Crossbones

by Nuruddin Farah

  Now the car is slowing down. A man in a sarong and a T-shirt is standing in the middle of the road, holding a gun in his right hand. He flags them down.

  Dajaal pulls to the side of the road and cuts the engine, as instructed. They alight, and the man gestures them to benches in the shade, an indication that they could be here for a long while. Gumaad asks, “Under whose authority?”

  Dajaal gets a grip on Gumaad’s elbow and leads him toward the benches, although not without Gumaad asserting loudly that he will make a call to TheSheikh and all will be sorted out in no time. He says to the man in the sarong and the T-shirt, “We thought that checkpoints manned by armed militiamen loyal to the warlords were things of the past.”

  The man pays him no attention at all.

  As if to throw them further off course, another man arrives—an impressively large man, hairy of face, proud of bearing, slow of stride, with beady, penetrating, but unusually self-contained eyes. He has the longest, most unkempt beard Jeebleh has ever seen, reminiscent of a devout Sikh’s. His immaculate, all-white attire, which he wears the way a police officer might wear a uniform, consists of a tunic and pajama-like trousers, cut wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, the legs short enough to allow him to perform his ablutions without rolling them up. He carries two mobile phones, a ringing one in his right hand, a silent one in his left. Maybe there is a third mobile phone in the pocket of his tunic, which droops heavily as he strides forward. Gumaad whispers to Dajaal, “What is he doing here?”

  Dajaal says, “You never know with Garweyne. But tell me, is he no longer in the computer business? I thought he was doing very well lately, considering.”

  Gumaad says, “He is the rising star among those who have been inducted into the intelligence division of the military wing of the Courts.”

  “I’ll be damned!” says Dajaal.

  Malik overhears the conversation and thinks that, for all his size, the bearded man looks like a body builder, not an inch of flab on him.

  Jeebleh is thinking about the change in the city’s attire over the past decade. In the mid-nineties, for want of trained tailors, three-quarters of the men wore sarongs. Now Mogadiscio is awash in styles imported from as far away as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He is amazed at the variety of dress, both male and female, that he has seen in just the short time he has been here.

  BigBeard makes a beeline for Malik’s computer.

  “Is that your computer?” the man asks Malik.

  Malik stands firm, with his legs splayed and his body leaning back, as though preparing to shoulder in a resistant door.

  He says to BigBeard, “I am a Somali journalist living in America and have come on a visit, inspired by the exemplary events here.”

  “For whom do you write?”

  “I am a freelance journalist.”

  Malik recalls reading about journalists and writers visiting the Soviet Union in its day of communist glory. Those who gave cagey answers met with official reprimand and would not be issued permits. He takes the plunge. “I hope to write about the peace that has dawned in the land, thanks to the Union of Islamic Courts, which has wrested it out of the hands of the warlords and their associates.”

  BigBeard speaks as though desert sand he swallowed a lifetime ago is interfering with his speech pattern, altering its rhythm, impeding its natural flow, like a drain blocked with an avalanche of sludge. He says, “Give the computer here.”

  Malik’s eyes cloud with doubt as he realizes that the door he has meant to charge will not budge. But he remains silent, his expression stiffening. He furrows his forehead, more in confusion than anger, wondering why none of the others intervenes on his behalf.

  “Why?” Malik asks, choking on his anger.

  BigBeard has the astute look of a man who makes up his own rules as he goes along. Malik sees that there is no way he can force him to reverse the decision to dispossess him of his computer. He has met men like BigBeard before—brutes bullying journalists.

  “Because I say so,” BigBeard replies. His hands are busy in his beard, twining it; his tongue is plucking at his mustache. How Malik wishes he could strike the smirk off that face. Silence reigns. What can anyone do to forestall a crisis?

  Then Gumaad asks, “What if we refuse?”

  BigBeard almost achieves the impossible task of working his grin into a grimace. To Gumaad he says, “We—who is we? You and who else?”

  Nervous, they fidget. A subtle nod from Gumaad encourages Dajaal to say, “I’ve always believed that the difference between your lot and the warlords from whom you took control was your sense of respect. Don’t you think that our guests deserve respect?”

