Nuruddin Farah - Knots

He says, “I insist on coming with you.”

After a solemn moment in which she considers her options, she realizes that, like it or not, she has joined whichever group Zaak belongs to and that she might as well benefit from her association with him until she has disaffiliated herself from his clique and become part of Kiin’s.

“You come on the understanding that I call the shots,” she says. “We drive close to it, we do not stop anywhere, and the armed escort remains inside the vehicle. Is that agreed?”

“We are at your service,” he says.

She tells him, “I can’t thank you enough.”

Zaak is chuffed. She discerns a frisson of joy in his eyes, then an adrenaline rush of excitement lighting up his entire face. There is delight, which expresses itself in his bodily movements, for he makes as though steeling to embrace her, but, thinking better of it, he restrains himself in time before wholly committing himself. Moreover, there is a lascivious look in his shifty gaze. Even so, he focuses less on the upper parts of her body and more on her sandaled feet, like a teenager blushing at the sudden appearance of his paramour. Cambara is wickedly attractive to him. She knows what Zaak thinks of her, how much he has always adored her body. Not only is she aware of this, she is also conscious of the obvious fact that he is in awe of her irresistibility, which probably explains why he is acting in a provocative way, why he has been mean all along: because he hasn’t ever had her and never will.

“Why do you look rested and I do not?” he asks.

“Because I did not chew any qaat , that’s why.”

“You look rested and beautiful,” he says.

She looks away, smiling. She is in her summer cotton casuals: a pair of stretch slacks — comfortable to wear indoors, especially when relaxing — and a shirt open at the neck, her cleavage temptingly ensconced. She cannot help wondering if Zaak is tempted to take advantage of her situation, which is in upended disarray. Their current circumstances are the reverse of what they were several years ago, when he was the guest and the one in need, and she the host and the one in a position to be kind or unpleasant.

He knew the boundaries then and behaved as well as he could under the prevailing conditions. Some hosts are by nature inhospitable when it comes to their private spaces and are miserly if it is their turn to share it.

He says, “You’ll have to change if you want to go out of the house. You won’t want to attract unwelcome attention to yourself, which you most definitely will if you are dressed the way you are.”

“Would you advise me to change into a veil?”

“Since you have brought one? Yes. By all means.”

“I have brought two, as it happens.”

“Put on a veil on top of what you are wearing.”

“It will be unbearably hot.”

Quick to take offense, he turns his back on her and flings the words at her. He says, “It’s your call.”

She notices a smudge, dry and unwashed, at the lower corner of his lip and pictures him eating and bringing his plate close to him, like a Chinese peasant picking up morsels of food with chopsticks, inaccurately tossing food toward his mouth and missing occasionally. He was always a messy eater, Zaak. The residual smear of an uncooked meal, that is what she thinks she is looking at.

The man is a mind reader; he says, “Breakfast?”

The thought of eating food prepared by him in his house is so disturbing that she can only shake her head no. Actually, she means to pick up something somewhere else, she has no idea where or what. A hotel with a restaurant will do her nicely. There she will inquire if anyone knows how she can reach Kiin, her friend Raxma’s friend and cousin.

What attracts her attention is not the state of the kitchen, where she might want to cook, or the piles of unwashed plates, which she might wash, but his forefinger, to the end of which something has attached itself: the brown texture of a sort of waste, which eventually she identifies as mucus. He must have picked his nose with the nail of his index finger, which is the longest and dirtiest nail she has ever seen. Smiling, she sees the inside of his mouth, which is unsightly.

Such is the strong feeling that has come over her that her hair reacts to it, each hair rising in the shape of rashes on her skin, the size of pustules. When she readies to speak of her irritation, her tongue, ineffectual, turns as coarse as a camel’s, unimaginably papillary.

“Let us see,” she says, talking to herself.

Her movement away from him has the feistiness of a woman angered into action, a woman who cannot hear the loudness of her heartbeat, because her bitterness has gotten the better of her.

“I can make tea for myself,” she says. “I suggest you go, as you must not let everyone wait for you here at home, where the armed escorts are, and at the office, where the elders of the subclans engaged in skirmishes are expecting to see you.”

She starts washing a teapot, scrubbing it clean with a metal brush until it is almost as shiny as a mirror — before he has had the opportunity to respond to her suggestion. For some reason, he looks off-kilter all of a sudden, as redundant as a piece of furniture no longer of any use to anyone.

She boils water for her tea, which she makes in silence. No milk, because she reckons it will have turned, what with the intermittent power supply, and no sugar, because she has decided she will give it up as of today, thank you. During this long pause in their tentative talk, she replays yesterday evening’s rude remarks, which prompted her to leave the room and forced her to seek refuge in the seclusion of the upstairs rooms.

He seems to have worked out a detail concerning how he would like to organize his day and hers. She can tell this from his renewed sense of purpose. Finally, he says, “Give me a minute, please.”

He explains to her that he is going out to talk to the driver and the armed security detailed to escort him to and from work and that he will collect the keys of the truck from the driver and ask him to take a mini taxi back to the office.

“What about the armed youths?”

“They’ll come with us in the truck to guard it and guard its passengers too,” Zaak informs her.

“Might this not send the wrong signal to the warlord occupying the family house, if he happens to see us casing his joint? We wouldn’t want him to become aware of us reconnoitering, or of my presence in the country or for that matter in his neighborhood,” she says.

“Trust me,” he says. “I know what I’m doing.”

Then he goes out the back door to have a word with the driver and the armed escort.

“You will bring me back here, and then you will go to work?” she says. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he replies. But after a pause, he asks, “But why can’t you wait for a couple more days, when we are better organized and can deal with all eventualities?”

“I want to get this out of the way,” she says.

“Make your tea, we’ll talk some more.”

As she does so, in the isolation of the kitchen, now that he has stepped out to talk to the driver and the armed escorts, less unwelcome memories call on her, catching her off guard, memories from their youthful years. To forestall any infelicitous emotions overwhelming her, she strikes the posture of an adolescent girl, impossible to please and hard to get, relaxed, blasé, full of gumption. A bit of a poser, with an undecided expression gathering into a frown as concentrated as a storm, she stretches her body and folds her arms across her chest. She breathes slowly and evenly, lulling herself into a sense of necessary composure. She tells herself that first she must put aside her uncertainties, in order to take a good hold of herself and banish all reservations from her current preoccupations.