Knots (9 page)

In the event, Wardi does not go away for the weekend with his paramour as planned, scared she might ask how he came by those ugly bruises. Wardi and Cambara share the same space for a few days, hardly communicating; they eat and cook separately for much of this interim period, but avoid each other. For her, the modus vivendi put her in mind of the arrangement she had worked out with Zaak, each keeping to his or her part of the apartment. They would come together for the sake of decorum whenever one of their relations or friends visited or when they had to honor a friend getting married. Nor did Cambara speak of the fistfight; who started it, who bled more, who won, and who lost what. Privately, she felt she was the one hard-done by what happened, especially after the death of her son.

Then, one morning, Cambara wakes up looking like a cat in distress, and, with her gut troubled, her mind unsettled, and smarting because of her heart, which hurts terribly, she resolves to put the greatest of distances between herself and Wardi. Long discussions ensue to which Arda and Raxma are parties, now with one alone, now with the other, and later with both. Security tops the agenda. Arda is of the view that no property in present-day Mogadiscio is worth the risk involved in its recovery. Raxma is inclined to hold the opinion that a visit now will be all to the good, may even have therapeutic value. But where will she stay? They agree to look deeper into every aspect, think of where she might put up and with whom, and then meet again.

Cambara buys a one-way ticket to Mogadiscio after she hears back from both Arda and Raxma. While Arda insists that she will okay the trip on condition that she stay with Zaak and vow to return immediately in the event of the slightest danger, Raxma promises to contact Kiin, who owns a hotel and who, she is certain, can provide her with backup security and accommodation.

Her eyes half open, clouded from exhaustion, Cambara stirs at the sound of the kettle singing downstairs and calling to her host, saying to him in kettle-speech, “Come and make your early tea, Zaak.” She lies motionless in the bed, revisiting her first days with Wardi in Geneva, when love was good, and the two of them made it with the leisure of a man and a woman who could not have enough of it or of each other.

Wardi and Cambara met by chance, in a café. Both had been stood up by the person each was waiting to meet: She had an appointment with a screenwriter working on a script about a Somali refugee being deported from Switzerland, and Wardi was to meet with an immigration lawyer to help him present his case to the refugee authority at the canton of Geneva. Drawn to each other as two lost souls, each sought salvation of some sort in and from the other. For Cambara, it was holiday time; she had just completed a two-week film shoot funded by a Swiss-Canadian outfit. Wardi, for his part, was a penniless Somali, eager to receive the papers on which his refugee status in Switzerland depended. She was charmed with immediate effect, and she felt there was no way to undo that; they were bound to each other.

They left the café feeling each other, touching, holding hands. She was giggly, because she found him funny and lighthearted, and being with him excited her in a way she had not thought possible. Hours later, in the same day, she treated him to a gourmet meal at the first upmarket restaurant he had been to since arriving in Switzerland. He walked her to her hotel, where they sat in the lounge and talked until the small hours of the night. Just before dawn, she exchanged her single room for a double so they could chat some more and get to know each other better. He fell asleep with his clothes on. At nine the following morning—she had not slept a wink the entire night—she went out shopping and returned with the clothes she had chosen for him.

She found him awake, just after a long shower. He stood handsome and desirable in a towel wrapped around his waist. Then she gave him the shaving kit she had bought, plus a pair of trousers and a couple of shirts, which fit him perfectly. He behaved as kept men are wont to do—taking their paramour's continued loyalty and love for granted without ever reciprocating either. This should have sounded warning bells in Cambara's appraisal of what to expect, but no. In love for the first time at the age of thirty-five, she was unwilling to hear anything but the sound of her adoring heart beating in rhythm with his.

When he told her about Raxma and her mother's phone calls from Ottawa, Cambara wore an amused expression, in the secretive attitude of a younger girl having her first date. She did not show interest in knowing what her mother had made of him. Why? Because she knew Raxma and her mother well, knew they could prove to be difficult and uncompromising when it came to Cambara's choices of men, especially after what she had been through with Zaak. Arda located flaws in character, clan affiliation, educational background, or some other shortcoming in all the men in whom Cambara had shown interest.

