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by Nuruddin Farah

  “When did you come back to Mogadiscio?”

  “I returned a few months after UNOSOM got here.”

  When they had finished the first course, Af-Laawe asked for his usual, which Jeebleh suspected had in it a tot of something forbidden in an Islamic country. Eventually another waitress brought baked fish in garlic sauce for Af-Laawe and pepper steak, well done, for Jeebleh, and a salad for each. Jeebleh listened, as Af-Laawe continued talking.

  “Some of us are of a ‘we’ generation, others a ‘me’ generation. You mix the two modes of being, and things become awkward, unmanageable. I belong to the me generation, whereas my clan elders belong to the we generation. A man with a me mindset and a family of four—a wife and two children—celebrates the idea of ‘me.’ It is not so when it comes to our clansmen who visit from the hinterland, and who celebrate a ‘we.’ They believe in the clan, and they know no better—many of them have never been to school or out of the country. I am included in their self-serving ‘we.’ This leads to chaos.”

  Pausing, he glanced at Jeebleh, who obviously wasn’t enjoying this monologue. Af-Laawe resumed: “You and I belong to the me generation. We’re professionals with qualifications, and we can survive on our own anywhere. You’re a university professor, and I am a highly paid consultant. So far so good?”

  It wasn’t, but what the hell. Jeebleh nodded.

  “But while our European counterparts belong wholeheartedly to the me idea, you and I belong at one and the same time to the me and the we. After all, we have extended families to clothe and to feed, by fair means or foul. You and I, indeed many of us first-generation schoolgoers, are made up of competing ways of doing things.”

  Jeebleh didn’t agree with the spin that Af-Laawe put on things, his belief that educated Somalis didn’t believe in the clan; he, Jeebleh, knew many who did. But he chose not to challenge.

  “If you peel away the political rhetoric,” Af-Laawe went on, “what you have is a me grievance dressed in we clothing! And with such overriding loyalties, driven by personal ambitions, the invented memories of a me are cast in an imagined we. This way ‘me’ is reinvented as ‘we.’”

  To Jeebleh, Af-Laawe’s nonsensical double-talk made mockery of his own earlier pronoun fixation, and he was relieved when the waitress came to clear their plates. Af-Laawe ordered a cappuccino, and Jeebleh a double espresso.

  As the waitress walked away, Jeebleh said, “Do you have any sympathy whatsoever for the warlords?”

  “How can I raise a heart of sympathies for killers?”

  AS THEY WALKED BACK TO THE HOTEL, THE STARES OF THE PEOPLE THEY encountered overwhelmed Jeebleh with foreboding. He had no idea why the feeling had come over him. He wanted to be alone, that was his instantaneous reaction. In times of sorrow, he tended to enjoy being by himself. Alas, this was not possible here on unfamiliar ground. He didn’t know how to get back, or where the dangers lurked.

  As if to reinforce the point, as soon as they walked into the hotel grounds, he saw that the vultures were back in force. And a horde of buzzing flies hovered over a spot as red as fresh slaughter. Ali, the manager, met them in the courtyard, disheveled and distraught; you could see he was the bearer of sad news. Curiously, he spoke only to Af-Laawe, as if Jeebleh, a foreigner, did not understand Somali, or were not there at all.

  Shaken by the story he had to tell, Ali spoke confusedly, starting where he should have ended. “There were two of them, both young,” he said.

  “Two? Who?” Af-Laawe instructed Ali to calm down, not once but several times.

  His shirt hanging out, his fly open—something he didn’t notice till later—the manager tried two or three times to begin from the beginning. Still, Jeebleh and Af-Laawe failed to understand. Finally he came out with: “One of them was killed.”

  “But who do you mean?”

  “And the other, he was wounded, and has since been captured by our guards, and taken to a nearby hospital, where he is recovering.”

  The story became clearer in the fourth retelling. Two young men with firearms had sneaked into the hotel, and—with help from a staff member, who had since been fired—got into Jeebleh’s suite and hid there. A cleaning woman noticed a suspicious presence and reported it to the reception desk. Hotel security was alerted, there was a scuffle, shots were fired, and one of the intruders died inside. (“You can see his blood on the balcony, although his corpse has been removed,” the manager elaborated.) The wounded one was apprehended and interrogated. When he was frisked by hotel security, “incriminating evidence” was found in his pocket.

