Farxia, her voice more high-pitched than before, says, “I doubt if whatever has made you call me on the emergency line can wait, even though things are all right, actually.”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow evening,” Kiin says.
“I urge you not to postpone talking to me until tomorrow,” Farxia says. “So talk and talk now.”
At Farxia’s insistence, Kiin, who thinks aloud, most likely for Cambara’s benefit, wonders whether the esteemed doctor will accommodate a daring thought. Kiin takes a long time to discuss what is on her mind, even though Cambara believes that, whatever it is, no one will suspect Kiin of taking leave of her senses.
“Don’t play hard to get, Kiin.”
“I am not.”
“Then come clean, and fast,” commands Farxia.
Kiin obliges, saying, “Do you or one of your junior colleagues at the clinic have time to make a home visit?”
“Right away?”
“Better still,” Kiin says, the tone of her voice suggesting someone thinking on her feet, quick, capable of improving on ideas that are even more daring. “Do you have an ambulance and staff to help fetch a heavily pregnant woman and take her to your clinic?”
“Where is the pregnant woman?”
Kiin then suggests that Farxia wait at the clinic for her driver to come with a note from her, giving the pregnant woman’s name and details. The driver will lead the ambulance to the house where the said woman is.
“Will do,” Farxia says.
Cambara cannot help being impressed with how fast Kiin has sunk the future of her entire life and business by taking the single most daring step: emptying the family house of the only remaining proof of Gudcur’s occupancy. When she thinks how she is beholden to Kiin for doing what she has done, she is at a loss for words. Nor will the damp stains silhouetted against the ceiling and from which Kiin received inspiration earlier give her counsel, telling her what to do.
“One dealt with,” Kiin says, “another to go.”
Something sets Cambara off, and, thinking ahead, she starts to wonder how sad she will be if things go wrong. After all, that means that she has endangered Kiin’s and her daughters’ lives, not to mention her hotel business, the lady doctor, whom she has not met, and her colleagues, staff, and clinic. She shakes, feeling as light as a leaf blowing in the sea breeze, with the tremor that has its beginning in worry.
“My second effort has to do with women, the theater, and an abiding commitment to peace,” Cambara says. “Let me affirm that I feel certain that with your assistance, I will not have any difficulty achieving the things I’ve set my mind to.”
“Be specific,” Kiin says. “How can I be of help?”
Cambara settles in to the agreeable feeling of Kiin sorting out all her problems. She addresses herself to difficulties that she is likely to encounter when she starts to get down to the business of putting on a play in a country no longer familiar with this mode of entertainment. She goes on, “In fact, this is why I’ve wanted to meet a carpenter so I can construct a stage and help make the masks I’ve designed for it. I need an especially talented carpenter who can double as a joiner and who is bold in his or her interpretation of my sketches.”
Kiin strikes a charming pose, visibly pleased. “I know such a person,” she says.
“Here in this city?”
“He is Irish and I know him well.”
“Does he live in Mogadiscio?”
“He’s lived here for a number of years, has adopted Somalia as his own and, what is more, survived it.”
“What’s an Irishman doing here?”
“That’s a long story.”
“What is his name?”
“Seamus.”
EIGHTEEN
Early the next morning, at eight o’clock, Cambara sits alone at a table in the hotel restaurant with her large writing pad open before her, studying her scribblings and then revising them, now adding and now deleting. She does this in the halfhearted way a professor not interested in what she is reading peruses a student’s text. She turns the pages of the pad, which boast of chicken scratches only she can decipher, among them a sketch, in the form of a diagram for a play that she has worked on more off than on for several years; she thinks it will be ideal to produce the play here. She hopes that agreeing to put on a puppet theater will not only improve her chances of artistic success but also release her from her feel-bad factor, in terms of never having pulled off staging her own work.
She wishes she could work out what has prompted Kiin to talk readily, knowingly, and convincingly about Cambara’s passion in producing a play for peace in Mogadiscio. She guesses that Raxma, their mutual friend, has most likely been in touch, intimating Cambara’s keenness, which, as Arda has put it, “is generated by an obsession to make a name for herself at the same time as an actor and a playwright.” To date, she has kept her dream alive but has little to show for it, apart from some amateur efforts of which she can’t be proud. Not to worry about anything in connection with her artistic pursuit, though, for that can wait until she has scored successes on other fronts; then, she feels certain, agreeing to produce a play is going to be a sinecure, no sweat.
She can only imagine how much pleasure it will be if Gudcur comes back from the fighting wounded or is fatally injured and dies; then she will be in a much better position. As is her wont, she starts to count her chicks before her eggs hatch and thinks ahead to the day when she may use the family property’s banquet hall as her rehearsal site. With Gudcur gone, his fighters no longer posing a threat to her plans, and Jiijo out of the way and having her baby in hospital—in view of the arrangements that are afoot, thanks to Kiin and Farxia—Cambara is convinced she will make headway fast. She interprets her dream at dawn, in which she saw several hawks overpowering the hyenas whom they were battling, as meaning that she will outsmart her opponents, whoever they are and achieve her aim, whatever that turns out to be.
