“Maybe the two Strongmen know things we don’t.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jeebleh.
“Maybe they know the money is already in Europe, deposited in a Swiss bank, and waiting to be signed for, on submission of a coded number,” the driver speculated. “Or maybe they’re waiting until our man joins the Frenchman and the Norwegian who helped him spirit away the UN funds, and then Marabou will collect his cut, and share it out. Maybe an associate of one of the Strongmen is Marabou’s principal protector.”
“Like who?”
“Do you know of Caloosha? His name is often mentioned,” the driver said. “I hear too that Af-Laawe is quite friendly with a brother-in-law of his, who is StrongmanSouth’s deputy. Ours is an incestuous community, and the man has protectors all over the place.”
“What are his links to Caloosha?”
“I wouldn’t know, to be honest.”
The youths inside the vehicle were becoming fidgety, and looked out anxiously in the direction from which they expected the Major to appear. The one with the cast pointed out that as a highly placed officer often entrusted with dangerous missions, the Major ought to know that it wasn’t safe for them to remain stationary in one place for such a long time.
“We’ll give him another minute,” the driver said.
“And then we’ll go,” the youth insisted.
No sooner had the driver turned the key in the ignition than they saw the Major with his escort, carrying something in a plastic bag. Cursing under his breath, he appeared still very edgy as he entered the vehicle. The engine started and the vehicle moved.
3.
“WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?” THE DRIVER PUFFED HUNGRILY ON THE cigarette he had lit in a moody silence.
“We had to break the safe,” the Major explained, “because the woman couldn’t find her key. Apparently her old man had taken it with him.”
“The movement is broke and we need to raise funds from the usual sources, our clansmen in the U.S., am I right?”
The Major was on the point of accusing the driver of divulging a secret to a nonclansman, but then his face took on the expression of a man deciding to put aside his differences with another for the sake of peace. Surprisingly, he lapsed into a friendlier mood, even smiling, if a little uneasily. Maybe he had retold himself Voltaire’s admonition while breaking the safe, and had come around to the view that it wasn’t wise to make unnecessary enemies. He turned to face Jeebleh, and asked, “Have you ever met StrongmanSouth?”
“No.”
The Major said, with an odd mix of fear and pride. “I know StrongmanSouth very well.”
“What’s he like?” Jeebleh asked.
“The man is raving mad.”
Jeebleh remained silent and sullen. He had no idea what to expect or where their conversation might lead.
“And you know what?” the Major went on.
‘What?”
“For his breakfast, he eats cakes of soap.”
Jeebleh wanted to remain silent, but couldn’t help himself. “Why in God’s name would he do that?”
“To prove that he’s tough!”
Jeebleh caught a glimpse of the Major’s rage rising and felt he might explode any minute; he looked at the driver, hoping he would step in to calm things. And it appeared as if he might do just that, but then he seemed to change his mind, and he too remained quiet.
The Major was now raving. “I’ve known StrongmanSouth for what he is for years—a lunatic with a madcap notion of what he can achieve. I served under him in the Ogaden War. I know him to be a pushover, and that’s why I am not afraid of him. In fact, he’s no trouble at all. Never mind the myth that’s been built around his name by his clansmen and supporters.” He threw his cigarette butt out of the window, and turned to Jeebleh as if expecting him to applaud. “He invaded our territory, conquered it. His ragtag militiamen rape our women, his clansmen have helped themselves to our farms. He’s turned our ancestral land into an extension of his power game, and we’re part of his bargaining strategy when the different interest groups come to the national reconciliation tables to set up an all-inclusive government. I keep telling my men that no one is able to rule over a people if they’re prepared to fight. We’re ready to kill, we’re ready to die until our ancestral territories are back in our hands.”
When the Major fell silent, the relief was not just Jeebleh’s. They felt it all round, and took it in with a fine dose of the dust coming in through the window, cracked open because of the heat.
