Links (34 page)

He had seldom written to his mother, and was cautious when he did. Not only did he think there was no good to be gained from raising her expectations, but he did not want to cause her unnecessary distress. She never sounded keen on the idea of having his wife and two daughters visit. “What will I say to them?” she asked once. “I don't speak a foreign language, and you haven't taught them Somali.” And when he spoke to her again, asking her to think further about it, she said, “It'll only worry me to no end if they come. Besides, I won't be able to sleep a wink, night or day, expecting a knock on my door, and waiting for someone from the National Security to harass us.” She was a woman with an agenda, the preservation of her son and Bile, whom she loved as though he were hers too.

Jeebleh asked the housekeeper to tell him what his mother thought about his unannounced departure from Somalia.

“I don't like to hurt your feelings,” she replied.

“How do you mean?”

“Your mother died believing you were a traitor.”

He knew the woman wasn't telling the truth, and was sure she had been told to say this. He shifted his gaze away, refusing to look in her direction for a while. When he had her in his sights again, he asked, “How often did Caloosha visit her?”

It was her turn this time to appear drained of blood, her face becoming pallid. “I don't wish to get involved,” she said.

“What do you mean, you don't wish to get involved?” He pretended to be enraged. “What has my question got to do with your getting
involved
? Involved in
what
?”

He knew and she knew where he intended to take her with his questions. And he understood why she didn't want to go there with him, to a land of further attrition. Af-Laawe, he noticed, was agitated again. Jeebleh decided to interrogate her further. “Did my mother suffer any lapses of judgment?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I doubt that she would think of me as a traitor, unless she had suffered great lapses of judgment.”

“I wouldn't know.”

“Did she die fully alert?”

He had been kept so ill informed about her state of health that he did not even know about the deterioration until she was just about dead. He had seen this as symptomatic of a country whose people cared little about one another. On the one hand, there was deliberate indifference to her condition on the part of the state apparatus, because she was his mother. On the other hand, there was an incurable apathy everywhere. Someone like Shanta, who had visited the old woman and in all probability looked after her now and then, still hadn't stirred herself sufficiently to show that she cared, by writing to him.

He and his mother had never talked about his departure from Somalia: it would have been unwise to discuss his controversial one-way ticket out of the country on an open telephone line belonging to a neighbor. He had heard of his mother's deteriorating health, and tried to telephone, but could not get through because of the bad connections. Then he received a newspaper clipping, anonymously posted, in which her death was announced. Now he repeated, “What was my mother's mental state when she died?”

“Your mother died on her own terms,” she said.

“She was fully aware of what was happening?”

The woman nodded.

He imagined Caloosha calling on his mother, sitting at her bedside day in and day out, and describing her son as a traitor. Could she, in truth, have seen as a traitor someone who belonged outside the precincts of the human community? No. He knew she wouldn't have thought of him as a Judas. Alas, he had no one to support his side of things. His voice as hard and unbending as iron, he asked, “What about my letters to her? Why were they returned, unopened and unread?”

“I've no idea about letters' being returned.”

“You weren't aware?”

“I read her the ones I received!”

“What did you do with them?”

“Burned them.”

“Why burn them?”

“Those were my instructions.”

“Who gave you those instructions?”

“She did!”

If this was true, then it could only mean that his mother had attained the bitter age when nothing hurtful could have touched her anymore. He had failed her, and was blaming others for his foibles: that was the sad truth of it. He had come too late. What in hell did he expect in a country weighed down with the grievances of its people, dwelling in a land burdened by destruction and death? His own letters returned, unread? Now he asked, “Were you alone with her when she died?”

“We weren't alone.”

“Who else was there with you?”

“Caloosha!”

She would give no further details, and resorted to shaking her head back and forth, then up and down. She paused for a brief spell, then shook her head now to the right and now to the left, in the gesture of someone ridding herself of a terrible thought.

Jeebleh imagined his mother dying, and then total quiet descending, a butterfly no longer stirring, with its wings folded, still.

He heard Af-Laawe say, “Now to the cemetery!”

 

 

ON THEIR WAY THERE, JEEBLEH UNDERSTOOD THAT HIS MOTHER HAD DIED restless. It no longer mattered to him whether the woman now sitting behind him in the Mercedes, next to Af-Laawe, had served as her housekeeper or not; nor did it matter if she had lied to him. He and his mother hadn't ultimately made peace with each other. His visit to her grave and his wish to build a headstone were but attempts to effect reconciliation with her spirit, which had departed in a troubled state.

He assumed that Af-Laawe and Caloosha would feed him half-truths and apparent facts. Having bothered to bring him all the way to the cemetery, they would probably show him a tomb marked with a board bearing his mother's name. Thanks to Shanta, he knew what to look for: a Hinducini mango tree with seasonal fruits bigger than the head of a grown man, and four medium-to-large stones with his mother's name on them. He sat between two men in shades, with guns.

“What about the money?” he asked the woman.

“We used every penny of it,” she told him.

