Nuruddin Farah - Knots

She asks, “Did you say something about dinner?”

He looks at her in a wicked way, winking, and says, “My ambrosia is here, and therefore I’m not in the mood to eat anything else.”

“Maybe because qaat has dulled your taste buds?”

She thinks how little we know people when they change and their circumstances alter, especially when the two changes occur concomitantly. Like it or not, she has no choice but to adapt to her new situation. It is no easy matter to be in a city with which she is no longer familiar, what with the civil war still unfolding after more than a decade and her long absence from the metropolis. She cannot be sure that Zaak will take up the cudgel in safeguarding support of her if the city’s adolescent boys loyal to the warlord occupying the family property turn lethal. He is less likely to offer no help if the warlord refuses to vacate it. Maybe it is the norm for the likes of Zaak to behave abnormally in atypical circumstances.

She says, “You were never friends with food, unless someone else tamed it. I remember you either making do with the same diet every single day or running to the nearest restaurant at the sight of unpeeled onions. I felt you fled from uncooked meat the way some of us might flee a lion.”

“I’ve survived, as you can well see.”

“In what condition?”

“I am not complaining.”

When she can no longer focus her mind on these thoughts, she asks, “Where is the dinner that I must eat alone?”

“It is by the fridge,” he says.

“Not in the fridge?”

“The electricity grid has been off since before midnight yesterday,” he explains, “and the fridge is off. No point in keeping it switched on and no point in putting the food in it either.”

Cambara looks up at the bulb overhead, burning.

Zaak follows her eyes, nods several times, and then offers an explanation. “The supply of electricity for this — the second phase — originates from a small two-star hotel which generates its own power. The manager has a little ice-making factory. We tap into it.”

“How do you do that?”

“I make underhand payments to his workers,” he says, pleased with his graft. “The water heater, my bedroom, and this section of the living room are connected to this supplier. I pay five dollars a month for tapping into the system.”

“And to cook?”

“I don’t cook,” he says, as if proud of it.

Taken slightly aback because of the fierceness of his assertion, she makes as if to flatter him. She says, “Surely you’ve prepared the dinner you’re offering me? If offered, I would eat your Bolognese, I am so ravenous.”

“My dear, I couldn’t bear the pressure you place on anyone who deigns to present you with the food they have cooked for you,” he says. “You once described the sauce I prepared as looking like bird turd and tasting like chop suitable for a dog.”

She does not remember saying that to his face, but this sounds like something she might have said to her mother over the phone, and he might have been eavesdropping on her long-distance conversation with her. It would be very like him to have done that. No matter, his remarks do not produce the result he may have expected, even though they are acerbic, and he delivers them coolly, as though he has rehearsed them with the intention of hurting her; the keenness of his observation seems to dull against her skin, which feels indifferent to its scathing maliciousness. She stares at him long and hard, maybe in an attempt to think of badinage of equal incisiveness. Alas, she cannot.

He goes on. “I’ve seen you terrorize chefs.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Haven’t I seen you turn your nose up at good food, lovingly and humbly served to you?”

“I don’t recall ever making unfriendly remarks about your cooking,” she says, “never to your face, anyway.”

“Now we’re talking.”

He stares back at her in silence, his eyes reddening and his once-over smirking taking a more pronounced shape. He does not have to speak; his look says it all, in fact more than she can take at present or dare to cope with. This is the closest the two of them have ever come to sparring openly. If they have resorted to playing a power game — something they have never done before — then one of them has to concede defeat. There were the days when he avoided confrontations and withdrew into the tight-lipped taciturnity of equivocation, worried of what Arda might say or do to him. He was aware of his beginnings: that if it had not been for Arda, the likelihood of landing as many chances as he had under her patronage would have been either wholly nonexistent or minimal. Perhaps now that he is hanging on to the lowest rung of the ladder, he can’t be bothered.

Like a hound that has tasted blood and is closing in for the kill, he says, “Time you grew up, time you began to live in the real world.”

She feels her larynx seizing up, with her vocal cords failing to produce the slightest sound. However, she is still capable of processing the thoughts that her memory is transmitting. She thinks that when relationships between two persons who once thought they were intimate undergo major changes brought about by the presence or absence of sex that involve one party or both, the aggrieved one attacks the other with uninhibited animosity. She has been a victim of these types of assaults before — Wardi and now Zaak. She is alert to the contradictions and the unfairness of such reactions. Nonetheless, she understands where Zaak’s animosity comes from. Then she imagines herself in the body of an elephant, which puts the animal’s unparalleled strength into the equation; better still, given his physical shape, she likens herself to a sumo wrestler who lifts a challenger and drops him with accomplished flair. (Cambara is indebted to Arda, who is fond of comparing the strength of women to that of an elephant, which seldom makes full use of it, either because it does not know the extent of it and what it can achieve employing it or because its generous heart requires that it give more than it will ever receive in return.)

He resumes, “Time I welcomed you to the real world.”

“As if I live in a world of my own manufacture.”

“You lie to yourself; that’s your problem.”

“How dare you speak to me in that tone of voice?”

His silence serves as salt on her open wound.

“Tell me, why have you never spoken of this?”

“Because I’ve had no opportunity to do so.”

“Why today?”

Zaak does not say anything.

“Why choose the very first day of my arrival in the city? Is it because you are aware that I am wholly reliant on you for guidance and for protection? Is that how to treat a guest?”

“I’ve been a guest all my life,” Zaak says.

“Not in our house, you weren’t.”

“How would you know?”

She hurts deeply, her inside aching. “My mother raised you as if you were of her own flesh and blood.”

“You’re saying it yourself!”

“What? What have I said?”

“As if I were of her own flesh and blood, which I was not. You knew it and exploited it every way you could; she knew it and made a point of reminding me whenever I stepped out of line.” He throws the words at her like darts on a dartboard.

“Born a coward, you’ll remain one,” she says.

She tries to recall a single instance in all the time the two of them lived together — as children raised in the same household or as a couple pretending to be man and wife — when she behaved as uncivilly toward him as he is doing right now. It doesn’t surprise her that she cannot find any.

No doubt, she kept him at bay, refusing to share “intimacies” with him. Blame it on Arda for setting the terms. She believes she herself was impeccable in her dealings with him, albeit within the parameters of the contract with Arda and then eventually with him. As for the time spent together in their younger years, there is the matter of her excessive naughtiness. Her mother tried and failed to moderate her wildness or to make her behave as one might expect of a girl of her background. Zaak was such a dunce, only good enough to receive the school’s booby prizes; she knew he would not amount to much.