Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

Malik imagines the robed men on the run as night falls, alive to the fact that defeat exposes them to ridicule, that their fair-weather friends will leave them to their own devices the second they lose power. Refuge will be difficult to find. One doesn’t need to have read Machiavelli to know the tight spot the men of the Courts are in when or if the Ethiopians occupy Mogadiscio.

He asks Cambara, “How’s Bile taking it?”

“To date, he is not aware of what has happened.”

Malik, in his head, titles his article, “Sheikhs on the Run.” Then he itches most furiously, as if a battalion of lice is advancing on him. He is so itchy he is tempted to suggest that they talk later.

But Cambara goes on. “This isn’t an ideal country for someone on the run, especially if they are planning to stage a comeback, guerrilla style. There are no forests thick enough to hide a contingent of fighters preparing a hit-and-run attack, except in Lower Juba. TheSheikh won’t dare cross into Kenya.”

“Why not?”

“The Kenyans will hand him over to you-know-who.”

“Why not take to the sea?”

She says, “You’d be surprised to know that even many coastal Somalis, born and bred in cities and towns on the sea, never learn to swim, or eat fish.”

“Pirates not knowing how to swim? It’s bizarre.”

“It’s strange but true,” she says.

“I hear the Courts have planned a comeback.”

She says, “Lately, the Bakhaaraha rumor mills have been abuzz with sightings of Shabaab cadres ‘consecrating’ people’s properties with a view toward using them as bases from which they intend to launch their attacks on the Ethiopian forces invading or occupying Mogadiscio. Remember how the Republican Guard melted into the suburbs of Baghdad in the days of the U.S. invasion, and how they organized their comeback in a few weeks, with deadly results?”

“Is the plan afoot to do like the Iraqis?”

“They are planning a comeback.”

“What will the cadres of the Courts do with the houses they are, as you put it, consecrating?”

“I’ve been told by a man related to my maid who is in the arms business that Shabaab have already moved heavy weapons into the houses they’ve consecrated,” Cambara says. She goes on, “In fact, on the very day of your arrival, I met a young thing I suspected was on his way to set up such a safe house.”

Malik, taking notes, presses her to recall all the details she remembers about the encounter. But just as they get started, she says, “Wait, wait,” and when she comes back on the line, she says, “Bile is calling me. Bye, I must go. But, really, you must come and stay with us. You’ll be safer here.”

“Let me think it over.”

“Please come. It’ll be good to have you around.”

And when she hangs up, he remembers how often his wife interrupted her telephone conversations to attend to their daughter’s crying. He reminds himself to phone home and say that he is well and safe.

All the major news agencies quote the Ethiopian government spokesman justifying, in a brief statement, the bombing of the two airports in Mogadiscio. “We attacked the airports so that no unauthorized aircraft may land at either runway in response to acts of aggression from the Courts.”

Nothing sums up the foolishness better than the declaration the Courts’ defense spokesman makes, when he vows that Allah is on the side of the Courts and it is his intention to lead an invasion into Ethiopia and to defeat the army of infidels. He says, “I promise that with God’s will, the Army of the Faithful will conquer Ethiopia in less than three weeks, and it being Ramadan, the holy month, we will break our fast in Addis Ababa.”

By all accounts, Malik thinks, this was the communiqué that had been fired ahead of the bullets. Here is where no-brainers meet clichés, where clichés make their acquaintance with lies, and where falsehood and hyperbole pile up, pyramidlike, until one can’t tell the truth from a lie.

He sits on the balcony jotting down his notes, his mobile phone by his side, when he hears the muezzin’s afternoon call. A monsoon rain in the form of a brief, localized drizzle is drenching the ground below him. Malik feels it when a single, huge drop wets his forehead, the moisture spreading. On impulse, he decides to step out of the apartment alone and head in the direction of the neighborhood mosque. He wants to get there in time for the after-prayer sermon.

Malik remembers traveling with a handful of Afghans crossing hostile territory into Pakistan. He was impressed with how these illiterate men mapped their exit out of Afghanistan and then back into it after doing whatever job took them there. Another time, he spent eight weeks with Rwandan commandos tracking a Hutu génocidaire . But he wonders if he is cut out for a visit to the mosque, where assassins may lie in wait. Still, at a mosque he should be inconspicuous. And mosques, as Jeebleh told him, are the nerve center, the ideal place to take the nation’s pulse on a day such as this; mosques are the key with which to unlock the country’s amped-up politics.

He changes into a sarong, a plain shirt twice his size, a shawl, and a cheap pair of sandals. Out of the apartment, he follows a group of men headed toward the mosque, talking, their conversation touching on the bombing. There is something unmistakably “alien” about his gait as he compares his way of walking to that of the other men: his stride is paced, his look averted, and not wanting to step into a hole or stumble against the rocks and debris scattered here and there, he lifts his feet carefully. He smiles sheepishly when his eyes encounter someone else’s. He murmurs the Somali greeting “ Nabad ” to everyone he passes, and each answers, giving the full complement of the greeting in Arabic: “ Wacalaykumus Salaam. ”

The buildings on either side of the mosque are boarded up, with the odd door open, showing goats in full domicile there, their dry dung strewn like raisins. He holds back for a moment when he comes to the entrance, where a number of men are performing communal ablutions. Then he joins a queue at the standpipes, and begins to banter with a man about the day’s events.

The man says, “I was told there were four planes. One of them dropped the bombs, and the other three were American planes showing it the way.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Someone reliable assured me there were four.”

Another man contributes his bit. He says, “Yes, four planes. One on either side of the jet, the third leading the way to the airport, the fourth following.”

Malik asks, “Leading the way? Where? How?”

“They are idiots, these Ethiopians,” the man says. “I went to school in that country and know them very well. You see, they wouldn’t know how to find their way anywhere, not even to hell, unless you pointed them in the right direction.”

“And to whom did the other planes belong?”

“To the enemy of Islam.”

“Who is that, specifically?”

“The Americans, of course.”

The interior of the mosque is simply furnished; the ceiling is high, and there is plenty of space all around, with columns and pillars separating the prayer hall into uneven sections. Pushed and shoved, Malik is facing an impediment in the shape of a column as he joins one of the middle rows. As the faithful “purpose to offer up to Allah only,” toward Mecca, he whispers the words of the prayer, inclining his head and body, with his hands on his knees, now saying, “Allah hears him who praises him,” with his nose and then his forehead touching the floor, now prostrating, now kneeling. His knees hurt — he needs to pray more often, he tells himself, in the absence of a gym, and God will bless him more. His left foot bent under him, he sits on it, his hands on his knees. How excruciating the pain!