Once peace had been at least temporarily restored between the youths, the vehicle was on the move again, but not for long. The driver, as courteous as ever, apologized for the time it was taking to arrive at Jeebleh’s hotel. “It won’t be long now,” he added.
“Where are we?” Jeebleh asked.
“We are in the north of the city, where our clanspeople have relocated to, having fled because of StrongmanSouth’s scorched-earth policy,” the driver said.
The vehicle had scarcely come to a halt when Jeebleh noticed a change in the behavior of the militiamen. They showed a united front to the hordes of men, women, and children who came from the shanties all around. There was a lot of mingling, a lot of primordial rejoicing. As he watched the shambling efforts at camaraderie, Jeebleh thought nervously about the ingrained mistrust between the youths, who belonged to different subclans, and about the unreleased violence that stalked the people of the land: friends and cousins one instant, sworn foes the next.
From inside, Jeebleh looked on as a woman in some kind of nurse’s uniform instructed a group of teenagers how to lift the wounded fighter out of the vehicle. The teenagers were rough-hewn in speech and manner, and struck Jeebleh as being careless, picking the wounded youth up like a sack of millet, despite the nurse’s warnings—“Careful, careful!” Jeebleh was reminded of inexperienced furniture movers taking an eight-legged table out of a small room into a bigger one through a tiny door.
The driver, waiting, kept the engine running.
JEEBLEH WAS SAD THAT THE NIGHT HAD FALLEN SO RAPIDLY, AS TROPICAL nights do. He was sad that he took no account of it, when he had wanted to remain alert, from the instant he first remarked that it was coming at them in a series of waves. He wished he were able to tell the meaning of the stirrings in the darkness outside, a darkness that was imbued with what he assumed to be Mogadiscio’s temperamental silence. Jeebleh heard a donkey braying, heard an eerie laughter coming to them from the mournful shanty homes. He had looked forward to the twilight hour, had been prepared to welcome it, hug it to himself, but when it did come he hadn’t been aware of it.
As they moved, Jeebleh, with nothing better to do, pulled at his crotch to help lift the weight off his balls. From the little he had seen so far, the place struck him as ugly in an unreal way—nightmarish, if he dignified what he had seen of it so far with an apt description. Most of the buildings they drove past—he had known the area well; Bile’s mother had had a house hereabouts once—appeared gutted; the windows were bashed in, like a boxer who had suffered a severe knockout; the glass panes seemed to have been removed, and likewise the roofs. In short, a city vandalized, taken over by rogues who were out to rob whatever they could lay their hands on, and who left destruction in their wake. Jeebleh’s Mogadiscio was orderly, clean, peaceable, a city with integrity and a life of its own, a lovely metropolis with beaches, cafés, restaurants, late-night movies. It may have been poor, but at least there was dignity to that poverty, and no one was in any hurry to plunder or destroy what they couldn’t have. He doubted if there was enough space in people’s minds for the pleasures he had enjoyed when living in Mogadiscio.
“I feel embarrassed that my colleague was rude to you in my presence,” the driver said. “I cannot apologize enough. Kindly forgive us!”
“I suppose I should’ve said to the Major that I had returned to reemphasize my Somaliness—give a needed boost to my identity,” Jeebleh said tentatively. “Do you think that would’ve made any sense to him?”
“I doubt that it would have.”
“To tell you the truth, I was fed up being asked by Americans whether I belonged to this or that clan,” Jeebleh continued, “many assuming that I was a just-arrived refugee, fresh from the so-called clan fighting going on in our country. It’s irritating to be asked by people at the supermarket which clan I belong to. Even the colleagues I’ve known for years have been lousy at secondguessing how I felt about clan identity and my loyalty to it. You see, we Somalis who live in America, we keep asking one another where we stand on the matter of our acquired new American identity. I’ve come because I want to know the answers. I also wanted to visit these heat-flattened, sunburned landscapes, and see these shantytowns, witness what’s become of our city.”
