Crossbones

by Nuruddin Farah

  There are flowers in vases and new curtains, and the rooms have been aired, the beds turned down—details that point to the delicate touch of a woman. In the bedrooms, there are hand towels, soaps, flyswatters, and mosquito nets, along with notes of welcome from Cambara and Bile, saying among other things, “We wish you were staying with us, and maybe you will—eventually. We’ll see.”

  “Wow, so many books,” says Gumaad, who from the looks of him may never have read a book from cover to cover, and is amused at the excitement they have produced in the visitors, like children in a toy shop. He looks from Jeebleh to Malik, and then at the apartment, adding, “I’ve never known a place like this.”

  Dajaal insists on pointing out where things are, like a hotel bellhop. Here is the soap; here are the towels. The security system includes a metal plate huge as a door: you lock it from the inside when you are in and use the burglar bars on the windows and the one on the door when out. Jeebleh shows them how to work these contraptions, explains which metal extension is meant for which hole. He tells them how best to engage the locks in haste, in the event of an unexpected danger. “Securing the place is very important. You must be prepared at all times. Mogadiscio is a dangerous place, but you can make it less so. Please keep that in mind.”

  Lately, the apartment has been unoccupied. Bile has moved in with Cambara. Raasta, Bile’s niece—a friend to peace, who liked to say that “in a civil war, there is continuous fighting, because of grievances that are forever changing”—and simple Makka—“who smiled, crying, and cried, laughing”—are now grown and in Dublin. They are attending university and remedial school, respectively, under the eye of Bile and Jeebleh’s friend Seamus, who is spending more time in Ireland in order to be close to his bedridden mother. Jeebleh hopes to see them all there shortly, after he has helped Malik to settle in and hopefully helped to find the missing Taxliil.

  Dajaal leads Malik and Jeebleh to the kitchen. He opens the fridge and points out the pantry, where the tinned foods are. Then he runs them through the mobile phones, which have local SIM cards, with prepaid airtime, as U.S. mobile phones are not compatible with those available here. He dials his number on each, to register it in electronic memory so that they may call him whenever they wish to do so. Then he makes sure that Bile’s and Cambara’s coordinates are there as well. Satisfied, he gives each of them a mobile phone, ready for use.

  They all end up in a room with a sea view—it was Seamus’s for much of the time he was in the country, and later it served as Bile’s. Jeebleh offers it to Malik. Out of deference to his father-in-law, Malik declines, since Jeebleh is going to be in Mogadiscio for only a few days, but Jeebleh won’t hear of it. “I want you to have the best there is in this city, my dearest Malik,” he says, and they hug and touch cheeks.

  From there, they go to Bile’s former room, which will become Jeebleh’s. Malik is looking more relaxed, realizing perhaps that he has been caught in the crosscurrents of a century-old quarrel between Dajaal’s family and BigBeard’s, and has simply stepped into a counterpunch. And since no one has said anything to cause a conflagration, there are no flames to douse. There is truth in the saying that the hearts of fools are in their mouths.

  Malik wants to be alone in the room with the sea view. Jeebleh knows how keen he is on ritual. He wishes to get to know his room better in order to domesticate it, a concept that will barely make sense to a Somali pastoralist. Once, on a family trip, Malik refused to unpack his clothes until he had communed with his room’s vital force and exorcised it of its past demons. Maybe communal and personal superstitions come to the fore and dominate when one is confronted with the foreignness of a place. Jeebleh understands this as the superstition of a man thrown into the deep end of a conflict, who has to consider every aspect of his surroundings. To get the others out of the room, he offers to make tea, and they leave Malik to his rituals.

  As Jeebleh makes tea, Gumaad rattles on nervously over the telephone to a friend of his, and Dajaal silently plots his next move. Jeebleh hopes that when Malik reemerges, he will be in his element. One might consider today’s incident as a rite of passage, even if Jeebleh cannot bring himself to say it. The thing is: How well does he know Malik? Does one ever have intimate knowledge of in-laws, with whom one is by nature formal?

  Suddenly, Dajaal says to Gumaad, “Let’s go.”

