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“What?”

“The dog was barking and barking.”

“When would this have been?” Jeebleh asked.

“At dawn, I cannot be certain which day it was, my first intimation of danger was at more or less the same time as the muezzin's call. The barking, interspersed with the eerie quiet of the hour, struck fear into my heart. I thought of running away, and there was a great deal of sense in that. But I decided to sit it out. I waited and waited. No one came, and the dog stopped barking. I resolved to take the money, and use it for other people!”

“And you left?”

“In search of Shanta.”

“Had you any inkling where she might be?”

“No.”

“Had things calmed down by then?”

“Not much,” Bile said. “But it made sense to take the car in the carport, despite the moral question—although this irked me. Would I be stealing if I took a million dollars stashed in a duffel bag ready to go, from the house of people who had looted the coffers of the state before its final collapse? Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if I used the embezzled funds to set up a charitable refuge? We could argue about these moral issues at length. In the end, thief or no thief, I said to hell with it, took the car, and quit the house.”

“And the dog?”

“Where would I take the dog?”

“Fair enough. You drove off,” Jeebleh said, “alone.”

“In Somalia the civil war then was
language
,” Bile said, “only I didn't speak the new language. At one point, a couple of armed men flagged me down, and one of them asked,
‘Yaad tahay?'
I hadn't realized that the old way of answering the question ‘Who are you?' was no longer valid. Now the answer universally given to ‘Who are you?' referred to the identity of your clan family, your blood identity! I found the correct responses in the flourish of the tongue, found them in the fresh idiom, the new argot. I was all right. I was a good mimic, able to speak in the correct Somali accent, nodding when my questioner mentioned the right acronym. The men who flagged me down had in their gaze the shine of well-fed guard dogs. What's more, their four-wheel-drive vehicle was loaded, because they had just robbed the Central Bank.”

“So they let you proceed?”

“With a warning, after I spoke the acronym of the period,” Bile said, head down, as if embarrassed to have done so.

“What was the acronym of the period?”

“The initial letters of the clan-based militia movement that ran the Tyrant out of the city.”

“They just let you go?”

“They suggested that I take care. I gathered from this that it would be unwise to ask if they knew where I might find Caloosha. I didn't think it likely that they would lead me to Shanta.”

Bile's hands were beginning to resemble those of a baby, clutched tightly into fists. Maybe he was wishing he had done something cavalier by challenging the looters.

Bile continued, “I had barely gone a kilometer when a pack of knife-wielding urchins flagged me down. I was trying to appease them, when my prayer was answered: a man in uniform, armed but not looting, came driving by. He asked if there was a problem. The youths fled. I introduced myself to the gentleman, who told me his name: Dajaal. Taken aback, at first I assumed it was an alias, some sort of nom de guerre. When it became obvious that I could trust him, I told him that I wanted to get in touch with a sister of mine, and gave him some spiel, the gist of which was that I had no idea how to reach her. It was my good fortune that he knew my name, knew Shanta, and knew where she lived. He and I belonged to the same family—he said so right away, as if to assure me that I could trust him. That didn't matter to me as much as it mattered to him. What mattered to me was to find Shanta, and I said so. He told me to follow him, but for obvious reasons this didn't appeal to me. I wanted to get rid of the Volkswagen, I wanted to have no associations with the house I had gotten it from, or the family it had belonged to. So I got into his car and felt safe in his hands.

“Ours was the only car on the road in that part of the city, but there were pedestrians everywhere—at crossroads, ahead of us, behind us. Many were entering houses empty-handed and emerging with their loot. At one point, Dajaal nearly ran over a man carrying what appeared to be a very heavy load. I got out of the car and helped the man gather his scattered loot. I had half expected to find the roads blocked with checkpoints, and curiously, they weren't. I was relieved also that Dajaal hadn't inquired about the contents of my duffel bag!”

Bile learned from Dajaal that Shanta had married Faahiye, who was nearly twenty-five years her senior, and that she was heavily pregnant at forty-three.

“I had thought that she was past childbearing age, and reasoned aloud that if this was her first, I would have to prepare, for such a pregnancy might bring along its fair share of problems. ‘A miracle baby, then?' Dajaal said.”

As it turned out, by the time Bile was led to her, Shanta was in labor and in great pain. There were no doctors around, and no possibility of getting her to a hospital. Bile had to break the traditional medical code of conduct and help his younger sister in her hour of labor.

“Never mind the medical or traditional code, which I disregarded,” Bile said, “it gave me great joy to deliver a lovely dreadlocked miracle baby into the world!”

“And then?”

The phone rang, and Jeebleh and Bile looked at each other. “I'm afraid that installment will have to wait,” Bile said, and went to answer.

JEEBLEH DREAMT THAT HE WAS A CRAB. HE HAD GONE PAST THE LARVAL phase of transparency but gotten stuck in the stage of growing legs. His carapace was not broad enough, and his legs were deformed. He couldn't scuttle around as crabs do, he could only move slowly and laboriously. A distant cousin of the spider crab, he looked forward to waiting in thorny flowers for prey to pounce on. A pity that no victim came within the reach of his claws.

When he woke, he felt the urge to take a dip in the ocean. He missed the delicate touch of its saltiness, and remembered how much he enjoyed swimming and then going for long walks, the sandy beach stretching ahead of him and to his back, the air clean, the water as blue as the sky, and as clear. He and Bile would spend much of their slack time on a café terrace facing the ocean.

He decided to go for a swim before breakfast, and found himself walking sideways. At first, he was a little amused, but when he saw some youths staring at him in shock, he stopped walking altogether. He paused for a long while, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths, concentrating his mind on what he would do next. Eventually he moved, but only after he felt he could walk straight.

