Knots (5 page)

“Why do you say that?”

“All the five-stars in Nairobi show they are booked for months, no vacancies,” the thin woman said. “We always thought your country was much poorer than Kenya, kind of desert. You don't have petrol, do you? Like Libya or Saudi?”

She couldn't but shockingly admit how little Africans knew about one another's countries as a result, ironically, of their biased colonial heritage. After all, what did she know about Kenya or neighboring lands? Not as much as she did about Europe or North America. As part of her effort to create a good working relationship, she explained the class nature of the Somalis flying into Nairobi and putting up in five-star hotels and those who were arriving in dhows and overcrowded boats that docked in Mombasa and, because they were poor, were being treated as stateless and therefore as refugees. She placed the two sets of Somalis in the civil war context. “We'll learn more about them as we talk to more and more of them,” Cambara promised.

Then her series of interviews started, and she worked from early until late on some days, seeing less and less of Zaak in the daytime and more and more of him and Ngai, who went with the two of them to restaurants, in the evening. Cambara introduced Zaak as her man to some of the Somalis they met, and the two of them put on an act for their own and Ngai's benefit. In private, Cambara kept him at a distance, and he didn't seem to mind that much.

Because of the topicality of the events unfolding in Somalia, Cambara had a select number of her pieces aired on prime time in Toronto, including some in which she interviewed the staff of the Canadian and British High Commissions as well as the embassies of a handful of Arab and European countries, where the Somalis were headed. The notices in the Toronto papers were favorable, one of them,
The Globe and Mail,
describing the pieces as “impressive, the job of a pro.” There was a photo of Cambara, big enough to mount on her mother's bedroom wall as a memento.

The local media got into the act too, thanks to an anonymous call and a fax received from Ottawa alerting a couple of the editors to how Cambara's work “done in Kenya” was being received back in Canada. When one of the journalists from the
Daily Nation
rang for an interview, Cambara interpreted this as being part of Arda's string-pulling; the idea was to turn Cambara's visit to Kenya and the interviews she conducted into an article worthy of the front page of Kenya's high-circulation newspaper. A features editor specializing in writing about women's affairs in the continent did a piece on her for the paper, pictures and all.

The Canadian High Commission to Kenya jumped on the bandwagon after the appearance of the piece in the
Daily Nation
, and its titular deputy of mission, who had until then been of two minds whether to see her and for how long, invited her first to tea, which he later upgraded to lunch, because several of his colleagues at the station wished to join in. The high commissioner, who arrived late, was warm in his praise of her and had dessert and coffee with her as they chatted. When the luncheon formalities were over, she went down to the ground floor, where she met a woman whose name Arda had given her, the woman who would help with the speedy processing of Zaak's papers. Back home in Toronto, the woman who did not rate inclusion on the guest list of the deputy said that she, Cambara, was the envy of the fraternity of journalists because of her scoop. Herself, she saw her success as a one-off thing, on a par with the one-off she was doing for Arda by assisting Zaak in getting to Canada. She had no intention of becoming a reporter for CBS or a bed-sharing spouse to Zaak.

Several weeks of living in close proximity with Zaak neither excited nor palled on her. Her mother rang frequently, at one point teasing her that “it is not a bad thing to be a wife, when you think of it, is it? Especially when you are not subject to the tyranny of cooking, washing dishes and clothes, ironing someone else's pants, mending someone else's socks, and having babies and caring for them all on your own, without the husband ever lifting a finger.” Three months later, when the news reached her that the papers might be issued any day now, Arda was still wondering how Cambara felt about being “a wife” to Zaak.

Cambara thought she was seeing the humorous side of things as she answered, “It feels like picking up a threadbare skirt at a flea market.”

In Nairobi, their living arrangement remained unchanged. She had no room for closeness in private—each stayed in his or her section of the shared space—but when they were in the presence of consular officers, they made frequent use of such endearments that are de rigueur for a couple just married. If she were not a born actor, she thought, these on again/off again intimacies might have been difficult. It took a lot of nerve to get used to the juices of fresh love flowing, only for them to be turned off. This was clearly playing havoc on him. Arda explained, “Because women have more control over their bodies than men have over theirs.”

Zaak's carefree lifestyle—never keeping his side of the bargain, never helping in cleaning the toilets or making the beds, cooking or shopping for food—filled her with anger, and on such occasions, she hated their life of pretense. In Toronto, she knew the stakes would be higher; it was her territory, and she had very many friends from whom she held no secrets. The question was, how would she cope?

She was delighted to prove that she could excel in anything at which she worked and was pleased that the TV documentaries had huge political and cultural relevance to all Canadians, more specifically the Somali-Canadians. The idea of having kick-started a belief, until then not prevalent among Somalis, that they could make a success of their presence in Canada was ascribed to her, but she still felt unfulfilled. She wanted to make it at best as an actor or alternatively as the producer of a puppet play, having been interested in puppetry ever since she took a summer course in the art.

As if to highlight her importance, a two-man TV crew from CBS turned up at the airport to interview Cambara. Beaming a smile the size of the cosmos, Arda, wearing a garland, carried a bouquet of flowers in one hand and in the other a placard with two V's traced in black felt pen, the words “Congratulations: Two Accomplishments” as large as the mysteries not yet revealed. That evening's prime-time news alluded to her marriage without mentioning the spouse by name, for neither mother nor daughter would divulge it to friends or relatives until “the lucky man” arrived.

