Knots (4 page)

Cambara said, “Why would I want to become the wife of a man I haven't thought about in that way or seen for a number of years?”

“That way, you'll do me a huge favor.”

As she sought succor from the long silence, in which she considered the implication of her mother's statement, Cambara discerned a trace of her mother's fragrance in the form of
uunsi
scent, which Somali women traditionally wear to welcome back their husbands after a long absence.

She said, “Mother, you're too much to take.”

“You'll be a wife only on paper.”

“What would that make me in other people's eyes?”

“You can act as a wife, can't you?” Arda says.

“I don't want to act like a wife to Zaak.”

“In the amateur theater you've been in,” Arda said, “I've seen you act as a lowlife, seen you play the role of a wife to a man who is not your husband. Why can't you pretend to be a wife to Zaak? Pretend. Isn't acting your dream profession?”

If you had seen Cambara in her current state, you might have thought that she was strong on the outside and weak on the inside. Could it be that her mother was at last breaking her spirit? Was she about to relinquish all resistance? Admittedly, she had squandered her opportunity to set her mother right; maybe it was much too late to fend her mother off.

“Think of it as a favor to me, as I said.”

“I wish you wouldn't ask that of me.”

“There is no else I can ask.”

“It is unfair.”

“Let's think of it as your dare.”

“It's unlike you to do this to me.”

“A dare to an actor. A wife only on paper. Think.”

Since they meant the world to each other, and since the word “no” seldom passed the lips of the one of whom the other requested a favor, Arda relied on the art of persuasion, softening the inner core of her daughter's defiance not with authoritarianism but with pleading. Do me a favor, please, my daughter! Now a species of unequaled sorrow was beginning to take residence in Cambara and was becoming a tenant with full rights. She felt as inanimate as a puppet with broken limbs and no wires to get it moving. Even so, she doubted if acting as a wife to Zaak—pretending and only on paper, as her mother put it—would lend a greater dare to her acting ability or sharpen it. Knowing herself, she might take it on as a challenge, if only to try and turn it into a triumph to revel in. She wished the idea had come from her, then she could have determined the parameters of the relationship and walked out of it when her heart was no longer in it. If the original idea had been hers, then she might have experienced the real thrill from the perspective of her creativity. As things now stood, she would have to think of what Arda might say before instinctually terminating it. Zaak was not worth the candle that her mother was burning.

“I repeat: You won't have to marry him.”

Cambara put on a worn smile, exhausted from trying to weather the storm that was her mother. Her head between her hands, she said, “Take me through it all. Tell me what you have in mind, this panacea.”

The way Arda explained it, it was all easy. She was to travel to Nairobi on a commission from CBS to interview the Somalis as they arrived and work with a local crew to film them. While there, she was to look up a counselor at the Canadian High Commission who would facilitate the processing of Zaak's application so he could join them in Toronto after half a year.

Cambara said, “Everything is arranged?”

“Everything.”

Cambara said, “Still, I can't understand why I can't get him a visa with the help of this person whom I am to see? Why can't you sponsor him and have a temporary visa issued to him? Why his spouse?”

Arda said, “The drag, darling, is that most visas issued locally would have period limitation. Three months, half a year, and two years at most. There is the added hassle that you cannot renew visas issued outside Canada. The applicant will have to go out of the country and reapply to enter.”

“Curse the day you became his aunt.”

“My sweet,” Arda said, holding her daughter's hand, “I have it from good authority that Somalis wanting to come to Canada will find it very difficult to obtain visas, temporary or long term, in Nairobi. I have close friends in the relevant departments, some of them neighbors right here in Ottawa.”

“And marrying is the best option?”

“Two of my neighbors are on the case, as we speak, one of them having obtained the commission from CBS, the other liaising with the deputy high commissioner of Canada to Kenya, who happens to have gone to the same prep in Montreal, to make certain that your and Zaak's papers go expeditiously to the relevant desk.”

“You've thought it all through, haven't you? Why doesn't he show up at the airport? He'll be granted refugee status the instant he puts his foot on Canadian soil, being Somali. Why can't he come the way the others are coming? He is not counterfeit currency or contraband.”

After a pause, Arda says, “A favor to me. Your mother.”

“Anyhow, where is the accursed fellow?”

“As we speak, Zaak has an apartment in the center of Nairobi, paid for on my credit card, via a Nairobi-based real estate agent. As his wife, you will be staying with him there.”

The Ottawa sky, darkening, made Cambara pause and stare at it as if daring it to rain. She knew that once her mother had made up her mind and had worked out the details of a plan, the likelihood of her backing down or finding fault with it would be minimal.

“You know what, Mummy?”

“What?”

“You wouldn't do this if Dad were alive.”

“Let's not go there.”

“Would you?”

“I would find a way,” Arda said.

“I am not so sure,” Cambara said.

In the silence that came after, Arda busied herself, attentively removing dirt from under her nails. This put Cambara in mind of a mother monkey picking lice off her baby's head, then biting and chewing them.

Cambara asked, “Have you thought ahead, Mummy, on what Zaak and I must do about sleeping arrangements, first in Nairobi and then here, assuming that he is allowed to join me?”

“I have, indeed,” Arda responded.

“Yes. Go on. Tell me more.”

Arda said, “The imagination of most Somalis is prone to rioting as soon as they reflect on a situation in which a man and a woman share an intimate space alone, with no chaperone. They will assume that they are having it off.”

“And you don't think we will?”

