Knots (3 page)

New, all of a sudden, she awakens to a mélange of fragrances emanating from ancient spices; she is in front of a spice stall at the open-air market where a woman who trades in them is offering to sell her a selection. Other potent scents from a jamboree of mints almost knock her sideways, they are so powerful. Not far from where she is standing as if jinxed, another woman is beckoning to her. The second woman is encouraging Cambara to buy from her spread of edible plants and roots.

“I've brought no money,” Cambara says apologetically to the woman, who is offering her fresh cinnamon sticks, cumin seeds, roots of ginger, and cloves of garlic.

The woman is very pushy, and Cambara is more irritated with herself for not bringing some cash. A dollar would make a big difference to any of these women. As Cambara walks a couple of steps away from the stall, feeling foolish, the woman follows her and says, “Take everything that is on the mat for a dollar. This is a bargain.”

How has this woman worked out that Cambara is from elsewhere—a dollar country? Amazing.

Finally the woman says, “And since you haven't brought any money today, why don't you take these and bring the money tomorrow?”

But Cambara won't hear of it; she hates the thought of being in debt to anyone, no matter how small the sum. In fact she says it in so many words and as plainly as she can, but the woman won't let her be.

“How can it be that you haven't any money?” the woman challenges. “Tell me where you are from, so I know. Are you from Amriika? Igland? Swiidan? Filland? Put your hand in that pocket of yours and bring out the dollar. Please do not waste my time.”

Cambara finds herself automatically putting her hand in the deep pocket as the woman has instructed, and her fingers meet the knife. She brings out her empty hand and rubs it against the other hand. She says, “I have no money today. Not a cent.”

“I'll take what is in that pocket in exchange for my entire spread,” the woman says.

When Cambara reiterates that she has no money in her pocket, the woman's look forthrightly questions her statement, and the two of them stare into each other's eyes. The woman says, “Take the entire spread of spices and vegetables in exchange for the single item that is in the pocket out of which you've brought your hand.”

Cambara searches in vain for Zaak, whom she cannot locate. Curiously, however, she doesn't feel abandoned or threatened. It is because she is among women. She enjoys seeing so many women trading in local produce and wearing colorful
guntiino
robes, the traditional attire, and the fact that they are dominating an entire section of the marketplace. Many are past their prime and don't seem bothered about their exposed breasts; they strike Cambara as easygoing both in the way they carry their bodies and in their attitude toward one another.

She shakes herself loose from the vegetable seller and goes deeper and deeper into the mud-choked portion of the marketplace, pressing on, with one part of her conscious mind hoping to locate Zaak and the other busy working out what she might do if she can't find him. Then she sees a child sitting on a straw mat next to an older woman, presumably her mother. Cambara is grief stricken as an image calls on her. Careworn, drowned in the suddenness of a renewed distress related to her recent loss, she relaxes a little when she identifies the gender of the child—a girl. Next to the girl and sitting in a self-contained way, the woman has a spread of tomatoes, a pile of onions, and some emaciated-looking and nearly dry potatoes.

Zaak is back. He is saying, “Touché.”

Cambara pays him no heed. She stares at the girl until she cottons on to the little one's tender adult movements. The girl's expression reminds her of Dalmar, her son, whom she misses terribly and whom she has begun to see in every child of either sex or any age. That's not all; the small girl has only one leg, her second leg having been replaced with a wooden one, crudely constructed out of grainy wood. Furthermore, as Cambara's fragmented memories gather themselves around the girl's grainy wooden leg, she sees Dalmar, who had a keen interest in constructing puppets. The little girl's sweet smile, coquettishly flung in her direction the way an older woman might dart one at a man, takes Cambara back to Dalmar's last day on this earth, as he got into the backseat of his father's car, sweetly making smile-throwing gestures toward her and waving. Such a sweet smile in a girl so young and knowing, formulated in the carefree attitude of one who has suffered hugely at such an impressionable age. The girl is holding in her arms a modestly dressed corn-husk doll, which she is gently rocking to sleep.

Cambara makes herself look into the eyes of the little girl as into the mirrored sorrow of her loss. She feels that, despite everything, the girl has about her a sense of comfort, of being a child and a mother at the same time, and of grimacing at the discomfiture of what it is to be so young and drawn. Cambara stoops over the little girl and then crouches down pretty close to her.

“What's your beautiful name, sweet little love?” Cambara asks.