When he had finished speaking, Jeebleh relished the quiet drive, the silence of the hour, the fact that there was no fighting, no guns firing, no traffic in the roads. He could hear voices, but they weren’t threatening or frightening. The night they were plunging into extended a hand of welcome. Would that he could challenge his demons of despair, if these got in touch. On this trip, his life felt like it was on a mezzanine suspended between a floor marked “Ennui” and another marked “Hope.” While he knew that anything could happen, he was determined to do his utmost not to end up in a body bag, or in an overpriced coffin addressed to his wife and daughters, care of a funeral agency with a zip code in Queens, New York.
The driver said, “I’ll give you my telephone number so you can call me when you need to. And please don’t hesitate to get in touch if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“It’s very kind of you.”
The vehicle stopped in front of a hotel gate. The driver applied the hand-brake, turned to Jeebleh, and announced, “Here we are!”
4.
JEEBLEH TOOK NOTE THAT THE GROUNDS OF THE HOTEL WERE MARKED off from the street by a large sign, handwritten in Somali, Arabic, English, and Italian, warning that no one bearing firearms would be allowed onto the premises.
At the sound of the horn, the gate opened slowly, and his gaze settled on two men, neither, evidently, with a gun. One of the men appeared to have only one arm, while the other was distinguished by an enormous pair of buckteeth, bright white against an otherwise obscure face.
Above the gate, up in the heavens, the sky was soaked in the blood of sacrifice: it reminded Jeebleh of the Somali myth in which the sun is fed daily, at dusk, on a slaughtered beast. He remembered being told, as a child, that the routine of feeding the sun daily at the same hour made her return for food the following day. Now that he had gained his adulthood and come back to this fragmented land, he lamented the tragic absence of a hero worthy of elevation to solar eminence. He might have been at the gate of prehistory, because the quickening darkness of the hour dyed the visible world with the dim color of yet other uncertainties. Would he be safe at this hotel? Did it have running water? How intermittent was its electricity?
Of the two men at the gate, OneArm advanced with the wariness of a chameleon, once all the militiamen had gotten down from the roof of the vehicle. He was so dark he might have been woven out of the night. He moved around the vehicle in the stylized goose-step of a sentry on duty. “No guns, please,” he told the driver, who assured him that neither he nor Jeebleh was armed.
Bucktooth stayed behind, focused with reptilian attentiveness on every possible movement, his right hand in his pocket—maybe because a firearm was hidden there. The gate firmly in his grip, he kept half of his body out of immediate danger in the event of a shoot-out.
His hands on his lap, Jeebleh was a study in concentration. He was totally taken with Bucktooth, who seemed intent on outstaring him and the driver—until they conceded defeat, and showed their hands, palms forward. In fact, Jeebleh probably would have felt bothered and offended if he had been treated differently from anyone else.
As the gates opened fully to let the vehicle through, Jeebleh was touched by an instant of remorse as the minute hands of his destiny gathered the hours of his emotion. He looked forward eagerly to calling his wife and daughters in New York, to assure them that all was well with him so far; he felt a surge of anticipatory elation.
The driver parked under the glow of a fluorescent tube with a crowd of moths around it. Jeebleh got out, and took two steps before tottering to an unsteady stop: his toes had curled up in an awful cramp. While he was stretching his legs and retraining his feet to walk, two youths, presumably bellboys, not in uniforms but in
sarongs, grabbed hold of his bags, and went ahead inside.
He bid the driver farewell and, even though he didn’t think he would ever get around to calling him, wrote down his telephone number and thanked him profusely. Then he followed the youths, into an enclosed area where there were tables and chairs. He could not be absolutely certain, but it was possible that he took leave of his senses for a few exhausted seconds, during which he may not have known who he was, where he was, or what on earth he was doing there.
