The head of security gives what he can see of the white man a once-over and then barks instructions at one of the youths to “let the gentleman in.”
It is then that Seamus steps in, his hands fisted, his features breaking into a friendly grin, his stride even, his demeanor unafraid and unworried. However, because of the thickness of his facial hair and the distance separating her from him, Cambara cannot determine the nature of his amity or to whom he is addressing it or if it is turning into a snicker. Even so, Cambara says, “Terra firma,” to herself, as she studies him, thinking “What a great presence,” from the vantage point of seeing him and guessing who he is before he has laid his eyes on her. To welcome him, she gets to her feet, almost daring to call out to him by his first name. She takes a good hold of herself and then sits down, fussily smoothing her hair with her hands and touching them to her face in callous disregard of what anyone else watching her might think.
Seamus goes round shaking hands, taking the hand of everyone in his vicinity in his own. He starts with the head of security and then holds the hands of the other man in his for a few moments, eventually shuffling in her direction, his steps short, paunch more prominent than he likes it to be, and his right hand ahead of him, as if he might make a present of it to her. Seamus, she thinks, has the look of an exhausted beast of burden that is carrying more than twice its weight and rises to its diminished height, knees burdensomely bent and aching, gaze wary, and mouth pouting, as if annoyed. Look at him wanting to shake everyone’s hand; watch him hitching his belt up every so often and, while doing so, subtly touching his private parts as if making sure they are still there. Pray, how does he get around? What means of transport does he have, if any?
“I am Bile’s friend,” Seamus says loud enough for the benefit of all those overhearing him, this way defining a kind of kinship that he hopes will make sense to the armed and unarmed youths: a mascot for Bile, for friendship. She makes a knowing effort not to return the goggle-eyed stare of the youths, who, in her view, are merely highlighting their curiosity, it being the first time for them, perhaps, to see a Somali woman not in a veil welcoming a European man in view of so many of them. In broad daylight. Without a chaperone.
She says, “Seamus, I presume,” shaking his hand with the warmth of one who might even go as far as hugging him but stopping just short of that.
“Welcome to our city, Cambara,” he says, pronouncing faultlessly the guttural c with which her name begins. “Bile says hi and so does Dajaal, both having had the pleasure to make your acquaintance under unfavorable conditions. It seems to me I am the lucky one, in that I meet you when you look rested, relaxed, and ready to host me at your hotel.”
“The pleasure of meeting you in this friendlier situation is all mine, Seamus,” she says, mouthing his disyllabic name as if taking more of an ownership than she has meant to.
When the waiter arrives, carrying a double espresso for him, Cambara points Seamus to a chair, which he takes, his back to the youths who are presently undressing both of them with their leering. Seamus says, “Thanks,” instinctively, addressing his word neither to her nor to the waiter. He gives the waiter sufficient time to move away, shifting in his seat, then has his first long, pensive sip of the coffee but stops short of telling Cambara whether it is to his taste or not.
He pulls at the bristles on his chin, now and then rooting out a loose hair snuggling in the bend of his fat, thick fingers with the thoughtfulness of a farmer picking weeds in the underbrush. Something about the way he is sitting tells her that Seamus has grown into his Somaliness in the same way alien vegetation adapts to take root eventually in the soil in which it has been planted.
“Tell me,” Seamus says conversationally.
“Where does one begin?” she says. She sounds evidently charmed, her cheerfulness as spontaneous as a baby’s first grin.
“Begin anywhere,” he smiles encouragingly. “Anywhere will do.”
“I am sure you are familiar with John Coltrane?”
“Not as much as you are, I presume.”
“My favorite Coltrane is ‘A Love Supreme.’
“And is that where you want to begin?”
“I may equally begin it with a moment of on-the-level sadness, when one discovers one’s partner is glorying in one’s debasement, luxuriating in it?” She looks away, as though embarrassed, maybe because she is uncertain if he is following her meaning.
