Knots (12 page)

“Why does that matter?”

“It matters to me.”

Finally, Zaak sits up, preparing to drive, his back ramrod straight, and his lips atremble. Maybe he is reciting a brief prayer between switching the ignition on, engaging a gear, and moving on. His breathing strikes Cambara as being bothered, and his posture rigid as that of a pupil taking a test he is certain to fail. Only then does the memory come back to her that he is an awful driver. She remembers how he had to resit the oral and the driving tests several times, managing to pass on his sixth attempt. He sets about his driving with the care of a cattle farmer guiding the erection of a bull into a cow not yet in heat. He cries
Bismillah
twice before instructing the armed youths to get in, guns,
qaat
, and all.

Then Zaak turns the key in the ignition a few times before the engine comes to life, coughing, farting, sputtering cold wind, and spurting white smoke out of the exhaust pipe. He applies more pressure on the accelerator pedal than need be, and this jars Cambara's nerves, irritating her. Again, it takes him several attempts before engaging the clutch. But because he misjudges the biting point of the clutch and removes his foot from the brake, the engine stalls. He curses, starts the engine once more, places his foot heavily on the accelerator prior to engaging the clutch, and the vehicle jerks out of control.

Cambara sits up, and so do the armed youths. They all shift in their seats, anxious-looking, helpless, and not knowing what to do or say to Zaak, who, in his desire to prove his worth, is doing all he can to impress Cambara and failing.

Everyone hears the voice of a man, the driver, who is saying, “Do you want me to come and drive, Zaak? I do not mind, really I do not.”

Cambara looks out of the window, amused, her gaze falling on the driver, who is pulling his sarong up with his left hand and whose eyes are red and almost popping with exhaustion, presumably from lack of sleep. In her recall of her dream the night before, during her brief, jet-lagged sleep, she remembers the heavy downpour, remembers running, naked and free, among the fillies on a sandy beach, the sky tropical blue, her shoeless feet feeling tickled and she laughing in the way the happy and the young do. After a while, Cambara wakes from her daydream to the noisy reality of Zaak rudely dismissing the driver, to whom he says, “Go back to your chewing, and we'll see you here in less than an hour.”

She keeps whatever thoughts that come to her to herself, waits, and then watches as Zaak starts the engine yet again. This time, however, smooth as new oil, he gets the biting point of the clutch right and engages it without the engine stalling or disconcertingly jerking out of his authority. She tells herself that being around Zaak, being humiliated and derided, may become the death of her sooner than the bullet from a gun erroneously going off. To be sure, she does not wish to court danger, nor does she get a kick out of riding with boys in their preteens armed with an AK-47.

It is when she has sat back, starting to destress, that she realizes that the foot brake cannot perform the function Zaak has assigned to it, and the clutch is in fact not an accelerator. Eventually, his foot controls fail him just as before, with too little fuel reaching the engine, which almost cuts off but does not, or too much fuel and the truck surging forward. It is when he mistakes the foot brake for the accelerator that the engine speed does not match the road's, then, all of a sudden, he changes down a gear, then another, annoyingly picking up such a velocity that Zaak has no idea what to do and then brakes so abruptly they drive into a ditch and stop. One of the two boys, sitting forward, whose AK-47 trigger guard is off, pulls at it unwittingly, shooting volleys and emptying them into the roof. The explosion in the confined space of the motorcar is so close it feels as if a grenade has gone off. Gathering her wits about her, she sees Zaak, mouth gaping open in shock, sitting stock still as if frozen in fright, but she is alert to the imminent peril in the shape of a couple of armed youths who arrive on the scene from nowhere and who watch from the safety of the wall covering them. Cambara has the calm to inquire if anyone is hurt. No man can find his tongue; all is quiet. Cambara, in the meantime, turns round to check for herself and then figures out that, even though every one is startled, no one has suffered any visible harm.

It is then that a rank odor emanating from within the vehicle insinuates itself into the immense silence. Cambara is able to isolate the source of the putrid stench in no time, identifying its emitter: a boy in the back row who, out of embarrassment, holds down his head, cradling it in his hands. Apparently, the boy has fouled himself out of fright. She is for once undecided what to do, not that she knows what there is to say. It is too far for her to reach out to the boy, touch him, assure him that there is nothing to be ashamed of; too inconvenient to step out of the truck, go round and get back in, and embrace the boy. She looks away, her sense of discretion prevailing. Likewise, the older armed youths, who, covering their mouths and noses with their hands, surprisingly to Cambara, hold their tongues. However, the unfortunate boy's age-mates are rip-roaringly laughing, pointing their fingers at the unlucky boy, one of them calling him Xaar Fakay, meaning “ShitLoose.”