As she combs her hair, which is an impenetrable tangle of kinks and a jungle of curls as dry as Somalia is arid, and as she struggles to persuade them to unknot, loosen up, Cambara remembers how on Zaak's arrival in Toronto, hush met hush. Only one person was there to fetch him from the airport, Cambara, and she was judiciously dressed, her face swaddled in a shawl. She waited in a corner, away from the placard-carrying taxi and airport limousine drivers picking up strangers, or the others meeting their friends and relatives. No journalists. Not even Arda was there. At her mother's suggestion, she condescended to give him a hug, following it with a brief kiss on the cheeks, just in case someone was spying on them, you never know.

She showed him to his room in the apartment, and just as she had said when in Nairobi, he too said, “I'll be okay.”

But she asked, “What do you mean?”

“I'll pull my weight,” he explained.

She thought of telling him “You are on your own,” and then walking out and letting him figure out what she meant, or of challenging him on the practicability of his intentions. In the event she said, “You don't have to pull anyone's weight other than your own.”

She expected him to come back with a smart quip. Instead, he surprised her. He said, “You won't have reason to complain.”

In her head, she heard his statement differently, the refusenik part of her imagining a conversation between a wife-beater and his victim, the wife-beater vowing never to lay a finger on her and then giving her a worse thrashing the following day. However, the more accommodating part of her mind cast her thought in the generous spirit of a hopeless optimist, knowing full well that he would fail her.

“Same conditions as in Nairobi apply,” she informed him. “What is different here is that I have a job to go to and a lot of friends. So be prepared.”

She escorted him to the first obligatory interview with an immigration officer: This went well. Then she showed him the way to and from the school of languages, one day taking the bus with him, the following day the subway. She also pointed out where he might buy his takeaway meals. He was euphoric for the first few weeks, doing his homework and, on coming home and finding her not there, cooking spaghetti and a sauce distantly tasting like Bolognese. She returned home later and later, way past dinnertime. At times, she would let herself in quietly after midnight, having spent much of the night with Raxma or other friends, only to sleep, then wake up before him and slink out. She took it upon herself to prepare their meals when they were together. Because she could not bear the thought of sharing his.

They put on a show for public consumption, now and then, to wit, when they were attending Somali wedding parties together, they could be seen touching, holding hands, and she would address him as “darling.” And they signed cards as wives and husbands do. When they invited friends or acquaintances, she would make a point of almost picking a genuine fight with him, which was how she felt; she presumed others would see it differently: a wife nagging her husband. She was better at playing the part and was more comfortable in the role than he was. Asked by her mother how she was coping, Cambara complained that he was cramping her free-flowing lifestyle, crowding out all her favorite male friends, who wouldn't call her anymore or invite her to the parties she used to go to. Arda knew where she could phone her if she wanted to talk to her—at Raxma's—but she never bothered to enlighten Zaak about any of this.

Cambara soldiered on. Home alone and with no friends, Arda having discouraged him from frequenting the teahouses where Somalis in Toronto gathered and exchanged political gossip, Zaak watched some of the rental videos about Swiss and American immigration officers snooping into the private lives of aliens who applied for citizenship in their countries. He must have seen
Pane e Cioccolata
, in Italian with French subtitles, and
Green Card
, in the English original, to improve his language proficiency, so many times he could recite the exchanges of the actors.

Seven, eight months passed without much of a worrying event, when he gave himself a pass mark and was not so much impressed with his input as he was with the fact that he hadn't messed with Cambara or put her off. When she deigned to come home, cook, and eat with him, she would ask him questions about how he was doing. Not only that, she would not tell him much about herself, neither her work nor where she had been or with whom. He became progressively lonelier by the day, more and more bored, depressed.

One late evening, after he received confirmation that his papers had been approved, Arda rang to congratulate him and also to tell him to pick up a prepaid ticket at the airport counter and fly to Ottawa, where he would spend a few days with her. She must have touched a sore nerve, because he spoke rather uncontrollably about his aloneness, how, although tempted, he had not been in touch or mixed with other Somalis, worried that, in their probing, he might talk and then things might come to a pretty pass because of him letting on what was truly happening to him.

For some reason, maybe because he regretted sharing these confidences with his aunt and wished he hadn't, Zaak did not go. Cambara returned home early, expecting to find him gone, and was surprised to find not only that he was there but also that he was ready to lay into her. By then, of course, he had his papers and had done his language course and knew he could try his luck with another woman and also find a job. She reckoned she knew where his winded anger was taking him to, even though it may have been a one-off burst, an aberration, a detour from his norm.

He said, shaking with rage, “This is your world, and I am made to feel privileged to live in it the way a poor relative lives in the house belonging to his well-to-do kin.”

She imagined several months on, when he might behave like a man with a mind to beat her up because he couldn't have his way with her. She saw his unwarranted behavior as being like the red traffic cones in the middle of their journey, warning her that danger lay ahead and that she must act promptly.

She was so incensed she left the apartment without packing even an overnight bag, flew to Ottawa late the same evening, and informed her mother that she wanted Zaak out. Arda agreed—now that he had all she had wanted him to have, his nationality papers—that the time had come for him to make a world where he might be comfortable to be his own man, live his own life, and marry if he had the wish.

He moved out of the apartment into another in a borough that was the farthest suburb from hers. He became an employee-consultant to a Toronto-based NGO, tasked with resolving clan-related conflicts in Somalia, used his first salary to rent a more convenient place, and then a few months later made a down payment for a two-bedroom apartment with a loan from the bank, underwritten by Arda, who also topped up his monthly mortgage payments. When he landed a decent-enough job that allowed him to settle the bills himself, Arda announced it was time that Cambara filed her divorce papers. Two weeks after they came through, Zaak surprised everyone, including his aunt, by taking a wife. Arda was hurt, because she had hoped he would let her in on his decision and consult her. Several years and three children—all of them girls—later, everyone except Cambara was in for another surprise: Zaak appeared before a court, accused of excessive cruelty to his wife and his three daughters, whom he beat almost to death.