Knots (22 page)

Cambara, following a civil war rule of thumb, takes a route different from the one she used earlier to the shopping complex, aiming to get a taxi to Maanta Hotel. She moves with the single-minded vigilance of a lizard, watchfully preparing to confront youths idling away their time on street corners or in front of their squats in wait for potential victims to walk past. Some people feel there is protection in numbers; not Cambara. She prefers doing her own thing her own way, believing that the key to success in her endeavors lies in acting alone.

She is an optimist by nature. Asked why she is embarking on this adventure, she might reply that she is trying her luck. Notwithstanding that, she is inclined to keep the various parties with whom she is dealing separate so that none of them is au courant of her plans, especially not when she makes sallies into another party's preserve. From the little she has seen of him, Bile strikes Cambara as a man with a noble spirit, and he keeps returning to her thoughts. Dajaal seems to act with a kind of authority and native ability that is formidable. It will be to her advantage to work in collusive partnership with Dajaal and to humor Bile while he, in turn, humors her. Kiin, a woman apart, has not capitulated to the strictures of living in the city, which is admirable, considering the potential danger. As for Jiijo, it is looking more and more likely that Cambara has already won her over. It saddens her, though, as a trace of gloom invades her own bearing at the thought of relying on Jiijo to betray Gudcur, who despite being a warlord and a brute, has fathered Jiijo's children. Cambara foresees incomparable complications ahead.

Cambara now puts more energy into her stride, springing faster and faster, her heart anxiously beating like that of a young girl on her way to a rendezvous with her first date ever. This is because she is overwhelmed by the desire to get together with Kiin, with whom she wishes to become better acquainted. She is more than conscious that she has not done a thing about one of her principal pursuits: to devote more time than she has so far toward the construction of “peace,” so she may leave “the place” better than when she found it.

To advance her commitment to recruiting some of the youths and to promote the idea of peace, she hopes to give them a start in normal life. She will buy SilkHair, who is young enough to go to school, all the exercise and drawing books that he will need to register at one or another school as a remedial pupil. Then she trips up, losing her balance and catching herself in time before falling. As she tries to steady herself and regain her composure, her eyes fall on a clutch of men gathered at the bend in the dusty road just before the shopping complex. The men are staring; they have daggers for eyes, one of them managing to pierce through to the start of a weakening resolve. She stiffens her determination against the oncoming mugging, and the men seem to sense it, backing off as she approaches.

Odeywaa, the shopkeeper, finds her a taxi, which she takes not to Hotel Maanta, her destination, but—as a decoy—again to Hotel Shamac. There, the deputy manager receives her effusively, leads her to his air-conditioned office, and plies her with refreshments. He rings Kiin to alert her of Cambara's arrival, and learns that Kiin is expecting her.

The deputy manager says to Cambara, “My driver will take you to Hotel Maanta, where a message from Kiin is awaiting your arrival.”

A few minutes later, the driver of the vehicle the deputy manager of Shamac has lent her is pressing the horn of the air-conditioned saloon car. Two sentries in blue uniform open the gate of Hotel Maanta, and, on making out the man at the wheel, they rise, as if in unison and in welcome recognition of him, greeting him with voluble chattiness. Cambara alights from the vehicle to find a thickset man in a white long-sleeved shirt, beige trousers, and black dress shoes moving in her direction, having taken the steps two at a time, nearly falling. He extends his hand, a smile spreading across his broad face, and comes toward her with the resolute intention of not permitting the guards to outdo him when it comes to receiving an honored client. Cambara surveys the scene ahead of her, favoring it with a cursory scrutiny, deciding that she likes what she has seen so far and is sure to fall in love with it the longer she is here. Moreover, she wants to be indebted to Kiin, to become friends with her, to receive good counsel from her; she wants Kiin to acquaint her with aspects of Mogadiscio that Cambara has not yet encountered. She looks forward to Kiin introducing her to the other women of whom Raxma has spoken, legions of women who are peace activists. Turning around, Cambara waves to the driver, who is maneuvering the vehicle out of a narrow space with consummate ease and leaving, while she mouths “Thanks” and he waves in acknowledgment.

