“And the cobwebs?”
“Vamoose!”
Jeebleh wished he could say that about himself. But then, he hadn’t come to sweep clean the corners of his life that had grown dustier from neglect. And while eluding death, he would lay his mother’s troubled soul to rest. He knew this was a tall order, but worth trying.
“Tell me about yourself,” Seamus said. “Why are you in Mogadiscio?”
“I’ve come to ennoble my mother’s memory.”
Seamus knew that there were occasions when it was best not to say anything, not to even bother with condolences, because there are no words with which to express one’s sentiments satisfactorily. He had heard a great deal about the mothers of Jeebleh and Bile, but it was difficult for him to imagine them alive, a lot easier to think of them as dead. He had a vague memory of some controversy to do with Jeebleh’s letters, but Seamus wasn’t sure if Caloosha had been involved, and in what capacity. He seemed to remember it was Shanta who had spilled the beans on this aspect of the controversy.
“How do you plan to achieve that?” Seamus asked.
“I’m working on it.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Thank you.”
Seamus now had a disheveled expression as he asked, “Have you seen Caloosha, since coming?”
“I’ve seen him. Have you?”
“I haven’t had the desire to meet him ever,” Seamus said. “The things I’ve heard about him haven’t encouraged me to.”
“I met him briefly, that’s all.”
“And Shanta?”
“Not yet, but I plan to.”
Jeebleh looked at his right hand, palm up, and stared at where the heart line veered toward his middle finger. He asked, “Have you met Af-Laawe?”
After some reflection, Seamus said, “Af-Laawe, the Marabou, is sure to discover the whereabouts of the dead, in whatever state they’re in. I would seek him out if I hadn’t any idea in which of the many cemeteries someone was buried. The man’s death instinct contrasts well with Bile’s life instinct.”
“What do you think about him?”
“He gives me the shudders.”
As the conversation paused again, Jeebleh remembered their youthful, energetic days, when to pass the time they took turns completing each other’s unfinished sentences. When they engaged each other in that kind of banter, fellow students who joined them found it difficult to keep up. Often, even the languages changed—from Italian to English, then perhaps to Arabic. Toward the end of their stay in Padua, Seamus had picked up the basics of Somali.
Jeebleh would have to run a fever of nerves before reintroducing the seesawing games of their younger days in Italy. Most likely, it wouldn’t work here, in troubled Somalia. He asked, “Did you come to Mogadiscio before or after the Marines landed?”
“I arrived in Mogadiscio in 1992,” Seamus said. “I was head of an advance team charged with assessing the needs of the United Nations offices. I was to set up the translation units. The UN intervention was estimated to cost more than one hundred million U.S. dollars for that year alone. We put up a guesthouse, which doubled as our office. Because we hadn’t the authority to hire any local staff, New York imported Somalis with American passports. And you had old British colonial officers running the show: former BBC staffers, chummy with the former dictator, who served as consultants to the UN. I remember an Englishman who kept yattering at me about clan warfare, and how the combined efforts of the U.S. and the UN would sort out the mess. Sod it, it was utter rubbish. Left to me. I would’ve committed the lot to a nuttery, the self-serving imbeciles.”
“How did you and Bile meet?”
“I shared a table at the guesthouse with an Italian-American woman who was on an advance mission to open the UNICEF office,” Seamus said. “She mentioned his name in passing. I looked him up. It wasn’t difficult to find him.”
“Was he living alone then?”
“He was spending a lot of time at Shanta’s, with Raasta, even though he was living in shoddy settings. He had the bare minimum when I first visited him. We talked, and he shared some of his visions with me, visions that took a different form every time we met.” As he spoke, Seamus bit at his fingernails, to the flesh, at times making it difficult for Jeebleh to understand what he was saying.
“Did you recognize each other when you met?”
“He didn’t recognize me,” Seamus said.
“Because of the beard?”
“I hadn’t grown one then.” He looked into Jeebleh’s eyes, as if focusing on some distant horizon, and then sipped his coffee.
