Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Two options are open to her. On the one hand, she can act as though finding herself alone in the company of a male stranger is frightening, wholly paralyzing, keep her face veil on for effect, and decline to exchange a single word with the driver during the entire journey. This, she knows, will necessitate staying out of his rearview mirror and his radius of vision. She doubts she can pull this off, with the seat in the back being so uncomfortable and her moving and readjusting to avoid the springs and the sagging inconvenience. Moreover, she has to ensure that at no time during the entire trip does her face wander into his discernment, or her eye make contact. She cannot act in a way he might construe remotely as coquettish. On the other hand, she can act true to form and don her God-given identity in place of the veil. Given the choice, she will opt for the identity in which she plays herself — a woman easygoing in the company of men. What to do with the trappings? Cambara resolves not to rush but to wait for the appropriate time.

He is saying, “Are you staying at Hotel Shamac?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I may up the price of the ride.”

“Do you think that is fair?”

“I am afraid,” he says, “the word ‘fair’ no longer forms part of the vocabulary here.”

“I find that disconcerting.”

“Do you know what that tells me about you?”

“What?”

“That you are from somewhere else.”

“Because I’ve used the word ‘fair’?”

“And also because of your veil.”

“What about my veil?”

“It’s obvious you are not accustomed to wearing one,” he says, and manages a smile.

“How can you tell that?”

“In pre — civil war days, I used to head the transport unit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, assigned to chauffeur important dignitaries and ambassadors on missions to Somalia. I remember how often many of them would take off their ties, as if they were masks of disguise, the moment they were in the car and among their friends. How they would sigh, a large number of them, relieved.”

She feels exposed, and fresh strong winds of self-doubt start battering her from all sides. Her bodily movements strenuous, she shifts, agitated, a part of her mind urging her to remove one of the disguises, the face veil; at least she will feel more comfortable. However, before she acts out her inner contradictions, she ponders whether caving in to the suggestion from a man unknown to her will undermine her objective and turn her into a quarry of his machination, whatever his motives. An uncanny memory, in which Wardi figures prominently, calls on her. She sits in the back of the vehicle as maudlin as a tanked-up drunk decidedly resisting surrendering to the groundswell of sorrows coming at her in sizzled waves.

She elects not to acquiesce to the easier of the options, her thoughts wandering away, her eyes likewise. She sees more ruin everywhere she looks, houses with no roofs, lampposts denuded of cables, windows lacking glass panes: a Mogadiscio raided and destroyed. Looking around from where she is, she sees women in cheap chadors, men in sarongs and flip-flops, their guns slung over their shoulders. She concludes that the city, from her encounter with it in the shape of most of its residents, appears to have been dispossessed of its cosmopolitan identity and in its place has begun to put on the clannish, throwaway habits of the vulgar, threadbare semi-pastoralists. Even though she cannot contain her despair, she does not wish to dwell on the consequences of the civil war and the destruction visited on the entirety of the society; she wants to talk about the positive side of things. Therefore, she decides to focus on the shopkeeper and his wife, who, according to her husband, is active in the Women for Peace network that Raxma had told her about.

“How long have you known the gentleman who runs the general store where you picked me up?” she asks.

“I’ve known him and his family for a long time.”

“Tell me a little about them.”

“What would you like to know?”

“His name, for a start,” she says.

“Why are you interested in knowing about him?” the driver asks. From the expression on his face, she cannot decide if their conversation is entertaining him or causing him worry.

“I’ve found him very friendly, a gentleman of the kind you rarely meet in a city said to belong to the self-serving warlords and their henchmen. It has been a pleasure doing business with him.”

“What business are you in?”

Of course she does not want to tell him much about herself, but then how can she expect him to help her with her questions about a third party when she doesn’t seem willing to talk about herself? She puts a different spin on a response to a question he did not ask at the same time as she tries to put him right.

“I am saying it has been a pleasure shopping at his store,” she tells him. “Moreover, he has lent me a bag, and I want to return it to him as soon as I am done with it. It would be good if I knew his name. That is all.”

“Everybody calls him by his nickname, Odeywaa,” the driver tells her. “He is an unusual businessman with integrity. He is honest, he is fair, he is very forthright with everyone with whom he deals, including all the members in the atypical cooperative that he runs — the only cooperative of its kind.”

“What is so unconventional about it?”

“He serves the community at large in a way no other cooperative does. Of the nearly two million Somalis in the diaspora, there are tens of thousands who find themselves in areas of the world from where they cannot make remittances to their needy relatives at home in convertible hard currencies, like the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the sterling. Odeywaa’s aim in establishing the cooperative is to provide an outlet for the Somalis residing within the country who receive remittances in clothes and other goods, where they can sell them almost at cost price. It is a very rare thing he is doing, in this city where everyone is flocking to the warlords’ homes, their heads bowed in fawning subservience to their authority, paying their respects and behaving as commoners do in the presence of their betters.”

The driver goes quietly off on a woolgathering expedition, and from his face in the rearview mirror, she deduces that he is entertaining a private reverie; she lets him be, in silence, waiting.

He continues, “In this low intensity of the civil war, more of us are wising up to the fact that we have nothing but disdain for the warlords’ doings, a kind of contempt equaled only by our scorn for the so-called clan elders, who sanction the recruitment of the youths into the fighting militia.” He pauses long enough for Cambara to sit forward, eager to hear his words. “I see the warlords for what they are — men in drag, every one of them.”

“Men in drag? That’s a new one.”

The driver goes on, “In fact, one of them — also known as The Butcher — fled the southern city of Kismayo, dressed as a woman, when he lost control of it.”

“What do you think of the religious leaders?”

“Alas, they have shown their true colors too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing that they have done since the explosion of the civil war will endear us to the religious leaders, many of whom have lapsed into a state of despair, in which they have declared their loyalty not to Allah, the supreme, but to their birth communities, each to his own, as it were.”

They drive in silence again, moving in a southwesterly direction, over potholes that insist on frequent, abrupt detours and occasional sudden halts, if only to avoid the roadside ditches or the piles of rubbish along them. They pass walls pocked with bullet holes and buildings teetering unsteadily away in the opposite direction from which they will eventually fall when they do collapse.