“Did she die fully alert?”
He had been kept so ill informed about her state of health that he did not even know about the deterioration until she was just about dead. He had seen this as symptomatic of a country whose people cared little about one another. On the one hand, there was deliberate indifference to her condition on the part of the state apparatus, because she was his mother. On the other hand, there was an incurable apathy everywhere. Someone like Shanta, who had visited the old woman and in all probability looked after her now and then, still hadn’t stirred herself sufficiently to show that she cared, by writing to him.
He and his mother had never talked about his departure from Somalia: it would have been unwise to discuss his controversial one-way ticket out of the country on an open telephone line belonging to a neighbor. He had heard of his mother’s deteriorating health, and tried to telephone, but could not get through because of the bad connections. Then he received a newspaper clipping, anonymously posted, in which her death was announced. Now he repeated, “What was my mother’s mental state when she died?”
“Your mother died on her own terms,” she said.
“She was fully aware of what was happening?”
The woman nodded.
He imagined Caloosha calling on his mother, sitting at her bedside day in and day out, and describing her son as a traitor. Could she, in truth, have seen as a traitor someone who belonged outside the precincts of the human community? No. He knew she wouldn’t have thought of him as a Judas. Alas, he had no one to support his side of things. His voice as hard and unbending as iron, he asked, “What about my letters to her? Why were they returned, unopened and unread?”
“I’ve no idea about letters’ being returned.”
“You weren’t aware?”
“I read her the ones I received!”
“What did you do with them?”
“Burned them.”
“Why burn them?”
“Those were my instructions.”
“Who gave you those instructions?”
“She did!”
If this was true, then it could only mean that his mother had attained the bitter age when nothing hurtful could have touched her anymore. He had failed her, and was blaming others for his foibles: that was the sad truth of it. He had come too late. What in hell did he expect in a country weighed down with the grievances of its people, dwelling in a land burdened by destruction and death? His own letters returned, unread? Now he asked, “Were you alone with her when she died?”
“We weren’t alone.”
“Who else was there with you?”
“Caloosha!”
She would give no further details, and resorted to shaking her head back and forth, then up and down. She paused for a brief spell, then shook her head now to the right and now to the left, in the gesture of someone ridding herself of a terrible thought.
Jeebleh imagined his mother dying, and then total quiet descending, a butterfly no longer stirring, with its wings folded, still.
He heard Af-Laawe say, “Now to the cemetery!”
ON THEIR WAY THERE, JEEBLEH UNDERSTOOD THAT HIS MOTHER HAD DIED restless. It no longer mattered to him whether the woman now sitting behind him in the Mercedes, next to Af-Laawe, had served as her housekeeper or not; nor did it matter if she had lied to him. He and his mother hadn’t ultimately made peace with each other. His visit to her grave and his wish to build a headstone were but attempts to effect reconciliation with her spirit, which had departed in a troubled state.
He assumed that Af-Laawe and Caloosha would feed him half-truths and apparent facts. Having bothered to bring him all the way to the cemetery, they would probably show him a tomb marked with a board bearing his mother’s name. Thanks to Shanta, he knew what to look for: a Hinducini mango tree with seasonal fruits bigger than the head of a grown man, and four medium-to-large stones with his mother’s name on them. He sat between two men in shades, with guns.
“What about the money?” he asked the woman.
“We used every penny of it,” she told him.
He could only contemplate a life of regret, one in total ruins. If the woman was to be believed, the last words on his mother’s lips amounted to a curse. If he was being fed on half-truths, was it possible that even though the woman was as false as counterfeit money, the low-ceilinged house to which he had been taken really belonged to his mother’s housekeeper? And was this one reason why he hadn’t been allowed to go past the porch—because they were worried he might see many of his mother’s things, things the genuine housekeeper had appropriated or had been given by his mother? What gave this woman a certain credibility was that although she was a fake, she wore a dress his daughters had bought and sent as a gift to their grandmother.
