Nuruddin Farah - Knots

Jiijo works in total concentration on a corn on the small toe of her right foot, peeling off dead skin and tossing it away. “I could not bring myself to deceive my new husband. Instead, I chose to deceive my family, for I went to a ‘midnight nurse,’ as they say in these parts, and aborted the baby without letting anyone know except a school friend. I took ill, terribly ill. My mother was the first to learn of the reason, and she persuaded my father, without letting him in on our secret, to postpone the marriage until I was well enough. It grieves me that he never got to know what I had done before he died in the second week of the civil war.”

“Tell me about your husband.”

Then Jiijo lunges forward into her speech with the assumed gravitas of what she means to convey.

“He was successful in business, and, strangely, we were happy with each other for a long while, he and I,” she says. “He was a most gentle husband, wonderfully caring of me and all my requirements, granting me all my wishes and a lot more. However, I was unhappy in the marriage, because we were childless. After trying for several years and failing, he sent me off to Europe — no expense spared — to consult doctors, a number of whom I saw. The doctors did many tests, made me undergo numerous configurations, but to no avail. I wanted so much to bear a child, maybe out of regret for having aborted mine, or maybe out of guilt because he was such a nice man and I was a bad woman to whom something terrible would happen one day, I have no idea. I had the urge to take my body through a pregnancy, and I wanted him to share with me the experience, the tribulations and joys of motherhood. I thought this would bring us closer, would delight him and delight me too.”

The story moves Cambara, who, remembering how much joy mothering gave her, appreciates the dilemma.

“I could not decide whether to make a clean breast of the fact that I had undergone an abortion,” Jiijo continues, “but because I was not sure what good that might do, the doctors, who could read my body the way a blind person reads Braille, chose, for their own reasons, not to speak of my abortion to my husband.”

Jiijo has worked herself up into a heightened state of disquiet, one moment speaking with brio, the next falling sorrowfully silent and sullen, and then talking with slothful abandonment, the tone of her voice moist with the unshed tears waiting to be let go.

“When I look back on how Gudcur has treated me, the man who has fathered my children, and I think about my condition of enslavement,” Jiijo says, “I have difficulty reconciling his kindness to me, as his chosen woman, with the cruelty others associate with him. I will not deny having sensed his hard-heartedness. I’ve seen evidence of it when he plays mind games that are crueler than the physical pain the militiamen under his command mete out to their victims: beating, raping, looting, and plundering. And, of course, he beat me up last night. No denying that.”

A mobile phone rings somewhere in the house, most likely in the room opposite where they are. Jiijo sits up, first wrinkling her face into a frown and then falling silent, in self-rebuke. The phone’s ringing a few more times, with neither Jiijo nor Cambara answering it, coincides with the rapping on the pedestrian gate. On hearing the noisy arrival of her children’s familiar voices, Jiijo requests that she let them in, and Cambara is happy to do so.

Worn out from talking, too tired from having told Cambara her story, and too exhausted to minister to their never-ending indigence, Jiijo seeks a quiet retreat from the children. She takes leave of the scene, fleeing surreptitiously, and then closing the door behind her.

Left alone with the four children just back from the Koranic school, ages ranging from six to twelve, begrimed, hungry, eager to get to know her, and competing for her attention, Cambara asks them questions about their day away without listening to their answers, feeds them, and then offers them sweets and chocolates, which they eat to their heart’s content. Then she entertains them with an Indian fable, which she tells them from memory.

“Once upon a time, the pathways of kites and crows cross that of a wounded fox lying helpless under a tree. The kites and the crows concur among themselves that they will share the spoils in equal portions, with the upper half of the fox allotted to the crows and the lower part to the kites.

“The fox mocks at their options, and finding fault with the way its body parts have been apportioned, belabors the point that since, by the nature of things and in terms of creation, kites are superior to crows, it is baffled that its upper part has gone to the lowliest of scavengers, the crows. In the opinion of the fox, the head, the brain, and other delicate portions should go to the kites.

“Because they cannot agree among themselves, a war ensues between the kites and the crows, and a number of each group die as a result, the remaining handful fleeing the scene with difficulty. Meanwhile, the fox feasts for days on the dead kites and crows, leaving the place healthy, observing that the weak benefit from the disagreements of the powerful.”

When the smallest of the children pleads with her to tell them another story, Cambara looks at her watch, realizing that she has been here for more than three hours. She calculates on the best way of handing the responsibility of caring for the children over to their mother, pinning her hopes on the youngest to rouse their mother so she can go away. Woken up, Jiijo joins them, looking revived albeit groggy-eyed. And Cambara withdraws into the bathroom to read the pages the storm had kicked up. These turn out to be pages torn from an American oil-drilling company’s document detaling payments to one of Mogadiscio’s notorious warlords. Alas, she forgets it there when she emerges.

Cambara takes leave of them, promising to Jiijo and the children that she will be back as soon as she can. She makes a dash for the door.

Cambara, following a civil war rule of thumb, takes a route different from the one she used earlier to the shopping complex, aiming to get a taxi to Maanta Hotel. She moves with the single-minded vigilance of a lizard, watchfully preparing to confront youths idling away their time on street corners or in front of their squats in wait for potential victims to walk past. Some people feel there is protection in numbers; not Cambara. She prefers doing her own thing her own way, believing that the key to success in her endeavors lies in acting alone.

She is an optimist by nature. Asked why she is embarking on this adventure, she might reply that she is trying her luck. Notwithstanding that, she is inclined to keep the various parties with whom she is dealing separate so that none of them is au courant of her plans, especially not when she makes sallies into another party’s preserve. From the little she has seen of him, Bile strikes Cambara as a man with a noble spirit, and he keeps returning to her thoughts. Dajaal seems to act with a kind of authority and native ability that is formidable. It will be to her advantage to work in collusive partnership with Dajaal and to humor Bile while he, in turn, humors her. Kiin, a woman apart, has not capitulated to the strictures of living in the city, which is admirable, considering the potential danger. As for Jiijo, it is looking more and more likely that Cambara has already won her over. It saddens her, though, as a trace of gloom invades her own bearing at the thought of relying on Jiijo to betray Gudcur, who despite being a warlord and a brute, has fathered Jiijo’s children. Cambara foresees incomparable complications ahead.

Cambara now puts more energy into her stride, springing faster and faster, her heart anxiously beating like that of a young girl on her way to a rendezvous with her first date ever. This is because she is overwhelmed by the desire to get together with Kiin, with whom she wishes to become better acquainted. She is more than conscious that she has not done a thing about one of her principal pursuits: to devote more time than she has so far toward the construction of “peace,” so she may leave “the place” better than when she found it.