Qasiir insists he can explain everything.
Dajaal says, “Don’t you ever take liberties with our trust or treat us as if we are all fools. We’ll talk, you and I. This is not the time and place.”
“It was the only computer of its kind I could find in the city, and I received no cuts,” Qasiir says, defending his honor. “Nor did anyone know I was buying it on Malik’s behalf. Give me some credit, Grandpa. I am not that cheap.”
“So what was BigBeard doing there?”
Qasiir says, “How would I know, Grandpa?”
Still clearly perturbed, Dajaal lets it go.
“Never a dull moment here, is there?” Malik says, hoping to lighten the mood. Malik wholly trusts Qasiir and is certain from Qasiir’s behavior that he had no idea BigBeard would be in the shop. If anything, Malik thinks that it’s Sheikh-Wellie who is guilty of “insider trading.” Qasiir is clearly offended that his granduncle suspects him of dishonesty. He won’t react to it angrily, not now, not in Malik’s presence. He and Dajaal will have a quiet word or two about it in the car later, on their way home, after he has set up the machine for Malik.
They drive off in silence, passing people thronging the stalls to stock up on provisions. At some stalls, meat hangs from hooks hastily nailed into the wooden frames, buzzing with flies. Others display wilted cabbages, lettuce, and broccoli, dried-out carrots, and cassava pockmarked with fungus. The poor anywhere live the only way the poor know how: they buy food that is inexpensive. And the majority of the clients at these roadside stalls belong to this category.
Dajaal stops often to let pedestrians pass in front of the car, even when the vehicles behind him honk impatiently. He tells Malik and Qasiir that Cambara has already finished her shopping, buying enough food to last them for weeks if need be.
They pick up Jeebleh from Bile’s house. Malik sits in the back and brings him up to speed, mentioning how much less the computer cost than it would have in New York. He notes with satisfaction that Dajaal has registered this comment, and hopes that it will ease his displeasure with and suspicion of Qasiir.
Jeebleh is neither surprised nor shocked to learn that they bought the machine from a shop presumably owned by BigBeard. After all, he thinks, Somalis are incestuous by nature, inseparable by temperament, and murderous by inclination; and such is their internecine closeness that quarreling is the norm—like twins fighting.
Malik asks, “What is your news?”
The news Jeebleh brings from his conversations with Bile and Cambara and from having watched the coverage on TV is just as unnerving as the sight of the hordes they are now passing along the roads, blocking traffic as they head out of the city, afraid of being caught in the impending war. He says, “There is a report of a most exasperating action of a Shabaab operative, who is leading a convoy of a dozen or so gun-mounted battlewagons to Buur Hakaba.” Buur Hakaba is the town nearest Baidoa, where the president, the Federal Forces, and the parliament have their bases. “When asked why he needed to provoke a confrontation between the forces of the Courts and the FedForces,” Jeebleh continues, “he said he meant nothing sinister by his actions, certainly not to do any harm to the ongoing peace talks between the two sides. He was paying a visit to one of his four wives. She lives in Buur Hakaba, as it happens.”
It takes a minute or so for the significance of this report to sink in. Jeebleh tells them that the incident has set off alarm bells in a number of far-flung cities: in Baidoa, of course, where not only the interim president of Somalia, but the provisional prime minister and the cabinet are based; in Addis Ababa, where Ethiopia’s prime minister has called an emergency meeting of his cabinet and his military advisers; in Washington, D.C., where top functionaries at the Department of Defense and Department of State have called in those manning the Somali desk to brief them on the significance of this latest provocation. In Somalia, panic is everywhere, with everyone assuming that the garrison town of Baidoa will be attacked, if it hasn’t been already.
“War jitters, wherever you turn,” Malik says.
Jeebleh says, “Where will it all end? Will someone persuade the two parties to move away from the precipice, continuing with their peace negotiations instead of plunging this nation into an unnecessary, murderous war?”
“It’s war, war—not if, but when,” Dajaal says.
