Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

Ahl also regrets he hasn’t brought his computer bag down with him: all his cash is in an envelope in it. He hesitates whether to go back and fetch it, but figures that no one will go into the room to clean until later in the morning. In any event, he has a few hundred U.S. dollars in an envelope in his back pocket, just in case. At least he can pay for their breakfast.

“You conned me,” says Fidno.

“I did no such thing,” Ahl insists.

“You made a fool out of me.”

“Remember that Warsame arrived unexpectedly to pick me up. I had no idea what to say or how to introduce you, as I hadn’t prepared him for your presence.”

“And when we got to their home?”

“I had to talk to Xalan. She and I needed to sort out some family business. We had no chance, you and I, to talk alone.”

“You could’ve said so to me. Plainly.”

The waiter brings their food. Ahl decides Fidno has no right to heap guilt on him; he did no wrong. When the waiter returns to inquire how they are doing, Ahl brings out his two hundred dollars, as if testing the waiter’s and Fidno’s reaction to seeing greenbacks in large denominations. But if Ahl is hoping that the money will move Fidno to resume speaking to him as he had on their earlier visit — to tell him, perhaps, about the bagfuls of cash delivered as ransom to boats with crews held hostage — at least according to the international media — Fidno does no such thing. They eat their breakfast, neither saying anything. Yesterday, Fidno ate his and Ahl’s lunch without embarrassment. Ahl thinks that no one with self-respect would do that. Maybe Fidno’s pennilessness has canniness added to it, his impoverished state being of recent vintage, comparable to a gambler’s indigence — wealthy one day, impecunious the next.

Fidno says, “Let’s trade truths, you and I.”

“How do you mean, ‘trade truths’?”

“You tell me the truth of why you are here, like a man who wants to pick up a whore but dares not, and I’ll you the truth of who I am.”

Ahl is startled. He doesn’t like it when he can’t fathom a person’s character from his knowable features. Fidno, however, is several steps ahead of him. Fidno’s daring suggestion that they trade truths reminds Ahl of trading jokes with Malik. Malik knows thousands of jokes and, what is more, knows well how to draw out the punch line, how to mature it fully in the telling. Ahl has the terrible habit of ruining his jokes by mistiming the narration, the way some women foul their fine faces with the wrong makeup. Not wanting to fall for a ruse he does not recognize, Ahl takes his time, eating his breakfast in concentrated bites.

Fidno says, “I trained as a medical doctor in Germany, and had my own practice in Berlin ten years ago. Then I messed up by having affairs with two of my patients, one of them a close friend of my wife’s. My wife denounced me to the medical board, which charged me with malpractice; then she sued for divorce and won custody of our two children, but not before she’d emptied all our jointly held bank accounts. I left Berlin and joined the practice of an Indian in Abu Dhabi. He was not very good at his job; he knew it and I knew it. But he had an advantage over me: he knew the truth about me.

“For three years, however, things worked out well. Then — what a folly — I made another fatal error. I fell for a married Arab woman, my Indian colleague’s patient. When our affair went sour, she told him, and he reported me to her husband, who in turn reported me to the authorities. Because I did not want to face another case of presumed malpractice in an Arab country, where the punishment would be severe, I came to Somalia.

“In Mogadiscio, an uncle of mine set me up as a financier. I put together half a dozen unemployed fishermen just as the Somali coast was being invaded by Korean, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese ‘sea bandits.’ These sea bandits were stealing our fish, denying access to our fishermen, taking away their livelihood. In those days, there were no Somali pirates; there were only these foreigner sea bandits robbing our seas. As a last resort, I funded the hijacking of a ship belonging to a Korean shipping firm. We held the ship for three months, in return for which we received a fine for their illegal, unregulated fishing. We shared out the proceeds among the fishing community. I didn’t make a huge profit, but I continued to advance the idea of taking any ship found fishing illicitly in our waters. That’s how my involvement in the funding of piracy started.”

He uses the recently coined Somali phrase burcad badeed , which translates as “sea bandits” and which is commonly employed as a sobriquet for “pirates.” Ahl finds the terminology a bit confusing, banditry being something with which Somalis are familiar; in fact, in Kenya, the term shifta is a derogatory moniker for Somali. In other words, contrary to what is understood elsewhere — that Somalis are the pirates — Fidno seems to be casting the vessels fishing illegally in Somali waters as the true “sea bandits.”

Ahl asks, “But aren’t Somalis bandits, in that they exact ransom in the same way sea bandits do? You are unnecessarily obfuscating matters. Why?”

“Somalis are neither pirates nor sea bandits,” Fidno says, his voice strong. “The world doesn’t afford to Somalis a sinecure similar to the one given to those who sin against us. That is a fact.”

“If not pirates, what are they, the Somalis?”

“Pirates are cruel seamen,” says Fidno, “and they are out totally for their own personal gain. They rob their victims, using extreme violence. They torture their prey; they are no Robin Hoods. In all fairness, you cannot describe the Somalis as pirates, in that they do not behave cruelly toward the crew, use extreme violence, or torture their prey.”

“But they are no Robin Hoods, are they?”

“There are only two cases in world history that I can think of when men described by others as ‘pirates,’ for lack of a better term, did in fact play a positive role in their nation’s political history. You may not agree with me, but I would argue the Somali are a case in point. Even though described by others as pirates, it is fair to view them as conscientious avengers fighting to save our waters from total plunder.”

“What’s the second case?”

“The other case is the Dutch pirates.”

“What Dutch pirates?”

“The Dutch pirates known as watergeuzen —‘sea beggars’—set aside their sea banditry for almost two years, from 1571 to 1572, to fight alongside William of Orange to bring an end to Spanish occupation of their land.”

Ahl waits for Fidno to continue.

Fidno obliges. “The Somalis are the closest in outlook to the Dutch watergeuzen , in that the Somalis initially set out to fight off foreign invasion of their sea in the absence of a functioning state, and then establish some kind of a coastal guard to protect our sea resources against continued foreign invasion.”

But Ahl is not sure if they are anything like the Dutch sea beggars or privateers. He understands privateers as vessels armed and licensed to attack the ships of enemy nations and confiscate their property. Historically, many European sovereigns issued such licenses and they left it up to the licensed captains to determine the nature of the punishment to be meted out to the vessels they apprehended. A percentage of their catch went to the captain and crew, and the remainder to the license-issuing sovereign.

“What ‘foreign invasion’ are we talking about?” Ahl asks.

“I am talking of the inhumane assault on the coastland of Somalia, where the country’s trawlable zones are located. A Somali scientist who specializes in fisheries said that at night, the lights of all those foreign vessels were so numerous that they could be mistaken for ‘a well-lit metropolitan city.’”