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SEAMUS'S EYES CLOSED VERY, VERY SLOWLY, LIKE THOSE OF A CHILD RESISTING sleep. Then the phone rang, and Jeebleh answered it. Shanta was at the other end. There was a life-or-death urgency to her voice. She wanted Jeebleh at her place right away, but wouldn't tell him why. Assuming the worst, he got in touch with Dajaal, who promised he would take him there at once.

NO SOONER HAD JEEBLEH PUT ON HIS SEAT BELT THAN HE APPROACHED Dajaal about joining his cause. He broached the subject with the timidity of someone who had no wish to spend another day behind bars in a detention cell.

“Supposing that I set my sights on destroying a man who's wrought havoc on my life and done irreparable damage to others close to me,” he said, “and supposing I were to ask you to help, would you give me a hand?”

Sounding as if he had given the subject some thought, and had been expecting the request to come for some time, Dajaal answered, “Of course I would.”

Jeebleh mulled this over and then said noncommittally, “You realize I haven't a clear idea of what's involved?”

“Nor have I much of an idea what you're talking about, come to think of it,” Dajaal said, “but there's time to develop these plans, plot and fine-tune them. In my previous experience as an army man, and as a long associate of Bile—I'm eternally devoted to him—I have undertaken tough jobs. My training has prepared me, and I am always willing to accept risky tasks in the line of duty.”

Jeebleh assured him that he hadn't discussed the topic with anyone else, and that it was too soon to come up with a blueprint. In any case, they wouldn't make any moves until they were clear in their heads about the fate of the girls. Till then, Jeebleh said, mum's the word!

Dajaal told Jeebleh that as an army officer he was trained to share secret information on a “no-name, no-packdrill” basis. He, Dajaal, would honor that.

“What about Bile?”

“What about him?” Dajaal asked.

They had arrived at Shanta's gate. “How will he take it?” Jeebleh said.

“He's aware of your plans?”

“I haven't spoken to him at all about my plans.”

“When I met him at the clinic this morning,” Dajaal explained, “Bile alluded to how a female bee mates with any drone she meets in the course of her honey-making business.”

“Have you any idea what he was saying to you?”

“Not really,” Dajaal replied. “But he explained it this way: that for his self-fulfillment, a torturer will be content to torture a victim wherever he may come across one.”

When Jeebleh said, “Thank you,” he did not know whether he was thanking Dajaal for the lift or for the details of what Bile had said, or simply bringing their conversation to an abrupt end because he was feeling uncomfortable.

Jeebleh got out of the car. Dajaal chose not to accompany him, but to wait outside until he was sure that his presence was no longer needed.

 

 

JEEBLEH WAS SURPRISED THAT SHANTA DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO WELCOME him or thank him for coming promptly. As soon as she saw him, she cursed: “The son of a bitch has called.”

He was tempted to say, “Where are your manners?” but decided to make an allowance for Shanta. Of course, he could guess whom she meant, and he waited for her to say more. There was rage in her voice, old rage mixed with new.

“Did he say where he was calling from?”

“He sounded so close that it could've been from the house next door,” she said. Then she turned her back on Jeebleh and, again cursing like a drill sergeant—“The son of a bitch”—walked away. He didn't follow her inside immediately.

He averted is gaze, finding no pleasure in seeing her curves through the diaphanous dress she wore, a garment adorned with fluttering birds. He thought of his wife, to whom he had spoken the day before.

Shanta made him even more uncomfortable with her abusive language. “The son of a donkey has rung, but doesn't want to speak to me. Can you believe it?”

He entered the house and shut the door. He reminded himself how he had been reared in a venerable tradition in which you pretended that nothing untoward had taken place if a respectable person misbehaved in your presence.

“Would you like a cup of tea, while we're waiting?” she asked.

He wondered whether it was wise to have tea with her or even to wait, when he didn't know why he was waiting, precisely for whom or for what, or for how long. That she continued to swear irritated him greatly, he had no idea why. He spoke slowly: “Tell me if I'm right. Faahiye, your husband, called between the time I was here last and the time you called me at the apartment, and he said he'd call again, but didn't give a definite time or reason. Did he name the person he wanted to talk to?”

