Because he hadn’t expected to find a safe in a Mogadiscio hotel, he had resorted to making his own, in the safety of his hotel in Nairobi. He was a needle-and-thread man, and seldom traveled anywhere without a sewing kit. He had picked up the habit of darning during his years in jail. In fact, his study at home in New York was replete with all kinds of threads—cotton, silk, nylon and other synthetics, and a sewing machine, an ancient Singer, received as a Christmas present from his mother-in-law. With a reel of nylon thread, a pair of scissors, and a needle, he had made a false bottom for his toiletry bag, covering the visible part with waterproof material. He now had a space big enough to hide things in once he arrived in Mogadiscio.
He unloaded his toiletries onto the bed, and made sure the inner flap of the bag had been strengthened sufficiently. He was pleased with what he had done in Nairobi. Now he peeled off enough cash for his immediate needs, and put the remainder and his U.S. passport in the envelope into the false bottom of the bag. Then he replaced the toiletries in it, and left it conspicuously unzipped and in full view on the washstand, in the hope that no thief would suspect the bag to contain anything of value. As part of his strategy of deception, he triple-locked the closets, which contained nothing but his few clothes; he hoped to mislead any intruder.
He took a bucket shower quickly and methodically. Then he went out, in search of something to eat.
SEVERAL YOUTHS IN SARONGS WERE STANDING AROUND THE LOBBY. BEHIND the counter at the reception desk was an older man, more formally dressed; he appeared to be in charge of the desk. Jeebleh didn’t think the man was familiar with the etiquette of hotel business. He was crude, picking his nose and speaking rather loudly to the young men. When he made no move to ask whether he might be of some assistance, Jeebleh assumed that he was a relation of the hotel owner, newly arrived from the rural areas. Eventually a youth who described himself as a runner came forward and offered his help, saying, “We run errands for the guests. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“I would like to eat,” Jeebleh said.
“What do you want?” the youth replied. “There’s a restaurant close by.”
“What’s available?”
“Steak, other types of meat, spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti and salad?” Jeebleh doubted very much that he would eat more than a mouthful or two: he was worried that his stomach might act up, something it was prone to do. Not wanting to trust the runner with a large U.S. banknote, he lied, saying, “But I don’t have cash.”
“Don’t worry. You can pay later.” And without waiting for further instructions or Jeebleh’s confirmation, the youth ran off.
Alone in the courtyard, Jeebleh was struck by the night’s beauty, and gave himself time to admire its starry quality. His gaze fell on a tree in the distance, silhouetted by moonlight, and he was startled to notice a human figure wrapped in a subdued gray, sitting under the tree. The shape seemed detached from both time and space, reminding him of a well-trodden floor and a tableau vivant. He assumed he was looking at a woman, age indeterminate. Somehow, the woman’s figure evoked in him a funereal sorrow. Moving closer, he realized that there were in fact two women, sitting so close to each other that their veils merged and became one. They were so still for such a long time, neither speaking, that he thought of two cows sharing a scratching post. He had never examined these veils closely. They were less elaborate than the ones commonly worn by Yemeni women when he had lived in Mogadiscio.
Then he heard a man’s voice. When he turned around, the manager was standing in front of him. “A breathtaking sight, isn’t it?” Ali said. “Just look at how beautiful the night can be in a place that’s otherwise dreadful!”
And Jeebleh looked back up at the sky, which lay solemn in the placidity of its own composure, the stars a-scatter like maize kernels thrown into greedy disarray by two hens quarreling. He agreed: “The sky is divine!”
“I wouldn’t put it past StrongmanSouth to get it into his head that it’s time he owned the skies too,” the manager said. “Then we’ll all be in deeper trouble.”
In the pause that followed, Jeebleh was unable to say much, still shaken by the image of two women merging into one. He and Ali walked back to a table surrounded by chairs. Jeebleh asked, “What manner of veils do Somali women wear these days?”
“A lot has changed since you were last here.”
“I don’t remember these.”
