Nuruddin Farah - Links

“How many bolts, how many chains, my God!”

Bile said, “When you share an apartment in a violent city, you accommodate each other’s sense of paranoia. We bolt it up, chain and lock it, because it eases Seamus’s paranoia. He refers to this”—he touched the Italian padlock, heavier than a gorilla’s head—“as the ‘humor-me padlock,’ and you can see him holding it in his lap and caressing it, as though it were a cat or a baby!”

“The choices one makes!” Jeebleh said.

“Seamus has developed another obsession.”

“What can that be?”

“He loves the sound of chains against chains, loves what he refers to as the handsome feel and sexy sight of heavy-duty padlocks. These turn him on. One of his lovers in Milan gave him the contraption as a present. When he got back to Mogadiscio, he brought it out and spoke of it in the most glowing terms. He might have been a herdsman talking of his favorite she-camel, praising her.”

“Would you say Seamus is a fetishist?”

“What do you mean?” asked Bile.

“Of chains, locks, and bolts.”

“He is.”

“What’s your take on lock, bolt, and chains?”

“When we’re together, he locks up,” Bile said, “I open up.”

Since there was a logic built into the relationship between these two bachelors, Jeebleh wondered what his job was going to be in a threesome flat share. Bile went toward the kitchen with the breakfast package, avoiding the seven pieces of luggage in the corridor.

“When did he get here?” Jeebleh asked when Bile returned.

“He rang at an ungodly hour,” Bile said, “and told me that his flight from Nairobi had landed just before dark at an airstrip in Merka, he had no idea why. He managed to get a lift from the airstrip, which is about a hundred kilometers from where we are, to a guesthouse in the north of the city. But the manager of the guesthouse had no place for him. It is a house for European Union officials visiting on short missions in Somalia. I was at a friend’s house, but Seamus managed to get me on my mobile, and I arranged for Dajaal to bring him to the house where I was. It was in the dead of a dangerous hour in Mogadiscio, close to three in the morning. Then I drove him here.”

Good breeding kept Jeebleh from asking Bile where he had spent the night, or with whom. In the old days, it was Seamus who always told you everything about his one-night stands, provided you with their first names or aliases, gave you the size of their brassieres, informed you what they liked and didn’t, how they kissed, or whether they were sloppy in bed or not. Details of Jeebleh’s own infrequent forays came out sooner or later at Seamus’s badgering. Bile, however, was unfailingly discreet; he wouldn’t tell you a thing.

Jeebleh said, “I bet Seamus won’t stir until midday.”

“Always dead to the world in the mornings, our Seamus.”

After a pause Bile asked, “Would you like an espresso?”

“If it’s homemade and by your good hands, I would. A double!”

JEEBLEH TOOK A BITE OF HIS BRIOCHE. THE HONEY RUNNING DOWN HIS chin reminded him how much he used to enjoy these delicacies. It was comforting that life had plotted to bring the three of them together again, all this time after their days in Italy, and he couldn’t help praying that they would still live in the country of their friendship.

The espresso was majestic; there was no other word to describe it. Full of vigor, stronger than the kick of a young horse. It was dark, grainy, and concentrated like a Gauloise. It reminded him of their days in Padua, and he was tempted to ask for a cigarette even though he had abandoned the habit two decades earlier. Life was young in those smoke-filled days, days full of promise, all three friends eager to make their marks on the societies they had come from. Dreaming together, the three inseparable friends, and the two women whose presence became de rigueur for Seamus and Jeebleh, smoked their lungs away, and consumed great quantities of espresso.

In those long-ago days, you would see Seamus going off lonely and alone into the darkened moments of memory, as he recalled what had happened to his family in Belfast, blown up in their own apartment, a grenade thrown through an open window from a passing car. He had lived with constant worry about sudden death. He would talk like a man deciding to forget, but not forgive. And he would remind you time and again that two brothers, a sister, and his father had died in the massacre; only he and his mother had survived, because they happened to be out. Mother Protestant, father Catholic, he had been brought up to live as inclusive a life as he could, in which sectarian differences were never privileged. And then the massacre. He was hard-pressed to know what to do. There was something in the way Seamus told the story that made Jeebleh think that he had exacted revenge. And on several occasions he had heard Seamus screaming in his sleep, “The bloody dogs are done!”

Bile now asked Jeebleh, “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, I did. I dreamt too.”

“Do you feel like sharing your dream?”

“I saw a one-eyed, five-headed, seven-armed figure,” Jeebleh told him. “Maybe you’ll help me interpret it, the way you used to.”

“Was the one-eyed figure with multiple heads dancing?”

“Yes.”

“Were there voices in the background chanting narrative sequences to the tale being mimed?”

“How have you worked out all this?”

“Just answer my question.”

“Yes.”

“And was the movement of the figure with the multiple heads extravagant, the gestures now rapid, now deliberately slow, and were the index finger and the thumb held away from the rest of the body, and the arms of the dancer shaped into a wide circle?”

“Yes again.”

Silence settled on Jeebleh, as if permanently. He remembered the calmness as he watched the figure dancing, and saw several faces known to him. He was sorry he couldn’t put any names to the faces — maybe they were from an earlier life, now forgotten.

“Was the figure garlanded and in costume?”

“Y-e-s!”

“Hindu deities have a way of presenting themselves in movement,” Bile said, “some boasting an enormous headgear and the costume to go with it, others arriving while riding a rat. I’m thinking of Ganesh, whose intercession is sought whenever a Hindu embarks on a journey or an enterprise, whose potbellied image, with an elephant trunk and tusks and shiny countenance, is paramount at the entrance to a great number of temples.” Bile rubbed his palms together excitedly and asked with a grin, “Was there a peacock?”

“There was a peahen!”

“Not a peacock?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you saw Mira in your dream — a peahen!”

“Mira?”

“Miss Mira Meerut,” Bile said. “Our — that’s to say, Seamus’s — Mira from the city of Meerut, India, possibly the most beautiful woman to join our tables in Padua. She was in love with Seamus.”

Jeebleh’s ears throbbed, the skin tightening, the rhythm unnerving, his heart beating faster and faster. “Mira wasn’t from India,” he corrected. “She was of Indian origin, all right, but she was from Burma.”

Bile agreed that she may have been traveling on a Burmese passport when they met her, but she was from southern India, culturally speaking. Her parents had migrated from Gujarat, in western India.

“She was the one who brought along a couple of exquisite woodcarvings,” Jeebleh said. “I remember those.”

“That’s right,” Bile confirmed. “She was besotted with Seamus, who, in turn, was besotted with the carvings. The figure he fell for was caught in the process of movement. Such a vivid rhythm, I recall. We had it on our mantelpiece in the apartment in Padua.”