Crossbones

by Nuruddin Farah

  Malik adds, “I’ll discuss the matter with Qasiir, and then we’ll firm it all up in your and Dajaal’s presence later. I’d like to receive Dajaal’s backing; it’s proper to do so.”

  “Good idea,” Jeebleh agrees.

  WHEN JEEBLEH IS BUZZED INTO BILE AND CAMBARA’S HOUSE, HE finds the maid preparing to leave. Bile, seated, welcomes him with a warm handshake. He looks better. As Bile motions Jeebleh to a chair, the maid says, “Please, Bile, tell Cambara that you’ve asked me to leave early before I finished the job she asked me to finish. Please, please do so, because I don’t want her to be upset with me.”

  Jeebleh thinks she can’t be very good at her job, considering the unswept corners where the dust has gathered, the unwashed dishes in the sink. Surely jobs as cushy as this are hard to come by in a city with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world.

  Bile says, “I’ll tell Cambara that.”

  But the maid lingers until Bile shakes his head in annoyance and says, “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  With her gone, Jeebleh and Bile cursorily revisit their shared past, as childhood playmates raised like brothers in the same household through their years in Padua.

  Now Bile gives Jeebleh news that pleases him no end: of the three lemon trees that Jeebleh planted at his mother’s grave site, two have already fruited, and the mango tree is producing fruits the size of a monkey’s head as well as providing shade to visitors at the cemetery. Bile says, “I’ve been there only twice in the past year, I am afraid, once in Dajaal’s company, the second time in Cambara’s.”

  “I will treasure the memory of your kindness.”

  “Come, come, she was my mother, too.”

  Moved, Jeebleh begins to blink away tears, and the palms of his hands reach upward, bloodlessly pale as a lizard’s underside. Bile looks away, tracing the life line, the head line, the love line, the sun line, and finally the fate line of his own palm with his forefinger, as a blind man might. What a journey it has been, two friends taking parallel roads for a lifetime informed by the same ideals. Each served long prison terms as well, the last few years of Bile’s in solitary confinement. Then their fates took them to opposing destinations: Jeebleh’s, as a professor at a college in the United States and as a father of two daughters, one of whom has blessed him with a grandchild. Bile dedicates his life to the ideals of philanthropy; it is a great pity that civil wars do not admit the principle of charity toward others.

  Bile is often off-kilter, prone to mood changes when he takes medicine and sick like a dog when he does not. His back and knees are the death of him, thanks to those years in cramped confinement. Today his shirt buttons are in the wrong holes, but Jeebleh won’t draw attention to this, or to the sleep in the corners of his eyes, the dried toothpaste on his chin, or his unzipped fly. He’ll only embarrass his friend; no one is else around, anyhow. He and Bile are no strangers to each other. Bile involuntarily issues a sound without being conscious of it. Jeebleh thinks, It happens to the best of us, like talking in our sleep, or snoring.

  Taking their time, unrushed, they move to the kitchen. Bile sits while Jeebleh prepares a light repast for him; he must eat before taking his tablets. While Jeebleh prepares noodles in lemon and garlic sauce with freshly chopped chilis, Bile snacks on cheese and other delicacies Jeebleh presents to him. Unasked, Bile talks about the rapport between employers and employees in civil war Mogadiscio, pointing out that the maid is tetchy. Harmony between employer and employed is highly prized here in these troubled times, everyone fearing that things can quickly get out of hand when one party resorts to using the gun as the arbiter in the smallest dispute.

  “Is that what she’ll do if you tell her off?”

  Bile replies, “If you have a dispute about the overtime due to her or, God forbid, fire her, a couple of youths bearing guns will turn up to waste you in less time than it takes to stub out a cigarette.”

  It has become a common feature of the civil war for armed youths to kill volunteer doctors working for Médecins sans Frontières or one of the UN bodies because of a spat over some paltry sum of money.

  “Haven’t the religionists put a stop to that?”

