Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Midway through drying the plates, she turns round. Zaak, as if on cue, reassembles his features, adorning his fat lips with a beautiful smile.

“What is on your mind?” he asks.

“It may not make any sense to you, but I am thinking that mine is a life that needs simple satisfactions,” she says. “I want my own property back, and I want to put my life together the best way I can, on my own terms and under my own steam.”

“Does Wardi figure in any of this, somewhere?”

“I have no wish to factor him in,” she replies.

“Maybe that is the problem?”

“How is that?”

The word “problem” has in Zaak’s view an erotic edge to it; it boasts of a territoriality, if you will, of things hidden, of sweets binged on, of lies spoken and not owned up to, of the death of a child not as yet satisfactorily mourned. And she? She is wholly unanchored by his use of the word in its erotic sense. Maybe “problems” arouse him.

“Might I suggest something?” he asks.

“Go ahead.”

“Think ‘danger’ before you do something rash,” he says. He sounds wise, at least to himself, and he grins from cheek to cheek, euphoric. “Meanwhile, you and I will work on arriving at a modus vivendi agreeable to us both.”

She moves about as though she has been cast loose from everything that might hold her back, her eyes twinkling with a knowing smirk, lit with a torch of mischief.

“You are on your own if you decide to visit the property,” he says. “I am making it clear for the last time. I’ll come nowhere near the place.”

“We’ll stop half a kilometer away and won’t come out of the truck. You will point me in the direction of the house so I can familiarize myself with the surrounding landmarks.”

“All set,” he says.

“Just a moment.”

And she goes to her room upstairs and returns shortly, wearing an oversized veil, khaki-colored, dark mirrored glasses, and on her head, although she doesn’t need it, a scarf to further disguise her appearance.

Then they go for a drive to reconnoiter.

Cambara, reminding herself to ask Zaak to give her a set of keys, gets into the four-wheel-drive truck, clumsily hitching up the bottom end of her veil and eventually reclaiming its loose ends from the sharper corner of the vehicle’s door, in which it had gotten caught. She heaves herself up into the passenger seat, first by raising herself on the heels of her palms, her entire upper body leaning forward in a tilt, and then by lifting the rest of her body up into place, voilà! She shifts about a little agitatedly before repositioning herself in an attempt to be as far away from Zaak as possible.

Zaak replaces his house keys in his pocket, breathes anxiously in and out, the words catching at his throat when he starts to say something. He looks at Cambara with an incensed expression on his face. He turns away from her, the better to wait until she has made herself comfortable before he speaks. Then she observes that he is more eager to talk to his captive audience than he is to start the engine and get moving.

He says reproachfully, “You are being rash.”

“How so?” she asks.

He holds her gaze. Then he says, “Why the rush?”

Stymied for an appropriate reply, she remains silent.

He says, “We have all the time in the world to plan so that we make things work to our advantage.”

“We do, do we?” She singles out the one word, the first person plural in “to our advantage.” She is surprised by his feigned keenness to include himself, remembering that he has been saying that he does not wish to have anything to do with her folly.

He scrutinizes her features for a clue and, discerning none, goes on, “The way you are going about it — calling on the man and his family who are occupying the property without having the slightest idea what we will do after the visit — is downright foolish.”

She is not responding or reacting to what he is saying. It is as though it has only just now dawned on her that it may make sense to have a rethink and beat a hasty, face-saving retreat. Excited, no doubt suddenly scared, her heart palpitating hard and speedily, she wonders if Zaak can hear it pulsating in disquiet from where he is sitting behind the steering wheel. Even though she is in a fluster, she manages to stay phlegmatic in her bearing, barely betraying her unease. The truth is that deep inside her, she feels like a swimmer who is barely able to keep afloat in a pool of medium size, who is thrown into an ocean. Moreover, her skin is alive with irritability when he releases the brake and his hand meets hers on the way back to his lap, where he has been keeping it ever since getting into the vehicle. She is aware of the difficulty that comes with sharing cabin space. This, after all, has its unpredictable bodily configurations, like being in the same bed with someone you have no desire to touch: unsettling.

He throws his hands around, making nervous gestures whose meaning is not obvious to her. He says, “I would rather we worked together, you and me, on several what-if scenarios before we called at the property and came face to face with the new reality of civil war Mogadiscio, with which you are hardly familiar, because you arrived only yesterday. That’s all I am saying.”

Cambara can scarcely believe her ears. She thinks that he may mean well, but can she trust his motives for speaking to her this way? How is she to react to a world in which her eyes gaze in a different way on her altered circumstances, into which she has brought along her unease and her long history of diffidence when it comes to men?

He tells her, “People here are sensitive to one’s nuances, the hidden and surface meanings of what one says. Every action and every spoken word must be made in an implicit recognition of these. If we do not want the guns dug up from where they have been buried, after the humiliated departure of the U.S. Marines, then we have no choice but to take these sensibilities into account.”

She thinks she understands his meaning only partially, and she reacts to that portion. She says, “It is hard to think of these people as sensitive or sensible,” she says, her teeth clenched in silent fury. “I think of them as bloodthirsty, clan-mad murderers. That’s how I imagine them. Maybe I am wrong in my judgment. Of course, there have been many others — Somalis and non-Somalis — who have described the warlords differently, as clan elders, which they definitely are not. These approaches have been of no avail and have led this nation nowhere, most emphatically not to the house of peace. I cannot understand how you can speak of them as sensitive and sensible.”

“Trust me,” he says. “I am in the business of conflict resolution, and I spend a lot of my time mediating between warring groups. Easily hurt, people here carry with them egos more grandiose than any you’ve encountered anywhere else. The result is that everyone reacts in a self-centered way to every situation. That’s what I am talking about when I say they are sensitive.”

She waits in the futile hope of further clarification. When none is forthcoming, she asks, “What are we waiting for?”

“We’re waiting for the armed escort.”

“Where are they?”

“Somewhere in the back garden.”

“What are they doing?”

“Chewing a couple of morsels of qaat .”

“Even the two that are in their preteens?”

“Every one of them is a chewer.”

He might be talking about a heroin addict needing his daily fix. Her hand instinctively moves to sound the horn, but she does not, as she realizes that in readiness for this eventuality, Zaak is leaning forward to prevent her doing so.

“Tell me something.”