“What was the acronym of the period?”
“The initial letters of the clan-based militia movement that ran the Tyrant out of the city.”
“They just let you go?”
“They suggested that I take care. I gathered from this that it would be unwise to ask if they knew where I might find Caloosha. I didn’t think it likely that they would lead me to Shanta.”
Bile’s hands were beginning to resemble those of a baby, clutched tightly into fists. Maybe he was wishing he had done something cavalier by challenging the looters.
Bile continued, “I had barely gone a kilometer when a pack of knife-wielding urchins flagged me down. I was trying to appease them, when my prayer was answered: a man in uniform, armed but not looting, came driving by. He asked if there was a problem. The youths fled. I introduced myself to the gentleman, who told me his name: Dajaal. Taken aback, at first I assumed it was an alias, some sort of nom de guerre. When it became obvious that I could trust him, I told him that I wanted to get in touch with a sister of mine, and gave him some spiel, the gist of which was that I had no idea how to reach her. It was my good fortune that he knew my name, knew Shanta, and knew where she lived. He and I belonged to the same family—he said so right away, as if to assure me that I could trust him. That didn’t matter to me as much as it mattered to him. What mattered to me was to find Shanta, and I said so. He told me to follow him, but for obvious reasons this didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to get rid of the Volkswagen, I wanted to have no associations with the house I had gotten it from, or the family it had belonged to. So I got into his car and felt safe in his hands.
“Ours was the only car on the road in that part of the city, but there were pedestrians everywhere—at crossroads, ahead of us, behind us. Many were entering houses empty-handed and emerging with their loot. At one point, Dajaal nearly ran over a man carrying what appeared to be a very heavy load. I got out of the car and helped the man gather his scattered loot. I had half expected to find the roads blocked with checkpoints, and curiously, they weren’t. I was relieved also that Dajaal hadn’t inquired about the contents of my duffel bag!”
Bile learned from Dajaal that Shanta had married Faahiye, who was nearly twenty-five years her senior, and that she was heavily pregnant at forty-three.
“I had thought that she was past childbearing age, and reasoned aloud that if this was her first, I would have to prepare, for such a pregnancy might bring along its fair share of problems. ‘A miracle baby, then?’ Dajaal said.”
As it turned out, by the time Bile was led to her, Shanta was in labor and in great pain. There were no doctors around, and no possibility of getting her to a hospital. Bile had to break the traditional medical code of conduct and help his younger sister in her hour of labor.
“Never mind the medical or traditional code, which I disregarded,” Bile said, “it gave me great joy to deliver a lovely dreadlocked miracle baby into the world!”
“And then?”
The phone rang, and Jeebleh and Bile looked at each other. “I’m afraid that installment will have to wait,” Bile said, and went to answer.
12.
JEEBLEH DREAMT THAT HE WAS A CRAB. HE HAD GONE PAST THE LARVAL phase of transparency but gotten stuck in the stage of growing legs. His carapace was not broad enough, and his legs were deformed. He couldn’t scuttle around as crabs do, he could only move slowly and laboriously. A distant cousin of the spider crab, he looked forward to waiting in thorny flowers for prey to pounce on. A pity that no victim came within the reach of his claws.
When he woke, he felt the urge to take a dip in the ocean. He missed the delicate touch of its saltiness, and remembered how much he enjoyed swimming and then going for long walks, the sandy beach stretching ahead of him and to his back, the air clean, the water as blue as the sky, and as clear. He and Bile would spend much of their slack time on a café terrace facing the ocean.
He decided to go for a swim before breakfast, and found himself walking sideways. At first, he was a little amused, but when he saw some youths staring at him in shock, he stopped walking altogether. He paused for a long while, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths, concentrating his mind on what he would do next. Eventually he moved, but only after he felt he could walk straight.