  Dajaal speaks like a man who has lit on a bright idea, on which he must act instantly. He won’t hear Jeebleh’s suggestion or Gumaad’s appeal to stay for their tea, which is almost ready.

  “What’s the hurry?” Gumaad asks.

  Dajaal says, “Tea later. Now we pick up the computer.”

  Gumaad is insistent. “What’s the rush?”

  “Have you ever heard of the proverb that asserts that where water recedes, crocodiles proliferate?” Dajaal asks.

  Gumaad challenges. “What’s your point?”

  But Dajaal is at the door, waiting, and then out of it as soon as Gumaad joins him.

  Alone, Jeebleh drinks his tea, and thinks back to the days when the former dictator ran the country, and when censorship was at its severest; when telephone tapping was common; when one handed over his passport to the immigration officer at the airport on returning from abroad and was expected to collect it from the Ministry of the Interior a week later. There is nothing new, is there? The present situation is nothing but dictatorship by another name. He leafs through an illustrated picture book of ancient Mogadiscio, thinking that Somalis, long familiar with dictatorships of socialist vintage, are now getting accustomed to a brand of religionist authoritarianism. But the imposition of will by religious fiat is still the imposition of will.

  Jeebleh also worringly remembers reading about the target assassination of several former army officers, peace activists killed at home late at night in full view of their wives and children, intellectuals eliminated, allegedly, by Shabaab operatives, who saw them as threats to their Taliban-inspired interpretation of Islam.

  Dajaal telephones Jeebleh to inform him that they have picked up the computer, no problem, and they are on their way back. Jeebleh inquires whether BigBeard or one of his minions has bothered to explain what they have done to the computer, and if by any chance they deleted files or found material of a pornographic nature and removed it. Dajaal says, “He has deleted several files that were not complimentary about the Courts and the photo of a nude girl serving as a screen saver.”

  It rankles Jeebleh that BigBeard has deemed the photograph of his one-year-old granddaughter, soaped and naked as she stands in a bathtub, “pornographic.” It goes to show how much energy religionists of the parochial variety squander on matters of little or no significance.

  Malik joins him in the kitchen, refreshed and ready to take on the world, Jeebleh thinks. He informs Malik that Dajaal has retrieved the computer and is on his way back. When Malik asks for details, Jeebleh tells him that some of the files have been deleted, because they have been found to be uncomplimentary to the Courts.

  “Is anything else deleted?” Malik wants to know.

  Jeebleh tells him about the photo.

  Malik says nothing. Jeebleh feels the sense of stress spreading, with Malik biting his lower lip, too angry to speak. Jeebleh thinks how stresses produce inexplicable results and he wonders how the stresses they are all under, the strain that is bound to invade them—Malik, Ahl, and himself—will affect them. What will they be like when they crack up? What will Malik be like when the nervous tension makes him go to pieces? He watches with worry as Malik steps away and stands before the mirror on the wall in the living room and takes a good look at his reflection. Jeebleh senses that even to himself Malik must look older in a matter of moments, rugged and more wrinkled, his face careworn.

  Dajaal returns alone and gives the computer without further explanation to Malik. Malik handles it with care the way a mother handles a sick child who is asleep. He takes it to the table in his future workroom off the kitchen, without bothering to open it. />
  Jeebleh asks, “Where is Gumaad?”

  “He took public transport,” Dajaal replies.

  Jeebleh’s mobile phone rings. It is Cambara, saying, “Where are you all? Bile and I are waiting, and the lunch is getting cold.”

  “We’re coming,” Jeebleh assures her.