Cambara waits for Zaak to move before acting on the instinct to intervene, interceding with the bigger boys to desist from bullying the hapless boy, whom, now that she has had a good look, she refers to as Tima Xariir, for his dark, silky, brilliantined hair. However, Cambara is helpless in the face of this new challenge, because it is one thing to make a fuss over the waste of one's child; it is altogether another thing to clean up the mess of a preteen boy, armed, potentially unruly, and likely to pose a problem later.

Zaak, for his part, does not respond to SilkHair's predicament as a grown man might. Angry and showing no empathy, he puckers his face, an indication that the odor has had more of an effect on him than it might on a woman who has dealt with a baby's excreta. In her mind, Cambara links this incident to the scene earlier yesterday when, being most unkind, he told her, “Grow up, woman.” Now she feels like saying the same thing to him, to behave as an adult woman might. Zaak says, “Get out and walk.”

The boy raises his head, his eyes popping out, as if he were a goat a slaughterer has readied to kill. No one says anything as SilkHair works out how to get out of where he is without drawing more derision from his mates, knowing that the waste will have run down the legs of his sarong and will have soiled his nether regions too.

Cambara surprises everyone by saying, “There is nothing unnatural about what the boy has done, and I want him to stay in the truck.”

“No one wants him to remain,” Zaak says.

There is uncomfortable silence all around.

“I would like him to,” she says.

Zaak is ill at ease, not certain how to react.

Cambara says, “Or else I'll go with him then.”

“Where will
you
go?”

“Where will
he
go?”

In the quiet that follows, she remarks that she does not smell anything. It feels as though the rank odor has been replaced by tension and anger, which make their demands on all her senses.

Zaak backs down. “Let's go back to my place and then plan things better. Since we will need to have the inside of the car washed, I suppose the driver can do it better than we can. Besides, there is no point going forward.”

Cambara does not share her thoughts with Zaak, but she trusts he knows that she will turn SilkHair into a cause: clothe him, pamper him with bountiful love, given that she has plenty of it. She imagines that she has as much untaken love as a breast-feeding mother whose baby has died has milk. She thinks that the poor thing is most likely wearing the only sarong he owns and if they get back to Zaak's, he won't have anything to change into. Yes, she can give him some of the clothes that have survived Dalmar's drowning. She preferred bringing them with her to Mogadiscio, rather than sending them along to the Salvation Army in her neighborhood in Toronto. Dalmar's clothes will fit SilkHair nicely. What's more, she will take care of him, disarm him, school him, and turn him into a fine boy, peace-loving, caring.

Cambara steps out of the vehicle with the determined step of someone who knows where she is going and what she will be doing. Before making much headway, she pauses in her stride, slowing down, and soon enough she remarks that she has SilkHair by her side, waiting expectantly. He is smiling sweetly, and, his hand extended out to her, it is as if he is proposing that she take it and hold it; he is nodding his head by way of encouragement, if she needed one. Cambara is under the positive impression that the young fellow has arrived at a conclusion similar to hers: that he wants to join her, walk alongside her, be with her wherever she is headed. Not in so many words, though. A mere glance can tell her how pleased he is to stand physically close to her, as if pointing out that they share more than either has realized until now.

His hand gingerly smooths the gorgy silkiness of his unkempt hair with studied effeteness, and Cambara wishes she could help him neaten it more by running her fingers through it, grooming it. Her sweeping glance registers everything around—from the driver and the other youths to the guns and, farther right, to where Zaak is scampering away, in a huff. At a midway point in a thought not yet matured, she cannot decide what has become of the boy's missing upper tooth; another is already going brown, maybe rotten at the root, an abscess not dealt with in time. Or did the missing tooth suffer a sudden trauma? Cambara intends to ask him what has happened to it and to pay the dentist's bill to have it fixed. Of course, it is possible that he has lost the tooth in fierce fighting or in rough play not so long ago. There is a lot that she wants to know about him—and soon.

“Come with me,” she says to SilkHair.

She motions with her head for him to follow her, which he does very willingly. He hesitates for a fraction of a second, however, wondering whether to take along his weapon and, if not, what to do with it. In the event, he acts decisively and stands it against the wall closest to him but not without removing the cartridge, which, he discovers, contains three bullets. He looks politely in her direction and nods apologetically before pocketing them all. Then he indicates that he is ready to go. These well-thought-out moves leave an impression on Cambara, who feels more positive about him than before. She is of the view that he is a responsible lad who she hopes will give her pleasure to look after. She can't imagine her son, Dalmar, ever doing a thing like that. No doubt, SilkHair's and Dalmar's situations are different, the one raised in Toronto in a caring home, the other born in an immense wasteland, filled with civil war gloom.