COMING TO, HE CAST ABOUT FOR A SOLID ANCHOR AND SOON SPOTTED A rather rotund man, with a cuddly look about him, struggling to heave himself out of a threadbare chair. He was tempted to offer the man a hand, but thought better of it when he saw him extricating himself from the deep chair and straightening up, then coming forward, his right hand outstretched. He was not the handsomest of men: his mouth protruded, boasting teeth that might have been molded out of soapstone, and his lower lip curved in the unlikely shape of a kilt of clouds covering the southern half of a full moon. The man introduced himself as the manager. Jeebleh was comforted when he shook the man’s fleshy palm. “Welcome,” the manager said. “I hope everything has been smooth and comfortable since your arrival.”
The accumulated horrors of the scene at the airport, the stress of meeting so many strangers in a city virtually alien, and now the necessity of staying in a hotel—these were taking their toll on Jeebleh, unnerving him, and making him lose his general equilibrium. Lest he should speak impulsively and say whatever came into his mind, he remained silent.
“Welcome home, our bitter home!” said the man, reading into Jeebleh’s silence. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his baggy trousers, in which you could hear the jingle of colliding coins. (Jeebleh wondered what manner of coins these might be, and assumed they were not Somali, considering the high rate of inflation: a dollar was exchanging nowadays for thousands of shillings; when he had left for the United States, it had been worth six.) “I am Ali!”
Ali offered a belated smile, as if now remembering that he had been trained to please his customers. “In an earlier life, in long-ago peacetime Somalia, I used to be the favorite of gossip columnists and the envy of other hotel managers,” he told Jeebleh. “I was appreciably more adept than any other hotel manager at getting the best of jobs. In my day, I played host to several kings of the petrodollar variety, not to mention a handful of African presidents on visits to Mogadiscio, and the secretaries-general of the UN, the Organization of African Unity and the Arab League too. And even though I am suitably qualified to run hotels anywhere in the world, having taken a degree in hotel management in England, I’ve chosen to stay. We are the sons of the land, to which we belong, you and I. I feel no regrets, though, none whatsoever.”
Jeebleh suspected he knew what Ali meant when he said, “We are the sons of the land.” He understood the manager’s “we” to be inclusive: Jeebleh, Ali, and many other known but unnamed clansmen of theirs, united in blood. But was he right to interpret it this way?
“Why have you chosen to stay?” he asked.
“I have a bedridden mother to look after.”
And here he was, Jeebleh, come to pacify his mother’s troubled spirits. Yet he couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to say, No regrets, none whatsoever.
“Anyway,” the manager continued, “we’ve been alerted to your coming, and we are at your service, to offer you our best.”
“Who alerted you to my coming?”
“A good friend of yours.”
“A good friend of mine?”
“Af-Laawe.”
Jeebleh let this pass unchallenged. Moreover, he purposefully radiated a false sense of confidence, if only to prove to the manager that he was on top of things. He thrust his chin forward and asked, “Where are my bags?”
For a moment, because he had no idea where the bags had ended up, the manager cut an undignified posture; but he was quick in setting things right. He summoned the tallest of the bellboys and inquired what had become of the gentleman’s bags. Another bellboy in a sarong informed them that he had taken the gentleman’s bags to “the suite.”
“Now for the formalities, if you don’t mind.” The personification of courtesy, Ali placed a pen on top of some forms and pushed them toward Jeebleh.
“Would you like to see my passport?” Jeebleh asked.
“There’s no need.”
Jeebleh completed the forms in haste. The words for date and place of birth, sex, marital status, and permanent address were in Italian, and spelled incorrectly; the paper was so dry it felt to Jeebleh as if it would break if he tried to fold it; and some of the spaces he was supposed to fill in already bore pencil markings. When he had finished, and was preparing to go up to his suite, he heard Ali say, “Please do not judge us too harshly!”
“But of course not,” Jeebleh replied.
“Times were”—Ali gestured out toward the gates, toward OneArm and Bucktooth—“when you knew who was bad and who was good. Such distinctions are now blurred. We are at best good badmen, or bad badmen.”
