Knots (11 page)

“It's daunting to explain what has happened,” she says, and, pausing, she looks him in the eyes until he averts his gaze. “For years, I have lived with an unarticulated rage that has since become part of me and that has taken a more murderous turn after my son, Dalmar's, drowning. I trace the source of the rage and Dalmar's unfortunate death to Wardi.”

She has tears in her eyes, but because she will not let go of a drop of it, she trembles. Cambara is a dyed-in-the-wool rejecter of other people's unearned pity.

Zaak intercepts the course of their conversation, guiding it to terra firma, and asks if she intends to live in the property herself if she manages to wrest it from the hands of the man illegally occupying it. He adds a rider, “As I said before, I doubt very much that the man will go without a fight.”

“I have no idea what I will do with it once the property is in my hands,” she replies. “I feel certain deep within me that I will wrench it from his clutch.”

“You must know something I don't,” he says.

“I do.”

“Will you share it with me? I'm curious.”

She does not repeat what she said to her mother about the warlords being cowardly et cetera; she chooses not to, because this way he will have a counterargument. She says, “I am a determined woman, and determined women always have their way.”

A snicker. Then, “Will you rent it or sell it?”

“I haven't figured out what I'll do,” she says.

Struck by the sorrow spreading on his countenance, he is perhaps mourning like a man watching the passing of an age. He quotes a few lines from an Arab poet, and imagines seeing a dove struck in midflight and shot at the very instant she gazes upon her destroyed nest; the dove dies. The image of Cambara meeting a sorry end makes him shake his head in disapproval. However, he does not speak of the ruin he envisions for anyone who attempts to dislodge a warlord, minor or major, from the house he occupies.

He asks, “Why wrest the property from those living in it if you have no idea what you will do with it?”

“Because it's mine,” she says.

“And you want it back, no matter the risk?”

“What risks can there be?”

He has heard of a handful of property owners who have been gunned down when they tried to repossess what was legally theirs. Some have reportedly been harassed and run out of town; others have been humiliated and their womenfolk raped to teach them a lesson. No longer sure if there is any point in voicing his admonitions, he wonders if her determination to forge ahead with a plan hatched in Toronto, while she was enraged and with no intimate knowledge of the situation on the ground, is tantamount to a death wish. The more he thinks of it the more surprised he is that Arda made no mention of Cambara's intentions. Is it possible that she has no idea how mad her daughter is? Wardi had once been the cause of their separation, when daughter and mother wouldn't exchange a greeting. Could it be that they were barely on talking terms and that Arda had rung him to host Cambara out of concern for her safety, no more?”

“Do you know who the occupant is?” he asks.

“Tell me what you must tell me, anyway.”

“His name is Gudcur,” Zaak says, “and he is the ringleader of a ruthless clan-based militia raised from the ranks of one of Mogadiscio's brutal warlords.”

“I don't stand in awe of any of the warlords.”

“Have you worked on the practical side of things?”

“What might these be?”

“How you are going to go there and so on?”

“I was hoping you would point me in the general direction of the place, since I won't recognize it, because of the state the whole neighborhood is in,” she says, taking a sip of her now cold tea. “I would appreciate it if you took me round and showed me the outlay of the area. You can leave the rest to me.”

“Any contingency plan if you are hurt?”

“I hear what you're saying,” she says impatiently.

“I want you to know I'll take no part in it.”

“I am aware of that.”

A sudden harshness comes into his eyes, and she stares back hard at him. Maybe she is hoping to shame him into withdrawing his pledge not to be party to her lunacy. He absorbs her reproving stare with the equanimity of a sponge taking in more water than it can hold, and, having nothing better to do, he starts to sort the rice from the chaff, preparatory to cooking the risotto for their evening meal.

Growing restless in the extreme, Cambara rises to her full height and then, as an afterthought, bends down to gather the tea things. As she does so, Zaak has a good glimpse of her cleavage, and, fretful, he stirs in his chair. Both are conspicuously nervous, and Zaak, the first to move, takes two long strides in the direction of the toilet, entering it, maybe because the door to it happens to be the only one that is near and open or maybe because he needs a place where he can hide his embarrassment. For her part, she draws her lips back into a huge grin as she says to herself, “In addition to being a loser, he is a wanker.”

