Knots

by Nuruddin Farah

  She is silent and almost in a trance, pondering. His comment, “The boy is good,” makes her stir out of her stupor.

  It takes her a moment to regain her composure and longer still to find her voice. She says, “He has the timbre of a trained actor, Gacal has. Glad I’ve stumbled across him by chance.”

  “Where?”

  “Turned up at the hotel where I am staying.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “Extraordinary.”

  And before he has the opportunity to elaborate on her meaning, she moves purposefully toward the hall, with Dajaal on her heels, as though making sure he will remain close to her, protect her from harm. They come to the gate, and she suddenly stops, her hand going up, knuckles ready but not tapping. It is as if she can’t bring herself to believe her luck, and there is no wood to touch, the gate being of solid metal. Then she smells cooking coming from the courtyard: potatoes boiling, onions in a pan sizzling, a tape recorder playing a Somali song. Again, she hears the grown baritone of a boy who can easily train as a tenor, speaking.

  “Please,” Dajaal says, and when she turns he insinuates himself into the gap that has opened, bows deferentially to her, and, pushing the gate, says apologetically, “Please step aside.”

  He treats her like royalty. How long will this last? she wonders to herself. It can’t, it won’t, not for as long as she is with Bile. Maybe, all this gallantry is in lieu of the bouquet of flowers that a man courting a woman brings along and the dinners at restaurants to which he takes her. Besides, Bile is not all there, is he? Living in the abnormal times of a civil war means that this will have to do.

  Entering, they find the armed guards sitting around the fire where SilkHair is tending to two pots, cooking. SilkHair says, more for the youths’ benefit than for Cambara’s or Dajaal’s, “You’ll have supper in a few minutes. Until then you may go and listen to Gacal. We’re having plenty of fun.”

  Cambara pats him on the head and says, “Well done,” and proceeds toward the hall, where she is pleasantly surprised to find a stage: two planks that Seamus nailed together pronto, good enough for her immediate purpose. She says to no one in particular, “Seamus is a miracle worker.”

  Then they watch Gacal going through his routines, whatever these are meant to be, rehearsing and taking different lines in turn, now speaking as a grown man, now as the young cowherd who has been missing and whom the villager looks for just before nightfall. A latticework of shades—the ones in the outer rings light, those in the inner circles darker—overwhelms Dajaal and Cambara, who can only stare, confused, because they cannot make sense of it, at least not at first. But it does not take Cambara long to locate the source of the shades and work out that someone is playing with mirrors of different tones and of various color emphases.

  “That’s Qasiir, using a mirror to emit messages in codes,” Gacal says. “That means all is well and there is nothing to worry about.” Then he approaches, to welcome Cambara back with a hug, but hasn’t the ingenuity to carry it through. He lapses into the voice of his proper age, a boy in his early teens. “It is fun, rehearsing, SilkHair cooking, Qasiir fooling with mirrors,” says Gacal.

  She is impressed with both boys for having taken the initiative themselves, a healthy indication that, if guided in the right way, they will be okay. “You’re all doing very well. How marvelous.”

  Then he reverts to his own character, as she has so far sussed out. He retrieves a tape recorder from one of Cambara’s tote bags, and he plays it for her. Cambara listens to a voice montage, her own mixed with Gacal’s, and, superimposed on both of them, SilkHair’s. She realizes that he has ruined her tape, which is a copy of another. Luckily, she did not bring the original. She does not reprimand him.

  “How have you managed to mix the voices?” she asks, going closer to them, sounding sweet, charmingly maternal.

  “By playing several tapes and recording our own song, Gacal and I,” SilkHair says. “I am enjoying cooking too. We must feed them.” He points at the young militiamen in shiftless expectation of eating a meal, regardless of who cooks it, since they won’t.

  Dajaal has had enough of this, and he is in no mood to indulge anyone. Just as Gacal joins them, Dajaal goes closer to where Cambara is standing. Mindful to be courteous to the two boys, whom she is pampering with her attentions, he speaks to her in an undertone, “In my job as a bodyguard and security fiend, I must have enough sleep. It’s been a long day, and I need to get back. Please let’s go. I’ll take you and your two boys to Maanta, then show my face to Bile before I call it a day. Do you mind?” He goes back to the car and waits.

  The boys have resumed rehearsing. She waits for a couple of minutes for the two boys to get to a point in their routines where she thinks they do not mind being interrupted, then she claps her hands together, now looking at Gacal, now at SilkHair, and applauds.

  Then she turns to SilkHair. “Is the meal you were cooking for the armed youths ready? Because if it is, then we must head back, return to our hotel, where there will be food for the three of us.”

  When, after a few minutes, he says, “Cooked,” she instructs him and Gacal gather their things and hers too, so they will all return to the hotel. They do as they are told as soon as the armed youth descend like hungry wolves on the pots, one or two of them almost burning themselves and quarreling greedily.

  Then she remembers a joke she and her son used to share, because she is pleased with the way things have gone today and she is all game. She says, “Last to the car is the pig with the shortest snout.”

