“Uncle hasn’t been well!” Shanta’s words were reduced to a whine.
Raasta regarded Bile, who now looked fine to her, and thought to herself: But what on earth is Mother talking about?
She gave her mother a sweeter hug, which took in her sorrows, as one might draw up a skirt that’s too long. She talked to her mother, then to Makka, then to the sick girl, in an inclusive way. She beckoned everyone to join in a hug. But when she looked up to invite Uncle Bile and Uncle Seamus, they were not to be found, and she had no idea when or where they had gone. Restlessly, she pulled the sick child closer, as though going down a slide together, down and down until their hearts were in their mouths. Raasta was a little scared going down slides. Shanta rarely gave such all-inclusive hugs to anyone voluntarily.
Raasta now thought of a neater way of closing the brackets her mother had opened when she spoke of Uncle’s not having been well. “Uncle Bile looked fine to me,” she said. “Tell me, what do you think is the matter with him?”
“It’s a long story, my sweet!” said Shanta.
Raasta knew that she wouldn’t get to hear the story. But never mind, she thought, because on the whole she had had a wonderful life, compared with other children; she had had fun, and had been looked after by wonderful people, whom she adored. She knew it would be greedy of her to ask for more. After all, there was no joy in making demands that were impossible to meet. It wouldn’t do to ask Uncle Jeebleh to stay on in Mogadiscio, when he had a family in New York, and a job to go back to. She had met him face to face only yesterday, but she loved him dearly, because of his courage.
Raasta sensed that she had an attentive audience in her mother, Makka, and the sick girl, all three of them eagerly waiting. But since her return, she had been struggling to find her tongue. It was curious that words were avoiding her lately, as though she had betrayed or abused them; they no longer leapt joyously to her tongue as before, when she could speak effortlessly and make them do as she pleased. She looked around self-consciously and saw Shanta studying her with more care—perhaps wondering if the past ordeal had imposed silence on her.
It took a long time, a lot of patience, and a great many questions before mother and daughter passed words back and forth, and in the end resolved what Raasta meant to say. “I’ll never sit on his lap, ever, or hug him or kiss him.” And yes: she knew about the terrible things he had done to Uncle Bile and Uncle Jeebleh decades before, knew about the blood on his hands. There was so much blood he would not be able to wash it away, even if he prayed fifty times a day for the rest of his life.
But there was a hitch. Raasta could not bring herself to use the word “hate” to describe what she felt. The word would not come off her tongue, it just would not, even though for the first time in her young life she felt she hated someone—Caloosha, whom she would never call Uncle again, because he had been very wicked. She believed he was holding her daddy prisoner. And she was certain that he had ordered her abduction and that the job had been carried out by some of his friends. Although she had not seen his face, she suspected that she had heard his voice.
“You’re too young to hate!” Shanta told her.
“I know from what Uncle Bile has said”—Raasta spoke with unprecedented ease, not because she grew more articulate, but because she was quoting her favorite uncle—“that there are too many people fighting over matters of no great consequence.”
For a few moments, the words she ascribed to her uncle gave her as much joy as a new toy might offer another child. Her face beamed as she spoke in a tongue borrowed from her uncle, of how every time militiamen fight and kill, a new twist is given to the old fighting, which then takes on the shape of a new quarrel. And when there is the possibility of peace, a new fight erupts, based on an old complaint, and which some people call justice and others madness. “And,” she asked Shanta, “do you know what Uncle Bile said about civil war?”
“Tell me.”
“That in a civil war there is continuous fighting, based on grievances that are forever changing.”
31.
JEEBLEH’S EYES, WHEN HE SAW THEM IN THE MIRROR WHILE SHAVING THE next day, were proof enough that Caloosha’s death did affect everyone in the close-knit family of choice in major ways, whether they admitted it or not. But how had the death of the monster been achieved? Dajaal? Had Kaahin and his associates, or Qasiir and his boys, lent a hand?