When, several minutes later, he joins her in the kitchen, she is drying her hands after having washed the pile of dirty dishes. She has her back to him, standing imperiously in front of the sink, her head bent slightly to one side, her body tall as a pole, motionless and in concentration. He cannot work out what is on her mind, in part because of her air of toughness, practiced, and also because of her determination. She will work on regaining the inner calm that she first lost on the day her son died and that she thought she would never ever recover on the morning she beat Wardi up. Then she will prepare for the ultimate battles. She intends to reject death; she means to celebrate life, and she can only do this away from Zaak, not with him. She prays that Kiin will prove a helpful, trustworthy friend on whom she can rely.

Midway through drying the plates, she turns round. Zaak, as if on cue, reassembles his features, adorning his fat lips with a beautiful smile.

“What is on your mind?” he asks.

“It may not make any sense to you, but I am thinking that mine is a life that needs simple satisfactions,” she says. “I want my own property back, and I want to put my life together the best way I can, on my own terms and under my own steam.”

“Does Wardi figure in any of this, somewhere?”

“I have no wish to factor him in,” she replies.

“Maybe that is the problem?”

“How is that?”

The word “problem” has in Zaak's view an erotic edge to it; it boasts of a territoriality, if you will, of things hidden, of sweets binged on, of lies spoken and not owned up to, of the death of a child not as yet satisfactorily mourned. And she? She is wholly unanchored by his use of the word in its erotic sense. Maybe “problems” arouse him.

“Might I suggest something?” he asks.

“Go ahead.”

“Think ‘danger' before you do something rash,” he says. He sounds wise, at least to himself, and he grins from cheek to cheek, euphoric. “Meanwhile, you and I will work on arriving at a modus vivendi agreeable to us both.”

She moves about as though she has been cast loose from everything that might hold her back, her eyes twinkling with a knowing smirk, lit with a torch of mischief.

“You are on your own if you decide to visit the property,” he says. “I am making it clear for the last time. I'll come nowhere near the place.”

“We'll stop half a kilometer away and won't come out of the truck. You will point me in the direction of the house so I can familiarize myself with the surrounding landmarks.”

“All set,” he says.

“Just a moment.”

And she goes to her room upstairs and returns shortly, wearing an oversized veil, khaki-colored, dark mirrored glasses, and on her head, although she doesn't need it, a scarf to further disguise her appearance.

Then they go for a drive to reconnoiter.

Cambara, reminding herself to ask Zaak to give her a set of keys, gets into the four-wheel-drive truck, clumsily hitching up the bottom end of her veil and eventually reclaiming its loose ends from the sharper corner of the vehicle's door, in which it had gotten caught. She heaves herself up into the passenger seat, first by raising herself on the heels of her palms, her entire upper body leaning forward in a tilt, and then by lifting the rest of her body up into place, voilà! She shifts about a little agitatedly before repositioning herself in an attempt to be as far away from Zaak as possible.

Zaak replaces his house keys in his pocket, breathes anxiously in and out, the words catching at his throat when he starts to say something. He looks at Cambara with an incensed expression on his face. He turns away from her, the better to wait until she has made herself comfortable before he speaks. Then she observes that he is more eager to talk to his captive audience than he is to start the engine and get moving.

He says reproachfully, “You are being rash.”

“How so?” she asks.

He holds her gaze. Then he says, “Why the rush?”

Stymied for an appropriate reply, she remains silent.

He says, “We have all the time in the world to plan so that we make things work to our advantage.”

“We do, do we?” She singles out the one word, the first person plural in “to our advantage.” She is surprised by his feigned keenness to include himself, remembering that he has been saying that he does not wish to have anything to do with her folly.

He scrutinizes her features for a clue and, discerning none, goes on, “The way you are going about it—calling on the man and his family who are occupying the property without having the slightest idea what we will do after the visit—is downright foolish.”

She is not responding or reacting to what he is saying. It is as though it has only just now dawned on her that it may make sense to have a rethink and beat a hasty, face-saving retreat. Excited, no doubt suddenly scared, her heart palpitating hard and speedily, she wonders if Zaak can hear it pulsating in disquiet from where he is sitting behind the steering wheel. Even though she is in a fluster, she manages to stay phlegmatic in her bearing, barely betraying her unease. The truth is that deep inside her, she feels like a swimmer who is barely able to keep afloat in a pool of medium size, who is thrown into an ocean. Moreover, her skin is alive with irritability when he releases the brake and his hand meets hers on the way back to his lap, where he has been keeping it ever since getting into the vehicle. She is aware of the difficulty that comes with sharing cabin space. This, after all, has its unpredictable bodily configurations, like being in the same bed with someone you have no desire to touch: unsettling.

