Crossbones

by Nuruddin Farah

  “The murders are political,” Bile says.

  “Are these assassinations commissioned by fifth columnists allied to the Courts?” Malik asks.

  “According to what Qasiir has told me, they are.”

  “Is he implying that Dajaal set himself up for it, describing himself publicly as a secularist?” Malik says.

  Bile ventures, “Shabaab knew all along where Dajaal stood. He needn’t have called himself a secularist. If anything, he was a democrat and therefore a secularist. It is a mystery they didn’t kill him sooner.”

  Malik takes a furtive look at Cambara, assuming with little evidence that unless she occupies center stage, where she is appreciated, pampered, loved, and praised, she is the type who will stand apart, as she does now, listening to their banter as if it concerns someone she doesn’t know. He attempts to bring her back in.

  “What’s your feeling, Cambara? The Courts are out—we know you weren’t enamored of them or their hard-line position. Now the Ethiopians are here. What would you say if I asked you what your feelings are today, as matters stand?”

  “A plague on both their houses,” Cambara mutters.

  Bile says, “As the Somali saying goes, ‘Drinking milk is unlikely to help you when you choke on water.’”

  Cambara says, “Aren’t you saying the same thing I am saying, only with proverbs?”

  “Perhaps I am saying more than that,” Bile says.

  “Peace, please!” says Malik.

  “I am saying that the Courts will have learned their lesson,” Bile retorts. “And if they get a second chance to rule Somalia, they won’t be as arrogant and unreasoning as they were the first time. Of course, there will be those who will insist on having an Islamic state at all costs, and there will be splinter groups, this faction against that faction and so on.”

  “You can’t do much with a bad egg. That is what the Courts are, a bad egg,” Cambara says, pleased with herself.

  “What are the Ethiopians, then?” Bile asks, amused.

  “Pollutants farting against the wind,” she says.

  There is a long silence.

  Then Bile says, “The bad-egg image of the Courts is apt. But there are at least possibilities of negotiation. They are now in the political wilderness. They were wrong to assume that weapons from Eritrea would help them defeat Ethiopia here and march all the way to Addis, and take and occupy it. Easier dreamed of than done.”

  Cambara stares at her fingers, thinking. She says, “You surprise me, darling. You have a soft spot for the Courts. I would never have thought that of you.”

  “I so loathe the Ethiopian occupation and this interim president who engineered it, I would have the Courts back any day, in their place,” Bile says. “Still, I would choke on the water that I may have to drink.”

  On another day, Malik might stay and enjoy bantering with Bile, especially as he seems to be in better health today. But he retreats into the bathroom to send Qasiir a text message asking him to come for him in a jiffy. When he rejoins Bile and Cambara, he says, “It’s past your siesta time, and I have plenty of work to get through. So I’ll thank you for the wonderful lunch and company.”

  Bile says, in a tone of command not to be challenged, “I’ll ask Qasiir to bring your things from the apartment. I want you to move into the annex. It’s safer here.”

  “We have everything you require,” Cambara says.

  Bile adds, “Please, no back talk from you.”

  “I will move in,” says Malik, “but not until tomorrow.”

  “Why not right away, or tonight at least?”

  “I am in the middle of something,” Malik says.

  “We’ll tell the maid to set it all up.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  En route to the apartment—Qasiir at the wheel—Malik notices several missed calls, many of them dating back to last night, and one very long SMS.

  In the SMS, Ahl, who says he has sent the same text in an e-mail format, shares his latest with him: that he confirms that he feels more comfortable putting up at Xalan and Warsame’s, indirectly suggesting to Malik that he move in with Cambara and Bile—but not clearly spelling it out. Ahl ends with, “Be on guard at all times.”

  Malik can tell that Qasiir is excited: his eyes keep narrowing, like a shortsighted person concentrating on a faraway spot, and his lips are constantly moving. Malik asks him, “Is everything okay?”

  “I’ve found Marduuf, the former pirate,” Qasiir says. “We met at a teahouse. He is a very angry man.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “I know what he does for a living, too. He sells rugs,” Qasiir says. “He told me that since he discovered there was more risk than money in piracy, he bought a small pickup truck with what money he had made and set up a rug-selling business.”

