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by Nuruddin Farah

  “I get your point!” Caloosha replied.

  They were silent for a long while, and a semblance of calmness returned. Caloosha was where Jeebleh wanted him to be, in an amiable mood. “I am here to make peace,” Jeebleh said. “Okay? The past is not here, the present is war, so we must think about the future and marry it to peace. You get me?”

  “I get you.”

  Jeebleh hoped that it wasn’t too late in the day for him to introduce the subject that had brought him to Caloosha in the first place. He thought cautiously and elaborated the question in his head. Then he straightened his back, massaged it, and yawned. “Have you seen Faahiye lately?” he said.

  Jeebleh talked about Faahiye when he actually wanted to talk about Raasta, and her disappearance. Because the girl’s father was as safe a topic as he could come up with at short notice.

  “He came to see me the other day, to say hi.”

  “Alone?”

  “Af-Laawe brought him along.”

  “When was this?” Jeebleh asked.

  “I can’t recall.”

  “What about my mother’s housekeeper?”

  “What about her?”

  “Could you tell me how I can reach her? I’ll do so without imposing on you.”

  “It is possible,” Caloosha said, “that like Faahiye, your mother’s housekeeper went to a refugee camp in Mombasa. I’ll see what I can do, and get back to you when I have news of them.”

  How convenient: a refugee camp in Mombasa!

  “What about Raasta and Makka?”

  Caloosha gave the question serious thought before responding. “Faahiye assured me, when I asked him, that he knew nothing about his daughter’s whereabouts. You know that the girl’s parents had separated before her disappearance?”

  “I would like to see Faahiye.”

  “If he is in the country, you will,” Caloosha vowed.

  “And my late mother’s housekeeper?”

  “If she hasn’t left for Mombasa, you will.”

  They exchanged a few pleasantries, and Jeebleh helped himself to another cup of coffee, and then asked if Kaahin could take him back to his hotel, on foot. And of course, he would think about the offer to move in with Caloosha, thank you most kindly.

  11.

  BACK IN HIS HOTEL, JEEBLEH ARRANGED TO PHONE BILE. WHEN THEY spoke, they agreed to meet, and Bile promised to send Dajaal to fetch him. Jeebleh was eager to talk, because Af-Laawe’s and Caloosha’s innuendos were beginning to bother him.

  As he waited for Dajaal, Jeebleh replayed in his mind the two encounters—with Af-Laawe his first day, and Caloosha today—and his expression clouded over as he sadly contemplated how difficult it might be to discredit the accusations. Even though he did not think there was any truth to their insinuations, he did not want to dismiss them out of hand. It was possible that they were trying to trick him away from the direction in which he ought to be moving. And what better way to achieve their devious ends than to introduce such hard-to-challenge charges against Bile’s integrity? Jeebleh didn’t wish to rely only on his gut feeling: he wanted to hear his friend’s side of the story too.

  There was much ground to be covered. But before getting to what interested him, or asking Bile to refute the allegations or own up to them, Jeebleh decided that he would inform him about his own activities so far. He would tell him about being shadowed and then approached by the military types who had escorted him to Caloosha’s villa, and how the place had crawled with suspicious movements, how he felt the armed men were out to intimidate him and make him stop asking questions about Raasta.

  Once Jeebleh and Bile were together, they were anxious to get talking before Bile was called away on some emergency or another. They spoke fast, their words now merging and working well together, now jarring and making no sense at all.

  It fell to Jeebleh to make coffee for himself and tea for Bile, and to serve them both. It fell to him too to ask the appropriate questions so that his friend might build a bridge between his elusive past and the murky present in which they found themselves now.

  “What was your first day of freedom like?”

  “I had a harrowing experience of it,” Bile responded readily, prepared for this question, “because fighting framed my life then in ways I’ll never be able to communicate well to others not familiar with the circumstances.” The stress on his face was evident. “My first day as a free man proved to be the most frightening day in my entire life.”

