Nuruddin Farah - Knots

“What?”

Apprehensive, she asks, “By any chance, are you afraid of what the armed youths might do if you order them around?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Please correct me if I am wrong.”

“We’re hostages to their guns, that’s true.”

“They put the guns to your heads whenever they want to blackmail you into granting them more concessions than you are prepared to grant them?”

Zaak nods his head in agreement, adding, “We do their will, bribe them with qaat , pay them extravagant bonuses, and humor them as best as we can. With death being near, as close as their fingers are to their trigger guards, we value our life and appreciate every second of it.”

“What a sad spectacle,” she says.

When he does not react to her throwaway remark, her thoughts move on, dwelling for a few moments on her personal tragedy. She tells herself that when an old person dies, you accept it, reasoning that in all likelihood his or her time has come. That is not the case, however, if a nine-year-old full of life and laughter drowns. This is because you sense deep within you that the boy’s time has not come and that calamity has come a-calling. No wonder that at first she felt suicidal and then homicidal the day she learned of Dalmar’s death.

Her sorrows, because of the tragic loss with which she has lived up to now, devolve into a moment of intense injudiciousness. She asks, “Can’t we go by ourselves?”

“Not without armed escort.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is not done.”

“How far are we from the family house?”

“Pretty far.”

“What about Hotel Shamac?”

“That is even farther.”

She unmoors herself from whatever is going on in the truck, whose engine is not running because he has not switched the ignition on, and from the conversation that is going nowhere and says, “What a travesty!”

After an uneasy silence, he says, “What travesty?”

“That because life is so precious, we need a couple of boys in their preteens bearing guns to protect us?” She pauses, then adds, “Do you know I could dispossess them of their weapons as easily as I could chase a chicken away from the grains at which it is pecking?”

“They are tough, these boys.”

“Have you seen them in action?”

“I won’t want to see them in action.”

“I bet you’ll wet your pants, come to that.”

“Our lives are less precious than a handgun or the vehicle we are driving,” he says. “If we hire armed escort, it is because we do not want to die at the hand of other armed gangs more interested in the four-wheel-drive truck than they are in who we are, what our clan affiliations are. To those whose services we hire, pay salaries to, humor, bribe, we are worth more alive than dead, but to all armed thugs, we are worth more dead than alive. Tell me what is so perverse about this line of reasoning?”

She stares at him, her chin raised, jaws clenched, eyes burning with her unengaged rage. Not an iota of empathy informs her hard look; if anything, she does not wish to admit that he has a point. In her surreptitious glance in his direction, she means to convey her fearlessness, despite her altered situation, brought up by his unmitigated cruelty, both when they separated as putative spouses and since her arrival here as his guest. From the way she is looking at him, you might think that she is giving him notice: that she will eventually do away with him, his deceits, and double-talk, as if she intends him to serve as a lesson to all the betrayers of our unearned trust. In her sober moments, when she does not give in to her giant rage or her disapproval of all forms of inactivity, she knows that there is no wisdom in rushing, and no mileage in employing shotgun approaches; these will hardly help her in her desire to stay on top of things or ultimately assure her of becoming a winner.

“Please, let’s get going,” she says.

He looks expectantly in the direction of where he expects the armed youths to come from, but he just shakes his head, saying nothing.

She tells herself that she must go past the reach of his meanness to stay alive and unharmed. Even so, she cannot help questioning herself anew if her genuine diffidence might bring up the rear of more fatal fears that are yet to manifest their grip on her imagination. In other words, what will happen when, like a child in whose imagination fear has started to dwell, her sleep marks her as disturbed, with bugbears dominating everywhere she turns, and she is wakeful. She surprises herself by speaking the command for which she too has not been prepared: “Can we go? We’ve waited long enough.”

Zaak’s response is to take a good hold of the wheel. Appearing lost, he is agitated and more like someone who does not know how to drive. He shifts in his seat, cursing under his breath, and moves backward, rubbing his bum on the seat the way urchins might wipe their hind-parts when they have no toilet paper or water to wash. His apparent discomfort puts her in mind of many a traitor soon after hearing the charges of his treason. She imagines him speaking as though she can deliver him from all blame. In fact, that is what he does, more or less.

He says, “It bears repeating that you are most welcome to stay here. It bears reiterating too that since there is no chance in hell for you to recover the family property from the warlord without a fight, it would be ill advised for us to go there before we make adequate preparations.”

She says, “I just want to acquaint myself with the area of the city in which our upmarket family property is located, that’s all.”

“I’ve noticed that you haven’t mentioned even once the other family property in Via Roma, in which we all lived and in which you and I grew up? Why?”

“Because Mother says that every building in Via Roma has been razed to the ground in the fierce fighting between StrongmanNorth and StrongmanSouth in the early years of the civil war,” she explains. “Is this borne out by what you know or have seen?”

“What do we do after we’ve parked a hundred or so meters away so the family living in the property cannot see us or link us to any conspiracy?” he asks.

“I have no intention of announcing my presence.”

“I say we need to plan it together, you and I.”

“Point taken,” she says, knowing that she will not involve him in any of her doings until she has worked out all the configurations of how, where, and when to act on her plan.

“I insist on this.”

“Can we get a move on, please?” she says impatiently. Then she surprises the two of them by sounding the horn, pressing it gently once, then harder, and then much louder and continuously until its sound brings the youths running and panting unhealthily. They arrive, with their guns hoisted above their heads, a couple of them as good as naked and a third stumbling, because of being trapped in his sarong, now loose and around his ankles. Ready for action, their weapons poised, with only one of them lying prone in imitation of some movie or other he has seen, moving his gun this and that way, deciding where to aim or who to shoot. Even the driver is there, his cheeks as full as a camel busy chewing, his lips traced with greenish foam, shading his eyes from the harsh sun. Zaak waves the driver off, indicating that he does not need his services. The expression on the driver’s face brightens. He picks his nose liberally, and he stalks away, heavy-footed but also eager.

Cambara says to Zaak, “Why don’t you want him to drive us to and back from the house and the hotel? It’ll be a lot easier, quicker, and perhaps also safer for all concerned.”

“Because he is unhealthily inquisitive.”

“Why does that matter?”

“It matters to me.”