Nuruddin Farah - Knots

“Let me get you some water,” the woman says.

The woman gone, Cambara stands in the forecourt of the house, with the carport, empty of vehicles, to her left and the large gate now secured with a chain. She takes things in at a startling speed. She calculates the enormity of the ruin all around her and at a guess assumes that it will require a great deal of funds to repair the damage done to the property. She reckons that to make it rentable or habitable, nothing short of destroying everything and rebuilding it from scratch will do. She sees irredeemable wreck everywhere she looks: the walls scaling in large segments; the wood in the ceiling decomposing; the toilet facing her with its door gaping open emitting rank evidence of misuse; the windows emptied of glass panes; the carpets rolled up and stood against the outside wall, in a corner. Cambara retches at the sight of so much callousness; she places her hand in front of her mouth, as if needing to vomit into it.

Cambara looks to her right and finds the woman extending a glass to her, the color of the water mud-brown. She receives the proffered glass, noticing smudges on the outside of it — maybe the result of the woman’s moist fingers — and murmurs a feeble thank-you. To earn the woman’s trust, Cambara puts the glass to her lips, and takes a lip-wetting sip.

The woman asks, “Would you like to sit down?”

“Yes, I would,” says Cambara.

“Let me get you a decent chair, then.”

The woman moves into the house with renewed enthusiasm, then up a staircase, heaving forward ploddingly, like a dung beetle shifting its ration up a steep gradient. Cambara now entertains herself with an outrageously daring thought, on which she acts forthwith, no hesitation at all. Having seen the ruinous state of the outside of the house, she wants to find out what the rooms are like, inside. Who lives in them? What manner of furniture is there? But before taking her first step, she covers her face with the face veil, nervously biting the strip of muslin and sucking it in to the point of wetting it. Aware that nothing in her intuition or in her sense of general desperation can have prepared her for this derring-do, she enters the room facing her. Through the half-open door, she can see confirmation of the presence of children from the clothes that are strewn around the mattresses and the bunk bed. Cambara presumes that the children are not this woman’s, so whose are they? How many families are sharing the house?

Yet she does not pause or draw back, as though answering to a stronger pull, for she has known the house inside and outside, played in it when it was under construction, and came to it when her mother, Arda, was showing it to the estate agent who would rent the property. Of course, she is well aware that embarking on such a dangerous mission is foolish, to say the least. All the same, she lunges forward at the same time as she reminds herself that she might not have abandoned herself to such a sudden impulse or behaved in this carefree way were it not for the fact that the property had been hers and she intended to repossess it. Could it be that her son’s death, the fierce falling out with Wardi, and her beating him up have made her reckless, unafraid, indifferent to danger? What the hell, she thinks and pushes the door open, goes in, and then shuts it behind her.

With the curtains drawn, the room is very dim, until she removes her face veil. In addition, there is an oppressive odd mix of odors, principally of unwashed bodies. Her refusal to display fear helps her give the room an unhurried good scour until she sees the vague human forms, sleeping figures on the mats on the floor. Then she puzzles out the shapes of a couple of Kalashnikovs within reach of two of the men and a submachine gun close to one man, who is an island unto himself. The man, bare-chested and young, sits up in a startle, his sleep-squinted eyes finally focusing on Cambara. Befuddled, the man’s dreamy look dwells on the tall, all-dark, motionless figure, and he is unclear in his head if he is conjuring her up or if she is there as real as he is staring at her. He is unable to decide what to make of her veiled presence; he shakes his head in disbelief, then listens to one of his mate’s snoring rumpus and returns to his interrupted sleep. Cambara waits long enough for his breathing to even up, her hand always on the Swiss knife. Eventually she slips out of the room, closing the door gently.

Once out of the room, Cambara is face to face with the woman, whose unfriendly bearing and bothered expression almost prompt Cambara to violent action. The woman asks, “What were you doing in the room?”

“I needed a toilet,” Cambara says meekly.

“You should have waited for me,” the woman says.

Cambara says, “I had no idea.”

The woman’s irritation lends her voice a harder edge. She says, “What do you really want?”

“A toilet, please,” Cambara repeats.

“First water, then a toilet. What next?”

“It’s urgent,” Cambara says. “The toilet.”

“Follow me, then, and stay with me, you hear.”

The damp, rank odor hits her with a vengeance, and she cannot bring herself to close the toilet door, so penetrating the ferocity of its accumulated essences that Cambara almost brings out the vinegary intimations of her salad of a couple of days ago. She struggles to open the window, even if slightly, only it won’t budge, no matter how hard she leans against it, pushing with all her might.

Cambara comes out of the toilet sick, like a cat unsure whether it is retching or coughing. From the look on the woman’s face, Cambara concludes that she can guess what monstrosities she has seen: the accumulated brownielike concentrates floating in the toilet bowl to the top, almost welling out. On coming out, she takes in a fair dose of fresh air and then lights upon the woman’s smile.

Her back to Cambara, the woman says, “They are worse than animals.”

Cambara does not bother to ask the woman to elaborate. She thinks she knows whom the woman means. The upshot of it is that the woman’s statement helps to break the ice.

Besides, exhaustion is ultimately having its toll on the woman, as evidenced by the many unfinished tasks still waiting for her: adult clothes soaking and in need of washing; children’s school uniforms that have been washed, which need to be neatly folded, the creases ironed out; lunch to be cooked; the floor to be swept. How can a woman in her advanced pregnancy hope to finish these all on her own? Cambara thinks how, since her arrival, her own life has been taking a basic design in which she steps in to put other people’s lives in some order. If there is anything positive about this, it is that she has less time to brood on her loss, to mourn, or to grieve and eat her heart out.

Cambara considers completely removing her face veil. After some hesitation, she takes off the body tent altogether, and with the exposure to the air, she feels lighter in her blood and bones. As she methodically folds the body tent into some shape easy to get into later, she gives the clothes she is now standing in a moment’s scrutiny, no doubt wondering if it is wise to do away with her disguise, her guile. She shrugs her shoulders, what the hell, rolls up the sleeves of her caftan — only then becoming conscious of the weight of the knife in her pocket — and offers the woman a break. The woman is so worn out she is in no position to refuse. Scarcely has Cambara done a stroke of domestic work than she takes the measure of the woman’s exhaustion.

She says, giving herself a false name, “My name is Xulbo. What’s yours?”

The woman is silent for quite a while. She struggles to sit, now rubbing her back, now her hips, staring ahead of herself, her eyes rolling in amazement at what is happening here: a help at hand, what kindness! The woman is rigid in her appearance, preoccupied, busy worrying a blackhead, picking at it. Maybe she is deciding whether to accept Cambara’s offer to help with the house chores; maybe the idea of telling her name to a total stranger does not sit easily with her or with the men sleeping off a night’s qaat -chewing.