Nuruddin Farah - Knots

“Any chance of this happening?”

“To this end,” Raxma says, “I have brought with me affidavits signed by the Duluth police chief, another by a congressman, and a third by the headmaster at the school in Duluth Gacal went to, all of them attesting to Gacal’s identity and that of the woman otherwise known as the Unidentified Woman.”

“What did the consular officer say?”

“In a letter that I am carrying,” Raxma says, “the consular officer at the embassy invites Gacal for an interview in which the boy will be allowed to present his own case.”

“But that’s wonderful,” Cambara says.

Just then, Arda drags Cambara away and, for some bizarre unexplained reason, insists that her daughter submit herself to a thorough physical examination, more or less in public, one to be conducted under Farxia’s astute supervision. They all wait in the anteroom to her clinic, anxiously silent like patients at a dentist’s, as if in pain. After a few minutes, Farxia returns and she seems pleased with the result as she goes to where Arda, Bile, Kiin, Raxma, and the Unidentified Woman are all sitting, worried stiff. Elated, Farxia shows them a single printer-generated sheet, the kind that has perforations at the edges.

Joyous, Arda ululates, “Didn’t I always say so?”

The sheet with the mysterious information about Cambara looks a bit more tattered now that it has been handled by several persons. It is straight in some edges and cut crookedly in some corners; it is passed from hand to hand. When everyone in the anteroom is satisfied, Arda calls to Bile, who is permitted to see the diagnosis.

Bile’s verdict. “A clean bill of health.”

“What do you know?” says Raxma sarcastically.

“My mother is nuts,” says Cambara.

Then Cambara wakes up.

Bile says to Cambara, “I suggest we take a break.”

It is past midday the following day, and Cambara, Gacal, SilkHair, and Bile are upstairs in the en suite bedroom, rehearsing. They are here because Seamus hasn’t finished the much-needed carpentry and joinery work on the stage, and he has requested they find an alternative temporary place until the day after tomorrow, when he hopes to be done. Cambara has chosen the room farthest from where Seamus is hammering away with unprecedented fastidiousness. It is the only almost-habitable room in the house, the others being no better than dumps. But neither Gacal nor SilkHair has minded sleeping downstairs, since they have had the run of the entire house except for Cambara’s room, which is under lock and key.

They’ve been rehearsing nonstop several hours every day — from soon after eight in the morning, following a quick breakfast, until the lunch hour, after which they take a brief break, no siesta, and then resume work, going over the text again and again. A perfectionist, Cambara feels there is still a lot of rehearsing to go through. Cambara is dead beat. To the trained eye of Bile, who takes pride in interpreting the delightful expressions on the face of the woman whom he adores, she looks battle weary.

It’s become de rigueur, in the last couple of days, for Cambara and Bile to spend several hours with each other, with Cambara directing and occasionally rewriting and Bile, Gacal, and SilkHair rehearsing and learning their lines. At times, when Cambara invites them, they are joined by others, including Dajaal, Qasiir, and others who make walk-on cameo appearances as part of the crowd in a village, speechlessly watching as the principal protagonists act out their roles per Cambara’s set plan. Plainly told, the latest version of the play is about an eagle raised from babyhood among chickens. He is made to fend for his food by pecking on the ground, in the dust — and therefore he thinks of himself as a chicken. A chicken who is the eagle’s peer and playmate is hell-bent on sabotaging the idea of the eagle’s finding his wings and flying, so to speak. The farmer who found the eagle several years earlier and who didn’t mind the bird’s cohabiting with the chickens now wants to retrain the eagle so he will become what he has never been — a bird able to fly. Cambara, in her rewrite of the original folktale from Ghana, has altered its drift — from giving a moral message, as folktales are wont to do, to being intense, provocative, complex, and a touch modernist.

“Time to take a break,” Bile advises when he realizes that Cambara is not getting her way with the boys. Tired and hungry, they are tetchy, their back talk moody. She is exhausted too; so is he.

Although Cambara is discreetly aware of Bile training his keen eyes on her, she does not capitulate until the sharpness of his overpowering probe mixes with her desire to be alone with him in a room, not doing anything extraordinary, not even loving — just cuddling, snoozing. The look in her gaze softens a little under the scrutiny of his stare and a door to her heart opens, albeit in a tentative way. How marvelous to live close to someone whom you can wholly trust, whose companionship is never in doubt. But despite her exhausted state, in spite of the fact that her eyes are narrowing like the shutters of a shop at closing time, Cambara does not luxuriate in the warmth and affection she feels toward Bile, instead remembering the anger that has precipitated her arrival in the civil war city — her husband’s treacherous behavior, which led to Dalmar’s death and brought about her leaving him and Toronto to reinvent her place in the world. She wishes she could reciprocate Bile’s charismatic advances, taken as she is with his calm approach to matters of the heart, never pushing, always concurring to withdraw at the slightest hint of bother on her side, or a change in her mood or perspective. She is cautious, as women must always be. Nor does she want to offer the impression of being too forward. She can’t help being mindful of how first commitments lead one to a plateau of high expectations, only to abandon one in yet another snare. She would do well to pretend, if need be, that she is operating within the boundaries of tradition and remain within the parameters of acceptable behavior in the presence of Dajaal, Kiin, Gacal, and SilkHair. Seamus, she tells herself, is a person apart, a man in his own category, when one thinks of him in the context of local convention. Nothing she might do would ever disconcert him; he is a seen-it-all, done-it-all Irishman. All the same, it will not do for her to acquit herself with the deliberate calmness of a hard-to-get, difficult-to-know, impossible-to-love woman.

In her mind, she is staring at a door. Which key might open it to help her interpret the dream earlier? Was it a dream full of prophetic craving, in that it was very concrete — her mum visiting, the play brought to the stage, Raxma coming, bearing affidavits from the police chief in Duluth and calling at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, where she arranged for an interview with Gacal? Hopes raised and then dashed are a disaster. Must she interpret the dream as being no different from the daily, weekly, or monthly horoscopes one reads in the newspapers and magazines? She feels dizzy; the room she is in roams; she has no idea where she is and with whom until Bile speaks. Alas, she can’t follow what he is saying — she is engaged with her worries.

He is most attentive to her, his bodily postures very deferential, quiet as a monk in a monastery at prayer time, highly indiscreet. His physical closeness helps her relive the telling pleasantness of their moments spent together, just as the world keeps speedily retreating. Imagine a world with Bile in it, but with no Dajaal. It is a kind of marriage, Bile’s dependency on Dajaal, and Dajaal’s protectiveness of his — for lack of a better word — employer. But when you work Seamus into this symbiosis, then you have problems of a different nature. She doesn’t know if a relationship with Bile on his own, without Dajaal and without Seamus, will ever be feasible.