  “What kind of evidence?” Jeebleh asked.

  Ali spoke directly to Jeebleh for the first time since their return to the hotel. “He had your name and suite number written on a piece of paper. We’ve interrogated him, as I’ve already explained, and even though he hasn’t volunteered a lot, we’re satisfied with what we’ve gotten out of him.”

  “But this is madness!” Af-Laawe said.

  The manager sobered up, perhaps at the word “madness.” He continued to address Jeebleh, “There’s no reason to panic. We’ll change your room, give you my suite. It’s much more comfortable, and a lot more secure. We’ll beef up the security around you. No reason to panic. We’ll take care of you, despite what’s happened, or what you’ve done here on my hotel grounds. I guarantee that you’re safe with us, safe!”

  “Where’s the corpse?” Af-Laawe asked.

  “In your van.”

  “And my bags?” Jeebleh asked.

  “In my suite, safe.”

  Jeebleh was relieved that he had had the foresight to leave his valuables with Bile. He decided to call him and ask him to send Dajaal, with a driver, to fetch him. He needed a quiet moment, to contemplate all this madness.

  He stood apart, and used the mobile phone. “I need your immediate help, Bile,” he said. “It’s urgent.”

  “Where are you, what’s happening?”

  “I need you to get me away from this place.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “A young man found hiding in my room has been shot dead, another has been wounded.” Jeebleh’s voice was low, charged with a mix of anger and terror; his whole body was shaking. “I’ve no idea what’s happening. I want to leave this place as fast as I possibly can. Please send Dajaal.”

  “I will.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do be watchful,” Bile advised, “and stay calm.”

  “I will,” Jeebleh said, and disconnected. He turned and felt a nervous change in his surroundings. He heard the hotel gate open. A huge man waddled in: Caloosha, making a dramatic entrance.

  At once everybody tried to be useful to him, the men at the gate opening it wider, others standing to attention. A handful of bodyguards, among them Kaahin and men he had seen earlier, walked beside him and behind, their guns at the ready. Ali arrived pronto, half running. He stopped a few meters before the visiting VIP, then bowed as if to royalty. Caloosha dismissed everyone, including his bodyguards and the manager, and moved to a café table nearby. He sat down with the slowness of a hippo that had eaten its fill, and summoned Jeebleh and Af-Laawe. As he approached, Jeebleh could tell that Caloosha was in a rage, glowering at Af-Laawe. “Where did you go?”

  “To eat,” Af-Laawe said sheepishly.

  Now Caloosha said to Jeebleh, “Did he drink?”

  Jeebleh couldn’t control himself. “What does it matter if Af-Laawe has taken a drink? My concern here is about death. Did you have a hand in it? Was I supposed to be here when the youths sneaked into my room? Is this why you’re asking Af-Laawe where we went?”

  “There’s been a lapse in your security,” Caloosha said.

  He couldn’t believe his ears: “A lapse in my security?”

  “And Af-Laawe is responsible for it.”

  “What does ‘a lapse in security’ mean?”

  “Someone who was supposed to be here wasn’t.”

  “And Af-Laawe is to blame?” Jeebleh asked.
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  Night had descended early in Af-Laawe’s eyes, and he hung his head in despair—his ear, in Jeebleh’s disturbed thinking, assumed the shape of a full-grown bat.

  Jeebleh turned to Af-Laawe. “If there is something you haven’t told me, please speak up.”

  “We were supposed to go to Caloosha’s house,” Af-Laawe replied, “where you were to meet the clan elders and apologize. But I took you to my favorite restaurant instead. Caloosha thinks that the incident with the dog is my fault too, because I was supposed to keep you company and out of mischief.”

  “Am I a child, whose every activity must be supervised, lest it be seen as mischievous?” Jeebleh said. “Am I to be told when to apologize to self-serving elders?”

  “That’s no way to react,” Caloosha said.

