Crossbones

by Nuruddin Farah

  Ahl says, “I am delighted to hear Taxliil’s news, even if I can’t decide what to expect next.”

  Xalan says, “For a second, I thought Saifullah might bolt out the door like a frightened horse. Or that he might seize up and not speak, or run off and disappear as mysteriously as he appeared.”

  A brief silence follows.

  Then Ahl says, “Funny, him saying that he is not authorized to speak on the matter. What manner of bureaucratese is that?”

  Xalan says, “You know what is worrying me?”

  “What’s worrying you?”

  “He has the look of someone not meant to last.”

  Ahl concurs, “As if he is on a mission.”

  “I can’t bring myself to think about it.”

  The thought troubles Ahl and he tries to fight it off by taking the opposite view, if only because he wants to believe that he will see Taxliil, too. “Maybe once he has slept off his nightmares, Saifullah will be more willing to talk to us.”

  Xalan says, “I must visit his mother.”

  Up in his room, Ahl makes several more attempts to reach Malik and Fidno. The messages he gets are identical: the subscriber is not in range. What on earth can that mean? At last he reaches Malik, and brings him up to speed, summarizing all that has happened.

  Malik sounds optimistic. “I am sure everything will work out in the end. Taxliil will return, as runaways often do, unexpectedly, apologetic, and promising not to do it again. Look at Saifullah.”

  Ahl gains courage from listening to what Malik has to say and is delighted and relieved to find his brother in a more receptive mood than he expected. It is then that he says to him, “Fidno has offered to introduce you to one Muusa Ibraahim, otherwise universally known as Marduuf, a former pirate, who also has it in for Shabaab, because they killed his younger brother, a teenage conscript of the group. Are you interested in talking to him?”

  Malik is enthusiastic about the idea and takes down Marduuf’s contact details, although he cannot say when he will meet or talk to him.

  MALIK RINGS THE BELL NEXT TO THE OUTSIDE GATE AT BILE AND Cambara’s, and then looks back at Qasiir parked within view of the gate, waiting. Qasiir wants to make sure that Malik gets in before he drives off.

  While waiting for someone to appear or for the lock on the gate to be released via the intercom, activating the dogs’ barking, Malik recalls watching 101 Dalmatians on DVD with his baby daughter in his lap. At one she was too little to understand it, even though she points at real dogs excitedly, and imitates their barking. To amuse her, he likes to run through a repertoire of different breeds’ barks: he can yelp like a collie, woof like an Afghan hound, and bay like a husky.

  Cambara’s arrival reminds him of where he is. She calls to tell him that she is on her way to open the gate manually, because of a power outage. Approaching, she walks cautiously, as if avoiding puddles, and affects a frown that is really a smile. She has on a pair of indoor shoes and a guntiino robe that flatters her, showing bits of flesh and a flash of cleavage when her garment fashionably slips off her shoulder. As she approaches the side gate, though, she pulls up the patterned summery shawl as if to make sure there is no misunderstanding on Malik’s part. He turns to wave at Qasiir in the departing car. Cambara passes the bunch of keys to Malik so that he can open the gate from the outside. Their fingers touch accidentally and this produces static electricity. Malik looks away, embarrassed, although Cambara appears unruffled. She walks ahead of him, and neither speaks until they are inside the house and Cambara has restored the key ring to the hook behind the door.

  In a rehearsed voice, Malik says, “That death comes early and snatches away our best is a wisdom that many of us do not appreciate until someone dear dies. Of course, it is worse if he is murdered.”

  Waiting for him to finish, with her hands outstretched, maybe to embrace him, Cambara has the look of someone with fog in her eyes and who can’t therefore see more than two feet ahead of her. For an instant, Malik stands so still that it feels as if bits of him have stopped functioning.

  Cambara puts life back into him, saying, “Yes!”

  Malik goes on. “I’ve known Dajaal for a short time, yet I will miss him. His death makes me think, What if I die when I have less than a page left to write? Dajaal had plenty of work to do, and some evil person cut his life short.”