IT IS WITH TREMENDOUS WORRY, INEXPLICABLE THOUGH IT MAY seem, that Jeebleh stirs in his sleep, dreaming, and registers horses neighing, donkeys braying, cows mooing, the night darkening just before dawn breaks, the muezzin calling. In the dream, Malik and he are, surprisingly, among the worshippers. Malik sticks close to Jeebleh, looking anxious, as if he is suddenly unsure what to do, whether to place the right hand upon the left below or above the navel when standing; whether, with head and body inclined and hands placed upon the knees, he should separate the fingers a little or not at all. He is aware there are differences among the sects as to what to do when. But having not set foot in a mosque or prayed for almost twenty years, he is uncertain, and watches Jeebleh with intent so as not to embarrass his father-in-law.
A man standing nearby speaks of “morning madness reigning.” Jeebleh doesn’t understand what he is talking about. Nor is he bothered by the fact that he doesn’t know who the man is until he discovers that Malik, with notebook in hand and pen ready to scribble away, is interviewing the man. Billows of dust stir in the distance, beckoning, and Jeebleh wanders away in the general direction of the vortex of sand, over the hills, farther east.
Then Jeebleh finds himself in a neighborhood with which he is unfamiliar, where virtually all the houses are leveled, the roads gutted, the pavements reduced to rotted ravines, with unexploded mines scattered in the rubble. In a gouged spot past a massive ruin that must have been caused by a bomb with the force of a meteor, there is a Technical, its mounted gun smeared with the blood of its victims; the Technical is still emitting smoke. When he touches it, it is as warm as a living body. Somewhere nearby are corpses left where they have fallen, some of them Ethiopians, from the look of their uniforms, others of them young Somalis. Then several of the dead Somali youths come to life and go into a huddle, as sports teams do. The huddle breaks and they take what appear to be prearranged positions, speaking in the manner of actors rehearsing a badly scripted play. Dressed in immaculate white and donning colorful keffiyehs, they sport long beards. Several women come out of nowhere, uniformly pretty, gazelle eyed, the very image of the houris of Paradise, to tend to the youths.
Now the youths separate themselves into units. One unit digs up an arms cache from the rubble: rocket-propelled grenades, light and heavy machine guns, semiautomatic weapons, an array of homemade explosives. A second unit waits by the roadside, bantering. But they go quiet when several armor-plated pickup trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns approach, and the youths get in an orderly fashion. A third unit, composed of the youngest, receives training in explosives from a short man with thick glasses, who consults a manual every time one of the pupils asks him a question.
Jeebleh has the feeling that he is not in a city but in a village somewhere in the hinterland. But he is not sure; Mogadiscio has lost whatever shape it used to have and is now as featureless as a ground-down cog in a broken machine. He is deeply disturbed that it is no longer the metropolis with which he is familiar, its current residents imported to raise a fighting force. Everywhere he looks, destitute men, women, and children in near rags wearily trudge by, many of them emaciated, their bellies swollen with undiagnosed illnesses, their eyes hosts to swarms of roaming flies. They seem exhausted, inarticulate with fear and vigilance, which imposes a further formlessness.
A mine detonates in the vicinity. Many people die and many more are injured. Jeebleh checks to see if any of his limbs are gone. Luck spares him this time. But he looks about in horror. Most of the dead and injured are young. There is little he can do to help. He meets a man as old as he is. When Jeebleh wonders aloud why the elderly have been spared, the old man says, “We a
re alive for a reason.”
“Why have you been spared?” Jeebleh asks.
“Because I recruit the martyrs,” the man says.
“You recruit them, they die, and you live on?”
“I blood the young brood of martyrs, suicides.”
“The young die as martyrs and the old live on?”
The old man replies, “That’s right.”
“But that is absurd,” Jeebleh says.
“On the contrary,” the man says, “it is exemplary to die for one’s country. There is nothing as honorable as martyring oneself, when young, for one’s nation.”
“Ultimately, it depends on the martyr, doesn’t it?” Jeebleh challenges. “Has it ever occurred to you to give the young the choice whether to live on or to die for a religious cause in which they may not believe?”