She says, “Come,” and moves as though all of a sudden she has freed herself from every sort of impediment in her way, and walks up the stairway to her room now that she is also convinced that Zaak has retreated to nurse a huge sulk. This is nothing new to Cambara, who has known Zaak to withdraw into his moody silences or to leave one perplexed as to what one has done to annoy or slight him whenever he is in a fit of pique. She remembers him looking as sick as a dog suffering from diarrhea and taking shelter in ill humor. In contrast to him, Cambara is famously admired or feared for confronting problems head-on and immediately. Nor does she have difficulty admitting her failings, whatever these are. She is in her element only after she has sorted out a knotty situation; she is in an upbeat mood right after a fight, ready to work out a truce between her and the parties with whom she is warring. No backbiting for her and no slinking away or sinking into a brooding mood, while at the same time he bad-mouths others. She is eager to prove to Zaak and to the boy soldiers that her mettle is of a hardier stuff than all theirs put together. Bent on making things happen, she leads the way into the house, SilkHair following and the driver and the youths watching.

Once inside the house, the two of them alone, Cambara plucks the courage to take SilkHair by the hand, and they walk up the stairway together, she with the resoluteness of someone with a purpose ahead, he with the growing confidence of a youth putting his trust in someone after what has proven to be an awful experience. Just then, she comes to a sudden stop in front of the door to her rooms. She turns her back on him, mouthing the words “Give me a moment,” and then, with circumspective care, she replaces her hand slowly, rather tentatively among the folds of her veil, eventually retrieving the key from where she put it earlier, in her bra. Her forefinger and thumb rubbing and chafing it, the key feels warmer from having snuggled near her breasts.

Again, she is indecisive, hesitating whether to take him downstairs to Zaak's bathroom, where he should be having his shower, but, because she can't be bothered to inquire if Zaak might mind, Cambara decides to go the easy way. She tells him, “Wait here.” Then, moving faster than she has done for a long time, she rushes into her room, as if something is chasing her, and in a moment returns with a towel in her right hand, her left engaged in pulling the door to her room and closing it securely behind her.

She points him to where the bathroom is, into which he goes ahead and waits a little warily, as if suddenly becoming conscious of crossing a boundary. He keeps some distance as she turns the tap on at the same time as she holds the towel in her left. Surprisingly, there is running water. She fills a bucket, into which she dips her hand. Even though there is a touch of chill in it, she thinks SilkHair is not likely to mind having a cold shower. In fact, she thinks that he won't give a damn, at least not as much as she does, she assumes, because he may not know what it is to have it warm.

Face to face with him and a little closer, her heart goes out to him, and she can't help wanting to touch him. On second thought, she feels she is too forward and, as if covering her tracks, pulls back. She walks over to the wobbly rack pushed into a corner and hardly used, and places the towel on it. She tells him to have his shower and, before leaving the bathroom, adds, “You will find the change of clothes, which I will leave for you outside this bathroom. I want you to put them on and then to join us downstairs, clean and dressed.”

In her room, she rummages in a suitcase marked “Dalmar's: For Charities,” and she selects two pairs of trousers, several underpants, half a dozen T-shirts, and a portable CD player, which she tests, and having concluded that it is working, she brings along with her. She is confident that at least some of the clothes will fit SilkHair nicely. She leaves the pile for him outside the bathroom door before going down, dead set on shaking things up in Zaak's place in such a way as to make a difference when she is done.

Cambara tears down the stairway, as though on a warpath, and strides over to the toolshed in the backyard, which has been converted to the
qaat
-chewers' retreat. There, the driver and several youths are busy munching away, their cheeks bulging with the stuff, slurping very sweet tea and sipping Coca-Cola. From where she is eavesdropping on their conversation, barely a few meters from the door to the shed, she can hear them chatting lazily about cutthroat civil war politics and also debating about which warlord controls which of the most lucrative thoroughfares in the city and how much money he collects daily from his tax-levying ventures. Speculating, they move on to another related topic, mentioning the name of an upstart clansman of the same warlord, formerly a deputy to him, most likely to unseat said warlord with a view to laying his hands on the thriving business.

Having heard enough about warlords and their presumptive, empty jabbering, she decides it is time she barged in without announcing either her presence or motive. First, she takes her position in the doorway, blocking it—arms akimbo, her feet spread wide apart—and fuming at their conjectural politics and their slovenly behavior. Some of the men look appalled; others appear amused; yet others shake their heads in surprise, as they all unfailingly turn their heads in her direction and then toward each other. To a man, they stop whatever they have been doing, maybe because they were unprepared for her entry.