  Malik asks, “When can I meet him?”

  “Whenever you like, really.”

  “You mean as soon as now?” Malik asks, excited.

  Qasiir says, “But of course.”

  “I am a bit exhausted.”

  “Tell me what suits you, and it’ll be done.”

  Malik thinks it over. A former pirate who has a lot of venom toward Shabaab is a good prospect. He says, “You’ll drop me and then fetch him.”

  They fall silent. Then Malik ventures the question that has been on his mind. “What was your grandfather’s home situation? Is your grandmother still alive?”

  Qasiir drives in silence for a while, in the attitude of someone taking the measure of a challenge. Finally, he answers, “Grandpa lived alone in a house that was in first-class shape when he bought it. Lately, however, it’s begun to fall apart, the roof leaking, the paint flaking, water gathering in puddles, the drainage not functioning. He kept saying he would deal with the structural problems and either rent it out or, if peace came, sell it and buy a one-room apartment. He didn’t want to bother fixing it piecemeal.”

  “Did he have dependents?”

  “Not if you’re speaking of a wife and children.”

  “You were his only living relative?”

  “May I ask where these questions are leading?”

  “You see, before leaving, Jeebleh informed your grandfather that he would set up a monthly check. Did you know about this?” says Malik, who doesn’t mention his own discussion with Bile and Cambara, who were also of a similar mind, ready to put some money aside for Dajaal.

  Qasiir asks, “That is very good of Uncle Jeebleh. But tell me, what is your question?”

  “Did your grandpa have dependents, like a young family—you know, men in this part of the world continue producing until they are dragged off to their graves.”

  “No, he had no young family.”

  “None at all?”

  Qasiir broaches the subject of his own younger sister, deaf from the noise generated by the helicopters of the U.S. Marines when they invaded the district in which StrongmanSouth had his base. He goes on, “She was a baby then. Sadly though, she hasn’t spoken since and can’t look after herself. Grandpa was her lifeline after I started my own family. She was dependent on him.”

  “Let’s talk in more detail about it when we have the time,” says Malik, seeing that they are nearly at the apartment. “In the meantime, I need to ask: do you know anyone with firsthand information about what happens at the Kenyan border to Somalis with foreign passports who are suspected of being sympathetic to the Courts? Because according to a HornAfrik commentary I heard, there are a handful of FBI officers present when the Kenyan immigration officers conduct the interviews.”

  “That’ll be easy,” Qasiir says. “In fact, I know a man, one Liibaan, who served in the National Army with Grandpa and who owns a fleet of buses that I think ply the route between Mogadiscio, Kismayo, and the border crossing. Maybe he will help find us someone, or better still, he may be prepared to talk to you. Leave it with me, and I’ll find somebody.”

  What a beautiful phrase—“Leave it with me”—Malik thinks, es
pecially when spoken with such confidence. He takes comfort in it and delights in its meaning: “Trust me, and everything will be done to your satisfaction.”

  “You’ll call me if you can’t find Marduuf?”

  Qasiir says, “I know where he lives, I know the mosque at which he prays, the teahouse at which he plays cards with a couple of his pals. I’ll get him. So see you shortly.”

  While waiting for Qasiir to return, Malik wanders aimlessly around the apartment and ends up in his workroom. He picks up a piece of paper from the floor, and a few lines in his own hand catch his eye, part of a longer piece he has completed and sent off to some editor, he cannot recall which: Somalis are a people in a fix; a nation with a trapped nerve; a country in a terrible mess. The entire nation is caught up in a spiraling degeneracy that a near stranger like me cannot make full sense of. It is all a fib, that is what it is, just a fib.

  On second thought, the scribbler has run a hesitant line through that last sentence and continued with these words: This conflict has nothing to do with clan or religious rivalries. Rather, it has everything to do with economics. There is a Somali wisdom that it is best that the drum belongs to you, so that you may beat it the way you please. If not, the second best thing is for the drum to belong to someone close, like a relative, who will share it with you. In other words, the Somali civil war has a lot to do with personal gains and personality conflicts.