“To someone like you,” the Major started up again, “we’re all nuts, we’re ranting mad. You probably think we’re all fighting over nothing of great importance. You’ll say, ‘Look, your country is in ruins, and you keep fighting over nothing.’ Those of us who’ve stayed on and participated in warring against the invaders of our territories feel maligned. We feel belittled when those of you who left, who have comfortable jobs, and houses with running water and electricity, somewhere else, where there is peace, speak like that. Has it ever occurred to you that some of us carry our guns, as the good everywhere must bear arms, to fight and die for justice?”
“But what makes you think that I believe you’re fighting over nothing of great importance? I’ve said no such thing.”
“I’ve met and heard many like you!”
Jeebleh chose not to answer and looked away.
The Major continued: “We’re fighting for a worthy cause, the recovery of our territory. We’re fighting against our oppressors, who’re morally evil, reprehensibly blameworthy, every one of them. I see StrongmanSouth as evil for wanting to impose his wicked will on our people.”
Jeebleh knew a lot more than he was prepared to let on, knew that the Major’s armed movement was engaged in acts equally reprehensible as those of StrongmanSouth’s militia, knew too that, as part of its policy to gain total control of the region, it had “cleansed” its ancestral territory of those hailing from other regions. From what Jeebleh had read, the leaders of the movement to which the Major and the driver belonged condoned the killing of innocent people who belonged to other clan families with ancestral memories different from theirs. Jeebleh considered the acts of all these armed movements immoral. Even so, he doubted there was any point engaging the so-called leaders in debate.
“Why are you here, anyway?” the Major demanded.
“Just visiting,” Jeebleh replied.
“Who’re you visiting?”
Jeebleh took his time before responding, because he didn’t like the Major’s aggressive tone. To calm himself, he studied the early hints of darkness coming at them in waves, and enjoyed this intimation of his first night in Somalia descending. His silence made the Major more impatient; he insisted on his question. “Are you visiting anyone in particular?”
“I’m visiting my mother’s grave,” Jeebleh said quickly.
But he felt ridiculous even to himself as soon as the words had left his lips. Granted, there was no gainsaying the fact that he had intended to call at his mother’s grave, but he had planned to achieve other things during his visit, including a good air-clearing session with Bile about their unfinished business. He saw the Major and the driver exchange knowing glances; both looked at Jeebleh and then back at each other.
“Did your mother die recently?” the driver asked.
“Close to nine years ago.”
“She died without you having seen her for years?”
Jeebleh nodded.
“Any idea where she’s buried?”
“None whatsoever.”
“During the last few years,” the driver said, “a lot of terrible things have been done both to the memory of the living and to the spirit of the dead. I’m glad you’ve come on a visit to ennoble her memory, and honor it. Even though, if I permit myself to be cynical for a moment, your mother was fortunate to die when she did. This way she was spared many of the horrors of the civil war.”
“How will you find her grave?” asked the Major.
“I am pinning my hopes on my mother’s housekeeper and caretaker, who will most probably know where she is buried,” Jeebleh said. But, he revealed, he had no idea how to find the housekeeper, who was actually in his employ, in that he paid her salary in the form of monthly remittances from America, directly into her account in Mogadiscio. Jeebleh was sure the housekeeper held the key to many secrets, and he was eager to talk with her.
“Don’t you have any blood relations in the city who might know?” the Major asked.
Although he was tempted, Jeebleh chose not to talk about his motive to visit, or admit that he was hoping he might be able to locate his mother’s story in the context of the bigger national narrative. So he kept it simple: “There are no surviving relations that I know of, or that I’m in touch with. But I have a couple of friends I plan to look up, and I’m pretty sure they’ll help in leading me to where my mother is buried.”
“How odd!” The Major sounded shocked.
“What?”
“I cannot believe that you have friends in the city, but no surviving blood relations.” He repeated the word “friends,” pronouncing it with a mocking distaste. “This is what America does to you.”
“What’s America done to me?”
“It’s made you forget who you are.”
“No, it hasn’t.”
