Knots (6 page)

Unwelcome among close family and his friends, Zaak relocated to Mogadiscio to be the local representative of the NGO with which he worked. He was made the coordinator of its peace-driven line and, from all accounts, redeemed himself, at least in the first few years.

Showered and dressed and ready to go down, if need be, to prepare a meal for the two of them, since she won't imagine eating his food, she tells herself that Zaak is a hopeless man in a ruined city. In Nairobi, while on the CBS job, she did not benefit professionally from his input on the documentary on the fleeing Somalis, about which he too had a lot to say. It was he who profited from her visit, becoming a husband to her and moving to Canada. Sadly, he reduced himself to a wreck and destroyed whatever opportunities might have come his way. He was a wife-beater, an abuser of children, and an ingrate fool. She supposes that this being the fourth time when chance brought them together—first as children, then in Nairobi, after that in Toronto, and now in Mogadiscio—she will endeavor not to make the same error, however one might define this.

Will she capitalize on her presence here in Mogadiscio and make something of herself, or will she waste the opportunity and return to Toronto empty-handed? If she hasn't let Arda know much about the plan taking shape in her mind, it is because she wants to be her own woman, not a marionette her mother might control from as remote a city as Ottawa. Only one other person is aware of the bare bones of her plan: her closest friend, Raxma.

Cambara hears a knock at the door. The tapping insinuates itself into the gap between the sounds made by the proverbial owl hooting and warning her to take care, and Cambara's recall of what took place between her and Wardi, her current husband.

“You are coming down?” Zaak asks.

She interprets this as “Are you going to cook?”

“Half an hour, and I'll be down,” she says.

Cambara enters the living room, half of which is bathed in amber light, the other curtained away and covered in the somber darkness of a black cloth, similar in color and texture to that of a common everyday chador.

As she walks in, her hand instinctively inches toward and eventually touches her head, which is swathed in a head scarf. She is self-conscious that she did not ease the tangles in her matted hair, considering that she did not succeed in running a comb through its massy thickness before coming down. A smile crosses her face, but whether for her remembrance of Arda scolding her, as a girl growing up, whenever she slept without first neatening her hair and then grooming it or for seeming to have wrapped her head as if she were going into a place of worship, Cambara can't decide. Either way, she steps into the softening hour shaping into the shadowy twilight of a world with which she is not familiar.

After a while, she picks up Zaak's general whereabouts by scenting him in the manner in which a shark might become aware of blood in the vicinity. With pinpoint precision, she identifies his presence by his body odor before she actually sees him. He is the bare-chested, sarong-wearing, heavily perspiring figure with the distended belly sitting on a rug, legs extended in front of him and jaws active. His eyes, which he narrows to the size of the eyelet in a shoelace, are bleary. He leans languidly backward, with his right elbow resting on a cushion and his head, laid back, on yet another, the latter one propped up against the wall.

He is masticating, the pouches of his cheeks filled to bursting. His features retain the inebriated look of a commonplace and homeless alcoholic, chomping his swollen tongue, which now and then he mistakes for food. Her gaze falls on the uneaten, unopened bundles of
qaat,
now delicately wrapped up in wet dish towels to keep the leaves fresh. All around him are Coke bottles, two of them empty and on their sides, a third close to him. This one is open, and he takes sips now and again, and there are two flasks. She presumes one of them is filled with sweet black tea, the other tea with milk. There are also several bottles of imported mineral water.

He tries to get up, as though out of courtesy to her. His attempt to rise to the occasion, however, comes to naught, and he falls awkwardly backward, tipping over like a mechanical device that a child has wound up and that has run its prescribed time, in the process exposing his bare bum and balls before restoring what little there is to his sense of decorum. He lies on his side in obvious discomfort, with the part of his distended paunch that is now visible to her spilling over and spreading in a downward direction. The image of Zaak, relaxed and yet tensely waiting, brings to Cambara's mind the tortured posture of a hospital patient bent over and almost on all fours into whose rectum a nurse is introducing a suppository.

His demeanor discomfited, he pushes the morsel of
qaat
that he has so far chewed out of the way with his tongue, which, for a fleeing second, is visible in all its glory, fumbling, fondling, agitated, and slobbering too. She imagines a baboon fingering the mess of a just-peeled rotten banana and lavishly gorging on everything in sight. It is no wonder that despite the distance she has kept, Cambara, in a state beyond bearing, momentarily suffers a dislocation on account of the odors invading her senses. She has the bizarre feeling that she is at the entrance to a stable reeking of wet cattle dung mixed with horse manure. What is she doing here?

