Nuruddin Farah - Knots

She waffles. “You know I can walk for miles and miles if I put my mind to it? Remember how I used to jog ten miles every now and then without a break or a moment’s rest?”

“No problems?”

“None whatsoever.”

Zaak picks up a bundle of qaat , selects a couple of young shoots, snaps their tender ends off with the impulse of an executioner decapitating a criminal, and then stuffs them into his mouth. When his eyes tighten, Cambara assumes they do so at her inauspicious conduct — a madwoman courting danger by going it alone, walking, when he has offered her a lift in a truck, with a driver and an armed escort. That’s what he will say, even if it is untrue.

“You are not okay in the head,” he says.

“Maybe you’re right.”

“You’re most peculiar in the way you behave.”

She doesn’t rise to his untoward comments but looks at her watch and studies its time-telling face, as a semi-literate might attempt to strain elusive sense from the sequence of the letters in front of her. She interprets his “You’re not okay in the head” as meaning “You’re not behaving like a woman.” She remembers instances from her past in which men used similar words to put her down.

“You do find it all incredibly exciting, don’t you? Courting danger,” he sallies, his voice almost breaking, his gaze uncertain. Knowing him, Cambara imagines him to be more irritated with himself for appearing so helpless than with her for exhausting his graciousness and testing his patience.

“I won’t deny that,” Cambara responds.

“Wooing danger has some appeal?”

“To some people, it does.”

“Does it to you?”

“I haven’t thought of it that way.”

Perhaps he sees her doings as the workings of a sex-starved woman mourning not the death of her only son but the loss of her husband. Is this why he retreats into the surrounds of his indulgent indecisiveness, one instant describing her as insane and wanting not to have anything to do with her rash behavior, the second displaying worry and warning her about going further? As for her, she turns a thought over and over in her head, and she analyzes it from every possible angle. Is it a tall order for her to want to leave every place better than she has found it? Is this why she has bought the food with the same ease with which she requested Kiin to get a plumber and an electrician? Maybe she needs to prepare Zaak for the changes that she plans to introduce. He is not likely to accept the changes without a struggle. After all, a pig is more comfortable wallowing in its squalor than lying on a bed with a mattress, bedspreads, and freshly laundered sheets.

“Why?” he asks, all of a sudden.

Then he holds his palms side by side in the gesture of someone praying Salaatul Khauf, performed in time of war when other prayers are difficult to recite for fear of the ongoing hostilities. Zaak stares at her, the expression on his face clouding. Cambara thinks he is annoyed in spite of himself; she suspects he thinks that she is raving mad, coming to Mogadiscio, as she has, and going it alone.

She does not bother to answer his question.

“Why?” he repeats, his palms opening and going toward each other in the gesture of one praying in preparation for a blessing.

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“I am not doing anything to you.”

“But you are,” he says. “You know you are.”

Zaak is in a sweat and is murmuring profanities. Cambara reckons she cannot relieve him of his sense of frustration, considering that she does not know the basis of it. Is he breaking in a kind of sudden high fever, because her uncontrolled impatience is destined to consign her to disaster? Or is it because he is disturbed that he cannot bend her to his will and that when she runs into ruin and he steps in to help, he will not be in a position to? There is no way he can avoid blame.

“I phoned your mother earlier today,” he says.

A great unease descends on her mind. Her anger gives her a jolt and then suddenly rises toward her head, nearly blinding her.

She asks, “When did you call my mother?”

“I came back home unexpectedly just about noon and found you gone,” he says, “no note from you, and no indication as to where you might have vanished. I was worried. As your host, cousin, and former partner, I kept thinking, ‘What will I say to Arda if something happens to you?’ That is when I rang her.”

“Did you think she would know where I might be?”

“I thought she might fill me in.”

“On what? Fill you in on what?”

“About things you do not tell me.”

“I see,” she says with knowing sarcasm.

“What do you see?”

“Bet you thought you were doing your duty by me?”

“How’s that?”

“As a male cousin, you feel responsible.”

“I won’t deny that I do,” he concedes.

“You keep your watchful male eyes on me and my doing, and you want to make sure that even though I may put my life in danger, because of an act of madness from which you will do all that is in your power to protect me, I must not bring dishonor to your name and the name of the family.”

“I feel duty bound, that’s right.”

“Do you think we are in Saudi Arabia?” she asks.

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

She looks at him steadily in the eyes and lights upon his awkward expression, more surprised than shocked. Of course, he knows what she means: She is accusing him of behaving in an unenlightened way.

He takes a pretty long time to consider his response, and then he shakes his head, indicating his disapproval. Finally he says, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Then he falls silent and furrows his forehead, maybe to add a rider to his admonition, and this results in a preoccupying thought darkening his face. When the shadow shrouding his appearance clears, he mouths the words “Don’t be ridiculous” a second and a third time. It is then that Cambara happens upon his countenance, which reminds her of a quote from an author whose name she has forgotten that it’s not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.

“You’re impossible!” he says.

She remembers his favorite descriptions of her behavior or general attitude when they were both young, and the word “impossible” was the key one, as in “You are impossible.” Or he would use the word “incorrigible,” as in “She is incorrigible.” The former description was always directly addressed to her, the latter more often cast in the third person to third parties. In those days, his descriptions of her were made in an amicable tone of voice with not a trace of anger. He may have thought of her as too forward in the way she looked at him and in the teasing manner she threatened she would touch him, even though she never dared, fearing a reprimand from her mother. He was vulnerable when provoked and prone to giving in. She was wont to saying he was lying, and he wouldn’t bother to tell her off, unless he felt embarrassed, which he often did in front of their peers. She remembers the shock on his face when she wore her first lipstick, her mother’s, at the age of nine. There was an amused look of expression when he saw her putting on a bra, to cover the dark patches on her chest that passed for nipples.

Cambara is debating what to do or say when she discovers a change in the surroundings and then hears footsteps quiet enough to suggest the tread of someone tiptoeing, his or her intentions unknown. Turning, she sees a figure silhouetted against the fading light in the doorway and moving neither forward nor back. When she identifies the person as SilkHair, a smile of relief spreads itself all over her face.

She says to SilkHair, “Would you like to come and help me cook supper?”