The manager explained that the influence came from the heartland of Islamic fundamentalism, from societies such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, where knowledge about the faith was essentialist, or Saudi Arabia, where the people were traditionalist. He described how the “robes” were made from two widths of black material sewn together into a kind of a sack, with sleeves that were equal in width to the length of the gown. They had a face veil, consisting of a long strip of poplinette that concealed the whole face except for the eyes. The robe covered the woman from the tip of her forehead to her ankles.
“Well, I never!” Jeebleh said.
“How long have you been away?” the manager asked.
“Far too many years.”
The manager looked away, stared down at his hands, and said nothing.
Peace was a luxury expressed in an evening’s beauty, Jeebleh thought, in the calm into which a cricket chirps, into which the owl hoots.
“Has there been much fighting lately?” he asked.
“Every now and then,” Ali said. “When there is fighting, our evenings become very ugly and we hear nothing, not even the heart of our fear.”
“And the point to the fighting?”
“I don’t see any point to much of it.”
“But the entire nation is held for ransom,” Jeebleh said, mostly to himself and the quiet night.
Then he heard a scuttle coming from behind them: two geckos bickering over supremacy or rats, he couldn’t tell. He looked at the wall behind him, at the space ahead of him. Alas, he couldn’t make out who or what had made the sound, no matter how hard he tried. To a frightened man, he thought, everything appears strange, and every noise poses some threat.
The youth arrived, carrying two aluminum plates, one on top of the other, together containing a runny meal. Jeebleh had no idea why the youth had brought him a steak, or why it was drowned in the sauce it had been cooked in. He hoped it was freshly cooked, not warmed up several times over. The fried potatoes were soggy and inedible, and the steak tougher than the hoof of the cow slaughtered to produce it. The manager sat forward, and made as though he might launch into a lengthy explanation. Jeebleh waited, his fork raised, mouth in a grimace. He took a bite of a sodden potato, then a tougherthan-thou bite of steak. It was possible that his grim countenance dampened the manager’s intentions.
“Do you know the driver with whom I came from the airport?” Jeebleh asked.
“He was no driver in the ordinary sense of the term,” said the manager.
“What’re you saying?”
“Don’t be fooled.”
Jeebleh was thoroughly confused. He took a mouthful of potatoes and helped himself to a generous cut of rubbery steak, which he eventually swallowed.
“What is he, then, if he’s not a driver?”
“He was once a top civilian aide to the Dictator,” the manager said. “Now he is second man to an armed militia that enjoys the backing of Ethiopia. You want my advice: Don’t be deceived!”
Jeebleh wasn’t sure how to react to the information. He stared at Ali in the hope that he might continue with this line of advice. No one likes to be taken for an easy ride. Was he being fed falsehoods? A driver who was not a driver! Once a diplomat in the Somali chancellery in Rome; then a top aide to the Dictator; now a driver. Where was the truth in all this? Then there was Af-Laawe, otherwise known as Marabou, who presented himself as a friend of Bile’s but at the same time badmouthed him. Someone had sent him to the airport to meet his flight, but Jeebleh was damned if he knew who.
“How did you come to mee
t your ‘driver’?” Ali asked.
“Af-Laawe arranged a lift for me with him.”
“A night has two faces,” the manager commented.
“What does that mean?”
“Simply that a night has a face that’s visible in the light,” the manager said, “and a face that’s ensconced in the mystery of the unexplored.”
Jeebleh could see that the manager was enjoying himself, probably repeating something he had rehearsed previously in front of other clients like him. In repose, the manager’s taut face put him in mind of a tree cut before its time. Although he couldn’t wipe the agitation off his own face, Jeebleh remained silent; he would have to find out if there was a profitable purpose to the lies.
The manager sat in an unkempt huddle, his arms folded across his heaving chest. “Don’t be deceived!” he repeated.
Jeebleh pushed away the inedible food, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, and asked if there was a way to make a telephone call to America. The manager informed him, to his surprise, that this was possible. And when Jeebleh asserted that he hadn’t seen a phone in his room, the manager said, “There’s a one-man telephone company I can send for.”
“A what?”