He says, “Will you join me?”

“And do what?” she asks.

She waits for him to say something before she goes off on a tangent in pursuit of her memory, which is now afloat and which leads her back into the murkiness of their time together. She journeys past that to a period after they divorced and he married a semiliterate woman, fresh from Mogadiscio with no family to speak of and no one to advise her. Zaak fed terrible stories into the rumor mills of Somali Toronto, turning Cambara into a figure of fun. Asked why his and Cambara's marriage did not prosper, he would speak of how he had surprised her late one evening when she was frolicking in the nude with one or the other of her female friends; if browbeaten with persistent demands to tell it all, he would mention Raxma by name. When his fellow
qaat
-chewers would inquire what she was like in bed, Zaak would reply that the two of them did not get it off often, “once every six months, if that.” Someone in the select audience, every member of which was from his immediate clan family, was bound to want to know more, and Zaak would oblige. To the questions of whether it was his fault and he had failed her, or whether she was just not interested in sex, period, or was frigid, he would deliver his reply with a cheeky finality: “Because she is a woman's woman, not a man's woman.” Not that it bothered her what any of his mates thought of her, one way or another. But to think that she and Arda, through the latter's intercession with her, had done him such a good turn, which made it possible for him to obtain landed immigrant status in Canada on arrival, frankly she expected him to behave differently, at least amicably toward the two of them. Because in his attempt to paint a sullied picture of Cambara, Zaak was alleged to have insinuated that Arda had been the lover of the Canadian diplomat who, while stationed in Nairobi, staffed the Somali desk at the High Commission, the same diplomat, now stationed in Ottawa, who speeded up his own paperwork. He based his innuendo on something that Cambara may have said and that he either misheard or clearly misinterpreted: She had described Arda's relationship with the said diplomat as being “close.” Of course, she never let on, nor did she ever breathe a word about this to her mother. What would be the point? Maybe it is in the nature of those who are denied sex or do not have enough of it to be so preoccupied with the subject that they view everything else through its distorted lens.

“What do you say?” he is asking loudly, chewing.

“About what?”

Her voice sounds like that of someone awoken from a deep sleep. Suddenly she comes to know where she is and with whom—the rank miasma emanating from Zaak's corner. I cannot endure it, I will die from this before long, she tells herself. This is torture.

“You see, my fellow chewers, all of them men, have declined to come, knowing that I have a female guest,” he says. “You may know it, but I can tell you it is a darn curse to chew alone.”

“No, thanks.”

“I have a lot of
qaat
. Please.”

The thought of joining him leaves her cold, worse than having the earlier shower a second time. All of a sudden, she is furiously scratching her head, her pulse throbbing speedily, and her ears filling with the sound of her deafening heartbeat. She looks at her arm, at which she has a dig, almost making it bleed, and then at him. From there, she looks at the bundle of
qaat
with the string undone and lying spread out, waiting for Zaak to consume it. Time was when only the Somalis from the former British Somaliland protectorate and those in the Somali-speaking Ogaden of Ethiopia chewed it, not those in the southern portions of the peninsula. When Cambara lived here, neither her parents nor any of her friends or acquaintances, in fact nobody she knew ever touched the stuff. Lately, however, the habit has become widespread, to the extent where even at clan council meetings, to which pastoralists are invited, the organizers pass it around, to make certain that no one will question the addled thinking of the attendees, not least that of the warlord and his deputies. Looking at Zaak now, she remarks a worrying dullness in his eyes, reminiscent of the stoned expression her English-language instructor, who was from Hargeisa, used to wear to the primary school here in Mogadiscio after an all-night chewing.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I'm fine.”

“You don't look it,” she says cockily.

“What makes you say that?”

“The unhealthy way you're sweating,” she comments.

“You don't like sauna, à la tropics?” he says.

“This is no steam bath, and you know it,” she says.

“I like my sauna this way,” he says.

“How misguided can you be?” she says.

He is silent—a man alone with his fever.