  “Everyone, including the religionists, is playing a wait-and-see game,” Bile says, “and no one has done anything about the firearms. Gun owners will bury them, stash their weapons, waiting to spot the weaknesses in the structures the religionists have put into place, in hope of exploiting them. The current situation is no different from that of 1993, when the U.S. Marines were first deployed. Then the warlords and their allies engaged in wait-and-see trickery until they identified the fault line in the indecisive ineptitude of the Americans. Basically, every gun-wielding youth wanted to know whether the Marines were peacemakers or peace enforcers. StrongmanSouth pursued the weakness of the U.S. rationale, and he maneuvered matters to his advantage when he played dirty, dragging an American corpse through the streets of the city. You can be sure the same will happen to the Ethiopians when they invade and one of their numbers is wounded or killed. They, too, will consider withdrawing—mark my words—just as the Marines did.”

  Jeebleh wonders if Bile has had the chance to see the movie Black Hawk Down, released since his own last visit to Mogadiscio, about the American attempt to deploy their post–Cold War “intravasionist” policy stratagem to “make the world safer.”

  Bile makes throaty noises, like that of a cat choking on a hastily swallowed fishbone, then sips at his glass of water and relaxes, ready to resume speaking.

  “I would be tempted to reach for a gun, if I owned one, whenever I hear phrases like ‘The Marines are here to serve God’s will,’ as the then U.S. president said, or when the religionists talk of having ‘popular support’ or of working according to ‘popular will’—or when they sentence a woman raped and then falsely accused of adultery to death by stoning. I am displeased, too, when someone spouts the obsequious fallacy that all Somalis are Muslim, especially if this is meant to offer legitimacy to a clique of religionists determined to impose their will on this nation. Let’s face it, the religionists are no different from the warlords they routed, or the Federalists. No one can convince me that the broad mass of Somalis will fall for the religionists’ falsehoods. In any event, the religionists will sooner or later split into radical and moderate wings, whether Ethiopia invades or not. Although I itch with anger at the thought of provoking the bully next door, our age-old enemy.”

  Bile takes a bite of cheese, then adds, “I prefer a spineless secular state that is all-inclusive to a religionist one run by a bearded cabal.”

  “Are the religionists clan-based?”

  “They are and they aren’t,” Bile replies. “When someone is earmarked to be eliminated, they assign the job of killing him to a close relative from within their ranks, to avoid anyone ascribing the killing to someone from another clan family. If they take a town, they appoint as governor someone with no roots or history there. It is a kind of affirmative clannism. Still, I am not impressed. That they suffer from infighting is evident in the fact that the Courts haven’t set up a working administrative structure for the city, because they cannot agree among themselves.”

  Jeebleh feels like a man in a lean-to, sitting out a raging hurricane that is leveling homes and destroying lives. Is it safer to stay inside or foot it as fast as he can?

  He dishes out the food and they eat. He asks, “What is your and Cambara’s relationship with the religionists?”

  Bile slowly rises to his feet, the fingers of his outstretched hand pressing against the edge of the kitchen table. He sways this way and that, his knees atremble; he looks askance at a world too shaky for his liking.

  Jeebleh asks, “Where are you going?”

  “My tablets are in the medicine cabinet.”

  Jeebleh gets them for him.

  “I wish I didn’t tire so easily,” Bile says.

  Jeebleh is relieved that his mother did not live into a sickly old age. How the body falters! Bi
le was such an athlete when he was young, never batting an eyelid when there was a chance to compete. Now, sickly as he is, he shambles on, preferring coping on his own to being dependent on the help of others. Jeebleh can’t determine which category he would belong to if he were in such a state. Like Bile, he can’t stand a spouse’s overprotective fussiness. And his wife is of a fussier disposition than Cambara is.

  When they’ve eaten their lunch, they move to the lounge, and more comfortable chairs, their knees almost touching, Bile drinking tea and Jeebleh coffee, both of them brooding.

  Bile says, “If a city becomes the person who loves to live in it, then Mogadiscio befits me—and Somalia suits me more than anywhere else.”

