Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Finally, Zaak sits up, preparing to drive, his back ramrod straight, and his lips atremble. Maybe he is reciting a brief prayer between switching the ignition on, engaging a gear, and moving on. His breathing strikes Cambara as being bothered, and his posture rigid as that of a pupil taking a test he is certain to fail. Only then does the memory come back to her that he is an awful driver. She remembers how he had to resit the oral and the driving tests several times, managing to pass on his sixth attempt. He sets about his driving with the care of a cattle farmer guiding the erection of a bull into a cow not yet in heat. He cries Bismillah twice before instructing the armed youths to get in, guns, qaat , and all.

Then Zaak turns the key in the ignition a few times before the engine comes to life, coughing, farting, sputtering cold wind, and spurting white smoke out of the exhaust pipe. He applies more pressure on the accelerator pedal than need be, and this jars Cambara’s nerves, irritating her. Again, it takes him several attempts before engaging the clutch. But because he misjudges the biting point of the clutch and removes his foot from the brake, the engine stalls. He curses, starts the engine once more, places his foot heavily on the accelerator prior to engaging the clutch, and the vehicle jerks out of control.

Cambara sits up, and so do the armed youths. They all shift in their seats, anxious-looking, helpless, and not knowing what to do or say to Zaak, who, in his desire to prove his worth, is doing all he can to impress Cambara and failing.

Everyone hears the voice of a man, the driver, who is saying, “Do you want me to come and drive, Zaak? I do not mind, really I do not.”

Cambara looks out of the window, amused, her gaze falling on the driver, who is pulling his sarong up with his left hand and whose eyes are red and almost popping with exhaustion, presumably from lack of sleep. In her recall of her dream the night before, during her brief, jet-lagged sleep, she remembers the heavy downpour, remembers running, naked and free, among the fillies on a sandy beach, the sky tropical blue, her shoeless feet feeling tickled and she laughing in the way the happy and the young do. After a while, Cambara wakes from her daydream to the noisy reality of Zaak rudely dismissing the driver, to whom he says, “Go back to your chewing, and we’ll see you here in less than an hour.”

She keeps whatever thoughts that come to her to herself, waits, and then watches as Zaak starts the engine yet again. This time, however, smooth as new oil, he gets the biting point of the clutch right and engages it without the engine stalling or disconcertingly jerking out of his authority. She tells herself that being around Zaak, being humiliated and derided, may become the death of her sooner than the bullet from a gun erroneously going off. To be sure, she does not wish to court danger, nor does she get a kick out of riding with boys in their preteens armed with an AK-47.

It is when she has sat back, starting to destress, that she realizes that the foot brake cannot perform the function Zaak has assigned to it, and the clutch is in fact not an accelerator. Eventually, his foot controls fail him just as before, with too little fuel reaching the engine, which almost cuts off but does not, or too much fuel and the truck surging forward. It is when he mistakes the foot brake for the accelerator that the engine speed does not match the road’s, then, all of a sudden, he changes down a gear, then another, annoyingly picking up such a velocity that Zaak has no idea what to do and then brakes so abruptly they drive into a ditch and stop. One of the two boys, sitting forward, whose AK-47 trigger guard is off, pulls at it unwittingly, shooting volleys and emptying them into the roof. The explosion in the confined space of the motorcar is so close it feels as if a grenade has gone off. Gathering her wits about her, she sees Zaak, mouth gaping open in shock, sitting stock still as if frozen in fright, but she is alert to the imminent peril in the shape of a couple of armed youths who arrive on the scene from nowhere and who watch from the safety of the wall covering them. Cambara has the calm to inquire if anyone is hurt. No man can find his tongue; all is quiet. Cambara, in the meantime, turns round to check for herself and then figures out that, even though every one is startled, no one has suffered any visible harm.

It is then that a rank odor emanating from within the vehicle insinuates itself into the immense silence. Cambara is able to isolate the source of the putrid stench in no time, identifying its emitter: a boy in the back row who, out of embarrassment, holds down his head, cradling it in his hands. Apparently, the boy has fouled himself out of fright. She is for once undecided what to do, not that she knows what there is to say. It is too far for her to reach out to the boy, touch him, assure him that there is nothing to be ashamed of; too inconvenient to step out of the truck, go round and get back in, and embrace the boy. She looks away, her sense of discretion prevailing. Likewise, the older armed youths, who, covering their mouths and noses with their hands, surprisingly to Cambara, hold their tongues. However, the unfortunate boy’s age-mates are rip-roaringly laughing, pointing their fingers at the unlucky boy, one of them calling him Xaar Fakay, meaning “ShitLoose.”

Cambara waits for Zaak to move before acting on the instinct to intervene, interceding with the bigger boys to desist from bullying the hapless boy, whom, now that she has had a good look, she refers to as Tima Xariir, for his dark, silky, brilliantined hair. However, Cambara is helpless in the face of this new challenge, because it is one thing to make a fuss over the waste of one’s child; it is altogether another thing to clean up the mess of a preteen boy, armed, potentially unruly, and likely to pose a problem later.

Zaak, for his part, does not respond to SilkHair’s predicament as a grown man might. Angry and showing no empathy, he puckers his face, an indication that the odor has had more of an effect on him than it might on a woman who has dealt with a baby’s excreta. In her mind, Cambara links this incident to the scene earlier yesterday when, being most unkind, he told her, “Grow up, woman.” Now she feels like saying the same thing to him, to behave as an adult woman might. Zaak says, “Get out and walk.”

The boy raises his head, his eyes popping out, as if he were a goat a slaughterer has readied to kill. No one says anything as SilkHair works out how to get out of where he is without drawing more derision from his mates, knowing that the waste will have run down the legs of his sarong and will have soiled his nether regions too.

Cambara surprises everyone by saying, “There is nothing unnatural about what the boy has done, and I want him to stay in the truck.”

“No one wants him to remain,” Zaak says.

There is uncomfortable silence all around.

“I would like him to,” she says.

Zaak is ill at ease, not certain how to react.

Cambara says, “Or else I’ll go with him then.”

“Where will you go?”

“Where will he go?”

In the quiet that follows, she remarks that she does not smell anything. It feels as though the rank odor has been replaced by tension and anger, which make their demands on all her senses.

Zaak backs down. “Let’s go back to my place and then plan things better. Since we will need to have the inside of the car washed, I suppose the driver can do it better than we can. Besides, there is no point going forward.”

Cambara does not share her thoughts with Zaak, but she trusts he knows that she will turn SilkHair into a cause: clothe him, pamper him with bountiful love, given that she has plenty of it. She imagines that she has as much untaken love as a breast-feeding mother whose baby has died has milk. She thinks that the poor thing is most likely wearing the only sarong he owns and if they get back to Zaak’s, he won’t have anything to change into. Yes, she can give him some of the clothes that have survived Dalmar’s drowning. She preferred bringing them with her to Mogadiscio, rather than sending them along to the Salvation Army in her neighborhood in Toronto. Dalmar’s clothes will fit SilkHair nicely. What’s more, she will take care of him, disarm him, school him, and turn him into a fine boy, peace-loving, caring.