Beaming from cheek to chin, the large man introduces himself. “My name is Mohammed. I am an assistant to Kiin, the manager, and I have a message for you.”

“What's the message?”

Mohammed puts his hand in his trouser pockets only to bring it out empty and then study it as if it might reveal a mystery to him. Then he inserts it in the other pocket, rooting in it, with Cambara waiting for him all the while, thinking he may bring out a piece of paper with a message scribbled on it. She is anxious, patient. In a moment, despite her expectation, he is looking at a key and, for some reason that is unclear to her, appears first mystified, then despondent. He hangs his head to one side, like a boatswain whose vessel has mysteriously gone adrift. Mohammed offers the key to her, saying, “Here.”

Cambara takes it with both hands, muttering her thanks, which to her sound a little fake, and averting her eyes, because there is something she does not understand. She stares at the key for a long while, amused. In her head, Cambara replaces the word “message” with “key,” but this will not do. Rather than ask what to do with the key or to identify which room it is meant for, given that there is no number stamped on it and nothing to indicate what it may open, she asks, “And the message?”

Mohammed makes the laborious effort of someone struggling hard to mask a speech impediment. He speaks, pausing between every two or so words. Cambara strains to string the words together herself to make sense of them. “Kiin has said to give you a key to the room that she has reserved for you.”

Cambara turns the proffered key this and that way. The wind in the trees, the sweetness of their shade, the fact that the air here is fresh and no cigarette odor is riding the breeze: these, she hopes, will help her spend a very pleasant time at the hotel and make her stay in it an abiding joy. Overwhelmed with a sense of elation, and, unnerved, because everything is working out beyond her expectation, she loses her focus for a moment and then her physical equilibrium. Her gaze unfocused, she looks farther into the undefined distance, and as she does so, places her left foot behind her right, with the big toe of her left foot pushing against the right heel until she feels excruciating pain; then steadies herself.

She asks Mohammed to lead her to her room and follows him not too closely as she conjures up images of her workaday situations during her stay at Hotel Maanta. After she ascends a flight of stairs down by the well to her left, her body cells register the proximity of water. The generator is on and providing electricity. She feels the earth under her feet tremble and prays that her room is farthest away from this ungodly din.

“Is the generator on all day and all night?”

“It's not on when we can tap into an ice factory in the proximity,” replies Mohammed. “We turn it on whenever the owners of the factory are load shedding, and they do this without prior notice.”

She remembers in the days when power was supplied by the municipality of the city and cost almost nothing, and no one ever heard of load shedding. Realizing that she is lagging a few paces behind Mohammed, she catches up with him, and they walk up another flight of stairs, down an asphalted lane, with trees and shrubs on either side of it, through a metal door, up the stairway to the first floor, and along the corridor.

Finally, Mohammed comes to a shuffling halt and points out the metal door with no number on it to her. She inserts the key in the lock somewhat tentatively and after several attempts, turns it with resolute thrust. She thanks him again and lets herself in, securing the door behind her with a bolt.

The two-room setup—neat, decent-sized, boasting two beds, both pushed against a wall—faces away from the two generators, one of which is on now, maybe because the minimal daytime supply of power provided by the privately run electricity company is off. That the air conditioner is on and that she can barely hear the noise of the generator assures her further that she will like it here.

