Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

Malik’s skin is smarting from the sand now blowing from the sea, the breeze bearing more than a touch of salt; he is ceaselessly rubbing his eyes sore with the heel of his hand. The same white-robed man with the purple keffiyeh opens a window in the Customs cubicle and, after a payment of a visa fee of twenty U.S. dollars, stamps their passports, not a single word exchanged. Even so, Jeebleh’s Somali seventh sense will not settle down.

They pick up their suitcases. Another white-robed man, this one with a single-tailed whip in his hand, asks if they have anything to declare. Jeebleh responds that they do not. The man says, “Welcome to the country,” and adds, “Godspeed.”

As soon as they are out of the building, Jeebleh starts across the no-man’s-land of the airport grounds, giving himself the physical and mental space to calm his heightened nerves. Malik trails far behind, taking his time. No question there is a huge difference between this arrival and Jeebleh’s harrowing arrival last time, at Casillay, twenty-five kilometers to the north. He quaked to his feet then, his heart pounding with fear. Those were the days of fierce armed confrontations between the warlords StrongmanSouth and StrongmanNorth. A Green Line divided the city in unequal halves, each warlord running his half. A boy not yet in his teens had been killed before Jeebleh even left the airport, as he and his mother boarded their Nairobi-bound flight.

Jeebleh knows that the internal wrangling of the Courts has prevented them from setting up a city administration, but there is no denying the semblance of order in the shape of the white-robed men with their riding crops or bullwhips. This time, there are no shifty men to waylay one, or unruly youths to use one for target practice, taking odds on the outcome. Even if there are no uniforms or badges, there are still activities associated with authority: men stamping passports, checking papers, holding back the spectators and those welcoming passengers. They walk past the boisterous, expectant crowd, taxi drivers waiting for fares, unemployed men offering to carry their shoulder bags, beggars begging. Amazingly, no one in this rowdy lot dares to step beyond the cord meant to keep them out, over which a man in a robe stands guard with a whip. Then Jeebleh spots Dajaal, who is waving, and he relaxes. His friend is an old pro who has lived through good and bad times in this city. Jeebleh met him during his 1996 visit and knows him to be brave, reliable, meticulous, and, above all, punctual.

Jeebleh hugs Dajaal warmly, and introduces him to Malik as “the man you want on your side when the chips are down.” He introduces Malik as “my son-in-law, father to my only granddaughter.”

Dajaal has with him a gawky, toothy young man with a long neck, whom he presents as Gumaad, a journalist. Jeebleh remembers the name, and how Dajaal characterized him on the phone as a “homegrown religionist-leaning fellow.”

A crowd gathers around them, looking on curiously. In Somalia, crowds form quickly, maybe because people are hungry in many ways: hungry for news, good or bad; hungry and also hopeful that they may gain by standing close to where something is happening, to where two people are talking. But crowds change into mobs at the sound of a clarion call. Jeebleh recalls a couple of hair-raising incidents from his last visit.

As they walk toward the car, Dajaal says to Malik, “Gumaad will serve as your escort, your guide, and your researcher. God knows you will need someone with a handle on local politics, which is a minefield for a novice.”

Even if Dajaal had not said anything in advance, Gumaad’s accent would be a dead giveaway to Jeebleh. He hails from the same part of the country’s central region as do Dajaal, Bile, and StrongmanSouth, as well as the man known among the in-crowd of the Courts simply as TheSheikh, the current ideologue and firebrand of the religionists. Jeebleh has often contended that you can trace all of Somalia’s political instability over the past twenty years to this very district. Feisty and belligerent, its natives have between them contributed several of Somalia’s most obdurate warlords, deadliest head pirates, and wealthiest businessmen, each in their way sworn to making the country ungovernable.

Jeebleh takes Dajaal aside and asks, “How well do you know Gumaad?”

“How well can you know anyone these days,” Dajaal observes.

“Would you trust him? That’s my question.”

“I would string him from the rafters if he misbehaves toward you or Malik.”

Jeebleh doesn’t pursue the topic of trust, whether one can know another person in Somalia in these times. He knows that Dajaal means what he says.

Gumaad, finding himself alone with Malik, meanwhile, dispenses with formalities. “Be warned, I have strong views, and they are different from Dajaal’s.”

“I see nothing wrong with that,” Malik says easily.

They get into the sedan, Jeebleh sitting up front with Dajaal, Gumaad and Malik in the back. Dajaal starts the engine but does not move, insisting that everyone put on his seat belt. Gumaad grumbles that “belting up” is un-Islamic; accidents happen and deaths occur when Allah wills them. “When will you accept that nothing happens without His express decision?”

“In my car, we wear seat belts,” says Dajaal.

Even after he buckles up and Dajaal puts the car in motion, Gumaad doesn’t let it go. “Listen to you. ‘In my car, we wear seat belts.’ This is Bile’s car, not yours. So you can’t say ‘my car.’” A jet of his saliva strikes Malik in the face, and he wipes it away discreetly. Jeebleh, amused, shakes his head at this pointless altercation, looking from Dajaal to Gumaad. What relevance does the ownership of a vehicle have to do with wearing or not wearing seat belts? But Somalis, he knows, seldom admit to red herrings. It is typical of them to confound issues, mistake a metonym for a synecdoche. While there is always a beginning to an argument, there is never an end, never a logical conclusion to their disputation. Somalis are in a rich form when holding forth; they are in their element when they are spilling blood.

Now the car is slowing down. A man in a sarong and a T-shirt is standing in the middle of the road, holding a gun in his right hand. He flags them down.

Dajaal pulls to the side of the road and cuts the engine, as instructed. They alight, and the man gestures them to benches in the shade, an indication that they could be here for a long while. Gumaad asks, “Under whose authority?”

Dajaal gets a grip on Gumaad’s elbow and leads him toward the benches, although not without Gumaad asserting loudly that he will make a call to TheSheikh and all will be sorted out in no time. He says to the man in the sarong and the T-shirt, “We thought that checkpoints manned by armed militiamen loyal to the warlords were things of the past.”

The man pays him no attention at all.

As if to throw them further off course, another man arrives — an impressively large man, hairy of face, proud of bearing, slow of stride, with beady, penetrating, but unusually self-contained eyes. He has the longest, most unkempt beard Jeebleh has ever seen, reminiscent of a devout Sikh’s. His immaculate, all-white attire, which he wears the way a police officer might wear a uniform, consists of a tunic and pajama-like trousers, cut wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, the legs short enough to allow him to perform his ablutions without rolling them up. He carries two mobile phones, a ringing one in his right hand, a silent one in his left. Maybe there is a third mobile phone in the pocket of his tunic, which droops heavily as he strides forward. Gumaad whispers to Dajaal, “What is he doing here?”

Dajaal says, “You never know with Garweyne. But tell me, is he no longer in the computer business? I thought he was doing very well lately, considering.”