He could only contemplate a life of regret, one in total ruins. If the woman was to be believed, the last words on his mother's lips amounted to a curse. If he was being fed on half-truths, was it possible that even though the woman was as false as counterfeit money, the low-ceilinged house to which he had been taken really belonged to his mother's housekeeper? And was this one reason why he hadn't been allowed to go past the porch—because they were worried he might see many of his mother's things, things the genuine housekeeper had appropriated or had been given by his mother? What gave this woman a certain credibility was that although she was a fake, she wore a dress his daughters had bought and sent as a gift to their grandmother.

Like it or not, he was visiting a land where demons never took a break. There was so much distrust that demons didn't need to top things up, make sure there was enough to go round, give everyone his or her commensurate share of misery.

 

 

AT LONG LAST, THEY REACHED A GATE WITH A BROKEN SIGNBOARD, WITH THE words “The Sity's General Cemetary” written in the shaky hand of a semiliterate. The road was choked with low shrubs, leaving only a narrow point of entry for the car. Traces of the old tarred road were visible, as was a broken-down shack, which once had served as a guardhouse. From the few times he had come here, Jeebleh remembered a caravan of vehicles waiting at the entrance. In those days, you had to present a death certificate from the municipality to be allowed to bury your dead here. Civil wars, anathema to bureaucracy, do away with the authority that is synonymous with normality. Civil wars simplify some matters and complicate others.

They drove for quite a while before the vehicle came to a stop at the command of the housekeeper, who saw the landmark she was looking for. The first to get out, Af-Laawe went around and gave the housekeeper a hand. Jeebleh got out and walked forward with a clubfooted gait. The huge loss was at last getting to him, weighing him down with more guilt. Had he been by himself, he would have sunk to his knees and stayed there, taking comfort from his humbled position. He heard his name spoken in a low whisper, and the housekeeper's announcement: “There, I can see it!”

He took a good hold of himself and looked around. There was no mango tree with a sweet shade close by. Nor could he see four medium-to-large stones with writing on them to mark the grave, as Shanta had described. He didn't know what Af-Laawe and the housekeeper expected him to do. He went on his knees, not because he wished to humble himself in prayer, but because walking or standing upright was proving difficult. Of course he knew that the moment toward which he had been moving all these years, to be face to face with revelatory death, was further away now than he had imagined. “This is not my mother's grave,” he told the housekeeper.

“But it is,” she insisted.

“It isn't!” he said.

Af-Laawe came nearer to find out what was happening, and the two musclemen with shades and guns approached as well. Jeebleh prepared for the moment when he would sink deeper into a reverie, and waited.

All the while, the woman pointed at a mound of earth that wasn't his mother's, saying, “There!” Who was she? Why was he still on his knees? From the way the woman indicated the mound, her forefinger extended, she might have been Columbus pointing at a new world beyond the horizon.

“That grave doesn't belong to my mother,” he said.

Af-Laawe said, “Does a grave belong to the person in it, or to those claiming it with an authoritative apostrophe, as when someone says, ‘My mother's grave'?”

Jeebleh wasn't sure which Af-Laawe was getting wrong, his pronoun or where to place the apostrophe. Nor did he like Af-Laawe's lip. But then what could he do about it, considering that there were two muscles who would kick him to death if he challenged him?

The woman came to him now, and towered above him. With her head inclined, her smile diffuse, she took his hand and led him to a mound that had collapsed on itself. And pointed at it. “Here she is!” She picked up a strip of zinc with his mother's name recently inscribed in the hand of an autistic child. “Your mother's here!” she said.

“My mother doesn't belong in here!” he insisted.

With mouthy rudeness, Af-Laawe said, “She may not belong in the grave herself anymore, given her condition, but her bones do.”

One of the musclemen moved into Jeebleh's field of vision, blocking it. He pretended to help Jeebleh to his feet, while his companion prodded Jeebleh sharply with the professional accuracy of a nurse giving an injection.

Jeebleh's stomach turned, and he dropped deeper and deeper into nausea. He could not get up, and was so weak that he felt almost lifeless. By the time he managed to crawl closer to the mound and lay his head on it, the squeamishness had disabled his knees. Finally he fell, forehead first, as though he were dead.

HOW DID HE GET
HERE
?

He was in a restaurant, sitting by himself at a table, and before him was a cup of tea—which, he found by dipping in his finger and touching it to his lower lip, was highly sugared. There was a huge gap in his memory. He couldn't recall what had happened between the moment his knees gave way, after the jab from the muscleman-cum-medico, and now.

He studied the curious faces surrounding him and concluded that he didn't know who they were, and hadn't the slightest idea how or why he had been brought to this place, or by whom. His memory had run out, abandoning him at the mound. But in his mind he replayed Af-Laawe's rude remarks, which he hoped Af-Laawe would pay for sooner rather than later. Jeebleh remembered the supposed housekeeper pointing at a grave, her forefinger extended, and saying, “Your mother's here!” Then Af-Laawe's sass . . . and then what? Did the jab come before or after he had had enough of Af-Laawe's lip and the woman's lies?