She stares into the girl's big dark eyes as she might look into the unfathomable black hole with which she has become intimate since her son's death.

Even though the girl says her name several times, Cambara fails to disentangle the girl's guttural consonants from her mute vowels. Then she looks from the little girl to the woman and then at the surrounding chaos, and back finally to the little girl, who is singing to her corn-husk doll a lullaby about a mother who has been raped, a father killed, an uncle dispossessed of his property, and a sister gone and never heard from again.

“How old are you, sweet little love?”

“I don't know.”

Cambara remains in her clumsy crouch, her every bone creaking, her every joint aching, and her thighs enflamed with pain. She can tell that Zaak is close by, chain-smoking and unwrapping the bundle of
qaat
and helping himself to its shiny, leathery leaves upon which he chews meditatively, like a cow attending to its cud. His eyes redden, and his right cheek bulges gradually, chipmunklike.

She says to Zaak, “Can I borrow some money?”

“How much do you need?”

“A couple of dollars' worth in shillings.”

He says, “I have less than a dollar.”

Her stomach turns at the disturbing thought that he has bought
qaat
and paid money sufficient for several families to live on for a week. How wasteful! She can't bear the thought of receiving the money from him herself, she is so disgusted.

She says, “Please give them the money.”

And she extends both her hands to receive the plastic bag into which the woman has stuffed the produce that Zaak has paid for.

They walk back to the house, Cambara furious with herself all the while for having accepted her mother's condition that she stay with him. As they tread along, he stops every now and then to select juicy young shoots of his precious
qaat
and consumes them hungrily.

She looks away, in revulsion.

Fretful, Cambara is in the upstairs bathroom, bracing for a cold bucket shower, her first in many years. The thought of having one brings on goose pimples. As she readies for the first drop of cold water, she clenches her teeth, closes her eyes, and, standing in rigid expectation of the water descending from above her head, trembles all over. She considers giving up the idea and finding a hotel with warm running water and all the modern amenities she is used to. On second thought, however, she carps at admitting defeat so soon after arriving, conscious of the fact that more civil war–related travails lie in wait for her and that it is high time she took this small challenge head-on.

She remembers talking to Zaak earlier and cannot get rid of seeing the bemused look on his face, as he informed her, almost with a touch of glee, that the geyser in the upstairs bathroom is no longer working, but if she wanted, she could have a warm shower in his downstairs bathroom. Truth be told, she declined his invitation to use his bathroom, because she did not wish to repeat her Nairobi experience years ago when they shared an apartment and she found him wanting. She wonders if the disparaging smile his face wore earlier meant that he hadn't forgotten how much she disliked cold showers. Whatever the case, she thanked him and said that she preferred getting accustomed to the conditions prevailing here right away to postponing the inevitable, for, sooner or later, she would have to confront similar situations and worse. She puzzles over the problem of sharing a small space and living in intimate proximity for a few days. Can she suffer it and for how long? Will they rub each other the wrong way?

Even though she doubts that Zaak will knock on the door on some pretext or another or walk in, she makes sure she bolts the bathroom door from inside, just to be sure. She opens the window wide to let in the early-evening sea breeze, which in its own way weakens her resolve to have the cold shower after all. Her chest rises and falls as she fills her lungs with sea air and breathes in nostalgic memories of the city's salted humidity. The puff of the wind washing over her helps stimulate her powers of recall, and before she knows it, she is in her preteens, mischievously baring her budding breasts in Zaak's presence and daring him to touch them. Because he hadn't the nerve, she accused him of being a shirking coward. Naked and in flip-flops, her right hand resting limply on her hip, her admiring gaze falls on her waist, which is too narrow for a woman her age, especially one who has had a child. Cambara wonders how much the exposure to civil war horrors has affected Zaak's outlook on life and, if so, in what significant ways.

As if asking now the right profile and now the left one to yield up their cheeky confidences one at a time, she stands slightly to the left of the mirror and then to the right of it. She listens to a faucet dripping, a cistern running, a rusty window shakily creaking on its hinges. Then, when she least expects it, she distinctly picks out the sound of a bird calling to its mate, in mourning. She regards the face looking back at her lengthily from the depth of the looking glass with renewed apprehension. She ascribes her inability to compose herself in the way she likes to the fact that, like the bird, she too is grieving.