At some point, Cambara sent him out on the pretext of getting her
Le Monde.
While he was gone, she returned Arda's call. Unsurprisingly, Arda segued into a song, in which the word “love” chimed not with stars shining most brightly but with the notion “ruse.” In short, Arda did not like the way Wardi's voice presented itself well ahead of the rest of him. She had no liking of him, because she felt he was hard at work to make her fall for him. “Crafty bugger” was a phrase she employed more than once. Yet she had not met the man! Arda's advice was: “Fly back home minus him.”

For her part, Raxma thought that Cambara was deservedly having a delightful time, and, as such, she would not dare to suggest to her friend, who was swooning in the embrace of her fresh infatuation, to give him a wide berth—not until she met the fellow. Told about Arda's take and how she had inferred the man's character from a single, brief telephone conversation, Raxma reiterated that she would reserve her judgment at least until after Cambara had filled her in on the hiatuses in their story. She concluded that, not knowing enough, she would be inclined to a more prudent approach and cautioned against hasty marriage.

Now, lying in bed in Mogadiscio, Cambara remembers with a good measure of self-recrimination that she did not heed her mother's advice. Cambara returned to Toronto a few weeks later, minus Wardi, but that was not all. Cambara married Wardi at one of the city's registries, unbeknownst to Arda, Raxma, and many of those very dear to her, convinced of her true love. It did not seem to matter to her what other people might say, or if they would or would not approve of the union. The hush-hush affair took place in the presence of two of her Canadian colleagues on the film shoot, who served as her witnesses. Before the ink of their signatures on the forms had dried, Wardi was urging her to file copies of their marriage certificate with the Canadian consulate, “for our family reunion,” he explained.

Even though she found nothing terribly wrong with Wardi's request to file the marriage papers the same day, Raxma felt a little uneasy, though she hesitated to describe it as distasteful. Compared with Raxma's reaction, Arda's was over the top. “What did I tell you?” she said. “He is a con man, not to be trusted.” Cambara proceeded with understandable caution from then forward, and she resolved not to reveal that Wardi was urging her to draw up a legal document clearly stating in legalese that what was hers was his too. It was her aim to humor him as best she could; that was all. Nothing else to it. Nor did any cautionary bells sound in her unhearing ears. How love deafens!

Back in Toronto, her mother made her position very clear: She wished to have nothing to do with the whole affair and would not help or hinder her daughter's effort to get him to join her. Meanwhile, Canadian immigration took its time, cognizant of the fact that she had been married once before to a Somali and been granted a family reunion on that basis. The waiting took its toll on Cambara, who filled in multiple copies of more forms and more papers with the help of Maimouna, who acted as her lawyer. She rang Wardi almost daily, and if she failed to do so, he phoned her collect, her bills mounting and her anxiety likewise. Although she took no delight in her daughter's misery, Arda hoped that Cambara's enthusiasm for Wardi would wilt, like a tree in unseasonable weather, the longer she had to wait for the situation to resolve itself. To the contrary, Cambara claimed that her love grew and grew the more the immigration authorities put bureaucratic obstacles in her way, which she was confident Maimouna would clear.

She had no satisfactory answers when, in passing, Maimouna asked why she had granted Wardi every demand he tried, offering him more than he had ever dreamt possible. More desperate than she cared to admit, she considered relocating to Geneva to be with Wardi. Arda thought her mad and said nothing, but Raxma would not hear of this. “Why, an unemployed couple—one of them a jobless makeup artist, the other a Somali with no refugee papers—couldn't live on the welfare benefits of meager monthly Swiss handouts.”

Finally, Cambara came clean about everything, including the fact that she had put down Wardi's name as a co-owner of her own property in Toronto. Now that the onus was on Arda, she did what she knew how to do best. A fixer, she stepped in, calling up someone in authority. Within a month, Wardi's application moved speedily from the junior desks and landed on much larger escritoires where prompt decisions are initialed at the end of a phone call. Notwithstanding this, Arda stuck to her original guns, in view of Wardi's unhealthy hold on her daughter. She used Raxma to carry her messages, saying that she would remain forever suspicious of Wardi and, given the choice, would not allow him to get within her own parameters.

