Nuruddin Farah - Knots

She closes her eyes and stops short of celebrating her triumph when she hears someone’s light footsteps coming and, without her tapping on it, the door opens with the slow cautiousness of a guest yawning in the presence of a hospitable host. Based on the half of the face that she can see, Cambara moves slightly to the right to place herself in Jiijo’s eyeshot.

She says, “It is me, Jiijo. Please let me in.”

Cambara stands stock still, recalling belatedly that in her attempt to privilege secretiveness and taciturnity, she had given Jiijo a false name, which, sadly, she cannot recollect now. She hopes that this mistake will not haunt her later or leave a serious blemish on the nature and character of their relationship.

Jiijo opens the gate. There is exhaustion in her eyes, the bags of which have distended toward her upper cheeks, to which there is hardly a shine now. Jiijo’s bodily gestures reveal an overwhelming tiredness. As Jiijo straightens up, her features contorted into discomfiture, the two women stare at each other stupidly, neither moving or saying anything for a brief while.

“Go on in and take the weight off your feet,” Cambara says to her gently. “I will bring in the stuff. Leave everything to me.”

Jiijo lets go of the gate, wincing because of fresh thrusts of localized pain, and grabs her right flank, massaging it as she toddles forward into the courtyard, which is open to the sky. Cambara does not follow her immediately. She peers in, scanning the space before her, and waits to appraise the present situation, in cautious assessment of whether it is safe for her to go in. After all, it will not do to make the heady assumption that the minor warlord and his minions are sleeping it off after a night of chewing. When she is convinced that no one else is up and about and that the doors facing the courtyard are all closed, she goes in, helps Jiijo, who is still holding on to her side, rubbing it, into the very couch she led her before, then moves about to bring her purchases in and put them away.

“Can I get you something?” Cambara asks.

Even though unequivocal, Jiijo expresses her sense of relief inadequately, her demeanor giving countenance to her disregard. Then all of a sudden, the pained expression on her face prompts Jiijo to surrender herself totally to the reality as well as the memory of other pains, some of recent vintage.

As Cambara takes a good hold of herself, she debates whether to ease Jiijo’s apparent physical unease by giving her a partial massage, a kind enough gesture to make in humble surrender to her own memory of being pregnant with Dalmar. She senses she is right in assuming that, like Wardi, Gudcur does not help Jiijo in her current state.

Cambara is distracted, however, the moment she feels the weight of the papers she salvaged from the youths. Briefly, her recall of her unpleasant encounter with them now preys on her mind, and she takes nervous account of the paper slipping downward, lodging inconveniently close to her belly button, irritably rendering Cambara’s forepart itchy. But there is nothing she can do about it, and she wishes she were in a room all on her own where she might disrobe and then remove the papers before having a good scratch.

Disturbed that she cannot remember her alias, she now reminds herself that whereas she told nothing but distorted facts that are part of her disguise to Jiijo, she gave the truth to Dajaal and Bile. No doubt, she is understandably mistrustful of Jiijo; she cannot, however, articulate why she elected to be trusting of Dajaal and Bile, despite the fact that she knows neither of them. Whatever else happens, she must avoid letting her mind go walkabout, because that is where the pitfalls are.

Jiijo’s labored breathing worries Cambara in that she is hopelessly unprepared for any eventuality that may compel her to look for outside help, someone to tell her where to get an ambulance or a doctor; she doesn’t know what to do or who to turn to. She won’t want to rely on Zaak and has no choice but to depend on strangers with whom she has made acquaintance only recently, namely Kiin, Dajaal, and Bile, or the shopkeeper, to give a hand. Now Cambara hears Jiijo saying something meekly and sounding uncertain, the words unnecessarily spaced, like computer-generated speech. After putting a lot of effort into deciphering Jiijo’s statement, she decides that Jiijo is blaming herself for not remembering her name.

“Never mind what my name is,” says Cambara, her voice firm, determinedly brave, despite the circumstances. For all she can tell, Jiijo may not be letting on that she has found out the truth about Cambara, whom she will eventually challenge. Careful not to stir into counterproductive action based on unproven suspicion, she says to Jiijo, “Tell me what is ailing you, where you hurt. I can fetch a taxi and then rush you to a hospital, if there is need.”

Cambara’s lump of worry, which has lodged itself for a short while in her throat, blocking it, melts. In its place, a sense of relief eases itself into her body, and she relaxes into the lengthening silence punctuated by Jiijo’s strained breathing.

Jiijo sits up on the couch, in evident discomfort, her features pinched, her legs spread awkwardly, her skin showing signs of neglect, as dry as harmattan, flaky. It is possible that Jiijo’s physical distress with her pregnancy began in her mind before it made its presence felt in the rest of her body.

Cambara asks, “Will you tell me what’s ailing you so that I know what I need to do?”

“He beat me last night,” says Jiijo weakly.

Cambara wagers her intuition that she can tell the man who beat her up. She remembers coming in on him lying prone and snoring, surrounded with half a dozen pillows and cushions, a man in a world separate from the others, as they had neither pillows nor cushions. Disgusted, she is tempted to give in to the temptation to walk into the bedroom, where she will find him and his qaat -chewing mates sleeping off an all-night session, and maul him, if for no other reason than to remember how she dealt with Wardi. Cambara hesitates to put to Jiijo the questions that are presenting themselves to her, as a trespass of her privacy. She wants to know what the man is to Jiijo, what the nature of their relationship is before electing her course of action. She has to take care not to add further humiliation to the infringement already meted out to Jiijo, lest she should seize up and refuse to talk altogether. In a moment, however, Cambara is studying Jiijo’s situation from a perspective in which the two of them no longer dwell in distinctly autonomous spheres, marked off by their known differences in terms of class, provenance, and experience or by an invisible boundary of mistrust. She sees in this context that, as women, they share the communality of male violence, both having suffered in their different ways at the hands of their partners.

“Where is he?”

“He isn’t here.”

“What about his men?”

“They’ve all gone.”

“Where?”

“They are all taking part in a skirmish over the control of a bridgehead near the town of Jowhar with access to Mogadiscio,” Jiijo explains, drying her cheeks, now that she is no longer weeping.

“When do you expect them to be back?”

“No idea.”

Cambara’s quick thinking kicks in.

“Tell you what we will do.”

Fear inserts itself into Jiijo’s eyes and her voice too. She asks, “What do you want us to do?”

Cambara finds Jiijo’s use of an inclusive “us” a little unsettling at first, then, after giving it some thought, becomes excited to the extent that she makes a slipshod patter. She says, “We’ll fix you something to eat.”

“I don’t know if I can eat.”

“In the meantime go and have a shower,” Cambara says, convinced that she would persuade her to eat something. “We’ll talk when you’re done.”