Nuruddin Farah - Links

“What is she like?”

“A halo of comfort to me,” he said. “An elated sense of peace descends on my head when she is around me. In her presence, I am as happy as a yuppie throwing his first housewarming party.”

It occurred to Jeebleh that Seamus, the polyglot from Northern Ireland, might have some thoughts related to his pronoun obsession. He tried it on him: “What pronoun do you think is appropriate when you refer to the people of Belfast? Not in terms of being Catholic or Protestant, but just people?”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“Do you use ‘we’ because you see yourself as part of that community, or ‘they’—a ploy as good as any to distance yourself and to distinguish yourself from the sectarian insanity of which you’re not part?”

After some serious thought, Seamus said, “I don’t know if I’m as conscious of the pronouns as you are. Anyway, what pronouns do you deploy?”

“Myself, I use ‘we’ when I mean Somalis in general, and ‘they’ when I am speaking about clan politics and those who promote it. This came to me when I was refusing to contribute toward the repair of their battlewagon, for I didn’t want to be part of their war effort. I left their side of the green line and relocated in the section of the city where the other clan family is concentrated. It’s as if I’ve written myself out of their lives.”

“Enemies matter to those who create them ,” Seamus responded quickly.

“I’m not with you.”

“When you think of them as ‘they’ and therefore create them yourself, then it follows that you become an enemy to them the moment you opt out of their inclusive ‘we.’ As it happens, you are worth a lot more to them dead than alive, assuming of course that they can lay their hands on the wealth you had in your room or on your person.”

Jeebleh nodded in agreement. “Another Somali proverb has it that the shoes of a dead man are more useful than he is.”

“How cynical can a people get.”

“I would say we’re a practical nation.”

“Deceitful too,” Seamus said, and after a pause went on: “I bet Af-Laawe would’ve helped them to effect their clannish claim on your cash and so on. He’d be attending to your corpse in jig time, before anyone else knew you were a goner.”

“Is he as much of a shit as Shanta depicts him to be?” Jeebleh asked. A wayward silence gave him the luxury to recall Af-Laawe’s thoughts on pronouns. But when other memories from other dealings that had passed between him and Af-Laawe called on him, Jeebleh felt his body going numb, as though his limbs had been rendered lifeless. Nor could he shake off the shock of hearing Shanta’s suspicions about the cartel! Shanta was a mother with a missing daughter, and at times she was clutching at straws, but some of her speculations made sense to him. “Tell me about Af-Laawe.”

“The man is in the thick of every wicked deed,” Seamus said. “Unconfirmed rumor places him in the role of go-between, something he’s apparently good at.”

“Where else does rumor place him?”

“I understand he ran an underhand scheme,” Seamus said, “in which four-wheel-drive vehicles were spirited away with the help of Somali drivers and some UN foreign employees. Again, he acted as a go-between, linking the UN insiders and the Somali drivers. But he received the biggest cut, because it was his racket. The Somali drivers would vanish into the city’s no-go areas, and the Lord knows there were many, and some UN bureaucrat would get his commission in cash. And the vehicles would end up in Kenya or Ethiopia! You’ll probably have heard of the four-million-dollar heist, the one that made it into the international press.”

“Why do you think he hasn’t quit, retired on his millions?”

“He’s past the stage when he can just walk away,” Seamus speculated. “I presume he gets a kick out of courting danger on a daily basis. Sure as eggs is eggs, he’s his own story now, and too big a man to lose himself in other people’s fibs, or to care about them. My guess is that he’ll eventually tempt Caloosha’s wrath, and he’ll end up dead.”

Jeebleh looked disconcerted: “And the AIC?”

“What about him?”

“Did he become part of the story too?”

“Fools are famous for the gaffes they make,” Seamus said. “We weren’t on first-name terms, the AIC and I, but we got on reasonably well until he lost his way in the complex plot of Somalia’s story. He may have meant to do ‘good,’ but his methods were highly questionable. In the process, he ended up behaving very much like StrongmanSouth, whom he meant to expose.”

“He too became his own story?”

“And he compounded the problem by misinforming the American militariat and the UN too. I don’t wish to be unfair to him, but I think that in the end he mislaid his marbles.”

“Would you say he was evil?”

Seamus’s worries made him look more careworn, and a little paler. “I would say he was banal.”

“No one’s going to think of anything else when ‘banal’ comes this close to ‘evil.’”

“He was true to type, and American.”

Not knowing what to make of this, Jeebleh let it be. He concentrated his stare on a gecko at the bottom of the wall, within reach of his hand, and a fly washing its head reflectively, as though tempting the gecko.

SEAMUS’S EYES CLOSED VERY, VERY SLOWLY, LIKE THOSE OF A CHILD RESISTING sleep. Then the phone rang, and Jeebleh answered it. Shanta was at the other end. There was a life-or-death urgency to her voice. She wanted Jeebleh at her place right away, but wouldn’t tell him why. Assuming the worst, he got in touch with Dajaal, who promised he would take him there at once.

NO SOONER HAD JEEBLEH PUT ON HIS SEAT BELT THAN HE APPROACHED Dajaal about joining his cause. He broached the subject with the timidity of someone who had no wish to spend another day behind bars in a detention cell.

“Supposing that I set my sights on destroying a man who’s wrought havoc on my life and done irreparable damage to others close to me,” he said, “and supposing I were to ask you to help, would you give me a hand?”

Sounding as if he had given the subject some thought, and had been expecting the request to come for some time, Dajaal answered, “Of course I would.”

Jeebleh mulled this over and then said noncommittally, “You realize I haven’t a clear idea of what’s involved?”

“Nor have I much of an idea what you’re talking about, come to think of it,” Dajaal said, “but there’s time to develop these plans, plot and fine-tune them. In my previous experience as an army man, and as a long associate of Bile — I’m eternally devoted to him — I have undertaken tough jobs. My training has prepared me, and I am always willing to accept risky tasks in the line of duty.”

Jeebleh assured him that he hadn’t discussed the topic with anyone else, and that it was too soon to come up with a blueprint. In any case, they wouldn’t make any moves until they were clear in their heads about the fate of the girls. Till then, Jeebleh said, mum’s the word!

Dajaal told Jeebleh that as an army officer he was trained to share secret information on a “no-name, no-packdrill” basis. He, Dajaal, would honor that.

“What about Bile?”

“What about him?” Dajaal asked.

They had arrived at Shanta’s gate. “How will he take it?” Jeebleh said.

“He’s aware of your plans?”

“I haven’t spoken to him at all about my plans.”

“When I met him at the clinic this morning,” Dajaal explained, “Bile alluded to how a female bee mates with any drone she meets in the course of her honey-making business.”