Crossbones

by Nuruddin Farah

  Praise for Nuruddin Farah and Crossbones

  “Politically courageous and often gripping…Crossbones provides a sophisticated introduction to present-day Somaila, and to the circle of poverty and violence that continues to blight the country.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Mesmerizing…A searing look at individuals caught in the chaos of anarchy.”

  —The Daily Beast

  “Often reads like a taut, tense thriller…a thought-provoking read as well as an absorbing look into a culture and a people in extreme circumstances.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Farah’s accomplishment is, through art, showing us both the value and the devaluing of life through the machinations of historical, political and social power.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Adopts an almost thriller-like realism to give an account of modern-day Somalia…Crossbones is well worth the read.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Combines an intimate dissection of power within the family with a strong dose of skepticism about the machinations of national and global power.”

  —The Economist

  “Vivid and detailed…[Farah’s] understanding of human relationships is spot-on, as are the twists and turns in this suspenseful drama.”

  —Ebony

  “[Farah] writes beautifully about his native Somalia.”

  —The Millions

  “Fiercely critical, ruefully funny, profoundly compassionate…humanizes the dire complexities inherent to a place fractured by perpetual violence, corruption, outside exploitation, bone-deep poverty, and fanaticism. A writer of charm, wit, conscience, and penetrating vision, Farah is a commanding and essential global writer.”

  —Booklist

  “Farah has become the voice of the Somalian diaspora, telling stories of political, religious, and family conflict without sentimentality…. Like Conrad, Farah proves a master of his adopted language, enhancing his narratives with proverbs and instances of institutionalized irrationality.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Harrowing without resorting to sensationalism, this highly topical final volume in Farah’s Past Imperfect trilogy should burnish his well-deserved reputation. [A] gripping but utterly humane thriller set in one of the least understood regions on earth.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Farah writes enthrallingly about his native Somalia…. Expect sharp insight into both human nature and sectarian strife, told in illuminating language free of cant.”

  —Library Journal

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CROSSBONES

  Nuruddin Farah is the author of ten previous novels, translated into more than twenty languages, and has won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been featured in The New Yorker and other publications. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he lives in Cape Town.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Riverhead Books, a member of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2011

  Published with revisions in Penguin Books 2012

  Copyright © 2011 by Nuruddin Farah

  All rights reserved.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The New Yorker, where portions of this book previously appeared, in slightly different form.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Farah, Nuruddin, date.

  Crossbones / Nuruddin Farah.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-55210-0

  1. Americans—Somalia—Fiction. 2. Mogadishu (Somalia)—Fiction.

  3. Political fiction. I. Title.

  PR9396.9.F3C76 2011 2011018748

  823’.914—dc22

  BOOK DESIGN BY STEPHANIE HUNTWORK

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  FOR

  CHARLIE SUGNET

  &

  ILIJA TROJANOW

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  A YANKEES-CAP-AND-RAY-BAN-WEARING BOY OF INDETERMINATE AGE gets out of a car that has just stopped. He climbs out gingerly, like a spider creeping up a crevice. He retrieves a carryall from the trunk of the car without help from the two men sitting in the front. The men are old army hands, and although they haven’t said anything to him, he knows that they do not think highly of him.

  The boy slings the carryall over his shoulder, nodding his thanks to the two men in the vehicle. They look away with obvious disdain; they do not wish to acknowledge his gratitude. He smiles with youthful bravado, betraying none of his trepidation. He does not want to fail; he cannot afford to fail. He is aware of the huge difference between martyring oneself and making a blunder of things and getting killed. Of course, he does not wish to die, not unless he has fulfilled his dream.

  He is small in stature, huge in ambition. On his first day as a draftee into Shabaab, the instructor, upset with him, had pulled him up by the scruff of his neck, shouting in Somali
, “Waxyahow yar!”—“You young thing!” The sobriquet stuck, and he answers to it now. The car reverses and he moves forward on the dirt road, his breathing heavy under the load he carries.

  It is hot, and just before noon he meets a woman in a full-body tent going in the opposite direction. The woman takes an interest in him: a small-boned, four-and-a-half-foot-tall figure—a dwarf, she thinks at first—hoisting a carryall bigger and heavier than he is. She watches him as he puts the carryall down on the ground and sighs with relief. She waits for him to remove his sunglasses before she will consider peeling off her face veil or entertaining any question from him.