“I know you are your own woman.”

“What does that mean?”

“I trust your judgment.”

Talk of the imagination of Somalis going amok about sexual matters, as do all prudish societies. More to the point, could she, Cambara, share an intimate space with a man who might come on to her at the sight of her showered, with her favorite night cream on, walking into the bedroom and lying on her side of the bed, wanting to read? Could she sleep in such physical proximity to him? Will he respect her wishes, or will he pester her until she loses her temper and reminds him of his responsibility to himself: “All for your own good!” Tempted, will she make the first move? What of his bad breath? How would she bear it?

Just before dusk, mother and daughter returned from their long walk and talk, the one content, the other worn out, hot and bothered, and looking half alert to the goings-on, restless like a child having a bad sleep.

Between showers and a dinner together, Arda held out an envelope, which, when opened, Cambara discovered to contain an open return air ticket to Nairobi, a lot of cash in thousands of U.S. dollars, in small and large denominations, a yearlong and renewable insurance policy for two, with one of the parties described simply as “partner.”

“Do you have dates by which I must leave?”

Arda replied, “We'll wait for the letter from the commissioning editor at CBS, who has assured my neighbor that she has put it in the post. Meantime I've booked your onward flight, window seat all the way. I'll let you decide on your return date.”

“How sweet of you!”

“You'll be a better judge, since you'll be there.”

“What else?”

“Damn. I clean forgot.”

“What?”

Arda retrieved an envelope from the top of the sideboard, which, sitting down, she passed on to Cambara. “The yellow fever and cholera certificate.”

“But I haven't had the jabs.”

“It's all taken care of.”

“How did you swing it?”

“I know how you hate taking your shots.”

“Did you bribe somebody?”

“There are ways to get around such problems.”

“You've left nothing to chance, have you?”

Cambara left for Nairobi as arranged. She hired a taxi from the airport and went directly to the place she was to share with Zaak. It irked her to be there exhausted from the long trip, having barely slept a wink because of a neighbor who talked endlessly. When she got to Zaak's door, he was so deep in sleep that it took her and two security men from the apartment complex almost half an hour to rouse him from it. She interpreted irritably the fact that he was unprepared for her arrival. Her irascibility did not augur well, and she knew it.

Within an hour, soon after a shower, she joined him in the kitchenette and right away noticed the telltale disfigurements in body and soul, which she would see more of when she met other Somalis who had just come from Mogadiscio: trauma born of desolation. She could not put her finger on why she felt uncomfortable in his company, maybe because she sensed that he was transmitting to her a flow of detrimental vibes, possibly without being aware of them. She held back and wouldn't get any closer to him, afraid that he might have transported some kind of contagion from the fighting that he had fled. To have the place to herself, she sent him out on an errand to the local general store with cash to buy basic groceries, including coffee, tea, and fresh milk. Then she had a couple of hours' sleep. She awoke to Somali being spoken and was able to work out in no time that it was the BBC Somali Service early-evening bulletin.

They dined out their first evening together at an Indian restaurant two doors away from the apartment complex, prepared to pay for it. Whatever attempts either made to get to know the other or at least to converse bore no positive results: They behaved as if they were a married couple who were under the torment of a recent estrangement and who had no idea how to overcome their mutual antagonism. At some point, she decided that sitting and facing each other in a restaurant when neither was saying much and she was too exhausted was not worth a plugged nickel. She asked for the bill, which she settled, and they left. When they got to the apartment, she retired to her room forthwith, wishing him good night.

From the following morning on, she relegated every other worry to a back burner, determined to throw herself into her work. She got up early and fresh, poised to activate contact with the coordinator of the Kenyan crew, a young woman who doubled as a cameraperson/driver, who told her to wait for her and her Somali-speaking colleague, who had arranged for the interview appointments, at the main gate.

Half an hour later, Cambara, dressed in a discreet manner, eager to get started, and holding her notes in folders in an old leather bag in preference to a showy executive case, was at the main entrance. She introduced herself to the two women in the beat-up Toyota. Compared to the one at the wheel—younger, and guessing from her name, Ngai, Kikuyu-speaking—who looked livelier, the Somali-speaking woman sitting in the back of the vehicle was massive and broad as a cupboard. It was she who said something first, speaking to Cambara in halting Somali that sounded as if she had learned the language in an after-work adult education class, unable to get her tongue flexibly around all the gutturals in Somali. Next to her—in fact, within reach of her stretched hand—were the tools of the cameraperson's trade, including a camcorder and other instruments. It was difficult for Cambara to know where she was from. The huge woman was carrying nothing save a kitschy handbag, pink like her dress and her shoes, the latter also in imitation leather. As soon as she saw her spread in the back of the vehicle, Cambara knew she wouldn't rely on her for much assistance.

Ngai was a bouncy, slim, very friendly and talkative woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, pigeon-breasted, head recently shaved, and with eyes as huge as stray UFOs spotted over a mountain at dawn. She was easygoing and full of life, and she and Cambara hit it off immediately, each returning the compliment to the other. But she was a hairy driver and went into the blind bends rather perilously, often speeding when it was unsafe to do so and jabbering away mostly about the Somalis who, according to her, were everywhere, especially in the center of the city, and seemingly moneyed. It was obvious that Cambara took an instant liking to her.

“I kept telling my countrywoman sitting in the back that I am beginning to think that maybe Somalia is richer than our country, Kenya,” Ngai said, when they were on the road for a few minutes.