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by Nuruddin Farah

“I hurt!”

  Still restless, Jeebleh rose again and paced back and forth, agitated one moment, depressed the next, up and moving purposelessly one instant, down and wincing the next. At some point, he was surprised to find himself facing Bile, who had gotten to his feet too.

  “Let’s go!”

  Jeebleh didn’t ask where.

  HE FOLLOWED BILE DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS AT A RUN; THEN DOWN ANOTHER set of steps, which he approached with caution; past a knot of women, some washing their babies, others busy cooking at braziers; past a group of men sitting uncomfortably on a mat, playing cards.

  Jeebleh was becoming two people, one leading a familiar life, the other a life that was unfamiliar; one looking in from the outside, the other looking out from inside. Alive to his surroundings, he was able, with his active side, to spot the security detail shadowing them. He could see Dajaal and two young men tailing them. His more contemplative side wondered whether the civil conflict was being driven as much as greed—the quick gains and limitless profits available for the warlords—as by bloodlust, shedding the blood of others to settle centuries-old scores. He questioned Bile as they walked.

  “Money runs the civil war’s engine, all right,” Bile agreed. “There are the corrupt commissions paid to the warlords for a start, the money they make from hiring out militiamen to foreign delegations on visits. There’s the money paid to the warlords in the form of tributes by foreign firms operating in the country. And Mogadiscians also pay other tributes to the warlords, who levy road tax and duties on everything imported through the entry points of the city, which they control.”

  Jeebleh remembered being stopped in the car, and StrongmanSouth’s armed youths in fatigues readying to extort money when they recognized Dajaal. “Why do most vehicles on the roads have plates from the Arabian Gulf, and why do they all look just-bought?” he asked.

  “Bringing vehicles in from the Arabian Gulf is a racket, all right!”

  Jeebleh waited for an explanation.

  “When a vehicle is in an accident and is written off somewhere in Europe or the USA,” Bile said, “a mechanic puts it back together and has it repainted, makes it look as good as new. An import dealer brings the reconditioned vehicles into the Gulf, usually into the Emirates, which specializes in import/export. The cars are quickly re-exported to Mogadiscio or Nairobi. Many vehicles stolen in Europe end up in the Gulf in the same way, and they’re sent on to other countries with little or no customs control.”

  Jeebleh was amazed. “There’s a racket everywhere you turn, isn’t there? And I bet the rackets are run by the same people who run the guns!”

  Bile explained that vehicle owners hired gunmen for protection, and the more expensive the car, the more gunmen needed. But in the earlier days of the civil war, cars had their fuel tanks rebuilt in a way that reduced the fuel intake. In those days it was common to see two-liter plastic containers on the floor of a vehicle, by means of which the engine was fed, through a hose. You couldn’t travel great distances, because you ran out of fuel frequently, and had to refuel more often. But your car was safe from potential carjackers.

  “An American journalist described Somalia as an ideal model for the rest of the continent,” Jeebleh said. “In his view, Africans could do away with governments by studying what’s happening in Mogadiscio, where telephones work better now than they did when there was a state. The same journalist pointed out that whereas there used to be only one daily newspaper—the government’s mouthpiece—now there are no fewer than thirteen dailies, with opposing views. What do you think?”

  “What do I think? Where’s this journalist on education?” Bile challenged. “Where is he on providing hospitals, or security and other social services to the ordinary person with no gun? Every Somali not in the pay of a warlord would agree with me that even an inefficient and corrupt government will offer better services than those provided so far by the warlords, who are in the business not of building institutions but of demolishing them. The services may be faulty and faltering in other countries, but any central government, however weak it is, will do better than these murderous warlords and their cartels. Just look at this city! You know what it used to be like.”

  “Are the warlords subservient to business cartels?”

  “As long as they are from the same blood community. Fact: The warlords and the business community stand to profit from every skirmish, every confrontation. Fact: Most fighting takes place outside business hours, in the late afternoon, when the markets have closed for the day, or very early in the morning, before they have reopened, or at night. I would say that the so-called markets have something to do with much of the fighting, but you can’t divide business and blood so easily in this country.”