Her hand moves toward the upper part of her cheek—a woman who hasn’t decided whether she is wiping away tears or removing a bit of kohl with a Kleenex. She recalls not putting on eyeliner for several months now—she, who has trained as a makeup artist—not since losing her dear, darling son.
“My son died,” she says. “Drowned.”
“I am very sorry,” Seamus says, looking away.
“In my husband’s lover’s pool.”
He mouths the word “Sorry,” but issues not a sound. Again, he looks away and then at his fingernails, which, Cambara notices, either have been chewed down to the flesh or are long and dirty.
“You could say that I’ve come here to grieve.”
Seamus swallows as if he had a fish bone in his throat, which he clears. He is the image of a man who wants to help but does not know how, who wants to say something but has no idea what words will express what is on his mind.
Then after a long silence, when Cambara is at a loss for words, he says, “And while grieving, while mourning…”
“I’ve vowed to recover our family property.”
“Kiin has made no mention of that.”
“What has she spoken to you about?”
“Mourning, peace, and masks,” he says, brief in his choice of words, as if tapping out his thinking in Morse.
“I hope to be of some service to the community of women among whom I find myself,” Cambara explains. “I am thrilled Kiin has asked me to make my contribution in that regard.”
Seamus behaves as if he is ill prepared for what he is about to say, and so he frets, his beady eyes dwelling on his nails, which, biting, he has cut close to the flesh and are bleeding a little. In the disquiet that is of a piece with his absentmindedness, he puts his finger in his mouth and, tasting blood, frowns.
He says, “Put plainly, you need our help.”
“That’s right.”
As the waiter returns, this time with Seamus’s order of liver-and-pancake breakfast, Seamus smiles distractedly, then she sees his right hand going up and waving with enthusiasm to someone, she presumes. Cambara wants to know whom he is greeting, notwithstanding, and spots Kiin gesticulating and finally touching her open palm to her lips in a quick dispatch of kisses to both of them before moving away from the balcony of the upstairs of the outhouse.
Cambara asks Seamus, “How is Bile?”
Seamus replies, “He is a little unwell.”
“What’s ailing him? Is he depressed?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” agrees Seamus.
Then he beckons to the waiter who is standing close by, against the wall. In accented Somali he says he would like another espresso, no sugar, please.
“Tell me in plain language what it is you need help with,” Seamus says to Cambara, “and I will see what I can do and tell you whether or not I can.”
She speaks plainly and to the point, starting from the beginning, now that she is no longer nervous in his presence and need not try to impress him. She talks animatedly about her plans: how she will be grateful for any assistance he can offer her, especially in the carving of masks. Then she explains that she has already sketched everything herself and shares with him the pencil drawings she has done on her sketch pad.
“What about the text?” he says.
Cambara gives him a synopsis of the story on which she plans to base the play. She goes on, “The version of the play I have in mind to produce is inspired by an oral parable from Ghana, first committed to paper by one Kwegyir Aggrey, famously known as Aggrey of Africa.”
“I have brought the very thing you need: sketches upon sketches, models, and how-to books for beginners interested in learning the art of puppet theater.”
“Then we are in business,” he says, and, half rising, he stretches his hand out to her, his bare beer paunch and its hirsute features distracting Cambara for a second, and they shake hands on it.
“We will have a great deal of fun doing it,” he says when his rounded bottom hits his seat, “and it will be instructive to all concerned if we manage to stage it.”
She hands the sketches across to Seamus, who takes the pad and, studying them, turns the pages after he has looked at each of them, nodding with approval. Then they hear the gentle sound of a klaxon. Seamus looks away and then at the gate and watches one of the unarmed sentries putting his eye to the peephole. The sentry opens the gate, and a vehicle is driven in. Seamus recognizes the car, and, about to end his conversation, looks at his watch and nods as though his timing has worked to perfection. It is Cambara’s turn to recognize the driver, Dajaal, who comes out of the car and exchanges greetings with the armed and unarmed sentries staffing the gates, calling each of them by name.