  BigBeard is a master at taking his time. Up close, Jeebleh sees the whiskers on his cheeks twitching like those of an angry cat. He says to BigBeard, “Can we see some identification, please? That is what the young people are saying.” He speaks with the politeness of someone needing not to lose both the battle to keep the computer and the war to recover it, if it is confiscated. There is no defeat in his eyes, only mild defiance.

  With the desert sand no longer audible in his voice, BigBeard says to Jeebleh, “I represent the authority of the Courts. To date, the Courts have not supplied us with identity cards. We work as volunteers. Therefore, you have to trust me on this. I advise you to cooperate for the good of all.”

  Jeebleh says, “What if he refuses?”

  BigBeard puts his hands in his pockets and knits his eyebrows together in the gesture of someone entertaining an unpleasant memory. At BigBeard’s command, four armed youths emerge out of a cubicle to the right of where the group is standing. The youths fan out, each in a dramatic way, as if they are mimicking a movie they have seen or some jihadi documentary they have been shown. They raise their gas-operated AK-47s and, standing with their feet apart, push the selector switches to automatic: they are ready to shoot, if provoked or ordered by BigBeard to do so. But just at this least likely moment, BigBeard volunteers his name. “I am Abu Cumar bin Cafaan,” he says, and he repeats that he is charged with ensuring that no objectionable computer software or pornographic material is imported into the country, in breach of the Islamic code of conduct.

  Malik grudgingly hands over his computer.

  Gumaad says to Malik, “Go in with him and type in your passwords so he can have access.”

  “There is no need,” BigBeard says.

  “No need?”

  BigBeard says, “I should disabuse you of the view that just because we bear Muslim names from the days of the Prophet, may Allah bless him, and do not answer to Johnny, Billy, or Teddy, we’ll have difficulty accessing a computer without a password. We are not as backward as you may think.”

  Dajaal says to Malik, “Give it to him and fear not what he might or might not do. We know how to deal with his kind.”

  Malik sits racked with despair.

  BigBeard says, “Dajaal and I—fancy bearing a satanic name and being proud of it!—have known each other for a very long time. He knows what I am capable of, this ally of the devil.”

  As BigBeard walks away with the computer, leaving the four of them to exchange looks, none of them knowing what to say or do, Jeebleh remembers that, in Islamic mythology, Dajaal is the name for the Antichrist. Anyhow, he hopes that, as matters stand, the four of them will not blame one another for what has taken place. What BigBeard is doing seems to have less to do with protecting against breaches in the Islamic code of conduct than with the settling of old scores with Dajaal. Malik is already comparing this latest experience with a long chain of previous encounters with the abuse of authority, from his detention by an Afghan warlord keen on Malik’s companion, a female journalist, to the Congolese strongman who confiscated his car, cash, and an assortment of valuables.

  Jeebleh calls, “Shall we wait?”

  “I don’t know how long it’ll take,” replies BigBeard. “I suggest you go and take a look around the city, enjoy your lunch, have a shower.” Then, indicati
ng Dajaal with his smug smile, he says to Jeebleh, “Send your driver and his sidekick to fetch your computer later.”

  Again, no one can think of anything to say.

  AS HE DRIVES AWAY, DAJAAL REMEMBERS BIGBEARD’S CHILDHOOD epithet, “the father of all lies, an uncle to deceit.” He drives fast, as though closing in on an elusive past in order to show the others what he has always seen. All he says, however, is this: “BigBeard is a man with more pseudonyms than anyone else I’ve ever known.”

  Dajaal is a military man; he speaks sparingly and is not given to emotional outbursts. He is cautious, concerned that his actions do not harm either Malik or Jeebleh. He and BigBeard go back a long way. He knows BigBeard and his family members for what they are: a self-destructive lot, the less said about them, the better for all. He is relieved that Malik and Jeebleh do not press him to speak.

