Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

The phone in the room rings, reception telling him his SIM card has arrived. He collects it immediately, then sends brief messages to Yusur and Malik, giving them his Djibouti mobile number, which will be valid for only twenty-four hours. On learning that the airline offices reopen at four, he takes a nap.

In a dream of a clear quality, he meets a Somali woman unknown to him in a room in an unfamiliar city. They talk about nothing in particular for a very long time. Then they go for a walk, up a mountain, into a valley of extreme greenery, the leaves shiny, the shade of the trees delicious. To make him speak, a masseuse offers him a massage.

He wakes up, feeling rested.

In search of something to eat, Ahl walks out of the hotel and turns left. He has a cap on against the glare and the midday heat. Here the sun is very, very strong and, never weakening, bakes everything in sight, shortening one’s shadow, almost obliterating it. He knows from having lived in Yemen that only after the sun has exhausted its stamina the afternoon shadows emerge.

Djibouti is a small country caught in the crosshairs of several tendencies — it shares a border with Somalia; is close to Yemen; lies along a stretch of an important waterway, the Bab el Mandeb; and exists cheek by jowl with Ethiopia and Eritrea. The eyes of the Western world are trained on it, and NATO has a prominent presence on its soil. It is a miracle that Djibouti continues to exist and fight for its corner in its own wily ways.

The country, rich in history, replenishes Ahl’s sense of nostalgia, and he walks with the slowness of a hippo after a fight, taking in Djibouti’s polyglot of tongues — Yemeni Arabic, Somali, Amharic, French, and Tigrigna. He’s read somewhere that there is proof of sophisticated agriculture in the area, dating back four thousand years. Important evidence comes from the tomb of a young girl going back to 2000 BC or earlier. Now he is impressed with the city’s cosmopolitanism.

The noise of children running in every direction attracts his attention: a dog is giving chase to five, six boys, one of whom has apparently run off with its bone, maybe to eat it; his mates are in the running for fun, but the dog wants its bone back. A Somali-speaking Yemeni who is standing in front of an eatery observes that the boys are not so much engaged in mischief as they are in finding something to eat. They won’t let a dog eat its bone in peace.

Ahl asks the man if he is open for business. He asserts that he is, and they talk. It turns out that the man relocated from Mogadiscio to Djibouti after the eruption of the civil war there. Ahl orders a meal of mutton and injera, Ethiopian pancakes made from teff, the millet-like grain grown exclusively in the highlands of Ethiopia and ground into flour. Ahl loves the spongy feel of the injera, and its sour taste.

The Yemeni asks him where he is from, and Ahl says he is going to Bosaso.

“You must be in business, then,” the Yemeni says.

“Do you know Bosaso at all?”

The Yemeni sings Bosaso’s praises, describing it as a booming town. He claims to know a couple of people who are making a mint out of shady businesses such as piracy and people smuggling. Pressed, he won’t give their names, only their broad identities. This is not of much help in a region more varied in hyphenated identities than even the United States. But the man is becoming suspicious, knowing that Djibouti is chockablock with spies from the United States, Ethiopia, and other countries. His conversation comes to a halt, and he goes away and returns with the bill, announcing that it is time for him to close up and join his mates. Ahl isolates the key word sit , which in Djibouti, Yemen, and everywhere else Somalis live means to chew qaat .

On the way back to his hotel, the streets are empty; everyone, it seems, is chewing qaat . Ahl comes across an abandoned building, with the paint coming off in layers, birds nesting in its gable, and a dog and its litter of pups sheltering in a quiet corner. The lintel is engraved with the Star of David. A huge lock the size of a human head, and an equally large chain, both brown with rust and old age, hang on the door.

In Mogadiscio, the cathedral was razed to the ground in the general mayhem at the start of the civil war, but here in Djibouti, the synagogue stands as testimony to peace. One of the first victims of the Somali strife was an Italian, Padre Salvatore Colombo, who lived in Mogadiscio for close to thirty years as the head of the Catholic Church — funded orphanage, one of the oldest institutions in the city. More recently, a Shabaab operative desecrated the Italian cemeteries, digging up the bones and scattering them around. To Ahl, the presence of a synagogue in a country with a Muslim majority is a healthy thing: cities, to qualify as cosmopolitan, must show tolerance toward communities different from their own. Intolerance has killed Mogadiscio. Djibouti is a living city, of which its residents can be proud.

At the hotel, he learns that the building served as a synagogue during the colonial era, but lately it has not been active as a place of worship. The man at the reception adds, “But do you know, there are Somalis claiming to be the true lost tribe of Israel.”

“What’s their evidence?” says Ahl.

“Their professional clan name — professional, because they work with metal and leather, and act as seers to other clans — sounds almost like a bastardization of ‘Hebrew.’”

The pin drops. Ahl knows the name of the clan.

He watches some more TV news, and when the airline office has reopened, he buys the ticket to Bosaso, paying in U.S. dollars. Then he goes for a long walk, luxuriating in a day in Djibouti before flying out to Somalia.

To savor the city at night, he goes for a stroll without worrying about his safety. A clutch of men and half a dozen ladies of the night are at the entrance of a nightclub. He pays for a ticket and goes in. The music is terrible. There are four couples on the floor, only two dancing, the others talking and smoking. Despite this, he finds a corner table and sits. What has he to lose? He doubts there are nightclubs in Bosaso or that alcohol will be openly available for fear of what the religionists might do.

A woman with a cigarette between her lips, her dress tight across her chest, her cleavage showily pushing through, wants a light. Instinctively, Ahl feels his pockets, as if he might find a lighter there, or a box of matches. He shakes his head, and with the white of his palms facing her, shouts over the music, “I’m sorry, I don’t smoke.”

“No need to be sorry. But are you alone?”

He pretends he hasn’t heard her question. Even so, she sits down, and as she bends down to do so, he gets a whiff of her perfume. Whatever else he may do, he mustn’t lead her on. But how can he tell her that he is in the nightclub just for the experience of it? Granted, he hasn’t had sex with his wife since Taxliil went missing.

“If you have no objection to sitting with me for a chat and no more,” Ahl says, “then I can offer you a drink of your choice.”

“I’ll sit with you until I find a client.”

He agrees to the deal. She orders hard liquor, a packet of cigarettes, and a lighter. The waiter insists on advance payment for the liquor. Then she asks, “Where are you from?”

“I am on my way to Somalia.”

“Why would you go to a place everyone is leaving?”

“Maybe there is a purpose to my visit,” he says, and falls silent.

The waiter arrives with the order.

“Why come into a nightclub when you are not drinking, dancing, or picking up a woman for the night?” she asks.