  AHLULKHAIR, KNOWN TO FAMILY AND CLOSE FRIENDS AS AHL, OLDER brother to Malik and the director of a Minneapolis-based center tasked with researching matters Somali, calls in sick, the first time he has done so in his long career as an educator. The truth is, the growing trend among Somali youths to join the self-declared religionist radical fringe, Shabaab, has thrown him off balance. Taxliil, his stepson, has now been gone more than six months, and is suspected to be somewhere in Somalia. In an earlier rumor, the runaway youth was seen in Kismayo, a coastal city that is in the hands of Shabaab and deemed too dangerous to visit. He was said to be training as a suicide bomber. But more recently they have heard, relayed to Ahl’s wife, Yusur, via her close friend Xalan, whose husband, Warsame, received it from a man in the Puntland Intelligence Service, that Taxliil, along with a couple of Shabaab-trained diehards, is headed for Bosaso. Warsame and Xalan live in Bosaso and have offered to host Ahl when he arrives in the region in a few days, in search of Taxliil. Nobody is sure of the whereabouts of the other twenty or so Somali-American youths who have vanished from their homes (in various parts of the United States, but principally from Minnesota), but the rumor that Taxliil has been dispatched to Puntland, hurriedly promoted to the assignment of liaising with the pirates in a bid to build a bridge between them and Shabaab, is gaining plausibility. Taxliil is said to have served twice as an interpreter to a delegation from the Courts, to help them to communicate with hostages, some of them Muslim, held by Somali pirates.

  Ahl’s whole body has lately been out of kilter, so unbalanced that on occasion he has been incapable of coordinating the simplest physical demands. A month ago, he woke up just before dawn from a deep sleep, and, needing very badly to pee, sat up, ready to do just that. Only he never got to the bathroom; he wet himself, like a baby.

  Malik and Jeebleh vowed to ask around about Taxliil when they reached Somalia, attempting to trace his movements in the country, but Ahl knew he must go to Puntland himself. Of course, there is no guarantee that Taxliil is in Puntland, or that any of them—Ahl, Malik, or Jeebleh—will locate him. Or that even if they do so, the young fellow will be willing to return with them to Minneapolis.

  It is no easy matter preparing for a trip to Somalia these days. The country has been in the throes of unending violence for the past two decades. Moreover, Ahl and Malik, born and raised in Aden, were brought up to think of Somalia as their father’s land—and even the old man himself never knew or visited the place. Even so, he made sure his sons spoke the language from childhood. Although the country is unfamiliar, Somalia’s troubles haven’t been very far from their minds.

  In preparation for his visit, Ahl has taken the required vaccinations and has begun ingesting his weekly malaria tablets. He has also been collecting as much information as he can on Puntland, poring over maps and consulting others on what to do, where to go, and whom to contact. He has been in touch with Xalan, whom his wife, Yusur has known since childhood. Ahl knows from her that Xalan’s nephew Ahmed-Rashid, her older sister Zaituun’s son, has been missing for more than a year from Columbus, Ohio, vanished during his first year at a community college there. But because Zaituun, the boy’s mother, doesn’t seem bothered about his disappearance, Xalan and Warsame and the rest of the family act as if they are not worried, either. Perhaps this has something to do with the bad blood that exists between the two sisters, Xalan and Zaituun, although they both live in Bosaso. At any rate, Yusur has assured him, it won’t affect his rapport with Xalan.

  Ahl has trusted this and given the dates of his visit to Xalan in the hope that, with her husband’s help, she will set in motion security arrangements for him. He prefers putting up in a hotel to staying with her and her husband for the first couple of days, if only to get an initial take on the place and a grip on his own priorities. He has his round-trip ticket to Bosaso via Paris and Djibouti. Xalan has offered to have Warsame pick him up from the airport and has confirmed that she has booked a room for him in a hotel.

  Sitting with a book about Puntland open before him, Ahl has his cell phone by his side, willing it to ring; the landline is also within his reach. He is anxious to hear from Malik, who will have just landed in Mogadiscio. He wants to know if everything has gone according to plan. The night before, with Yusur on night shift, he stayed up late watching Al Jazeera, the BBC World Service, and CNN; and supplementing the information gleaned from these sources by reading American and European newspapers online. He wants to know the latest about the impending Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

  The phone rings: Yusur asks if he has heard from Malik. When he replies that Malik hasn’t called, she lets out a whimper. Ahl reminds himself that he must remain strong for everyone’s sake. His wife has a way of pulling him down with her to a point so low that there is nothing but despair. Since her son left, she has been prone to long bouts of depression; at times, she has found it difficult to hold down her nursing job at a hospital. Of late she has been working night shifts at an old people’s home, and she seldom comes home even during the day. There is always something to do at an old people’s home, especially for a mother desperately mourning her missing son.

