Crossbones (5 page)

By now, Malik’s dejection has spread inside the vehicle, like a contagion for which no one has a cure. Dajaal drives on; the car moves as though on autopilot. Gumaad appears troubled as he tries to get in touch with “someone” big in the Courts hierarchy to intercede with BigBeard. Each time, the line is busy (with optimism he lets everyone know), or it rings and rings and no one picks up (which he does not bother to tell them).

Jeebleh notes the absence of youths with weapons roaming the
streets, or armed clan-based militiamen high on drugs, intent on threatening the lives of those who refuse to do their bidding. Since his 1996 visit, most of the youths have grown beards and donned those white robes, save for the odd youth in military fatigues or an ill-matched uniform assembled from various post-collapse loyalties. The general collapse is still the same, though; houses with their insides caved in, with a Lego-like look to them, the floor below or the one above entirely missing.

The great tragedy about civil wars, famines, and other disasters in the world’s poor regions, he thinks, is that the rubble seldom divulges the secret sorrows it contains. The technology, the forensics to determine what is what, scientifically, is not available; the dead are rarely identified or exhumed. Often no one knows how many have perished in the mudslide or the tsunami. One never gets to hear the last words that passed their lips, or what, in the end, caused their death: a falling beam, a failing heart, a spear of bullet-shattered glass? Or sheer exhaustion with living in such horrid circumstances day in and day out?

Jeebleh cannot tell where they are in relation to the apartment, disoriented by fresh ruins from the latest confrontation between the warlords and the Courts, three months ago. One loses one’s sense of direction in a city that has suffered civil war savageries; one is, at the best of times, in want of the guidance of those who have continued to live in it. Hoping to help Malik get the hang of the city’s layout, he asks, “Where is Cambara’s current home in relation to the apartment?”

Dajaal explains, “The Green Line marking off the territory between the two warlords is gone. But more roads have fallen into disuse and worse.”

Malik says to Gumaad, “How do ordinary people with no cars move around? How is the transport here compared to other African cities?”

“I’ve never been outside Somalia.”

“How do you move about?”

“There are ten-, fifteen-seater city hoppers-on. You flag them down and jump on, and pay your fare.”

“Are they safe to take?”

“That is how I came to the airport, on a fifteen-seater minibus,” Gumaad says. “I took it from close to where I live in Yaqshid, and then I took another from Makkal-Mukarramah Road to the airport. I had to wait long for the minibus that brought me to the airport, because the driver parked at a strategic spot and waited until there were enough passengers to make it worth his while to come. On the whole, there is peace, imposed through the Courts’ goodwill. And taking the bus is safe.”

Dajaal says, “The peace imposed needs a government to make it last, a government to provide the city and its one and a half million inhabitants with social services: schools, hospitals, and so on. I doubt the Courts have the experience, the willingness, and the wherewithal to provide us with these.”

“Given time, the Courts will,” Gumaad says.

Dajaal says, “With all the infighting, the clan-based rivalry, and the corruption among top cadres, the Courts are in no position to make peace work.”

Gumaad explains how bad blood between various parties in the country has caused so many deaths and so much havoc. Dajaal and BigBeard, for example, have been enemies going back to when their families were neighbors and the two of them were young. “It’s mutual loathing born out of personal jealousies,” he maintains, then elaborates, “Dajaal here proved to be the more successful one, in every venture, while BigBeard’s efforts usually met with disaster. Dajaal did well professionally, he was a major in the army and raised a loving family and was blessed with a boy and a girl, both of whom had their own children. BigBeard has married five times, no children; and until recently, he was not doing well financially.”

“Yet he gives himself such airs,” says Jeebleh.

“A self-assured man wears no airs,” Dajaal says.

Gumaad goes on, “It is a well-known fact that BigBeard has lately targeted Bile, accusing him of living with Cambara in sin, to some an indictable offense, punishable by public stoning.”

Cambara had alluded to a religionist who was fixated on her cohabitation with Bile when she and Jeebleh spoke on the phone the previous week; but she gave no name. Now Jeebleh realizes he’s let himself be taken in by the hype about the Courts in general circulation among Somalis in the diaspora, who want to believe that the country has begun to turn a corner. It’s been his folly to invest his trust in them. He reminds himself that the dodgiest words to pass the lips of a politician are his affirmations of faith in God.

Dajaal slows down and turns left into a parking lot that Jeebleh remembers from earlier days. Dajaal and Gumaad help carry the bags up the stairs and into the flat.

There is something charming about the mess in the apartment, as if someone, with knowing chutzpah, has scattered books everywhere, making them appear to have fallen the way the petals of a geranium fall to the ground. Books—in a plethora of tongues and genres, about a miscellany of subjects—lie by the entrance into the apartment and sit orderly in the kitchen, spines showing. Books stand every which way in a metal rack; at the foot of the dining table; and in the toilet, on a low side table. Cleaned, dusted, the books are a great welcome to a professor of Italian literature and his journalist son-in-law. There is a TV set, too; from the wires showing, it looks to get cable as well.

There are flowers in vases and new curtains, and the rooms have been aired, the beds turned down—details that point to the delicate touch of a woman. In the bedrooms, there are hand towels, soaps, flyswatters, and mosquito nets, along with notes of welcome from Cambara
and Bile, saying among other things, “We wish you were staying with us, and maybe you will—eventually. We’ll see.”