Her eyes bulge with so many unshed tears, and she senses a sudden, almost blinding rush of hot blood flowing to her head, but she catches herself in time before losing her balance and dropping to the wet floor in a dead faint. She stands upright and breathes in deeply, harder and longer, and more frequently until she is sure that the world won't pull away from under her feet. Now steady, and not likely to founder, she inhales some more sea air, and when she imagines that she has taken in enough, she regains her normal bearing. She first bends down slowly with deliberate willfulness, and then lifts the scoop, which she dips into the bucket filled to the brim with water. Lest she lose her grip, she clutches at the scoop as if making a grab for an item that is, of necessity, an extension of the self. She raises the scoop, preparatory to pouring the water on her head. However, before a globule of liquid has reached any part of her body, her face wears an expectant, tense look, and then ready, set, go. The first drop is insufferable, causing her body to be covered with tiny bumps; the second drop is not so unbearable. By the time she has emptied scoopfuls on her head, she feels she has acclimatized to the inclement temperature, and no part of her body raises a single goose bump. Because she is no longer breaking out in cold spots, she compliments herself for a small achievement, the first since her arrival.

After she has toweled down and gone back to the privacy of her room, which she bolts from the inside, and has chosen what to wear—a discreet dress, decent and not in any way provocative enough to make Zaak wish they had been lovers—she revisits a scene that is permanently etched on the screen of her memory. In it, she and her mother are on an afternoon walk in a park in the suburb of Ottawa where her parents had relocated a couple of decades before Somalia had collapsed into stateless anarchy and where her father, a diabetic, had had two legs amputated in a matter of six months and had been bedridden for nearly two years. At the time, Cambara was not doing as well as she might have hoped in her dream profession, acting. She was worth no more than cameo parts, nothing big, and even then didn't have her name in lights. She had not landed any role that might turn her overnight into a household name anywhere. No one showed the TV commercials in which she had had parts, even though they had been commissioned, and none of her other short skits were ever aired in prime time. In fact, earlier that month, Cambara had failed to get an audition for a role about a young, ambitious Somali woman who is at loggerheads with her in-laws over the infibulation of her seven-year-old daughter, a story that her agent made her believe had been written with her in mind. No wonder she was in a downbeat mood.

“A pity that my biggest fan is in no position to hire me for an acting role,” Cambara would remark tongue in cheek to her mother and friends. Arda was so enthusiastic about her daughter's potential that she would delight in speaking gloatingly and praising her to high heaven; she would describe her, preeminently, as an actor who would one day surprise the world, given the chance. When relatives or family friends pointed out that Cambara was getting on in years and hadn't as yet made a breakthrough, married, and provided her with a grandchild, Arda, in her riposte, would speak of the primacy of her profession, which she would place above marriage or childbearing. She would add that Cambara would turn her mind to matrimonial matters only after she had secured an acting contract worth the wait. In the meantime, Cambara worked as a makeup artist for an outfit called The Studio and was very popular among theater folk and among Somalis, who sought her out so she would prepare the bride on the eve of her wedding.

In fairness, Cambara was more realistic than her mother made her out to be. At times, it embarrassed her to hear her mother's over-the-top bragging, her mother who awoke nearly daily animated with the energy derived from the belief that Cambara would one day make it big, and that she would bring a smile to everyone's lips and pride to her own eyes and heart. Arda dreamed of precipitating a profitable scheme that would lead to her daughter's ultimate success. Ever since her parents' relocation to Canada several years preceding the fighting in Mogadiscio, which wrenched power from the dictator's iron grip, Cambara assumed a central role in their lives. She rang them often and called on them whenever she could. When her father took ill, it fell to Cambara to drive to his house and spend her weekends or holidays. And when the old man became bedridden and there was need for round-the-clock care and her mother relied on an elderly Filipino woman for this purpose, Cambara helped out the best she could. Her father's death brought them much closer. How the two women enjoyed their long conversations, complimenting each other, the one a fan, the other, in her self-restraint, refusing to lap it all up like a famished kitten consuming the milk in a saucer. However, seldom did either allow her talk to veer toward the very personal: marriage or babies. Discreet, Arda would reiterate that, in matters of the heart, she had faith that Cambara eventually would make the right choice.