  Just when he had said his say and they are at last ready to embrace, she pricks up her ears and pauses in mid-movement, like a ballerina stopping before completing a pirouette—and backs off. Instead she takes his hand and together they walk forward, she leading, he keeping pace.

  “No doubt a difficult man to please, at times harder on himself than on others, Dajaal was a man of such high principles. He was loyal, truthful; he was reliable. We’ll miss him terribly. He is our story, Bile’s and mine. He made our world go around a lot of the time, making our living together easier, even though occasionally he came in between us, causing mild frictions between Bile and me. But I was fond of him, very fond.”

  Malik says, “I often think how, in fiction, death serves a purpose. I wish I knew the objective of such a real-life death.”

  Cambara makes two tall drinks and a short one, adds a drop of something to one of the tall glasses—Malik is unsure what, maybe a drop of medicine, for Bile? She gives him one of the tall ones and raises her short one, saying, “To your health.”

  He asks, “How’s Bile been?”

  “He is coming down shortly,” she announces.

  And soon enough, Bile joins them. He is looking much better, if a little nervous; his index and middle fingers rub against his thumb in rhythm with his slow tread, his every step bringing him closer to his goal—a soft chair with a hard back set between Cambara’s and Malik’s seats. They can’t help but be conscious of his gradual progress, but neither wants to focus on it. Malik rises to his feet to offer him a hug.

  Cambara offers him the untouched tall drink and she says to him, kissing him on the forehead and then on the lips, “Your drink, my dear, with a drop of your medicine in it.”

  He holds the edge of the glass to his lower lip and takes a sip, his Adam’s apple visibly moving, then another thirsty swallow.

  Just then a single rocket falls close by. The house trembles slightly, the windowpanes shaking in their frames, the bulbs of the chandelier lightly knocking against one another with a tinkling sound that, to Malik, distantly recalls one of his daughter’s windup toys.

  “Well, what do you say to that?” Malik says.

  Bile, who obsessively keeps abreast of news of the fighting by listening to HornAfrik, has heard that some of the rockets are aimed in the general direction of the villa where the Ethiopians and the interim president are based. “Earlier, we could feel one of them flying overhead. Some of those interviewed on the radio talked of being able to identify the house where the insurgents firing the rockets were holed up.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then they heard the response coming from the direction of the presidential villa, with the Ethiopians employing heavier bombs, deadlier and causing more damage.”

  “I’ve known rockets to miss their targets in the wars I’ve covered,” Malik offers. “And as a consequence there are civilian casualties.”

  “Here neither of the warring parties cares,” Bile says. “The Ethiopians delight in causing more Somali deaths, and the insurgents, as religionists, by their very nature, are equally unpardonably brutal.”

  “According to the radio reports, many of the bombs did in fact miss their intended destination,” Cambara says. “They cause enormous civilian casualties.”

  “I am sure that it will interest Malik to visit some of the homes destroyed, and learn about the people whose lives are cut short,” Bile says.

  “Shabaab assassinated Dajaal,” Cambara says.

  “And the Ethiopians bomb and kill civilians.”

  Cambara then adds, “Indiscriminately.”

  Meanwhile, Bile, adjust
ing in his seat, unwittingly pushes away one of his slippers and then his feet search blindly for them, only to kick them farther, rather than bring them nearer. Malik is quick to get up and help recover the slipper slithering out of Bile’s reach.

  Bile says, “Thanks.”

  Malik offers his condolences for Dajaal, and Bile stammers a few almost inaudible words in reply, nearly spilling his drink as he says them. “Here I am useless and living, and there he was very useful—and dead. We have the tendency to self-destruct as a people.”

  “He was wonderful to me, generous,” Malik says.

  Bile inquires about Malik’s writing, the research and interviews, and if Qasiir is working out well so far. Malik’s positive replies delight Bile, and he drinks to everyone’s health.

  “We want you to move into our house,” Bile says, “now that the two-room flat is empty of its troubled occupant.”

  “What’s become of Robleh?” Malik asks.

  Cambara answers. “He’s gone.”

  “I’d say good riddance,” Bile says.