  Deciding to be on an equal footing with him, she takes off her face veil and then crouches close enough to him, looking straight into his eyes in an effort to put him at ease. They exchange standard greetings, she addresses him in the may-peace-be-upon-you Somali greeting, Nabad, and he, in preference, uses the Arabic equivalent: Salaamu Calaykum.

  “Can I help you?” she says. “You seem lost.”

  He asks her to tell him the way to the qiblah.

  She takes her time, wondering if he is one of the young Shabaab mules assigned to do their dirty work. The poor sod must be mistaking the qiblah—the Arabic term for the direction in which a praying Muslim faces—for north, she thinks. She wonders if he is a grown man with the voice of a boy, or a boy in the body of a man. They stand on the dirt road, in East Wardhiigley, a rundown district of Mogadiscio, sizing each other up. The woman, Cambara, is on her way to the Bakhaaraha Market; she needs a few last items for the apartment she is preparing for her guests, Jeebleh and his journalist son-in-law, Malik, arriving on the morrow. Now she lights upon a thought, studying the young thing, that maybe he is passing himself off as someone he is not, just as she puts on the body tent before she leaves the house, as part of her disguise, like a theater prop. Somali women, who never used to wear veils, resorted to them when the strife began, in 1991—a protection from sexual harassment by armed youths. But lately, ever since 2006, when the Union of Islamic Courts took control of Mogadiscio, expanding their rule of Sharia law, veiling has become de rigueur. Women are punished if they appear in trousers or the less restrictive dresses that were common before the civil war.

  His hair is the color of ash and is cursed with kinks that no comb can smooth out. From the little she has heard so far, his voice has not broken. Yet his face crawls with the deep furrows she associates with the hardened features of a herdsman from the central region, where all of Somalia’s recent political instabilities have originated. Shabaab, the military wing of the Union of Islamic Courts, has been trying to terrorize the residents of the city into submission, and it appears to have succeeded to a degree. She assumes that he is one of the conscripts charged with “consecrating”—or rather, confiscating—a house in the neighborhood, from which he and his colleagues will launch attacks on their enemy targets. Cambara points south, sending him in the wrong direction, well away from the northeastern part of the city where she lives.

  YoungThing lifts his carryall and walks in the direction the woman has shown him. He shifts the burden of his load from one shoulder to the other, breathing loudly through his nose. He plays at being tougher than he is; he tries to tread lightly, even if it is obvious that his attempt is a sham—he can’t take two steps without faltering. Hampered by the weight he has to bear, he can no longer remember the details of the instructions he was given. No doubt he feels lucky to have been chosen for this delicate assignment cloaked in secrecy, his first mission. He will do anything to impress the commanders of the cell of which he is now a bona fide member. This brings a smile to his face, and briefly injects fresh energy into his gait.

  He loses his balance just as he recalls picking up the carryall earlier that day. He had been sent to see a heavily bearded man known by the nom de guerre Garweyne—BigBeard. BigBeard manages one of the largest computer shops in the Bakhaaraha Market—a sanctuary from within whose labyrinthine warrens the insurrectionists initiate frequent offensives. The market complex confuses anyone unfamiliar with its numerous dead ends, bounded by shacks and stalls that take half a day to construct and only a couple of hours to dismantle.

  In the carryall, BigBeard has put roadside mines, grenades and other explosive devices, small arms meant to make holes in airplane fuselages in the event of an Ethiopian raid, YoungThing assumes. In truth, BigBeard shared little intelligence with him directly, and YoungThing knows that it is not his place to ask questions. He can’t give in to curiosity, since any departure from instructions will earn him severe punishment. YoungThing understands this much: He is the advance member of a commando unit preparing the ground so that Shabaab can respond immediately to an Ethiopian invasion of Mogadiscio. He is an explosives trainee, but his job today is to consecrate a safe house.

  There are two men in charge of YoungThing’s unit—a select coterie of fighters sharing a central command. One of the leaders has the nom de guerre Dableh—FootSoldier. At the outbreak of the civil war, he was the commander of the largest weapons stockpile in the country, a colonel in the National Army appointed by Barre, the former dictator, himself. After the civil war began, the colonel changed sides and gave the warlord StrongmanSouth unfettered access to the arms cache, arming his ragtag clan militia and enabling them to run the head of state out of the city. Dableh has survived the civil war and changes in his masters’ fortune. When StrongmanSouth died, he lost no time in switching his allegiance to the Courts, aiding in their final triumph over the warlords, in 2006. Now, a few months on, he is contributing his military expertise to the plan to invade Baidoa, the seat of the weak Transitional Federal Government.

