the Café Venezia where Sarah, who had driven Fatma to Rockfield, was already waiting for her.
“Tell your mother hello,” Fatma said. “I will.”
“Pia, you’re what kind of doctor?”
“I’m a plastic surgeon,” she said. “Didn’t I ever tell you that?” “I probably forget.” Fatma could see as Pia stared at the scars
on her face – the split lip – that she was waiting for Fatma to request one more favor, but she only kissed Pia on the cheek and headed over to Sarah’s car.
*
Sarah drove Fatma to Logan Airport on the second of June. Fatma was wearing high heels and a rust silk suit and a cream-colored top with gold threads running through it. It was hot, and she held the jacket over her arm.
“It gets cold in the plane,” Sarah said. “You always need something.”
She wore the ring and some new jewelry she had bought. She was all gold and sparkly, like a bottle of champagne whose cork has just been popped. It would be a long trip, with a layover in London. “That’s trouble,” Miss Wilma said. “Drugs and pickpockets everywhere. Watch yourself. And call us,” Miss Wilma said.
“Anytime,” Sarah added.
She hadn’t informed her family of her visit to Mombasa. She would surprise them and return from America like a girl in a movie she had once seen who came home from Paris: sophisticated, mature, and – most important – whole, or almost so. At 6:10 in the evening she was airborne somewhere over Connecticut when Mary Ellen answered the telephone at Haven House. Because Mary Ellen liked to lie, it took a while before Miss Wilma believed her when she said that a man claiming to be Fatma Kornmeyer’s son had called from Somalia.
V
Shangazi
She landed in Nairobi at eleven in the morning, twenty-three hours after departure. Afraid to set foot in the London streets after Miss Wilma warned her of pushers and pickpockets, she spent her six-hour layover at Heathrow seated at the gate, her arms embracing the handbag and carry-on on her lap.
The Nairobi airport was more drab than she remembered, with its flat, tan concrete buildings, and about as busy – which is to say not very. Security officers with machine guns outnumbered passengers. The main building had never been enlarged; rather, new smaller ones had been constructed. Since there was no need to provide shelter from the cold in Africa, unlike the large terminals at Logan and Heathrow where she had just come from, little distinction was made between inside and out. With no moving walkways or shuttle buses or trains, she walked a good distance in high heels from the international to the domestic terminal. She arrived with blisters popping on the balls and heels of her feet.
The tiny white-tiled airport in Mombasa did not disappoint her, however. I’m home, she thought as she descended the escalator, exited the building, and got into a taxi. It was hot – she had forgotten just how hot – and it was humid. Shifting her body on the torn leather seat inside the stuffy, gasoline-fume-filled cab sounded as if she was ripping adhesive bandages from her thighs. Her undergarments soon became soaked with perspiration.
“Where you goin’, mama?” the driver asked. “The first hotel you come to.”
As they drove into the city, her eyes adjusted to the sprawling, run-down, strip-mall architecture, the abundance of matatu buses and bicycles in the crowded streets, and the scarcity of cars. There appeared to be a greater presence of Somalis and other outsiders than she remembered. A sleek United Arab Emirate Bank skyscraper looked boldly out of place. Trash was everywhere. She found the heat unbearable. Her mind juggled images, trying to reconcile the disjunction between America and Africa, between the past and present. Had her memories been real? Had her mind simply painted comforting yet distorted visions from childhood? Or had drugs and alcohol completely warped her memory? She felt as though she had slipped into a soft and familiar sweat suit that had shrunk and now subtly nagged at her: too tight in the crotch, too short at the ankles.
“Where you been?” the cabby asked.
“On vacation.” She wasn’t in the mood for talk. “It was good vacation?” he persisted.
“Very long one.” She tried to trap the rising nausea in her throat. “This okay, mama?” he said after fifteen minutes of silence. “Fine.” She hadn’t even taken a good look at the hotel. Grateful
for the end of a bumpy ride, she rushed to get out of the stifling car, only to find the air outside wasn’t much better.
She paid him the thousand shillings he requested. The equivalent of ten U.S. dollars may have been an outrageous amount, but she was no longer used to bargaining over cabfare.