  “It doesn’t look that way from the outside!”

  “Of course it doesn’t.”

  Jeebleh murmured to himself: Warlords, market forces!

  With subliminal grief on his face, Bile continued, “Some people, as a matter of fact, trace the falling-out of StrongmanSouth and StrongmanNorth to the arrival of billions’ worth of Somali banknotes flown in from England, where they had been printed for the former dictator’s regime. All hell broke loose when the plane bringing the banknotes in from Nairobi was diverted to an airstrip in the north of the city.”

  “By StrongmanNorth?” Jeebleh asked.

  “The excessive greed of both strongmen produced fragmentation, then a civil war,” Bile said. He stopped suddenly and turned to Jeebleh: “Here we are!”

  “Where’s here?”

  “The Refuge.”

  THE GATE SLUMPED ON ITS HINGES, CREAKING FORWARD, ITS BOTTOM EDGE almost touching the ground, its paint flaking off. Jeebleh assumed that it was seldom closed, and imagined children and abused women walking in, the children to be looked after and fed, and the abused women to receive comfort and professional counseling. You didn’t need to close such a gate.

  As he and Bile passed through, Jeebleh saw a number of bungalows. There was a sign saying “HOYI”—shelter—in prominent capitals, and a smaller one announcing “The Refuge.” “In days now long gone,” Bile explained, “when schools ran morning, afternoon, and evening sessions, most of these bungalows served as dormitories. Day students of several secondary schools in the neighborhood, whose parents lived in other towns, used to stay here.”

  They walked past a low-ceilinged cottage where youths in dark overalls were gathered around a broken-down vehicle, being instructed in motor repair. As they walked farther, the din grew louder, and younger too. A bell rang, and twenty or thirty teenagers, most of them boys, came pouring out. Jeebleh and Bile stood aside. A door behind them opened, and more boys and girls, younger than the previous group, came out, running with the uninhibited enthusiasm of youth. The girls were giggly, the boys full of chase. They seemed so much younger than the armed youths at the airport, or the runners at the hotel.

  An elderly woman greeted Bile by name, and then acknowledged Jeebleh’s presence with a nod. Jeebleh learned that she was in charge of the children, with the help of several younger women. To one side, a man was bending down to tie the shoelaces of a very small girl.

  Peace reigned here, Jeebleh thought. Bile had created several overlapping worlds, ideally conceived: the flat he shared with Seamus; The Refuge; the clinic, which Jeebleh had yet to see; and Raasta and Makka’s world too, temporarily interrupted as that might be. These worlds were contrasted starkly with what one might experience in the rest of the city. They were oases of comfort in a land of sorrow.

  Bile pushed open a door to the anteroom of an office. On the wall were photographs of children, some in school uniform, some not. For a moment, Jeebleh was lost in reverie, forgetting where he was. He stared at images of boys and girls receiving awards from an Italian monsignor. There were captioned photographs of a swimmer receiving a medal, a chess player who had finished second at a competition in Prague, a runner who had been second fastest in a steeplechase competition.

  “Did yo
u choose this place?” Jeebleh asked.

  “Do you recall what it used to be?”

  “I remember we used to call it ‘The Dormer.’ When we were in our teens, it was a dormitory run by the Roman Catholic Church. It was a home to abandoned children, who were looked after by the fathers. And before that, it belonged to a Sicilian who had named it Villa San Giovanni.”

  “Well done!” Bile said.

  “Now tell me more about it.”

  As it happened, Bile had walked into the building by chance one day, a few months into the civil war. He was on some errand or other, and for some reason took a detour. Maybe a mysterious force had led him here. He came upon a child in a corner, wrapped in a blanket and smartly dressed in pants and a handsome T-shirt with writing in Gothic script. The presence of the girl in an empty dormitory made no sense, and there was no way of knowing who had left her there. When he returned home with a girl for whom he had no name, Shanta and Faahiye, with whom Bile shared the house then, decided on one for her, because she kept pointing to herself and saying something close to “Marta,” or was it “Marcia”? They called her Makka, and sure enough, she responded to it.