They are baffled, because it is unclear to them under whose authority she is acting, and because they have no idea where Zaak is on this or what part he is playing. One of them whispers to his mate that she is like a headmistress at a convent school who is disciplining her charges. His mate, in riposte, compares her to a parent waking his truant teenagers from a late lie-in, shaking them awake. When a couple of the others resume talking in their normal voices and some go back to their chewing or tea sipping, Cambara embarks on a more startling undertaking: She confiscates their
qaat
. The whisperer now says, “How incredibly fearless!” His mate remarks that it is not enough for her to barge in on them as if she owned the place; she must show us she is the boss. Another wonders where it will all end.

As if to prove the whisperer's mate right, she gathers the bundles of
qaat
that they have not so far consumed from in front of them—they are too gobsmacked to challenge her—and she dumps the sheaves in a waste bin crawling with noxious vermin. Turning and seeing the shock on their faces, she does not ease off. She shouts, “This is a sight worse than I've ever imagined. How can you stand living so close to the fetid odor coming from the waste bin, which none of you has bothered to empty for a very long time?” And before the driver or any of the youths has recovered from her relentless barrage, she tells them, “It is time to be up.”

No one speaks. They are all eyes, fixed on her. After a brief pause, however, the driver gathers his things and joins her; several others do likewise. One might wonder why the driver or the youths act out of character and remain biddably unassertive when it is very common among the class of men to which the armed vigilantes and the driver belong to take recourse to the use of guns at the slightest provocation. Cambara puts their compliant mood down to the fact that her behavior has taken them by surprise and that many of the armed militiamen hardly know how to respond to the instructions of women.

She orders the driver to supervise the two youths who earlier had bullied SilkHair, whom she tells to wash the inside and outside of the truck, vacuum, and make sure they rid it of the execrable odor. When the driver retorts that he does not have a Hoover or any of the other sanitizers about which she is speaking, she suggests that they use a house disinfectant. Still, when each of them, except for the driver, picks up his gun—for they seem naked without one, now that they are upright, their hands uselessly hanging down—and they argue that they do not know where they can find any deodorizers, Cambara eyes them unkindly. Then she takes one of them by the hand, dragging him into the kitchen; she provides him with an assortment of these cleaning items from a stack of household goods, mostly for cleaning, which presumably Zaak bought and locked away in one of the cupboards. She returns with the youth bearing the stuff and breathing unevenly. She gets them down to work, on occasion swearing at them under her breath. On top of being amused, she watches them for a few minutes with keen interest. Good heavens, how clumsy they appear now that they are missing their weapons, which over the years have become extensions of themselves; they appear wretched without them. With their bodily movements uncoordinated, they are as ungainly as left-handers employing their right hands to lift something off the ground. For their part, the guns have an abandoned look about them, to all intents and purposes, just pieces of metal worked into pieces of wood and no more menacing than a child's toy.

When the driver and the other youths have washed the outside and the inside of the truck, she sets them to work in the living room: sweeping, dusting, and cleaning it. Watching them as they shift the settees and other furniture, she wonders if they have ever lifted anything heavier than their AK-47s. To while away the time pleasantly as they work, she puts on the CD player, and out comes blaring some Somali music, actually a song of her own composition, the CD cut privately in a back-alley studio in Toronto. The words and the voice-over are both hers, set to music by a Jamaican friend of Maimouna's. Maybe they recognize the voice, because they all stop working and stare at her in doe-eyed fascination. She becomes self-conscious, realizing that this is the first time she is listening to her own words and voice on a CD. In the context, she thinks that maybe she needs to do more work on it, tightening it here and there, strengthening the weaker parts, in short re-recording everything before releasing it. Thinking, “Not too bad, though,” she lets them hear it several times.

In the song, a boy—the voice is that of Dalmar—says, “When is a man a man?”

A woman's voice, Cambara's, replies, “A man is a man when he can work like a man, hardy, dedicated, mindful that he uses his strength to serve the good of the community.”

Eerily, her heart almost misses a beat, as she assumes that she has had a distinct glimpse of a boy wearing familiar clothes, a boy who reminds her of her son, and who is now standing in the entrance to the living room, dressed in
his
trousers and shirt. For an instant, Cambara feels dislocated from her surroundings, and then she remembers that she is the one who has presented SilkHair with the clothes, which fit him perfectly. When it dawns on her that she does not like the song anymore, she turns the CD off, then walks over to where SilkHair is and, beaming with delight, says to him, “Well done.” Then things begin to take a bad turn.

Call it what you like: jealousy, because one of their number, the youngest, whom they could bully with impunity until earlier today, has been luckier than they, having charmed The Woman; call it in character or reverting to type, because you could not expect the youths to act as normally as others might. Whatever the case, one of the youths, bearing the nickname LongEars, who earlier bullied SilkHair, has found his tongue. He speaks loud enough for everyone to hear, now that the music is off, and everyone is invidiously focusing on Cambara hugging and welcoming SilkHair.