  “Why?”

  “As prisoners, we were entirely cut off. We had no idea what was happening outside our cells. We had no idea that the Tyrant had fled the city. Someone, Lord knows who, opened the prison gates, someone else the gates of the city’s madhouses, someone else the gates of the zoo. So you had humans, some mad and some not, you had animals of every shape, size, and description, all of them on the run. And running alongside them, or in the opposite direction away from them, you had the looters, and the frightened families fleeing. You had thousands of political detainees, and hardened criminals in the tens of thousands. The lions, the zebras, the hyenas, the zoo camel with its two humps—every single creature on the run. You couldn’t tell who was fleeing from whom and who was chasing whom. Left to myself, I would’ve stayed on in my prison quarters, where I might have felt safer.”

  “How did you know the gates were open?”

  “Several hours after they were opened, a handful of vigilantes burst into our wing of the jail,” Bile replied, “and went from cell to cell, vowing to kill all the prominent politicians from the opposite clan family. The vigilantes had a dust-laden accent—they must have been recruited from the nomadic hamlets north of Balcad town. I was threatened with death because I tried to intervene, using the nationalist rhetoric of the sixties and seventies. They told me to leave, but I couldn’t, because I had a problem getting up. But they didn’t hack me to pieces with a machete. In the end, I left my cell, my home for so many of my prison years, when it was safer to do so.”

  Jeebleh poured more tea into Bile’s cup. And looking outside, he saw the sky wearing the clearest of blue and the sun a very bright smile.

  Bile continued: “The streets were filled to bursting with the mad, the political detainees just released, the criminals with all kinds of murderous records, and the animals from the zoo. The hard-hearted military types were busy looting the banks and city coffers. The clan militias recruited from the nomadic encampments were looking for city women to rape, and for properties to plunder and cart away in the trucks they had appropriated. The city, the whole country, was pure chaos. The advancing morning melted into high noon before I knew it. I was told of hungry hyenas scavenging in the city center, of lions on the prowl in school dormitories, and of elephants running amok in supermarkets! An unannounced eclipse at dawn: that was what it felt like, the first morning of my freedom.”

  A heart-wrenching noise erupted outside. They both looked up. Bile explained that vultures were making this ungodly din on the roof of a nearby building, fighting over a carcass.

  Neither spoke for a good while.

  “What bothered me most was that I couldn’t tell the bad guys from the good guys,” Bile went on. “After all—not that I had any trust in them—those in uniform, whether they were on the payrolls of the National Army or the police, were all busy looting too. I felt that before long the army and the police would fragment into splinter groups along clan lines. So I moved about in a state of utter confusion.

  “I was hungry, frightened, and I didn’t know where I was headed. I didn’t want to go to Caloosha. I couldn’t care less if he was dead or alive. But I wanted to get in touch with Shanta. I had no idea where she was, if she was in danger, or if she had fled the city. It was a nightmare from which, given the choice, I might not have wanted to awaken.

  “On one occasion, while moving around, I remember coming up to a madman who took one look at me and kept out of my way—maybe he thought that I was madder than he. Of course, I wasn’t mad in my own
mind, because I was overwhelmed with embarrassment at the figure I must have cut—something the mad seldom feel. You see, I wasn’t in a prisoner’s uniform. I was in rags, so dirty not even a beggar would put them on. Part of me wanted to be touched, seen and helped, the other part wanted to hide my eyes, ostrichlike, in the sand of my imagining. In short, I felt suicidal.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “If twenty years in jail had taught me anything,” he said, “it was never to trust in luck. In any case, I ran into trouble, right where Lazaretto Road meets Stadium Road, when I was accosted by a group of men, common criminals by the look and sound of them. They chased me. I ran faster than they, and had just turned a corner when I saw a group of thugs roaming the area farther on. Luckily I was at a quiet cul de sac, where a gate opened. A boy in his early teens, dressed in sneakers, khaki shorts, and a safari hat, as if ready for a picnic, came out and looked this way and that. He retreated into the house in terrific haste. I waited. Then a big four-wheel-drive with maybe a dozen passengers of all ages, from grandparents to grandchildren, came out, the boy holding the gate open. When the vehicle had reversed out, he pulled the gate shut and got in, and the vehicle sped away. I forced the gate open—it needed only a decisive push—and went in, closing it behind me securely.

