, no matter how hard he tried; she would wait until time had done its job and had edged open the door to her secrets gently, without compunction. Meanwhile, she would sit tight and unbothered, impervious to the hateful stirrings within her heart. After all, she would not want to startle herself and embark on regrettable action.

  Cambara knows that Zaak is an early-to-bed person; he likes to be up with the first dawn. As she takes her first sip of her weak tea, she has unclear memories of a scene she cannot be certain she dreamed or saw in real time, however jet-lagged her state. She recalls seeing him from her window overlooking the partially covered veranda, with his notebooks spread around him on the uneven floor, maybe working. Maybe he was up early, preparing for the day ahead, before the sun showed its bright, hot face to the rest of the world. Cambara is a night person, up until late.

 

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