“He wants to speak to you.” She nearly flew into a fresh rage. “‘I want to speak to Jeebleh.' That's how he put it. ‘I want to talk to that man and no one else, and I want you to ring him and get him, and I'll call!'”

“I hope you're not blaming me.”

“Have you been talking to him behind our backs?” She looked like a floor cloth, untidy in her moment of sheer rage. “Tell me the truth!”

“No, I haven't.”

“So why has he rung you, if you haven't?”

“I wish I knew.”

“It doesn't make sense, does it?”

“If Faahiye and I had spoken, as you say,” Jeebleh challenged her, “would he not have a better way of reaching me?”

“I suppose you are right.” She settled into the sofa, shifting in it. She rubbed her forehead with her hand, as though this might help reduce her pain. The minutes passed slowly. He thought of trying to assure her that he was not offended by her insinuation, but chose not to, certain that it would be of no use.

“He rang me soon after you left,” she said.

Jeebleh thought that maybe one of Caloosha's security operatives who was keeping tabs on him had seen him with Shanta, as they walked away from where the epileptic man had collapsed. When the word got through to Caloosha, he might have called Faahiye and asked that he speak to Jeebleh. It was safe to assume that Faahiye would do what he had been told.

“Did he say anything about Raasta?”

“No.”

Even though it wasn't in Jeebleh's nature to see the bright side of things, he felt he needed to be optimistic. The words came to him easily, but he was having difficulty in delivering them convincingly, so he repeated them to himself over and over. Faahiye wouldn't be making contact unless he had decided to bring the crisis to an agreeable end; he was free to make such a decision on his own, and not at someone else's suggestion. But Jeebleh couldn't pass his optimism on to Shanta, as he feared that she would become more aggressive.

And she would not give up. “Why, of all the people in the world, has he chosen to talk only to you, if you haven't been in touch with him on your own?”

“I have no idea,” Jeebleh said.

“There's got to be a reason,” she insisted. “I've never known him to do anything unless he's given it a lot of consideration, and studied it from every possible angle.”

Jeebleh said, “Maybe he thinks it'll be easier to talk to me, because I'm the only one who's known him for donkey's years and with whom he hasn't quarreled?”

“I am Raasta's mother.”

Jeebleh was on the verge of saying that that was beside the point, but it dawned on him that the opposite was the case: The fact that she was Raasta's mother
was
the point. He speculated aloud: “Maybe he looks on me as a neutral person, or an impartial judge, able to listen to the two sides of the argument judiciously?”

“What two sides? There
are
no two sides! I want my daughter back, and I want her now. He can go where he pleases, something he's already done. I don't care. I want my Raasta back.”

“We're assuming, without knowing it for a fact, that he's holding Raasta hostage,” he countered.

“Why do you say we're assuming that?”

“Because we are,” he said.

“Isn't he?” she asked.

“We haven't established that.”

Shanta grew more and more tense, and then, exhausted, slumped back lifelessly. He sat forward and, turning slightly, saw a slim book in Italian written by Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, a Somali of Persian origin. He recalled reading the book in New York, and thinking that it was no mean feat for a housewife to write about her life in Mogadiscio, and then her exile in Italy. He was pleased that Somalis were recording their ideas about themselves and their country, sometimes in their own language, sometimes in foreign tongues. These efforts, meager as they might seem, pointed to the gaps in the world's knowledge about Somalia. Reading the slim volume had been salutary, because unlike many books by authors with clan-sharpened axes to grind, this was not a grievance-driven pamphlet. It was charming, in that you felt that the author was the first to write a book about the civil war from a Somali perspective. He asked Shanta what she thought about the book.

“I hadn't been aware of the depth of her hurt until I read it,” she said, “just as I hadn't given much thought, I confess, to the suffering of many Somalis of Tanzanian, Mozambican, or Yemeni descent. The civil war has brought much of that deep hurt to the surface. I hope that one day we'll all get back together as one big Somali family and talk things through.”