  Qasiir waits in the TV room, watching sports, while Malik gets down to the business of interviewing Muusa Ibraahim, aka Marduuf.

  Marduuf has the deportment of a man whom, if he walked into your home and declared himself the owner, you wouldn’t feel fully entitled to challenge. He is of medium height, with a broad chest and the fists of a pugilist. Veins run all over the back of his hands, and they move as he gesticulates. He is soft-spoken, though, for a man his size, and his smile is disarming.

  Malik asks him where and when he was born, how many siblings he has, and where, if anywhere, he was schooled. Marduuf’s voice is so soft that Malik brings the tape recorder closer to his mouth and adjusts the volume. There is something of the hillbilly to his accent as well, and Malik has to pay a great deal of attention to catch his nuances.

  “I was born in Daawo, the twin sister to Eyl,” Marduuf says. “I am the firstborn. My family started large, but became reduced to three. Five of my siblings died before they reached the age of four; there were deaths from diseases like TB and malaria, or because there was no doctor in our village to cure a cough. Very few of the children born in our area survived. You had to be very strong from birth to live.”

  Malik cannot decide if it is nerves or anger, but something makes Marduuf pause every few words, like a reader who has come late to literacy.

  “How old are you?”

  “I am thirty-five.”

  “Where are your remaining siblings now?”

  “My sister works on planes, as a stewardess.”

  “And your brother?”

  “He is recently dead. Shabaab killed him.”

  Malik wants to ask why, but he doesn’t want to get diverted from his real interest in Marduuf’s story.

  He asks, “How old was he when he died?”

  “He didn’t die. He was killed,” Marduuf says, with emphasis.

  “But how old was he?” Malik says.

  Marduuf bristles slightly, then collects himself and says only, “He was small for his size. He had the face of an old man, but the body of a boy. He was sixteen, maybe a little older. Now that he has been killed, he has become large. In our memory.”

  Malik notes that Marduuf’s voice goes up a decibel when he speaks about his murdered brother.

  Malik asks, “Do you know Fidno?”

  “Yes. I worked with him several times.”

  “What work did you do for him?”

  “I was a pirate,” Marduuf says.

  “And Fidno—what was he? A pirate, too?”

  Malik thinks he catches a slight sneer or even a snicker. Maybe he finds the thought of Fidno becoming a pirate either ridiculous or amusing. Malik waits. Ultimately, his patience pays its dividend.

  Marduuf says, “If you are educated, you do not want to become a pirate.”

  Now that is something new to Malik. He feels certain that it is equally new to many others: that it is the barefaced privation of opportunities, the total absence of any chance to improve your life that turns one into a pirate, especially when one’s livelihood has been threatened, interrupted, and destroyed. This runs counter to the theory that the presence of a strong central state guarantees a cessation to piratical exploits. He thinks of maybe one day writing an article titled “Poverty Is the Invention of Piracy.”

  “What work did Fidno do?”

  Finally, Marduuf is in his element, and the words pour out of him, with little stammering and fewer pauses. “Fidno is book-educated,” he says. “He reads all the time. Every time we saw him he had a new book in his hands, books in the white man’s language, not English. Maybe German, or so somebody said, because he lived in that country, a very powerful man there. When he talked on his mobile in one of these languages, he spoke fast, as fast as water running down a glass window after it has rained. But he is a bad man. He cheats his own pockets. He is the kind of cheat who puts something in his shirt pocket but makes sure that the ‘thief pocket’ in the front of his trousers has no idea what is in the shirt pocket. Do you know what I mean? You can’t trust him. He is too clever. With money, Fidno is a dangerous man.”

  “Did you make a lot of money from piracy?”

  “Not much,” Marduuf says.

  “What do the pirates do with what they make?”

  “Many buy Surf, a four-wheel drive.”

  “Did you buy one yourself?”

  “I have bought a small pickup. More useful.”

  “Not lots of money in piracy, eh?”