One day, half a year after her father's death, Arda invited her on the pretext that she might have discovered an elixir for her professional problems. Cambara went to Ottawa to humor her mother, assuming that her mother's summons had something to do, most likely, with the strife raging in Mogadiscio and the rest of the land, no more than that. If anything, she supposed that a relative was in some trouble and needing a leg up, or maybe the Canadian government was setting up a commission to help its policy makers come to grips with the Somali crisis, and it was possible that through someone's intercession, Cambara was being asked to join the assembled pundits. Whatever it was, and even though she would not elaborate on it at all, her mother had sounded chuffed. She doubted if the visit would have any bearing on her professional ambitions or would result in her mother's discovery of a panacea, but since, in her experience, Arda's records of intervention were invariably marked by success, Cambara said to herself, “What do I lose?” and drove to Ottawa to hear her mother out.

They got down to the business of talking after a hot bath and a delicious meal prepared and served with loving maternal care. All was good at the initial ground-clearing phase, in which Arda spent a long time on the preliminaries and Cambara listened with due patience and filial deference as her mother untangled the wool gathered from the mesh of her speculative fibers. However, when Cambara finally got the drift of her mother's plan and paid more attention to the nuances being employed, Cambara found out that she could not fight the feeling of nausea gradually coming upon her in waves and eventually overwhelming her with a sense of despondent torpor. The short of it was that Arda was proposing a course of action that would prejudicially undermine Cambara's sense of privacy and encroach upon it drastically.

Cambara was disturbed. Not only was the plan, as her mother conceived it, unworkable, from her own point of view, it broke with a long-held understanding between them, reached during the young woman's teens, that at no time and under any circumstances would either of her parents ever make a decision that might affect her without first talking it over and clearing it with her. In her zealous attempt to remain her own person, Cambara stood guard over her own privacy, allowing no one to intrude upon it and permitting nobody, family or nonfamily, to step past its threshold unless she approved of it. What upset her no end was that she and her mother spoke and met often, especially after her father's death, and she was appalled that the old woman could entertain such a preposterous idea without taking Cambara's feelings into account, in this way entering sensitive territories beyond which she knew she was not to venture ever. Whatever had made Arda barge in without her time-honored thoughtfulness! Yet this was precisely what Arda had done. Cambara could see no sense in her mother's behavior, which was so unlike her. To put it another way, what her mother was now proposing did not tally at all with what she had alluded to when she invited her a couple of days ago to come and talk about the panacea to her daughter's professional success.

The languor that at the moment rippled through her whole body made her want to sit on the first available bench in the park where they were walking. From the expression on her face, you might have thought that someone had held a bottle full of ether to her nose—she was so breathless, and she was becoming drenched with cold sweat. It rankled Cambara that she, who always took exceptional pride in declaiming that she could read her mother's mind as easily as a fortune-teller reads a desperate client's particular needs, was being proven wrong. It was obvious one of them did not make the grade this time, and both would have to revise their views, which she was finding equally disturbing. And when, a little later, Arda seated herself at a small distance from her, Cambara's chest produced something between a chuckle and a snivel.

Emboldened, Arda took this as a sign she could resume speaking. She said, “The long and short of it is that I would like my nephew Zaak to join us here in Canada, legally.”

Cambara was sufficiently vigilant to spot the catch, instantly feeling the sting in the tail of the key word “legally.”

As irony would have it, planeloads of Somalis were arriving illegally at major ports or airports everywhere in the world, including Toronto, nearly all of them declaring themselves as stateless, and no one was turning any one of them back, not from Canada, anyhow. But Arda did not want her nephew to board an aircraft from Nairobi, where he ended up after fleeing the fighting in Mogadiscio, like tens of thousands of other Somalis, as a refugee. Being Arda, she intended to spread a carpet of welcome for him all the way from Nairobi, which he would leave, if at all, on a flight bound for Toronto, not as a refugee but legally as a spouse. She felt protective toward him, solicitously making sure that he was not vulnerable to harassment at the hands of the Kenyan immigration authorities, who were given to extracting exorbitant corruption money from Somalis relocating to Europe or North America. She did not want him to be apprehended at a midway location between Africa and Canada and returned to Nairobi. Making an already terrible situation worse, Arda, plodding, repeated everything from the beginning for the third or fourth time, as though she, Cambara, were a bit thick: that she would fly out to Kenya on a work-related visit to that country, link up with Zaak, who was waiting for a sponsorship to a third country, and bring him along as her spouse.

Without honoring any of what she thought of as her mother's harebrained plans with a reaction, Cambara stared at Arda, as if trying to puzzle out what her mother meant when she spoke of her making “a work-related visit” to Nairobi. What “work” did she have in mind? But she wished to deal with what bothered her most first.