  Jeebleh sits in back with Malik now, but Malik won’t respond to his solicitude. Jeebleh thinks how different people behave when their pride is hurt. Some sulk and withdraw into themselves, while others become jumpy, lose their cool. Where small sorrows make one incautious, Jeebleh reckons, big sorrows may render one tongue-tied. Malik is now entertaining a thoroughbred sullenness, neither looking in Jeebleh’s direction nor talking. He doesn’t even seem to be listening to Gumaad, who, emboldened by the others’ silence, blabbers away so excitedly no one can follow what he is saying. Mercifully, Malik hasn’t said anything that he may later regret.

  Unable to engage Malik, Jeebleh looks out of the window, sickened by the despoliation years of civil war have wrought on the city—as would be anyone who knew the metropolis in its “pearl of the Indian Ocean” days. The square mile of downtown, where at any one of five movie houses he watched Italian films in the original and other foreign films in their subtitled or dubbed versions, is utterly disfigured, and the historical districts are demolished. He thinks, There is no hurt worse than the hurt you cannot fully describe.

  Malik, meanwhile, is replaying in his head a scene from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, which he saw recently on DVD. He is recalling in particular the harrowed look on Peter O’Toole’s face when he emerges from the interrogation room, where he has undergone such suffering at the hands of his torturers. From then on, Lawrence is a changed man. Malik reminds himself that to be effective in his profession, he must not give in to personal anger. He must concentrate on boning up on everything Somali as speedily as possible, so that he can start writing about the place knowledgeably and without prejudice.

  Jammed up against the side of the car, as far away from Jeebleh as he can get in the confined space, Malik looks past Jeebleh at the ravaged streets of the metropolis. Something in the shape of anger-as-madness sticks in Malik’s gullet every time he visits a country in the throes of civil strife; but what makes this time unbearably hard to take is that this is his father’s country, a land of which his father has seldom spoken with affection.

  Both his parents were children of the British Empire, an offshoot of what Lawrence of Arabia had in mind to put together. His paternal grandfather, a Somali, worked as an interpreter and an accountant with his maternal grandfather, a Malay Chinese who’d been recruited to serve in Aden. Their children were schooled together, fell in love with each other, and married. Malik is of the view that perhaps an empire of a different thrust is now at work in Somalia. The Muslim world, from what he can tell, is at a crossroads, where several competing tendencies meet. One path is a burgeoning umma, a community of the faithful as conceived in the minds of Islamists who see themselves in deadly rivalry with both moderate or secularist Muslims and people of other faiths. The way Malik sees it, Somali religionists of radical persuasion are provoking a confrontation with the Ethiopian empire in hopes of pitting the Muslim world against Christian-led Ethiopia, even though Ethiopia, being militarily stronger and an ally of the United States, is very likely to gain the upper hand in the face-off. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan, two nations with nuclear potential, are locking horns. With Afghanistan turned into a theater and Chechnya haplessly caught in the fray, several countries’ political and territorial concerns converge at oblique angles. And of course there is the never-ending conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, which puts a large segment of the Muslim world in opposition to the Jewish state and the United States. Empires are no longer won by the musket, as that old imperialist Kipling argued Britain had done. An empire is won by those with the wherewithal to hold it, to subjugate it. Malik doubts very much that Shabaab can win a war, let alone, having won it, hold on to the conquered territories.

  By now, Malik’s dejection has spread inside the vehicle, like a contagion for which no one has a cure. Dajaal drives on; the car moves as though on autopilot. Gumaad appears troubled as he tries to get in touch with “someone” big in the Courts hierarchy to intercede with BigBeard. Each time, the line is busy (with optimism he lets everyone know), or it rings and rings and no one picks up (which he does not bother to tell them).

  Jeebleh notes the absence of youths with weapons roaming the streets, or armed clan-based militiamen high on drugs, intent on threatening the lives of those who refuse to do their bidding. Since his 1996 visit, most of the youths have grown beards and donned those white robes, save for the odd youth in military fatigues or an ill-matched uniform assembled from various post-collapse loyalties. The general collapse is still the same, though; houses with their insides caved in, with a Lego-like look to them, the floor below or the one above entirely missing.