Like it or not, he was visiting a land where demons never took a break. There was so much distrust that demons didn’t need to top things up, make sure there was enough to go round, give everyone his or her commensurate share of misery.
AT LONG LAST, THEY REACHED A GATE WITH A BROKEN SIGNBOARD, WITH THE words “The Sity’s General Cemetary” written in the shaky hand of a semiliterate. The road was choked with low shrubs, leaving only a narrow point of entry for the car. Traces of the old tarred road were visible, as was a broken-down shack, which once had served as a guardhouse. From the few times he had come here, Jeebleh remembered a caravan of vehicles waiting at the entrance. In those days, you had to present a death certificate from the municipality to be allowed to bury your dead here. Civil wars, anathema to bureaucracy, do away with the authority that is synonymous with normality. Civil wars simplify some matters and complicate others.
They drove for quite a while before the vehicle came to a stop at the command of the housekeeper, who saw the landmark she was looking for. The first to get out, Af-Laawe went around and gave the housekeeper a hand. Jeebleh got out and walked forward with a clubfooted gait. The huge loss was at last getting to him, weighing him down with more guilt. Had he been by himself, he would have sunk to his knees and stayed there, taking comfort from his humbled position. He heard his name spoken in a low whisper, and the housekeeper’s announcement: “There, I can see it!”
He took a good hold of himself and looked around. There was no mango tree with a sweet shade close by. Nor could he see four medium-to-large stones with writing on them to mark the grave, as Shanta had described. He didn’t know what Af-Laawe and the housekeeper expected him to do. He went on his knees, not because he wished to humble himself in prayer, but because walking or standing upright was proving difficult. Of course he knew that the moment toward which he had been moving all these years, to be face to face with revelatory death, was further away now than he had imagined. “This is not my mother’s grave,” he told the housekeeper.
“But it is,” she insisted.
“It isn’t!” he said.
Af-Laawe came nearer to find out what was happening, and the two musclemen with shades and guns approached as well. Jeebleh prepared for the moment when he would sink deeper into a reverie, and waited.
All the while, the woman pointed at a mound of earth that wasn’t his mother’s, saying, “There!” Who was she? Why was he still on his knees? From the way the woman indicated the mound, her forefinger extended, she might have been Columbus pointing at a new world beyond the horizon.
“That grave doesn’t belong to my mother,” he said.
Af-Laawe said, “Does a grave belong to the person in it, or to those claiming it with an authoritative apostrophe, as when someone says, ‘My mother’s grave’?”
Jeebleh wasn’t sure which Af-Laawe was getting wrong, his pronoun or where to place the apostrophe. Nor did he like Af-Laawe’s lip. But then what could he do about it, considering that there were two muscles who would kick him to death if he challenged him?
The woman came to him now, and towered above him. With her head inclined, her smile diffuse, she took his hand and led him to a mound that had collapsed on itself. And pointed at it. �
�Here she is!” She picked up a strip of zinc with his mother’s name recently inscribed in the hand of an autistic child. “Your mother’s here!” she said.
“My mother doesn’t belong in here!” he insisted.
With mouthy rudeness, Af-Laawe said, “She may not belong in the grave herself anymore, given her condition, but her bones do.”
One of the musclemen moved into Jeebleh’s field of vision, blocking it. He pretended to help Jeebleh to his feet, while his companion prodded Jeebleh sharply with the professional accuracy of a nurse giving an injection.
Jeebleh’s stomach turned, and he dropped deeper and deeper into nausea. He could not get up, and was so weak that he felt almost lifeless. By the time he managed to crawl closer to the mound and lay his head on it, the squeamishness had disabled his knees. Finally he fell, forehead first, as though he were dead.
PART 3
“. . . Murderers and those who strike in malice,
as well as plunderers and robbers ...
A man can set violent hands against
himself or his belongings....
Now fraud, that eats away at every conscience,
is practiced by a man against another
who trusts in him, or one who has no trust.”
(CANTO XI)
Who, even with untrammeled words and many
attempts at telling, even could recount
in full the blood and wounds that I now saw?