“A one-man telephone company!”
Jeebleh remembered that until the late eighties it had been impossible to call Somalia from anywhere because the country boasted the worst telephone network on the entire continent. You just couldn’t get through to anyone living here. So how it was possible in civil war Mogadiscio for a one-man telephone company to allow him speak to his wife?
“It will cost you four dollars a minute. Shall I send for him?” the manager asked.
“Yes, please!”
HALF AN HOUR LATER, A MAN CAME TO JEEBLEH’S ROOM WITH A BRIEFCASE full of gadgets, including a telephone linked to a satellite long-distance service. Jeebleh called his wife at work, and gave her a sanitized version of what had happened so far. Lest she beg him to return at once, he omitted any mention of death or tensions. As far as he could remember, this was the first time that he had deliberately kept things from his wife.
And he realized, when he was once again alone in his room, that he wouldn’t hesitate to lie if he believed that by doing so he might serve a higher purpose: that of justice.
5.
BILE SAT UP, STARTLED, CALLING OUT JEEBLEH’S NAME, HIS VOICE HOARSE and his thinking addled. He was shaking all over, shivering fitfully one instant, perspiring heavily the next.
In a dream, a young woman in search of a physician had come for him, to tell him about a neighbor’s horse that had broken loose and, in the process of bolting blindly, trampled her elderly husband underfoot, wounding him badly. Hysterical, the woman had appealed to Bile to help her. And she kept repeating her plea, “Save me from becoming a widow. Have pity on me and my unborn child. You must save him from becoming an orphan.” She repeated the same sentences again and again, until the words merged one into another and he couldn’t separate them.
Bile sat up in the darkness of his nightmare, disturbed that he was unsure whether he had ever met the young woman, or known of her. In his discomfiture, he couldn’t resolve whether the dream had called on him for a reason as yet unclear, whether it had any bearing on his life or the lives of those who mattered to him.
THE NIGHT SOFTENED INTO DAWN, AND STILL RESTLESS, BILE GOT UP TO MAKE a pot of coffee the way he liked it: black, strong, no sugar. In his pajamas and dressing gown, and still a little shaken, he moved around in the apartment in which he had lived alone for a week now, half listening for the kettle to call when the water had boiled. He felt a chill of fluster in his bones, and a deep fear surged in him. Jeebleh, his friend, who was in Mogadiscio now, and Seamus, a close Irish friend, who was away in Europe, were of the view that he was in the habit of going into silent depressions, avoiding confrontations, or putting things off. He had never grieved enough, or been able to work through his rage at Caloosha for all the damage his half brother had done to him. Bile would retort that if he hadn’t acted on the deep-felt hurt, it was because he was a man of peace.
He returned to the kitchen in jitters, his hands trembling as he picked up the singing kettle. He poured the boiled water into the pot and, missing his target by a few inches, emptied much of the water on the flames, thus extinguishing the fire. He became even more agitated thinking about what Jeebleh might ask when he saw him. He was likely to ask whether Bile had done anything about Caloosha, and if so, precisely what. If Bile’s reply was in the negative, his friend was bound to say, “But what’s wrong with you?”
Wrapped in a fever of shivers, Bile took the coffee tray with him into his study and sat in a swivel chair by the window, whose curtains were open. He placed the tray precariously on the side of the crowded desk, because there were far too many books on the coffee table. There were books everywhere, on the desk, on the floor by his favorite rocking chair, on the windowsill, many of them open, some with bookmarks, others lying facedown. One book was splayed on its side, as though it had been knocked over recently. Bile knew the man who had written it, a fellow doctor famous more for his silly infatuation with the politics of his clansman StrongmanSouth than for his professionalism. Bile stared at a spot in the distant heavens, in the manner of someone abruptly stripped of memories, and balked at his own reaction to Jeebleh’s unexpected arrival.