The old man quips, “It is the martyrs’ blood that helps keep the nation alive. Without that, there will be no country.”
The old man walks away and sits nearby, pretending to pray. Jeebleh assists the wounded and then buries the dead in a mass grave, with no help from the recruiter of the martyrs. Then he leaves, and walks past a house caving in. He can spot human figures hanging from the rafters. He wonders if anyone will be charged with this mindless mass murder, if anyone will be made to answer for these crimes.
Jeebleh wakes up as exhausted as a wayfarer who has covered an immense distance to get here. His whole body aches, and his mind is weighed down with unidentified worries. He listens for sounds emanating from Malik’s side of the apartment but hears none.
He is enjoying a leisurely breakfast of toast and coffee when Malik emerges from his workroom, saying, “Coffee. That is what I need.”
Jeebleh says, “Good morning.”
“Morning,” Malik says.
“Sleep well?”
“I’ve slept little, but I’ve worked well.”
Malik—indicating that he wants Jeebleh to wait for a moment—walks away in haste and enters the bathroom, maybe to clean his teeth before coffee. Jeebleh says to his back, “You can always catch up on sleep.”
Malik is back before long. “Can I have some, please?” he asks, indicating the coffee.
Jeebleh replies, “With pleasure. And what else can I offer you?”
Malik says, “I agree that one can always catch up on sleep faster than one can catch up on writing when one has neglected it for some time.” He takes a sip of his coffee and, as if defining the extent of his haste and underscoring that he is in no mood to engage in a lengthy conversation, says, “You won’t mind if I leave you? I am itching to get on.”
Jeebleh says, “Brilliant.”
“It’s time I met a journalist or two, time I set up interviews with people in the piracy business,” Malik says. “But I plan to rely less on Gumaad and more on either Qasiir or Dajaal. They are plenty well connected.”
“Good idea,” Jeebleh says.
And Malik is off.
Jeebleh packs his suitcase and puts half the cash he has left in an envelope, to do with it what he will before he takes his flight early tomorrow—most likely share it out between Dajaal and Qasiir, giving the larger portion to the older man. Then he sits in the living room and catches up on his reading. He has brought along half a dozen books from New York, and he hasn’t had the time to so much as look at them, much less read them. He will probably leave them behind; they could be useful to Malik for his research into the piracy question and the Somali civil war, viewed from the perspective of how the continued strife and the resultant impoverishment and desertification of the country may herald future conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.
But Jeebleh is restive and can’t concentrate. It is unlike him to make hasty conclusions about what he has discovered so far about the men from the Courts, but from his brief encounter with BigBeard and the little he has gotten to know about Gumaad, he can’t help concluding that they are an unhealthy procession of hardened, self-obsessed men who have been waiting in the wings for the opportunity to run the country their way. He worries whether Malik will fall victim to the particular cruelty Shabaab metes out to secular-leaning journalists.
He hangs up and dials Bile and Cambara’s number. She picks up the phone on the first ring. Listening to her, Jeebleh realizes that he has taken to her more than he has been aware. He finds her voice not only pleasant but reassuring, and he is delighted that his friend is receiving the attention and affection he needs.
He says to her, “I wonder if it is convenient for me to visit? Malik is working, and I don’t feel like reading.”
“Yes, please,” she says. “Do come. Anytime.”
“How is Bile doing?”
“In bed, reading and occasionally napping.”
“I’ll see you shortly, then.”
After he hangs up, Jeebleh telephones Dajaal to come fetch him.
After a light lunch with Cambara and Bile, Jeebleh is at the sink, washing up. Cambara is upstairs with Bile, who has packed it in, exhausted. Cambara has assured him she will come down once she has attended to Bile’s needs.
He reads the Arabic writing on the bottle of dishwashing liquid: Imported from Australia, via the United Arab Emirates. Jeebleh thinks that the term globalization is misleading, a word that hardly describes all that is happening in businesses, big and small, the world over. His forehead is crisscrossed with furrows as he revisits his dream. He recalls that when he awoke, his hair stood out like the roots of a baobab tree battered by a tempest. He didn’t tell his dream to Malik.