The hotel was a cheap one. There was no real mattress, just a foam pad. Nor was there a private bath, or even a fan. She collapsed on the bed and slept until the sound of squabbling between a man and woman in the next room wakened her. She took the towel at the foot of the bed along with her bag of toiletries and headed for the bathroom in the hallway. She washed with the mushy piece of used soap in the shower stall, put on fresh clothing and makeup and, already glistening with new perspiration, set out for the streets of Mombasa.
On Biashara Street she bought a big bar of scented soap and some cheap underwear. At the rate she was sweating, she would run out of what lingerie she’d brought faster than she could wash and dry it. She continued to walk, expecting to see someone she knew or someone who knew her. Years ago, everyone knew everyone in Mombasa. A young boy purchased some miraa from a kiosk for three dollars a kilo. He pulled the leaves off and chewed on the sticks, then spit them out into the street. She wondered what the margin of profit was for the kiosk owner, assuming she could do better. She edged her way past shoppers bargaining for clothing and household merchandise and occasionally examined a silver teapot or feigned interest in a rug or a kanga – the housedress Kenyan women wore at home – so that she could pause in the shade of a shop’s awning for relief from the sun.
On Digo Road, men seated at tables on the balconies of an endless string of tearooms read newspapers in front of open windows framed with faded brown shutters. Grease-stained curtains escaped from the windows and waved like flags in the Mombasa dust, beckoning other men upstairs into rooms that were dark and dingy and so unlike the sparkling Little Venezia Café in Rockfield. As she made her way through the crowds toward Hanawi Street, she was struck not so much by the number of Somali women she encountered as by their appearance. What had always distinguished a Somali Muslim woman from a Kenyan, who wore the solid black cover-up called a buibui, were their colorful outfits. But that was no longer the case. Many Somali women were now also covering their faces with veils, just as her Saudi mother used to do.
She entered the pastel section of the city, where a few homes were still graced by massive carved wooden portals. Star-shaped spikes protruded from the doors, protection in former days from invaders’ elephants.
“Where you goin’? What you doin’?” A toothless old man took her by surprise. The neighborhood watch had long existed in Mombasa.
“Nyumbani,” she said. Home. Hearing Swahili, he smiled. “Sawa,” he said. Okay.
“Sawa,” she echoed, happy to have the familiar words bounce back and forth from tongue to tongue again.
She wandered on through the dirt passageways of Fort Jesus. A tourist asked her to take a picture of him and his wife at the entrance to one of the caves. At first she thought they were Americans: he with his jeans, white T-shirt, sneakers, and backpack; she with her long linen travel skirt and sandals. But they informed her they were South African, which surprised her. The South African tourists of her childhood had been white, not black like this couple.
She walked beneath the remains of a mud-brick arch that opened onto a quadrangle of green lawn similar to the town common in Willowsville and sat on one of the blue painted chairs at a long table beneath a tree. The sun was beginning to go down, but not the temperature. Fort Jesus had been taken for granted when she lived in Mombasa, a relic of the past that tourists made sure not to miss, a marker of the Old Town. F
or the first time she wondered what it might have been like to retreat into the fort for protection from evil forces. She wondered what evil had been at work within its thick mud walls. What women had been violated? What children compromised? What men humiliated? Man against woman. Tribesman against tribesman.
*
In the morning she prepared herself to meet her family. She put on a white shirred stretch-lace top. Her silk suit jacket had perspiration stains under the armpits, but if she folded it a certain way and carried it over her arm, the stains were hidden and it added elegance to her outfit. The night had been filled with the anxiety and fear that her tortured sleep might leave her bruised, but it hadn’t. She took her coffee and rolls at daybreak and checked out of the wretched hotel as quickly as she had checked in.
“Five hundred shillings, mama,” the taxi driver said when she directed him towards Auntie’s.
“Two hundred,” she countered. “Four.”
“Three.”
They settled on three-fifty. Soon they were riding along the beach, which seemed narrower than she remembered.
“What are they doing?” she asked, watching two men empty large plastic bags into the ocean.
“Dumping trash,” he said, matter of factly. “The water’s full of seaweed anyway.”
She told him to stop at a fairly decent-looking hotel. “This new?” she asked.
“The Giriami? No, mama.”