His papers through, Cambara met his flight alone. With little love lost between Wardi and Arda, Cambara wondered if her mother would at least meet him, but the old woman would not acquiesce to her daughter's request that she bring him to her house. The stand-off lasted for several months, until Cambara became pregnant, which happy event made Arda break with her stance: she rang to congratulate her daughter. Then Arda asked Cambara to visit, and mother and daughter had the opportunity to talk, but not necessarily about their estrangement from each other.

Arda moved in with them a fortnight before the due date, agreeing to accept the fait accompli presented to her: that Wardi, a man she thought of as a rogue, was the father of the baby to whom she would be a grandmother. Raxma was a godsend, in that she took Cambara away for long walks and entertained her when the going was toughest on all concerned. Arda did what she had to do, bit her tongue whenever she was tempted to speak, and learned to live with a man she did not trust for the forty or so days she was there to help look after the mother and the baby. Wardi absented himself often during that period, leaving earlier as a trainee attorney-at-law, arriving late at the most ungodly hours, and staying in the room farthest from his wife and her mother. On many a night, he did not even return home.

That there was a great deal of unease all around was plain to see, and everyone remarked on it. While most of Cambara's friends fidgeted around the subject of the relationship, Raxma was the only one who dared to broach the subject: the full-blown affair he was having with Susannah, the principal partner of the law firm where he was doing his yearlong internship. Cambara, meanwhile, concentrated on giving birth to a healthy child, believing that transmitting negative vibes to the baby before its actual birth might somehow adversely affect it. The baby born, Wardi spent more time away from the apartment, presumably with Susannah, in the office. Cambara, her mother, and Dalmar's moods often lapsed in an equal measure of joy in one another's company and a mix of guilt and anger when it came to Wardi's unspoken-of absence.

Now, as she hears the outside door of the house closing, presumably because Zaak has left for work, the image of Wardi—lying on his back with a tortured posture, his nose bleeding, his eyes runny with a sickly amber discharge, his lips cut and swollen—comes to her. She cannot help wondering whether their relationship would have been different had she not married him secretly. Then a fresh rage, mixed with hurt, rises within her, and she does not know what to do, short of continuing to hate herself for her own weakness.

With her son drowned, her marriage to Wardi as good as over, Cambara is in Somalia, where she has more time for reflection. Has she come to Mogadiscio because she hopes to empty her life of him?

It is very early the following morning, and Cambara is already awake, the jet-lagged state of her body demanding that she get out of bed. She walks downstairs and then moves about with the stealth of a burglar, cautious, quiet, and looking this way and that. Finally, as she tiptoes into the kitchen area, certain that she has the place to herself, no strange male odor yet scented, and prepares to make herself tea and a bite to eat, if she can find any food. She discovers that she is face to face with Zaak, who, with an unpleasant smugness on his face, is hiding in a corner, waiting, as if in ambush.

“How is my dearest doing?” Zaak says.

The tone of his voice sounds self-satisfied; he seems to take much delight in seeing her surprised expression and obvious discomposure.

Unsettled, she takes refuge in an all-encompassing silence, careful not to make a tetchy remark that she would later regret. After a moment or so, she grows sufficient pluck to stare at him long and hard, and, as she does so, she affords herself the time to look back on their young years together. She finds it hard to picture ever having had the hots for him.

In those days, Cambara's favorite read was an Italian girlie
fotoromanzo
monthly called
Intimità.
With her and her schoolmates, the
affaires de coeur
took precedence over everything else. Her friends, giggly, many of them spoiled brats because they belonged to the bourgeois classes, would not want to pay him a moment's attention. When on two separate occasions Cambara tried to egg on two of them to dance with him at her birthday party, one of the girls refused, describing Zaak as “the pits.” Cambara pretended not to know what her friend was talking about, when that was certainly not the case, and then rose to his defense, saying, “He is just insecure, the poor fellow, but he is nice, once you get to know him.” Some of her friends started to tease her, one of them predicting that whoever took a fancy to Zaak was sure to be led to “Endsville.” No doubt she has ended up doing just that.

Now Zaak asks, “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, I did, considering,” she replies.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I have a long day ahead,” she says.

“What are your plans?”

Just as she readies to answer him, if evasively, she starts at a sudden noise, which disorients her. She looks in the direction of the kitchen and then up at the roof, hoping to identify the source of the scurrying sound, but she cannot decide if it is that of rats or other rodents, and if this is coming from somewhere up in the ceiling or from the scullery. Finally, she is drawn to an identifiable ruckus: a diesel truck arriving outside, its doors opening and closing, a number of youths alighting, and then the hubbub of human voices approaching.