  Bile has often said he’ll leave Mogadiscio only on his way to the grave. His bullheadedness puts Jeebleh in mind of scenes from Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. In this unique novel, one of the most memorable in fiction anywhere, Hagar, named for the handmaid in the biblical tale, is imprisoned in her pride as well as in the confines of her enfeebled body. She is an ill-natured ninety-four-year-old woman, who has constructed her life on uncompromising certitudes. She hates being helped because she hates being beholden to anyone, and insists on surviving into her old age with dignity, refusing to be put into a nursing home. She shrieks walls down, she is so strong willed. Unlike Hagar, Bile is a mild-mannered man, yet he, too, is headstrong, and old age has only made him more obdurate. He sees himself as a cosmopolitan who refuses to quit the city when everyone else has done so. Jeebleh’s thoughts are now edged with anxiety as he weighs how to encourage Bile to come to the United States to see specialists.

  He says, “My wife, whom you’ve never met but who sends her love, wonders if you’ll ever visit us in New York.”

  A touch of tenderness in Bile’s voice. “But of course, I will visit you one day, even if I cannot say when.”

  Jeebleh thinks of Bile as a man drowning in discomfort, his eyes glazed over, his feet stretched forward, his body rigid. Maybe by their very nature, the sick and the elderly grow restive, depressive; they take up residence in that nowhere land, unreachably distant.

  “What about you and Cambara?”

  He says, “Commendably, she has invested in my worthless life, contrary to what often occurs. Many of my friends have been abandoned by their partners when they are ailing or in need. Cambara has stayed by me, a loyal, loving companion. She thinks of it as buying shares in the life of your partner, subject to capital gains and losses, as with all investments. ‘You gain some, you lose some,’ she says, in life and in love, too. She bought shares in my life when there was no working capital as such, and invested heavily in my recovery and stayed by me. I thought it was time I, too, made a commitment of a serious nature. So I proposed to her.”

  “What’s been her response?”

  “That she’ll love me, but not become my wife.”

  Jeebleh is not surprised to learn this. The woman is formidable, a match for Bile. A man in the last lap of his life, too ill to matter—and she loves him.

  Bile says, “She says we are the front line.”

  The image of young men departing for the front line, healthy and full of the joy of youth, sets off a panic button in Jeebleh, reminding him of the imminent invasion. He thinks how in movies young men going to war commit themselves to their sweethearts.

  Bile says, “Cambara became a wife, on paper, to Zaak, soon after the eruption of the civil war in the early 1990s; he had just fled Mogadiscio. Theirs was a paper marriage and was never consummated, and they both knew it would not be. Several years later, she fell for and wed Wardi, a refugee in Switzerland, where he had no other chance of becoming a citizen. She married both her previous men to get them citizenship in Canada. Maybe she sees me as a man apart from her previous men, even though I, too, am in a war zone, equally damaged by the conflict. She doesn’t wish to rush into marrying a third time, afraid it might not work for her. To a point, I can see what she means.”

  Jeebleh asks, “May I get on her case?”

  “No point badgering her.”

  “That will get the religionists off your backs.”

  “She has no faith in marriage,” Bile says.

  They hear the voices of a man and a woman, a door opening, and Cambara and a young man walk in, laden with heavy shopping bags. Kisses, hugs, and then introductions. “This is Robleh, here is Jeebleh,” says Cambara, kissing Bile on the forehead and then on the lips. Robleh looks ill at ease.

  “Food to last us for months,” Cambara says.

  When Robleh and Cambara go out to the car to fetch in the rest of the groceries, Bile tells Jeebleh that their guest in the annex has been ratting them out to the Courts. He can’t help it, the poor sod. He seems to hope that squealing on them to the religionists will lead him to the gravy train. “It is the thing to do in Somalia these days. No scruples. No probity. This is what’s got us to where we are. Helpless.”

  “Why not show him the door?” Jeebleh says.

  “It’s Cambara’s call, not mine,” says Bile. “There’s only one way of doing things. Her way.”

