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by Nuruddin Farah

  Now the past, which Shanta had smuggled in by alluding to their mothers, became the fifth person in the room, assuming a larger presence than anyone had been prepared for. Bile admonished them to desist from introducing the past, as a contraband idea, as this would exclude Seamus. Nor could the three friends and coevals speak of their more recent past, as this would exclude Shanta. Seamus stepped in to steer the conversation away from the present to a past not close to anyone’s heart: the role the United States had played in Somalia!

  “I’ve my misgivings about saints and angels,” he said, “especially as I fear that people describe the Yankees as ‘good angels’ come on a humanitarian mission, to perform God’s work here. Do you think Yankees ceased being angels, because of the conditions they met here, conditions that wouldn’t permit them to perform any work but Satan’s? When do angels cease to be angels and resort to being who they are, Yankees? That’s a topic worth pursuing, wouldn’t you agree with me, my American friend?” And Seamus looked at Jeebleh, teasing.

  Jeebleh was comforted by the prospect of affording his mind time to dwell on another subject, and he thought, half remembering a quotation attributed to J. M. Synge, that there was no one like Seamus to soothe and quiet one’s nerves on an evening such as this. Meanwhile Seamus’s unerring sense of kindness toward everyone made it possible for him to speak a gentle reprimand in the very idiom that made you think he was praising you. The man thought of the world, Jeebleh reflected, in images that surprised even Seamus: unpredictable in an interesting way.

  Shanta was excited to high heaven, and so was her voice, as she addressed Seamus, who now assumed the role of a moderator at a panel discussion, but only momentarily. “They ceased to be angels,” she said, “which they weren’t in any case, and became who they were, Americans, when they used overwhelming force in such an indiscriminate fashion and lots of innocent Somalis died.”

  Bile agreed, adding that, from the moment they landed and started putting on a circus for the benefit of prime-time TV back home, you felt they couldn’t have come to do God’s work.

  “Why did they come, then?” Seamus said. And when no one spoke, he gave his theory: that everything that could’ve gone wrong for the Yanks had gone wrong because they saw everything in black and white, had no understanding of and no respect for other cultures, and were short on imagination, as they never put themselves in anyone else’s shoes. They were also let down by their intelligence services, arriving everywhere unprepared, untutored in the ways of the world; he brought up the collapse of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and the disintegration of several ramshackle states in different parts of the globe. “They came to show the world that they could make peace-on-demand in Somalia, in the same dramatic fashion as they had made war-on-demand in the Gulf. They came to showcase peace here, as a counterpoint to their war effort elsewhere. Iraq and Somalia had one thing in common: both were made-for-TV shows. Christ, they were uppity, but they never lost their focus—the prime-time performance was their focus all along.” He turned to Jeebleh, who looked ill at ease. “I am agreeing with you. What’s your gripe?”

  Jeebleh pondered for a few seconds. “Doesn’t the sound of a gunshot make the birds perched side by side on a telephone wire take off in fright, all at the same time?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Y-e-s?” Bile seemed interested.

  “But a few seconds after taking off in fright,” Jeebleh said, “don’t many of the birds that haven’t been hit come back to sit on the same telephone wire, or another one very much like it?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “The Americans shouldn’t have permitted the armed vigilantes to return to their haunts. They should’ve disarmed them soon after their arrival, when the irregular armies allied to the Strongmen were afraid of America’s military might. They sent contradictory messages to the warlords, and then fell back on this zero-casualty idea. I’d say they lost their focus, all right.”

  “Perhaps the cutthroat conditions the Americans encountered here, which they had no way of dealing with, made them blow hot and cold?” Shanta speculated.

  “There was another problem,” Bile said. “A problem to do with definitions.”

  “How do you mean, definitions?” Seamus asked.

  Perhaps because the conversation was no longer about Raasta and Makka’s return, Shanta became more garrulous than Jeebleh had known her to be since their first encounter, and couldn’t control her enthusiasm. She fidgeted, got up, moved about, then returned to her original seat, mumbling something to herself. No one paid her any mind.

  Bile spoke. “The U.S. forces failed to define why they really came to Somalia in the first place, soon after the Gulf War. This was never made clear. The ‘good’ Americans, just back from defeating Bad Guy Saddam, were seen on TV holding a dozen starving babies at a feeding center—a picture of postcard quality. Later, after the trigger-happy U.S. soldiers massacred hundreds of innocent civilians and turned the life of the residents into hell, we asked ourselves how the Americans could reconcile the earlier gestures of mercy with the bombings of the city, in which many women and children were killed. And did you hear what one of the U.S. officials said when they pulled out after the October debacle? ‘We fed them, they got strong, and they killed us!’ Do you recall who it was said that?”

  “Some U.S. major or other,” offered Seamus.

  “A spokesman of the UN, actually,” Bile said.

  “He could’ve been U.S. Army, though.”

  “What’s the difference?” Shanta said.

  “A matter of definition!” Bile said.

  Seamus took it from there: “Surely StrongmanSouth’s armed youths who shot at the Americans, and killed many UN Blue Helmets of other nationalities, were not the emaciated babies with whom the Marines had those heart-wrenching pictures taken in front of the cameras? Surely the spokesman of the UN military was mistakenly equating the small group of armed militias who fought against them with the whole of the Somali nation?”