Each tongue that tried would certainly fall short
because the shallowness of both our speech
and intellect cannot contain so much.
(CANTO XXVIII)
DANTE, Inferno
24.
HOW DID HE GET HERE?
He was in a restaurant, sitting by himself at a table, and before him was a cup of tea—which, he found by dipping in his finger and touching it to his lower lip, was highly sugared. There was a huge gap in his memory. He couldn’t recall what had happened between the moment his knees gave way, after the jab from the muscleman-cum-medico, and now.
He studied the curious faces surrounding him and concluded that he didn’t know who they were, and hadn’t the slightest idea how or why he had been brought to this place, or by whom. His memory had run out, abandoning him at the mound. But in his mind he replayed Af-Laawe’s rude remarks, which he hoped Af-Laawe would pay for sooner rather than later. Jeebleh remembered the supposed housekeeper pointing at a grave, her forefinger extended, and saying, “Your mother’s here!” Then Af-Laawe’s sass . . . and then what? Did the jab come before or after he had had enough of Af-Laawe’s lip and the woman’s lies?
The mystery was now cast in a framed moment that was difficult to define. He had been on his knees when he felt the jab; he had smelled something noxious, although he couldn’t determine its nature. He had seen the shadowy presence of the muscleman in the corner of his vision, then a second muscleman’s hand insinuating itself into the lamp of his consciousness, making him go out as quickly as the flames of a fire extinguished with a miasmic liquid. He had heard the voices of the two men in shades, before a needle pricking him on the upper thigh interfered with his thinking. Now he felt his stomach to make sure that he hadn’t undergone a surgery in which an organ of his had been removed. He touched where the needle had prodded, and it ached. He hoped he wasn’t developing an exaggerated sense of paranoia, in which, like Shanta, he would detect the hand of the cartel everywhere.
What would become of him now, he wondered, as he listened to a miscellany of male voices. Af-Laawe was somewhere near, he was sure. And he was damned if he knew the purpose to all this, or where his new reality began and where it might end. But why did “they” have to resort to these crude methods?
He heard someone calling his name.
TALL, BUCKTOOTHED, THIN AS A CANE, FAAHIYE STOOD BEFORE HIM. DISSOLVING into the shadow he cast, he was as elusive as a mirror reflected in the image of its own shiftiness. Jeebleh stared up at him, and he wouldn’t take a seat. Jeebleh focused on the toothpick in the corner of Faahiye’s mouth, which his tongue was busying itself with, moving it here and there, back and forth. He had the drawn-in cheeks of a man of advanced age. Jeebleh made sure that he was seeing no visions. He thought it safe to assume that Faahiye, who had come out of hiding, should be the one to say something first.
And that was how it came to be. Faahiye took the toothpick out of his mouth and said, “I’m surprised you recognize me.”
“Where am I?” asked Jeebleh.
“I was told you’d be here.”
“Who told you that I’d be here?”
“I am not at liberty to disclose that particular detail.”
Jeebleh said, “Sit down anyhow,” and Faahiye did so. Then, because they hurt, Jeebleh closed his eyes. He took a deep breath, then exhaled, counting to thirty, and praying that he wasn’t hallucinating, seeing things and thinking weird thoughts at this most crucial moment of his visit. Faahiye sat close to him, their thighs touching, Jeebleh’s itching. How he wished he could scratch the spot! But uncertain what to make of Faahiye, he did not dare.
“We’ve all been through it!” Faahiye said.
“We’ve all been jabbed, have we?”
“Jabbed?” Faahiye asked.
“Poisoned!”
“I meant that all of us who’ve lived in this civil war have become someone other than ourselves for brief periods of time, in which we’ve entertained moments of doubt, or dropped into a deep well of despair. Have you too become someone other, in spite of yourself?”