  They fell silent as a young man entered the office without knocking. He brought them tea on a tray. Bile nodded a thank you and waited until they were alone to speak further. “In another sense, you could say that Raasta brought us all here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Or rather, I should say that Raasta brought her mother here, as a prelude to her being born. And then guess what? Dajaal met Shanta here, again by chance.”

  “I won’t ask what Dajaal was doing here either.”

  “He was in charge of the force holding the district.”

  “Go back to Shanta, or how Raasta brought her here.”

  “It’s all fascinating and complicated,” Bile said, and paused. “Shanta was very pregnant with Raasta, eight months or so. She had gone to an appointment with an obstetrician, but because of the fierce fighting between the clan militia and the Tyrant’s forces, the doctor wasn’t there. Shanta had walked a great distance, all the way from Digfar hospital. The fighting between the clan militiamen and the regime was very fierce, bombs were falling everywhere. But at no time, Shanta would tell me later, did she fear for her own life or her baby’s.”

  A handheld radio on Bile’s desk came to life, and the static in the room made him silent. They listened as two women talked about provisions for The Refuge, which one of them was supposed to obtain.

  When they signed off, Bile continued: “It was probably Shanta’s weighty bladder that brought her here. She was in need of a toilet, tired, so she found a bed and fell asleep. Sometime later, after it had gotten dark, Dajaal, who was in command of the group fighting against the Tyrant’s forces in the district, woke her up. He went to get her husband, who helped find a midwife. Then Dajaal led me to her, in time to deliver Raasta into the world. So we’re all connected to this place!”

  DINNER AT THE REFUGE PROVED TO BE AN EYE-OPENER.

  Jeebleh had to sit on a mat on the floor. If he needed a reminder that he was physically out of shape, then here it was, drilling pain into his knees, his upper thighs, even his heels. He could not tuck his feet under his body, as the others all managed to do with ease. Even though he ached terribly, he remained in a crouch, and kept changing position. Finally he squatted, balancing himself on the tips of his toes.

  “Who are these children, and why them?” he asked.

  “In the main, there are periods when there is little or no fighting, and periods when the strife is more intense,” Bile replied. “The bulk of the children, those who form the core group, we refer to as ‘inmates.’ A third of the children you see qualify as ‘tourists’—they’ve fled the fighting in their villages, but they plan to go back when the fighting dies down.”

  The refectory was noisy. There were younger children, numbering about thirty, and adults supervising their eating. There were teenagers and young men. They sat on the floor, close to where Jeebleh and Bile were sharing a large plate with Dajaal and the driver. There were nine massive plates in all, with seven or eight people to each one.

  “We’ve resorted to the traditional method of eating together daily from the same mayida,” Bile said, “in the belief that we create a camaraderie and we’ll all trust one another. Some might consider hogwash the idea that those who look one another in the eye as they eat together are bound closely to one another. But our experiment bears it out—anyone meaning to do harm to a fellow sharer of the mayida will not dare look him, or anyone else, in the eye. Around here we say that many people prefer staying away to coming and sharing the mayida when there is bad blood. And when we share the mayida, there can be no bad blood.”

  “A brilliant idea,” Jeebleh agreed.

  15.

  “YOU MUST TELL ME ABOUT RAASTA AND MAKKA,” JEEBLEH SAID.

  “I’ll be very pleased to,” Bile replied.

  They were now back in the apartment, the light in Bile’s eyes suggesting sorrow coming home. For his part, Jeebleh was restless again. They sat on the balcony, a touch of salt in the early-evening breeze.

  Jeebleh told Bile that for his own belated benefit, he wanted to know better what had happened on the day the two girls disappeared.

