Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

“Are you still teaching?” Cambara asks.

He nods his head yes.

“Retirement not in sight?”

“Not yet,” he replies.

“And your wife?”

“My wife thinks we’ll be in each other’s way if I retire and stay at home, as she does — she took early retirement. This is also because we’ve recently moved. We bought a smaller apartment for just the two of us when our younger girl left home.”

“Retire and tour the world,” she says. “Why not?”

Jeebleh bites down hard on his lips to keep mum, as he considers the difficulties Cambara and Bile would confront if they were to attempt a world tour. Cambara, younger and healthy and carrying a Canadian passport, wouldn’t have a problem, but Bile wouldn’t get far.

He says, spacing his words, “Ours is a problem of a different nature from yours. Judith was born in Manhattan to Jewish parents from Lithuania. She thinks that New York is the center of the world; she can’t imagine why anyone wants to bother with the peripheries.”

“Isn’t it interesting that all the time I lived in Toronto,” Cambara says, “I never fancied myself as residing in one of the world’s centers? However, when I was younger and lived in Mogadiscio and knew no better, I thought of myself as residing in the center of the universe. How the world changes, and with it our perceptions of centers and peripheries!”

Jeebleh asks, “And what shape have your current perceptions taken now that you are back in Mogadiscio?”

“Every thought is centered here, on Bile.”

“Are you saying that nothing else matters?”

“I am saying that my world is here, where Bile and I are, a world on the periphery that has become a center for me,” she says.

“It’s amazing — how we accommodate the changes.”

She says, “I have been out of Mogadiscio only once since coming here, when I flew to Nairobi with Bile for his prostate operation. We had immense difficulties arranging for his visa into Kenya. I have no idea when or if I will return to Toronto. I can’t see myself living there alone.”

“You can’t imagine my joy at meeting you.”

“And I you.”

He can’t begin to imagine how she will respond to the thought that has just intruded upon his mind. He wonders if, in the midst of this easygoing conversation, this sudden question will encumber their rapport.

He asks, “What of your marriage prospects?”

He feels easy in his mind only after she laughs, his heart gladdening when she sighs and smiles. He is pleased to hear the jauntiness in her tone when she says, “You’re bull’s-eye direct for someone who is otherwise very refined in his manners.”

“I am worried about Bile.”

“How will marriage allay this?”

“It’ll get the religionists off both your backs.”

She says, “I doubt if marrying would achieve that goal. They lack goodwill. Why not think of me as a nurse caring for a convalescing man? They have outlawed contact between the sexes; soon they will forbid women driving. Where will all this end? Only male nurses for male patients? Female patients able to consult only female doctors? And this in a country short of female nurses to begin with, let alone female doctors?”

“How do they view it when Dajaal drives and you’re in the car, sitting beside him in the front, lightly veiled and talking with him?”

She replies, “I lied once when a young nitwit stopped us and asked if he was my husband. I said he was. You see, these religionists are happier being lied to than hearing the truth. They are a hopeless lot, the sods, and I suppose they find me provocative, against the grain. After all, I am not one of the hordes of ill-clad women they recruit to sweep the roads. I’ll say this about them: they know the type of women they prefer — the unlettered kind, who can’t stand up to them. That’s why they look to orphans and kids from broken homes to draft into Shabaab. They rely on the ill-informed and ill-supported to do their bidding.”

“I wonder, are the women volunteering to clear the roads exempt from putting on veils?” Jeebleh asks.

She replies, “It is a class thing. A woman at the wheel of her own car, who lives with a man not married to her and speaks her mind — that they find provocative.”

She falls silent now, and for the first time looks sad.

Jeebleh asks gently, “Where do you stand with Bile?” He waits until she is ready to answer.

“I love him.”

“Let’s call some people in,” he says.

“Who and what for?”

Jeebleh abandons himself to a flush of shyness. Then he says, “So that you and Bile are declared man and wife, in the presence of witnesses.”

He looks around, then at her, sighs heavily, sits back, closes his eyes, and rubs the bridge of his nose. Then he gazes at her, smiling. “God. I feel I am the one proposing.”

“You’re doing just that. Very adequately, I might add.”

“As if I were his parent,” Jeebleh says.

“Is that not how marriages are arranged?”

Jeebleh says, “If you wish, you may choose not to be present when the sheikh pronounces you and Bile man and wife.”

“How very apt!”

“You know what I am doing, why and for whom.”

“The trouble is I do.”

“Then we’ll say no more about it until the day?”

As if on cue, a bell rings, and a minute later, Dajaal comes in to fetch Jeebleh, as arranged. Jeebleh gets out of the chair, undecided what he will do. Dajaal senses that the atmosphere into which he has walked is heavy with others’ concerns; he strides back out to wait in the car.

Cambara stands close to him, their bodies almost touching. Then she takes him in an embrace and kisses him, one cheek at a time. He feels a slight tremor in her body, as she withdraws from a full-fledged embrace. It becomes obvious to Jeebleh that she wishes to get one thing off her chest. She says, “There is no cause for worry on your part or anyone else’s. Bile is in good, loving hands, and he won’t be wanting for anything as long as I live. So don’t worry about him.”

They hug again.

“Go well.”

“Be well.”

Dinner is a hurried affair, because Malik hasn’t got the time to talk; he is on a high, writing. Jeebleh retreats into his room. He is at a loss as to what to do, since he still cannot seem to hold the ideas of a single paragraph in his head long enough to make sense of it. It is his third attempt to read “Plundered Waters: Somalia’s Maritime Resource Insecurity,” a thirteen-page chapter by a political geographer named Clive Schofield in a book called Crucible for Survival . After several more failed attempts, he puts the book aside and, in his head, thanks the author for bringing the plundering of the Somali seas to the world’s attention.

Jeebleh puts on a sweater, fearing he may find the breezy balcony cold. He gains the balcony without disturbing Malik, who is still at it, and he sits as fretful as a debtor worried about settling a bill. He wishes he could help Malik more; he wishes he had thought about how much closer to danger a journalist would be here.

The night is pitch black, the drone more fitful in its nocturnal reconnoitring. He tells himself that this will be the third time foreign forces have aided Ethiopia in invading Somalia. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese mercenaries fought on the side of Ethiopia — then known as Abyssinia — to defeat the Somali warrior Ahmed Gurey, Ahmed the Left-handed. In the late 1970s, the Soviets changed sides and the Cubans intervened, chasing the Somalis out of the Somali-speaking Ogaden region in Ethiopia. Will the third time mark the entry of the United States into this dark history?