  “No sooner had I taken my second step than I saw a very fierce dog waiting for me. It was medium-sized, with a short black coat, most likely a Doberman. It was growling and barking. I acted as though I was a friend. But when I moved, the dog bared its teeth and continued barking at me more fiercely than before. I snapped my fingers, tried what I could to make the dog into a friend, but it still barked whenever I moved. It didn’t attack me, though, and eventually I got to a door, and into the kitchen. I bolted myself inside.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I marked time.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I made myself coffee,” Bile said. “I walked around in the house, marked out my territory, after I had made sure no one else was there. I ventured up to where the bedrooms were, and disconnected the alarm. Being able to achieve this most difficult of feats helped me conquer my fear. I showered, found a wardrobe. The choices were so many. I felt like a child dressing for a birthday party. In the end, I chose a pair of jeans and a pressed shirt. By this time, I had ceased to think of myself as an intruder, and felt like the owner of the house—at least I moved about like I was. It was the kind of house I might have owned or lived in, given the chance.”

  “And then?”

  “I thought of winning the dog’s trust. I opened the front door and it came at me, growling. But it wasn’t as fierce as before, maybe because I had on its master’s clothes. The dog and I stood there uneasily, sizing each other up. Then I played with it, making it go fetch a ball. An hour and a half of this, and the dog and I became friends of a kind. And it began to follow me everywhere I went, and jumped into the Volkswagen Beetle in the carport when I inspected it, trying to see if it would start.

  “I went into the house once I was exhausted from playing with the dog. And when the silence got to me, I switched on the radio to listen to the BBC news and, as I did so, ate some Parmesan cheese of stupendous pedigree. I had coffee and more coffee, and then more Parmesan. Heaven was coffee with Parmesan. I tasted the joy of life in the coffee I drank, and in the Parmesan I ate.”

  Bile had a ball of a time, living it up. He hadn’t a care in the world, like someone living on borrowed time, and enjoying every instant of it. He ate cheese or what fruit there was, because he couldn’t bring himself to cook a meal. And because there was not a single book in the entire house, except for school texts in Italian and Somali, he listened to the radio and exercised his leg, which was still giving him a bit of trouble. With plenty of time on his hands, he decided to use it profitably: he taught himself to read and write Somali, which was given an official orthography only in 1972, while he was in prison. And when he tired of learning to read and write, or of listening to the radio or playing with the dog, he went to the telephone and pressed the redial button in hope of speaking to a human voice. The line was either busy or the phone was not functioning, he couldn’t tell.

  He wished then that he were one in a crowd, where he could touch and be touched. “That was what I wanted,” he said. “I had lived in total isolation for years, and hadn’t touched or been touched. I envied the mad, naively thinking that they never feel lonely, as their heads are full of talk and of other people’s memories. I envied the madman who could think of himself as a crowd, and behave any way he liked!”

  “And then?”

  “I felt depressed, miserable, and lonely. I slept for who knows how long, and woke up a new man. My memory, which I thought had gone dead on me, had been stirred into action, selectively remembering some of the things I had seen and done. I couldn’t remember what I had done between when I saw the fierce dog and made myself several cups of espresso and walked about the house alone, marking out the territory as though it was mine, and when I decided to think of myself as a free man. Then I realized I didn’t have to hide in one of the city’s shadowy corners, or reinvent myself by changing the history of my loyalties. It was then that I finally decided to celebrate my freedom!”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I was going to go out.”