“Wow, so many books,” says Gumaad, who from the looks of him may never have read a book from cover to cover, and is amused at the excitement they have produced in the visitors, like children in a toy shop. He looks from Jeebleh to Malik, and then at the apartment, adding, “I’ve never known a place like this.”

Dajaal insists on pointing out where things are, like a hotel bellhop. Here is the soap; here are the towels. The security system includes a metal plate huge as a door: you lock it from the inside when you are in and use the burglar bars on the windows and the one on the door when out. Jeebleh shows them how to work these contraptions, explains which metal extension is meant for which hole. He tells them how best to engage the locks in haste, in the event of an unexpected danger. “Securing the place is very important. You must be prepared at all times. Mogadiscio is a dangerous place, but you can make it less so. Please keep that in mind.”

Lately, the apartment has been unoccupied. Bile has moved in with Cambara. Raasta, Bile’s niece—a friend to peace, who liked to say that “in a civil war, there is continuous fighting, because of grievances that are forever changing”—and simple Makka—“who smiled, crying, and cried, laughing”—are now grown and in Dublin. They are attending university and remedial school, respectively, under the eye of Bile and Jeebleh’s friend Seamus, who is spending more time in Ireland in order to be close to his bedridden mother. Jeebleh hopes to see them all there shortly, after he has helped Malik to settle in and hopefully helped to find the missing Taxliil.

Dajaal leads Malik and Jeebleh to the kitchen. He opens the fridge and points out the pantry, where the tinned foods are. Then he runs them through the mobile phones, which have local SIM cards, with prepaid airtime, as U.S. mobile phones are not compatible with those
available here. He dials his number on each, to register it in electronic memory so that they may call him whenever they wish to do so. Then he makes sure that Bile’s and Cambara’s coordinates are there as well. Satisfied, he gives each of them a mobile phone, ready for use.

They all end up in a room with a sea view—it was Seamus’s for much of the time he was in the country, and later it served as Bile’s. Jeebleh offers it to Malik. Out of deference to his father-in-law, Malik declines, since Jeebleh is going to be in Mogadiscio for only a few days, but Jeebleh won’t hear of it. “I want you to have the best there is in this city, my dearest Malik,” he says, and they hug and touch cheeks.

From there, they go to Bile’s former room, which will become Jeebleh’s. Malik is looking more relaxed, realizing perhaps that he has been caught in the crosscurrents of a century-old quarrel between Dajaal’s family and BigBeard’s, and has simply stepped into a counterpunch. And since no one has said anything to cause a conflagration, there are no flames to douse. There is truth in the saying that the hearts of fools are in their mouths.

Malik wants to be alone in the room with the sea view. Jeebleh knows how keen he is on ritual. He wishes to get to know his room better in order to domesticate it, a concept that will barely make sense to a Somali pastoralist. Once, on a family trip, Malik refused to unpack his clothes until he had communed with his room’s vital force and exorcised it of its past demons. Maybe communal and personal superstitions come to the fore and dominate when one is confronted with the foreignness of a place. Jeebleh understands this as the superstition of a man thrown into the deep end of a conflict, who has to consider every aspect of his surroundings. To get the others out of the room, he offers to make tea, and they leave Malik to his rituals.

As Jeebleh makes tea, Gumaad rattles on nervously over the telephone to a friend of his, and Dajaal silently plots his next move. Jeebleh hopes that when Malik reemerges, he will be in his element. One
might consider today’s incident as a rite of passage, even if Jeebleh cannot bring himself to say it. The thing is: How well does he know Malik? Does one ever have intimate knowledge of in-laws, with whom one is by nature formal?

Suddenly, Dajaal says to Gumaad, “Let’s go.”

Dajaal speaks like a man who has lit on a bright idea, on which he must act instantly. He won’t hear Jeebleh’s suggestion or Gumaad’s appeal to stay for their tea, which is almost ready.

“What’s the hurry?” Gumaad asks.

Dajaal says, “Tea later. Now we pick up the computer.”

Gumaad is insistent. “What’s the rush?”

“Have you ever heard of the proverb that asserts that where water recedes, crocodiles proliferate?” Dajaal asks.

Gumaad challenges. “What’s your point?”

But Dajaal is at the door, waiting, and then out of it as soon as Gumaad joins him.

Alone, Jeebleh drinks his tea, and thinks back to the days when the former dictator ran the country, and when censorship was at its severest; when telephone tapping was common; when one handed over his passport to the immigration officer at the airport on returning from abroad and was expected to collect it from the Ministry of the Interior a week later. There is nothing new, is there? The present situation is nothing but dictatorship by another name. He leafs through an illustrated picture book of ancient Mogadiscio, thinking that Somalis, long familiar with dictatorships of socialist vintage, are now getting accustomed to a brand of religionist authoritarianism. But the imposition of will by religious fiat is still the imposition of will.

Jeebleh also worringly remembers reading about the target assassination of several former army officers, peace activists killed at home
late at night in full view of their wives and children, intellectuals eliminated, allegedly, by Shabaab operatives, who saw them as threats to their Taliban-inspired interpretation of Islam.

Dajaal telephones Jeebleh to inform him that they have picked up the computer, no problem, and they are on their way back. Jeebleh inquires whether BigBeard or one of his minions has bothered to explain what they have done to the computer, and if by any chance they deleted files or found material of a pornographic nature and removed it. Dajaal says, “He has deleted several files that were not complimentary about the Courts and the photo of a nude girl serving as a screen saver.”