Hiding in Plain Sight

by Nuruddin Farah

  The waiter brings their drinks and then tots up their bill, scribbling the total and leaving it on the table.

  “How are Aar’s children faring?” Ngulu asks.

  “They’re having a difficult time,” Bella says.

  “They go to school here, right? In the suburbs?”

  Bella is not inclined to give him any more information than she needs to. She senses that their relationship is dying a natural death, although she is not sure this is the right moment to end it definitively. She will bide her time. What is the rush?

  Ngulu asks, “Have you a plan for this evening?”

  “I am planning for a very long night.”

  “With me, I hope.”

  “And what do you have in mind?”

  He brings out a room key. “This is the plan I have in mind. I’ve paid for a suite for the night where I hope we will frolic and love and remember.”

  Bella’s gaze shifts from the room key he has shown her to the mineral water, which she has not even touched. She weighs her words carefully before she speaks. She knows that she is in a more privileged position than the vast majority of women. She is economically independent, she has a profession in which she is well respected, she knows what she is passionate about, and she has friends on whom she can rely. Most important, she is not beholden to any man. She has had the run of her own affairs for much of her life, and it is not only in her nature but also in her means to withdraw unequivocally from any situation where she is not treated with the dignity she deserves. Life is tough on women, and Bella thinks she has been well prepared for it. If, as Sophie Tucker is thought to have said, a woman needs good looks between ages eighteen and thirty-five, a good personality from thirty-five to fifty-five, and plenty of cash thereafter, Bella has had all that she needs to make herself happy with her lot. So why should she permit this boy toy to behave badly toward her?

  She says, with the calmness of Lot addressing his betrayers, “I wish you had let me know because I’ve made other arrangements. In future, always tell people what you have in mind. I might not have come if I’d known you expected me to spend the night with you. In fact”—she looks at her wristwatch—“I really must leave. Will you pay for my water, or shall I pay for it myself?”

  And with that, she walks out of the café bar.

  —

  Bella is not proud of what she has done, but she feels that she had few options. She couldn’t let Ngulu get away with such insulting presumption. But she is angrier with herself than with him, for it is she who put herself in a position to be treated with so little respect.

  It will do her good to spend an evening by herself, relaxing and eating leftovers or making herself an omelet. Then she can set to work cracking Aar’s e-mail and other accounts. Realizing that there was no way of knowing what personal secrets she might find once she cracked the computer’s code, Bella had decided not to seek Salif’s assistance in puzzling out his father’s passwords or bank details. It wouldn’t be fair to him, she thinks, nor would it be fair to his father. The living who happen to have access to the secrets of the dead must deal with them as though they were sacred.

  She doesn’t recognize anything she is passing, and wonders if Cawrala has led her astray, but then she spots a familiar landmark and knows that she is on the Uhuru Highway. She knows the way from here. She silences Cawrala and drives the rest of the way home feeling calmer. Next time, she thinks, she will bring along some CDs, music to feed her soul. Jazz, in particular, has always nurtured and sharpened her creativity, bringing out the best in her.

  She is only a few streets from Aar’s house when she hears her phone somewhere in her handbag. She decides she won’t bother to answer it. Likely it is Ngulu calling to apologize, and she has nothing more to say to him. In any case, she has never liked the idea of being on call like a medical doctor, obliged to answer every time the phone rings, and she disdains the habits of the text-messaging generation, who seem to think of their iPhones as extensions of themselves. On the other hand, what if it is Salif, or Dahaba having a difficult time and needing to be comforted or picked up? Didn’t Bella tell her to call her at any time of night or day?

  By the time this thought occurs to her, she is home. She parks and deactivates the alarm, then goes into the house, turning on the lights in the kitchen. She pulls out her phone to see who has called. Gunilla!

  Bella dials her back. They chat for a few minutes, and Gunilla asks after her and the children, speaking as a friend rather than as Aar’s colleague. Bella tells her about the sleepover at Fatima and Mahdi’s and her plans for a solo dinner of leftovers and a quiet evening of work. She makes no mention of her encounter with Ngulu, needless to say.

  Gunilla says, “Of course, you haven’t had time to do a proper shop! In fact, you probably don’t even know your way around the neighborhood. You know, I’m not far from you, and there is a big mall close to my house that doesn’t close until about nine in the evening. I know how difficult it can be to figure out daily life in a city that you are not familiar with. Would you like to give me your shopping list, and I can get the items for you and bring them over later? I have to do a shop myself.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you,” says Bella.

  “Or how about this? You have a bite to eat. I’ll come for you in an hour or a little less, and we can go shopping together. I’ll take you home, and if you have the energy, we can have a chat and a cup of something.”

  Bella’s heart surges with pleasure, but still she hesitates. “Are you sure you have the time to do all this?”

  “I do,” says Gunilla, “and I’d love to see you.”

  “Brilliant,” says Bella. “I look forward to it.”

  As soon as she hangs up, Bella realizes that she has forgotten to tell Gunilla the address. She is about to ring her back when she remembers that, of course, Gunilla knows where it is. She has been here with Aar. Bella smiles to herself—she’s not the only one with a secret life.