Dajaal joins Cambara and Seamus, bows his head in acknowledgment of her warm greeting but stands apart, his body stiffening, a little too formal for her liking, distant. All the same, she points him to a chair, offers him his choice of tea, some coffee, a glass of water, perhaps, anything. Dajaal declines and taps on his wristwatch, indicating he has no time. He eyes Seamus with a knowing grin, and when the Irishman does not get up to go with him, Dajaal says to Seamus, in Italian, “Bile is waiting.”
Still, Seamus does not move.
“We must be on our way,” Dajaal says.
Cambara says to Seamus, “Take the sketch pad with you, and let’s meet and talk further in a couple of days, by which time I will have prepared a photocopy of the text of the play.”
“So long,” Seamus says.
Dajaal urges Seamus, taking hold of his elbow, as if helping him to get to his feet. Although he does not like what Dajaal is insinuating, Seamus humors him by not saying anything. She cannot for the life of her determine what it is about these three men, each of them charming and very likable in his own way, that makes similar movie personages come to mind when she thinks of them. Walter Matthau and his cohorts in the comedies, including Jack Lemmon and another whose name she cannot recall; and of course there are Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. You think of one, you think of the others.
Cambara says, “Greetings to Bile.”
She feels that the charmed part of her is going with them as they get into the car, which Dajaal starts energetically. She wishes she could join them. In fact, she is tempted to wave to Dajaal, shout to him to stop the vehicle, go back to her rooms, put together an overnight bag in which to carry her basics, this time including a makeup kit, and then hop in at the back for no other reason perhaps than to see Bile. Yet she can’t define the source of this keenness or point her finger precisely at the fount of this longing, having met the man only the one time and not under ideal circumstances.
Just then—what a spoiler—her memory brings up a horrid scene from one of her ugly encounters with Zaak on the first day of her arrival. Trust her to remember his admonition, spoken in his inimitably cruel tone of voice, saying “Woman, grow up.” No longer waving or grinning, her hand goes down with the speed of a punctured tire.
Cursing the day she met Zaak, she withdraws into herself, reaching deep down to where she knows she is strong; she retreats into the purposeful pensive mood of a woman determined to pull herself together. And even though she goes into her rooms to put on a touch of makeup before joining Kiin and her daughters for lunch, she is so restless that she cannot bear the thought of being alone in her rooms.
She sits in the café with a book in her hand, the mobile phone in her lap eerily silent. She watches the goings-on near the gate where the armed and unarmed guards have gathered, engaging in some friendly banter. Wandering, her thoughts lead her back to the conversation she has had with Seamus, to whom she has revealed more of her sad side than she imagined she would. Maybe it has been her intention to dispel any glamour-girl status that Bile may have; who better to leak this to than a third party, in this case Seamus, who is bound to share it with him. Why, Seamus too has let it slip that Bile is a depressive.
All is well when all is revealed early!
NINETEEN
No sooner has Cambara sat in the shade and located the page where she left off in her thriller than she sees the driver waving to her in greeting. She is about to acknowledge it when, turning, she spots a young boy who draws her attention away from everyone and everything else. She wonders to herself if she is hallucinating or seeing apparitions, because a boy, until then nameless and definitely not known to her and yet seemingly familiar as he reminds her of her own son, Dalmar, is suddenly there. It is as though he has materialized out of nowhere, with the air around him thickening with mystery the longer she looks at him.
The waiter has by chance returned to the café to wipe the tables with a wet cloth and then lay them for the lunch seating. She calls him over and asks him, “Do you happen to know the boy or what his name is?”
“Gacal is his name.”
“Whose son is he?”
“He is no one’s son,” replies the waiter.
“No one’s son?”
“That’s right. He is nobody’s son.” The waiter speaks with the straight face of someone who does not quite realize the pithy quality of his remarks. He is not even remotely aware how fired up Cambara is as she repeats his utterance to herself, relishing its inspired nature.
“He is no one’s son,” he says again.