Because he wanted to create a small measure of trust, Jeebleh blundered forward. “Do you know Bile?” he said.
“He’s a good man.”
“What’s the latest about Raasta?”
“Nothing, so far that I’ve heard.”
As Jeebleh took his leave politely, half nodding, the manager asked, “Would you like to get in touch with Bile?”
“There’s time for everything,” Jeebleh answered.
A bellboy escorted him to his suite.
“SUITE” WAS A MISNOMER, GIVEN THE ROOM’S SIZE AND ITS AMENITIES. AND now that Jeebleh was alone, the demons were back. His agitation was due, in part, to a lack of clarity in his mind—how to define himself here. His difficulty lay elsewhere, in his ability to choose whom he would associate himself with. He was somehow sure that Ali knew that Bile was his childhood friend, but not a fellow clansman. Jeebleh revisited his earlier exchanges with the Major, a barking dog penned in a kennel with many others like him, helplessly damned. It had been one thing talking to the Major, who thought of him as an outsider; it was altogether another to be in the company of the manager, with his inclusive “we”! What was he to do? Spurn Ali, who wished to relate to him, or welcome the inclusion, and yet keep a discreet distance, for his life might in the end depend on it?
He thought of how it was characteristic of civil wars to produce a multiplicity of pronominal affiliations, of first-person singulars tucked away in the plural, of third-person plurals meant to separate one group from another. The confusion pointed to the weakness of the exclusive claims made by first-person plurals, as understood implicitly in the singled-out singular. He remembered a saying, “Never trust a self-definer, because an ‘I’ spoken by a self-definer is less trustworthy than a she-goat in the habit of sucking her own teats,” and it made good sense when he thought about how Somalis drove him crazy with their abuse of pronouns, now inclusive, now exclusive.
Pronouns aside, he felt alienated from himself, as though he had become another person, when he witnessed the brutal murder of the ten-year-old boy earlier. Thank God, that sense of alienation lasted a mere moment or two, making him wonder whether he was not the he who had left Nairobi earlier that day. Why were the demons making him engage in a discourse of the mad, a discourse marked by pronominal detours?
He was ill at ease with the kind of discourse drawn from the obsession with pronouns. Take that inclusive “we.” Assume, he told himself, that Ali, presumably a clansman of his, kills someone. Wouldn’t the family whose son had been murdered take vengeance and murder, for instance, Jeebleh? Was he, as a member of a clan family, responsible for the murders committed in the name of a shared “we”? And what of the claim that violence is cathartic, capable of making people get to know one another in a deeper way, just as a person comes closer to knowing others in times of disaster?
He was sure that he did not love Somalia the way he used to love it many years before,
because it had changed. Maybe love did not enter into one’s relationship with one’s country? Maybe nostalgic patriotism demanded its own brand of flag-waving? Was he back in the country to refurbish his emotions about Somalia with fresher affections? Can one continue to love a land one does not recognize anymore? He had never asked himself whether he loved America. He loved his wife and daughters, and through them, he was engaged with America.
He took an intent look around the room in search of a secret place where he might hide his valuables, certain—although he hadn’t asked—that the hotel had no working safe. The room contained the minimum essentials: a single bed, evidently hastily made; a bedspread covering it, color discreet indigo; a bedside table with a lamp; a washstand with a jug below. Also, a threadbare facecloth, a bidet to the right of the stand, and near it, a plastic kettle. The kettle reminded him that he was back in an Islamic country, where one performed the rite of ablution several times a day.
He thought ahead, imagining that a hotel employee had stolen his valuables. Caught and found guilty, the thief would lose his hands. Jeebleh was distressed, because he didn’t want to confront the hard realities of today’s Somalia—where the limbs of the small fry are amputated, while the warlords are treated with deference. He pulled out the wallet holding his cash, and felt the freshness of the dollar bills between his fingers. His whole body shook at the thought of receiving an amputated hand as compensation. He replaced the cash in his wallet, and pulled out his toiletry bag.
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