He throws his hands around, making nervous gestures whose meaning is not obvious to her. He says, “I would rather we worked together, you and me, on several what-if scenarios before we called at the property and came face to face with the new reality of civil war Mogadiscio, with which you are hardly familiar, because you arrived only yesterday. That's all I am saying.”

Cambara can scarcely believe her ears. She thinks that he may mean well, but can she trust his motives for speaking to her this way? How is she to react to a world in which her eyes gaze in a different way on her altered circumstances, into which she has brought along her unease and her long history of diffidence when it comes to men?

He tells her, “People here are sensitive to one's nuances, the hidden and surface meanings of what one says. Every action and every spoken word must be made in an implicit recognition of these. If we do not want the guns dug up from where they have been buried, after the humiliated departure of the U.S. Marines, then we have no choice but to take these sensibilities into account.”

She thinks she understands his meaning only partially, and she reacts to that portion. She says, “It is hard to think of these people as sensitive or sensible,” she says, her teeth clenched in silent fury. “I think of them as bloodthirsty, clan-mad murderers. That's how I imagine them. Maybe I am wrong in my judgment. Of course, there have been many others—Somalis and non-Somalis—who have described the warlords differently, as clan elders, which they definitely are not. These approaches have been of no avail and have led this nation nowhere, most emphatically not to the house of peace. I cannot understand how you can speak of them as sensitive and sensible.”

“Trust me,” he says. “I am in the business of conflict resolution, and I spend a lot of my time mediating between warring groups. Easily hurt, people here carry with them egos more grandiose than any you've encountered anywhere else. The result is that everyone reacts in a self-centered way to every situation. That's what I am talking about when I say they are sensitive.”

She waits in the futile hope of further clarification. When none is forthcoming, she asks, “What are we waiting for?”

“We're waiting for the armed escort.”

“Where are they?”

“Somewhere in the back garden.”

“What are they doing?”

“Chewing a couple of morsels of
qaat
.”

“Even the two that are in their preteens?”

“Every one of them is a chewer.”

He might be talking about a heroin addict needing his daily fix. Her hand instinctively moves to sound the horn, but she does not, as she realizes that in readiness for this eventuality, Zaak is leaning forward to prevent her doing so.

“Tell me something.”

“What?”

Apprehensive, she asks, “By any chance, are you afraid of what the armed youths might do if you order them around?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Please correct me if I am wrong.”

“We're hostages to their guns, that's true.”

“They put the guns to your heads whenever they want to blackmail you into granting them more concessions than you are prepared to grant them?”

Zaak nods his head in agreement, adding, “We do their will, bribe them with
qaat
, pay them extravagant bonuses, and humor them as best as we can. With death being near, as close as their fingers are to their trigger guards, we value our life and appreciate every second of it.”

“What a sad spectacle,” she says.

When he does not react to her throwaway remark, her thoughts move on, dwelling for a few moments on her personal tragedy. She tells herself that when an old person dies, you accept it, reasoning that in all likelihood his or her time has come. That is not the case, however, if a nine-year-old full of life and laughter drowns. This is because you sense deep within you that the boy's time has not come and that calamity has come a-calling. No wonder that at first she felt suicidal and then homicidal the day she learned of Dalmar's death.

Her sorrows, because of the tragic loss with which she has lived up to now, devolve into a moment of intense injudiciousness. She asks, “Can't we go by ourselves?”

“Not without armed escort.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is not done.”

“How far are we from the family house?”

“Pretty far.”

“What about Hotel Shamac?”

“That is even farther.”

She unmoors herself from whatever is going on in the truck, whose engine is not running because he has not switched the ignition on, and from the conversation that is going nowhere and says, “What a travesty!”

After an uneasy silence, he says, “What travesty?”

“That because life is so precious, we need a couple of boys in their preteens bearing guns to protect us?” She pauses, then adds, “Do you know I could dispossess them of their weapons as easily as I could chase a chicken away from the grains at which it is pecking?”

“They are tough, these boys.”

“Have you seen them in action?”

