Nuruddin Farah - Knots

She tilts her head to one side and then remembers the curious remark Zaak made when he picked her up from the airport, comparing blood relations to rivers in which the currents move in different directions, occasionally going parallel but hardly mixing. “And yet the patches of water belong to the same river, as do the members of a blood community,” he said. “There is the matter of choice in regard to which side of the river you stand on. Had you given thought to any of this before upping and coming to Somalia?”

She thought he was fishing. She believed it wise not to tell him much, definitely not before she had her feet firmly on the ground, had her own room in a hotel, and had reconciled herself to her new situation. She would not give in to his badgering, no matter how hard he tried; she would wait until time had done its job and had edged open the door to her secrets gently, without compunction. Meanwhile, she would sit tight and unbothered, impervious to the hateful stirrings within her heart. After all, she would not want to startle herself and embark on regrettable action.

Cambara knows that Zaak is an early-to-bed person; he likes to be up with the first dawn. As she takes her first sip of her weak tea, she has unclear memories of a scene she cannot be certain she dreamed or saw in real time, however jet-lagged her state. She recalls seeing him from her window overlooking the partially covered veranda, with his notebooks spread around him on the uneven floor, maybe working. Maybe he was up early, preparing for the day ahead, before the sun showed its bright, hot face to the rest of the world. Cambara is a night person, up until late.

Cambara mulls over the day’s events and at night eats her heart out until there is nothing left of it to pump her blood around. Cambara and Zaak have known of each other’s waking, sleeping, and other bodily timetables, their likes and dislikes, since living together first as youngsters and later when they pretended to be husband and wife in Toronto. Now that they do not have to bother about form, she wonders if Zaak will cope with the tensions that are an integral part of their new condition.

Cambara was born to a happier childhood, with parents who adored her, especially her father, who was very content with an only daughter, on whom he doted. Although of a firmer strain of mind, Arda adored her in her own way from the moment of delivering her into the hands of a world ready to welcome her with adulation.

They were a very atypical Somali couple, her parents, blessed as they were with an unusually bright and attractive daughter. It was unheard of for a man to be as devoted as her father was to his only wife, Arda, to whom he was also faithful. When Cambara grew to be self-consciously lonely, needing a kind of playmate and companion, her parents “invited” Zaak, Arda’s nephew, the oldest of six brothers and the smartest of them all, into their home, to keep Cambara away from mischief; he was also to tutor her in her science subjects, in which she was weak. Because Zaak’s parents often came down heavily on him in view of his maladroitness, Arda took care not to be on his case even, being all thumbs and no fingers, when he made a hash of things. Arda brought him into their home on the speculation that Cambara would benefit from living in close proximity to a boy very different from her, gambling on the assumption that he would stand her in good stead in the future.

Zaak, in recompense, received material comforts as well as intellectual backup, these being of a piece with living in Cambara’s home. He trained his mind for higher things, whatever these meant, and while doing so, kept Cambara busy and out of misconduct. To keep his mind occupied profitably, Zaak would set himself unattainable challenges, including committing an entire dictionary to memory or picking up the rudiments of a new language in a matter of days. She would often catch herself asking, But to what end? He would retort that he was doing these things just for the fun of it. Then he would spend the best part of a weekend reading Tolstoy in Arabic, only to read the same novel the following week in English.

Years later, only after he had spent two thousand days in prison, a thousand and one of them in solitary confinement, would Cambara understand what he meant when he spoke of training his mind for higher things. Everyone assumed, until a decade later, following his marriages to, respectively, Cambara and Xadiitha and then his relocation to Mogadiscio that he had come out of detention unscathed. Not so, apparently. Cambara thinks that maybe his current physical and mental conditions are symptomatic of the country’s collapse, a metaphor for it.

When younger, she was the more self-assured of the two, the one with the handsomer demeanor, blessed with everything you wanted in a child growing up. He was weak in the eyes and wore glasses as thick as an elephant’s posterior. He had a feeble heart and was given to complaining of sudden flutters. Quite often, you saw him holding on to his chest, doubling up in pain, or coughing nonstop. He was deficient in many physical departments but was very strong in the mind. Cambara’s mother admired his mental strength but so often worried enough about his health that she consulted doctors and, on occasion, other types of healers, some quacks of the duplicitous kind, others of the sort who sought cure-alls for ailments in the word of the divine.

Cambara became aware of their physical boundaries when she came in on him one day, naked. His pubes were covered with hair; hers weren’t. And he was fondling himself. To this day, she doubted if he had seen her or heard her tiptoe away. She would’ve been about nine and he about fifteen. She had gone to his room to ask him to help her with a math problem, and she had to slink away quietly. This would have been the first secret she had withheld from her mother. If she had spoken of what she saw to either of her parents, she was sure her parents would not have stopped at blaming him; one of them might have consequently punished him. Years later, as putative spouses sharing living spaces but no intimacies, she would often wonder to herself how much change would have occurred between his youth and then, as a grown man. Not that she was ever tempted to look through a knothole. She feels certain that in his current state — what with his distended paunch and his continuous consumption of qaat , said to affect a man’s sexual prowess negatively — Zaak’s manhood is as lifeless as a hangnail.

Furthermore, she recalls now that later the same morning, while she was alone and brooding, she happened to come across a peacock that was excited at seeing her and which behaved as though agitated when Cambara paid it no mind. The peacock was on full display, with an elevated peacock eye, vainglorious in bearing and gait, and with a most gorgeous train, which he now thrust forward at Cambara, or so thought the then pubescent girl. A nearby harem of peahens kept their safe distance, especially when the feathers of the peacock’s tail started to shake and he moved in Cambara’s direction, eager to make contact with her. From where she was, she remarked the shimmering quality of the peacock’s feathers at the same time she heard the rustling sound that, aroused, he emitted. She would hear it purported that young girls or women anxious about their own sexuality attract peacocks; these pick up their body odors, which, unbeknownst to them, they release into the biosphere. On that day, in her own dim recall, Cambara, weeping, ran off to her mother. She came close to telling her mother whom she had seen, where, and what he had been doing; she came close to speaking about being aroused at the sight of a peacock in full libidinous magnificence. Was it then, she wondered, that Arda began to think that her daughter and nephew were destined to become man and woman?