  If Jeebleh didn’t ask pointed questions to get Bile to devote a few minutes to answering Af-Laawe’s and Caloosha’s allegations about murdering and stealing, it was because he didn’t wish to interrupt the flow of the narrative. He was sure they would have the opportunity to talk about this and many other subjects too. “And?”

  “It was when I was looking for some clothes to carry away for my immediate use that I stumbled on a duffel bag full of money, in large denominations, in cash and ready to go! The amount was staggeringly high, close to a million U.S. dollars. It was there all along, only I hadn’t seen it.”

  Jeebleh stared at the scar on Bile’s forehead. An inch long, and pale, no bigger than a caterpillar that would mutate into a butterfly. He stared at it, because he sensed it moving. Now he said, “What did you do?”

  “I went to sleep,” Bile said.

  “But what on earth for?”

  “Not being a thief, and not wanting to tempt fate,” Bile explained, “I decided I no longer had any reason to hurry. I was determined to take my time and decide what to do with the money, whether to appropriate it, or just leave it where I found it.

  “But I became afraid of the looters, whom I knew to be stronger than I, and who I knew would come. If I was clear in my mind about one thing, it was that I should ultimately hand the money over to the government. I hadn’t thought about what I might do in the absence of a reconstituted national government.”

  He paused, helped himself to more tea, and then went on: “I’m not a religious person, but for the first time in years I thought about God and His purpose in me. I also thought about a couple of small things I might use the money for. Then Plotinus came to me. And I thought about peace, about the misery and poverty of our people, and how, if the money were mine and I used it judiciously, even a small sum could help a lot of people.”

  “You didn’t think the owners might return?”

  “I stayed on in the house with the money,” he said. “I was in no hurry—remember, I wasn’t a thief. And when I slept—and I slept for a very, very long time, almost three days I should think—I dreamt at one point that I was setting very, very many small things right. Then I came to, because I heard a god-awful noise!”

  “What?”

  “The dog was barking and barking.”

  “When would this have been?” Jeebleh asked.

  “At dawn, I cannot be certain which day it was, my first intimation of danger was at more or less the same time as the muezzin’s call. The barking, interspersed with the eerie quiet of the hour, struck fear into my heart. I thought of running away, and there was a great deal of sense in that. But I decided to sit it out. I waited
and waited. No one came, and the dog stopped barking. I resolved to take the money, and use it for other people!”

  “And you left?”

  “In search of Shanta.”

  “Had you any inkling where she might be?”

  “No.”

  “Had things calmed down by then?”

  “Not much,” Bile said. “But it made sense to take the car in the carport, despite the moral question—although this irked me. Would I be stealing if I took a million dollars stashed in a duffel bag ready to go, from the house of people who had looted the coffers of the state before its final collapse? Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if I used the embezzled funds to set up a charitable refuge? We could argue about these moral issues at length. In the end, thief or no thief, I said to hell with it, took the car, and quit the house.”

  “And the dog?”

  “Where would I take the dog?”

  “Fair enough. You drove off,” Jeebleh said, “alone.”

  “In Somalia the civil war then was language,” Bile said, “only I didn’t speak the new language. At one point, a couple of armed men flagged me down, and one of them asked, ‘Yaad tahay?’ I hadn’t realized that the old way of answering the question ‘Who are you?’ was no longer valid. Now the answer universally given to ‘Who are you?’ referred to the identity of your clan family, your blood identity! I found the correct responses in the flourish of the tongue, found them in the fresh idiom, the new argot. I was all right. I was a good mimic, able to speak in the correct Somali accent, nodding when my questioner mentioned the right acronym. The men who flagged me down had in their gaze the shine of well-fed guard dogs. What’s more, their four-wheel-drive vehicle was loaded, because they had just robbed the Central Bank.”

  “So they let you proceed?”

  “With a warning, after I spoke the acronym of the period,” Bile said, head down, as if embarrassed to have done so.