  And she breaks into a trot, half running. Gacal and SilkHair appear unimpressed, maybe because they find her humor about becoming the pig with the shortest snout a bit offensive. So they deliberately take their time, as if trying to wind her up, gather their stuff slowly, and then put on adult faces, silent, before they join her and Dajaal in the vehicle.

  By then, Cambara is conscious of what they are up to, and decides to show them that she is no pushover. She says, “Boys, it’s been a long day. We’ll thank Dajaal in advance for his patience and generosity, and we’ll turn in early, the three of us, immediately after we’ve eaten our suppers.”

  And that is what Cambara does: She turns in early, soon after her room-service meal. Too exhausted, she cannot bring herself to sleep. Restive, she switches on the lights to read, but her eyes close as if of their own accord, and her mind races off like a pampered child going out for a stroll with its mother, now running ahead of her, now behind her, and picking up memories and giving each of them a fresh once-over. Cambara examines in detail what her life has been like for the past few days, if only to determine what else she must do to make sure that she stays on course.

  She thinks she has led too much of a sedentary existence since arriving, hardly exercising, her muscles atrophying. Thing is, though, her mind is alive—thank God for that; her family’s property is back in her hands to do with as she pleases. She worries about Bile’s descent into darker moods of dejection. She needs to devote equal time to the personal and the professional sides of her interests from this moment on. She dedicates several hours of the next day to decide how she will go about these.

  Looking at the telephone, as though willing it to ring, she wonders when Raxma will call to give her the news she has so far gathered about Gacal’s parents. Eventually, she falls asleep in the small hours but not before reminding herself that she needs to know just as much about SilkHair.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Cambara wakes up, dazed, to the ringing telephone in her room. She stretches her hand out to answer it, and, as she does so, her eyes still closed, she thinks, who can be calling at this most ungodly of hours? Perhaps Bile to thank her for the stupendous bunch of grapes she presented him with and which they shared with pleasure. But when she grabs the phone and then opens her eyes, mouthing the words “Hello, who is this?” she realizes that she is making two errors: one, it is later in the morning than she thought—probably about eight-thirty
, nine o’clock; and two, she did not see him in real life or give and share grapes but in a dream, which the phone call interrupted.

  She hears a confirmation of this in the distant voice of a woman who says, “This is Raxma with the latest. Are you up, ready to receive it?”

  “Just a moment, Raaxo.”

  She gives herself a moment to look at her watch, which is by the bedside, sees that it is quarter to nine, and tells herself that it is time she has been up, eaten her breakfast, and asked after her two charges, to find out how their night has been. She sits up, rams a pillow behind her to lean against, and says, “I am listening, Raaxo.”

  Raxma’s voice sounds closer, as if coming from next door. “I’ve rung around and am able to confirm much of what he has told you.”

  “You’re a comfort to me,” Cambara says. (The two friends alter each other’s name—Raxma abbreviating Cambara to Cambo, meaning “apple,” and Cambara changing Raxma to Raaxo, meaning “comfort.”

  “What time is it where you are? Don’t tell me that you’ve stayed up to call me, because it is close to one in the morning.”

  “What won’t I do for a friend?”

  “I appreciate it, I really do.”

  “Anyhow,” Raxma starts to speak, then pauses. “Gacal’s parents, namely Qaali and Omar, lived in Duluth, Minnesota, until Omar found a two-year consultancy in Nairobi and the boy’s mother, Qaali, moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to complete the remaining one-year compulsory coursework for a postgraduate degree at that university. Just before Qaali’s departure for her fieldwork in anthropology in some faraway village in the Dogon country, the people whose traditional culture she was researching, she and Omar agreed on a date, in three months’ time, when she would visit them in Nairobi for a break. From what I hear, they communicated as frequently as they could. In the part of Mali where she was stationed, telephones were unreliable and e-mailing was impossible, because there were frequent power cuts, at times for a week and more.”

  “Tell me what you know about her.”

  “Qaali has been described to me as a very determined woman intent on making up for lost time, in that she was determined to take her Ph.D. before her fortieth birthday. This was her second marriage, Omar’s first. She had other children by another man; he had none, except their only boy. Add to this the fact that Omar was her junior by five years and the one with the job and the money. As a family, they often avoided the company of other Somalis, and they chose to relocate because of the adverse comments some Minnesota Somalis made about the gap in their ages and their respective incomes.”

  “I feel for Qaali, I like her,” says Cambara.

  “I knew you would.”

  “So they had no friends among the Somalis?”

  “They had only American friends, who call her ‘Precious,’ a direct translation of her Somali name, Qaali. Here you have a Somali woman reinventing herself as an American. I suspect, too, that she may have put ‘Precious,’ not Qaali, on her U.S. passport, so we must keep that in mind when searching for her whereabouts,” says Raxma. “Anyway, Qaali and Omar spoke Somali to Gacal, their son, and English to each other, and wanted to have nothing to do with this clan business, his side or hers, it didn’t matter.”

  “I’m curious how you garnered this information?”

  “Don’t interrupt my flow. Wait until later.”

  “Go on.”

  “What was the last thing I said?”

  “Nothing to do with this clan business.”