“You didn’t expect him to recognize you?”
“For one thing, my name would’ve been the furthest thing from his mind,” Seamus said. “Also, the civil war had had a disorienting effect on him—he was concentrating on minimal survival. But he recognized my voice the moment I spoke a full sentence.
“I went to visit him at The Refuge. He was quieting a toddler who was having a convulsive crying fit. The girl fell silent on seeing me come closer, and from the way she stared at me, you might have thought she knew me from somewhere else. She rose to her full height and wobbled away, past me, up to the new playhouse, where Raasta was playing with blocks.”
“And then?”
“A thousand memories were condensed into a giant singular memory, which dwarfed all others, and I recited a verse from Dante’s Inferno, in which enslaved Somalia was a home of grief, a ship with no master that was floundering in a windstorm.”
“Then he recognized you?”
“And I stayed to help at The Refuge.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that!”
“What else?” Jeebleh asked.
“I don’t know why I thought about olives then—olive fruits, olive trees, and olive wood,” Seamus said. “Or why my mind went quietly about its thoughts in the way bees go contentedly about their motion, each droning note resulting from the previous one. I had no idea if the thought about olives came to me because we had been in Italy when we last met. Or if the fine polish of Bile’s smooth skin reminded me of olive leaves, dark green on one side, silvery on the other. It could be that I was comparing our friendship to the olive tree. Because when the top branches die, a fresh trunk with a new lease on life emerges. And the tree bears fruit between the ages of five to ten years, and may not reach full maturity until after twenty!”
Thinking about friendship and about olives and their fruits, Jeebleh recalled the times they had been through as friends, and asked himself where he had heard the phrase “the country of our friendship,” and decided that Bile had spoken the words; now the image Seamus used to describe his and Bile’s friendship was an olive tree. When he turned to his friend to ask, Seamus’s eyelids were like moths at rest, leisurely wrapping their wings over their bodies, in contented contemplation of their own mortality.
“And then what?” Jeebleh said.
“Raasta took to me,” Seamus said.
“Right away?”
“She consented to sit on my lap the first time I invited her. It was love at first sight, mutual.”
“What of Faahiye?”
“I didn’t meet him until after my third visit. And when I did, I had the feeling that there was something wrong, and that he and Shanta had ballsed up their marriage. I could see that was affecting Raasta in a negative way. I worked out for myself that Faahiye was the primary source of the discord.”
“What was Raasta like?”
“She was very striking.”
“Because of the dreadlocks?”
“Actually, you might have assumed she was Bile’s daughter if you hadn’t known, because of the family resemblance. Also, she was very comfortable around him. They touched a lot, the two of them, they touched all the time.” Tears filled Seamus’s eyes.
“And when you eventually got to know Faahiye?”
“He made me think of a tree that has never flowered,” Seamus said. “Yo
u might think he was from another, older world. He took everything personally, and because of this, he hurt easily.”
Not knowing what else to say, but wanting to make a remark, Jeebleh said, “I hope the girls are unhurt.”
Seamus, looking exhausted, covered his mouth and yawned. “Is there anything I can do for you before I go back to bed?” he asked.
“Could you give me directions to Shanta’s?”
Seamus obliged, then returned to his room.
19.
BRIDGES SEPARATE THE TWO SIDES THEY JOIN, JEEBLEH THOUGHT, AS HE took long, eager strides on the way to Shanta’s. He kept consulting the mass of squiggles passing for a map that Seamus had drawn as though from bad memory. Now he came to a stop, and looked this way and that, and then at the piece of paper, which he held at trombone distance. He had forgotten to bring along his reading glasses. With no prominent landmarks to guide him, and no street names either, he was unable to determine whether some of the asterisks represented two- or three-story buildings reduced to rubble or crossroads. Was he to turn left here, go a hundred meters or so, then turn right at the next destroyed building? He went on nonetheless, with the confidence of a man who knows where he is headed.