  “He’ll get his just desserts,” she says.

  “He was nothing but trouble,” Malik says.

  Bile says, “Yet Cambara wouldn’t throw him out.”

  Malik is thinking about changing the subject, when they hear another bomb exploding in the vicinity that makes the house shake. But Bile won’t leave the topic alone. He pursues it with vengeful venom. Malik thinks they are living on edge, amid all the bombs falling, and because Dajaal’s death has brought their own mortality home to them.

  Bile says, “Robleh had the habit of bringing home neophytes from the mosques, and of telling them right in our presence that he has frequently advised us to ‘take the vow.’ A lie like any other, one he couldn’t say to us alone and, what’s more, didn’t. I would have killed the fool if I could.”

  For a moment, Cambara resembles a cat in the gaze of a snake and she makes a hissing sound. Then, finding things to do in the kitchen, she departs, visibly annoyed. Malik is convinced that it won’t be the end of the stories about Robleh. He has a mind to pursue a tangentially related theme: Somalis with foreign passports leaving the country in the wake of the Ethiopian invasion. He wants to write an article about how they are treated at the Kenyan border, and he is sad that he has to give the topic a wide berth for now. Maybe Qasiir can find him someone to interview.

  Cambara serves them a light repast of clear lemongrass soup and prawns. They eat right where they are, balancing their plates in their laps—Bile’s on a tray, so that he does not have to move, as his knees are bothering him. They sip their soup with hardly a sound, not even the clink of a spoon against a bowl. Malik has a worry knocking about in his head.

  “I’ve meant to talk about Dajaal,” Malik says.

  “What about him?” Bile asks.

  Malik says, “Before Jeebleh left, he and I agreed that we would set up some sort of remuneration—on a monthly basis, the equivalent of a year’s pay—for Dajaal. Now that he has been murdered, I do not know what to do about the remuneration. I should have asked Qasiir, but it would be helpful to have the view of someone outside the immediate family circle.”

  “What are you trying to ask?” Bile says.

  “Did Dajaal have any family who could benefit from the funds, if I set it up?”

  “We were his family,” Bile says, as if to preempt any further discussion of the matter. “I wouldn’t want you to bother,” he adds.

  “I owe him his pay, though.”

  Bile says, “You’re our guest, so don’t worry.”

  “Jeebleh and I…,” Malik starts, and trails off.

  “Please,” says Bile.

  Cambara turns to him. “Let’s hear him out.”

  Bile says firmly, “You stay out of it.”

  Malik thinks that if the herdsman takes delight in talking of his camels, the Don Giovanni of his exploits, the statesman of his political savvy, the war correspondent of the risks taken, then those like Bile and Cambara, who have known nothing but strife, for lack of something else to focus on, risk turning on each other. Again he changes the subject in an effort to avoid an argument.

  He says to Bile, “How did you and Dajaal meet?”

  There is a rough edge to Bile’s tone when he speaks, as if he were clearing his throat after swallowing a fishbone. He says, “Dajaal and I met a day or two into the civil war. The gates of the prison where I had spent almost two decades, half of it with Jeebleh, had been flung open. Knife-brandishing street urchins were threatening to seize the car I was traveling in, and the money I had stolen from the house where I had taken refuge after my escape. As luck had it, Dajaal drove by just then. He was in military uniform and armed. He suspected the urchins were up to no good, and he intervened. Then he helped me find Shanta, my sister. And when I set up the Refuge with the stolen money, I made him my factotum. I loved him: he cultivated to perfection the uncanny knack of being just where his timely intervention was needed.”

  Cambara drops her spoon. Bile and Malik look at her, and she blurts out, “Me, too!”

  “You, too, what? What’re you saying?” Bile asks.

  Cambara replies, “Dajaal’s first words to me were, ‘Are there any problems with which you need help?’ I had just fought off the menacing advances of several boys who pulled up alongside me in a car as I was on my way to this property, which at the time was home to a minor warlord. They’d offered me a ride and then tried to force themselves on me, saying, ‘Don’t you want it?’ I met Dajaal at the very moment I had managed to get them to drop me off, and I knew instantly that my life had taken a decisive turn. Dajaal would go on to help me recover the property.”