“I won't want to see them in action.”

“I bet you'll wet your pants, come to that.”

“Our lives are less precious than a handgun or the vehicle we are driving,” he says. “If we hire armed escort, it is because we do not want to die at the hand of other armed gangs more interested in the four-wheel-drive truck than they are in who we are, what our clan affiliations are. To those whose services we hire, pay salaries to, humor, bribe, we are worth more alive than dead, but to all armed thugs, we are worth more dead than alive. Tell me what is so perverse about this line of reasoning?”

She stares at him, her chin raised, jaws clenched, eyes burning with her unengaged rage. Not an iota of empathy informs her hard look; if anything, she does not wish to admit that he has a point. In her surreptitious glance in his direction, she means to convey her fearlessness, despite her altered situation, brought up by his unmitigated cruelty, both when they separated as putative spouses and since her arrival here as his guest. From the way she is looking at him, you might think that she is giving him notice: that she will eventually do away with him, his deceits, and double-talk, as if she intends him to serve as a lesson to all the betrayers of our unearned trust. In her sober moments, when she does not give in to her giant rage or her disapproval of all forms of inactivity, she knows that there is no wisdom in rushing, and no mileage in employing shotgun approaches; these will hardly help her in her desire to stay on top of things or ultimately assure her of becoming a winner.

“Please, let's get going,” she says.

He looks expectantly in the direction of where he expects the armed youths to come from, but he just shakes his head, saying nothing.

She tells herself that she must go past the reach of his meanness to stay alive and unharmed. Even so, she cannot help questioning herself anew if her genuine diffidence might bring up the rear of more fatal fears that are yet to manifest their grip on her imagination. In other words, what will happen when, like a child in whose imagination fear has started to dwell, her sleep marks her as disturbed, with bugbears dominating everywhere she turns, and she is wakeful. She surprises herself by speaking the command for which she too has not been prepared: “Can we go? We've waited long enough.”

Zaak's response is to take a good hold of the wheel. Appearing lost, he is agitated and more like someone who does not know how to drive. He shifts in his seat, cursing under his breath, and moves backward, rubbing his bum on the seat the way urchins might wipe their hind-parts when they have no toilet paper or water to wash. His apparent discomfort puts her in mind of many a traitor soon after hearing the charges of his treason. She imagines him speaking as though she can deliver him from all blame. In fact, that is what he does, more or less.

He says, “It bears repeating that you are most welcome to stay here. It bears reiterating too that since there is no chance in hell for you to recover the family property from the warlord without a fight, it would be ill advised for us to go there before we make adequate preparations.”

She says, “I just want to acquaint myself with the area of the city in which our upmarket family property is located, that's all.”

“I've noticed that you haven't mentioned even once the other family property in Via Roma, in which we all lived and in which you and I grew up? Why?”

“Because Mother says that every building in Via Roma has been razed to the ground in the fierce fighting between StrongmanNorth and StrongmanSouth in the early years of the civil war,” she explains. “Is this borne out by what you know or have seen?”

“What do we do after we've parked a hundred or so meters away so the family living in the property cannot see us or link us to any conspiracy?” he asks.

“I have no intention of announcing my presence.”

“I say we need to plan it together, you and I.”

“Point taken,” she says, knowing that she will not involve him in any of her doings until she has worked out all the configurations of how, where, and when to act on her plan.

“I insist on this.”

“Can we get a move on, please?” she says impatiently. Then she surprises the two of them by sounding the horn, pressing it gently once, then harder, and then much louder and continuously until its sound brings the youths running and panting unhealthily. They arrive, with their guns hoisted above their heads, a couple of them as good as naked and a third stumbling, because of being trapped in his sarong, now loose and around his ankles. Ready for action, their weapons poised, with only one of them lying prone in imitation of some movie or other he has seen, moving his gun this and that way, deciding where to aim or who to shoot. Even the driver is there, his cheeks as full as a camel busy chewing, his lips traced with greenish foam, shading his eyes from the harsh sun. Zaak waves the driver off, indicating that he does not need his services. The expression on the driver's face brightens. He picks his nose liberally, and he stalks away, heavy-footed but also eager.

Cambara says to Zaak, “Why don't you want him to drive us to and back from the house and the hotel? It'll be a lot easier, quicker, and perhaps also safer for all concerned.”

“Because he is unhealthily inquisitive.”