Listening to Faahiye was working positively on him, and he was managing to take it easy, despite himself. Faahiye’s words had taken him to a comfort zone, where he didn’t mind dwelling for as long as they were in the teahouse. Jeebleh would have been the first to admit that it would be unwise to meet up with Af-Laawe, after he had been told about him; Af-Laawe would put him through a grinder, he suspected. But now he was looking at the brighter side of things: at least he had gotten to meet Faahiye, never mind his dissipated condition. Who knows, he might even get to meet Raasta and take her home shortly, back to Shanta and Bile!
“We’ve all learned to be someone other than ourselves, and have relaxed ourselves into accepting our perverse condition,” Faahiye was saying. “This makes living easier, less tedious.”
Jeebleh felt as naked as a cat with singed hair. Were Af-Laawe and his cohorts making him jump through hoops of humiliation in order to warn him that worse things were to come unless he stopped being a nuisance? His tongue was now in a tangle, in part because he didn’t know whether it was wise to confide in Faahiye. After all, if trusting Af-Laawe had gotten him to where he was now, jabbed and in pain, then where would trusting Faahiye lead him?
“I know I am someone other than myself,” Faahiye said. “At times it’s pretty hard to figure out who I am, especially when I am by myself. This gets a lot more challenging when I am with others, who are themselves others!”
“What about when you are with Raasta and Makka?”
Jeebleh felt uncomfortable, because Faahiye’s expression didn’t change at all, as if he didn’t even recognize the names of the girls. To interpret his interlocutor’s shiftiness, Jeebleh willed himself into becoming as humble and calm as the metallic silver of a mirror. This way he might make sense of the shadowy apparition moving at the deeper end of what was reflected in Faahiye’s features.
“You know it and so do I,” Faahiye said. “You become someone other than yourself when you spend many years in isolation, or live separated from those who mean a lot to you. You become someone other than yourself when you live together with your jailers, whom heaven wouldn’t admit into its courtyard, and whom hell wouldn’t deign to receive.”
“Why did you opt out?”
“I am sure you’ve heard the proverb that says that even a coward, alone and untested, thinks of himself as a brave man?”
“I know the proverb, all right,” Jeebleh said.
“I left becau
se I thought I’d do better if I struck out on my own, away from the constraints of in-laws and so on. And because I didn’t like the false lives we lived.”
“False lives? What false lives, whose?”
“It would be unbecoming of me to name names.”
Faahiye beckoned to a waiter, who came and recited the menu of meats and pasta dishes. When he had taken Faahiye’s order, and it became obvious that Jeebleh didn’t want anything, the waiter relayed it at the top of his voice to the kitchen, about ten meters away, through an open hatch. Jeebleh drew comfort from the fact that he was meeting Faahiye in a restaurant filled with absolute strangers. Because no one there was carrying a gun—at least not openly—and no one appeared worried or frightened, Jeebleh remembered Mogadiscio as it used to be, peaceful. Not far from where they sat, several men were busy counting piles of Somali shillings, then handing them over to other men in exchange for U.S. dollars. Jeebleh guessed they were close to the Bakhaaraha market.
Faahiye continued talking. “Memory runs in awe of all that’s false, mean, and wicked. Myself, I’d ascribe my failure to adapt to life with Bile to the fact that before his arrival on the scene, Shanta and I had all the time we needed to construct a world out of dreams. I was, I must say, unprepared to live in an intimate way with Bile at the same time as having Raasta. It was all too much, too soon—I found it unhealthy, and contrived. Before his arrival, Shanta and I had dreamt dreams the size of a huge home with all its comforts, dreamt that we would enjoy our child’s love and companionship to the fullest extent. I had dreamt that I would relish being a father to Raasta, whom I hoped to rear on a diet of affection.
“We began our lives, Shanta and I, as a twosome, a loving couple, rarely raising our voices in anger at each other. We spent much of our time together, loving, bonded, tied to each other by the mutuality of our needs, the need to survive the war, which was then between the Dictator and the clan-based militias. Neither of us imagined life without the other. There was joy in our sharing of pure love, and we melted into each other. She was my barber, and devoted loving time to giving a smoother shape to my straggly toenails. I paid attention to all of her needs in every detail. We would shower together, soap each other’s bodies, and then make love.”
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