  Bella brings the carryall with Aar’s personal effects into the house. She puts the laptop on the desk in the study and plugs it in so that it can charge. She puts the rest of his things back in the carryall, which she hides under the bed. Then she goes downstairs and makes herself a bowl of spaghetti with plain tomato sauce.

  When she is finished, she goes back upstairs and sits down in front of the laptop. She guesses at the password, trying various combinations of Aar’s pet names for her, Gacalisissima1, Nuurkayga3, Gabar, Gu’, TobanKaroon! She tries the date of her birth. After a few attempts, she hits on the right combination.

  As she waits for the desktop to appear, something inside her goes very quiet. For a moment, she feels as if her heart were about to stop pumping blood to her head. It’s as if she has crossed the boundary between herself and Aar by accessing his private life without his permission. This is an infringement she would never have allowed herself while he was alive. What makes it kosher now that he is dead?

  Bella hears a quick rat-a-tat knock downstairs. The time has passed more quickly than she thought. Gunilla is at the door, her idling car behind her. She says she will wait for Bella in the car. As she turns to leave, Bella notices that Gunilla is wearing the necklace that is the twin of her own, the one Aar got for them both.

  She goes upstairs and turns off the computer, puts it in her room under the mattress. Now that she knows how to get in, there will be time to venture further later. She locks the bedroom door, shuts off the lights, sets the alarm, and locks the door to the house.

  —

  On the way to the shopping center, Gunilla speaks of her own delight at having met Bella. “Only I wish the circumstances were different,” she says.

  “It can’t be helped.”

  Indeed, Gunilla says, they almost met once.

  “When was that?” asks Bella.

  “Remember when you came to spend a few days with Aar i
n Istanbul?” Gunilla continues without waiting for a confirmation. “I was due to arrive from Stockholm two hours after he escorted you to the airport for your departure. He dropped you off and waited for me to arrive.”

  Secretive Aar! “I was there when he bought that necklace,” Bella says.

  “And did he tell you to whom he was giving it?”

  “I didn’t ask him.”

  “You were not curious enough, you mean?”

  “He was a very private man, Aar,” Bella says carefully. “I think you too would have found it unbecoming to ask him questions of that nature if you had known and loved him as much as I knew and loved him.”

  There is a silence, a silence that indicates that they have arrived at a sort of T junction in their conversation, no way forward, only to the sides.

  Gunilla says, “How have the children been?”

  “We’re okay when it’s just us,” says Bella. “But as Sartre says, ‘Hell is other people.’ When others are around us, there is turbulence.”

  As if intuiting which “others” Bella is referring to, Gunilla says, “By the way, we had a three-way conference call at Valerie’s insistence, involving me, Valerie, and the Ugandan lawyer representing her. She wanted to enlist our help in a new idea she has: a trust in the name and for the benefit of the children, to be set up with UN help. Naturally, she suggested that she, as the surviving parent, be appointed as the trustee. She spoke at length about her business savvy, managing what amounts to millions of rupees—not that millions of rupees is that much.”

  Bella says nothing, wondering to herself why Gunilla thinks this will be of interest to her. But, as a Swede and a UN bureaucrat, she is just being thorough. Or at least Bella hopes that is the reason.

  “And you know what I also found out today?”

  “What?”

  Gunilla is pleased with herself. “The penny has finally dropped. Valerie has no legal right to the children or to Aar’s estate. One: because their marriage in England was out of community of property. Two: by abandoning the family, Valerie did not share a conjugal bed with Aar for several years, which is one way of defining matrimony. Three: you and the children, as per the will in the files, are the only heirs—and her name appears nowhere in it. Valerie knows it too. So this is her new iron in the fire, this trust fund. Apparently, she has charged the Ugandan with the task of getting it up and running.”

  “Need we bother ourselves with any of this?” asks Bella.

  “Not really,” says Gunilla. “Unless out of generosity you wish to involve her in a trust fund for the children—and I see no reason why—or you allow her as co-custodian, which I doubt is wise, given what you’ve told me so far. This is what I think personally.”

  At the entrance to the mall, there is a police checkpoint. Gunilla’s vehicle is subjected to a thorough inspection by several plainclothesmen and some armed men in army uniform. When at last they park the car and enter the supermarket, it is getting near closing time. They divide Bella’s list, and Gunilla goes to get produce and drinks, while Bella gets everything else. Bella gets to the checkout counter in twenty minutes, as planned. Gunilla arrives a few minutes later.

  “I know,” says Bella, “that it is never easy to shop on behalf of someone you do not know well. And we have the additional burden of shopping for two teenagers whose habits neither of us knows well either.”

  As they drive away, Bella feels triumphant, as if she has accomplished a great feat. Gunilla says, “Having no children of my own, I can imagine how daunting it is to have this new responsibility.”

  “Believe me, I’ve gone shopping with them when they were younger,” Bella says, “and without them was easier! At least when Valerie was around. Later, Aar set stern terms with them before they so much as entered a shop. Children are easy when they know where the boundaries are.”

  “Have you checked in with them at Fatima and Mahdi’s?” Gunilla asks.