He was surprised to read in a report in one of the Mogadiscio rags, by its correspondent in the north of the city, that Caloosha had died in coitus, croaking on top of his young wife. Other tabloids had a field day too, one topping another in their scoops. A paper based in the south of the city, deemed to be more sober in its analysis and less vitriolic in its assessments, identified the wife as a young woman whom Caloosha had abducted a few years earlier, after killing her entire family. According to this article, he had kept her as his sex slave under lock and key in an upstairs apartment. She belonged to the Xamari community, and was her captor’s junior by at least forty years. Another paper, claiming a valuable inside source, reported that an unidentified woman had summoned Bile to the villa to help resuscitate his brother. He had gone there immediately, together with two other doctors. But their attempt at resuscitation was too late, and he was declared dead at the villa at about five in the morning. Yet another rag emblazoned its front page with the sensational headline “Blame It on Viagra!” Perhaps the editor was simply indulging in some cheap underhand joke at the expense of the dead man.
Jeebleh was surprised that no one expressed the least bit of sorrow at the death of a man whom they knew, and with whom a number of them had had dealings. At worst, he had expected some of those who’d benefited from their association with Caloosha to speak well of him. He wondered whether there would be any mourners at his funeral, or would he be buried alone, no one to attend but the gravediggers?
ON HEARING THAT CALOOSHA HAD DIED, SHANTA REACTED WITH UNBECOMING rage. She described him as a spoilsport.
Cursing, filled with the sappiness of her fury, she let the lava of her anger spill over, but made sure that it didn’t assume the solid form of hard evidence. When she began to cool, she complained: “What peeves me is that he isn’t letting me and Raasta enjoy our reunion in undisturbed peace.”
There was no evidence that Caloosha had committed suicide or that he had willed his own death, as far as Jeebleh could tell.
She raged on regardless. “He won’t grant us the pleasure of enjoying Raasta’s return, nor have we any idea what or who is keeping Faahiye from joining us. It’s Caloosha’s accursed intention to make us all look bad in everybody’s eyes.”
“And how does he do that?”
“I’m saying that even in his death, he is a snob,” she went on. “Look at it this way: The fellow is now spoiling the alla-bari party for your mother tomorrow afternoon. What will people say if we throw a party a day after his internment? And have we decided if we’re going to his burial, as tradition demands?”
“Are you?” asked Jeebleh.
“Are we?”
Silence took both of them by the throat. To complicate matters further, some unasked questions lay between them, on the low table in Bile’s living room: not-yet-composed questions now for Shanta, now for Jeebleh, like flies on the unwashed faces of malnourished children taking breathers after lavish compensatory feedings. One unasked question had to do with what Bile was up to, in the darkened room, with the door closed.
DAJAAL HAD MADE HIMSELF SCARCE AFTER THE VISIT HE HAD ALLEGEDLY PAID to Caloosha in Bile’s company. Jeebleh met him only once before he did his disappearing act. And he asked him pointed questions. Dajaal, in his circumspection, related the exchange between the two half brothers. Apparently, Caloosha had glibly told Bile that he would need more than bullets to kill him, that he wasn’t “of the killable kind.” He boasted that there were very many others like him around and that soon enough another “unkillable” would take his place, and things would remain as they had alway
s been. He ended his declamation by assuring his half brother that the rot in the soul of the nation had set in, and that killing him off would do little to reverse the process.
BILE HAD TAKEN TO BED EARLY, IN THE QUIET WAY IN WHICH A MAN WITH IRON in his soul suddenly lapses into a dark mood. Jeebleh resolved not to disturb him, guessing that he couldn’t stay awake for sorrow. His friend was best left alone in his private world of desperation.
But then Jeebleh wasn’t sure he and Dajaal had understood each other as conspirators do. That Dajaal had not made detailed references to the alleged visit, and had chosen not to divulge much of what he’d witnessed—save the conversation between the brothers—owed much to his military background, his no-name, no-packdrill training. In the end, this served as his sleight of hand, further strengthening the efficacy of the conspiracy.
Bile was decidedly in a sad state. Yet there was comfort in the fact that he wasn’t alone in the darkened room. Raasta, sensing the seriousness of her uncle’s despair, had pitched her play space in a corner of the room, and invited Makka to join her.