  Jeebleh spoke at the top of his voice, clearly impervious to the reaction of those in his vicinity. “Am I not a venerable elder myself, not of a clan, God forbid, but just a venerable elder? To earn everyone’s respect, do I need to put on two robes dipped in mud and then dried before I wear them?”

  Caloosha kept silent.

  “Who is the dead boy?”

  “The son of one of the clan elders, whom you insulted earlier today and sent off empty-handed,” Caloosha replied.

  “Will there be other deaths because of his?”

  “That can’t be helped!”

  “I don’t want any more deaths, not on my account,” Jeebleh said. “I forbid you to let your mad dogs loose on the family of the dead boy. There have been enough mindless killings already. I forbid you to kill on my account, my conscience won’t allow it.”

  Caloosha met Jeebleh’s earnestness with sarcasm. “Sadly, I don’t have a conscience.”

  “It’s high time you reactivated one.”

  “I’m afraid I cannot,” he said, mimicking Jeebleh’s serious tone, “as I sold my conscience to the devil to pay for a mortgage on the house of my self-promotion. To date I’ve survived on the proceeds, and I doubt I want to buy it back, thank you!”

  “Hell was invented for your kind.”

  “I am sure it was!” Caloosha bellowed.

  Before either managed to raise the stakes any further, Dajaal was standing there between them, unarmed. Caloosha’s bodyguards closed in on him and waited for instructions.

  Caloosha held his rage in check, his eyes fixed on Jeebleh, then on Dajaal. “Why are you here?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Dajaal said calmly. “Ask Jeebleh.”

  Af-Laawe got up and walked to a spot he seemed to calculate as beyond the range of a stray bullet. Caloosha, meanwhile, gestured to his bodyguards to relax.

  “I’m going to spend a couple of nights at Bile’s,” Jeebleh said, “and then decide what to do.”

  “Why not move in with me?” asked Caloosha.

  “Let’s talk in a couple of days, and maybe I will.” And to the manager, Jeebleh called, “My bags, please!”

  “We’ll beef up security,” Ali promised.

  Jeebleh assured him that he had wanted to spend a couple of days with Bile anyway. When he was paying his bill, he saw Caloosha eyeing the manager and shaking his head, indicating that he shouldn’t accept the money.

  “Take an overnight bag,” Caloosha suggested, “and then return in two days. Look how well I compromise!”

  “I promise I will visit you, Caloosha!” Jeebleh said. He asked Dajaal to take his bags to the car. He hoped he wasn’t making more unnecessary enemies out of Caloosha, the manger, or Af-Laawe. He was determined to buy himself time: to think, to figure out whom to trust, to plot. “I want to see you both,” he told Caloosha and Af-Laawe, “when I come to the north. Now, before I go, do you have any news about Faahiye, Raasta, or my mother’s housekeeper?”

  “We’re working on the assignments,” Caloosha said, his mockery gentler, even friendly, now.

  “Patience!” Af-Laawe added.

  Jeebleh waited in silence until everybody seemed relaxed, in particular Caloosha’s bodyguards. He stole a glance at Dajaal and by chance intercepted a communication between him and Kaahin. He didn’t know what to make of it; didn’t know whether he should view it as harmful to his own prospects for survival. Death is your most intimate neighbor when you are in Mogadiscio, Jeebleh thought, as he went out of the hotel gate, speaking to no one but also showing no sign of fear.

  PART 2

  O vengeance of the Lord ...

  I saw so many flocks of naked souls,

  all weeping miserably. . . .

  Some lay upon the ground, flat on their backs;

  some huddled in a crouch, and there they sat

  . . . supine in punishment.

  (CANTO XIV)

  . . . With all of Ethiopia

  or all the land that borders the Red Sea—

  so many, such malignant, pestilences.

  Among this cruel and depressing swarm,

  ran people who were naked, terrified,

  with no hope of a refuge or a curse.

  (CANTO XXIV)

  DANTE, Inferno

  14.

  JEEBLEH WAS IN SUCH DISTRESS THAT HE FELT HE COULD LIVE ONLY ONE minute at a time. He was unable to remember things in any detail; concepts like “an hour ago,” “yesterday,” “tomorrow,” “last week,” “next week” were meaningless with all that had taken place.