“You’ll see for yourself when you’ve been here for a couple of days that there are no longer ‘friends’ you can trust, anywhere in this country,” the Major asserted. “Here we don’t think of ‘friends’ anymore. We rely on our clansmen, on those sharing our ancestral blood.”
“I find it hard to believe that you don’t have friends,” Jeebleh said.
“Only a fool not in touch with the realities of this country and our current history would insist on placing ‘friends’ above the station occupied by blood relations.”
The driver shook his head. “I don’t agree with you, my dear cousin,” he said. “You and I know that even in the worst times of the civil war, many of us have been saved, given shelter, and then helped to safety by our friends.”
“This is no longer the case, and you know it!” the Major replied. “Let’s not kid ourselves with these and other lies. Nor is it that this fellow doesn’t have any surviving blood relations here—he has plenty of them. Only he chooses to have nothing to do with them, believing they’ll relieve him of his American money, which he doesn’t wish to share with them. He thinks our reliance on blood kinship is backward and primitive. He is saying that he has money, that his family is safe and in America, that he belongs to the twenty-first century, while we belong to the thirteenth. Can’t you see what he’s saying?”
The driver said, “No, I can’t.”
“He’s saying that we’re backward fools, because we think of our kinsmen. Listen to him. He’s here not to visit the country or some relations, but to call at his mother’s grave. And on his way to her tomb, he’ll make the time to look up a couple of his old friends. He’s a modern man. We’re primitive, we have our heads in the sand.”
The militiaman with the cast said, “I think he should go to the south of the city, where they’re all crazy, to look for his mother’s grave. I agree with the Major, there’s something wrong with this man!”
The driver winced like a parent in whose presence a child has been rude to a guest.
The Major now launched into a new tirade on how people like Jeebleh were on show-off visits “as false as their teeth.” He devoted a few enraged remarks to their mannerisms, their clothes, their shoulder bags, the Samsonites-on-wheels in which they carried steam irons with which to press their stonewashed jeans. “The man is here to be gawked at,” he said. “You can bet he left America after paying a visit to his dentist, who scoured his mouth for possible repairs, and after calling on his physician, who prescribed his tablets against malaria. A tangle of pretenses, that’s what he is!”
He paused for a moment, but he wasn’t done with Jeebleh. He turned to the driver and said, “Ask him who his friends are, since he has no blood relations in the land. Ask him.”
Jeebleh was silent, but the driver answered the Major: “I suggest you lay off!”
Midway through the last rant, Jeebleh had decided not to rise to the Major’s provocation, because he felt apprehensive. It worried him that he thought of the Major as someone behaving like a damaged person who placed his own inherent failures at the center of his self-censure, and who laid all blame at someone else’s door. But he knew this notion wasn’t right, and he didn’t like the fact he was thinking it. Instead, Jeebleh eavesdropped on the conversation coming from behind him and was shocked to hear so much hate pouring forth from the militiamen, directed at StrongmanSouth and his tattered army that had laid their region to waste. Jeebleh looked for a long time at the wounded youth, with as much pained empathy as he could muster.
The driver jumped into the opportunity the silence had afforded him to change the subject, telling Jeebleh, “Our young warrior in the back stepped on an antipersonnel mine buried by StrongmanSouth’s militiamen in a corridor of the territory we control. In the opinion of the surgeon in Nairobi, he was lucky to get away with injuries only to his leg—he could’ve been blown sky high.”
It grieved Jeebleh to note that many of the militiamen laying down their lives in the service of the madness raging all around were mere children. It pained him too that those in the vehicle with him were so full of adult-inspired venom, their every third word alluding to vengeance, to death, and to shedding more enemy blood. They had lost their way between the stations of childhood and manhood. To judge from their conversation, many of them preferred dying in the full glory and companionship of their kin to being alive, lonely and miserable. Jeebleh remembered what Oscar Wilde said: that simply because someone is willing to die for a cause doesn’t make the cause just.
The Major said, “What do you, in America, think of us?”