  “Don’t Somalis take the part and mistake it for the whole too?” Jeebleh knew he was in a distancing mode, apart from “them.”

  “I agree,” Bile said. “We too mistook the small group of senior officers and the military on duty here for the whole of America. You’d have thought from listening to the ranting of a supporter of StrongmanSouth that America had gone to war against the whole of the Somali nation, which of course it hadn’t. When one takes the part for the whole, one seldom bothers to distinguish between the uncouth soldiers with whom we’ve become acquainted and other, well-meaning Americans. I am sure there are millions of Americans who are good people, and millions of Somalis who wouldn’t hurt an American fly. When you think of it, the Americans, by their actions, made a hero out of StrongmanSouth, and this prolonged the civil war. After all, it was after their hasty departure that he nominated himself president. I’d say the American-in-Charge met his equal and Faustian counterpart in StrongmanSouth.”

  “What of the Belgians, the Italians, or the Canadians?” Seamus asked. “They didn’t act less uppity or more humanely toward the Somalis, did they?”

  Shanta now addressed Jeebleh: “Did you know that in everyday Somali, the term amerikaan means ‘weird’? Why do you think that is so?”

  “I know too that the term amxaar, the Somali word for ‘Ethiopian,’ means ‘unkind,’ ‘brutal,’” Seamus said. “And I can tell you why.”

  “The coinage of amerikaan to mean ‘weird,’ I should point out, precedes the Somali people’s recent encounter with Americans in the shape of the Marines and Rangers who shot the daylights out of them,” Jeebleh said. “Maybe it came about as a result of the Hollywood movies we’ve seen?”

  “I think it’s in the nature of the strong and the weak to define each other in ways that make sense only to one of them, not necessarily to both,” said Seamus. “To the Somali, the Amerikaan is weird, to the American GI, the Somali is an ingrate and a skinny.”
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  “And I would hate it if a GI Joe not worth a quid of chewed tobacco were to make up our minds for us about America!” Jeebleh replied. “Moreover, let’s ask ourselves a question: Can we blame them? Is a whole country responsible for a crime committed by one of its citizens? Can all of America be held responsible for the gaffes made by one of its nationals, however high-ranking, or however representative of the power invested in him?”

  It was then that Bile reminded them of how the rotors of one U.S. helicopter had blown a baby girl, barely a year old, out of her mother’s arms and up into the dust-filled heavens. They all fell silent, affected by the unimaginable horror. Jeebleh wanted to know if Bile had ever met her.

  “She was brought to my clinic,” he offered.

  Jeebleh remembered Dajaal’s mentioning that his granddaughter had been blown away in a helicopter’s uprush of air.

  “Dajaal came along to the clinic with the girl and her mother.”

  “I’ve been meaning to see her,” Jeebleh said. “Perhaps Dajaal can take me to her.”

  Shanta was the first to yawn, and the yawning became contagious, everyone agreeing that it was time to turn in. Bile reminded Jeebleh that just to be on the safe side, he would take him to the lab first thing in the morning.

  Shanta overheard and worriedly wondered if all was well with Jeebleh.

  “Just a checkup,” he reassured her. “I’d also like to go to the barber for a haircut,” he told Bile.

  “I’ll ask Dajaal to drive you. And maybe on your way to or from the barber’s you can make a detour and visit his granddaughter and her mother.”

  Shanta said, “Good night, then!”

  Instead of saying good night, Seamus left Jeebleh with an admonition: “Let no madness hurt you into bearing a gun!”

  Not rising to it, Jeebleh said, “Good night!”

  “Night-night!”

  “Night-night!”

  26.

  “WHICH DO YOU PREFER, WALKING OR TAKING THE CAR?” DAJAAL ASKED, when he and Jeebleh, back from the lab, met the following morning.

  “Are the two places far apart?” Jeebleh paused, feeling awkward, after taking a step. He put on the sarong he had brought from New York, and borrowed a conical cap and a shawl from Bile, wanting to look like a local when he went to the barber’s, and to visit Dajaal’s granddaughter and her mother.

  Dajaal replied, “At most, it’s half an hour’s walk from my daughter-in-law’s to the barbershop. I’ve arranged for Qasiir to meet us there.”

  Jeebleh had had a slight fever during the night and had been awake almost until dawn, tossing and turning, at times deciding to pack his bags and leave, then changing his mind and persuading himself to stay the course. Now his swollen glands were causing him discomfort, and several of his joints were burning from pain. Bile wouldn’t commit himself to a diagnosis until he had heard from the lab technician, who had promised to get back to them before the end of the day, tomorrow at the latest. If anything, Bile said, Jeebleh was lucky that he had a constitution as strong as a horse’s; Bile felt he was in no danger of imminent collapse.

  “Let’s walk,” Jeebleh said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Walking will do me good.”

  The memory of what he had gone through hit him afresh with agony and anger. He felt an upsurge of masochism within, like a river rising in the Sahara. He told himself to withstand the pain with unprecedented stoicism, but not to forget what had been done to him, so that he might link yesterday’s agony and anger to those of yesteryear, and to what had happened to him as a child.