AND WHERE WAS SEAMUS? HE WAS AT THE CEMETERY, HELPING THE MASON whom Jeebleh had commissioned to build his mother’s sepulcher, to a height no greater than the span between his thumb and his little finger, as Islamic tradition demanded. Seamus had gone there with Qasiir and his posse of armed youths, in a battlewagon lent through Kaahin’s good offices. Seamus had spent much of the morning in the apartment, drawing his women, every one of these looking as if she could have had a walk-on role in Fellini’s 8½, babies at the women’s singularly abundant breasts, the women’s features like the Madonna’s. He wasn’t due back until after the mason had finished the tomb. Seamus had to be there, offering any help he could, because the illiterate mason could not work from his sketches, which he found most intimidating.
Jeebleh now remembered the cutting remark Seamus had made in reaction to Shanta’s rage over her half brother’s death. Caloosha had owed “heavy debts in blood” to many people, Seamus had said, so it was natural for people to take vengeance on him now that he was dead. What an apt phrase—heavy debts in blood! Jeebleh wondered who might exact the heavy debts, and to what purpose? Would the same person or persons exact repayment of similar debts from Af-Laawe? What might his own contribution to the campaign be, his role in the business of overdue payment in blood? Would he serve as a mere catalyst? Or would he put the collection of debts into motion?
His mobile phone rang, and it was Seamus saying that Jeebleh should come to the cemetery at once, to approve the design and the construction of an enclosure with a patch of green, a kind of garden. They wanted him to see what they had done. To the question of how he would get there, Seamus responded, without the slightest hesitation, that he would send Qasiir and his friends along in a battlewagon, and they would escort him. Jeebleh couldn’t help noting sadly what their world was coming to: He and Seamus were rubbing shoulders with armed youths and accepting lifts in battlewagons! He was about to share his worries aloud, when Seamus asked how Bile was doing. Jeebleh replied that their friend was in his darkened room, in bed, lost to the world, and contemplating the ceiling.
“Alone?”
“Raasta and Makka are with him.”
“What bothers me,” Jeebleh added after a pause, “is that our friend is soreheaded, and as quiet as a physician retrieving a bullet from a patient’s skull. And he’s his own patient.”
The two agreed that a man in Bile’s state of mind couldn’t be left alone. Whereupon Seamus suggested that Qasiir take a detour on his way to the apartment and escort Shanta there.
AT THE CEMETERY, SEAMUS, THE MASON, AND TWO ASSISTANTS WERE AT work, mixing sand and cement, and laying a rudimentary foundation for the structure. Qasiir and his posse were enjoying the sweet shade of the mango tree, the battlewagon parked nearby. They spread a mat where they could sit, and chewed their qaat. Seamus wore a hat that from a distance resembled a horse’s oat bag but on close inspection proved to be a cloth cap, like what a Yoruba farmer might wear working in his fields. He and Jeebleh chatted while the mason and his assistants pegged away, chanting a work song and moving quickly and deliberately.
Jeebleh felt humbled at the thought of being in a position, at last, to mark his mother’s memory with a white stone. And it was thanks to Seamus, the pith and the pillar of their friendship. “What was it you needed help with, Seamus?” he asked.
“For starters, I’d like you to perform the office of placing the marble headstone in the ground yourself, with your own hands. Then I’d like to know if you approve of our building a small cupola into the structure.”
“A cupola?”
“A cupola supported by fake marble columns.”
“Too ostentatious,” Jeebleh said.
“Neither would your mother approve, you think?”
“Nor would orthodox Islam!”
Jeebleh was surprised that Seamus was so conversant with erecting a monument over a Muslim grave, and able to suggest an alternative: a domed tomb that wasn’t in the least ostentatious. Jeebleh now performed the office of putting in the headstone so that it faced the Sacred Mosque in the Holy City of Mecca.
Seamus appeared to be in a dither, and Jeebleh asked him what was the matter.