A hungry dog, its emaciated tail between its skinny legs, followed him. It kept a safe distance, its nose close to the ground, but its eyes focused mainly on him. The dog was on full canine alert, Jeebleh noted, ready to take off at the slightest hint of threat. It stopped and waited whenever he paused to take another look at the piece of paper, and didn’t move until after he had resumed walking. Jeebleh relived the incident with the Alsatian. He hadn’t thought he would get into trouble or risk being shot at if he stepped in to prevent a spoiled brat, the son of some minor warlord, from torturing a dog. He hadn’t counted on having to deliver the puppies, but he was glad he had been there.
With the bush dog still following, Jeebleh came upon several sick-looking goats. Then he saw a cow taking famished bites of a plastic bag and swallowing it, and watched as she coughed, like someone with a chest ailment. After this, he saw two elderly men lifting their sarongs until they showed their bare bottoms, preparing to defecate in full view of the road. When he had lived here, this behavior would have earned a reprimand or an immediate fine if someone from the municipality had seen them emptying their bowels.
A little later, he and his canine companion came upon a throng of men gathered around something on the ground. Jeebleh decided this was a curious crowd, and not likely to turn into a mob. But why were some of them bearing clubs and others firearms? Was it for self-protection? He could see the men concentrating on the same spot and pointing. Was it a corpse, the carcass of a dead goat or some other, more unusual animal? Before getting any closer, he made sure that he knew where the hungry dog was, worried that he might be held responsible if it bit someone, or went berserk at the sight of a corpse or a carcass. He stopped within reach of the dog, just in case he was forced to intervene.
What distinguished him from the men in the crowd, apart from the fact that he had neither a club nor a firearm, was that they were all wearing sarongs. He had on trousers.
The men made space for him, and he moved forward with the mindset of a man prepared for peril, all the while wondering whether it was wise to enter what might be a trap set to lure strangers like him into it. And yet he went forward. All at once a man with a prominent gap in his upper teeth blocked his path.
“Are you a doctor?” GapTooth demanded.
“I am not.”
Heads turned and stared, and many of those at the back of the crowd craned their necks to see. Were the men more interested in him than in the man who lay unconscious on the dusty ground, his body in a tortured posture, folded into his sarong? GapTooth volunteered the information that the man on the ground had just had an epileptic seizure. “But no one in this neighborhood knows him, or knows where he comes from or why he has had an attack and fallen right where he is lying.”
Jeebleh assumed that GapTooth had advised everyone in the crowd to keep a safe distance from the epileptic, a meter at least. But he was not saying anything of the kind to Jeebleh.
There was a rawness about the way the crowd looked at the fallen man, who lay unconscious, his eyes scarily wide open, his legs apart, and his lips traced with dried saliva. A tall, bald man standing to Jeebleh’s left wondered aloud if there was a divine purpose to the presence, in their midst, of an epileptic. This set several of the men to talk all at once. BaldMan intervened, hushing them, and said, “If there is a divine message, what is it? That we’re out of control? Handicapped? Brain-dead? Stuck in some state where we’re neither living nor dead?”
Those present turned themselves into a debating society, with several men reacting viscerally to what BaldMan had said. It seemed he was someone they listened to, even if his pronouncements were meant to be provocative, or downright offensive to many there. The talk shifted from the epileptic as a divine message to Jeebleh’s presence among them.
GapTooth, pointing at Jeebleh, said to BaldMan, “But what of this man, here? Do we know who he is? Is it a matter of time before he falls sick and drops forehead first into a heap of nervous disorder? Will his eyes begin rolling, his teeth clench, and will his tongue stiffen like a bridle in a horse’s mouth? Will his breathing become noisy, will froth run with the blood coming out of his mouth? Will he fall into a convulsive fit, lie unconscious on the ground, and when he opens his eyes, not recognize any of us? Will he remember our conversation? Will he die mysteriously, leaving the problem of where to bury him? I would say that the man lying unconscious on the ground, whom we are shunning, has more things in common with us than this newly arrived stranger here, who is upright, on his feet, and apparently healthy, walking through here in his trousers with his mangy dog. It is this man we should be worried about!”