She takes a measure of the low depth to which Zaak has descended since their last encounter several years ago in Toronto, when he spent a couple of nights in a police cell for beating his wife and maltreating his children. She raised and paid his bail at Arda's behest. When you combine his chain-smoking, his frequent chewing of
qaat
, and his living in unaired rooms stinking as awfully as the armpit of piglets, then you have a recipe for unmitigated dissonance between what is expected from someone you think you've known all your life and the unbecoming behavior they come up with when their situation has changed.

Maybe it all came down to the sad fact that Zaak did not deserve all the help he received from Arda and Cambara, as he could not appreciate their contribution from the time he joined them as a preteen. She was certain that he had been in a state fit to be airlifted from Nairobi and to enter into the contract of the anomalous matrimony soon after he and she ended theirs in an unbecoming acrimony. From the comments attributed to him, you would think that she and Arda had done him a disservice and that they ought to apologize to him, not the other way around. The memory of what he had done cut far deeper than she had imagined, and she hoped that he would be desperate for a sense of self-recovery in the same way she was trying to channel her grief into a positive outlook, which is what prompted her to come to Mogadiscio in the first place.

Now she holds his gaze steadily in hers until his eyes grow rheumy and he turns away. She does not feel sorry for him, nor does she empathize with him, because she disapproves of his current behavior as well as his unwarranted treatment of his wife and children. A bully goes for the jugulars of the weak, and his wife Xadiitha filled the bill: a young divorcée, barely literate and until then with no papers and no supporting family, who, in less than five years, gave him three girls. Cambara later heard unconfirmed reports that Arda had had a discreet hand in setting him up with Xadiitha. Rumor had it that Arda placed the first phone call to the family, from her and Zaak's subclan, with whom Xadiitha was staying—they treated her more like a servant than a valued member of their household—and then managed to remain in the background right until the day of the wedding, to which she contributed financially. That her mother had done this did not bother Cambara any more than it upset her when she first learned that Zaak had shown his true colors: that he was a violent man. If a cloak of indifference were drawn over Zaak's despicable mistreatment of Xadiitha; if it did not trouble Cambara enough either to confront him or to speak about it to Arda; if Arda made judicious interventions by having Xadiitha and the children visit for several weeks, it was because of selfish reasons, both on her part and her mother's. (Cambara put it to Raxma: “I derive a sense of egotistic relief, knowing that he is no longer a nuisance to me but to Xadiitha.”) She didn't need to elaborate that not only was Xadiitha dispensable but also she did not warrant Cambara and Arda's worry. Nor was the poor woman worth a moment's stress. If anything, Xadiitha was expedient, in that she helped them to rid themselves of Zaak, and there was no better way to achieve their purpose. Admittedly, it surprised her that her mother had never credited him with being a wife-beater and a sadist to his offspring. The shame of it: Officials from the social welfare department intervened to move his children out of harm's way and provide them with protection. Looking back on it from that perspective, she did count herself lucky. Why, it might have been her lot too if the two of them had become man and woman.

She asks, “Did you say something about dinner?”

He looks at her in a wicked way, winking, and says, “My ambrosia is here, and therefore I'm not in the mood to eat anything else.”

“Maybe because
qaat
has dulled your taste buds?”

She thinks how little we know people when they change and their circumstances alter, especially when the two changes occur concomitantly. Like it or not, she has no choice but to adapt to her new situation. It is no easy matter to be in a city with which she is no longer familiar, what with the civil war still unfolding after more than a decade and her long absence from the metropolis. She cannot be sure that Zaak will take up the cudgel in safeguarding support of her if the city's adolescent boys loyal to the warlord occupying the family property turn lethal. He is less likely to offer no help if the warlord refuses to vacate it. Maybe it is the norm for the likes of Zaak to behave abnormally in atypical circumstances.

She says, “You were never friends with food, unless someone else tamed it. I remember you either making do with the same diet every single day or running to the nearest restaurant at the sight of unpeeled onions. I felt you fled from uncooked meat the way some of us might flee a lion.”

“I've survived, as you can well see.”

“In what condition?”

“I am not complaining.”

When she can no longer focus her mind on these thoughts, she asks, “Where is the dinner that I must eat alone?”

“It is by the fridge,” he says.

“Not in the fridge?”

“The electricity grid has been off since before midnight yesterday,” he explains, “and the fridge is off. No point in keeping it switched on and no point in putting the food in it either.”