  Malik feels he doesn’t need to add his own experiences with Dajaal, although he could sing the man’s praises for hours. He says, “I wonder why it never occurred to me to ask him if he had a family. It’s embarrassing, isn’t it?”

  “He was so discreet,” Cambara says, “one hesitated to ask him questions about his private life or to ask if he had financial or other troubles. Unlike many employees, he never pestered you for a loan or absented himself from work.”

  “He wasn’t an employee,” Bile says. “He was family.”

  “Except he wasn’t family,” Cambara says.

  Bile’s eyebrows arch with visible indignation.

  Cambara asks, “Do you know what Dajaal did when he left us after dark, darling?”

  “No idea,” Bile answers. “He was a private man and he wanted it that way.”

  “Dajaal was, toward the end, a changed man,” she says.

  “You two didn’t always get along well,” he says.

  “He got touchy,” she says.

  Bile says, “So is the entire country—nervous, self-murderous, on edge.” He raises his voice a little, stressing his points. “Admit it, he was more exposed to the daily menaces than we were. Also, thanks to him, we felt protected. For all we know, Dajaal may have died protecting us.”

  “It’s not that he had ever talked back to me, or showed any dissent to me openly,” she says. “He was deferential to me, but I could feel a change in his behavior, his anger toward the world, toward life in general. It was as though he felt the times moving past him.”

  Bile says, “You would be a changed person, too, if your life was under constant threat and you didn’t know when a murderer in a balaclava might come out of the shadows to assassinate you.” He pauses for a long time, then asks Cambara, “What is it you’re not telling us? Something has eaten into you; something has turned you against Dajaal. What did he do to upset you so?”

  She sits up, looking miffed, and then stands, but at first does not seem to know what to do; then she sees Malik holding the plates and disposseses him of them, motioning to him to sit down.

  “There is no love without jealousy,” she says, addressing herself to Malik. “I wonder if it has ever occurred to Bile how often I’ve felt redundant when I saw him and Jeebleh together, so relaxed in each other’s company
, never exchanging an unkind word, their dialogue flowing seamlessly. No question about it: I’ve felt inessential. Bile looked younger, happier, and more alive chatting to Jeebleh. He appeared more ebullient in Jeebleh’s company than in mine, as if he finds me irritating, like a small child with insatiable demands. Alone with me, I sense he is less energetic and talks much less about life-and-death matters, only of what ails him and where. Often, he behaves as if I were his hired nurse.”

  Then, in the silence that follows, she murmurs a few words, as if to herself, and for an instant she appears embarrassed. Too late to regret her inapt outburst, she strides off toward the kitchen, the plates clattering.

  Malik blames the stresses under which Cambara and Bile have been living for her outpouring. Civil war makes excessive demands on those who suffer it, and many snap under the strain.

  The silence lasts until she returns to ask if Malik or Bile wants tea or coffee. She gives her profile to Bile, indicating her annoyance.

  Bile asks Malik, “Were you present at the last altercation between Dajaal and Gumaad in the apartment? Did you think that Dajaal went too far in provoking Gumaad?”

  Thinking that one witness is no witness, and that in any case he can’t tell if that altercation led to Dajaal’s death, Malik asks Bile, “Does anyone have any idea who murdered him?”

  Bile replies, “Qasiir claims to know.”

  “Does he suspect Shabaab?”

  “That’s what I gathered from talking to him.”

  Malik asks, “Does he have concrete evidence?”

  “His opinion is based on mere conjecture,” Bile says. “Not that that will stop him from acting on it, I fear.”

  Cambara continues to seem uneasy. She shifts in her chair, then says, “Yet Shabaab and their allies claim to be jihadis, when they do not even behave like Muslims.” Then she gets to her feet, as if to leave their presence.

  Bile says, “You can’t determine that. Only God has the privilege to decide if they are or aren’t Muslim.”

  “Why kill in mosques or in the vicinity of mosques?” she asks, as if the answer to the question might unravel everything.