Moving about the two rooms to explore the extent of their combined spaciousness, Cambara paces out the distance between the rooms and then the two beds, and then concentrates on measuring out their relative nearness to the bathroom. Like a spoiled child making a choice by going meeni-mano, now pointing at one bed and now at the other, she settles eventually on the bed on the right side in the belief that she will enjoy sleeping in it more. She stretches herself on it, testing how comfortable lying on it will be. Then she pulls open one cupboard after another until she discovers, discreetly worked into one wall, a safe, with instructions in Somali, Arabic, Italian, and English. Cambara is agreeably surprised to find, when she pulls the handle toward herself, intending to set the combination number of the safe to one she will remember, that her luck is favoring her with a good smile. This is because there is a Post-it note from Kiin informing Cambara that she has left a mobile phone under the mattress of the bed to the right-hand side of the room and asking her to “please ring her up” to let her know that all is well. She does as Kiin suggests, pressing the Menu button and speaking right away to her kind host. Then Kiin tells her that she has also arranged for a plumber to see Cambara in an hour or so and asks her to wait until he arrives, then take him and show him the jobs she wants done. Mohammed, on Cambara's say-so, will be only too glad to organize a vehicle and bodyguards for her.

Cambara rings off, her unbounded sense of exhilaration spreading to the point of affecting her so deeply that she is almost tearful. She decides no one can touch Kiin for out-and-out kindness shown without obvious ulterior impulse. Civil wars or not, there are people like Kiin who are by nature generous to a fault, well meaning, and excessively munificent. In contrast to the uncharitable Zaak, who is her cousin, her former “spouse,” and her current host, Kiin has taken to seeing to all of Cambara's immediate needs despite the fact that they are not blood relations. Cambara thinks that this goes to prove that not every Somali is obsessed with the idea of clan affiliation and that many people behave normally even if the conditions in which they operate are themselves abnormal.

Cambara's display of marked, positive attitude toward Kiin's generosity is short lived when she starts to sorrow over the general state of decay in the compound opposite the hotels. The unsightly scene before her pulls her up for further grief. She stands directly behind the window, looking out and surveying a wasteland of heartbreaking ugliness: trees that have not grown to their natural height, scraps of wood and metal thrown any which way, children rifling in the arid waste all around, as though in search of something precious that they can sell. The fact that she sees adult men squatting and defecating in full view of the road, which is about fifty meters to their back, troubles her no end. Then her wandering gaze dwells for a few moments on a man wielding an ax and turning a huge metal pipe of industrial size into fragments, chopping it into cartable portions. She reckons that men giving themselves in to insatiable greed employed similar destructive methods first to dismantle the national monuments and then to break them up into bits before selling them off dirt-cheap in the one of the Gulf states.

It is when she turns away from the desolation outside and reenters the bathroom that she is impressed with how clean its floor is. She even forgets about all her other disconsolate impressions for a minute, and her eyes shine forth with radiance. Finally, she removes her boots and then takes off her clothes, item by item, dropping them on the floor and trampling on them, the way her son used to do whenever he was in a mood to try his father, Wardi's, patience. How Wardi would go berserk, ready to hit the boy for his obduracy. Cambara, in maternal circumspection for her son's well-being, would intervene, picking up the offending items herself from where her son dropped them and telling Wardi: “I want you to take it easy. And please let peace reign in this house.” Remembering the turf wars fought over the raising of her only son, whom she failed, as she could not safeguard him from Wardi's filicidal tendencies, she is unable to keep her rage in check. She wishes that she had acted like a hen, clucking away in watchful frenzy over her chicks, shielding them from harm.

She is so full of rage that she takes a huge karate kick at the door. Fortunately, she doesn't break it in two. But that doesn't stop her from letting go a scream so ungodly that running feet come and someone taps gently on the door to ask after a decent interval if everything is okay with madam.

“Everything is fine, thank you,” she says.

Then she sinks into a crouch, her fists balled into a fist, her teeth clenched, and her whole body in a tremor as if she is fortifying herself for a final showdown with her inner demons.

When her desperate attempt to calm her nerves leads her to mutter self-recriminations of the remonstrative kind, in which she blames Wardi for her own shortcomings, the activated part of her mind pulls itself back in the rational belief that this is self-destructive. Has she not come to Mogadiscio in hope of chancing upon a noble way of mourning her loss, not in anger but while recovering the family property to devote herself to the service of peace?