  “We’ve been able to piece together, from talking to two women who work at The Refuge, that Makka was the first to go missing,” Bile said. “This is because something unusual occurred earlier that day. A girl around six or seven years old probably, arrived at the gate, dressed in an outfit made up of colorful beads, similar to the kind that bare-breasted Zulu maidens wear. She stood where she was for a good while, but wouldn’t come into the compound. Neither of the two women knew who she was, where she came from, who had dropped her at the gate, or picked her up when she eventually left, about twenty minutes later, walking north, vanishing into the mystery that had brought her forth. Makka saw the girl at the same time as the two women did, and soon afterward started acting like she was under some sort of spell, shaking. The two women agree that our Makka was so taken with the girl’s beads that she followed her when they were called away to attend to some problem.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Makka returned, alone,” Bile said. “And a short time later, Makka went out again, apparently in search of the beaded girl. The two women remember Makka saying that she had come for Raasta, so they could go ‘play beads’ with the other girl, or something like that. And she said something about a man and a woman. Many things are not clear.”

  “And Raasta?”

  “Raasta was very agitated to learn that Makka had gone off on her own. And she went in search of her.”

  “Then?” Jeebleh asked.

  “The women saw a fancy car with tinted windows, engine running, parked at a road to the south of ours. By the time we mounted a search in the neighborhood, we couldn’t find any sign of the car. A neighbor claims to have seen one of the men. He had shades on, the kind often worn by gangsters in American films.”

  Jeebleh mused aloud, as though to himself, “I wouldn’t have thought that fancy vehicles would be commonly seen in the potholed streets of civil war Mogadiscio.”

  “There is such a fleet, which once belonged to the now collapsed state,” Bile said.

  “Is this why everyone assumes that a warlord is behind the disappearance of the two girls?”

  Bile picked his words with caution: “To spare her from worrying too much unnecessarily, we haven’t told Shanta everything we know. Only the two women and I know about the fancy car.”

  A long, long silence followed.

  “TELL ME MORE,” JEEBLEH SAID.

  “They’re so unalike, it’s incredible,” Bile said. “But they have become completely dependent on each other, and are beginning to look alike, in their own fashion. You know the story, when a man and his wife have lived together for many years, they begin to sound alike. In fact, Raasta and Makka do sound alike, to a certain degree.�
� Bile paused, perhaps suddenly conscious of his natural use of the present tense, a sign of his belief that the girls were well and unharmed.

  Jeebleh remained silent. He did not mention that he had spoken to Caloosha about the girls, because he wished neither to raise Bile’s hopes nor to dash them.

  “Except for the day of their disappearance, neither girl does anything or goes anywhere without the other knowing about it,” Bile continued. “They’re like Siamese twins, neither makes a move without the other being there.”

  “So whoever separated them on the day they went missing knew what they were doing—lure one away and you get the other,” Jeebleh guessed. “Could it have been an inside job?”

  Bile wasn’t ready for speculation. “Where Raasta intimates care, Makka communicates boundless, generous love. No one knows exactly how old Makka is, or how she came to be sleeping in that room at The Dormer where I found her. She’s given to kissing, to touching, and to trusting people. There’s a smile forever on her lips, and she displays joy at every opportunity, seldom crying, rarely showing any depression, which other children in similar circumstances might. Often I tell myself that she’s held together within the framework of a narrative not yet known to us, that she’s an untold story. Her every word points to so many unasked questions needing answers. At The Refuge, she is treated with great affection, because of her special qualities. Everyone is kind to her. She smiles crying, and cries earnestly, laughing. Compared with her, I feel a great lack.”

  This was how he had found her: He heard a bizarre sound coming from what he presumed an integral part of the mystery that is nature. He was in The Dormer all on his own, when he picked up a sound between a gargle, a clearing of the throat preparatory to making a long speech, and a growl, a form of communication more associated with animals not endowed with speech. Once he found the Down’s-syndrome girl, a little bundle in the fashionable clothes of a child from a well-to-do family, it had taken Bile several minutes to decide that she was speaking not Somali, but a language that sounded like German. He wished Seamus were there, as he might have known whether it was German or Flemish or Dutch. Bile could only assume that she was half Somali, half European, the European half unspecified. The sounds she had mumbled—deciphered and rearranged in his head—did not form a phrase, and led him nowhere. She had a nasal form of speech, n’s colliding with a handful of g’s. It was hopeless to try to understand what she was saying. It was a lot easier to comprehend Raasta’s babbling than to disentangle the jamboree of Makka’s words.