  “Let’s walk and talk!” he said.

  DAJAAL LED THE WAY AND JEEBLEH WALKED ALONGSIDE, CLUTCHING THE candies he had brought for Dajaal’s granddaughter. Death was no longer in every shadow cast by every wall. When he first arrived, he feared being ambushed by an unexpected death, and worried that he might die anonymously, killed by someone who did not know him and had no idea why he was administering death to him. Since then, he had wised up, coming around to the view that in the Mogadiscio of these days, death was seldom anonymous: it had a face and a name, and you were more likely to be killed by someone supposedly close to you or related to you. It was becoming rarer for total strangers to kill one another for no reason. Gone were the days of random killings. Lately, murderers were more calculating, factoring in their possible political and financial gains before killing you. Was it Osip Mandelstam who had said that only your own kind would kill you? To elude death of that sort, Jeebleh had fled south, where he was supposed to be an other, and where—here was the irony—he felt safer.

  Dajaal interrupted his thoughts. “Are you happy in America?”

  “America is home to me, but I doubt that I would use the word ‘happy’ to describe my state of mind there,” Jeebleh said tentatively. “I’m comfortable in America. I love my wife and daughters. I love them in New York, where we live. I can’t help comparing your question with one that I asked myself when I got here: Do I love Somalia? I found it difficult to answer.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I love Somalia.”

  “What about as a Somali in America?”

  “When I think about America from the perspective of a Somali, and reflect on what’s occurred following the U.S. intervention, then I feel I’m in a bind.”

  Dajaal took a tighter grip on the ball he kept squeezing to help the blood in his hand circulate. You could see that he too was turning a thought in his head, stirring it, agitating it.

  “Something happened that I hadn’t reckoned on,” Jeebleh said. “I discovered that I was not saddened by the deaths on either side as much as I was saddened by the ruthlessness displayed by the young fighters.” He watched the flight of an eagle briefly before turning to Dajaal to ask, “What did you think of the Marines and the Rangers as fighters?”

  “I couldn’t fault the junior officers.”

  “What about the commanding officers?”

  Dajaal took an even firmer grip on the rubber ball, his knuckles protruding more prominently and appeared a shade paler than their natural color.

  “My heart went out to the young Marines and Rangers,” Dajaal said, “even though on the night of the third of October, when I confronted them—man to man—I gave each of them as much of a piece of hell as I could. But during the lull in the fighting, I felt as though each of them was alone in his fear, like a child left in the pitch-darkness of a strange room by parents who were enjoying themselves elsewhere. I imagined them wondering what they were doing in Africa, away from their loved ones, and asking themselves why some skinny Somalis in sarongs were taking potshots at them. I imagined them questioning in their own minds the explanations put out by military spokesmen at Pentagon briefings. But you want to know what I thought of the commanding officers. From the majors upward, including the AIC?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I hoped to God they would be court-martialed, and wished them hell and much worse.” Dajaal squeezed the ball as though he might eventually succeed in getting blood out of it. “The senior officers were too ignorant to learn, too arrogant. If only they had had enough humility to put themselves in their subordinates’ shoes, I kept thinking. Their behavior was loony. But the young Marines and Rangers redeemed themselves with their fighting. They held up well, fought fiercely, and gave back as good as they got. As fighters, there was a major flaw in their character, however. They thought less of us, and that was ultimately the cause of their downfall. You should never think less of your opponent—we were taught this at military school. If you respect your enemy, you can be easier on yourself later, especially if you lose the fight, and it is of high moral value when you win.”

  “They belittled StrongmanSouth’s militia?”

  “They belittled all of us, fighters or no fighters,” Dajaal corrected him. “StrongmanSouth didn’t fight. I was there, and he didn’t fight. That was to prove the Americans’ undoing, the fact that they belittled the fighters.”

  �
��You’re saying that pride can cause one’s ruin?”

  “A lot of terrible things were done that night and the following morning by both groups, ours and theirs,” Dajaal said, “all in the service of the raging insanity. We had hardly wised up to what was being done on our side when we witnessed the worst imaginable horror in the shameful shape of youths dragging a dead American down the city’s dusty roads. But then I thought, A mob is a mob, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Mobs run riot, they are good at that: if they go mad, they do it everywhere, even in America.”

  “Was there any way someone could’ve prevented it?”

  “It all happened so fast,” Dajaal said, “we couldn’t have done anything, even if we had wanted to. We were aware of the mob gathering, chanting the usual anti-American slogans. Then, before you could say, ‘Please, let’s not do that,’ the youths, mostly urchins and riffraff, were rampaging, my grandson Qasiir among them. No one was in control. Many of us were too exhausted from the nightlong fighting and couldn’t be bothered. You must remember, there were so many deaths on our side, over a thousand by our reckoning. Many of us went straight from the fighting to the burial grounds. We were all out on a limb for all of thirteen hours or so, fighting to keep death at bay, and I doubt if we could’ve raised our voices against what the youths were doing. I can assure you that we were shocked. Were you not shocked?”