It wasn’t familiar. She didn’t ask how old it was, because the driver was only a boy. What did he know about time? It might have been erected after her departure or had been there and changed hands in her absence. Maybe it had simply fallen into one of those black holes of her damaged memory.
He took her bags out of the trunk; she paid him.
“The Giriami is very nice hotel,” he said in anticipation of a bigger tip. She gave him an additional fifteen shillings and told him to wait.
At sixty dollars a night the Giriami was indeed quite posh, with private bathrooms, air conditioning, in-room phones, two pools, and real mattresses. She told the clerk she’d be staying only a night or two, until she got settled with relatives. Taking no chances, she insisted on accompanying the porter who took her bags up to the room before she continued on to Auntie’s. It was June, and she imagined her family would be preparing for the annual reunion. After all, Auntie’s health was failing; ever yone would surely come.
When the driver pulled up in front of the house, Fatma almost told him he was mistaken. The once-proud villa, as orderly as the bricks that sat one on top of one another, appeared as tired-looking as a hooker who’d been out on the street too long, its neglected gardens like a woman in wrinkled clothing.
Her brother Hamal answered the door. Middle age had not treated him as well as it had Daniel. Political, financial, and social ruin had produced a forty-five-year-old who looked more like sixty-five or seventy. They hardly recognized each other.
“Hujambo,” he said, surprised. “Umekuja.” You came.
*
Nearly two years had passed since Jamila had brought Hamal’s message to her at Shelby, yet he didn’t question her tardiness, and she offered no excuses. The rooms were as cluttered and filled with old and new as the streets of Mombasa: a television on top of an old refrigerator, a high chair alongside the sofa, T-shirts and several pairs of jeans draped over Auntie’s carved Arabian sideboard, toys scattered here and there. Hamal, who had always preferred to communicate in Somali, spoke only in Swahili.
“Excuse this, but there are a lot of people living here. You should have called. Jumaa!” He summoned the houseboy, who came running. “Bring my sister a Fanta orange.”
This was hardly the welcome she had anticipated. But should she have expected to reappear after years of silence, and so long after Jamila had delivered his message, and receive a warm embrace from the brother who had beaten her for running away on her wedding night? That he had tried to get in touch with her had been for Auntie’s sake, and probably also had had something to do with ensuring his own comforts. This was, after all, her house, for she, not he, was Auntie’s child. But there was a Somali tradition, one she had forgotten about but that Auntie had not: when a mother dies, a sister assumes her role as parent of her children. So it is too with fathers and their brothers. Auntie, who had been unable to conceive, now had fifteen children. She was Hamal’s mother too; when he spoke of her, he no longer referred to her as Shangazi, or Auntie, rather as mother, as only Fatma had done in the past.
“Mama has taken a turn for the worse,” Hamal said. “You did not get here a moment too soon. She suffered another stroke two weeks ago.”
“Fatma is here, Mama,” he called out, leading Fatma into her room.
She was lying in bed; several pillows propped up her gray head. Her face was crooked, as though it had been made of clay by a creator who, unable to decide how to arrange it, had left it unfinished and drooping on its right side. Fatma sat on the bed and took her mother’s hand.
“Binti.” With great effort, her lips tried to form the word for daughter. “Binti,” she repeated, her speech slurred.
“Sawa, Mama.”
Fatma hoped that her vision was blurred too, that she could see none of her imperfections, that she appeared as unblemished as the girl who had left so many years ago.
“I am sorry,” Fatma cried. “I am sorry for having stayed away so long.”
Auntie nodded, as if to say she knew why Fatma had disappeared, the way only a mother knows things. The way a mother senses danger or feels a child’s pain.
“There are reasons,” Fatma persisted. “You are here,” she whispered.
Fatma rested her tear-streaked face on Auntie’s breast; Auntie rested a hand on Fatma’s head.
Later, Hamal told her how Uncle Oliver had left Auntie and gone back to Liverpool a few years after his venture in America failed, salvaged his declining business. Hamal and his wife had taken care of Auntie. “I’ve tried to help any family members I could,” he said. Hamal’s wife’s cousins were living on the second floor, along with Hamal’s own children and grandchildren. Auntie’s house had become a boardinghouse, in which every room was a bedroom. The houseboy Jumaa slept on a cot in the kitchen. In Kenya there was always someone worse off and willing to work for next to nothing; Jumaa came from the lowliest tribe of the oldest slave port, Takaungu.