  The great tragedy about civil wars, famines, and other disasters in the world’s poor regions, he thinks, is that the rubble seldom divulges the secret sorrows it contains. The technology, the forensics to determine what is what, scientifically, is not available; the dead are rarely identified or exhumed. Often no one knows how many have perished in the mudslide or the tsunami. One never gets to hear the last words that passed their lips, or what, in the end, caused their death: a falling beam, a failing heart, a spear of bullet-shattered glass? Or sheer exhaustion with living in such horrid circumstances day in and day out?

  Jeebleh cannot tell where they are in relation to the apartment, disoriented by fresh ruins from the latest confrontation between the warlords and the Courts, three months ago. One loses one’s sense of direction in a city that has suffered civil war savageries; one is, at the best of times, in want of the guidance of those who have continued to live in it. Hoping to help Malik get the hang of the city’s layout, he asks, “Where is Cambara’s current home in relation to the apartment?”

  Dajaal explains, “The Green Line marking off the territory between the two warlords is gone. But more roads have fallen into disuse and worse.”

  Malik says to Gumaad, “How do ordinary people with no cars move around? How is the transport here compared to other African cities?”

  “I’ve never been outside Somalia.”

  “How do you move about?”

  “There are ten-, fifteen-seater city hoppers-on. You flag them down and jump on, and pay your fare.”

  “Are they safe to take?”

  “That is how I came to the airport, on a fifteen-seater minibus,” Gumaad says. “I took it from close to where I live in Yaqshid, and then I took another from Makkal-Mukarramah Road to the airport. I had to wait long for the minibus that brought me to the airport, because the driver parked at a strategic spot and waited until there were enough passengers to make it worth his while to come. On the whole, there is peace, imposed through the Courts’ goodwill. And taking the bus is safe.”

  Dajaal says, “The peace imposed needs a government to make it last, a government to provide the city and its one and a half million inhabitants with social services: schools, hospitals, and so on. I doubt the Courts have the experience, the willingness, and the wherewithal to provide us with these.”

  “Given time, the Courts will,” Gumaad says.

  Dajaal says, “With all the infighting, the clan-based rivalry, and the corruption among top cadres,
the Courts are in no position to make peace work.”

  Gumaad explains how bad blood between various parties in the country has caused so many deaths and so much havoc. Dajaal and BigBeard, for example, have been enemies going back to when their families were neighbors and the two of them were young. “It’s mutual loathing born out of personal jealousies,” he maintains, then elaborates, “Dajaal here proved to be the more successful one, in every venture, while BigBeard’s efforts usually met with disaster. Dajaal did well professionally, he was a major in the army and raised a loving family and was blessed with a boy and a girl, both of whom had their own children. BigBeard has married five times, no children; and until recently, he was not doing well financially.”

  “Yet he gives himself such airs,” says Jeebleh.

  “A self-assured man wears no airs,” Dajaal says.

  Gumaad goes on, “It is a well-known fact that BigBeard has lately targeted Bile, accusing him of living with Cambara in sin, to some an indictable offense, punishable by public stoning.”

  Cambara had alluded to a religionist who was fixated on her cohabitation with Bile when she and Jeebleh spoke on the phone the previous week; but she gave no name. Now Jeebleh realizes he’s let himself be taken in by the hype about the Courts in general circulation among Somalis in the diaspora, who want to believe that the country has begun to turn a corner. It’s been his folly to invest his trust in them. He reminds himself that the dodgiest words to pass the lips of a politician are his affirmations of faith in God.

  Dajaal slows down and turns left into a parking lot that Jeebleh remembers from earlier days. Dajaal and Gumaad help carry the bags up the stairs and into the flat.

  There is something charming about the mess in the apartment, as if someone, with knowing chutzpah, has scattered books everywhere, making them appear to have fallen the way the petals of a geranium fall to the ground. Books—in a plethora of tongues and genres, about a miscellany of subjects—lie by the entrance into the apartment and sit orderly in the kitchen, spines showing. Books stand every which way in a metal rack; at the foot of the dining table; and in the toilet, on a low side table. Cleaned, dusted, the books are a great welcome to a professor of Italian literature and his journalist son-in-law. There is a TV set, too; from the wires showing, it looks to get cable as well.