  “I am working on the assumption that if there are calls to be made then they should be the ones making them,” Bella says. “As a child, I discouraged my parents from meeting my playmates, believing they would embarrass me. So unless I hear otherwise, I won’t call. They’ll call me when they’re ready to come home.”

  “They are lovely children,” Gunilla says.

  “I hope you’ll get to meet them,” Bella says.

  “I have met them twice,” says Gunilla. “The first time when I went camping with them and Aar.”

  Bella had forgotten. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Of course you did. Forgive me for having forgotten. Maybe we’ll do that again,” she adds softly. “I mean, camp.”

  “I’d like that very much,” says Gunilla.

  Bella feels that if the difference between formality and familiarity is made obvious by a speaker’s use of tu or vous in French or tu or Lei in Italian, then she and Gunilla have now gone beyond addressing each other formally and can assume they share amity, a closeness born out of mutual trust and potential friendship.

  And suddenly Bella’s imagination is flying ahead into a future with the children—one in which Gunilla reencounters the children, but not at a restaurant or on a trip, but at a proper meal in that kitchen, where no one has cooked regularly for months. Surely Aar, who had to look after his children on top of traveling a great deal and often working late into the night, had neither the energy nor the desire to entertain. Her mind races with plans to explore the country with the children and learn to love it with them and think of it as her own. She will organize camping trips, visits to places of interest in the suburbs of Nairobi. She’ll encourage them to improve their Swahili and think of themselves as citizens of Kenya.

  Her thoughts come back to the present as the car comes to a stop at the gate. The guard waves them in, and they park and bring their purchases into the house, sharing the intimate mundane task of putting them away in the fridge and pantry.

  When they are finished, Bella offers Gunilla a drink. Compared to many Swedes Bella has known—and even compared to Valerie or Padmini—Gunilla is a modest drinker. It takes her a whole hour to finish her one glass of red wine. “I’ve learned from Aar to enjoy the pleasures of life and delight in the mercies that life has afforded us, always remembering that while we have plenty millions of others have nothing,” she says. “So what’s the hurry? Take it easy. Life is in no rush, so why rush?”

  Bella recognizes her brother through and through in this sentiment. “How true!” she says, finding herself once again near tears.

  “Since I met Aar,” Gunilla continues, “I no longer drink hard liquor, and I no longer take even wine when I am alone; I do that only in company and only after work. This modest drinking is rather uncommon among Nordic expatriates, you might have noticed,” she says with a smile. “Those among the UN staff who have seen me in Aar’s company say, ‘What next?’”

  “What do they mean, ‘What next?’”

  “They are wondering if the next time we meet, I’ll be wearing the hijab,” Gunilla says. “I tell them, ‘Don’t be daft,’ because they are daft. After all, Aar was a thoroughly secular man, cosmopolitan in his temperament, very modern in his thinking, soft-spoken and unassumingly humble.”

  Now it is Gunilla’s turn to tear up. She rummages in her handbag for a tissue but finds none. Bella looks around, frustrated at how difficult it is to find even ordinary things in an unfamiliar house, especially one in which teenagers live. Gunilla says, “Pardon me,” and she is gone for a few minutes. When she returns, she is carrying a large packet of tissues.

  “And here is something for you, Bella, dear,” she says.

  At first Bella thinks Gunilla means the tissues. And then she sees that she is holding out an intricately wrapped package firmly sealed with tape. Bella receives it with both hands.

  “What is it? What’s in it?” she asks, thrilled and surprised.

  “It is
a gift from me to you,” says Gunilla. “Open it.”

  “I love gifts,” says Bella.

  She is so eager to see what it is that she tugs at the tape impatiently. But the tape is stubborn, and she is about to resort to her teeth when Gunilla has the presence of mind to get up and fetch a pair of scissors, whose mysterious location she clearly knows well.

  Bella gazes down at the gift, remembering a line from a poem by Apollinaire: “La joie venait toujours après la peine.” It’s a collection of photographs: Aar with friends at a party; Aar with Gunilla and the children camping; Aar in Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Burma; Aar with Gunilla in Istanbul. Bella has never seen any of them before. And they are good, very good, every single one of them.

  “They’re Aar’s,” says Gunilla. “I’ve put them together for you and the children.”

  “Grazie, carissima Gunilla!”

  She receives the present with out-and-out joy, appreciative of the time and thought Gunilla has put into arranging them in an album and giving it to her and the children.

  Bella embraces Gunilla, who says suddenly, “That reminds me. We had a phone call earlier today at the office from an elderly Italian lady. She said her name was Marcella and that she’d been ringing every UN office in Nairobi trying to reach someone who knew you.”

  Bella sits up with a worried look. “Maybe Marcella called me on my Italian mobile number, which has been turned off since my arrival here. And Marcella hates e-mails so we’ve never communicated that way. We always use the telephone. That is typical Marcella, seventy-five and still volunteering in a Rome hospital. And you know what? She delivered me. Anyhow, what message did she leave?”

  “She said to tell you, ‘Come mai ti sei perduta?’”

  Bella asks Gunilla, “Do you know what that means?”