When he heard the muezzin calling all Muslims to their dawn prayer, he pushed his enraged emotions aside and got up, intending to find a prayer rug for the first time in many years. He had no idea why, but a few minutes later he was standing before the blackboard on the wall, a piece of chalk in his hand, adding “Clean towels, sheets for Jeebleh’s bed, etc.” to the day’s to-do list. No sooner had he replaced the chalk and dusted his hands clean than he was appalled that he hadn’t said his prayers—and on top of this he was dismayed at reading what he had just written, for he had assigned Raasta’s room to Jeebleh without giving the matter any serious thought. He leaned against the wall, worried that he might sink into a delirium. With the sun’s early rays falling on his face, he might have been a rabbit caught in a mighty floodlight, its warren of possible escapes blocked off. When he went into the bathroom, he felt as closed in as a rabbit seeing its frightened expression in a mirror. Studying his reflection, he felt that he was staring at someone else’s face, remembering and reliving someone else’s history, listening to the thought processes of someone alien to him.
Bile was fifty-eight, tall, with a back straight as a ramrod. There wasn’t a single ounce of extra fat on his body. His mud-brown eyes were restless, and his lips were forever astir, in the active manner of a mystic endlessly reciting his devotions. His hair was cut short, in the style of a get-up-and-go man who hasn’t the time to comb it. He typically wore either jeans or trousers that didn’t need to be ironed.
Shaving, he cut his chin, and his forefinger came into contact with a trickle of blood. He dabbed the cut with toilet paper, and grew steadily calmer, until he remembered who and where he was. He dabbed the cut again, to see how much blood he was losing.
In these unsettling times, everyone’s fate, actions, dreams, hates, and aspirations were seen, understood, and interpreted in stark political contexts; distrust was the order of the day, and everyone was suspicious of everybody else. If Jeebleh were to express dissatisfaction with Bile’s way of doing things, Bile would contrast it to his friend’s lex talionis, affirming that he, Bile, did not feel indentured to an Old Testament law of retaliation. There was no doubt in his mind that the dark side of wrong would not be allowed to triumph. Now this: Raasta kidnapped; her father, Faahiye, missing. Rumor had it that Faahiye had last been seen heading for a refugee camp in Mombasa.
Bile’s fears and sense of despair came close to depression, as he thought of a western he had seen once in which the good characters were caught in deadly quarrels among themselves, while the bad, who posed a greater threat to the fabric of society, were all dealt winning hands in the first part of the f
ilm. He knew from personal experience how often people, like Faahiye and his wife, Shanta, eager to change the unreconstructed ways of Somali society, fought fiercely among themselves until they had no energy left to take on the reactionaries who ran the real show. In a civil war, there were no progressives and no reactionaries; everyone was a victim, seldom a culprit.
His knees and hip joints stiffening, he recalled how, with the prison gates left open after the Tyrant fled the city, he had taken his first step into what he assumed was freedom. For almost an hour, he had watched with detached amusement as other prisoners ran from their cells as fast as their feet could carry them. A few of his fellow political detainees, whom he hadn’t seen for years because he was kept isolated, came by his cell on their way out. He remembered saying to one of them, “What’s the hurry?” But why, why didn’t he flee?
The truth was shockingly mundane. He was merely having difficulty getting to his feet, suffering, as he was, from locomotor ataxia, in which the lower limbs are numbed. Try as he might, he would rise and then fall, again and again, his feet and legs failing him, his heels hurting, his eyes in pain when he opened or closed them, his head dizzy. As a political detainee, in isolation for seventeen years, Bile had been denied his right to take fresh air, to walk about in the prison yard, or to come into even indirect contact with the world outside. He had received no letters and no books.
Kept in a tiny cubicle, where it was impossible for a tall man like him to stand to his full height, he did what he could to remain fit, exercising within the limited space. But things were made even less tolerable, physically and mentally, when a month before the collapse of the state, more draconian security measures designed to confound the prisoners were introduced. He was kept in a dark room, allowed no contact with anyone, including the wardens. Then he was taken out of isolation and made to share a cubicle with petty thieves and other riffraff. Bile couldn’t say whether he preferred total isolation in a dark cubicle to confinement in the same cramped space with lowminded thugs, who wouldn’t let him be.
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