“Who's to blame for what's happened?”

“I hate the word ‘blame,'” she said.

“Is Shirin Fazel Persian? Or is she one of us, Somali?”

“She is a deeply hurt Somali, like you and me,” she said. “When you are deeply hurt, you return to the memories you've been raised on, to make sense of what's happening.”

“Do you reinvent your life?” Jeebleh asked.

“It is as if you see yourself through new eyes. And then you reason that you're different, because you are after all from a different place, with a different ancestral memory.”

“You feel left out when you are hurt?”

“I suppose that is what Shirin Fazel feels. Left out and victimized, because she is of Persian descent.”

“Is Faahiye hurt in a similar manner?” Jeebleh asked.

“Because his family was different from ours?”

“Did he speak about it?”

“That would be uncharacteristic of him.”

“Because he belongs to the old world, in which you don't speak about what hurt you, is that why? Or is it because he believed that the clan business had nothing to do with his hurt? That it was personal?”

“He belongs to a world,” Shanta explained, “in which he expects that those hurting him will realize their mistake of their own accord and, without being told, stop hurting him any further.”

“What do people do when they're hurt?” he asked.

“Tell me.”

“Some people go public, and they show the world that they're hurt. They accuse those who've hurt them, they become abusive, vindictive. Some become suicidal. Some withdraw with their hurt into the privacy of their destroyed homes, and sulk, and whine. To someone who's hurt, nothing is sacred.”

Jeebleh felt oddly comforted by the thought that Shanta, no longer tearful, was attentive. No outbursts of emotion, nor did she behave neurotically when they talked in general terms. He must take care not to spring a question on her, lest she drop into a state of nervous tension.

“Why, why, why, why?” she asked.

He disregarded her question; he should muster the strength and the wit to make her relax until Faahiye called or Bile arrived—Bile would, he thought, show up at Shanta's sooner or later—whichever came first. Then he became aware of her fixed stare.

“He turned our private quarrel into a public spectacle,” she accused. “He left, so the world would talk about him. And do you know why he did that? He did that to exact vengeance.” She was calm, composed as she spoke, and nothing indicated that she would go weepy on him. “By going public,” she went on, “he brought his hurt out into the open, as though he expected to receive a proper redress. Did he think how I might feel, how Bile might feel? Then Raasta and Makka disappeared.”

Jeebleh realized that she was staring at him, in fact focusing on a dribble of saliva dangling from his lower lip. Embarrassed at his dribbling like a baby, as he was prone to do whenever he concentrated, he sucked it in with a gust of air. He remembered that he had lent her his handkerchief, so he dried his chin with the back of his hand. He was about to excuse himself, when she started to speak.

“A wife is not likely to display her hurt in public the way a husband does. A woman doesn't go blatantly public until after she has tried other ways of communicating with her spouse. Women keep these things under wraps for much longer than men do. It's only when a woman can no longer deal with it that she speaks of it, first to her friends, then to her spouse. Only when no solution to the problem is in sight does she speak to others. It takes a very long time before outsiders hear of the marriage problem from a wife. By the time a woman makes it public, we can assume that the marriage is doomed.”

He couldn't help thinking that this sounded like the crossroads where the Somali people stood. Like Faahiye and Shanta, they were not prepared to talk directly, but only through intermediaries—in the case of Somalia, through foreign adjudicators. Interfamilial disputes had a way of becoming protracted, at times requiring an eternity for the parties in the conflict to sit face to face and talk—alone!

They both looked toward the door, then at each other. Jeebleh wasn't sure if he had heard a car door open and then close. The optimist in him wondered whether that might be Faahiye coming home, with Raasta? He waited for the noise to make sense, but none came. He had almost given up, when the gate outside creaked. It was then that he stood, bracing himself for an unpleasant surprise. But when he opened the door, he saw Bile at the gate, waving to Dajaal as he drove off.