Heads turned back and forth, eyes focused now on Jeebleh, now on the epileptic. Two possible scenarios came to Jeebleh’s mind, in instantaneous reconfiguration. In one, the crowd turned into a mob. In the other, he was taking part in a TV game show in which the contestants pressed buzzers when they were ready to answer.
GapTooth asked, “If you’re not a doctor and you’re not sarong-wearing, and you do not suffer from epilepsy, then who are you?”
Trusting his instinct, he replied, “I am a guest.”
“Of the epileptic?” asked GapTooth.
“No, I am Bile’s guest!”
“Bile, the doctor?”
“That’s right.”
“Have Raasta and Makka been found, then?” GapTooth said.
“Who are they talking about?” someone called out from the fringes of the crowd. “What manner of name is Raasta? It is not Muslim, not even Somali.”
“Have you not heard of the Protected One?” someone next to him said.
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” the man said.
Before Jeebleh could speak, another man stepped forward. “The trouser-wearing stranger in our midst is new to the city, as you can obviously see. But at least he is no enemy and no threat to us, if he is Bile’s guest. And I am sure most of you have heard of the Protected One, Bile’s niece, and the Simple One, both missing for a while now. Unless you do not listen to the BBC Somali Service?”
Another man admitted to not having heard of Raasta.
“A pity you haven’t had the luck to meet either the Protected One or the Simple One,” GapTooth said rather theatrically. Jeebleh couldn’t tell whether some of them were teasing one another, as friends do. They could’ve been actors manqué, for all he knew, performing an impromptu play, staged for the benefit of anyone who happened to be passing.
With his hand extended to Jeebleh, GapTooth said, “Please remember me to the kind doctor when you see him next. And I hope, for our sake, that we find Raasta healthy and unharmed.”
“What’s your name, so I can give it to Bile?”
“Alas, I have no name by which I wish to be known in these terrible times,” GapTooth sai
d, “nor do I answer to my old name, because of the associations it has for me nowadays. Possibly, the good doctor would know who I was if I resorted to my former name, but I would rather wait until peace has come to stay.”
“I understand,” Jeebleh said, even if he didn’t.
At the mention of Bile’s name, the crowd had begun to relax, and so had Jeebleh. But he reminded himself that it was when you dropped your guard that someone could hurt you. He imagined panic descending on him in the unlikely form of a faint heart, his own. Then he felt ill at ease, and began perspiring, until the sweat soaked through his shirt, and his back became too wet for comfort. He kept his panic under check, even though he was short of breath and nervous. Finally he plucked up enough courage and then knelt to check on the epileptic. A man with a front-row view of the spectacle asked if there was nothing he could do for the poor man.
BaldMan asserted, “If I haven’t said it before: We do not bother with people we do not know!”
“But he’s a human being just like you and me!” Jeebleh shouted, whirling to his feet. “He needs to be taken to a hospital. Why do you need to know his clan family before you help him? What’s wrong with you? You make me sick, all of you! Out of my way, please.”
The crowd stepped back fast, clearing a large circle around Jeebleh and the unconscious man, only to close in shortly, gawking. The hungry dog, which no one had bothered to shoo away, stood nearby, waiting and watching. As Jeebleh glared at them, he assumed that many in the crowd thought he had suddenly gone mad, and might harm them. In the quiet that followed, as they gathered around him in the attitude of spectators assembling for the timeless pleasure of it, he knelt down again.
It seemed that the epileptic had started to undress before losing his consciousness and falling. His hands a little unsteady, Jeebleh rearranged the man’s sarong as well as the circumstances would permit, and straightened his legs. But he had no idea what to do next. So he took the man’s head in his hands, believing that this would help release the pressure of his teeth on his tongue.
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