She reminds herself that, according to one of the Horn Afrique radio correspondents who filed his dispatch at seven in the morning, Gudcur’s men have been sent packing, are on the retreat, having been hustled out of several more checkpoints. Moreover, unconfirmed more up-to-date bulletins attributed to other news agencies allude to the heavy toll of dead and injured among his men. However, in view of the fact that no reporter mentions seeing Gudcur in person, the hearsay that he is dead or at least badly hurt is gaining credibility, fueled by the rumor that his deputy is acting as if he is unmistakably in charge. At one point during the interview, Gudcur’s second-in-command let it slip that he is leading the campaign, now faltering, because of a faulty command structure. She sees the stand-in questioning Gudcur’s authority not so much as evidence of a humiliating rout but as indisputable proof of his powerlessness.
Fretful, she sits up, smiling in genuine welcome as the waiter arrives with an item of her breakfast: two slices of mango prepared the way Mogadiscians like them. Her mouth watering, she admires the sweet golden fruit that is cut in equal halves, the flat, rounded stone removed, the fleshy portion segmented, with a knife, into sections, ready for her to eat. When the waiter does not move, as though expecting her to say something, Cambara tells him not to bother bringing her the second dish, one of liver, to be eaten with canjeero-pancake, a favorite among middle-class Mogadiscians. In response to his gentle attempt to persuade her against her decision—“It is our specialty, liver and pancake,” he says—she explains that she doubts if she has the stomach for it. “Not this morning,” she adds.
Nodding, the waiter departs. Then just as she takes her first spoonful, an unheralded carnival of voices, as erratic as they are mercurial, unsettle her. A horde of young men are frenziedly carrying items of furniture, lifting and heaving them in the clumsy way untrained bearers pick up and hoist heavy, many-legged movables. She recognizes one or two of the young men, and she begins to worry that they may hurt their backs on top of disfiguring or breaking the odd table, chair, or sofa, which will no doubt set
Kiin back a bit. She watches them with a mix of anxiety and amusement as they haltingly struggle to bring a table that by her reckoning seats ten through a door that is too narrow for it. What is more, these youths’ maladroitness—raising the table above their heads with the likelihood of breaking one of its legs instead of tilting it to the side or bringing it out a leg at time—fills her with such unease she wonders if they will be good enough to participate in her play. In fact, she finds that her fearful worries have been realized: The table’s two front legs are wobbly, and the young men are drenched with sweat and panting. They go past the well to their left, then stumble, ungainly, up a stone stairway to her right, in the direction of the outhouse with the thatched roof and the windows that open outward at awkward angles.
Following them with her eyes, her gaze finally falls on the outhouse, which has an added-on aspect to it, an afterthought resulting from a need not only for more space but for something like a hall. She understands that that is where the hotel holds parties overflowing with revelers. In her mind, Cambara thinks of a future when peace is supreme and when Kiin’s preteen children may employ it as a bachelor pad. How curious that she realizes, only after watching the youths putting themselves out, hoisting and hauling, that the outhouse has an upstairs hall and a downstairs eat-in, the latter boasting a dozen or so tables and chairs dressed in colorful cloths and arranged as though for a formal function. Cambara has high aspirations that she will enjoy herself at the women-only party to which Kiin has invited her and will try to muster one or two of the women to help her with her plans, thank Farxia for what she has done and maybe at last meet the shopkeeper Odeywaa’s wife.
She looks up startled, with doubts starting to gnaw at her insides. Then again, she is consumed by an overwhelming uncertainty the moment she considers the furious tempo at which the new developments have unfolded, with Kiin becoming the plinth upon which the pillars of Cambara’s causes rest, and Zaak and Wardi virtually out of her sight and out of her mind. She persists, against reason, to rely wholly on Kiin, even though she feels that she must cultivate the friendship of other people to whom she can turn; otherwise, Kiin will be the only one on whom she will depend, however well appointed she has been or will be. Sadly, whenever she has had a good reason to celebrate a moment of triumph, Cambara is given to suffering an attack of anxiety, fearing the consequences of future failures instead of gathering the robe of success around her. Basta, enough!
SilkHair. What are her intentions toward him in the event that she commits herself more and more to his welfare? Will the time ever come when she may adopt him legally? This is one of her concerns. The idea of taking SilkHair in, even though it is not necessarily in the cards, does have its appeal, as it will give her more purchase when she decides to return to Toronto. She imagines saying, in response to her friends, who may ask why she is back so soon after leaving, “But you know, Mogadiscio is no place in which to raise an intelligent, ambitious child, as there are no schools, in fact nothing to recommend it.” Of course, there is no way of knowing how things will pan out, or whether SilkHair will prove to be a willing partner in her project, bearing in mind that he is the kind of boy who has clear ideas about what he wants to do with his life—for a boy of his age and background. More important, is she a good enough mother for a boy of his social circumstances. Is her hardiness comparable to Seamus’s, whom Kiin says has adopted the entire country and survived it?