  The second man in the command structure is known as Al-Xaqq—“the Truth”—one of the ninety-nine names of Allah. A modest man, Al-Xaqq gives a more temporal meaning to his name and prefers to be addressed as TruthTeller. He is an explosives genius and a member of the high order of the Courts, a learned man, with expertise in people management. He takes pride in his formidable ability to identify potential suicide bombers. Al-Xaqq sleeps and eats with them—at times exacting harsh punishment and ordeals to test their dedication—cementing loyalty before the young men are sent out on their missions. At times, he is the only one privy to the details of a sortie, plotting operations to suit the martyr he has handpicked. A few months ago, after YoungThing failed to make the grade as a suicide bomber, Truth-Teller suggested he train in the explosives trade and seconded him to FootSoldier’s unit.

  YoungThing knows the protocol: BigBeard will have sent a text message to both FootSoldier and TruthTeller, confirming that YoungThing has picked up the carryall. Special events require special rituals, which are repeated many times over—each time an insurgent receives a cache of arms or a wad of cash from the men leading the insurrection.

  Exhausted from lugging the carryall, YoungThing takes a long break, unsure that he’s going the right way. According to the driver, it should have been no distance at all to the house. But either he has been going around and around in circles or he was misled by the woman in the body tent. He senses that he won’t be on schedule. He quickens his pace, turns left, then right, and then right again. He happens upon two men conversing and decides they must be the two sympathizers who are supposed to give him further directions. The men do not pay him any mind at first, even though he stands close by. It seems to YoungThing that they cannot decide what to make of him. Then he remembers the agreed-upon code. In the rehearsed voice of an actor reciting his lines, he asks, “Will one of you please tell me which way is north?”

  That the two men do not exactly match the descriptions given to him by his instructors does not worry YoungThing. Tired and hungry, he is becoming hazy about the details of his mission. The older of the men is slim and very dark, with intelligent eyes; he is in a sarong. His younger, stockier companion is in Bedouin robes.

  The robed man, his teeth stained brown, is the first to speak. He turns to his companion and, with the characteristic flou
rish with which a highly literate man talks to the unlettered, says, “This young thing wants to know the way north.”

  The older man replies, “What makes you think that he wants to know which way is north, when what he wants to know is the direction of the qiblah?”

  YoungThing can no longer remember which stranger, or on what street corner, he was supposed to ask for directions, using the code word qiblah. From the tone of the older man’s voice, he suspects that they are leading him on. A longer look at them throws him into a further muddle. The robed man is behaving curiously, as if he wants to reach out and open the carryall. Then, as if to prove his superior knowledge to the older man, he creates further uncertainty in YoungThing’s mind. He says, “Does the young man think that the way north always points the way to the qiblah?”

  Now doubts stir in the older man’s eyes, and his gaze, too, focuses on the carryall. He tells YoungThing to go back the way he came until he finds a big house with a green gate bearing the freshly painted inscription Allahu Akbar in red paint.

  “How far is the house with the inscription?”

  The older man replies, “It is a hundred and fifty paces to the four-way road. Then you turn right, and right again. That’s the way north, toward the qiblah, toward Mecca, the correct way. You can’t miss the green gate or the inscription in blood red. That’s the house you want.”

  YoungThing is barely out of earshot when the robed man bursts into derisory laughter, amused at the thought that they have sent the boy to the wrong property, which belongs to a business adversary of the older man’s. The home owner is out of the country and has been renting it to a family from a rival clan with a questionable political history. “Two birds with one stone,” he says.

  As YoungThing searches for the house with the green gate and the inscription, he blames the frailty of his memory on the fact that he has eaten no breakfast, and that a young thing like him can’t comprehend the intricate political games adults play. He suspects he is being used. Everything is a muddle. All at once, though, he finds the front gate with the inscription and he forgets his doubts. He walks past it and then takes a left turn. He wants the back gate, as per the directive. Here there is a high fence, which he must scale.