  “But they were nationalists, and they wanted to provide their son with a worldly perspective,” Raxma continues, “and while he was still young and malleable wanted him to speak the language, learn about Somali culture, and pick up enough Arabic to be a useful tool for later in life. They saw the well-paid job in Nairobi as a godsend, for it would afford Qaali a number of years to devote to her studies; and Omar and Gacal would be close enough to Somalia to make brief visits. It just so happened that a fortnight before Qaali was due to visit, Omar bought air tickets for the two to make the first of what they hoped would be many trips. Omar was making a cursory reconnaissance, taking a good look at the city, deciding on a good enough hotel for them to stay in when the whole family reunited to spend four weeks together, after Qaali joined them in East Africa.”

  Cambara interrupts, “Come the week for Qaali’s visit…!”

  “No answer at home when she phoned, because by then they were in Mogadiscio,” Raxma continues. “One thing you need to know is that she came to the nearest town to make the phone call, since none was available in the village where she was doing her fieldwork. So she stayed in the town for a couple more days, ringing Omar’s mobile, his direct line at the office, his home in the evenings, and after several unsuccessful attempts, the school at which Gacal had been enrolled. She struck lucky there, the headmaster promising to look into Gacal’s disappearance. He called him his star pupil, and said that the whole class missed him. Apparently Gacal was ‘a charming kid,’ He asked her to phone him in a couple of days. When Qaali did, he informed her that he had learned that her husband had gone to Somalia, intending to be back after the weekend and that no one had heard from or about him or Gacal.”

  “What did Qaali do?”

  “She flew to Nairobi, a city unknown to her,” Raxma replies. “She had little money and therefore found a cheap hotel for the night. The following morning she went to her husband’s workplace, and they couldn’t tell her more than what the headmaster had relayed to her, nor did they know anything more at the school when she called on the headmaster. She didn’t bother asking the Somalis, of whom there are hundreds of thousands in Nairobi, putting up at every expensive hotel and frequenting the city’s cafés, teahouses, and restaurants, certain that Omar would not have had dealings with them. Two days later, she took a twelve-seater, qaat-carrying plane to Mogadiscio in search of her husband and son, last seen when they were both well and planning to make a weekend visit to Mogadiscio.”

  “And then?”

  “Not a word from her. Vanished.”

  Shocked, Cambara can’t think of anything to say. She takes a deep breath, shifts her position in the bed the better to know what to ask. After a brief pause, she asks, “How have you gathered this information? To whom have you spoken?”

  Raxma responds, “First I called Information, and got a Duluth number registered in Omar’s name. When I rang, I spoke to a woman who denied knowing who I was talking about, but she passed me on to the estate agency from which she rented the apartment, who initially couldn’t find either Omar’s or Qaali’s names as clients in their books. Then it transpired that they had her down as ‘Precious,’ not Qaali. Then I rang Information again, once I knew that she was a postgraduate student in anthropology at U of M, and I spoke to her head of department, her supervisor, and even the secretary to the department, all of whom answered my questions voluntarily. They had her first name as Qaali and her second as Precious, and used the two hyphenated. Insofar as the Americans are concerned, Qaali has disappeared in that large continent called Africa, and they have no way of knowing how to trace her. She isn’t in Mali, at least not in the Dogon village where she is supposed to be doing her fieldwork. The last phone contact from her was when she rang the head of the department, but, because he wasn’t there to talk to her, she informed the secretary that she might need an extension, because she was off to Nairobi and then Mogadiscio in search of her husband and son; she hoped to be back in a month or so. Alas, no word from her since that day. And then I spoke with the headmaster at her son’s school in Duluth—he was the last to speak with her. And finally, I spoke with our friend Maimouna, who knows everything about international law and passports and such, and she was able to help me collect many of the details. I’m afraid she became obsessed with the story—but she was very helpful.”

  Cambara pauses to smile at the thought of their friend doing so much work. Then she asks Raxma for Qaali’s and Omar’s last names and other particulars, and, after g
iving her the hotel fax number, she asks Raxma to fax her photographs of both adults, if she can lay her hands on any. “The university can provide you with a mug shot, if there is nothing else.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to drop it?”

  “While at it, give me their clan names as well.”

  “To what end?”

  “To identify them, of course.”

  “Don’t you have better things to do, my Apple?”

  “No, Comfort. Not anymore. I am decided.”

  They laugh until their ribs ache.

  “I prefer asking Kiin to intervene,” Raxma says. “For one thing, she has much better connections than you; for another, she can get the Women’s Network on board faster than you can. The network will be keen to give a hand. I’ll talk right away to Kiin, whom I will get onto the business of tracing Gacal’s mother,” announces Raxma. “She and I are to speak tomorrow when she is due to update me and Arda on the progress of your affairs. Why don’t you let me, since you have enough on your plate already?”

  “Because Gacal is my precious little man and I adore him.”

  “In all seriousness, let Kiin intervene.”

  “I insist.”

  “How’re things with you by the way?” asks Raxma.

  “Can’t complain; can’t complain.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Everything will be working out well,” Cambara says. “Someone at the door,” although there isn’t. “Let’s talk tomorrow or the day after. About this time. Either you call me, or I’ll call you.”

  “Take care, Precious Apple.”