She puckers her lips into wrinkled annoyance, disturbed at the recurrent thought that by inviting others into her life, she will bring into it complications without which she can do very well. Why does she keep doing that? Is it because she is perennially lonely, needing the company of others in the very same way some people have pets or married couples who are having difficulties invite third or fourth parties, because they cannot face each other alone? Why—even before she is certain of a favorable outcome about SilkHair—is she thinking about Bile? Maybe she believes that, in his own way, Bile not only will have supplemented and in the end completed her new self, but will have enriched it too. Like it or not, the question that comes to her mind now is whether or not she is exchanging Wardi, the estranged husband whom she has shed off, for Bile, and whether admitting SilkHair into the parameters of her newly reconstructed self will have given it a firmer format.
Her face brightens with a smile at the thought of not only meeting this Seamus but also placing the sketches of her plans before him and requesting that he carve the masks and, if feasible, build the stage and set too. Happy at the prospect of achieving her aim, Cambara takes a slow sip from her bottle of mineral water.
She takes a mouthful of the mango. She thinks, What a beauty, what a mango! Then she muses what shape this new self will take if allowed to develop to its full potential. To make things work, she will have to find out what kind of homeschooling Kiin has organized for her daughters and find out what chances there are for SilkHair. The question is how best to organize the life of a young boy in these difficult times and in such a way that it is manageable. Will she survive journeying into yet another new “thing” whenever the old “thing,” to which she gave her concentrated attention for many days, many weeks, many months, or many years, no longer fills her heart with excitement and emotion?
Suddenly, she hears a female voice that is at once familiar and full of animated vigor, giving instructions and shouting at several people at the same time. The part of Kiin’s voice that is familiar is imbued with an irresistible charm; the unfamiliar strain of it is raised, hastily spoken, stressed to the point of sounding plagued—the voice of a woman who is harried, hassled, and perfunctory too. Eventually, she catches sight of Kiin as she comes into view, riding the waves of her elegant stride. Deeply moved, excitement catches at Cambara’s throat, and she manages only to wave and wave. Eventually, Kiin acknowledges her beckoning motions and indicates, with a gesture of her hand, that she will be with her shortly.
Kiin joins her, even though it is clear that she is fretting, maybe because she has not much time to chat, what with the number of things that she must attend to before the evening party. The two friends hug, touching cheeks, kissing, each asking how the other is, and then answering, in unison, “Fine, very fine,” and finding this humorous and giggling.
When they have stood apart for a few seconds, Kiin says, “Have you heard from him? He’s promised that he will call you.”
It does not do Cambara’s heart any good to hear a generic allusion to a “he” and to remember that she has forgotten the mobile phone in the room—not knowing what manner of tidings this “he” will bring and whether they are good or bad. Who is supposed to have called her? Bless the fellow—Bile? Curse the fellow—Zaak? God forbid—Gudcur?
“From whom am I supposed to have heard?”
“Seamus.”
“How stupid of me,” Cambara says.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I’ve left the phone in the room.”
“Seamus has rung me.”
“What does he say?”
“That he’ll be here shortly.”
Cambara pushes her breakfast things away and, as soon as she does, grows restless, looking from the plates to Kiin and then finally at her sketch pad, which is to the right of her, and is filled with scrawls and patterns that make a fascinating viewing, at least from where Kiin is standing.
Kiin, meanwhile, instructs the waiter to go to the kitchen and place an order of double espresso and breakfast—liver, underdone, and canjeero-pancakes—for Seamus, and to bring it to Cambara’s table.
When the waiter has gone and they are alone, Kiin says, “I would like you to join us for lunch, my daughters and me.”
“Be glad to,” Cambara says.
“Lunch at one-thirty for two.”
Cambara half rises, readying to thank Kiin for everything and at the very same moment thinking of her, rather enviously, as a woman in charge of her life.
Kiin is off, saying, “See you then.”
A perfunctory appraisal confirms her suspicions: that the man sleeping in the chair, with his arms hugging his chest, his feet forward, and whom the junior unarmed sentries at the gate have not dared to disturb is, indeed, the man who led yesterday’s afternoon prayer. He is, apparently, the head of security, and now she remembers him directing the show in the car. Kiin has told her how much she relies on him.
Eventually he wakes of his own accord, maybe because, with the radio no longer on, the uncanny soundlessness alerts him to the changes of which he takes notice. He opens his eyes with the slowness of a cock squawking an exhausted crow from the depth of its drowsiness and then stretches his arms into the full extent of a yawn before doddering to his tallness. He rubs the weariness out of his eyes, leans against the wall for support, and asks what is happening. Receiving no answer from the others, who can only stare at him, he places his eye to the spy hole. He sees an ungainly white man with the hangdog expression of someone who has no business being there, a man with a beer paunch pulling at his bearded face and nervously feeding chunks of the graying hair into his mouth, chewing at it ceaselessly.
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