  He was certain that staying on in Mogadiscio would not be the same—even if he had no way of knowing whether his own actions had factored into the killing of the youth in the hotel. He reviewed the events, and everything became suspect. Was the young man running away, out of the room, when the bullet struck him dead? Did he mean to kill Jeebleh, and if so, why? Was it because he had insulted the clan elders, or because he had been kind to the Alsatian in labor?

  Disoriented by the urgency of his existence, and stymied by the demands on his time, Jeebleh had acquired other priorities, besides and beyond finding his mother’s grave and paying her his respects. He had lost his way in the labyrinthine politics of the place, and the labyrinth seemed to have Caloosha at its center. The man had had a wicked hand in his and Bile’s detention; another in encouraging the elders of the clan to call on him to extract the funds they needed; and yet another in having him shadowed from the instant he landed. If he had the wherewithal to have Jeebleh tailed to wherever he went, to “provide him with protection,” as he put it, it followed that he also had the means to have him killed if he so chose.

  Jeebleh hoped that he wasn’t losing his marbles, becoming paranoid and joining Mogadiscio’s multitudes of borderline schizophrenics. He remembered Ali’s pleading with him, when they first met, not to judge “them” too harshly. Jeebleh was quitting the north of the city, where his clansmen formed the majority, and taking up residence in the south, where Bile’s folks reigned. He found it ironic that he felt safer outside his clansmen’s territory.

  In the car, he broke the silence, saying to Dajaal, “Tell me a little about Kaahin.”

  Dajaal did not answer immediately. Waiting for an answer, Jeebleh was haunted by two images: in one, Kaahin and Dajaal communicated secretly, in a way that suggested conspiracy; in the other, Caloosha and Dajaal exchanged burning looks. The silence lengthening, Jeebleh noticed that the same driver was taking the same route as before to Bile’s. Then a third image came to him: a vulture, the size of a Cinquecento, flying off into high heaven with a baby goat in its claws!

  “Kaahin and I were very close at one time,” Dajaal said. “We were both army officers, we’d see each other at the mess frequently. And we were tennis partners. But we fell out just before the collapse of the state. Over a family matter.”

  “You aren’t related, are you?” Jeebleh said.

  “We could’ve been, but we aren’t.”

  He fell silent, knowing that this wouldn’t make much sense. Embarrassed, he looked away, averting his gaze from the driver too. He rubbed his face, like a monkey reflecting. There was an eerie quiet in the vehicle now, as though all three men had take
n temporary residence outside of time, and were dwelling in a nightmare of family disloyalties and dissonance. The driver nodded at Dajaal, as if encouraging him to say what was on his mind.

  “We came to fierce blows, Kaahin and I, when I learned that my youngest sister’s child was his, and yet he wouldn’t own up to it. Lately, since he admitted that he is the biological father of the boy, who is now eleven and living in Canada, we’ve been meeting to try to work things out.”

  “Do you meet in secret or openly?” Jeebleh asked.

  “In secret, of course,” Dajaal said.

  “Because it would upset Caloosha?”

  “It would, yes,” replied Dajaal. “Anyhow, I doubt that Kaahin would talk of this to anyone, least of all Caloosha, who would use it against him. It’s not in my favor or his for such things to come to light.”

  A whirlwind gathered and blocked the sun from Jeebleh’s vision. He wondered whether Caloosha’s discovery of these secret encounters of Dajaal and Kaahin might start another battle between the warring factions. He imagined fingers on triggers, imagined the joy on the faces of drug-crazed youths shooting and watching, as their victims collapsed in a heap of death.

  “Here we are!” the driver said.

  WHEN HE AND BILE MET IN THESE CHANGED CIRCUMSTANCES, THE ONE A host, the other a guest, Jeebleh was unable to recall things in as much detail as he would have liked. But he managed to tell Bile what had happened and in little time, fearing that he might not carry the telling through to the end. Bile listened without comment or interruption. When he was finished, Jeebleh felt restless, so he stood and opened the windows, wandered about, and then opened his shoulder bag, out of which he took the books he had brought as gifts. He presented them to Bile without ceremony, and then sat down, again without ceremony.

  “Do you feel betrayed?” Bile asked.