He was wearing a sarong that he had brought from New York—a present from his wife—a Yankees T-shirt, and under the sarong, a pair of swimming trunks. Around his shoulders was a towel. For shoes he had a cheap pair of Chinese-made flip-flops, the only item he had purchased in Mogadiscio since his arrival, from a vendor at the hotel. When he had inquired at the reception desk about going to the ocean for a swim, the man at the reception desk seemed amused, maybe because of Jeebleh’s attire. The man told him that the beach was no more than a five minutes’ walk away. He was to go east, and he would soon come to it.
The water stretched endlessly before him. He stared at its immensity, and had a moment of recollection. He was in his early teens, with Bile, and the two were escaping from Caloosha. In his memory, the ocean was a place of refuge, because Caloosha had never learned to swim, despite his having been in Mogadiscio for much of his life. When the memory faded, Jeebleh looked this way and that, and noted that the beach was deserted. He took off his sarong, T-shirt, and towel, and placed them under a stone, to make sure he would find them later.
After he had been in the shallow water only a few minutes, it occurred to him that it might not be worth risking his life for a dip in the ocean. Not that he was afraid of the surf or of sharks. He saw three men on the beach looking in his direction. He suspected that one of them was armed; he seemed to have a shiny revolverlike weapon in his grip. He guessed the man could easily have taken a potshot at him.
Who were they? He reckoned they were not from one or the other clan-based militia, for they seemed to be better disciplined than those armed thugs who killed for a bit of sport. For all he knew, they were there on instructions from Caloosha, to shadow and report on his movements. But would they harm him or protect him? It bothered him that he had no way of knowing. He doubted that Dajaal had the wherewithal to arrange such a security detail at Bile’s behest. Besides, Dajaal’s authority did not stretch to the north of the city, where Jeebleh was having his swim.
He swam farther and farther out and floated. He didn’t want to expose himself to sharks. He wasn’t sure what to do next—stay where he was, go out farther, or get out.
HE WAS AN EXCELLENT SWIMMER. HIS TECHNIQUE IMPROVED THE INSTANT HE exiled all worries of death from his mind. His breaststroke was as good as a competitive swimmer’s, his butterfly superbly rhythmic, and his crawl extraordinarily fast. When the water proved rough, he resorted to breaststroke. When it was calm, he rested, floating. He lay on his back, contemplating the blue sky, thinking.
He recalled sitting in an apartment in Queens with his wife and daughters, and watching the main event on television: Marines in combat gear, and cameras flashing as photographers took pictures of the Americans alighting from their amphibious craft. In a moment, several of the Marines, appearing proud, would be interviewed by one of the most famous anchormen in America. Jeebleh’s wife turned to him to ask whether the Marines knew what doing “God’s work” meant in a country like Somalia.
It was from the ocean that all the major invasions of the Somali peninsula had come. The Arabs, and after them the Persians, and after the Persians the Portuguese, and after the Portuguese the French, the British, and the Italians, and later the Russians, and most recently the Americans—here, Jeebleh remembered how the U.S. intervention to feed the starving Somalis became an invasion of a kind, hence the term “intravasion,” frequently used at the time. In any case, all these foreigners, well-meaning or not, came from the ocean. The invaders might be pilgrims bearing gifts, or boys dispatched to do “God’s work”; the American in charge of the U.S. “intravasion” would be described in the reputable Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1994 as the putative “Head of the State of Somalia.”
&
nbsp; Jeebleh stayed in the water for an hour. He lay afloat, the sky unfailingly above him, the warm water below. These were his only points of reference. And in the farthest reaches of the sky, he saw an eagle, majestically alone and riding the heavens’ sail, and around it the clouds paying homage. He sensed, even from such a distance, the determination in every feather—a bird in regal flight. What elegance!
Doing the breaststroke now, to view ahead of himself, he saw no sign of the three men. Were they gone? Did they have nothing to do with him? Was he being paranoid? Or were they hiding behind the bushes, ready to pounce? He came out of the water cautiously and walked, edging along the sea wall, faster and faster, because he was now truly afraid. Then all of a sudden he spotted one of the gunmen, who looked away, embarrassed. It was Kaahin.
The men kept their discreet distance, but still following him, until he was safely within view of the hotel gate. And when he turned, just before going in, he saw that they were no longer there.