  The shopping in, Robleh says good-bye from a distance, but Cambara joins them.

  “Why all this food?” Bile asks.

  Cambara says, “In the event of an invasion.”

  Bile is exhausted. His eyes close, despite his valiant attempts to keep them open. When Dajaal telephones, Jeebleh tells him to come and get him in five minutes. Waiting, they discuss the inevitability of the war and agree on how the Courts have mismanaged the Khartoum talks.

  “I hope to leave before the war starts,” Jeebleh says.

  “Will Malik stay on?” Cambara asks.

  “He’ll remain, whatever happens.”

  The bell rings, the dogs bark. The bells’ ringing and the dogs’ barking startle Bile from his napping. “Talk to you later,” Jeebleh says, as he takes his leave.

  AS SOON AS DAJAAL AND JEEBLEH LEAVE, MALIK AND QASIIR SET to work on the computer. And they talk at first about matters of no great concern to either. Malik asks Qasiir about what occupies his mind lately; how much time he spends with his family, his baby, and whether he goes to the movies, if in fact there are cinemas any longer.

  “The men from the Courts have shut down all the movie houses,” Qasiir replies. “Movies are xaraam—forbidden. Nothing, not even Bollywood; no music at teahouses. It is all serious religious stuff. This is resulting in young people becoming bored and in seeing life as very tough, tedious.”

  “What was it like in the days of the warlords?”

  “Those were brutes, the warlords. And they perpetrated indescribable cruelties against the unarmed civilians.”

  “I meant, what was life like for the young? You were young in those days and a member of a clan-based militia, weren’t you?”

  “Despite the terribleness of the times,” Qasiir says, “we had some fun, in our own way. We watched films, some of them Italian or American classics, played the music of our choice, we threw parties, we danced, we did everything the young everywhere enjoy doing. We even watched blue movies. There were a couple of places run by Zanzibari refugees where you could rent those. Of course, the warlords were terrible to most people, especially anyone who belonged to one of the weaker clan families or who wasn’t armed.”

  When they hear the muezzin announcing the prayer time, Malik tells Qasiir that he doesn’t mind if Qasiir stops working to pray and then gets back to work on the computer. But Qasiir doesn’t pay him any mind, and with his head inclined, his whole body still, he focuses his attention wholly on typing computer commands, intently reading the results coming up on the screen. Malik leaves the workroom, goes to the fridge, and returns with a can of Coke, which he offers to Qasiir. Qasiir pops it open, takes a sip, and says, “Thanks.”

  Malik sees an opening and he takes it. “What is your rapport with your former mates, who served in the same clan-based militias as you?”

  “Some currently occupy positions of power in the
Courts, a few have joined Shabaab and are training their cadre,” Qasiir says.

  “Are you in touch with them?”

  “I am in touch with a couple on a daily basis.”

  “Tell me, how are they able to distinguish the lies they told then, when they were supposedly killing in service to the supremacy and economic advancement of their clans, from the religious spin they propagate now as divine truth?”

  Qasiir is comfortable holding his ground. In his early youth, from what Jeebleh told Malik, he was an aficionado of everything American, with a special fascination for eyewear of the Ray-Ban variety and Clint Eastwood westerns, which he watched so many times with his friends that he knows the dialogue from some of the movies by heart. He now gives thought to Malik’s question, taking his time, and pauses in his typing.

  “Are you asking if the militiamen formerly serving the warlords, who are now members of Shabaab, are true to their characters only when they are pulling the triggers of their guns, when they are roughing up innocent folks and killing, rather than when they are in the mosque praying? Do you doubt their sincerity?”

  Malik remembers an audacious remark one of his journalist colleagues made when he was in Afghanistan, that honesty is not necessarily synonymous with truth. It stands to reason that not only is it convenient to do as your fellow fighters do but also, as a militiaman, you feel more secure in a crowd, less isolated. From the distant look in his eyes, Malik thinks that Qasiir may be reliving his younger days, when he considered it fun to hang around with other vigilantes and beat up any boy on the slightest provocation.