Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

Taxliil gloats, “But I wasn’t in Somalia then.”

This is the first time he has said this, and Ahl can’t decide if he is lying. That’s the problem with lying: one lie can make one have doubts about the truth of what has gone before or what is to come later.

“Where did you ring from, then?”

“I was in Lamu, about to travel by boat to Kismayo.”

“Let’s start from the beginning, before you got to Kenya. What route did you take to get to Nairobi?”

“To Abu Dhabi, with a stopover in Amsterdam. From there we flew direct to Nairobi,” Taxliil says. “For company, I had another student from Jefferson High, although I hadn’t known him previously.”

“Did he worship at the mosque as well?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know him well enough to trust him?”

“We just never connected before,” Taxliil says, adding, “You know how it is. Sometimes you connect fast with some people, sometimes you don’t. But during the long trip, we connected, became best buddies. And that felt good.”

Ahl has a natural sympathy for this kind of attitude. He likes it when someone gets on well with others, when someone makes the effort to make others feel good. Taxliil used to have a quality that gave comfort to those in his company. He used to be easy to get along with; he was a sweet child. Spending time with Shabaab has turned him into someone else, a plaintive, fearful youth, full of misgivings about the world and its inhabitants.

“Now, tell me how you got from Nairobi to Lamu.”

“Several of us flew separately to Malindi, where we eventually met up after taking different routes to Nairobi,” Taxliil says, proud that he is remembering the version he has given before.

“And from Malindi?”

“From Malindi, we took a boat to Lamu.”

“And from Lamu to Kismayo?”

“That’s right.”

Ahl is deliberately stretching their conversation a little, to give himself more time to study Taxliil’s expressions. “And after arriving in Kismayo?”

“We spent a night in Kismayo before separating into small units. We gave our American passports over to the minders assigned to take us to the forest, where we would receive our training and instructions. I took ill on the second day.”

“What was the nature of this sickness?”

“Malaria is endemic in the Juba Valley.”

So far so good. Not a hitch or an overlong pause. Then Ahl pluckily plunges into Shabaab-infested waters, asking Taxliil to name the names of his minders and tell exactly when and where he met them.

“What was the name of the chief of the camp?”

Taxliil repeats the same response he has given several times before. “We never knew the real names of the instructors. Nor did we get to know the names of our minders, or those to whom we handed over our passports.”

“Do you recall anything else about any of them?”

“Our instructor had a northern accent, and yelled at us a lot, and wouldn’t tolerate any back talk; he was quite a taskmaster.” Then half-laughing and half-serious, he tries to imitate his instructor. “‘We are not part of history. We are making history, living history! We are not liberators, fellows,’ he would chant. ‘We are martyrs, through the expression of our fury, through our ambition in action, to lead this nation away from self-ruin.’ Then he’d resume his chorus. ‘We are not part of history. We are making history, living history!’ We nicknamed him Taariikh, ‘History.’ It is hilarious when I look back,” Taxliil says, relaxed for the moment.

“What did your training comprise?”

“It was like boot camp,” Taxliil says. “A run before dawn prayer, oatmeal for breakfast, more physical training, bomb-construction training. Lunch, prayer, a half-hour break, then back at it until nightfall, no break except for prayer times.” He is on a roll now, and he goes on without any prompting from Ahl. “The boy I knew from Jefferson asked to be taught not only how to build bombs but how to defuse them.”

“What reaction did he get?”

“A tongue-lashing. The instructor called him a softie. He explained that Shabaab was not in the business of defusing bombs, but in the business of making them and causing as much destruction as possible, until we gained power and set up an Islamic state, the first true Islamic state not only on the continent but in the whole world. An example to others, a model and a beacon to other Muslims.”

“So how did you fare there?”

“It was all fun at first.”

“And then?”

Taxliil seems bewildered, as if he has gotten lost on his way to the answer. What is it that upsets him? What are the subjects about which he is not yet prepared to speak?

Ahl asks, “Did you make any friends?”

Taxliil said, “I knew I could trust Ali-Kaboole. He was more or less my age, but went to Roosevelt High, very bright, kind, always solicitous about me, generous to a fault. I found a friend in him, he was reliable. He reminded me of Samir.”

“What’s become of Kaboole?”

“Kaboole died — blown up by one of our own.”

Ahl asks for an explanation.

Taxliil says, “One of the clan-based factions fighting Shabaab for control of the coastal city of Kismayo killed him in a clash that claimed the lives of several of our best.”

“Did you take part in the fighting yourself?”

“I’ve never taken part in any fighting.”

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t fight; I had no spectacles.”

“How did you cope?”

“Funny you should ask. Before he died, Kaboole took part in a fire-fight in Kismayo, and found a pair on the battlefield, a pair thick as the bottom of a bottle. They belonged to an old man, from the enemy side, killed by one of ours. Kaboole brought them to me, thinking spectacles are spectacles, and any pair would do. This became our joke.”

“Nonetheless, you used them?”

“I used them. I had nothing else.”

“Then what?”

“I was assigned ‘civilian’ duty, and after a while I proved useful as a computer programmer. I was transferred to the publications division and soon promoted. My job was mujahid liaison. I was an interpreter for the foreign contingents training the cadre in bomb building and in explosives.”

“It doesn’t seem that was very harsh.”

Taxliil is quick to disagree. “Life was harsh. No TV. No fun. No games. It felt easy at first. But later, it felt like tasting a piece of hell served daily, along with your meals. We often heard the term shahid , martyr. When we joined, we believed in everything we heard about paradise and the houris in heaven. But eventually we realized it meant the one whose turn it is to die.”

Ahl doesn’t know if Taxliil’s initial enthusiasm to join Shabaab is now entirely replaced by the hostile attitude he displays at present, even though this is to be expected. But will he continue vacillating between several contradictory positions until they get to Djibouti and then feel much worse at his grilling by the U.S. authorities?

“Any idea what became of your passports?”

“We heard stories. That is all.”

“What kind of stories?”

“The stories contradicted one another,” Taxliil says. “We heard that our American passports were being used to bring foreign fighters into Somalia, but knew this couldn’t be true, because all the foreign fighters were older than us. Then we heard that some of the Shabaab leaders used them to get their sons into America,” he says. “I don’t know if this is true or not. I don’t know.”

Ahl has a glimpse, and not for the first time, of the immense difficulties Somalis are certain to face in America in the future.

“So how did you end up in the desert camp where Saifullah offered to martyr himself?” Ahl asks.