HE SENSED SOMETHING WRONG THE MOMENT HE GOT TO THE GATE, HIS shadow as short as a set of manacles fitted around his ankles. He stamped his feet on the paved driveway to rid them of the fine sand that clung to them, and while doing so, greeted the sentries at the gate. One of them kept making signs. Not adept at sign language, Jeebleh had difficulty following the meaning. The man kept doing funny things with his tongue. What on earth was he trying to communicate? Jeebleh noticed a group of elderly men crouched in a dusty huddle, whispering to one another. These must be his clansmen. The pedestrian door, carved out of the bigger gate, was opened for him, and he walked through.
At the reception desk, he was given a thick parcel. He broke the seal and unwrapped the package, and inside found a mobile phone with a manual in Arabic—presumably it had been imported from Abu Dhabi, where most Mogadiscians got their high-tech stuff. An attached note advised him, in Italian, of the numbers that had been fed into the phone’s memory. A P.S., in Bile’s hand, told him not to worry about the bills.
Then the same receptionist gave him an envelope. This was thin and contained a one-page message in Somali, written on lined paper torn out of a child’s exercise book. At first he thought that a child had penned it—an obviously shaky hand, some of the letters small, others large. At the bottom of the message were six thumbprint signatures and three printed names, difficult to decipher. His hand trembled as he held it, and he thought of it as a souvenir that would benefit from being framed—ideally on the walls of an adult literacy class. The message informed him that his clan elders wanted to discuss with him matters of family importance.
He took his time showering, then tried to make the mobile phone work. Being inexperienced, he pressed buttons at random and inaccurately, and got cut off or reached busy signals or wrong numbers. Just when he thought he had succeeded, Bile’s number was off his screen.
He felt it was time for his Yemeni coffee. Downstairs, he asked a runner to get him a pot of coffee and to prepare several pots of tea, milk, lots and lots of biscuits, and half a kilo of sugar, and to bring these to his table. When the runner returned, he told a bellboy to show the clan elders in.
THE MEN FORMED A LINE AND GREETED JEEBLEH ONE AT A TIME, EACH OF them respectfully taking his hand in both of theirs. Then they sat down at a table, three to the right of him, six to his left, he at the head. Before anyone uttered a word beyond the greetings, Jeebleh pointed to the nine teapots, one for each of them, the biscuits still wrapped, and the bowls filled to the brim with sugar. He suggested they help themselves.
They got down to the business of pouring out their tea with the clumsiness of four-year-olds. And even though their cups were full, they poured milk, then added several spoonfuls of sugar, so that the tea spilled over the sides. They did this with such devotion you might have thought they would depart as soon as each had attended to his sweet tooth. The table was soon as messy as a toddler’s birthday party would have made it. The crackling of biscuit wrappings mixed with the loud chorus of tea slurping. A host of flies arrived to feast on the sugary surfaces of cups and saucers.
The first elder to speak had biscuit crumbs on his chin and a bit of sugar on his cheek. He was of small build and looked healthy for his age. He explained that he and several other elders had come previously to greet and welcome Jeebleh, but they were informed that he had gone out. “Now we’re very pleased to return with a different lot of elders who’ve shown interest in meeting our son, and to welcome him back into the bosom of his immediate clan.” The old man requested that each of the other elders speak, but confine their remarks to a few words, because, he said, “your son is a very busy man and doesn’t have a lot of time to waste.” After they had done so, he invited each of them to recite from the Koran, in praise of Allah, who had brought their son back from “his worldly wanderings.” Their lips astir and their voices low, each man mouthed a few verses.
Jeebleh bowed to each of them in turn, greeting them with a ritual nod, but said nothing. Then he poured himself more coffee and sipped at it leisurely. One of the men passed him the sugar bowl. He nodded his thanks as he took the proffered bowl, and watched the consternation on the men’s faces as he put it aside without helping himself. Why was he drinking his coffee bitter, with so much sweetness available?