  When Ahl arrived in the Twin Cities in the mid-1980s, there was only one other Somali in town, a delectable young woman studying art. He had been recruited from the UK, where he had taken his Ph.D. in linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, to teach in the Education Department at the University of Minnesota. He bought an apartment in downtown St. Paul large enough to host Malik two or three times a year, between assignments for the Singapore-based daily in which he published his syndicated pieces. The two brothers set themselves apart from their birth communities, hardly socializing with the Yemenis with whom they had grown up in Aden, or with the new influx of Somalis with whom they shared a loose-knit communality. Later, when Minnesota became inundated with Somalis because the then governor offered them better facilities than they could have enjoyed in San Diego, Nashville, or other places where they had initially been concentrated, the two brothers communicated in whichever language would exclude those they did not wish to understand them: Somali when among Arabs, Chinese when among Somalis, and English with each other and when they wanted to be understood.

  Malik made a name for himself as a foreign correspondent. Their mother went back to Malaysia to look after her own aging parents, and their father to Somalia, his ancestral land, where, bizarrely, he melted into the rangelands of the north, tending hundreds of camels he had bought with the help of herdsmen in his employ. Their old man went totally native, as Malik liked to say, and married a woman in her late teens to produce additional offspring, in hope of making sure that his bloodline would not die out, a responsibility he no longer trusted either of his sons could fulfill.

  Though neither had regular contact with either parent, the brothers went out of their way to keep each other abreast of one another’s whereabouts, troubles, endeavors, and successes. Occasionally, Malik would disappear from view for months, covering some terrible war unfolding in yet another wretched, remote country. Then he would be back, exhausted from travel and needing Ahl to listen to his adventures and to read the pieces he had written. A run of intelligent women had fallen for him, and he’d had brief affairs with many of them.

  Ahl was the first to marry. He met Yusur, a Somali woman seven years his junior, at a refresher course in public health meant for Somalis newly arrived in Minneapolis. He had given a lecture on teaching Somali grammar to non-native speakers of the tongue. He and Yusur struck a heartfelt amity immediately when they talked but maintained a deferential distance for quite some time, knowing that no closeness between them was possible. She was
separated from her husband and lived alone with her infant son. Her marriage was troubled—she had an unemployed husband who passed his days chewing qaat with his likewise jobless mates. To a man, they received welfare benefits and, when possible, sponged off their wives. Yusur worked and attended classes part-time and so had to hire a babysitter. Not only was this expensive, but her husband’s bad behavior reached new depths when he was arrested for sexually assaulting the babysitter.

  Yusur’s in-laws were furious when she declined to pay the lawyer who had been hired in an attempt to have the charge reduced from rape to aggravated assault. And when her husband was finally released and she wouldn’t have him back, her in-laws made physical threats against her. In the end, his family, fearing he would continue to be a blight to their name, sent him off to Detroit to cool his heels and then helped him move to Toronto, where he submitted his papers as a freshly arrived Somali by virtue of a slight change to the order of his names.

  Yusur and Ahl saw each other discreetly for a long time before becoming man and wife. Their wedding was private, known only to Malik and his parents. Their mother graced the occasion with her presence, but their father merely sent a terse telegram from Hargeisa: “You have my blessings.”

  The boy, Taxliil, and Ahl developed a father-son rapport, and while he didn’t use the word, Taxliil behaved as though Ahl were his father.Ahl, in turn, made sure Taxliil was not lacking for anything. For most Somali children in the diaspora, he was aware, life was a chore: punishments at home; humiliation at school; mothers not assisted with the children, fathers seldom involved in raising their offspring. In many homes, relatives came and went from Somalia, bearing horror stories about what was happening in their country. The phones would ring at two, three, or four in the morning, the caller needing money to pay the burial expenses of a clansman killed in an intermilitia skirmish back home. With all the turmoil and the constant noise of the television, youngsters often lacked the will, the peace of mind, and the time to do their schoolwork.