“That'll be my lift,” Zaak explains. He pauses and then adds self-importantly, “The truck comes with its armed escort, six youths and the head of the security unit, formerly a major in the disbanded national army.”

He makes as if to get up, taking a good while before he manages to rise to his feet. When finally he does so and moves, it is as if he has metal in his knees, his every step a stumble of sorts; he appears incapable of coordinating his movements. He pauses, straightening his back, and rubs his spine, then his fogged eyes.

He says, “I am late for work, as it is.”

“Can your driver give me a lift?” she asks.

“Where to?”

“To our family house,” she says.

He shakes his head in disbelief. He affects a smile before looking away, and pretends to be concerned.

“Are you mad?” he asks.

“I won't go into the property,” she vows.

“What do you mean, you won't go into it?”

“In fact, not only will I desist from going into the property, but I will also make sure not to show myself to the minor warlord occupying it,” she says.

“Exactly what do you intend to do?”

“I just want to see the family property.”

“In which you've never lived.”

“Because it was rented out to foreign diplomats.”

“A property you haven't set eyes on for decades.”

“I would like to see it up close,” she says, “and get to know where it is in terms of where we are, your place.”

“You could do with a bit of help, couldn't you?”

“To be honest I could.”

“Tell me more.”

“What is there to tell you?”

He asks, “You don't expect the family occupying the house to present you with the keys and apologize as soon as you meet them, do you?”

“Are you taking me for a fool?”

“You'll be acting like one if you do not take into account the fact that you are courting danger,” he warns her. “It will not be a walk in the park to gain access to the property, still less to dislodge him.” He pauses, grins ostentatiously, and then adds, “He won't give it up without a fight.”

“I know it won't be an easy task.”

“I've heard of several property owners who've come to grievous harm when they've tried to recover it,” he says exultantly.

Her smile reluctant, Cambara sets about changing the subject. So she takes a step away from Zaak and in the direction of the door, making as if she will open it to let in a youth who is hanging hesitantly about as he considers whether or not to knock.

“Where else would you go if you had transport?”

“To one of the big hotels.”

“You are not thinking of moving?” Zaak asks.

“I am not,” she replies. “Not yet.”

“Why one of the big hotels, then?”

Cambara looks at him in apprehensive silence, uncertain whether there is any advantage to gain from deliberately misinforming him as opposed to neglecting to tell him everything. She says, “I am looking for a friend of a friend who works in one of the hotels as a deputy manager.”

“What's your friend's name?”

“She is a friend of a friend,” she says with finality. Then she is determinedly quiet, content with the vague intelligence she has so far given him.

A gentle early-morning breeze is blowing, the air moist with the saltiness of the sea. With patience, a part of Cambara is waiting for Zaak to run off at the mouth about the dangers of the city and about fatal muggings, and to dwell, for a few sadistic moments, on the large number of women who are raped, men maimed, horror statistics that are meant to keep the likes of her indoors. The other part of her waits for his snide remarks about her naiveté and how she is living in fantasyland. She is resolved not to allow him to put fear into her or to remain his guest and dependent on him. Even so, she will pay attention to the hidden meanings of what he might say and interpret his words in the light of what information other people might volunteer, then collate and compare these in the hope of negotiating a safe course between the perils.

“I'm thinking perhaps I should come too,” he says.

She would rather they not go together when she tries to insinuate her way furtively into the family property. She would rather he did not know anything about her plans or how she intends to charm her way, lie if need be, to gain access. He is bound to disapprove of her method and very likely will sabotage her effort.

“I'd prefer if you lent me your driver and car.”

“Things are more complicated than you realize.”

“What's so complicated about that?”

Waiting for him to explain, Cambara is under the impression that Zaak's faraway look is that of someone racing to catch up with an idea running ahead of him but in the wrong direction.

He says, “We need to make detailed preparations.”

“What do you mean?”

“You'll need an armed escort.”

“Why?”