The spokesman of the elders now discussed Jeebleh’s importance and the positive, commendable role he could play in the politics of the clan. Jeebleh lapsed into a private mood, a man in his own space. He did his utmost not to display unease at the thought of privileging blood over ideology. The idea of nine self-appointed clansmen making a claim on him was anathema. Of course, he meant not to anger them unnecessarily. But he changed his mind when the spokesman alluded to his mother without mentioning his father. “As it happens, we’re from your mother’s side of the bah!”
By invoking his mother’s name, not his father’s, the men from his mother’s subclan were explicitly distancing themselves from his father, the gambler. The elders failed to mention that they had blamed his mother for her husband’s wild ways, accusing her of driving him first to gambling and then to the bottle, when this wasn’t the case, according to his mother’s version. Some of these very men may have been present when family members had resolved to deny her a hearing—one of them was for sure, the especially ancien-looking sort with the thick glasses, whom Jeebleh thought of as FourEyes. So where was the clan when Jeebleh’s mother sang her sorrow, a single mother raising him, and later a widow isolated from the subclan? Where were these men then? The first time a member of his subclan ever visited him was when he returned from Italy, with a university degree. When he incurred the Dictator’s wrath and for his pains was thrown into prison and sentenced to death, they had all deserted him, hadn’t they? He knew that clan elders were self-serving men, high on selective memory and devoid of dignity.
“I am insulted by the way you’ve formulated my identity,” Jeebleh said. “Why do I feel I am being insulted? Why do you continue referring to me as the son of my mother without ever bothering to mention my father by name? Don’t I have a father? Am I illegitimate? We know what he was like and what kind of man he was, but still, he was my father and I bear his name, not my mother’s! How dare you address me in a way that questions my being the legitimate son of my own father?”
The gathering was thrown into a state of noisy confusion, as all the elders tried to assure him that they did not mean to insult him, or to offend his parents’ memories. He was elated that their cynical ploy had worked to his advantage, remembering how, earlier, he had restrained himself from losing his temper with Caloosha. The elders were now too shocked to speak. He had them where he wanted them.
“Why have you come, then?” he asked the bespectacled man to his right, and not the spokesman, farther to his left, who, rendered speechless, covered his mouth with his hand. The men’s evasive looks now converged on the face of the spokesman. He removed his hand from his mouth and shook his head regretfully: he was not going to speak, either on his own behalf or on anyone
else’s.
There was vigor in his voice when FourEyes now spoke. He came to the point: “Unlike other bahs of the clan, ours hasn’t been able to raise a strong fighting militia. We do not have sufficient funds to take our rightful place among the subclans equal in number to or even smaller than ours. We’ve come to appeal to you for money so we may repair our only two battlewagons.”
Jeebleh addressed himself to the gathering: “I’m busy with other concerns, and as you can imagine, I’ve not brought along with me more cash than I need for my daily expenses. So I suggest you wait until I return home and consult my wife and daughters, and I’ll come back to you with my response.”
There was absolute silence as the meaning of Jeebleh’s words registered with the elders. Then, as if on cue, the mobile phone on Jeebleh’s lap squealed. He answered it and told the gathering, “This is an important call, and I must take it in private. Please forgive me.” And he walked away.
“Are we to wait for you?” FourEyes called after him.
“You needn’t,” Jeebleh answered. “I’ll be in touch!”
The men argued among themselves, some suggesting that they should wait, others insisting that the earlier command to wait had been addressed to the caller. When he walked farther away, and they heard him ask one of the runners to show them out, they said in a chorus, “This is an insult!”
Jeebleh waved to them from the reception area, and shouted: “Go well!” And before they had a chance to say anything, he himself was gone.
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, JEEBLEH SAT IN THE HOTEL COURTYARD AND took note, with alarm, of three gunmen walking past the sentry at the gate without being stopped. The hotel runners entertained the three with friendly banter. Even so, Jeebleh was very conscious of the mood palpably changing. And when he called to one of the runners, asking what the gunmen were doing on the grounds of the hotel, the youth just made “Search me” gestures. The sun was burning hot, the sand seemed agitated, and the air unhealthy.
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