Crossbones

by Nuruddin Farah

  Jeebleh asks Bile, “Why are you interested in the topic?”

  “Because one of my distant nephews, a former fisherman, bought a skiff and set up his own piracy unit in Xarardheere after a Korean fishing vessel shot at him and his companions when they tried to discourage their presence near their own fishing grounds. Shot at, injured, made jobless, and very upset, they set up a cooperative and, together with some of his mates, formerly fishermen, now unemployed, they armed themselves to fight back. First, they hijacked a yacht, made a small killing amounting to a few thousand dollars in ransom, and then they took a Korean ship and crew captive. They received a ransom in thousands of dollars.”

  “Only a few thousand dollars in ransom?”

  Jeebleh asks, “Do you think that vengeance is the motive behind these acts? They want to reclaim what is theirs by right, since the world cares little about the illicit fishing.”

  Bile says, “From what my nephew tells me, there isn’t much money in it. Somalia loses more in the amount of fish taken away, in the continued degradation of the environment, and so on and so forth.”

  Malik wonders aloud, “You mean there are no lavish weddings being staged, no formidable mansions being built in Eyl, Hobyo, and Xarardheere? The entire region is not flush with funds and full of luxury goods?”

  Bile replies, “All I know is what my nephew has told me. He speaks of ten thousand dollars apiece, much less than what the newspapers claim.”

  Malik asks, “So where does the money go?”

  “I keep thinking something doesn’t add up,” Cambara says.

  Jeebleh says, “Do you think then, Bile, that Cicero’s often repeated description of pirates as the ‘enemy of humanity’ does not necessarily tell the whole story, when it comes to the Somalis locally labeled as the nation’s coast guard?”

  “That may have been the case when thievery at sea was common and when all the peoples living by the sea could’ve been described as pirates. Which they were, pirates,” Bile says. “In fact, according to Thucydides, it was common among ancient Greeks to pursue thievery at sea as a lucrative vocation. Here, ‘piracy’ started only after the wholesale robbery of our marine resources.”

  Cambara says, “Truth be told, resorting to thuggery at sea and banditry on land have become normal as a result of two decades of civil war. Any other explanation is beside the point, as far as I am concerned.”

  Bile screws up his face, chews his food with the slow deliberateness of someone entertaining a nasty thought, and then says, “Anyhow, according to a book I’ve read, the Chinese female pirate Mrs. Cheng commanded a fleet larger than the navy of many countries in her day. She was some pirate, wasn’t she?”

  Malik says, “She must have been.”

  Cambara says, “Jeebleh tells me that your parents met and married in Aden. That’s interesting.”

  A sudden exhaustion makes Bile’s face assume a different shape, like a plant that has had too much sun and is now starting to wilt. His eyes droop, and his lips form themselves into an exhausted pout. When Cambara inquires if he needs help, whispering into his ear, Bile waves her off. Jeebleh thinks that Bile is behaving like a tired child refusing to go to bed.

  Cambara says, “You would think that Somalis had invented piracy, from the way the Western media talk about their exploits, paying more attention to it than whatever else is happening in the country.”

  “Maybe because of the hostage-taking?” Malik wonders aloud. “And because of the dangers to shipping lanes.”

  “But that’s not how the piracy started,” she says.

  Jeebleh says, “I am sure he knows that was not how the piracy started.”

  “Will you visit Puntland to write about the piracy there?” Cambara asks Malik.

  “I am interested in writing about every aspect that touches on the lives of Somalis,” Malik says. “The civil war and its repercussions. The Ethiopian invasion. The piracy and who funds it, where they get their intelligence before launching their attacks, how they receive the ransom payments.”

  Jeebleh says to Cambara, “I am sure I told you on the phone when we spoke that Ahl, Malik’s older brother, is arriving in Puntland as we speak, to locate Taxliil, his runaway stepson. We believe he’s holed up there with the militants.”