Seeing him gloating smugly, she feels immediately shamefaced as she recalls from the few bits of information she has garnered about how Mogadiscio functions that, as a deterrent, it has become compulsory for owners of cars and trucks plying the roads to hire the services of armed escorts not necessarily to ensure the safety of the passengers but of the vehicle, because of the frequent carjackings that take place. She reminds herself that in a civil war setting, she must attach herself, perforce, to a broader constituency from which she may seek succor in the event of life-threatening complications. It is more than obvious that as a woman, alone, she stands no chance of surviving any of the possible civil war–related ordeals unless and until she appends herself to a group, armed and therefore clan-based, or civic in origin and therefore ideological. Hence the need to locate Kiin, an active member of the Women's Network.

“I'll organize the armed escort and the truck.”

“I wouldn't dream of being a nuisance.”

“It'll be a pleasure, not an inconvenience.”

“Please. You have important work to occupy you.”

He says, “I insist on coming with you.”

After a solemn moment in which she considers her options, she realizes that, like it or not, she has joined whichever group Zaak belongs to and that she might as well benefit from her association with him until she has disaffiliated herself from his clique and become part of Kiin's.

“You come on the understanding that I call the shots,” she says. “We drive close to it, we do not stop anywhere, and the armed escort remains inside the vehicle. Is that agreed?”

“We are at your service,” he says.

She tells him, “I can't thank you enough.”

Zaak is chuffed. She discerns a frisson of joy in his eyes, then an adrenaline rush of excitement lighting up his entire face. There is delight, which expresses itself in his bodily movements, for he makes as though steeling to embrace her, but, thinking better of it, he restrains himself in time before wholly committing himself. Moreover, there is a lascivious look in his shifty gaze. Even so, he focuses less on the upper parts of her body and more on her sandaled feet, like a teenager blushing at the sudden appearance of his paramour. Cambara is wickedly attractive to him. She knows what Zaak thinks of her, how much he has always adored her body. Not only is she aware of this, she is also conscious of the obvious fact that he is in awe of her irresistibility, which probably explains why he is acting in a provocative way, why he has been mean all along: because he hasn't ever had her and never will.

“Why do you look rested and I do not?” he asks.

“Because I did not chew any
qaat
, that's why.”

“You look rested and beautiful,” he says.

She looks away, smiling. She is in her summer cotton casuals: a pair of stretch slacks—comfortable to wear indoors, especially when relaxing—and a shirt open at the neck, her cleavage temptingly ensconced. She cannot help wondering if Zaak is tempted to take advantage of her situation, which is in upended disarray. Their current circumstances are the reverse of what they were several years ago, when he was the guest and the one in need, and she the host and the one in a position to be kind or unpleasant.

He knew the boundaries then and behaved as well as he could under the prevailing conditions. Some hosts are by nature inhospitable when it comes to their private spaces and are miserly if it is their turn to share it.

He says, “You'll have to change if you want to go out of the house. You won't want to attract unwelcome attention to yourself, which you most definitely will if you are dressed the way you are.”

“Would you advise me to change into a veil?”

“Since you have brought one? Yes. By all means.”

“I have brought two, as it happens.”

“Put on a veil on top of what you are wearing.”

“It will be unbearably hot.”

Quick to take offense, he turns his back on her and flings the words at her. He says, “It's your call.”

She notices a smudge, dry and unwashed, at the lower corner of his lip and pictures him eating and bringing his plate close to him, like a Chinese peasant picking up morsels of food with chopsticks, inaccurately tossing food toward his mouth and missing occasionally. He was always a messy eater, Zaak. The residual smear of an uncooked meal, that is what she thinks she is looking at.

The man is a mind reader; he says, “Breakfast?”

The thought of eating food prepared by him in his house is so disturbing that she can only shake her head no. Actually, she means to pick up something somewhere else, she has no idea where or what. A hotel with a restaurant will do her nicely. There she will inquire if anyone knows how she can reach Kiin, her friend Raxma's friend and cousin.

What attracts her attention is not the state of the kitchen, where she might want to cook, or the piles of unwashed plates, which she might wash, but his forefinger, to the end of which something has attached itself: the brown texture of a sort of waste, which eventually she identifies as mucus. He must have picked his nose with the nail of his index finger, which is the longest and dirtiest nail she has ever seen. Smiling, she sees the inside of his mouth, which is unsightly.