Now that is a new one, she thinks. She finds the observation most becoming, out of the ordinary: a boy, not quite ten by her reckoning, who displays a developed-enough personality and qualifies as no one’s son. More like a mythical persona: no parents like Adam; no known biological father like Jesus. Will this Gacal accomplish heroic feats like Krishna’s? Is there a shadow side to him, and if so what is it? Does Gacal share any of the traits of Sundiata, who, in Mandingo myth, was born not through a woman’s vagina, because of its associations with all manner of discharges, but through a finger, undefiled?
Apparently, the boy has come much closer, self-conscious of the rags he has on. It is as though he is on a performance trip, the way he poses; maybe, in a younger life, he was used to being photographed with alarming frequency, a loving mother cuddling him and his dad near and adoring. Look at how he blinks his eyes. Is he remembering the flash of the camera blinding him, the sun in his eyes dimmed? What manner of a poseur is he? Gacal has the sort of flair you associate with the well-born. He carries himself with élan. It does not require much imagination to sense that he is of a different class, physically aware of where he is in relation to where others are. Not only does he surround himself with much space, but he is also mindful not to encroach on yours. Does his behavior point to a middle-class upbringing in his past? Nor does he have shoes on. What’s more, she observes, he has the habit of raising himself on the tip of his toes, craning his neck, as if standing in a crowd between people taller than he is, watching a street revue.
Now that he is here, what is she to do? How is she to deal with the boy’s presence or just cope with things, preoccupied as she is with the family house and what will have become of it, if it is empty of Jiijo? Is she to welcome him, dolce far niente, without any need of explanation or justification?
Grinning, Gacal stands at a little distance to her right, quiet, his hands seemingly deferential in that they are clasped behind his back, his face grimy, and his rags grubby. His
mouth curves upward, as if in a smile, at the same time as he smirks impishly, defiantly waiting for Cambara to read his bearing, interpret it any way she likes. Cambara gives herself time enough to weigh her options, contrasting the possible advantages of not committing herself one way or the other to taking the indulgent position of a mother figure. She assumes that Gacal has not been in the company of either of his parents or that of a caring adult for a long while. What is his story? The question she dares not ask is whether he knows SilkHair, and, if he does, whether the two of them been in communication with each other about this soft woman, whom anyone can touch and who will come up with gestures of kindness no child in Mogadiscio has ever known. Beware of the sense of paranoia taking over your thinking, Cambara tells herself, and then takes a fresh interest in Gacal.
He has been in a brawl. That much is obvious. In fact, there is enough evidence to warrant the supposition that he has been in a very savage fight: the blood on his forehead and lower lip that is now dry; a few chin-bound, down-facing abrasions crossing others that are upward-bound, one of them ending close to the right eye; lacerations on his arms and neck; gashes on his chest. Moreover, he has lost the sleeve of the shirt, the zipper on his trousers is ripped off, and his skin is liberally grazed here and there. In addition, he looks hungry, and she feels sure that he has not slept a wink for the last twenty-four hours and that, by the look of it, eating and having a lie down may bring his color back to his cheeks and put a smile on his parched lips. Maybe it is not the time to badger him with questions. That can wait until she has had him fed and has organized a place for him to lie down.
Cambara beckons to the waiter, into whose ear she whispers her request: that, in view of the lateness of the hour, might he marshal a meal, a clean towel, a shower, and a mat-under-a-tree to lie down on for Gacal. When he nods his head, she says, “I will pay the charge.”
As the waiter tiptoes away purposefully, the scene puts her in mind of a questionable collusion between her and Wardi in their early days when, notwithstanding her misgivings about the rightness of getting involved with him, the woman in her could not resist giving in to the dictates of her heart. Wardi took advantage of her, cashing in on her naiveté, in the end making a substantial killing. Look at where he is now: in Toronto, comfortable. Look at where she is now: in Mogadiscio and putting some kind of a life together. Look at the brittle mischief in Gacal’s eyes, a sign that her interference is more likely than not to lead to a similar situation. There are two possible ways to deal with Gacal: have him follow the waiter, eat, sleep his exhaustion off, and then meet; or engage him in a desultory dialog right away and then finis! In any event, she invites him over. He makes as if to launch into an explanation, but she won’t have it.
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