  Bile perks up when he hears all this. “You see, my dearest, everything happens for a reason. Illegal fishing in Somali waters and the resultant piracy. The Ethiopian invasion. The American involvement in Somali politics. Al Qaeda’s presence in the peninsula. The Courts and their failings, apparent only to those of us who live in Mogadiscio. Somalis in the diaspora say, ‘But at least they brought peace to the country.’ Those of us who live inside the country and who know better say, ‘At what price?’ I doubt if that has been worth it. After all, the devastation being visited on the country following the Ethiopian invasion could have been avoided. If only!”

  Jeebleh’s gaze steadies and focuses on Bile, who is giving him a sharp look, as though urging him to level with him.

  “I know that there are two or more sides to every story,” Jeebleh says. Then he surprises even himself by blurting out, “We, too, have had a run-in with the capricious authoritarian nature of the Courts.”

  Malik, whose spoon is heaped with food, stops with it midway between his plate and his mouth, and stares at his father-in-law. His nostrils flare, touching off an alarm signal in Jeebleh. Malik is plainly unhappy that Jeebleh has chosen to speak about their encounter with BigBeard.

  An uneasy hush descends. Bile purses his lips in self-blame. He says to Malik, “Time I retired.” To Cambara, he adds, “Please don’t get up. Stay with our guests.” And he takes leave of Jeebleh, saying, “See you anon.”

  Self-conscious, they fall silent and look away. Bile takes a long time to get to the stairway and much longer to go up the steps one at a time. When he has gone out of sight and she assumes he cannot hear her, Cambara explains, “Bile tires easily.”

  Jeebleh is understandably worried that Cambara may one day up and leave, as the younger partner in a couple often does, and he wonders what will become of his friend. He remembers a married couple younger than he and with whom he has been friends for years. The woman, younger than the husband by some ten years, opted out of the marriage just before turning fifty. Soon after, she entered a lesbian relationship, because the thought of a husband demanding sex after her menopause put her off men forever. She explained that she dreaded submitting to her husband’s insatiable advances, and felt it would be easier with other women. Jeebleh never found out if that was the case, as he never dared ask her when they met in the common room at the college where they taught.

  No one wants to eat any more. All three get to their feet, and Malik, eager to go on a tour of the city, gathers the plates and takes them to the kitchen. He returns to find Jeebleh chatting to Cambara about his family and, most touchingly, about his granddaughter and how bright-eyed she is. Jeebleh acknowledges Malik with a heartwarming smile.

  Cambara says to Malik, “Be on your guard; journalists are under constant threat. There are fifth columnists, some working in cahoots with the religionists and others with foreign forces intent on destabilizing an already destabilized country.”

  Jeebleh thinks that Cambara has fallen afoul of the religionists because she is her own woman, unbending in her determination to do what she pleases. He recalls Dajaal informing him that she started wearing a headscarf and then the veil to minimize her unceasing quarrels with the men averse to seeing women with uncovered hair, or young women in trousers, or in dresses deemed to make men lust after them. Women must hide their bodily assets so that the men in whom fires of lust are burning may not be tempted into sin. It must be hard on Cambara, trained as a makeup artist and an actor, not to be able to express her womanliness, if that is what she has a mind to do.

  No wonder some of the religionists want to run her out of the city where she has found the happiness that eluded her in Toronto.

  Conveniently, Dajaal
is at the door, ready to drive them back to the apartment.

  Cambara stares into Jeebleh’s eyes with great intensity. There is a hint of sorrow—of loneliness with depth, Jeebleh thinks, and he remarks that she runs her tongue repeatedly over her lips and seems to be holding back tears. She does not want them to go, even if she can’t bring herself to say so; she wants the good-bye to last forever. Malik, for his part, thinks that there is nothing like the aloneness of a woman looking after a man she loves, in a city like Mogadiscio.

  It is then that she comes out with it. “I wish you were staying here with us, both of you. Only we thought, or rather Bile thought, that Malik would want to have his own place, where he could do his writing and conduct his interviews in peace. Also, we have a young man staying in the annex, Robleh, the younger brother of a close friend of mine, a die-hard supporter of the Courts. He spends all his time in the mosques, politicking. I would love for you to meet him. He is some sort of talent spotter for the radical religionist fringe.”

  “I’d very much like to meet him,” says Malik.

