Nuruddin Farah - Knots

In the silence, Cambara, her heart warmed, can now see the sun boldly shining through. SilkHair and almost all the other youths stand motionless, listening attentively to the driver’s words with more attentiveness than they have ever imagined possible. LongEars seems alone, as lifeless as the tongue of a mute.

“If you think of it the way I do, this lady is a godsend,” the driver goes on. “She has been with us for a couple of hours, and look at what she has achieved. In less than a day. Look at Agoon,” he says, and they all turn to SilkHair, several of the youths nodding in agreement with the driver. “If she can bring about such positive change in the short time she has had with us, imagine what it will be like when she has been with us for much longer. My brothers, let’s all resume working, for there is time yet for us to save ourselves. There is hope yet for us to regain peace.”

A youth known to be an ally of LongEars has something to say. The driver encourages him to get it off his chest. “But this has always been a woman’s job, cleaning, not a man’s job.”

The driver has an answer. “Because women are doing men’s jobs. That is why. They are raising the young family and keeping the house and keeping it united, protected from hunger and death. And since women are doing our jobs, it follows that we must do theirs, doesn’t it?”

She hears someone clapping and then sees the heads of several of the youths turning toward her, then away to the driver. LongEars storms out in anger. Cambara wonders if he may have gone to join forces with Zaak. Pray, what is Zaak up to?

To set an example, the driver is the first to get back on his knees, mopping, washing, and assisting another youth. She works together with SilkHair to remove the accumulated grit from a corner where two walls meet and where someone spilled a drink with high sugar content. It’s just as well, she observes to herself, that they’ve dislodged a clan of ants that have set up their base of operation for several months. They all join in the general banter, teasing each other amicably. She takes the opportunity to remind them that even though they are half her age, they cannot haul the furniture back and forth without fuss or complaint. She challenges the remaining two bullies who were nasty to SilkHair to help her pick up the two two-seater settees. She discovers that neither has any idea how to lift his side of a settee off the floor without doing his back in. Then she tells them, “Forget it,” and does it with SilkHair after explaining to him how to position his body.

All eyes swarm to her, as if she were a bee soon after the season’s flowers have blossomed into pollen of welcome seeds. Thanks to the driver, she has stung every one of them, and they are besotted not so much with her as they are with the idea of her or the idea of what she can do for them. She hopes that the driver has helped them relax into what they are doing and into relishing the sweetness of their labor. Her skin bristling, her body serves her as a radar trap in which she catches their admiring eyes as they stray away from the work they are engaged in and zoom in on her. She is relieved that the driver has spoken, saving her from caving in under the pressure of making difficult choices. Now she has two allies, SilkHair and the driver: the one because she has stuck her neck out for him and then presented him with clothes; the other because he has gone out on a limb for her and set a precedent.

She believes that the youths have gotten to know her far better than they have Zaak, with whom they chew qaat and whom they see as a boss, because he never dirties his hands, never bothers about house cleaning or cooking. She reasons that since all her involvements with men have been on a one-to-one basis and since this has proven to be unsuccessful, it is her wish to build a bridge of some kind of rapport with so many men all at the same time, something that she hopes she is going to be good at, as an artist. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of watching audiences lapping up the heartfelt intimacies of an actor at her best, when the audience might confuse who she is in real life and what makes her tick, move, love, and hate with the character she is just portraying.

She thinks that SilkHair looks more grown-up than when he went into the bathroom. No longer in tatters, smelly, or dirty, he has become the envy of every youth who is there. Cambara assumes that in their eyes she deserves their high praise, especially after the driver has added his word to support her action. She hopes she will have become a person to befriend, not the new boss on the block. This nervy awareness puts a proud spring in her stride and a grin blemishing the corner of her mouth.

Someone asks, “Where is Zaak?”

Cambara couldn’t care less where he is and does not want to talk about him. Instead, she wraps her arms around SilkHair, and together they walk to where the driver is giving the final touches to a spot he has just cleaned.

She asks, “What about lunch?”

“Chicken,” SilkHair announces.

He strikes her as a poseur, and she is amused.

“A good idea,” the driver comments.

A door in Cambara’s head opens. She puts her hand in her slacks pockets, bringing out five U.S. dollars in singles, which she hands over to the driver, whom she asks to take two or three youths, including SilkHair, to the open-air market and to buy chicken and vegetables sufficient to feed everybody. SilkHair’s eyes anchor their new cast in the bay of self-confidence.

The driver picks up the trace of worry entering Cambara’s eyes when she notices that the kitchen is not clean enough to cook in. The driver takes three of the youths, whom she presumes to be closer to him, aside, and they speak in low voices. They volunteer to finish the job, mop the floor, clean out the cupboards and the surfaces, as Cambara goes up to have a shower.

Then the driver says, “Let’s go get the food.”

After yet another cold shower, for which she is better prepared, Cambara comes down to ready the kitchen in time for the youths’ imminent return from the errand to the open-air market. In her effort to do so, she opens the lower and upper cupboards, the storeroom, the pantry, and every drawer with functioning runners and to her great dismay, finds the shelves not dusted as well as she might like. Moreover, she can see that although the youths have washed the cooking implements, they have not rinsed them in hot water, or properly. Not a single utensil or piece of crockery is of top quality. The wood of the cupboards is cracked, damaged, or warped; the soap too dry to be of use, or moldy. The more she gets to know of the state of disrepair of the kitchen and of the foul condition that it is in, despite the attempt on the part of the youths to clean it, the more she thinks of herself as a frontierswoman come to reclaim these men from their primitive condition. But she decides to keep her vow to the youths and cook for them in appreciation of their collaboration, certain that it will make a good impression on their thinking. She wants to leave the scene of their encounter in a more improved fettle than the one in which she has found it. Maybe then she may win over their hearts and minds — even if only briefly — to her triad of society: work, honest living, and peace. She is aware that in the views of someone like Zaak, she is being naive. So be it.

Like a rodent nosing an edible bit of food out of a spot difficult to access, she prises open the cupboards, the drawers, and the sideboards in order to ascertain what is in them. There is, overall, a basic lack: of cooking oil, of sharp knives or knife sharpeners, cutting boards, of butter that has not gone rancid, of sieves and swabs, of detergents, disinfectants, and serviceable sponges; of mops with enough pieces of string or cloth attached to the handle. Nor are there washing-up facilities, clean dishcloths, usable hand or paper towels, or wooden spoons and other implements necessary to provide a decent meal for a dozen persons. The pots are of the wrong shape or are of midget size, too small for her purposes. What there is in the way of cutlery points to the house’s multiple occupancy through the years: comparable to the cutlery of variously married households, the plates not matching, the forks and the spoons likewise.