Seamus explained, “One, the builder and I couldn’t agree as to the exact direction the headstone should face, even though we were agreed that it should face Mecca. Two, I wanted him to accommodate within the structure both a recess for an oil lamp to be lit for seven days, beginning tomorrow, and a cavity in the top of the headstone, in which we might plant flowers. But he wouldn’t hear of either, because he has never seen a recess or a cavity built into a headstone except in the tomb of a saint.”
“So he says my mother isn’t a saint?”
“Not in so many words, but yes.”
In an uneasy silence, Jeebleh looked from Seamus to the mason, who was an ordinary kind of guy, and clearly had an unusual way of assigning sainthood. But Jeebleh had no problem with that. Touched, he turned to Seamus, saying, “You’re the real McCoy, aren’t you?”
“Not genuine enough, when it came to convincing a builder what is or isn’t permitted in Islam, the religion into which he was born, but of which he has little understanding, less than I do. What’s more, I rubbed him the wrong way when I told him that although I was born Irish and into the Christian faith, I was agnostic. We communicate only in pidgin Italian, which he could barely use to order a meal at an eatery in Turin.”
“I wonder if he knows about Geronimo Verroneo.”
“Remind me who he was.”
“The Venetian who some say designed the Taj Mahal.”
“But your mother is more worthy than the empress in whose memory it was built,” Seamus insisted.
Jeebleh, speaking Somali, instructed the mason to create a recess and a cavity in the headstone, as indicated in Seamus’s design. Perhaps it was not the language, but the emotion in his voice, or the simple fact that Jeebleh was the son of the deceased, but the man acquiesced and set to work. Moving to further heights of enthrallment, Jeebleh took Seamus in his arms in a kissand-tell-all embrace. The mason and his assistants looked at them aghast. Qasiir and his boys first booed, then applauded Jeebleh’s action.
Jeebleh released his friend and held him at a distance. “If you’re not the most priceless thing that has happened to me,” he said, “then I’m done for.”
Standing opposite Jeebleh in the brightness of noon, and at that moment looking like a clown without his makeup, Seamus said, “Allow me and my colleagues to get on with the business that’s brought us here, please!”
Jeebleh looked away, amused, and his eyes clapped on three cars being driven slowly in procession. One of the vehicles was the kind that dignitaries are chauffeured in, the others were ordinary sedans. He found himself reciting one of his favorite sentences from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and revising it in his head to make it serve his particular purposes. “I might just as well say tha
t ‘I see what I hate’ is the same thing as ‘I hate what I see’!” he told Seamus.
Seamus imagined becoming as many-eyed as a peacock with designs on the object of his elusive desire, when he looked and saw what he too thought he hated—Caloosha. Never mind that he was dead or that this would be the last Seamus would see of him: his funeral cortege.
Now a jalopy came running ahead of the tail of dust following it. Qasiir and his friends stirred themselves into a more restless mood at the sight. With a dark mood clouding his forehead, Qasiir approached Jeebleh, prepared to receive his next instructions. But none was forthcoming.
“From the way the driver’s beating that heap,” Seamus said, “pushing it beyond its limits, you’d think he was late for his own funeral.”
“I wouldn’t wish to be early for mine either.” Jeebleh found it necessary to elaborate when Seamus looked at him inquiringly. He paraphrased for him the Somali proverb that the mother of a coward seldom mourns her son’s early death.
Jeebleh spoke in agitated whispers to Qasiir, suggesting that he and part of his posse drive to the site of Caloosha’s grave, and that a second, smaller group, headed by Qasiir’s deputy, remain behind. And what was Qasiir to do? He was to stay as low and as still as a dog tag lying where its owner had fallen. Qasiir went off in the battlewagon, excited like a hound scenting the closeness of its prey.
“Is this really what we want?” Seamus said.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“Do you want a shoot-out?”
QASIIR CAME BACK SHORTLY, WEARING A NEW PAIR OF MIRRORED SHADES through which you couldn’t see his eyes but he could see yours. Jeebleh was amused at his own reflection in the shades, and concluded that he had changed a lot in the short time spent in the city of his birth. Not that he bothered to consider the nature of the changes, or if they were to be permanent. He tethered his serious side to the job at hand, requesting that Qasiir kindly remove the shades, then asking where he had gotten them.
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