At first Fatma resented them all for descending on what had once been her home, but she soon felt grateful to Hamal. He and his wife had cared well for Auntie after her stroke, attending to her day and night with feeding tubes and bedpans. “This is still your home,” Hamal said, but they both knew that culture and circumstances had undermined that legal claim. Fatma owed her family the same generosity Auntie had offered them. They, in turn, owed her nothing. Besides, she had never planned to stay in Mombasa, and she couldn’t take anything away from her family, which was no longer rich and or united even in spirit. There would be no feast this summer, no party to mark her homecoming. She had been deluded in thinking there might be; there hadn’t been a celebration in years. Fatma was not the only one who had suffered. She was not the only one whose situation had changed.
*
Fatma returned to Auntie’s house the next morning and, against Auntie’s advice, called her sister Kamilah in Saudi Arabia. Fatma would confess everything, and Kamilah would understand and send or bring Hussein to Fatma, at least for a visit. She might even ask Fatma to come to Saudi Arabia. Disagreeable Kamilah had not changed, however, one bit and was outraged at Fatma’s phone call; she hung up the moment she heard her voice. Fatma called again.
“You’ve been gone too long. He’s not your son anymore.” Her tone was as flat and dry as the desert. Not your son anymore. Not your son. The dust of her Arabic choked Fatma’s ears and throat, and it took her a while to respond.
“Only because of Grandfather – and Mother.”
“No. You could have come for him. You could have tried to see him. But you never did.”
/> “How could I come? Grandfather would never have permitted it.” “He forbade you to raise Hussein. He never said you could not visit him.”
“That’s a lie!” But in reality, Fatma could no longer remember the exact details of her departure. There were many things she could not remember.
“You do not know what life has been like in this part of the world. It is no longer your world. As far as Hussein is concerned, he’s no longer yours either. It’s too late. He’s only fourteen. He doesn’t need to take on your mistakes. He doesn’t need to try and understand. He’s had to understand enough. He knows that his real mother was my sister. He knows that his father was American. That is all he needs to know. That is enough. Believe me. He goes to school. He has friends. He’s happy. He’s all I have.”
“Just let me speak to him, Kamilah, rajaan.” Please, Fatma begged.
Kamilah slammed the receiver down.
Fatma phoned again – ten, twenty times. Kamilah didn’t answer. She had taken a knife to the rope Fatma had knotted inch by inch and struggled to climb.
Fatma planned to fly to Saudi Arabia. She wanted only to talk to him, she told Auntie.
“Is this the only reason you have come?” Auntie asked. Her twisted face could not conceal her disappointment.
“No.”
Auntie told Fatma that Kamilah had been good to the family, that she had spent most of Grandfather’s money supporting their brothers and sisters in Somalia. Because of her, one had managed to get to Switzerland and another to France. But there had been only so much she could do.
It took Auntie a long time to say these things. Such hard work. Slowly, she spoke the wisdom of selflessness and true love possessed by one who has given it yet lived without receiving it.
“All I ever wanted was for you to be my daughter – only mine,” she whispered, her crooked mouth struggling with every syllable, her eyes glistening. “To me, you were and are my daughter. But my sister could never relinquish her role as mother. She was a holy woman, an intelligent woman, much smarter than me. She was a stubborn woman, and a selfish woman. I say this to you now, and I ask Allah’s forgiveness for speaking of the dead so. But it is true.” She paused and took several long breaths, then began again. “It pained me when you returned from your visits to her so sad. I knew why, and still I sent you all the same. I felt obligated to her. Without her, there would not have been you for me.” Her eyes filled up with tears that rolled down her cheek. Fatma gently swept them away with her fingertips. “Because of her selfishness I was never free to raise you truly as my own. But it was because of her selflessness that I had you at all. We are all capable of the two. You had two mothers: one strong, one weak. Forgive me for being the weak one, for letting her interfere and control what she should not have. At the time I thought that to go against her would have brought you more misery. Just as I thought to go against your uncle many times would have brought the same.”
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