He was wearing a sarong that he had brought from New York—a present from his wife—a Yankees T-shirt, and under the sarong, a pair of swimming trunks. Around his shoulders was a towel. For shoes he had a cheap pair of Chinese-made flip-flops, the only item he had purchased in Mogadiscio since his arrival, from a vendor at the hotel. When he had inquired at the reception desk about going to the ocean for a swim, the man at the reception desk seemed amused, maybe because of Jeebleh's attire. The man told him that the beach was no more than a five minutes' walk away. He was to go east, and he would soon come to it.

The water stretched endlessly before him. He stared at its immensity, and had a moment of recollection. He was in his early teens, with Bile, and the two were escaping from Caloosha. In his memory, the ocean was a place of refuge, because Caloosha had never learned to swim, despite his having been in Mogadiscio for much of his life. When the memory faded, Jeebleh looked this way and that, and noted that the beach was deserted. He took off his sarong, T-shirt, and towel, and placed them under a stone, to make sure he would find them later.

After he had been in the shallow water only a few minutes, it occurred to him that it might not be worth risking his life for a dip in the ocean. Not that he was afraid of the surf or of sharks. He saw three men on the beach looking in his direction. He suspected that one of them was armed; he seemed to have a shiny revolverlike weapon in his grip. He guessed the man could easily have taken a potshot at him.

Who were they? He reckoned they were not from one or the other clan-based militia, for they seemed to be better disciplined than those armed thugs who killed for a bit of sport. For all he knew, they were there on instructions from Caloosha, to shadow and report on his movements. But would they harm him or protect him? It bothered him that he had no way of knowing. He doubted that Dajaal had the wherewithal to arrange such a security detail at Bile's behest. Besides, Dajaal's authority did not stretch to the north of the city, where Jeebleh was having his swim.

He swam farther and farther out and floated. He didn't want to expose himself to sharks. He wasn't sure what to do next—stay where he was, go out farther, or get out.

HE WAS AN EXCELLENT SWIMMER. HIS TECHNIQUE IMPROVED THE INSTANT HE exiled all worries of death from his mind. His breaststroke was as good as a competitive swimmer's, his butterfly superbly rhythmic, and his crawl extraordinarily fast. When the water proved rough, he resorted to breaststroke. When it was calm, he rested, floating. He lay on his back, contemplating the blue sky, thinking.

He recalled sitting in an apartment in Queens with his wife and daughters, and watching the main event on television: Marines in combat gear, and cameras flashing as photographers took pictures of the Americans alighting from their amphibious craft. In a moment, several of the Marines, appearing proud, would be interviewed by one of the most famous anchormen in America. Jeebleh's wife turned to him to ask whether the Marines knew what doing “God's work” meant in a country like Somalia.

It was from the ocean that all the major invasions of the Somali peninsula had come. The Arabs, and after them the Persians, and after the Persians the Portuguese, and after the Portuguese the French, the British, and the Italians, and later the Russians, and most recently the Americans—here, Jeebleh remembered how the U.S. intervention to feed the starving Somalis became an invasion of a kind, hence the term “intravasion,” frequently used at the time. In any case, all these foreigners, well-meaning or not, came from the ocean. The invaders might be pilgrims bearing gifts, or boys dispatched to do “God's work”; the American in charge of the U.S. “intravasion” would be described in the reputable
Encyclopaedia Britannica
of 1994 as the putative “Head of the State of Somalia.”

Jeebleh stayed in the water for an hour. He lay afloat, the sky unfailingly above him, the warm water below. These were his only points of reference. And in the farthest reaches of the sky, he saw an eagle, majestically alone and riding the heavens' sail, and around it the clouds paying homage. He sensed, even from such a distance, the determination in every feather—a bird in regal flight. What elegance!

Doing the breaststroke now, to view ahead of himself, he saw no sign of the three men. Were they gone? Did they have nothing to do with him? Was he being paranoid? Or were they hiding behind the bushes, ready to pounce? He came out of the water cautiously and walked, edging along the sea wall, faster and faster, because he was now truly afraid. Then all of a sudden he spotted one of the gunmen, who looked away, embarrassed. It was Kaahin.

The men kept their discreet distance, but still following him, until he was safely within view of the hotel gate. And when he turned, just before going in, he saw that they were no longer there.

 

 

HE SENSED SOMETHING WRONG THE MOMENT HE GOT TO THE GATE, HIS shadow as short as a set of manacles fitted around his ankles. He stamped his feet on the paved driveway to rid them of the fine sand that clung to them, and while doing so, greeted the sentries at the gate. One of them kept making signs. Not adept at sign language, Jeebleh had difficulty following the meaning. The man kept doing funny things with his tongue. What on earth was he trying to communicate? Jeebleh noticed a group of elderly men crouched in a dusty huddle, whispering to one another. These must be his clansmen. The pedestrian door, carved out of the bigger gate, was opened for him, and he walked through.

At the reception desk, he was given a thick parcel. He broke the seal and unwrapped the package, and inside found a mobile phone with a manual in Arabic—presumably it had been imported from Abu Dhabi, where most Mogadiscians got their high-tech stuff. An attached note advised him, in Italian, of the numbers that had been fed into the phone's memory. A P.S., in Bile's hand, told him not to worry about the bills.

Then the same receptionist gave him an envelope. This was thin and contained a one-page message in Somali, written on lined paper torn out of a child's exercise book. At first he thought that a child had penned it—an obviously shaky hand, some of the letters small, others large. At the bottom of the message were six thumbprint signatures and three printed names, difficult to decipher. His hand trembled as he held it, and he thought of it as a souvenir that would benefit from being framed—ideally on the walls of an adult literacy class. The message informed him that his clan elders wanted to discuss with him matters of family importance.