But his thoughts return to happiness for his friend. Granted, their current circumstances, within the prison of civil war that curtails freedom of movement, expression, and association, may not make for picture-book intimacy all the time. But they seem comfortable in each other’s company. That they could live in these circumstances without giving in to acrimony indicates the depth of their commitment to each other. He couldn’t care less if they occupy separate bedrooms, although he hopes that his friend, who spent so many years locked away and denied the opportunity to love, has had some opportunity to make up for lost time before the prison of sickness and old age closed in.
Just as he finishes putting the dishes back in the cupboards, Jeebleh hears Cambara coming down. He looks up and observes how the dust motes disperse in the sunlight at her approach, opening a way for her.
She asks him to make them espresso, and to retrieve a bottle of mineral water from the fridge. Jeebleh is pleased that she takes this sort of liberty with him; it makes him feel at home.
They sit at an angle, facing each other. Demurely dropping his gaze from her face, he notices that the front of his trousers is wet from standing against the sink. Cambara notices, too, and looks away, smiling, then bows her head slightly. She has had a shower and changed into a more casual caftan, and she seems revived; with her earrings in the clutch of her thumb and forefinger, she pauses and inserts them in her earlobes. Barefoot, she gives him the impression of a woman who intends to tiptoe through the remainder of the day, without a care in the world. He remembers how relaxed his wife used to seem after the children fell asleep. She takes a sip of her coffee and then unclasps her earring, after a bit of struggle, and removes it. She places the stud on her palm and takes a long look at it, then tosses it up, catches it, studies it again, and pockets it. She shifts in her seat, as if considering whether to unfasten the earring in her left ear, but seems to think better of it.
They talk at length about the early days of her return to Mogadiscio, when she had to get accustomed to the discomfort of a body tent, something she had never worn when she first lived there.
Jeebleh asks, “How does it feel, to be all covered up?”
“It makes me miss Toronto,” she says.
Jeebleh senses she is comfortable with the figure she cuts, sitting confidently as she does now, her heels tucked under her. His gaze journeys from her heels to the firmness of the rest of her body. He doesn’t want to know what Bile and she do for love,
with Bile sick and she his junior by twenty-something years. Maybe the two of them take a long view of the matter, as life partners do, secure in the knowledge that there will be tomorrow and the day after, the way he and his wife have been doing since her menopause. It is the luxury of old age to have both a long- and a short-term perspective on sex. Jeebleh has known couples of disparate ages who seem to struggle to find topics that interest both partners. Bile and Cambara never seem to have a shortage of things to say to each other. But will Cambara continue to stay by Bile’s side as his body weakens, as his health deteriorates? Himself, he has made a long investment in his rapport with his wife. They have a strong affinity, which will hold them together until their dying days.
“Are you still teaching?” Cambara asks.
He nods his head yes.
“Retirement not in sight?”
“Not yet,” he replies.
“And your wife?”
“My wife thinks we’ll be in each other’s way if I retire and stay at home, as she does—she took early retirement. This is also because we’ve recently moved. We bought a smaller apartment for just the two of us when our younger girl left home.”
“Retire and tour the world,” she says. “Why not?”
Jeebleh bites down hard on his lips to keep mum, as he considers the difficulties Cambara and Bile would confront if they were to attempt a world tour. Cambara, younger and healthy and carrying a Canadian passport, wouldn’t have a problem, but Bile wouldn’t get far.
He says, spacing his words, “Ours is a problem of a different nature from yours. Judith was born in Manhattan to Jewish parents from Lithuania. She thinks that New York is the center of the world; she can’t imagine why anyone wants to bother with the peripheries.”
“Isn’t it interesting that all the time I lived in Toronto,” Cambara says, “I never fancied myself as residing in one of the world’s centers? However, when I was younger and lived in Mogadiscio and knew no better, I thought of myself as residing in the center of the universe. How the world changes, and with it our perceptions of centers and peripheries!”
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