  “Robleh is into everything the religionists do,” she says. “Who knows, he may know someone who can assist you in finding what has become of the runaway Taxliil. What do you think?”

  Dajaal, who has now joined them in the foyer, is pointing at his watch, indicating they are running out of daylight. Like a mother with a baby sleeping in another room, Cambara responds to a movement upstairs: Bile flushing the toilet and shuffling slowly back to bed.

  “I must go,” she says, hugging them, and they are off.

  Jeebleh isn’t keen on the city tour, but he doesn’t fuss. He sits silently while Dajaal acts as tour guide, answering Malik’s questions. Malik takes copious notes as Dajaal points out buildings, gives the names of streets, and spells the names of the districts through which they happen to be traveling. Dajaal has the sociology of it down pat. Malik writes in his notebook, “The heart sickens.”

  Jeebleh finds a generic featurelessness to the city’s destruction, as if the impact of a single bomb, detonating, had brought down the adjacent buildings, or they had collapsed in sympathy. The city is oddly ostentatious in its vulgarity, like a woman who was once a beauty refusing to admit that the years have caught up with her. Dajaal says, “It’s an in-your-face city, whose various parts, hamlets of no mean size, are less than the whole. It extends in many directions, in utter disorder, as if a blind city planner has determined its current shape.”

  Women in niqabs—veils—and body tents go past, treading with much care, in streets chockablock with minibuses speeding down the dusty roads. One loses one’s bearings in a city with few landmarks, no road markings, and no street names.

  Dajaal says, for Malik and Jeebleh’s benefit, “The city has undergone many changes, in the residents it attracts and in the services it renders or doesn’t render anymore.”

  Here, a set of dirt alleys leading into a maze of dead ends. There, hummocks of rubble accumulated over the years through neglect and lack of civic maintenance; kiosks, mere shacks, built bang in the center of what was once a main thoroughfare, now totally blocked. “How this city could do with the return of law and order in the shape of a functioning state!”

  Malik writes away furiously, happy with the tour. Jeebleh suffers in shocked sadness.

  Dajaal pulls off the road and stops. He asks Jeebleh if he remembers where they are. Jeebleh has no idea. He looks out in search of any distinctive features that might guide him, but finds none. Dajaal explains, “The Green Line dividing the territories of the two warlords during your last visit used to be here.”

  Satisfied now that he has filled several pages with his scribbles, Malik asks, “How far are we from the Siinlay?” He is referring to the spot where the fiercest battle between the CIA-funded warlords and the religionists occurred, ending with the religionists running the warlords out of the city.

  “Siinlay is far,” replies Dajaal.

  “What about the Bakhaaraha market complex?”

  “Too late,” says Dajaal.

  Jeebleh adds, “Besides, you need a whole day.”

  Dajaal looks at his watch and switches on the radio, just in time to hear a religionist announcing that the army of the faithful in control of much of Somalia is declaring war on Ethiopia.

  Jeebleh says, “This is madness.”

  Dajaal says, “This foolish man declaring war on Ethiopia thinks, erroneously, that invading the strongest military power in this part of Africa will be a walk in the park. It won’t be.”

  Silence reigns until they get to the apartment.

  Nearly an hour after dropping them off, Dajaal telephones Jeebleh to confirm that he will be bringing Gumaad along, as Malik has requested. Malik is interested in hearing Gumaad’s reaction to the declaration of war. He wants to know what an ardent supporter of the Courts will say.

  Jeebleh is in the kitchen, improvising a light meal. He is troubled, because he has just learned from Malik that in addition to removing the naked photographs of Malik’s baby daughter and several newspaper clippings and files, BigBeard has fed his computer a vicious virus that has effectively ruined the machine. At present, it works fitfully, coming on and then going off and sometimes balking when Malik attempts to restart it.

  Jeebleh is sad that so far things have not worked out to his and Malik’s expectations; he regrets that neither he nor Dajaal took preventive measures to avoid Malik suffering at the hands of a moonlighter claiming to be serving the interests of the Courts. Exhausted, his eyes closing as though of their own accord, Jeebleh is back now to the remote past, where he pays a nostalgic visit to his and Bile’s childhood and revisits his student days in Italy with Bile and Seamus. Thinking about the visit with Bile earlier today, the memory leaves him dispirited.