It dawned on Jeebleh that there was something doglike about the Major: his tongue in a mouth forever ajar, throbbing with deadly menace. But after studying it for a few moments, he decided that the tongue hung out not like a dog’s, but like laundry left on the line to dry.
“It’s very hard to judge from there. I’ve come here to learn and to listen,” Jeebleh said.
“Then there’s hope for us yet!”
“In some ways, I admit things were a lot clearer when I was last here, in the days of the dictatorship. But despite everything, and despite the prevailing obfuscation, I’ve come to assess the extent of my culpability as a Somali.”
And he imagined seeing corpses buried in haste by his kinsmen, the palms of the victims waving as though in supplication. Similar images had come to him, several times, in the comfort of his home, in New York, and on one occasion, in Central Park, he had been so disturbed that he had mistaken the stump of a tree for a man buried alive, half his body in, the other half out. This was soon after he had watched on television the corpse of an American Ranger being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadiscio. Those images had given him cold fevers for months. Now he felt the strange sensation of a many-pronged invasion, as if his nightmares were calling on him afresh. His throat smarted, as with an attack of flu coming on.
Abruptly the Major again gave the order for the car to stop. As before, the young gunmen dismounted from the vehicle’s roof and took up positions facing the shanties at the roadside and spreading out fast, covering every possible angle. The Major got out and beckoned to several of them, and gave them instructions in a self-important way. He bid Jeebleh farewell, saying, “I hope you find your mother’s grave!”
He vanished into the village, one armed youth ahead of him, another behind, and two others on either side—a VIP with his own security detail, presumably on his way to the money changer’s.
“SO, YOU AND THE MAJOR DIDN’T EXACTLY HIT IT OFF,” THE DRIVER SAID.
There were half a dozen people left in the vehicle, including the wounded youth in the back. The driver di
d not move off right away, but waited for the Major’s escorts to return. The engine kept running; everyone was now more relaxed.
“Is he on a dangerous mission?”
Jeebleh took it that the driver knew the Major better than he was prepared to let on, and gathered from the man’s body language that he was comfortable in Jeebleh’s presence. But would he take him into his confidence, tell him things?
The driver spoke, his voice almost a whisper. “When he was in the National Army, he was trained in intelligence gathering and sabotage. Now he’s been assigned to sneak into the area controlled by StrongmanSouth, where he’ll do a couple of jobs. I’ve no idea what these are, because I have no clearance.”
Jeebleh remembered reading about the region that the driver, the Major, and these youths came from: their ancestral territory had been turned into a battleground between bloodthirsty warlords. Many of the people had fled their towns and villages, fearful of being caught up in the fighting or of being massacred by drug-crazed militiamen on instructions to do as much damage as possible. The area had become known as the Death Triangle.
When the youths returned from having done their escort duty, the driver announced that he was ready to move. But no sooner had he done so than an argument erupted among the militiamen, those who had been on the roof insisting that they exchange places with those inside: Voices were raised; triggers were touched; death threats were made. Jeebleh prayed, Oh God, please, no shooting! He feared, for the second time since his arrival, that he might die in a mad shoot-out involving hapless youths.
Against the driver’s advice, he stepped out of the vehicle, injudiciously volunteering to sit on the roof with the youths on guard duty. To his relief, his ploy worked, because those on the roof consented to remain there—as one of them put it, “for the time being, in honor of our guest.”
Jeebleh had barely pulled the door shut when he heard one of the youths on the roof lashing out at those inside for being favored by the Major, to whom as cousins they were closer than the youth was. Admitted into the intricacies of kinship, Jeebleh learned that the Major was in fact showing preference to his cousins, whom he kept close to himself, inside the vehicle and farther from danger, whereas he assigned roof duty to those more removed. For Jeebleh, this proved clearly that the family thread woven from a mythical ancestor’s tales seldom knitted society into a seamless whole. He assumed that the driver and the wounded warrior had stayed out of the dispute because their subclan was loyal to an altogether different set of bloodlines.
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