  “We went into piracy when we were told there was a lot of money in it,” Marduuf answers. “The BBC says that people on the coast of Somalia were rich, the pirates all getting the most beautiful women, every night a wedding. But I never saw any of the money everyone was talking about, even after working as a pirate for several years. The largest share I received was seven thousand dollars.”

  Malik asks, “Can you name any of the ships you took hostage?”

  “A Korean ship; a very, very big Saudi one, bigger than the biggest house I’ve seen in Mogadiscio—don’t ask me to tell you their names, because I cannot remember them. There was that Spanish one, we caught the Spanish ship fishing in our waters,” Marduuf says. “We used small boats to chase them and made gun noises heavier than rockets, and they stopped. We took what the ship workers had in cash, maybe three hundred dollars, we took their smart phones and expensive watches and ate their food and waited for three months. After that we received a thousand dollars each. I swear no more than that.”

  “What business do you do now?”

  “I sell rugs straight to some of the mosques. I have a shop high up in the Bakhaaraha,” Marduuf replies. “That is how my youngest brother entered his first mosque. Kaahin was with me, a young thing then, when one day I went into a mosque to conclude a sale. He said when we went out of the mosque into the sun, which beat into our eyes, that he felt comfortable inside the mosque. He left me a week or so later and joined the mosque as a pupil. He said they were teaching him to read the Koran and to write. A month and a half later, he showed me he knew how to write his name in Arabic. I was happy. Then I heard from Wiila, my sister, that someone from our family who also had a son in the mosque had heard that Kaahin had taken an oath and joined a special group inside Shabaab, very secret. He came back to see me less often after that. And then I learned he was dead, killed.”

  “How did you learn that he was killed?”

  “I asked his mucallim where Kaahin was.”

  “What was his teacher’s reply?” Malik asks.

  “He said that Allah willed Kaahin to die.”

&nb
sp; “Did you ask the mentor to explain his meaning?”

  “That Kaahin was in heaven,” Marduuf says.

  “Did you ask how he knew Kaahin was in heaven?”

  “He told me that Kaahin gave his life for Islam as martyr.”

  Malik asks, “What did you do then?”

  “I asked to see his body.”

  “And then what?”

  “He said he would kill me if he saw me again.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing yet’?”

  “I will take action. I will avenge my brother.”

  Malik is tempted to ask Marduuf if he is planning to report all that has happened to the authorities, but he checks himself. He realizes that such a question will mean nothing to someone like Marduuf, born in a lawless country and brought up in post–civil war conditions, who has never known authority in the positive sense of the term.

  The tape recorder switches itself off. Marduuf is startled. He looks at the machine as if he might strike it for giving him a fright and then, for the first time, acknowledges Malik’s grin with a similar one.

  Qasiir shows Marduuf to his pickup truck, parked in the lot, and then returns to find Malik happy with the interview, but clearly too exhausted to stay awake.

  Qasiir asks, “How early do you want me to come in the morning with Liibaan?”

  Malik knows that tomorrow will be a bugger of a day, what with several important interviews and the move to Bile and Cambara’s. “First thing in the morning,” he says.

  SAIFULLAH HAS DISAPPEARED.

  No one, not least Ahl, understands how this could happen. He’d been upstairs listening to tape recordings of the Koran. Or so they believed. They trusted he was taking his time and would come down at some point, relaxed and willing to talk to them. They were trying to wait for things to be revealed—in time.

  Then, at teatime, Faai, bearing a cup of tea with lots of sugar, goes upstairs and taps at his door. When he doesn’t answer, she shouts his name and, for good measure, calls him by the endearments she used when he was a child. No reply. Xalan joins her, and the two women shout louder the longer they wait for him to answer their calls. Xalan wonders, What if he has jumped out of the window and is lying in the garden, unconscious? What if he has killed himself? Faai, keening, prays louder and more earnestly, “Please, God, no—please, God, no.” Xalan orders her to be quiet. Faai shuffles her way downstairs and sits at the bottom of the staircase, still pleading, “Please, God, no—please, God, no.” Then Ahl goes up to add his voice to the chorus, begging Saifullah to come out.