  Many years separate his and Bile’s shared milestones, each representing a turning point in a life fully realized. Jeebleh still wishes to discharge his duty to his mother, on whose grave he will call at some stage, maybe alone, maybe with Malik—but only on the proviso that he does not write about it in one of his articles. He wants to protect his mother’s memory.

  A knock on the door of the apartment coincides with the ringing of Jeebleh’s cell phone. Dajaal is outside. Jeebleh dismantles the security contraption, unbolting and then pulling back the metal sheet that covers the door. Then he pushes back the plating, which serves as a further impediment, meant to bar gunmen from gaining unwelcome access.

  Gumaad is the first to enter, dressed to the nines, hands empty; he is all grins. He strikes Jeebleh as less of a finished product now that he is trying to impress. Dajaal follows, pushing the door wider. Malik joins them in time to see that he is carrying what looks like a platter wrapped in a handwoven shawl, the kind with which corpses of worthy Muslims are shrouded on their way to the burial grounds.

  Once inside, Dajaal heads for the dining table, Gumaad on his heels to clear enough space for the platter. Dajaal sets it down with consummate care, as one might set down a soup bowl full to the brim. He says, “The best lamb dish Mogadiscio can offer. Compliments of Cambara and Bile.”

  “How thoughtful,” Malik says.

  “This is not homemade, is it?”

  Dajaal replies, “Of course not.”

  As all four prepare to tuck in, Jeebleh remembers a Mogadiscio tradition, in which families would send food over to the rows and rows of rooms facing a central courtyard. Those were the rooms of the unmarried young men of the family, who had only sleeping provisions, but no cooking facilities. If they had jobs and could afford it, the bachelors would eat at restaurants in the evenings, preferring not to join the rest of the family in the evening’s fare of beans and rice. There would be a glass of boiled and sugared milk waiting for them on their return home.

  The lamb, soft-looking, juicy and cooked in the traditional way, is on the right side of brown, and sits on a bed of rice cooked in saffron and garnished with a mix of vegetables. The dish reignites in Jeebleh a memory of long-ago day
s at an institution called Jangal Night Club, famous for its lamb dishes. The restaurant got its name from its location in the bushes. You sat right under the acacia trees, trimmed into the shape of umbrellas, in the company of a young woman. Waiters flitted about in the semidarkness, bearing kerosene lamps to show clients the way to their private eating enclosures. You placed your order but the waiters would dawdle, allowing the couple sufficient time to “do their thing.” When they returned, carrying a kerosene lamp in one hand and the food platters in the other, they would announce their presence and not enter the enclosure until you bade them to.

  Jeebleh is certain that the religionists wouldn’t permit such an establishment to function these days, but he asks anyway. “By the way, what’s become of Jangal?”

  Dajaal says, “This food is from Jangal.”

  Jeebleh says, “I am surprised to hear that.”

  “Jangal has recently reopened, with a new management, in a hotel,” Dajaal explains. “The city’s top-ranking religionists are the regulars there, so no fooling around in the bushes, necking or making love on the quick. The chef has not lost his magical touch, though—the lamb is still the best in town.”

  Malik says, “Let’s eat. What’re we waiting for?”

  They wash their hands with hot water and soap, preparing to eat with their fingers. Malik remarks how expertly Jeebleh distributes the choicest lamb portions in the unmistakable manner of a patriarch presiding over a dinner table, ensuring that everyone gets his share and eats his fill. Jeebleh for his part observes how different Malik’s style of eating is from theirs. He opens his palm flat, then forms it into the shape of a spade, picks the rice and some meat, and forms them into a ball before licking away mouthfuls of it. Maybe that is the way they eat where he originally comes from.

  Malik showers compliments on the food after every second mouthful, and heaps accolades on Cambara for suggesting that Dajaal bring it. After dinner, when the others are busy stacking the dishes and washing them, he goes into his room and reemerges with a tape recorder. Again his heart is beating angrily, because he knows that until he has bought a new computer, he has to write everything down in longhand.